Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

1993

Thesis Director

Parley Ann Boswell

Abstract

The film Raiders of the Lost Ark was released in 1981 to immediate success. Using a noticeably retrospective style, Raiders appealed to the public's desire to experience once again the same kind of viewing pleasure that Hollywood offered in the classical period. Accordingly, the film's nostalgic recreation of classical Hollywood entails a reliance on type characters, tough dialogue, and stock situations--with an overarching emphasis on maintaining a breakneck pace in its action. The appeal for the viewer, then, involves the satisfaction of a need to return to a superficially "simpler" time when the movies themselves were "simpler"--as they fulfilled the expectation of straightforward entertainment.

And yet, on another level, Raiders's debt to Hollywood past often manifests itself with irony and a slightly comic tone. In its reworking of genre conventions, the film tends toward parody. Certainly, the detection of such moments of parody is viewer-specific. As parody plays upon each viewer's distinct viewing history, each viewer may react differently to the film's inversion of the conventional. Whatever the case, Raiders's parodic revisions of genre expectations (for instance, those of the Western) enable the viewer to partake in a sort of game--wherein knowledge and recognition of those instances of parody provide their own reward: the viewer's active role in meaning-making results in the satisfaction of achieving a seemingly "higher level" of interpretation.

But Raiders's relationship to Hollywood past is neither "simply nostalgic" nor "simply parodic." Paralleling the strategies of postmodern art, Raiders appropriates existing film images and plots. Accordingly, much of the film is a pastiche of previous Hollywood pictures. But unlike parody, pastiche entails no connotations of humor or derision. The appropriation of the existing image in the new text is effected seemingly without comment by that text. Raiders borrows then from films as diverse as 1941's landmark Citizen Kane and the independent 1955 film noir Kiss Me Deadly. Although the antecedent texts are not actually parodied--that is, ridiculed--in such appropriation, they must be in some way implicated.

Understanding the significance of Raiders's appropriation though can be problematic. The effect of pastiche in Raiders is not so easily reconciled with the effects of pastiche in more overtly deconstructionist postmodern art. Part of the problem here is one of definition: the film seems to follow the formal strategies but not the oppositional politics normally associated with postmodernism proper. Ultimately, the key might be to follow the suggestion of Hal Foster and recognize two distinct strains of postmodernism. As Foster suggests, another (non-deconstructive) postmodernism exists: one that serves to uphold and rebuild--rather than resist--both the sociopolitical status quo and the overwhelming cultural influence of representation. Raiders, finally, formulates no real critique of the Hollywood film industry, but rather--and despite its gentle parody of film conventions--seeks to celebrate and affirm the Hollywood product's utility as a palliative.

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