Recycling of culture has been going on for a long time (among early classic films can be found adaptations of stage plays, books, national myths, etc.), but there is also ultimately always going to be a place for new material — regardless of how much like toddlers we may all be.

And genre mixing (and other more subtle and less parodic cousins of the mash-up), like in John’s Batman example, is one way in which new material emerges while still maintaining a relationship to the familiar.

And to the naysayers above: not all postmodern art and culture is bad. Dismissing an entire segment of culture offhand is just plain silly.

…let me just finish my Tang, turn off my Rock-Me-Amadeous record and we’ll draw up the proposal on dito-paper.

And for those in need of an undeniable example of postmodern cool… I present Ernie Cline: THE GEEK WANTS OUT.

http://www.ernestcline.com/spokenword/

(After an exhaustive study of postmodernism and other things that don’t matter, Ernest Cline’s head exploded. He then wrote the film Fan Boys.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVaVaJgeBH4

(Not a Charlie Brown expert, my child likes it and that info is in the “making of” section of the DVD.)

Also, could we declare a ten year moratorium on the term “post-modern”? I think if everyone stopped using it, it might go away. Then a lot of bad art, architecture and general culture might also go away, as it would stripped of the protective and obfuscating cover of “post modern”. Being post any coherent aesthetic it lacks definition. As it lacks definition it is impossible to criticize on its merits, or lack thereof.

This seems to suggest that prior to modern art, artists did not think of their work as product or, consciously, as art-in-the-making. As though artists of old painted or sculpted or wrote only in a kind of euphoric trance — until we sullied all of that with modern commercialism. It used to be that artists would say, “Yes, I suppose I would like to eat and have somewhere to sleep, but really I want to be heard!” Isn’t that right?

Except that implies a weak understanding of how patronage has long worked and seems reasonably dispelled by the existence of art studios run by the Masters for the purposes of recreating some of their works for sale to customers who couldn’t afford to be patrons.

Just saying.

For my part, I don’t really care for superhero movies. Sure, there are exceptions; I confessed above that I enjoyed “Iron Man.” The first “Spider-Man” was a good flick, and the original “Superman: The Movie” can do no wrong in my book. But as a rule, I’m more likely to enjoy straight dramas than movies that fit into what I can only call the poorly defined “comic book” genre.

So I liked “The Dark Knight.” I wanted pizza, expected to get a cheeseburger, and ended up having a pizza with some cheeseburger-inspired toppings. It worked for me, big time.

I’m not sure it would have worked the other way around. In fact, I’m positive it wouldn’t, because it didn’t. The last-but-one Batman movie, “Batman Begins,” was allegedly gritty and naturalistic, but I actually found it to be bland and disappointing. It was too silly to be realistic, but took itself too seriously to be fun. For me, it fell into an uncanny valley of sorts, and I deemed it a failure. I’ve had plenty of time to come to grips with the fact that I’m in the minority on this.

What we’re really talking about here, though, is subtext. Imagine you’ve never seen, or even heard of, Charlie Brown. Does the video up yonder “work” for you? You can appreciate “The Lion King” without making the connection to “Hamlet.” In fact, since it was nominally a kids’ movie, it’s fair to guess that a lot of people appreciated “The Lion King” without ever hearing of “Hamlet.” The parallels to a classic are one layer of subtext, not part of the text itself.

Contrast that with the “Noun Movie” series, where the allusions are right up front, and absolutely necessary to appreciating (I feel like I need a shower just from typing that) the work. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it, and there’s nothing there for you.

I dunno where I’m going with this. I’ve managed to dive pretty deep inside my own bellybutton by this point.

As for Dark Knight, I liked that it was a serious movie with Batman thrown in. I just didn’t like that it was so sloppily written and made, it had moments of absolute brilliance but other parts that were extremely rough, almost begging for another draft before they shot the thing.

While Iron Man was much more conventional, the execution was spot on throughout. It’s a tough call for me which I like better – TDK was way more ambitious, which I really respect…but it failed to meet those ambitions in many ways for me.

And thanks for bringing up Shakespeare in Love, a perfect example of this sort of postmodern reference raised to genius level.

In a sense, transmodernism is a mash-up of modern and postmodern thought.

And in that regard, I think you are dead on in your assessment of Batman and Twilight as transmodern works.