Umberto Eco once characterized the 'postmodern attitude' as that of a man who wants to tell a woman that he loves her madly, but is all too aware 'that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland' and is sure the woman will know this too. So his solution is to say to her: ‘as Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’. Thus he simultaneously acknowledges his painful conviction that everything meaningful has been said or done by others before, how conscious we are of following pre-written 'cultural scripts' in our everyday lives... but also manages to communicate genuine emotion. Eco's analogy explained the fondness for the many examples of postmodern literature and film which chose to parody or copy previous works.
Hadfield's return to Earth neatly illustrated Eco's logic. His method was not unexpected for a man whose expedition has embraced media culture from he outset, demonstrating an ease with one's private life being lived out in public. An exchange on Twitter with fellow-Canadian William Shatner, for example, included the lines, 'Are you tweeting from space?' (Shatner), 'Yes, Standard Orbit, Captain. And we're detecting signs of life on the surface.' (Hadfield). His return involved him putting together a video which showed him performing David Bowie's 'Space Oddity' live in space. As well as acknowledging that space travel - and the momentous address to humankind that comes with it - had been done before, in reality (the original Moon Landing in 1969) and in fiction (Bowie's song, which is itself a parody of the Kubrick film, 2001), it also manages to communicate the genuine sense of achievement felt by Hadfield. Truer still to Eco's logic is that Bowie's song contains the line 'Tell my wife I love her very much, she knows' - a way of telling his own wife, even though Bowie's narrator has said this before, and that his wife surely knows this is the case, that he loves her very much.
