Dr. Alex E. Blazer
Department of English
Georgia College & State University
Milledgeville, GA 31061
Flashback and the Gift of Post-Postmodern Cinema
Upon first viewing, Christopher MacBride's recent thriller Flashback (2020) invites comparisons to a J. J. Abrams puzzle box mystery, a David Lynch dream, and a Michael Kelly science fiction thriller. With closer examination, the film about a 31-year-old predictive data analyst obsessed with finding his highschool girlfriend who disappeared after senior finals becomes more radically ambiguous than Lost (2004-2010), more conscious than Mulholland Drive (2001), and more experimental than Donnie Darko (2001). Spurred by his mother's terminal illness, which includes aphasia, Fred Fitzell returns to his dreams of youth in the form of art and desire; he used to draw and do mind-expanding drugs with a girl named Cindy Williams. Shortly into his quest, the cinematic lines among present and past, reality and memory, consciousness and hallucination break down; and the viewer is presented with an ergodic film full of time imploding match cuts, cacophonous scoring, blurry and shaky camera work, and unreliable narration that puts the reality of Cindy Williams in doubt and raises the possibility that the film-world has been invaded by metacinematic aliens flailing and failing to communicate through the language system of cinema. As the title flashback comes to represent both psychological trauma and the narrative technique, the film's structural aporias gel into an emotionally resonant demand of the viewer to reckon with her own precarious self and maternal loss that is more weighted to post-postmodern sincerity than postmodern playfulness. Despite the film's collapsing timelines, decomposing shots, and character paranoias, the film transcends its genre roots and becomes what Sartre in What Is Literature calls "art . . . a ceremony of the gift, and the gift alone brings about the metamorphosis." Traversing the structurally and emotional difficult Flashback becomes "a pact of generosity between author and reader," i.e., filmmaker and spectator, which demands that each change their life.
This abstract summarizes my presentation, "Flashback and the Gift of Post-Postmodern Cinema." South Atlantic Modern Language Association. Atlanta Marriott Buckhead Hotel & Conference Center, Atlanta, GA. 9 Nov. 2023.