Robert Altman's O.C. & Stiggs furnishes a sample/example of postmodern pastiche. The film relies on a re-appropriation of the past highlighted by a depthlessness of characterisation and narrative construction. Certain elements of the film exist within themselves, without any sense of assimilation into the rest of the film. The minimisation of any symbolic or narrative contextuality of these elements forces viewers to derive their meaning from other sources. Meaning is therefore reduced to depthless referentiality, where recognition becomes the only meaning.

There are a number of culturally recognisable elements to the film, elements drawn from other culturally relevant films, including ones from Altman's own past. Yet this amounts to much more than the simplistic notion of "personality" that can be traced throughout the whole of an "auteur's" cannon of films. With O.C. & Stiggs, some details of form and content are not just the reflection of Altman's singular personal vision, they are direct imitations of previously constructed elements. These elements can be understood as postmodern "reproductions" of Altman's own past. One example is the "Big Surf" sign, which is the same in size, length and shot composition as the Nashville airport sign. Another is the running commentary of the soundtrack, which

includes a kind of aural appendix to the action -- much like the speaker announcements in M*A*S*H, the Phillips truck-drawn diatribes in Nashville, the Phyllis Shotwell songs in California Split, or the radio commentaries in Thieves Like Us . . . -- in the form of a local Phoenix disk jockey's fast and mindless patter. (Sanjek 45)

This "presence without explanation" is a major factor in the construction of a reality taking place throughout the rest of the film. There are elements, however, that come from beyond the boundaries of Altman's own fictional canon. The presence of Dennis Hopper is a direct reference to his character in Apocalypse Now -- draped in cameras, speaking in broken, elliptical sentences, supplying O.C. and Stiggs with an Uzi and then rescuing them from the Schawb families' bomb shelter in a helicopter (the "Air Cavalry" coming to the rescue). He is in effect the same character, constructed with as much (or as little) psychological depth as in the previous film, existing somewhere on the edge of both films -- isolated on the edge of society, in the "present" desert of Phoenix and the "past" jungles of Vietnam.1

There are, in fact, quite a few allusions to Apocalypse Now in the film: O.C. and Stiggs' journey up the river to locate King Sunny Ade, complete with Stiggs' Martin Sheen/Dashiell Hammett voice over narration; the fireworks that complement the journey's end; the helicopter rescue scene which is highlighted musically by Wagner. These elements may seem silly within the context (or lack of it) of the film, since they do not depend on any causal narrative force to propel and sustain them. Thus they serve in a more meaningful way as signposts, references back to Apocalypse Now, drawing from its context a meaning that serves as the thin line of reality in O.C. & Stiggs.

Perhaps the strongest and certainly the most striking example of the depthlessness of both narrative and characterisation in the film is the scene in which O.C. breaks into a spontaneous dance with Michelle, a woman he has just met at a wedding reception. Their eyes meet, they join together on the dance floor, and dance in perfect harmony while the rest of the guests look on, commenting as if this were an everyday occurrence. Not only does this instance immediately remind one of the spontaneous dance numbers of films such as Top Hat or Swing Time, but the characters actually refer to themselves (and also, therefore, to this re-appropriation of the past) as "Fred" and "Ginger". Nothing comes before the scene to prepare the viewer for such narrative and character indulgence, and nothing comes afterward to account for it. The dance simply exists, fragmented from the rest of the film, commented on matter-of-factly, never questioned or explained. This scene represents the ultimate lack of contextual meaning in the film -- a postmodern depthlessness that gains its meaning purely from its reference to historical figures and texts.

The insertion of characters from "real" life into the film also depends upon their status as already-known, already-defined commodities. Bob Uecker does not just play "himself"; rather, he serves as a representation of the status of celebrity. He is an extension of the typage that has been going on throughout the film: the gay couple, the middle-American businessman, the drunken wife, the whiny daughter, the post-Vietnam vet, the smart-alecky kids. In O.C. & Stiggs, then, Bob Uecker is "the celebrity" -- the already-defined representative of the type of human commodity so pervasive in postmodern pop culture:

As the camera pans across the eating area, the former baseball player turned color commentator / sitcom actor / beer pitchman Bob Uecker sits by himself, talking a blue streak to noone in particular, a performance that is, at one and the same time, a statement about the disunity of Phoenix and a judgement on Uecker's vacuous celebrity. (Sanjek 46)

1. Assuming, of course, that viewing O.C. & Stiggs follows a viewing of Apocalypse Now -- in the reverse case, one could say "the 'past' desert of Phoenix and the 'present' jungles of Vietnam". These qualifications are relative to each individual spectator, depending more on which film is being watched at this moment than which has been historically created first.(back)

Sanjek, David. "It Could Have Been Worse: Robert Altman's O.C. and Stiggs." Post Script Vol. 13, No. 3 (1994): 39-53.