So, if movies went through a process of Spenglerism, from rude iconography to cheap entertainment to low art to high art, where exactly did they end up? Postmodernism.

Postmodernism is a very important concept to understand. It’s also a very difficult concept to understand. It’s  shambolic and protean. Organized mayhem. As soon as you start finding a method in the madness, the madness shifts. I’m most familiar with postmodernism in architecture, but it’s basically the American way of life in everything from films to fire hydrants.

Here’s the American Heritage dictionary definition of postmodern. I’ll grant you that it’s a postmodern dictionary that doesn’t feel very attuned to any American heritage I know about, but it will have to do, because I’m lazy:

adjective

1. 1. Of or relating to art, architecture, or literature that reacts against earlier modernist principles, as by reintroducing traditional or classical elements of style or by carrying modernist styles or practices to extremes.
   2. Of or relating to an intellectual stance often marked by eclecticism and irony and tending to reject the universal validity of such principles as hierarchy, binary opposition, categorization, and stable identity.

I first encountered the term postmodern because of architecture. It reared its confused, ugly head back in the ’50s, but it really didn’t get a full head of steam until the ’80s rolled around. It’s allegedly a reaction to the bland, featureless ethos of the international style. You know, this sort of thing:

So since 1930 or so, people had inexplicably gotten the urge to live in a simulacrum of a dentist’s office, like that one, and postmodernism was supposed to fix that. How? By copying Las Vegas, of all things. From the Wikiup:

Las Vegas was regarded as a “non-city” and as an outgrowth of a “strip”, along which were placed parking lots and singular frontages for gambling casinos, hotels, churches and bars. The research group studied various aspects of the city, including the commercial vernacular, lighting, patterns, styles, and symbolism in the architecture. Venturi and Scott Brown created a taxonomy for the forms, signs, and symbols they encountered.^[3] The two were inspired by the emphasis on sign and symbol they found on the Las Vegas strip. The result was a critique of Modern architecture, demonstrated most famously in the comparison between the “duck” and “decorated shed.”

The “duck” represents a large part of modernist architecture, which was expressive in form and volume. In contrast, the “decorated shed” relies on imagery and sign. Virtually all architecture before the Modern Movement used decoration to convey meaning, often profound but sometimes simply perfunctory, such as the signage on medieval shop fronts. Only Modernist architecture eschewed such ornament, relying only on corporeal or structural elements to convey meaning. As such, argued the authors, Modern buildings became mute and vacuous, especially when built for corporate or government clients.

So the modernists got rid of all decoration. That was bad. The postmodernist decided to fix it by building everything to look like dentist offices only with misshapen and proportion-less classical elements stapled all over them willy nilly. Like this:

There are lots of ways I could think of to fix Brutalist and International style buildings, but Postmodernism ain’t one of them. It reminds me of this:

Because what we’re looking at here, really, is pastiche.

noun

1. 1. A dramatic, literary, or musical piece openly imitating the previous works of other artists, often with satirical intent.

   2. A pasticcio of incongruous parts; a hodgepodge.

I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to drill it into the side of how many people’s heads, but architecture shouldn’t accommodate jokes. Irony is mentioned in the definition of postmodern, you’ll recall. Architects don’t do irony. Architects aren’t supposed to tell jokes. Hell, a good architect probably hasn’t ever heard a good joke.

Making visually disturbing, disorienting structures might be fine for the Las Vegas strip, but it’s of no use to regular people living in regular housing. Back in 1920, people knew that architecture rendered in disturbing misshapen pastiche was appropriate for the set of a horror movie, not a suburban split-level:

Honestly, I don’t know why Frank Gehry doesn’t have to send a percentage back to Caligari’s copyright holders:

Lamebrains praise this sort of thing, because it’s wrong, and they love the wrongness of it.

Architecture had rules. The rules were based on three things: commodity, firmness, and delight, if you ask Vitruvius. They’re as applicable today as they were in antiquity. Does it accommodate the occupant’s needs? Is it sturdy? Is it beautiful? Everything is supposed to be based on the human being, too. The scale of it,  the amount of decoration, the size of it, the effect of it. The commodity part also warns you away from wastefulness, as one of the primary occupant’s needs is to be able to afford the damn thing. And affordability also means adaptability. There’s an old joke that a bad doctor gets to bury his mistake, but a bad architect can only advise you to plant vines. Do-overs cost too much in architecture to start telling jokes in sticks and bricks.

Architecture shouldn’t be anti-human. But it is, now. The last stop on the postmodern express, where everything is just a jumble, and can be all decoration, or no decoration, swollen and misshapen and malformed is just fine, any old whichaway you feel like it, and the human beings who have to live and work in a structure don’t matter one bit, devolves into this:

Hmmm. “SIMILAR TO BE BUILT.” I know a threat when I hear one.

If I were you, I’d demand to live in a post-postmodern world as soon as possible. You can’t live in a regular postmodern one. They didn’t make a spot for you, or anyone else human for that matter.