Community’s Postmodernism

 With its explicit intertextuality and self-referentiality, the season two episodes of Community “Paradigms of Human Memory” and “Critical Film Studies” both knowingly incorporate postmodern themes concerning temporality, culture, and collective memory to comment on the repetitive cultural production characteristic of the postmodern era. This critique then reveals the postmodern movement’s governing idea: that an individual’s subjectivity and identity is determined by their society's dominant culture. 

“Paradigms of Human Memory” begins with Señor Chang journeying through the school air vents to track and locate Troy’s monkey. Instead, Chang stumbles on iconography from the series’ past, which is used to structure the program's episodic story structure. From this discovery onward, the episode cuts away from its immediate reality to a liminal realm where characters perform a joke or relive a scene from past episodes before returning to the present. By purposefully structuring the episode around its own history, Community utilizes pastiche aesthetics common in postmodernist works by recycling its own content. The show further implements postmodern themes of hyper-reality by having the characters argue over which memory is the truth - over what really happened - as if any of them could ever know. Meaning, the show references itself because of, what a postmodern thinker would argue, the death of the subject and impossibility of creative innovation in a landscape of infinite cultural production that leads to the blurring of truth and fiction. 

Not only this, but the cutaways are often presented using easily recognizable genre conventions. During a cutaway prompted by Annie’s implication that she and Jeff are romantically involved, ethereal music plays as scenes from past episodes are presented in a dreamy slow motion. Meaning, this supposedly original episode of Community chooses to fill its runtime with scenes from its own history using recognizable aesthetics from other genres. If it were not doing so on purpose, this would be the ultimate example of the simulacrum, where originality in creative work is rendered impossible due to the rampant production of simulations of reality, or media text, existing in circulation to the point where intertextuality isn’t just common, but inevitable. Community thus purposefully implements the aesthetics of pastiche in order to comment on the process of cultural production that develops it, as if to tell the audience it’s time to break free from the cycle of reusing content. 

The ultimate critique of this cultural repetition comes at the episode’s end, when Jeff gives a speech that comments on the very structure of television as a whole. As Jeff begins his dialogue, the characters groan, signaling their distaste for a speech that he repeatedly gives. Jeff then declares that every address he’s given has been unique, just as his speech is interspersed between the cutaways previously seen in the episode. This implies that he has, in fact, given the same speech in each scenario. The postmodern irony is emphasized when recalling that each memory is designed with the aesthetics of genre cliches; for example, the gang investigating a haunted mansion akin to a Scooby-Doo episode. Every declaration of individuality is juxtaposed with familiarity, up until Jeff’s commentary concludes with the group recognizing they’ll be ok simply because that’s the nature of life, or, rather, the nature of life as a televisual character. The actors’ performances throughout the episode act as a knowing wink and nod to the audience about this fact, with the joke being that these characters are one degree away from realizing the true nature of their reality. For example, Troy states with comic optimism, “Well, I guess we can get through anything!” before the conflict is averted with a cliche group hug (17:30). It’s formulaic, but purposefully so, as it works to position the group as characters whose lives bend to the whim of narrative cliches. Meaning, by playing into, acknowledging, and replicating genre conventions and its own history, Community presents characters that seem aware of their inability to change and the model of sitcom programs. Or, in other words, characters whose behaviors are shaped by the dominant cultural medium of television and its formal elements. 

This idea reaches its fullest potential in the second episode “Critical Film Studies” by doubling down on the intertextuality present in “Paradigms of Human Memory.” The episode begins by replicating the aesthetic style of the film My Dinner with Andre, with Jeff musing to himself in voiceover narration while walking to a restaurant shot in wide. The plot then goes as follows: Abed, who has changed personalities due to his appearance on “Cougar Town,” and Jeff engage in a recreation of My Dinner with Andre, down to the same framing and shot-reverse-shot structure the original film utilized. Meanwhile, the rest of the group is at the location of a Pulp Fiction themed surprise party for Abed dressed in costumes, which are direct references to the characters in the film. The intertextuality is apparent, and its implementation evolves the postmodern themes seen in “Paradigms of Human Memory.” Rather than simply recycling iconic aesthetic styles and scenes, “Critical Film Studies” has its very characters change as a result of recycling cultural texts. This is best demonstrated in Abed’s Community identity being replaced with another. Rather than act as his usual off-kiltered self, Abed is polished and elegant, revealed to have done so to replicate Andre in My Dinner with Andre. However, the episode pushes further, as Abed provides an in-text reason for his sudden change as well. When appearing on the set of “Cougar Town,” Abed claims he changed into “Chad,” a character he imagined and embodied as a member of the actual show “Cougar Town.” However, when the shot ended, Chad didn’t, and Abed became a different person as a result. Pairing Abed’s personality change with the other postmodern themes presented, it is clear that Community is able to reveal how popular, dominant culture shapes one's subjectivities and identities.