The Age of Promiscuity: Narrative and Mythological Meme Mutations in Contemporary Cinema and Popular Culture

(Hardback)

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This book presents an original and engaging look at contemporary popular culture, opening with the provocative idea that this is a day and age of complete exhaustion of ideas, images, stories, and myths. Questioning the effects of content recycling in cinema and other media, the author further elaborates on the repurposing of cultural junk, the reassembling of narratives and myths. The thought-provoking hypothesis proposed in this research is that we have entered an age of cultural promiscuity. By analyzing the mutations of myth-making practices and connecting them with larger cultural manifestations, the author explains these transformations as integral to the development of a myth-illogical imagination. Cinematic and mythological representations in mainstream Hollywood films have reached a point of amalgamation with no return, which marks the beginning of a "fourth age of representations," where signs and meanings are manifested in illogical permutations. This is more explicit in films that commingle aliens, cowboys, undead American presidents, and zombie nazis, joining together in the same narrative ghosts, werewolves, and vampires, aggregating disjoined storylines and historical fake facts, all coalesced in an orgy of empty burlesque and infantile masquerades. This interdisciplinary research combines cultural studies, film criticism, art and myth interpretations, bringing into the debate multiple concepts from related fields such as critical theory and media criticism. The book also opens up to innovative approaches from a wide array of academic disciplines, offering researchers, students and those fascinated by the transformations happening in contemporary cinema an interpretative tool based on a revised dialectic approach. The conclusion is that we are now victims of a zombie semiotics. Meaning-making in contemporary culture, politics, and aesthetics is dominated by a process of incessant desecration of significations, specific to the total mishmash of representations analyzed here.

Reviews

From Hercules to Zombie Jim, from 50 Shades of Grey to 50 Sheds of Grey, from Game of Thrones to after-sex selfies, this book is a vertiginous guide to the current state of mythology. Pop argues that the apparently endlessly irrational recombinations of myth in contemporary culture go beyond the usual models of hybridization or appropriation. This is an encyclopedic amusement-park ride of a book. By the time it comes to its zombie-littered end you will have an entirely new vocabulary to ponder the endgame culture in which we are all swimming: you'll understand the hodge-podge imagination, cultural pimping, ugly silliness, the demise of forgetting, reasonable nonsense, superficial heroes, spectator perversity, the mingled imaginary, retroactive interpenetration, monstrous repurposing, and of course the wonderful zombie transfer of meaning. -- James Elkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Doru Pops The Age of Promiscuity casts an erudite yet pessimistic look at the philosophical, cultural, and political roots of the unprecedented crisis of contemporary Western myth-making. Like his fellow Eastern Europeans Slavoj Zizek and Zygmunt Bauman, Pops ardent analysis sustained by excellent knowledge of popular culture and cinema traces these roots to the corrupted heritage of the Age of Reason, which he argues has morphed into a barrage of "significantly insignificant" contents, meant to quench our insatiable needs of instant gratification. -- Christina Stojanova, University of Regina, Canada
With an impressive profusion of examples from Avatar to infantilized God memes to syndromes such as cultural zombification -- Doru Pops argument goes beyond Fredric Jamesons pronouncement of the death of originality to postulate a condition far more sobering: an age of promiscuity in which converging media manifestations have resulted in a junk culture of puerile, irrational, meaningless recombinations, making way for our current era of fake news. -- Linda Badley, Professor Emerita, Middle Tennessee State University

Author Bio

Doru Pop is professor of film and media studies at Babe-Bolyai University.