Abstract

‘Postmodern’ is a concept now deposited in the word banks of both highbrow cinephilesand lowbrow arbiters of popular filmic taste. How these two groups of critics deploy theterm, however, widely differs. Critiquing Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with SteveZissou , for instance, Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Glieberman writes: ‘Once again,[Anderson] creates a hermetic, glassed-in movie world of postmodern anachronisms thatcharms and distances in equal measure’ . Characteristic of most reviewers of LifeAquatic, Glieberman uses ‘postmodern’ in a purely aesthetic sense. Although this apoliticaluse of the term is endemic to the business of popular film criticism, part of the reasoncritics deployed ‘postmodern’ bereft of all cultural and political connotations in the case ofLife Aquatic can be chalked up to the film itself. Any overtly political meaning in the film ismediated by what Todd Gilchrist calls the film’s ‘fantastic, just-left-of-realityuniverse.’ Anderson’s idiosyncratic filmmaking style – his penchant for what Josh Bell calls‘empty collections of quirks’ and ‘irrelevant eccentricities’ which prize ‘false clevernessover story and content’ – exacerbates the problem of politicizing Life Aquatic’spostmodernism . A growing cult of the author begets the faciledismissal or deification of Life Aquatic based on tenuously apolitical criteria