Research Information System
in: Çerçevenin Coğrafyası Sinemada Mekan, Kadraj ve Anlatı, Doç. Dr. Atacan ŞİMŞEK, Editor, Vizetek Yayıncılık, Ankara, pp.59-77, 2026
The crises, disintegrations, and contested global conditions that characterized the new millennium and the early 2000s exerted a direct impact on both the individual and lived experience. Within a world undergoing continuous change and transformation, the subject that shapes its existence, vulture, and modes of production has been reframed by an emergent social structure; accordingly, cultural production and the affective sphere have been concretely reconfigured through this transformation. As a result of efforts aimed at explaining newly formed cultural content, the newly constituted subject that produces it, and this subject’s affective world and structure of feeling, the theory of metamodernism has come to occupy a durable position within contemporary cultural discourse. Emerging after postmodernism and building upon its foundations, metamodernism proposes new terminologies and stylistic orientations to grasp and interpret the spirit of the present moment and is fundamentally defined through a movement of oscillation. Centering on an irregular yet constructive oscillation between different and opposing poles—most notably between modernism and postmodernism— metamodernism’s affirmative impulse is articulated through the reflex of ‘upcycling’. As a biological term, upcycling doesn’t denote mere reuse in the sense of recycling but rather refers to an attempt to reuse by adding new value (Akker et al., 2021: 25). From the perspective of cultural theory, metamodernism does not seek to synthesize the modern and the postmodern; rather, it engages with both simultaneously while moving beyond each of them (Turner, 2011). In this sense, metamodernism, directed toward the construction of new forms of meaning and experience in the contemporary period, can be understood as operating through an oscillation among diverse materials, including modern stylistic modes, postmodern practices, classical artwork, figures of popular culture, and multiple genres and mediums with the aim of expanding and articulating the experiential horizon of the subject of the digital age.
In addition to oscillation, the practices of revalorization and the reuse of materials through the attribution of new value constitute defining characteristics of metamodern behavior (Akker et al., 2017: 31). The upcycling of pre-existing modes of thought, skeptical attitudes, form-content- structure configurations, or materials, with the aim of opening them toward new domains of meaning and experience, emerges as a significant framework not only for metamodernism but also for cultural production in the digital age. In this context, the film Here (Robert Zemeckis, 2024), which is positioned at the center of this study, is examined in terms of its practice of upcycling a single, unchanging house—and more specifically a single room—throughout the film and of employing this fixed space as the carrier of narrative, emotion, and experience, that is, as an affective carrier. Furthermore, beyond the human characters represented in the filmi, the attribution of human qualities to the space itself, despite its ostensibly inanimate status, and its positioning as an element that constructs and sustains the narrative constitute a significant dimension of analysis, insofar as these strategies indicate the film’s engagement with space within the framework of anthropomorphizing.
This study is constructed based on descriptive analysis, one of the qualitative research methods. Defined as an approach that enables the in-depth examination and detailed reporting of given events and phenomena (Creswell, 2012: 273-274), descriptive analysis makes it possible to systematically analyze the film Here as the object of research within a specific theoretical framework. Accordingly, the suitability of descriptive analysis for this study has been established insofar as it aims to identify the relationships between causes and outcomes and address the question of ‘how’.