Post-Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film

(Hardback)

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Starting in the early 1990s, artists such as Quentin Tarantino, David Foster Wallace, and Kurt Cobain contributed to a swelling cultural tide of pop postmodernism that swept through music, film, literature, and fashion. In cinema in particular, some of the arts most fundamental aspectsstories, characters, and genres, for instanceassumed such a trite and trivialized appearance that only rarely could they take their places on the screen without provoking an inward smirk or a wink from the audience. Out of this highly self-conscious and world-weary environment, however, a new group of filmmakers began to develop as the decade wore on, with a new set of styles and sensibilities to match. In Post-Pop Cinema author Jesse Fox Mayshark takes us on a film-by-film tour of the works of these filmmakers-including Wes and P. T. Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Richard Linklater, Alexander Payne, and David O. Russell-and seeks to reveal how a common pool of styles, collaborators, and personal connections helps them to confront the unifying problem of meaning in American film. Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket (1996) and Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997) were ultimately about their characters' lives-even though their characters often dealt with highly contrived environments and situations. And soon after Wes Anderson scored his first success, others like David O. Russell (Flirting With Disaster, Three Kings), the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (who collaborated with Spike Jonze on such projects as Being John Malkovich and Adaptation), Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways), Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko), and Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation) began to tread their own paths over this same ground. Although these men and women represent a wide range of styles and subject matter, all their films revolve in different ways around the difficulty of establishing and maintaining connections. This theme of connection also runs deeper than the films made: the directors share actors (Mark Wahlberg, Bill Murray, Ben Stiller, Jason Schwartzman), collaborators (the musician Jon Brion) and sometimes even personal connections (Spike Jonze starred in Russell's Three Kings, and was married to Coppola). Together these filmmakers form a loose and distinctly American school of filmmaking, one informed by postmodernism but not in thrall to it, and one that every year becomes more important to the world of cinema both within and beyond the United States.

Reviews

"Mayshark, an experienced staff editor for the New York Times News Service, has written perhaps the first in-depth study of the major contributors to the culturally and cinematically aware, accessibly eccentric "post-pop cinema." Mayshark interprets the creative output of directors from Wes Anderson to David O. Russell to Sofia Coppola, among others, who deal so originally and truthfully with their characters' struggles for individuality and clarity. His study of Todd Haynes in particular, covering films such as &ISafe, Far from Heaven, and the controversial Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, reveals a genuine understanding of the director's attempts to combine cinematic artistry with complex and often tragic characterizations. Mayshark illustrates that even as this period in American filmmaking creates new ways of storytelling, the seed of it all remains the difficult joy and madness of finding one's place in the world. This is a highly engaging and informative study of a sensibility more than a genre; recommended for all academic and public libraries."-Library Journal
"While he considers the 10 American directors (and one screenwriter) discussed here all members of a "post-pop" or "post-post modernism" school, Mayshark is wary of bunching them together for the fact that their most uniting trait is actually their overt individualism. Nonetheless he finds ample similarities in the "chinstroking" and "anarchic" works of P.T. and Wes Anderson (not related), David O. Russell, Todd Haynes, and Charlie Kaufman with Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, because they all tread the line between irony and sentiment and address questions of alienation and morality with a non- moralizing tone. The author offers analysis of this group's major films and of its major critics, and in the final chapter introduces three less prolific but promising American post-pop visionaries the directors of Fight Club, Lost in Translation, and Donnie Darko."-Reference & Research Book News
While he considers the 10 American directors (and one screenwriter) discussed here all members of a "post-pop" or "post-post modernism" school, Mayshark is wary of bunching them together for the fact that their most uniting trait is actually their overt individualism. Nonetheless he finds ample similarities in the "chinstroking" and "anarchic" works of P.T. and Wes Anderson (not related), David O. Russell, Todd Haynes, and Charlie Kaufman with Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, because they all tread the line between irony and sentiment and address questions of alienation and morality with a non- moralizing tone. The author offers analysis of this group's major films and of its major critics, and in the final chapter introduces three less prolific but promising American post-pop visionaries the directors of Fight Club, Lost in Translation, and Donnie Darko.-Reference & Research Book News
Mayshark, an experienced staff editor for the New York Times News Service, has written perhaps the first in-depth study of the major contributors to the culturally and cinematically aware, accessibly eccentric "post-pop cinema." Mayshark interprets the creative output of directors from Wes Anderson to David O. Russell to Sofia Coppola, among others, who deal so originally and truthfully with their characters' struggles for individuality and clarity. His study of Todd Haynes in particular, covering films such as &ISafe, Far from Heaven, and the controversial Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, reveals a genuine understanding of the director's attempts to combine cinematic artistry with complex and often tragic characterizations. Mayshark illustrates that even as this period in American filmmaking creates new ways of storytelling, the seed of it all remains the difficult joy and madness of finding one's place in the world. This is a highly engaging and informative study of a sensibility more than a genre; recommended for all academic and public libraries.-Library Journal

Author Bio

Jesse Fox Mayshark is a staff editor for the New York Times News Service, a contributing editor to No Depression magazine, and a journalist with 13 years of experience working for daily and weekly newspapers, covering subjects from pop music to welfare reform.