Stuff You Should Know - “Postmodernism:”

Episode Date: April 26, 2022

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Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's here too. This is Stuff You Should Know, post-modernism edition.

I'm strapping on my ice skates. I know. Chuck, I was thinking about it. This may very well be the most difficult topic we've ever tackled. Is this hard for you two? Oh yeah, it's hard for everybody. It's hard for everyone. Oh good. Yeah, no, it's very difficult. It's really hard to define. It's really easy to mischaracterize things as post-modern and lump stuff in, even though it is technically that. And worst of all, it's really easy for people to be snobby to other people about what is or isn't post-modernism. So it's going to be rough. I think that's why I'm a little, not nervous, because who really cares, right? It's just a podcast. But just unnerved because philosophical movements, art movements that have fuzzy boundaries. It's tough for me,

always has been. I deal a little bit more in the concrete. Oh yeah. So it's going to be interesting. Especially when you look at some more, I don't know about cynical, but just sort of straightforward definitions of what is post-modern art. And most people say, well, it's art that happened between 1955 and 1970 and right now. Wrong. Well, it's not wrong. It's an era. That's where it gets slippery. Right. Because art is defined by eras. And even though people did things in the different eras that thematically and stylistically apply more to other eras, like would you call the Godfather a post-modern film? No, but it was made in the post-modern film era. Precisely. So the differentiation here then is that it begins. The differentiation here

is the post-modernism that we're talking about is not just art. It's not just film. It's not just architecture. It's not even just philosophy. We're talking about an entire worldview that all of us collectively share. Most of us, I should say, I think, you know, the West, you could say, if you want to call it that, shares this culture, post-modernist culture. Post-World War II, generally. Yeah. Some people put it at the 70s. Some people put it at the 60s. Other people even go as late as like basically 1979, 1980. But it's not just an art movement. It's not just a type of film. It's not just a type of literature. It's a way of looking at the world that in turn shapes how we create or exist or live in or deal with the world. And we do it

together. It's culture. But the reason it's so fuzzy, Chuck, compared to other things, is because it may still be going on right now. And if it isn't still going on right now, it ended so recently that we're still so wrapped up in the turbulent effects of it that it's hard to see which way's up, down, sideways. So it's really difficult to nail down. But it's really fun to try, I've found. And it's the kind of thing where like they probably won't put a year marker until 30 years from now on what post-modernism is, which we'll get to. Yeah, totally. And even then, it's not a cut and dried thing because a change like this happens over the course of a decade or two. Yeah, or more even for sure. And I would posit that we're in

those decades of change right now. We're in a transition period between post-modernism and what's next. And I think that's one reason why everything is just so uncomfortable right now. In addition to a pandemic being dropped on top of us at a really uncomfortable time. And I would also say after reading a lot about this stuff, I think art, visual art, like let's just say painting. I know there's a lot more to it than that. But as opposed to literature and film, I think the boundaries there are a little more rigid than in other in things like literature and film, where they draw demarcation lines between pre-modern, modern, and post-modern eras a little more succinctly. Like technically anything made these days would be considered

post-modern art just by the virtue of the fact that it's now, whereas you would not say a film is necessarily. Right, right, right. I quit. No, you did great. We're doing great. Just hang in there, man. Just double up the strength of your fingernails and claw in further, okay? I just feel the emails being typed. It's fine. You know what? We could go super post-modern and just totally ignore them like they don't exist because what is really an email? You know what I mean? Yeah, or we could a really post-modern email reply would be, you know, I read your email and here's what I think and just stop at T-H-I-N. Yeah, that's pretty great. That would be great. So this is going to be fun. We're talking about post-modernism and this is one of those things

where we have to define it from the outset, which is the problem with post-modernism is figuring out how to define it. And before we go any further, every hat I own right now, I'm taking off for Dave Roos who helped us put this together. He did a great job. He did a wonderful job. It was not fair to throw this at him. No, I was really interested to see what he would do and he did. He really rose to the occasion. Like he did a great job. He kind of started with this anecdote about a student of an art professor who asked his class like, you know, what is post-modernism? How do you define it? And the student said basically something that the professor later ripped off, which is

it's where you put quotations around everything. Yeah, it almost feels cynical in a way. Yes, a hundred percent. Doesn't it? A million percent. Like the age of cynicism, remember the sarcasm of the 90s? Yeah, that went away. Right. Yeah, exactly. You just did it. So all of that is a hundred percent the fabric, the cultural fabric of post-modernism. It's, as we'll see, a tearing down. Not just institutions and authorities and all that stuff, but other people just doing it as like just the most casual thing in the world, just tearing down. That is the cultural basis of post-modernism.

