This document analyzes why the film Lucy is considered a postmodern case study. It contains three key postmodern elements: 1) It questions scientific facts and reality through its premise of an urban myth accessed through drug use. 2) It depicts an altered reality experienced by the main character through paranoia and drugs. 3) It bends time through a scene where the character travels through history, influencing the past without affecting the present. Overall, the film denies a single objective reality and explores how perception of reality can change.

1. WHY IS MY CASE STUDY
POSTMODERN?
By Janakan LOGANATHAN

2. Why is my case study postmodern?
 My case study Lucy appears to tick all the boxes
when it comes to being postmodern. The entire
premise of the film is a comment on a scientific
urban myth and goes against both science and
religion in one. The film constantly refers to an
alternate reality, the one that Lucy sees, through the
use of drugs.

3. Specific use of Paranoia
 In the French movie Lucy – the main character
(Scarlett Johansson) suffers from a serious kind of
paranoia but it doesn’t seem so in the beginning or
throughout the movie. It is being as some kind of
erotic thoughts throughout her plays in the film but
at the end when she ends up in an island lying
down on the beach with another man, she tends to
discover that she was indeed in a state f paranoia
all of her life. This is a very deliberate characteristic
of postmodern films and indeed, the movie Lucy is a
great chosen case study for me as it contains
scenes that are essentially very postmodern.

4. Specific use of Altered
 The drug given to Lucy to hold is released
into her body and unleashes her full
potential. This follows the postmodern theory
of altered realities, or a realisation of an
alternate reality through the use of drugs
and mental disorder.

5. Specific use of Time Bending
 During the climatic end of the film, Lucy travels
though time and space to view some of history’s
greatest moments. This is also contributing towards
the postmodern theory against a meta-narrative, as
she is able to influence the past without effecting on
the present.

6. Specific use of ‘Changing of
Location’
 Postmodernist theory constantly refers to
the idea of combining high and low
culture and in this case study, we see the
film travels from low town Taiwan to a
University in Paris, France.

7. Key points (Lucy)
 The film has elements of:
- Denial of meta-narrative
- The use of drugs in order t perceive a
separate state of world.

8. Hyper reality
 According to Jean Baudrillard, the world once
consisted of signs that could be associated
with their actual referents in reality.
 This has been replaced by the postmodern
simulacrum, a system in which signs have
lost their association with an underlying
reality. Baudrillard says: “the distinction
between what is real and what is imagined
is continually blurred and meaning is
systemically eroded.”