This was great; my wife and I hadn’t spent time geeking out like this since we were undergrads living in dorms. Big ‘ol postmodern cyberhunt at the Scalise household this weekend. Good stuff.<\/p>\n
Though much of this was covered in John’s post and the comments that followed, the most striking metaconstruct around this movie is its very functional role in a larger intertextual experience<\/a> that is much, much more outwarldly-reaching than the events in the originally-released film. It seems as though the film exists only to create a world to perpetuate an investigation of its framework independent from the thing. For instance, go here<\/a> to understand how to navigate the movie’s website<\/a>, which is, in itself, an experience almost completely outside of the actions of the movie, and they both reflexively inform one another. The movie, itself, is in a way just a large dramatization of events related to the larger experience of The Philosophy of Time Travel<\/a><\/em>, which seemed create a fully functioning "accidental subculture" reailty around the movie.<\/p>\n My question is: why the 80s? With the intertextual elements so clearly engrained, the broad events of this strory are intrguiing enough for it to be set in present day. I kept wondering the reasoning behind setting the backdrop in such a highly politicized time, with the space-time continuum opening up over the Fairfax\/DC area a week before the 1988 election? (My only reading on this, and it’s a poor one, is that it’s an anti-republican commentary, that HW Bush’s defeat of Dukakis caused a corruption in the universe.) Casting Drew Barrymore and Patrick Swayze in lynchpin roles was clearly a move to create an homage to the decade that ushed them into popular culture, but is it just Gen X nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake? The soundtrack (and everything else) was so stylized as to create an almost obstructive pastiche of the time period (which, if you buy into the theories behind the film, is a slice of tangental time that never really should have existed anyway). The slow-mo, MTV-type of camera moves over Tears for Fears or Echo & the Bunnymen came off as a clear ironic answer to the 80s John Hughes<\/a> films exploited so famously. <\/p>\n Something to think about. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This was great; my wife and I hadn’t spent time geeking out like this since we were undergrads living in dorms. Big ‘ol postmodern cyberhunt at the Scalise household this weekend. Good stuff. Though much of this was covered in John’s post and the comments that followed, the most striking metaconstruct around this movie is … Continue reading Totally Better Than Bubble Boy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}