premonitions about the fast technological changes that not only affect
society, but also the human body. The Matrix, Videodrome, eXistenZ, Strange
Days (Bigelow, 1995) and The Terminator are perfect examples of both: a
pessimistic vision of the future and the increasing link of technology with the
human body, the end of the duality of flesh and machine. In this respect, we
find the work of Donna Haraway as an alternative to the pessimistic
conditions described by Cyberpunk. For Haraway the cyborg is a ‘hybrid of
machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of
fiction’ that designates forced adaptations of life to global capitalism and
produces future hybrid solutions to technological societies (Haraway, 1991:
199).
Indeed, (con)fusion and contradiction are probably the best way to
define the nature of the postmodern cinema wherein there is a constant
blurring of boundaries; where reality and unreality share the same
representations; and where technology and human, cultures, temporal
periods, spaces and languages are (con)fused. In other words, postmodern
cinema symbolically (re)constructs and (re)presents reality in ways that
‘simultaneously and contradictorily abolish and establish the real and its
representations’ (Jameson, 1991: IX-XIII). Postmodern cinema should be
understood as the ‘historical’ and social result of the confusion between
reality and unreality, a cultural intention to join the technological
development with our old social and philosophical knowledge that has not
been significantly transformed since the Enlightenment. Postmodern cinema
reflects the times in which we are living, times of digitalization in which copy
and modification acquire new magnitudes and consequently affect the
relationship of signifier and referent. Postmodern cinema is, in this sense, the
‘crisis caused by modernism and modern culture confronting the failure of its
own strategy of visualizing’ (Mirzoeff, 1998: 4). Lash (1990: 11-12) indicates
that the basic difference that we can find between modernism and
postmodernism in cinema is that whilst modernism is interested in the
problematic character of representation, postmodernism makes reality
problematic and consequently referents and signifiers assume a new and
different relationship:
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