BUFFET

The sutura is a special case perhaps, because it runs the gamut from Pinteresque conversational/behavioural non sequiturs like in THE BIRTHDAY PARTY (where the disruption of conventional conversational logic is designed to force a re-evaluation of the system itself, a search for a truer logic of human interactions) to out-and-out breaches of causality like in BUFFET FROID.

Archive 2010-01-01 Hal Duncan 2010

The sutura is a special case perhaps, because it runs the gamut from Pinteresque conversational/behavioural non sequiturs like in THE BIRTHDAY PARTY (where the disruption of conventional conversational logic is designed to force a re-evaluation of the system itself, a search for a truer logic of human interactions) to out-and-out breaches of causality like in BUFFET FROID.

Modality and Hamlet Hal Duncan 2010

Reading BUFFET FROID as an explicitly postmodern text however, I think, risks projecting onto that ironic detachment an an intentional impetus that is at odds with the very philosophy we're taking it to espouse.

Notes on Strange Fiction: Postmodern(ism) Hal Duncan 2008

It is nice and safe, after all, to read BUFFET FROID as ironic.

Notes on Strange Fiction: Postmodern(ism) Hal Duncan 2008

To take a visual example, in Bertrand Blier's film BUFFET FROID there are two such pataphysical quirks right at the start of the film, strangenesses which serve to establish its agenda.

Notes on Strange Fiction: The Pataphysical Quirk Hal Duncan 2008

Again, we might well relate this to BUFFET FROID where the narrative offers semiosis rather than mimesis -- the symbols of characters, places and actions working through relationships to each other that are ultimately divorced from the objective reality we would expect them to be related to, gaining their meanings not from referential connections with real-world objects but from their interactions with each other.

Notes on Strange Fiction: Postmodern(ism) Hal Duncan 2008

By reading BUFFET FROID as part of the postmodernist project, it seems to me, we close off these "totalising" interpretations and leave only one valid reading of the text: as an autotelic artefact of darkly comic absurdity, the ironic distance of its vision the only tenable response in a postmodern era.

Notes on Strange Fiction: Postmodern(ism) Hal Duncan 2008

From a nihilist/existentialist position then, reading BUFFET FROID as a comment on the objective reality of death -- if only as a comment on a (post) modern state of confusion where we're pretty much divorced from that objective reality -- is valid, I'd say.

Notes on Strange Fiction: Postmodern(ism) Hal Duncan 2008

Throw your TAX-CUTTER to open the bandages and free WARREN BUFFET.

Doug Lieblich: Financial Meltdown: The Video Game (Walkthrough for Playstation 3) Doug Lieblich 2010

A short answer would be BUFFET FROID; I think this does read as a postmodern text in most respects.

Notes on Strange Fiction: Postmodern(ism) Hal Duncan 2008