Posted in: Denver Comic Con, Movies | Tagged: Charles Soukup, denver comic con, entertainment, Everything Is Awersome, film

Denver Comic Con '15: Everything Is Awesome! In Postmodern Movies

Published Sun, 24 May 2015 11:15:46 -0500

by Dan Wickline

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Evan Fries writes from Denver Comic Con 2015:

After wandering around Denver Comic-Con all morning and seeing some of the incredible things that the convention has to offer, I decided to finally get myself into one of the panels. The avid movie-consumer in me led me to a panel called Understanding Postmodern Culture via Movies: Everything is Awesome, presented by Charles Soukup. He kicked things off on a light note, saying: "Only at a Comic-Con could you attract a full room of people to come listen to French philosophy and postmodernism…"

At first, I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but Mr. Soukup immediately engaged the room by kicking things off with the music video for "Everything is Awesome" from The LEGO Movie, which then led into the beginning of his talk. The material he presented today is, as he called it, a boiled down version of a sixteen week course he taught on the subject fairly recently, and he wanted to hit the most important ideas behind it. It wasn't a one-way lecture either, as he frequently asked audience members to chime in and discuss ideas based on the plethora of clips that he included in his presentation.

One the first questions Soukup posed was "what are the implications of our most traditional an intimate art forms becoming spectacle?"

"There's no place for subtlety," answered a woman sitting a few rows behind me.

Soukup brought up Mad Max: Fury Road in response to this answer, agreeing that it is a huge spectacle movie with some pretty profound feminist themes running throughout, but those were probably completely lost on many of the moviegoers who saw it. "When we're on our deathbeds, what are we thinking about? The last big movie we saw, or the people we love? Probably the people we love… although maybe 'oh, I'm going to miss the next Star Wars movie,'" he joked.

The first major point of the presentation was "intertextuality," which is the interconnectivity of so many different forms of media that all matter to one another. "We live in a world where various mediums become part of our understanding," he said, citing the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But this intertextuality is not just limited to continuities, but also in references, parodies, homages and the like. He showed a small sample of clips from the Family Guy Star Wars parodies, and while the audience laughed along, he asked us why these jokes were pleasurable to us. Digging deeper than the "sophomoric humor," there are layers to these jokes that actually rely on the audiences understanding and proximity to the Star Wars films. The implication here is that the more you see something like Star Wars, the more pleasure you can derive from humor based on it. Soukup once again brought up The LEGO Movie, pointing out that while an eight-year-old can laugh at the film because it's big and fun, an adult can appreciate parts of it and get the deeper references to their own cultural awareness.

Next up was the concept of "hyperreality," which is the idealized version of reality that we can romanticize while ignoring actual reality. For example, when it comes to celebrity culture, people idolize fame and have a glamorous idea of what fame would be like. On the flip side, many famous people make it very clear that fame can be a terrible, all-consuming thing that controls your life. Even so, we still cling to the hyperreality of fame, not the reality. To illustrate this point, Soukup played a couple of clips from Birdman. In the film, Michael Keaton plays an actor who is trying to escape the hyperreality of fame that has been driving his life ever since he played a larger-than-life superhero. "He's trying to create something real. Everything else has become false and meaningless for him," Soukup says after a clip of Keaton's character trying to deal with vulture journalists, a situation that quickly seems to spiral out of his control and almost immediately devolves in to them asking about Birdman as opposed to the real man in front of them.

Overall, this presentation ended up being a lot of fun and very engaging. Soukup clearly has a passion for the things he is talking about, and he was able to package a lot of information into fairly easily digestible bits that can get you thinking a little bit more about how you perceive and consume media. He was very open to talking to members of the audience after the panel as well. Needless to say, I wish I could take his class!