Yeah, like if someone were to talk about Andy Warhol's soup cans, they can say, well, that's his truth in reality, but you would put that in quotes with your hands at a party. You put truth in quotes. You put reality in quotes. And that's what that student was saying. You put everything in quotes because the philosophical basis of post-modernism is that there is no such thing as universal truth. There's no such thing as reality, like your reality. You could put soup cans in quotes. You could. You could even, if you wanted to be a total jerk, you could do soup in quotes and cans in quotes. And Andy Warhol in quotes. Right. So, and Andy Warhol would love it. He would roll over in his grave, but it'd be like a

dance move more than something out of agony. Yeah. So, that's kind of what the student was saying. You put everything in quotes because nothing is, there is no universal truth. And that is where post-modernism broke from its immediate predecessor, which is modernism, which said, no, there's all sorts of universal truths. And that carried on an even longer tradition of the idea that there's universal truths and we can try to find these through different ways. Right. And with modernism, it was like, let's not use religion. Let's use reason. And it's like a post-enlightenment sort of frame of mind where we can figure out these universal truths and we can apply them to our artworks, whether it's literature or any kind

of visual art. Right. Right. So, with modern art, as weird as it can seem, as abstract as it can seem, what they were doing really ultimately at base, followed in the tradition of like the Romanticists before them, of the Renaissance painters before them, they were all trying to move toward what's called sublime sensibility, which is this idea that there is a universal truth. There is universal beauty. There is universal happiness. Nature is a universal. It's shared and common to all people. It exists in and of itself. And they just kind of chose a different way of going after that. Rather than painting like cherubs and the most amazing clouds you can possibly come up with behind the crucifixion of Christ or something, they tried to evoke it through those shapes and colors and

abstract paintings. But they were still at base after the same thing, which was uncovering that universal truth of like beauty. Right. And then, you know, I took, we talked about it before, I took a philosophy class in college that both blew my mind and I just didn't even understand, but I tried. I think I actually made an A in it because I tried really, really, really hard in that class. Nice. No, kids, I tried hard in every class, but especially hard in philosophy. But I remember studying Nietzsche and some of it hitting home a little bit in that even though Nietzsche was for sure like pre-postmodernism as far as an era is defined, but had these thoughts of postmodernism in that Nietzsche came along and said, you know what, there are perspectives.

There is not a universal truth because we are all individuals and we all have our own unique perspective on what beauty might be or what truth might be or reality might be. So that, I remember that speaking to me some more than, I guess, the modernist thought. Yeah, because it makes sense. It's that whole kind of thing like, what is the color green to you? It's not the same to me. Or if you look at an apple on a table and then you move around the table, the apple changes shape. So depending literally on your perspective, you see things differently. And so what Nietzsche was saying is that if you take that and multiply it by however many billion people are on the planet, how can there possibly be such a thing as a shared

reality? How can there possibly be such a thing as a universal truth? There can't. It's just not possible because not only do people see things differently, they have different experiences in their lives that alter perception even more minutely. It's just too complex. Humans and then collectively humanity is too complex to have universal truths. And so that was kind of the basis of his perspectivism that you were talking about. And then in turn, by proxy, he said, well, then that means that all of these meta-narratives, stories that we tell ourselves, they're meaningless. They can't be true either. Yeah. So what postmodernism would end up becoming is rejection of modernism. And that would play

out across all kinds of different kind of art forms that we're going to talk about in a little bit. But philosophically as well, because if science and reason bring us world war and nuclear bombs, then there's going to be, I think, a tendency to reject that. Yeah. So kind of like, I think we talked about before, I don't remember in what episode, but that world war one was like, it revealed the full horror of just putting all of your faith in science and reason, that like it would lead to technology that led to destruction. And then that was followed up by world war two and the Holocaust. It was followed up by things like lobotomies and phrenology and just mass destruction, the nuclear bomb, all this

stuff came from the application of science and reason faithfully, unerringly. And so postmodernism said, we need to get rid of this completely and totally. We need to tear it all down and start over. So the whole movement started out as a response, a reactionary response to the horrors of a different movement. And I think anytime you have a movement that's born out of recoiling a repellent response to something, it's going to be reckless. And I think in that sense, postmodernism is and always has been reckless because, again, it's all about tearing down and it started with tearing down all of the pillars and the golden calves of modernism. Well, reckless or free? Both. It's definitely both.

All right. I think it's very much both because I think, as we'll see later on, postmodernism ultimately led to its own horrors that we're living with today. And it was out of recklessness, I think. Okay. You talking about the digital age? That's part of it, for sure. Should we take a break? I think your dog says so. Did you hear that? It is National Pet Day. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life.

In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second-hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. My dog barked again to signal us. And I guess we should just go ahead and say that the term itself, postmodernism was coined by a French philosopher named Jean Francois. How would you pronounce that? Is it Lyotard? Lyotard or Lyotard?

