3.3. Postmodernity
One could isolate two impulses in tension at the turn of the
century -the impulse to rectify the discontinuity of
modernity, its traumatic disruption, through the provision of
an illusion of continuity (to resist modernity), and the
impulse to embody discontinuity as a fundamental human
condition (to embrace modernity). The cinema, in effect,
does both (Doane, 1993: 13-14).
Postmodernity is explained by the disruption of the modern illusion in
constant progress. Today we find that progress in cultural, social, political
and economic areas is not as advanced as we might wish; yet technology
hides this frustration with the ability to create unrealities never thought able
to be produced before. George Balandier indicates that today we are living in
a hyperrationalized and aseptic culture that is sentenced to segregation: on
one side exists a collective imagination that reflects the socially frustrated
dreams, and on the other side a ‘technoimaginarium’, where the power of
the image and the magic of the complex machines that we have developed
cover up the dissatisfaction hidden behind the brightness of the lights
(Balandier, 1988: 242). The reproductions that we have created conceal our
incapacity to build a world in which égalité, fraternité and liberté, the
dream of the Enlightenment and the fundamentals of modernity, become
true, not only in virtual, hyperreal, cyber-realities of 0s and 1s, but in the
real world of atoms. Thus, the so-called culminating point of our society is
revealed in films such as The Matrix, Blade Runner and Terminator, SF
dystopias with a pessimistic image of the future: a loss in faith related to our
progress in terms of science and rationality. The assumption of this social and
cultural failure of modernity is metaphorically represented in The Matrix
when Neo, after choosing the red pill and consequently choosing to know the
truth, opens his eyes and is guided by Morpheus in a demonstration of the
real status of the world: a destroyed society in a deserted environment.
In economic and political terms, we can define our era as that of a
multinational capitalism, a system that is highly dependent upon rapid
technological advancements for its continuous expansion. As described
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