Déjà vu and the Timequake: Beyond Postmodernism

The aim of this article is to verify how Tony Scott proved to be, throughout his career, a director particularly sensitive to social shifts and to artistic and cultural modifications. He adjusted the content and formal structure of his films according to what seemed to be the most “modern” or suitable way of depicting contemporaneity. When observed in these terms and a posteriori, in his last films Tony Scott can be seen as a director who tried to go beyond postmodernism, addressing himself towards the new movements of post-postmodernism, as with metamodernism, pseudomodernism or digimodernism. Among Scott’s films, the one which seems to be particularly relevant in this sense is Déjà Vu (2006), where the latest artistic point of view of the director is quite well summarized. It is a film that puts into metaphor some of the political problems of our epoch and, above all, through a reflection on time embraces some of the features of postmodernism. In doing so, it surpasses postmodernism, opening towards the new aesthetic movement of post-postmodernism. In such a kind of filmic construction, which entails a theoretical reflection on modernity through images, Scott adopts and confirms the post-postmodernist inclination of the final phase of his body of work.