Okay. And this was in 1979. So, you know, people put the postmodern era. Again, there's their fuzzy numbers, but I've generally mostly seen sort of mid 1950s to early 1970s is kind of the beginning. And so, this was in 1979 when it was actually defined by Jean Francois who said, I define postmodern as incredulity toward meta-narratives, which you already talked about, these sort of stories that we tell ourselves that sort of give structure to all of our existence. Yeah. It's like, I saw it explained as a meta-narrative is the blueprint that we carry out

like our actions and our lives in so that like without a blueprint, a plumber just laying pipe, it's just randomly laying pipe. There's no point or reason to what they're doing, but if they're following a blueprint, it gives their work meaning, guidance, there's a purpose to it. And so, meta-narratives can take all sorts of different forms from the free market is going to deliver us all to like this prosperous, happy, progressive future to religion explains why we're here to basically any grand story that's like the big picture, that's a meta-narrative. And we've got a lot of them and postmodernism said, not a single one of those is legitimate.

Well, I don't know about legitimate, but not a single one of those should be looked at as the truth. Okay. Like I think they can be considered, but the problem I think with modernism or at least as far as a postmodernist goes is that they laid claim that these are the universal truths. Okay. I think that was a very important nuance point that you're right. All right. I retract my original statement. Okay. We need to ding Chuck one point. That'll be my only ding. I don't know, man. You've been dinging it up already. I just haven't used the sound effect. Okay. But it's, you know, we talked about cynicism. It's also

about skepticism, right? Yeah. So I think that's part of the sarcasm and the irony when you are sarcastic towards somebody, when you're ironic about, you know, when you speak ironically about something, you're expressing skepticism that what that is is true or cool or real or anything, whatever it is you're saying, as long as it's sarcastic or ironic, it's a form of skepticism. And that is kind of like the hallmark cultural move. I think hallmark is good. Okay. That's the cultural hallmark of postmodernism, I think, irony in skepticism and in sarcasm. Okay. I agree with all that. Ding ding. Or we need Chris Hardwick on here just to say points. Oh, that's a good one. What's he doing these days? He could probably do that.

I think he's still doing the talking dead. No, I'm sure he does plenty. Yeah. He's a brand into himself. Yeah. He's like the Ryan Seacrest of podcasting. That's sure. He probably podcasts, too, though. Probably, but I think Chris Hardwick is still the Ryan Seacrest of podcasting. Should we talk about art, like painting and stuff? Yeah. Yeah. Because I think we laid the groundwork here, but let's just go over this real quick one more time. Postmodernism is a recoil, repellent response to modernism, which produced all sorts of world wars in the nuclear bomb and was based on authority figures and rigidity and universal truths. You have to follow this and you have to look at this this way. If you paint a different

way outside of that, it's not really art. The art world was one of the very firsts outside of philosophy to rebel against that. The idea that there's anybody who could say, that's art, that's not art. One of the first people to really do that was the dadaist Marcel Duchamp. Yeah. Here's the thing with talking about eras of art. If you look at some of Duchamp's work, in particular, we should just go ahead and reference probably one of the most famous, which was what he called a ready-made, which was to take, in this case, a urinal, not built a urinal, but take a mass-produced urinal, signed a name on it. A pen name in this case was R. Mutt, M-U-T-T, and it called it Fountain in 1917. This was a piece of art. If you look at this

piece of art, it is decidedly postmodern, but it was made five to six decades before anyone would define art as postmodern art. It lives squarely in the middle, I don't know about the middle, but it lives squarely in the modern art movement. The difference between, and I read a lot about this, between modern art and postmodern art is philosophical. It's also cultural in that it was mainly men who were making the art. Postmodern art really brought along different cultural perspectives and female perspectives. It was also, I read, very goal-oriented, whereas postmodern art cared more about process. Apparently modern art was very much still goal-oriented, even though they saw it as a rejection of the still life of the bowl of fruit on the table before them.

A lot of the work still sort of echoed that kind of thing. Then you have Duchamp coming along with his toilet, which is completely postmodern, but lives in a modern era. Like you were saying, he came decades before the postmodern era, in exactly the same way that Nietzsche was laying the foundation for postmodernism and philosophy and culture, decades before the postmodern era too, even further back than that. There's just no way of looking at Duchamp's work any other way than, this is a postmodern artwork. Not just that one, the fountain. That was his bread and butter, was using these ready-mades. That was a huge foundation of the actual postmodern art movement that came later, which was, first of all, tearing down the distinction between

high art and low art, because Duchamp was a serious artist exhibiting in serious galleries and museums and things like that, but he was also buying urinals, signing them and calling it art. In one way, that makes it way more accessible to you and me. It makes it less scary. Art's less scary. You don't have to be an art expert to come into the art world now and appreciate art, or laugh at art, or stop taking life quite so seriously. At the same time, the fact that he went and bought something, he paid for something from a plumbing supply company that was mass produced, also laid the foundation for guys later, like Andy Warhol, who melded consumerism into art to create pop culture, which opened the door for commoditization of art, which then

opened the door for what we live in today, which is art is advertising, basically. There's almost no distinction whatsoever. It's everywhere, and it's hijacked to sell things as much as it is to actually make art or make something beautiful or good or thought provoking. Yeah, and I don't know. I think that the transition to postmodern art is really interesting, because it opened it to different classes. Modern art was almost exclusively based in Europe and Russia, I guess, whereas postmodern art, after World War II, things really, I mean, you could say all of the West, basically, was taking part, but just sort of outsider art and conceptual art and to things where we have today, we're like, well, someone will put a pile of

