Reading the Dialectical Ontology of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Against the Ontological Monism of Adaptation
2007; Edinburgh University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.3366/film.2007.0001
ISSN1466-4615
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
Resumo‘Postmodern’ is a concept now deposited in the word banks of both highbrow cinephiles and lowbrow arbiters of popular filmic taste. How these two groups of critics deploy the term, however, widely differs. Critiquing Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), for instance, Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Glieberman writes: ‘Once again, [Anderson] creates a hermetic, glassed-in movie world of postmodern anachronisms that charms and distances in equal measure’ (2004). Characteristic of most reviewers of Life Aquatic, Glieberman uses ‘postmodern’ in a purely aesthetic sense. Although this apolitical use of the term is endemic to the business of popular film criticism, part of the reason critics deployed ‘postmodern’ bereft of all cultural and political connotations in the case of Life Aquatic can be chalked up to the film itself. Any overtly political meaning in the film is mediated by what Todd Gilchrist (2004) calls the film’s ‘fantastic, just-left-of-reality universe.’ Anderson’s idiosyncratic filmmaking style ‐ his penchant for what Josh Bell calls ‘empty collections of quirks’ and ‘irrelevant eccentricities’ which prize ‘false cleverness over story and content’ ‐ exacerbates the problem of politicizing Life Aquatic’s postmodernism (2004). A growing cult of the author (and his artifacts) begets the facile dismissal or deification of Life Aquatic based on tenuously apolitical criteria. Interestingly, critics praised Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation (2003) for being postmodern and post-postmodern. Jough Dempsey’s article for Cinema Review, titled “Adaptation: Beyond Postmodernism” (2004), informs discerning cineastes that the film’s ‘ironic take on ironic postmodernism results in a sincere look at writer’s block, human
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