Postmodern amorality on display in new movies

Go
Directed by Doug Liman (1999)

Election
Direction by Alexander Payne (1999)

Reviewed by MC12

A Washington Post critic called Go "perversely entertaining" and 
compared it to Pulp Fiction. The characters are all self-centered 
hedonists with not a care in the world beyond themselves and the 
next day's fun. In Election, what looks like a model high school 
civics teacher and a model dedicated student both turn out to be 
completely self-absorbed, with no regard for the democratic 
principles they espouse.

Both movies could be seen as critical of the empty characters, 
offering cynical commentary on current lifestyles. But neither 
movie offers an alternative, and both end up making their vacuous 
characters -- the only ones there are -- lovable and even 
admirable. MIM is not above taking cynical potshots at pop 
culture, and laughing along as pseudo-rebellious teens mock 
dominant morals (Go) or the farce of democracy in a mainstream 
high school is exposed (Election). But we don't offer these 
cultural criticisms without trying to build up an alternative, 
culturally and politically.

Both of these movies offer amorality, that is the lack of a moral 
center. There are no good guys or bad guys. This is one trademark 
of self-identified postmodern culture: instead of "imposing a 
morality" on the audience by identifying someone as good and 
someone as bad, they offer a collage of characters each pursuing 
their own interests. An additional postmodern trait of both movies 
is the lack of a narrative center. Each movie is told by different 
characters at different points, more postmodern attempts not to 
"impose" one view of the story. Having different narrators tell 
the same story can be an effective tool to show how different 
kinds of people see the same thing differently, but when they are 
presented as morally equivalent the result is just more amoral 
wheel-spinning.

In Go, a set of California young people go through one action-
packed night revolving around the drug ecstasy and the rave scene, 
sex and prostitution, violent incidents and injury, and so on. The 
same story is told through several different voices. The humor in 
the fact that the characters are all shown as being essentially 
untouched by their experiences. Even the womyn who is run over by 
a car by one person and almost shot to death by another is seen 
trudging to work the next day as if nothing much had happened. (In 
our theater, as the audience roared with laughter at this scene, 
one member of the audience could not contain herself, and yelled 
out: "This is NOT funny!" She was right if she was describing a 
scene in real life. But in the movie, the scene WAS funny, which 
is the problem with the movie.)

In Election, a young, precocious and obnoxious high school student 
is running for class president. She is ruthlessly civic-minded, 
seeing herself as a future president, but also revoltingly self-
promoting. The civics teacher who supervises student government 
decides he can't deal with her for a year as class president, so 
he sets about undermining her election. You might think he is a 
hero, because his denunciations of her ring true. But his 
completely unprincipled approach to the problem, and his 
subsequent back-stabbing antics (including sleeping with the wife 
of his best friend), undermine is would-be good character.

Like anarchists, postmodernists say they want to avoid providing 
leadership  -- in the form of morals or even a narrative with a 
perspective -- because they think leadership itself is 
destructive. And like anarchists, postmodernists cannot help but 
provide leadership, if only by example. In both cases, the 
leadership of non-leadership is in support of the status quo. 
Their example is one of tolerating the current dictatorships in 
practice, by failing to offer a serious alternative.

Go offers an implicit criticism of bourgeois morality and its 
repression of young people. And Election debunks myths of Amerikan 
democracy. But in their presentation of comic anti-heroes they 
celebrate a do-nothing, self-serving approach to these problems. 
And that is where MIM departs from their postmodern creators.