sunflower seeds in the middle of a floor and call it art. That is the postmodern sort of rejection of what was already, I think, a pretty radical departure as far as the art world is concerned with modern art, because when you have people like Jackson Pollock or Picasso or the Cuba stuff, there was already, I think a lot of that stuff was a little bit slower to accept from sort of the traditional pre-modern art critics. Right. So postmodern just blew that, blew past it. It definitely did. And then, so Warhol comes along and creates pop art, and everybody starts

definitely riffing on that vibe. But one of the other hallmarks of postmodern art is borrowing and remixing, mashing up other styles, other types of art from different eras, different media, and just kind of mixing it together in a brand new way. That's one of the hallmarks of postmodern art as well. Yeah, I love that David Byrne quote you sent, because he's a sort of the quintessential postmodern musician, and he said he was all about the mashing up and the mixing up of things, and it was just sort of a really free and creative time, so he was all about it, right? Yeah, for sure. And I mean, especially now today, the world we live in, postmodernism,

has a really bad name, almost across the board to everybody. But there was definitely a time where it was glorious and beautiful and fun, and David Byrne was definitely there for that heyday, for sure. Can we talk about a couple of these other famous postmodern works? Yeah. The treachery of images is another one. And again, I think this was in the modern era technically, but it was one of the first seeds of what was to come. This was from René Margrete, and it is the very famous picture of a pipe, a smoking pipe, with a caption in French. It says this is not a pipe, but what would that be in French, my French speaking friend? Cine pas une pipe. He sounded literally like the Google person on, or the YouTube translator. Josh says. I did not know you

had that as a moonlighting job. I do, and I'm making almost no money off of it, but it's still, it's a labor of love. But this is a great example of what was to come with postmodernism, which is, here's a picture of a pipe. It's clearly a pipe, but it says this is not a pipe, because perspective, baby, that's not my reality. There is no objective truth. Yeah, that's another thing that postmodernism kind of came along and warned everybody about, is us putting all of our faith and just casual trust in the images and words that we've created to create our culture, right? Yeah. So Margrete was saying, and this is like quintessential postmodernism, that this is not a pipe. It's a picture of a pipe. You can't trust it. You

can't use it. You can't stuff it with tobacco and smoke it. Don't call it a pipe. It's not really a pipe. And that kind of like postmodern thought, where there was no real meaning to pictures, images, words, sounds, aside from what we ascribe to them, it kind of eventually morphed into this weird thing where we got really comfortable with that David Byrne idea of remixing everything, of using these different things and these different codes to create new meanings. But at the same time, we were simulating reality in different ways. And so eventually we started to lose the ability to distinguish between reality, like anything approaching what we would call real reality, and simulated reality, which was all the words and images and pictures

that we just kind of take for granted are real, but actually aren't. They're all just symbols that we've stopped seeing as symbols. And so what postmodernism was warning about, what Margrete was warning or kind of reminding us of, ended up subverting itself and creating an inability in us here living today to distinguish between simulated reality and real reality. Because I mean, you're a terrible example of this, but the average person out there, when's the last time you actually went out in the woods? Oh, sure. It's probably been a really long time. When's the last time you saw a video or an image of the woods? And to your brain, you're like, oh yeah, I've probably been in the woods pretty recently. No, you haven't. You haven't

been in the woods in years. You saw it on TV last week. That's the most recent brush with the woods that you've had. That's what has been the result of postmodernism. And it's interesting that they were originally warning about it and then came to kind of throw this shackle on all of us. Yeah, I like this other example, because I think when people of the time might have seen Margrete's This Is Not a Pipe, I'm sure like your average person might just say, what are you even talking about with this? Yeah. Or somebody might see that today and say that. But in the 60s, Dave found this other great example that very much evokes that This Is Not a Pipe work from Joseph Kosuth's One in Three Chairs. And I think this one is more likely to get through to someone who

doesn't, may not typically understand this kind of philosophy, which is it's a real folding chair. And then it's flanked by a black and white photograph of that same exact folding chair. And then a placard with a dictionary definition of chair. And I think this is a little more accessible for your average Joe to maybe come up and say, oh, I get what they're doing here. Like, I might not fully understand it, but like, I see what they mean. This is a chair, and this is a chair, and this is a chair. Plus, it's not in French. Exactly. It automatically makes it more accessible to the average Joe. Yeah. How would you say that in French? Do you even know One in Three Chairs?

