7 - To Destroy the Sign

Summary

Even after the close of the 1970s, the films of the 1980s and the 1990s continued to engage the image in its diminished relationship to the natural real. In this chapter I will consider a number of these later films, but I will not necessarily claim that they are “resistant.” The films cited take a variety of positions regarding their replication of old images, and in so doing they raise new questions. The first involves the further calcification of the image through its transformation from television, comic books, and other serialized forms into film. The second is the thorny issue of the contemporary “remake.” Within this obsessive recycling of past forms, then, I will confront the issue of repetition itself as sharing the structure of a traumatic neurosis in response to recent historical events. In this way, the works already cited will be contextualized, and their early impetus will be traced to more recent practice.

The Loss of the Real

Sydney: This is my life! This isn't a movie.

Skeet: Sure it is, Syd. It's all a movie. It's all just one great big movie.

Scream, 1996

When everything feels like a movie/

Yeah, you bleed just to know you're alive.

The Goo Goo Dolls, 1998