I enjoyed how we continued to
discuss Jameson’s theories in class on Wednesday. The notion of simulacra and
the idea of something lacking a sense of truth or history became clear to me
when Dr. Cummings presented us with the example of the “peasant shoes” vs.
“diamond dust shoes”, stemming from “waning of affect” (Jameson 489). In class we looked at the painting The Scream, by Munch, followed by other
images of different things that replicated this famous piece of art. The iconic
image of Macaulay Culkin, from the
movie Home Alone, copies the
expression from The Scream, while
having to do absolutely nothing to do with the actual art piece itself. The
loss of authenticity within these superficial products provided no historical
background, and another way of exemplifying loss of an era.
In
high school I took a class about the 21st century, and we focused on
the construction of media, and the postmodern world. For one test we were
provided with an image and instructed to analyze it using our own
interpretations. The image shown was from a magazine ad, and was a
reinterpretation of The Last Supper,
by Leonardo da Vinci. The Last Supper
portrays the reaction of the twelve Disciples as Jesus announced that one of
them would betray him. The parody of this famous piece of art, displayed a
beautiful model in the center of twelve other skinny supermodels, sitting
around a table with empty plates. Jameson states that “depth is replaced by
surface” (490) which goes along with the notion of something with historic
meaning being replaced by something new and irrelevant. In my class there was
one kid who had never been familiarized with The Last Supper, so he interpreted this piece completely
differently than the rest of the class. I found it intriguing that his fresh
interpretation of this image, was not pre-constructed with any historical
meaning like the rest of ours was. He offered a new vision of what this image
was trying to portray. I could not find the exact image that we were required
to analyze, but I have found other parodies of The Last Supper that exemplify Jameson’s idea of pastiche eclipsing
parody.
Parody From the TV show LOST
Parody From The Lion King
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