Is it Chairs? I haven't gotten to that on my YouTube channel. Yeah. So no, I can't remember what chair is, but I'll bet some people are going to write in and tell us. Yeah. But you know, what all of this did was in speaking in terms of like this kind of visual art is it opened the doors not only for different cultures and different people in different classes and races and men and women and all across the gender spectrum to open up their minds and create, but it was a lot of times it was shocking and it allowed them to really push the boundaries of what art could even be, which was a new thing. I was reading up. Do you remember the huge controversy in the late 80s? It turned out to be 1987. I didn't remember that, but

with that image, Piss Christ. I don't remember that. It was an enormous thing. The National Endowment of the Arts got its funding slashed as a result because it turned out this artist, I can't remember his name, but he did a photo series of crucifix and different like body fluids, like his own blood and this one was submerged in his own urine. And it's actually pretty until you realize what you're looking at and it set a lot of Christians, including Jesse Helms, off and they went crazy on the National Endowment of the Arts. This artist lost a bunch of funding. Yeah. It was a big deal and it brought to the fore this kind of culture clash of no one, especially not Jesse Helms, can say what's art and what's not art. This artist has created

something and he says, this is art. It's art and that in and of itself is a very postmodern way of looking at things. And also, it turned out the artist himself is like a devout Catholic. He didn't mean it blasphemously at all. It was designed to provoke, I'm sure. It was. I can't remember exactly what his purpose of it was, but I don't think he meant anything to happen like it happened. But even that, that's just beside the point. The point was there was a fight over what's art and a lot of the arch conservatives won that fight by slashing the National Endowment of the Arts and giving it a bad name because it's federally as a federally funded agency and so taxpayer money was going into it. Taxpayers who didn't think that was art at all didn't want

their money going to it. It was quite a big kerfuffle, but it was super postmodern while it was happening. Right. And they were like, what's wrong with a bowl of fruit on a table? Can't we just paint that forever? Exactly. Everyone loves the bowls of fruit. How about some more of those Georgia O'Keefe flowers? I love those for some reason. I can't quite put my finger on. Oh, that's funny. Should we take a break here? Should we talk about literature then take a break? That's up to you. It's up to your doggy. All right. Nico says go forward with literature. Okay, cool. The modernist movement with literature featured people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf and this is again sort of with modern art. Boundaries were being pushed in

different directions from sort of the old school of literary styles. All of a sudden you had stream of consciousness happening, nonlinear narratives happening. This is where free verse poetry was born. But then postmodernists came along and they went, oh, you think that's pushing the boundaries? Let me introduce you to Thomas Pinchon and Joseph Heller and people like this who really took things to an nth degree to the point where you found that one book that just stopped in the middle of the first chapter over and over. Yeah, there's a book by Italo Calvino called If on a Winner's Night a Traveler. It's from 1979. It's a quintessential postmodern novel in that it's written in the second person perspective. So he talks about you. So you're

the main character and it starts out by saying you're about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel If on a Winner Night a Traveler. Relax, concentrate, dispel every other thought. So the author is directing you, the reader, to begin the novel that you're reading. So you're immediately the character. Like he's writing about you in this page. And then it very quickly careens from what you would consider real. Like the book runs out on page 32 in the book. The book you're actually reading still goes on. It's just in the book that happens. So now you, the character have to go to the bookstore and you get another version and you end up reading 10 different beginnings to the same book. But the upside of it is you fall in love with Ludmila,

the book store shopkeeper as well. So it's just completely out of left field. And you could say absurd. And that is quintessentially postmodern too. They weren't, James Joyce wasn't doing anything quite like that. No, not at all. And this is where I, you know, I have an appreciation for it. I think very clever. I see what you're doing there. But I would rather read a good novel from beginning to end with a great story. So that Chuck, that is a real criticism of postmodernism because everything has, everything's meaning is up for grabs. It's up in the air. There's no universal truth. And if you, if you can put meaning in air quotes as well, that, that means by proxy that everything is meaningless in a certain way of looking at it.

And so yeah, it's cool. That was an interesting thing and it kind of was clever. But it, is it, is it as satisfying? Is it as meaningful as like you said, a good novel or, you know, like an actual novel that follows like maybe a little more structure rules. Some people would say no, but a lot of people would say yes. And they would point to the idea that there's this kind of nihilistic bent in postmodernism in every form, whether it's visual art, film, novels, that, that makes it less important in a way. And again, I personally think it's because postmodernism was born as a repellent response to a long standing thing and that it was immediately, it was automatically born on shaky, reckless ground and that how can you create something

beautiful if you don't think there is such a thing as beauty? How can you create something meaningful if you don't think there is such a thing as meaning? And if there is no such thing as meaning, then stop writing because you're just doing that for money now at this point. Right. Which I think was the goal oriented movement of modern art. It didn't specifically say, but what else would the goal be rather than to have a showing and sell paintings? Yes. Some of the other sort of elements of postmodern literature, one is paradox and randomness. Books like Slaughterhouse 5 and Catch-22, you started seeing, and even though there were nonlinear narratives before, you found stories that were really told out of order at this point

and that even had facts that don't align with one another where you might say, well, that doesn't even make sense sometimes according to what I had previously read, like even earlier in the same book or chapter, sometimes purposefully obfuscating, meeting or disorienting the reader. And then this whole idea of intertextuality, which is like sort of the mashup that David Byrne was talking about, but in this case with literature incorporating plot lines and characters from other works or other tropes and literary ideas is kind of bringing them all into one book. Yeah, like a good example of that is not found in literature, but in TV, in the character of John Munch, who's a detective who started out

