When in Rome

Seen at: Cinemark Greeley Mall, March 10 at 2:30 pm

As I've mentioned before, in the Postmodern Hollywood paradigm, traditional Christian religion, along with a belief in God, has been largely exiled to fringe movies like the one in my last post. But that doesn't mean Postmodernity is atheist. Instead, we get a smorgasbord of spiritual beliefs in curses, legends, and disconnected spiritual forces that affect our lives.

When in Rome is a good example of this, in the context of a romantic comedy. Kristin Bell, a decent actress of her generation who seems to be gravitating towards harsher bitchy role as she matures, is a romantically down-on-her-luck heroin who blatantly invokes such spiritual forces as a revenge against the Goddess of Love.

She does this by picking up coins out of "the fountain of love" in Rome, thinking it will save the poor lovelorn saps who have thrown in the coins. Later she finds out that according to her Italian brother-in-law, this act by her invokes magical forces that will cause the coin-throwers to fall in love with her. If you've seen the trailer, you will have gotten this premise of the story.

Of course this being a romantic comedy, we know that somehow she will wind up with her soul mate.

How is this Postmodern? So far, it is not explictly so. This could be the set-up to a Classical comedy. The difference is that in this case, the magical forces of the fountain turn out to be absolutely real, instead of simply a legend, as they would be in a Classical story.

Another way of saying this is that there is no naturalistic cover in this story. The actions of the male coin throwers can be explained only by believing that the curse/legend of the fountain is real. As I'm watching this I'm thinking, "wait till this gets out on the Internet about this fountain of love!"

By contrast, a Classical version of the story would have somehow explained the coin-throwers' encounters with Bell's character in a way that did not explicitly endorse the reality of the magic fountain. This kind of thing was taboo in Classical cinema to a large extent, because it violated the Christian paradigm of free will.

So instead of the universality of God, in Postmodernity we have a world in which every petty old wives tale turns out to be mystically true. I've seen it over and over again in Postmodern cinema, to the point where I'm beginning to think of it as the "Postmodern Religion."

Forutnately there is a little more to the movie that this premise. The real love story of the movie turns out to independent of curse/magic of the fountain. This is the twist at the end of the story, one that very easy to see.

We may be in Postmodernity and wallow in our belief in animistic magical forces around us, but Postmodern women still want and need to believe that men fall in love with them not out of compulsion from magic, but from free will.