Traumatic postmodern histories: Velvet Goldmine's phantasmatic testimonies.

If modernity was characterized by and imagined itself in terms of a particular awareness of time and history--the unfolding of social, political, and technological projects of progress and revolution, a heightened sense of novelty, increased speed, shortened distance-postmodernity seems to understand itself in terms of the deprivation of history and perhaps even the loss of time itself. Anything characterized as progress must beget a mournful attitude toward history, since the past becomes fraught--by definition--with error. The inhabitants of the past might be forgiven based on their lack of knowledge of the future, but Western history as a history of follies and repressions, egregious exploitation, and murderous violence is hardly something we can excuse, however remote these deeds may be. This is a history that almost begs to be forgotten--as much as it cries out to be remembered.

The difficulty of balancing the two demands is a postmodern historical predicament that we should hope cinema can address, if not resolve. Jean-Francois Lyotard characterizes postmodernity in part as a loss of faith in master narratives, utopian teleologies of history; yet within this conceptualization, the consciousness of the loss of history can itself be an historical form of consciousness.1 If the post of postmodernity marks a rupture with modernity, a historical break or coupure, then this distance might at least allow us to be able to understand and represent the past from a secure vantage point. But if this post is no simple break and does not imply chronological succession or even distance, then postmodernity cannot offer a position from which to represent modernity and provides little epistemological leverage. Rather than being a loss 0f history or a specific position in history, this postmodernity, as Fredric Jameson suggests, names a difficulty in locating ourselves with respect to history. After all, the nostalgic cinematic mode retro, an approach to "the 'past' through stylistic connotation, conveying 'pastness' by the glossy qualities of the image," and the tendency toward pastiche--a jumble of historical styles that Jameson identifies as central for the postmodern aesthetic--seem to suggest as much.2 If, however, we were to understand this postmodern historical consciousness as itself historical, might there not be a more positive description of the postmodern relation to history? And might not the very aesthetic and cultural forms of postmodernity--pastiche, the mode retro in cinema, a concern with images as media commodities rather than expressions of subjectivity--actually function as forms of historical awareness? Since Jameson is keen on taking the modernist aesthetic as the realism appropriate to modernity, we should take him seriously in following this insight apropos of postmodernism.

This essay explores the possibility that the postmodern aesthetic might itself be a way of thinking historical experience, but one that falls outside the traditional categories of historical representation. In what follows, I draw on concepts of trauma and testimony, witnessing and bearing witness, to demonstrate a specific relation to history that we might characterize as postmodern. I demonstrate the way this form of history takes shape in contemporary cinema through a discussion of films by directors as diverse as Claude Lanzmann, Atom Egoyan, and Todd Haynes. I argue that at least some works of contemporary popular culture employ an epistemology of trauma and testimony both to put us in a different relation to history and to help us think through the status of media culture in mediating past and present, collective and individual trauma. In so doing, these works help us understand a postmodern aesthetic as mediating among disparate identity groups otherwise in danger of being pitted against each other in a balkanized political landscape. Because I will be focusing on Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine (UK/US, 1998), the groups in question will be queer men and (middle-class white) women. Haynes's work crucially forms complex visual and emotional webs between the two and so also gives us the opportunity to think through both the feminist intellectual heritage of queer critical work and the purchase of critical concepts developed by feminists in a changing critical context.

Two strategies seem to be available to contemporary filmmakers for coping with the epistemological difficulties presented by postmodern history: historicist revisionism and the phantasmatic transcendental mode. After describing the first, more familiar model, I will introduce the phantasmatic transcendental mode by reading first a recent film by Atom Egoyan and then, in more detail, Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine. Haynes's film is perhaps most useful in relation to the discourse of trauma precisely because of its lack of intuitive connection: rather than representing the Holocaust or another genocide, it deals with the simultaneous shattering and construction of identity through popular culture and the oedipal fantasies that culture refracts and even instigates.

In historicist revisionism, the past is depicted through the visual styles associated with it--what Jameson calls, in French parlance, the mode retro. But this visual style is either "corrected" with a different or more neutral one, or the representation itself is somehow modified to correct past political and social errors: the past is made to look like the way we have come to think the past should look, and past oppressions are highlighted so as to work in tandem with the visual style to make us feel that we can see the past in a way they could not. The trauma of history, its follies and lack of foresight, are overcome by putting us in a position of "now we know better." But by reducing style to a connotation or by correcting both the style and the content to correspond with greater hindsight, such films position earlier cinematic representations as flawed, incomplete, and inaccurate. Earlier styles are historicized, made products of their era, but the contemporary reprise or revision, the mode retro, fails to historicize itself and instead places accuracy and completeness as the basis for its own representational strategy. The now-we-know-better of historicism implies that the now has somehow been cut out from the continuum of history: historicist revisionism conceives itself ahistorically.

Good examples of historicist revisionism would be Titanic (dir. James Cameron, US, 1997) and, more subtly, the work of the brothers Joel and E than Coen--notably O Brother, Where Art Thou? (UK/France/US, 2000) and The Man Who Wasn't There (US, 2001). In Titanic, the protagonist Rose (Kate Winslet) sees not only the inequities of gender, nationality, and social class around her; she sees the aesthetic (and perhaps even monetary) value in Impressionist art and the impending sinking of the Titanic itself. As an actor in the French and Saunders parody of the movie (24 December 1998) says apropos of the fiance's disdain for Impressionist art, "It's so ironic," with heavy emphasis on the word ironic, as if to match the screenwriter/director's equally heavy hand. We congratulate ourselves on our superiority by identifying historically with the forward-thinking heroine. When the Titanic then sinks and Rose apparently frees herself from oppressive patriarchy, all the social and gender inequities of the past seem to have sunk like the ship itself. As in an exorcism, the film calls up social problems like pesky spirits in order to banish them. The film performatively positions itself as "post"--after the stupidity and lack of foresight that characterized inequality, traditionalism in art, and bad safety planning (all somehow made equivalent in the text through their homology). We are not simply or automatically postmodern: this historical positioning needs to be constantly reperformed. Based on the success of the film, this must indeed be an attractive procedure: there are, after all, so many past mistakes to forget.

The Coen brothers constitute a more complex and self-aware example of the mode retro. 0 Brother, Where Art Thou? knowingly borrows its title from the would-be socially progressive film that the successful director in Sullivan's Travels (dir. Preston Sturges, US, 1941) does not end up making: neither Sullivan nor Sturges got to make the deep, socially conscious film, but, thanks to a trick of history, the Coens can. (3) Similarly, the film inserts a clip from an actual Depression-era film in order to contrast its stagey style with the film's own visual style copped from WPA (Works Progress Administration) photography: in the past, they didn't represent themselves "accurately" in movies, only apparently in photographs. In a comparable move, by inserting the "old-timey" folk musical style that white musicians liven up by employing black musicians (the historical figure of Robert Johnson) and appropriating their musical styles, the film tries to criticize this very process of borrowing while at the same time congratulating itself for recognizing the history of black exploitation, oppression, and marginalization. Popular culture used to be phony and stolen, but now, by fiat, it is not. The film has its cake and eats it too.

A similar argument can be made about the Coens' film The Man Who Wasn't There. Whereas the main intertext, Double Indemnity (dir. Billy Wilder, US, 1944), could not show a homosexual relationship …