Unease with the postmodern condition: Oscars edition
What do this year's Best Picture nominees have to say about homo sapiens? S. Brent Plate says (a) plenty and (b) it ain't simple.
Through this year’s batch of films, human identities interface with technology, are lost, confused, mixed up between surface and depth, public and private, between who we are by ourselves and who we are in relation to others.Against the modern myth that we are all individuals, these movies tell us that who we are is determined by social, political, familial, and technological forces, most of which are well beyond our individual control. Yet, with a variable sense of identity forming in and through our high- and low-tech social networks, a key, prime question of religion—who are we?—is put in play in new ways.
We are left wondering how religious traditions themselves will become more variable as they work, consciously or not, with new media technologies, new formations of family, and new divisions between public and private. Whatever else our variable identities might produce, it is a time of new and potentially reinvigorating “interface” relations.
