INTRODUCTION

In 2002, a remake of the 1975 flm Rollerball was released in cinemas. It flopped at the box office, disappearing quickly from movie screens and reappearing shortly thereafter on home video. While aesthetically horrendous, the remake of Rollerball is instructive, as it provides a point of contrast to the original flm, highlighting a change in our culture's mode of engagement with the problem of nihilism. Both flms share a roughly similar plot, yet in the dif-fering manners that they explore and develop that plot, we can glimpse two separate ways in which nihilism may be encountered, confronted and dealt with. The differences are quite striking.

In the original 1975 flm, nihilistic melancholy is depicted as a situation stemming from individual strength and the aspiration toward excellence. The forces of culture, and of nature itself, are portrayed as conspiring against any individual who strives for absolute spiritual fulflment, with the ultimate message that personal honour, nobility and success can be had only at the cost of forsaking public adoration and the economic rewards offered by corporate culture. In the 2002 remake, on the other hand, the encounter with nihil-ism is depicted as a result of personal inadequacy and individual weakness. This version portrays the entanglements of mass culture more sympatheti-cally, in the sense that they offer the failing individual a way out of personal hopelessness. Whereas the original 1975 flm ends with the main protagonist resolutely and fatalistically braving his destiny alone, the 2002 remake ends with the main character taking part in a mass movement against the powers that be.

The different sensibilities of these two flms are best summed up in this last contrast, which also points to a characteristic difference between the ways that modern and postmodern cultures tend to view the issue of nihilism. Whereas modernists view nihilism as arising out of the individual's confrontation with a world naturally hostile to the innate strivings of authentic and self-reflective human beings, the postmodernist perspective sees nihilism as merely a transi-tional stage in the evolution of mass culture; one that might be overcome with the abandonment of older, more individualistic ways of thinking.