Postmodernism as a whole is said to be a rejection to modernism. To be able to understand postmodernism, we first must understand modernism and why the postmodernism movement happened. Modernism was about always looking towards the future and not looking back and that everything was original, the argument that postermodernists have come up with is that how can we move forward, if we don’t acknowledge the past,. Surely if we don’t learn from our mistakes, we would just be repeating it over and over again, therefore we wouldn’t be moving forward, and we would then only staying still. A postmodernist would will also take in the Jean Francois Lyotard’s theories of the Grand Narratives such as Science, Politics and Religion. As we speak, post modernists would take aspects of the grand narratives and put it together to create their own, there are numerous examples of this in our everyday lives, it can happen with Fashion, Music and media.
In order to understand Postmodernism you have to look at the examples of postmodern texts, an example would be where a director of a film has taken influences from other texts, this would be called an 'Homage' as he/she is respectfully taking influences from existing works such as television shows, computer games, music etc. to incorporate into his own. An example of a postmodern text which I have looked at is Dan Black's 'Symphonies' created by following the Levi Strauss's theory of 'Addition, Deletion, Substitution and Transposition'. In this video, Dan Black makes clear intertexual references to other texts, there are various examples which run through the video but to name a few, he has chosen to include the Universal Studios-like clip at the very start, the use of 'Umbrella' soundtrack during the opening credits, the old hollywood style etc. There are many more which play throughout the video, but the point that I am making is that only a postmodernist would be able to spot these intertextual references because he/she would have already seen the original texts which only then, can they see what Dan Black is doing. But you do not have to be a postmodernist to admire and like the video, for example someone who did not have the knowledge of the intertextual references could easily be as amused while watching it as a postmodernist, he/she would just think that the video was creative through the use of different effects.
An example of a film which is postmodern is 'Hobo With A Shotgun', the reason for this being is because the film was based on a fake trailer, made for a non-existent imaginary film. Directed by Jason Eisener, this film does not have a productive and dynamic storyline. The reason why it was made to be gore to gore sake, the film features scenes showing people getting killed or tortured in the gruesome-ist ways. There is no point to the film and some postmodernists say that the film was too good at being bad.
Another example of a postmodern text is the game 'Desert Bus', this game could possibly the real-est game I have ever played. The reason for this is not because of the graphics, or the story line as such, the game does not even have a story line. All it requires the player to do is to get from point A to point B by driving a bus on a straight line for 8 hours to get to Las Vegas, 8 hours actually being accurate as it would actually take 8 hours to drive there on a bus in real life which makes it such a real life game. The game does have a reward system, when you finish the 8 hours and get to Las Vegas, you receive 1 point and then you have to drive back again. You cannot pause the game and if you slow down or drive of the road, you will have to wait for the amount of time you have played on the game for the bus to be towed back to the start to be able to play it again.
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