The Boat That Rocked/Pirate Radio - Exhibition issues - postmodernism

For A2 students who have studied postmodernism!
Like all postmodern texts the film does not take itself seriously. This "text" is playful. Its characters indulge in being self-referential, the film trades in nostalgia and is heavily laden with irony; it breaks conventional narrative boundries of length and character development and is decidedly intertextual ( it includes references to other films in both image and sound -  for instance, see and hear the "Good, The Bad and The Ugly" "chicken" scene in which The Count and Gavin prove their manhoods and honour by climbing up a boat's steep radio mast; some of the songs were also released outside of the setting of the film.

On the original pirate boats there was at least one wedding and this is referred to in the film. However, the seriousness of a marriage at sea and the institution of marriage ceremony itself  and religion is treated in a typically postmodern, ironic, manner in which very little is taken seriously. Of course the film's comic genre aids this undermining of modernist conventions. The fact that the marriage only lasts for 17 hours shows how the bride never took it seriously either as January Jone's Elenore only goes through with it to be close to Rhys Ifan's character, Gavin. This is highly ironic for the  60s"wife" who is faithful for so long to her unfaithful husband, Don Draper from AMC's Mad Men, set in the early 1960s