As the postmodern present dissolves and becomes increasingly mutable, we find ourselves looking for stability by returning to the past—the nostalgic turn.
And yet, in our look backward, we find historical movies have a jumpy and grainy unreality, which has now been smoothed into a slick hyper-reality: history is re-envisioned as epically cinematic, which reads as another slick, artificial fantasy.
The production of the real underscores the fake, further deteriorating our search for stability.