Starting in the early 1990s, artists such as Quentin Tarantino, David Foster Wallace, and Kurt Cobain contributed to a swelling cultural tide of pop postmodernism that swept through music, film, literature, and fashion. In cinema in particular, some of the arts most fundamental aspects--stories, characters, and genres, for instance--assumed such a trite and trivialized appearance that only rarely could they take their places on the screen without...