as a detective on the TV show Homicide, Life on the Street. And then that same character appeared on Law and Order SVU. He was a recurring longtime character on that show, right? So is it the same actor? Yes, same actor, same character. Is this part of the same elsewhere, universe theory? Yes, yes. The Tommy Westfall, yeah, the Tommy Westfall universe. Yeah, John Munch is like one of the fulcrums of that universe because he's also been on X-Files. He's also been on The Wire. Like he's this character that people like love and love to bring into their own show, even though they had nothing to do with Homicide Life on the Street. And so that's a really good

example of intertextuality. This character keeps popping up in different works and it's the same character. And in him appearing there, it's saying this show exists in the same universe as this show. And yes, you can all trace it back to the same elsewhere finale, which I think we talked about in our Not So Fan Theories episode. Yeah, Tarantino does that a lot too with the Vega brothers. And I think that was Red Apple Cigarettes. Yeah, and there was a character in Jackie Brown that was also in, I can't think of his name, one of the FBI guys. Michael Keaton played him in Out of Sight. But I think that was a recurring character and different. Without any real sort of, it's not like Alfred from Batman appearing in different Batman movies.

It's sort of out of context, intertextuality, if that makes sense. It makes total sense. And then also Tarantino is a good example of postmodernism as far as like pastiche, which is just such an obnoxious word. But once you look into it, it's basically just borrowing other styles in the postmodern sense, mashing them together. So Tarantino was like crazy about 70s kung fu stuff or 70s gangster flicks. And he would use those. He would actually take characters who were based on those other eras and those other styles and put them all into the same movie, into the same universe together. That's pastiche and that's another very postmodern thing. Wes Anderson is another good example. His like, just unparalleled love of mid-century

like looks and design. That's a pastiche. Although it turns out he's a post-postmodern director in almost every sense of the word. Yeah, I mean, I think Pulp Fiction is very commonly referred to as sort of one of the hallmarks of postmodern filmmaking in that not only the mashups, but the nonlinear storytelling, the good guys are bad guys, bad guys are good guys, the sort of rejection of purpose like, you know, what's in the briefcase. Like that's a very non. And I think that's why I never really cared that much. But I think it's why I drove a lot of people crazy because as filmgoers we're so trained to have to know what's in that briefcase because it should have some sort of meaning and he was kind of turned it

on its ear a little bit. And then everybody copied for the next decade Pulp Fiction. There were so many bad sort of half ripoffs made. Yeah. I'm not going to say any, there's one I could call out, but I'm not going to. Oh, text it to me or something. I will. But have you seen Severance on Apple TV? Yeah, I'm about halfway through. I love it. So it's so good. That's like a good example of that. Leaving people wanting more and just absolutely not giving it to them like, sorry. There's no resolution. It's just crazy how strong out you feel after the last episode. Oh boy. I can't wait. All right. I think we should shoot where we got to take our second break now. Yeah, we definitely do. And we'll talk a little bit more about film and

sum this all up maybe. Sure. All right. We'll be right back. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing could be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot,

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All right, so Pulp Fiction is routinely singled out as a postmodern film. The one that's considered probably the godfather of all of them is Eight and a Half by Fellini, Frederico Fellini. I've never seen it, have you? Yeah, sure. Godfather not in the movie since. So we don't confuse everybody. I think you just did. I think you planted that about 40 minutes ago. Yeah, I've seen Eight and a Half. If you've taken any sort of film appreciation class in college, you're going to see it. It's Fellini's, one of Fellini's masterpieces. The whole movie could be described as a meta-fiction because it's a film about making a film.

It's really good. It's dreamy and trippy and confusing. It's full of a lot of dream sequences and reality and fiction are blurred. Highly recommend seeing Eight and a Half and then like reading a lot about it afterward. I love that. So you can make sense about it. That's one of my favorite types of movies is a movie that you can watch and then go find a bunch of film crit on it that explains it or points it out. Discusses it. I love that kind of thing. I finally saw Casablanca, by the way. Oh, great. What'd you think? I'm not going to say medium. It was really good. I would not put it among the best films I've

ever seen or ever made. Even as a mainstream film? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I thought it was really, really good, but I definitely didn't see like, oh my god, this is the best film I've ever seen type of feeling. Yeah. I think people leave out that it's one of the best mainstream films I've ever made of the first half or, yeah, I guess the first half of the century or the middle of the century I would even expand it out to you. I loved it. I think it's just a great movie, but I'm glad you saw it finally. But it was, I think maybe the expectation. It's sort of like when I saw Citizen Kane for the first time after so much buildup, it really delivered on that as far as, I think,

