The Holograms are Symbolic

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.