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Part memoir, part cultural criticism, this fast-paced ride through the postmodern landscape of American popular culture explores how our responses to headline events and popular films help script the ways in which we imagine ourselves and the world around us.
In Postmodern Journeys, Joseph Natoli continues to chronicle how our responses to headline events and popular film help script the ways in which we imagine ourselves and the world around us. Here we clearly see how svelte marketing strategies take the present pulse of the American mass psyche in order to play to the frustrations and anxieties, the desires and hauntings that can neither be fully faced nor totally ignored. In the years covered here, films such as Fargo, Titanic, Boogie Nights, Jerry Maguire, Saving Private Ryan, and Good Will Hunting crisscrossed such headline events as the deaths of Princess Diana and Mother Theresa, a record-breaking Dow, welfare "reform," the fall of Newt Gingrich, the rise of Jesse Ventura, and, overshadowing everything, Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton, and Ken Starr. Somewhere in the intersection of what the record shows and how popular film and culture put us into play with that record lies the postmodern American landscape we are imagining and creating. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, Postmodern Journeys continues the fast-paced ride into that imagined time and place.
"Engaging, provocative, and full of insight into current culture, society, and politics." — Douglas Kellner, author of Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern
"Natoli's readings are provocative in the best sense of the term—even if you disagree with them, they goad you into formulating your own take on a given film. This book will appeal to anyone interested in finding accessible, highly 'teachable' forms of postmodern cultural analysis and also students of contemporary Hollywood film. Natoli's style is so engaging that you want to go along for the ride, and its accessibility will greatly enhance its attractiveness as a course book." — Jim Collins, author of Architectures of Excess: Cultural Life in the Information Age
"What we have here is a portrait of a psychology, the psychology of an academic who has been marginalized in the profession and fought back with his mind, of a 1960s campus radical who is still fighting corporate capitalism, of a son who broke with his father and is now trying to give up that fight." — Amy J. Elias, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Questions at a Book Signing
Walk On!
Side Trip: Why Do Anything
The U.S. Open?
Where Are We Going in Fargo? And How Do We Get There?
Honey, Be Glad We're Not Rich
Side Trip: Resentment
Walking Down Main Street U.S.A.
Journeying Out of Illusion
Side Trip: Feeling the Glitch
Walkabout: America on the Verge of a Walkabout
Walkabout in a Lost World
Journeying into Slow Time
Long Day's Journey to Boogie Nights
Side Trip: In Some Dreams You Travel...
Voices from the Stars, Voices Behind Comets
Hanging in the Last Rung on the Way to the Millennium
The Princess, The Mother, and the Clothes Designer
Side Trip: Cool Beans
Hunting Expectations
Side Trip: Passeggiata
Death Ahead
Mythologizing the Journey
Side Tracked: The President as Bad Subject
Side Trip: Timing Our Journey, Setting a Moral Compass
Permutations on the Act of Saving in A Sliding Door Action World
That Rug Really Tied the Room Together
Side Trip: "And the Sun Set..."
Cul-de-Sac: Seductions and the Wellsprings of Loneliness
No Sign of Loss on the Horizon
Index