just breaking boundaries of filmmaking and raising the bar. And I don't feel like Casablanca did that. I thought it was kind of just a normal, really good movie. Yeah. Very normal and mainstream. Yeah. It's a good one. I agree. So eight and a half, it's like you said, it's a meta narrative, basically. And anytime you see something like dreamy or weird or people play themselves or strange versions of themselves, you have stumbled into a postmodern film. A really good example of that is basically everything Charlie Kaufman's ever written or directed. Like Sinecta Key in New York is probably one of the most postmodern films ever made. But then also, so it was like Eternal Sunshine of

the Spotless Mind. But people were like, this is truly postmodern in every sense. But it checks enough boxes that you could say that's definitely a postmodern film. Same with being John Malkovich. Yeah. An adaptation. I mean, that's the currency he deals in. And I still haven't seen the most recent one with Jesse Plemons. I've got to check that out. I'm thinking of ending things. Yeah. Is that what it's called? I think so. I saw the Nicholas Cage movie that's coming out. I ended up at a screener. Was it good? It is very good. But it's very postmodern too. Like Nicholas Cage plays himself. And it's just completely off the rails from time to time. And in a lot of ways,

it reminded me of adaptation where it purposefully goes off the rails to make a point like adaptation did. And so it borrowed from that. And it didn't, it certainly seemed that way even more because Nicholas Cage is in it. But it's pretty good movie. It's worth seeing for sure. And shout out while we're off track. I just saw the Nicholas Cage movie Pig from last year about a former chef who is a truffle hunter and is trying to find his pig. And stuff he should know listener, I believe, because he was a movie crush listener. Michael Sarnowski directed that movie. Oh, neat. I've heard good things about it. It's fantastic. That's awesome. It's really, really good. I will definitely check it out then.

All right. Let's wrap this up, I guess. Should we talk about, I don't know, criticisms? Sure. Also, we just need to definitely give a shout out. Postmodernism and architecture is also a thing. Shout out to Frank Gehry. Right. It's almost its own track, but it had an even more abrupt change than, say, like film or art did. Like it's just, it went from minimalist, functional design to just take everything apart, tear it down and put it back together in weird ways. And yeah, Frank Gehry is the embodiment of the postmodern stark attack, is what they call him. Yeah. And I think if you want a good example, if you want to look at modern versus postmodern, you can look at the two Guggenheims from Frank Lloyd Wright in New York to Gehry's in Spain.

I was just in New York and went to the Guggenheim and saw the Kandinsky exhibit. Highly recommend going to that before it closes. Nice. Or anything at the Guggenheim, because just being in that building is quite an experience. Still have never been. Oh my God. You're kidding. No. It's the best one. It's the best Guggenheim. It's my favorite museum in the world. Really? Yeah, because it's, you're in and out in a couple of hours. It's not intimidating. You just ascend up that circular ramp and see a lot of great art over a couple of hours and then you're out of there and the building itself is art. Very nice. Well, I'll check it out. It's like going to the Met is intimidating. The Guggenheim is not intimidating. I'm going to get super efficient and watch pig

and go to the Guggenheim in the same day. Totally should. Go to New York. Don't watch a movie in New York. Watch it on the plane. There you go. I have to really select my airline carefully. All right. So criticisms of postmodernism, like you said, it is a bit of a punching bag these days and maybe kind of always has been, but you have people from both sides of the political spectrum criticizing postmodernism, whether it's sort of the old school leftists who think like, no, it has nothing to do with social progress. All this individualism is no good for our movement. To conservatism, conservatism, conservatism, which is we do not like this whole there is no right or wrong. It's all about your perspective things because there's definitely right and

wrong everybody. Yes. Like how can you ban a book when it's not demonstrably wrong for asserting a viewpoint that's outside the norm? It's a very good point. Yeah. So of course they don't like the idea of moral relativism, but I was surprised that the leftists thought that until I learned that Leotard himself was basically like, yeah, this is a strange new unhappy direction that we're going in and they laid it at the feet of the failure of Marxism to kind of bring about collective social progress. And then the response to that was Thatcher's and Reagan's neoliberal policies that basically said deregulate everything, make as much money as you can at the expense of whoever you need to, and let's go global, baby. And that is part and parcel with

postmodernism as far as economics is concerned. And if you're an economist and a philosopher and you're looking at postmodernism, probably to you late capitalism and postmodernism are basically interchangeable words. And that's another reason why so many people are so sick of postmodernism because there isn't anything right. There isn't anything wrong. There is no truth. There is no morality. It's just get as rich as you can as a huge part of it too. The commodification of art really kind of laid the groundwork for that. And it's permeated everywhere. Right? So now people say, okay, we're sick of postmodernism. We think it's dead. What's next? Next. So, Chuck, what is next after postmodernism? Well, I certainly don't know, but you sent along

some interesting reading for me to ponder. And the general thought is that we are in an era now of, and again, it won't be probably defined until 10 to 20 years later, but hypermodernism, which is what this article calls postmodernism on steroids, where advertising is art and where tech companies are the governments of the world, or at least as influential as the governments of the world and the religions of the world, or metamodernism, which is not quite hypermodernism, right? It's sort of harkening back to modernism. Yes, but with the advantage of having seen the failures of modernism before and then having lived through postmodernism. So it's this idea that there is such a thing as beauty and truth and nature, and that they are important and they

