The Honors College

Popular culture - including television, video games, and film - has become more complex in the past few decades. Steven Johnson proposes that popular culture, through changes in distribution and consumption patterns, requires more intellectual rigor and therefore creates a smarter consumer base. Because of this, consumers of popular culture expect and accept material that is more difficult to understand and that suggests or even requires multiple viewings. While I disagree his assertion that consumers of pop culture are becoming more intelligent because of the media, I think that the new acceptance of more difficult forms of media allows for new trends outside of the puzzle film genre. While prior writing such as Johnson's focuses on the narrative aspects of more difficult media, my analysis focuses on the aesthetics of the media involve. My paper will argue that the change in values of popular culture affects expectations of the viewers to where filmmakers and other artists can push the boundaries of form in media as well as narrative. The puzzle film genre, where viewers must piece together the storyline due to nonlinear or obfuscating form, flourishes as an example of the new climate of complexity and difficulty, and other types of films similarly play with aesthetics as a trend away from the invisible style of some films. While independent films always have had the liberty to pursue experimental forms, Hollywood films also follow this trend because of the increased consumer-base of difficult material. These puzzle films pave the way for blockbuster pseudo-puzzle films that contain significant elements of puzzle films while still being able to command an enormous audience. I compare the puzzle films Memento, Irreversible, and Mulholland Dr. to the blockbusters Shutter Island and Inception to explore how modern blockbusters have borrowed elements of the puzzle film to give popular film more depth.