navigating the intertextual landscapes of thicketed perpetuity (the throes of a turkish loggerheads) a.k.a, academic rockstars

i don't know about you, but i get a kick out of postmodern writing. well, i should qualify that: i get a kick out of it when it "deconstructs" pop culture. take this popmatters article on martin scorsese, for example. quoth:

When any eager genrephile, from a rank and file movie-goer to a film scholar, tries to pigeonhole a Martin Scorsese film into a neat category, their attempts are almost unilaterally frustrated. Testosterone-laden male youths view his works as action “flicks” replete with headshot gratification, the older set looks upon his oeuvre as a chain of endlessly amorphous dramas that exposes the underbelly of society, and the 21st century intelligentsia waves the banner of Lyotard and calls Scorsese a filmmaker deeply entrenched in the postmodern aesthetic.

However, I find that Scorsese’s work is too complex—indeed polysemy is the very core of Scorsese’s filmmaking—to be satisfactorily subsumed under such simplistic headings. I posit, as an alternative, that Scorsese’s cinema is an admixture of distinct renderings of each of his respective narratives: that of hyperrealism and that of neo-realism. Through a mosaic of simulacra, a hyperbole, a-canonical plot structure, and a salient omission of clear protagonist antagonist demarcations, Scorsese creates what a sort of “grotesque neo-realism”. The dualistic nature of this style is precisely what has allowed Marty, as he is affectionately referred to by fans, to sit astride the division between popular and art filmmaking, and endlessly confound viewers who try to reduce his work to a singularity.

further:

A true taxonomy of every outrageous performance in a Martin Scorsese piece would rival the length of the combined credits of his oeuvre. Directing actors to play their characters in this manner, Scorsese’s players become archetypal grotesques. His figures play parodies of themselves and their baroque identities flesh out his diegeses as hyperreal. For virtuality to be fully constructed, it is insufficient for the world alone to be markedly simulated. The characters must be as well. In this way, Scorsese points his discursive finger at his viewers and safe-guards his schema from being misinterpreted as reifying the world as hyperreal. Rather, Scorsese shows his manifold of simulacra to be progeny of the figures which people his diegeses.

Here we will break from the topic of the grotesque and advance to that of the neo-real. This latter component rescues Scorsese’s films from the threat of absurdism and masterfully transfigures his exaggerated worlds into ones which viewers may relate to. This is not to say that Scorsese’s wielding of neo-realism immerses the audience in the diegesis and welds their humors to the sentiment of the film; spectators are rarely emotionally attached to Scorsese’s works. Rather, viewers are safely distanced from empathy by characters who are boors at best and alien environments such as the world of taxi drivers and aristocratic 19th century New York. However, the true faculty of Scorsese’s neo-realism is to ground his otherwise baroque narratives in some semblance of humanity. This serves as the bridge between the hyperreal and the everyday experience of members of the audience. As imitation of their reality, the neo-real aspect suggests that perhaps the hyperreal (with which it is conflated) is also a mirror of the viewers’ world.

good god, what hideous nonsense! has someone been reading baudrillard lately? yes? and now we feel the need to show off, hmm? very well. tragically, this article makes very little sense, simply because postmodernism itself is nonsensical. yet no matter how severe its grotesquerie, i'm never hard-pressed not to find chuckle-worthy gems. but it's not even that postmodernism fails to make sense so much as it gussies up very pedestrian ideologies in fancy words. take baudrillard's "hyperreality" bit-- basically, it's just fake environments, like las vegas. but instead of simply saying that, he had to coin a new term and drench it in tirelessly abstract, opaque prose.

the biggest offender, and possibly one of the grandest douchebags of the 21st century, is slavoj zizek. for an example of such buffoonery, i bring you his myspace "about me":

In Cyberspace all positive properties are externalized in the sense that everything you are in a positive sense, all your features can be manipulated. When one plays in virtual space I can for example be a homosexual man who pretends to be a heterosexual woman, or whatever: either I can build a new identity for myself or in a more paranoiac way, I am somehow already controlled, manipulated by the digital space.

this is not even syntactical, but whatever. again, it's somehow too proletariat simply to say: "i can bullshit online much like how i do in the classroom," but that would be too boring. and i find the whole "swinger" distinction frightening (please don't haunt me in my dreams).

but i do give postmodernists, and zizek in particular, credit for building careers out of shamelessly bullshitting people. hey, we all gotta hustle, right?