matter, and they're things we should move towards, and that we should be positive and inclusive. So, Ted Lasso is like a cartoonish embodiment of metamodernism. And we see this clash going on right now, Chuck. There's a huge clash in every kind of culture war. It's between people who are saying, no, we need to keep extracting and consuming, and other people are like, no, we need to go a different track than, like, say, save the planet or whatever. And some philosophers say, this is the split that postmodernism kind of broke into. And right now, we're figuring out which direction we're going to go in, you know, save the planet, ruin the planet. Like, that kind of black and white choice is basically being laid out for us right now. And that's our place in history. And

no one has any idea which one's going to win out, although some people say hypermodernism already has. Like, we're just too much slaves to our devices. We've just been co-opted by technology too deeply already to get ourselves out of it. Other people say not so fast, including Ted Lasso. Well, all of the stuff that you sent me about metamodernism made me finally understand one of my favorite singer, country artist, Sturgill Simpsons. First record was called Metamodern Sounds and Country Music. And now that title makes more sense to me than it ever did, because he is a country singer who sort of defies the modern country singing movement by harkening back to another time. He's, you know, like a progressive liberal country singer, so that doesn't go over

well in a lot of circles of country music. Is that fair to say? I think so. Like, when he got COVID and he was sort of speaking out about it, I was reading Fox News comments about this and people were like, who even is this guy? He's no country star. I've never even heard of him. He'll dress him like a deer. That's because they don't play him on modern country music stations because he doesn't sing about tailgating. But his first record is called Metamodern Sounds and Country Music, and it's fantastic. He sounds like a mashup of Waylon Jennings and George Jones, if that tells you where he's come from.

Dude, how could you go wrong with that? Exactly. With a little bit of Joan Baez thrown in. Yeah, why not? So, Sergio Simpson is possibly the future, or Bitcoin mining is the other future. It's our choice, everybody. Who knows where we'll end up, but we'll find out. All right. So that was Postmodernism. That's the surface. Yeah, we did. And that's the stuff you should know way. If you want to know more about

Postmodernism, there's a lot to go read about it. There's a lot to read about hypermodernism, metamodernism, post-postmodernism. It's really, really interesting rabbit holes to go down. You can make a hobby out of it. And since I said you can make a hobby out of it, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to follow this up. This was about the short stuff about nose breathing and that you got a toothache from nose breathing. This is from a, quote, qualified dentist working in the UK. Nice. Name Tom Park. Hey, guys. I'll kind of skip the greetings for length, but he goes on to say,

the maxillary, maxillary, maxillary. The maxillary sinuses, usually referred to just as the sinuses, sit next to the nose about in the region of your upper cheeks and extend to the front of your face on either side of the nose. They're very close to the ends of the roots of your molars, premolars, and sometimes canines, where all the nerves supplying your teeth enter those teeth. When you have sinusitis, this can feel like a toothache even a couple weeks after the block. No symptoms have settled and lots of people come to the dentist around wintertime with toothaches, which is ultimately put down to this phenomenon. I had it myself once and the jog I went on was agonizing and my empathy for my patients grew considerably.

That's nice. This can also occur when you read in very cold air through your nose, if that air then goes into the sinuses, but it's usually more transient. I hope this helps. Perhaps Josh should check with his own dentist to see if he has cavities that need managing. Well, this was like a decade or so ago. What's the dentist's name, the qualified dentist? Tom Park. Thank you, Tom. This was at least, no, this is probably more like, oh my God, 20 years ago when it happened, thankfully. I definitely did have a cavity that needed to be filled back there. But I went to the dentist recently, Chuck, and get this. My dentist said that she's going to

need to raise my sinus. I was like, how do you raise a sinus? She said, well, they used to do it with the hammer and chisel. We still got the hammer and chisel, but we have a better way of doing it now that's less painful. But they used to go in and put a chisel up under your sinus and then tap it and actually raise your sinus. It sounds medieval. Are you going to do it? To quote Pulp Fiction. Yeah, I'm going to have to because I need a little bit of bone put back there and they can't do it without raising the sinus. Oh, man. I'll keep you posted. I'll be without my tooth, man. What's going on with us? I don't know. We were genetically conferred with terrible teeth, I think.

And by the way, Tom Park also says, by the way, also your description of the audience in Manchester, who didn't clap until the very end, made me laugh out loud. As a man in CUNY and myself, I can tell you that we are not easily impressed, so good on you for earning that clap. And that is from dentist Tom Park. Go to Tom Park. If you're anywhere in the UK, you should make that trip to see Tom. He's got the empathy. It's right. He loves Ted Lassa. Loves. If you want to be like Tom Park and write in about something we talked about, we love that kind of stuff. And somebody comes back and crosses a tee or dots an eye or adds an ellipse even, although we don't like the ellipses that much. And you can put that all into an email and send it off to StuffPodcast

at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Life. Tell everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view

on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.