Essay Plan 2500-3000 words): Introduction 250-300 (10%) This assignment will analyse critically Baz Luhrmanns Moulin

in Rouge! (2001) in regards to the postmodern assumption that surrounds it. It focuses on postmodern themes from nostalgia, to death of the author and how they impact on the world of Moulin Rouge!. Sources that will lead the investigation include The Condition of Postmodernity (1992) by David Harvey which will aid to define the key idea of postmodernism, Jean Baudrillards Simulacra and Simulation (1994) to explore ideas of hyperreality, and M. Keith Bookers Postmodern Hollywood: What's New in Film and Why It Makes Us Feel So Strange (2007) to help in deducing key postmodern themes including postmodern nostalgia. The assignment will begin by summarising key points of Moulin Rouge! then defining and interpreting key terminology including postmodernism before moving on to examine how certain aspects of postmodernism mould the film and suggest it to be unable to exist as it is without the inclusion of postmodernism. To conclude, the assignment will strive to show the integral relationship between the idea of postmodernism and the existence of the Moulin Rouge! world. Main Body 2000-2400 (approx. 11 paragraphs) 1. Paragraph focus: Introduce Moulin Rouge! as a text of importance Link 2. Paragraph focus: Introduce the concept of Postmodernism No one exactly agrees as to what is meant by the term, except, perhaps, that postmodernism represents some kind of reaction to, or departure from, modernism. Since the meaning of modernism is also very confused, the reaction or departure known as postmodernism is doubly so (Harvey: 1992) Link 3. Paragraph focus: Introduce/define postmodern nostalgia Thompson have emphasized that the progressive nostalgia of which they write must have at least some basis in authentic experiences, so that nostalgia becomes part of an effort to recover a usable past. Postmodern nostalgia, it would seem, requires no such basis in historical truth. In addition, postmodern nostalgia is more mediated by culture than are earlier forms of nostalgia. (Booker, 2007: 51) Link 4. Paragraph focus: Develop on idea of postmodern nostalgia (Apply to Moulin Rouge! Though music, costume/setting) Flinn notes that films of these decades quite often employed scores based on the classical works of nineteeth- century Romantic composers to create an impression of perfection and integrity in an otherwise imperfect, unintegrated world. Indeed, Flinn argues that this practice was so widespread that film music came to be associated with the idea of anteriority and idealized pasts. (Booker, 2007: 49)

Link 5. Paragraph focus: Introduce/define Death of the Author Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified when the Author has been found, the text is explained everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, run at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath. (Barthes, 1977: 147) Link 6. Paragraph focus: Idea of Mash-Up, pastiche in Death of the Author (Apply Death of the Author to Moulin Rouge!) Primarily through the techniques of parody and pastiche, the film effaces the boundaries between the past and the 1980s Luhrmanns pastiche is at all moments a process of ceaseless interaction between elements... it ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of pre-existent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage. (Synder, 2002: 175) Link 7. Paragraph focus: Introduce/define meta-narrative For Lyotard, metanarratives are a distinctly modern phenomenon: they are stories that not only tell a grand story but also claim to be able to legitimate or prove the storys claim by appeal to universal reason. (Smith, 2006: 65) Link 8. Paragraph focus: A play in a play (Apply to Moulin Rouge!) Journalists have attacked Moulin Rouge as a blatantly artificial story forgetting that all film is artificial Artifice is a filmic strategy that permits an audience to probe, question and unravel the colours, sounds and narratives propelling the action. Moulin Rouge, as a meta-musical, displays the scaffolding of the cinema Moulin Rouge takes viewers on an emotional bungee jump. This is a film where audiences bring their experiences and realities to the screenit is not one movie. It is movies. (Brabazon, 2005: 177) Link 9. Paragraph focus: Introduce/define simulacra & simulation Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. (Baudrillard, 1994: 1) Link 10. Paragraph focus: Fake, simulacra of real Moulin Rouge (Apply to Moulin Rouge!) There is a plethora of myths of origin and of signs of reality- a plethora of truth, of secondary objectivity, and authenticity. Escalation of the true, of lived experience, resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. (Baudrillard, 1994: 7)

Link 11. Paragraph focus: Simulacra & Simulation: Hyper-reality (Moulin Rouge!s world is just a hyper-real mash-up which feeds on our utopian desires) Baudrillards hyperreality is not the opposite of reality (unreal) but a continuous simulation that creates the real as just another sign in a chain of signs which endlessly refer to each other. (Kooijman, 2008: 70)

Conclusion- 250-300 (10%) Illustration List Bibliography Narrowing down to a point (in relation to Moulin Rouge! as fully postmodern):

Postmodern Nostalgia
(Postmodernism playing on the world/time we want/would like to think existed but actually didnt)

Death of the Author

(Postmodernism then applies this to existing popular culture and uses them to relate with what we do want)

Meta-Narrative
(Postmodernism next uses a text to talk about the text, making the text seem real but the text in it not. (The play is realno longer a play. The play in it is now the play)

Simulacra/Simulation
(Postmodernism then takes existing realities as models and changes them so much that they are now simulacrum of a reality that is thought of but never existed.) Hyper-reality (Moulin Rouge! is just a borrowing from many already existing cultural examples which creates an all new reality/sign which constantly refers to different parts of itself)