Things Past, a modernist re-membering of experience, to the recursive postmodernism of a Back to the Future. Again "science fiction" film is illuminating.[33] While the Back to the Future films are certainly apposite, Alex Cox's postmodern, parodic, and deadpan Repo Man (1984) more clearly manifests the phenomenologically experienced homogeneity of postmodern discontinuity. The film is constructed as both a picaresque, episodic, loose, and irresolute tale about an affectless young man involved with car repossessors, aliens from outer space, Los Angeles punks, government agents, and others, and a tightly bound system of coincidences. Individual scenes are connected not through narrative causality but through the connection of literally material signifiers. A dangling dashboard ornament, for example, provides the acausal and material motivation between two of the film's otherwise disparate episodes. However, the film also re-solves its acausal structure through a narrative recursivity that links all the characters and events together in what one character calls both the "cosmic unconsciousness" and a "lattice of coincidence." Emplotment in Repo Man becomes diffused across a vast relational network. It is no accident that the car culture of Los Angeles figures in Repo Man to separate and segment experience into discrete and chaotic bits (as if it were metaphysically lived only through the window of an automobile)--while the "lattice of coincidence," the "network" of the Los Angeles freeway system, reconnects experience at another and less human order of magnitude. The postmodern and electronic "instant," in its break from the temporal structures of retension and protension, constitutes a form of absolute presence (one abstracted from the continuity that gives meaning to the system past/present/future) and changes the nature of the space it occupies. Without the temporal emphases of historical consciousness and personal history, space becom...
