The other night I went to see Jem and the
Holograms (starring a very talented former student—which created its own
strange yet cool form of cognitive dissonance). There is something rather
postmodern in the premise of the film itself, as it’s a revisionist remake of
an eighties cartoon produced by several companies, one of them Hasbro, a toy
company. Rushkoff discusses the revisionist impulse in his section on narrative
collapse—in particular he identifies Pulp Fiction as a film which
compresses imagery from various decades into a retro pastiche, and forces the
audience to “give up its attachment to linear history and accept instead a
vision of American culture as a compression of a multitude of eras, and those
eras themselves being reducible to iconography as simple as a leather jacket or
a dance step” (Rushkoff 33). Of course Pulp Fiction also subverts the
traditional linear narrative by presenting events out of order. In this way, Pulp
Fiction is a post-narrative story on several levels.
Jem, in contrast, is
presented in a linear fashion: the only departures are the framing device that
bookends the film, and flashbacks presented as home movies. However, like Pulp
Fiction, Jem conflates two eras: the late eighties and right now.
Like all reboots, Jem is charged with preserving some of the source
material—enough so that the original fan base will recognize the story they
remember. In this case the filmmakers borrowed from the Tarantino playbook and
used eighties signifiers in the form of clothes—now costumes for the band
members.
Some critics took issue with how little of the
original was preserved, which is a common issue with revision stories. Like so
many modern revisions—this is not just a remake it’s a reboot—a notion
that in and of itself is quite modern. The word itself is bound up with the
digital age, of course, but more than that, the concept of a reboot means that
characters and situations from the past are brought into the now. What was once
then is now part of the present: Star Trek is now, Batman is
now—we have a new origin story of an old hero, one that often wipes out many
elements of the original or previous incarnation. In the case of Star Trek,
director J.J. Abrams quite literally overwrote more than forty years of
franchise history with a time travel device. He kept what worked for him, now,
and jettisoned the rest.
In the case of Jem, the now aspect of the reboot phenomenon is particularly interesting as the film is essentially about the presentist generation’s mania for documenting their lives online. The aforementioned flashbacks are presented as found footage from a video camera. The framing device is the main character filming an online confession that is later (spoiler alert) overwritten by a choice to delete the footage and pursue a different course of action—one that presumably, in the world of this film, will be documented by someone’s phone camera.
Complicating the narrative further, the film is
also intercut with YouTube videos. For example, as main character Jerrica
engages in an online contract negotiation with her future producer, a clip of
two dueling drummers is shown. As a refugee from the days before narrative
collapse, I found myself attempting to make connections between the situations
and people in the video and the situations and people in the story I was
watching. I tried to make the drummers into characters, but on some level I
realized that they were not, they were signifiers, like the icons mashed up by
Tarantino in Pulp Fiction. The young Youtubers who showed up throughout
the film were in a way the avatars for the audience. In this version, Jerrica
is discovered via viral home video. The writers even make this claim concrete
near the end of the film when Jerrica tells a crowd of fans that everyone is
Jem, when they have something to say and they use a disguise and a camera to
say it. Of course, recorded reality is not real life; the camera itself is a
distancing device, and we can be anyone at all online. The issue of online
identity versus “real life” is not a simple one.
Overall, the film is in many ways a postmodern,
prenstist narrative. As Rushkoff states, in our modern stories, “Characters
must learn how their universes work. Narrativity is replaced by something more
like putting together a puzzle…” (37). Like many modern films and shows in the
post narrative-collapse era, the hero’s world is complicated—in the case of
reboots by the layering of previous incarnations and versions, built-in
audience expectations. In the case of all postmodern fiction, by the writer’s
penchant to experiment with form (in Jem’s case, the interstitial
interruptions by online videos). Underneath all of these layers, this film, and
many others, still follows a very familiar narrative arc, the main character
leaving home and figuring out her identity. Just as the question of “is
the online me the real me?” is a complex one, so is the question of traditional
narrative vs. post narrative. This will all likely be complicated further
when our devices become a literal part of us (à la The Matrix…or Feed!)
Rushkoff, Douglass. Present Shock: When
Everything Happens Now. New York: Penguin, 2013. Nook.
