Free What Is Postmodern View Of Utopia AND How It Differs From Modern Approach? Book Review Example

Film Studies

Modernist and postmodernist approach to the issue of understanding and comprehending reality differ significantly. In modernity we usually have one single idea that is common for everybody and shared in the society. Postmodernity often offers several ideas and rejects similarity in views. Utopia and dystopia can be achieved in modernity because people agree on what these concepts mean. In postmodernity people have range of ideas on the same phenomena. Thus, their reaching is impossible.
The main attributes of the postmodern city are time, fragmentation, decentralization, militarization and surveillance. Various experts state that the priorities are changing and flexible accumulation overtakes the main position in the urban economy and environment. People adjust to new trends in the world and embrace the way of living that postmodernity suggest often not thinking of consequences. People became segregated though their means of communications develop. The cult of consumption turns cities into trade centers and marketplaces. Advertising serves as means of manipulation and controlling people’s minds.
Postmodernity develops its cinematic subject – the cyborg. This means that human being is no longer valued and appreciated; he or she can be easily replaced at any time. If life is not considered as a biological process and if it can be substituted by artificial process, the society’s values deteriorate and it turns into “cyborg society.” Blade Runner and Falling Down are the two films that represent this postmodern reality. They differ in the approach they use to demonstrate postmodern shifts, but they both pay attention to the impact the economic fragmentation on individuals and societies.
The main idea of this chapter is to attract attention to the negative consequences of postmodernity. They regard not only individuals but society as a whole. The author also point out that mass urban segregation and economic fragmentation will lead to unprecedented global changes.

Questions

(A utopian vision is necessarily singular and ideal in modernity, while a postmodern condition accepts that the ideal cannot be the same for everyone).

What can you tell about the concept of cyborg in postmodernity?

(Haraway argued that “we all are chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine ansd organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality”).

In Blade Runner how does the replicant emerge and how can it be distinguished from humans?

(The replicant emerges as a product of this dystopic postmodernity and can be distinguished only by the authenticity of memories).