Directors: Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert
Writers: Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert
Cast: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, Jamie Lee Curtis
Runtime: 139 mins.
2022
everything
What does meaning mean?
Around the middle of the 20th century, the gargantuan impact of modernism was being challenged, as the 'grand narratives' were seeming more and more like an emperor without clothes. Structuralist explanations of the world and its machinations began to feel oppressive, flattening human experience into molds that never quite fit. The tyranny of meaning no longer held court. God is dead, and we stragglers struggle with the plurality of perspective, the unknowability of a quasi-infinite quantum universe. Deconstruction eradicated the clichés, traditions, and beliefs that we had held dear. Everything is relative, you see, and meaning is little more than a comfortable shawl that is bittersweet to part with.
The ramifications of this movement oscillated through every aspect of culture. Here were the early rumblings of identity politics, in which our particularity gives us a unique perspective that is not to be invalidated. Here, too, was the primacy of metafiction: art that is aware of itself as art. If meaning is broken, at least we can still mess around with the frame like a child playing dress-up with glassless glasses.
