Popular Culture Review Vol. 1, December 1989 | Page 22
Stories the “'D ivine Comedy’ for the ’80s.” In this analogy,
Corliss sees the narrator as a modem-day Virgil (is it coincidental
that Byrne named his town the same?) who is escorting us, the
viewers, through Hades, through “the subterranean currents of
bizarre behavior that bubble under Smalltown, U.S.A.” (80).
Corliss goes on to argue, however, that Byrne encourages
laughter “o f recognition, not o f condescension” in this film, that
he’s not warning viewers of the emptiness o f the American Dream
but that h e 's illustrating how unique and harmlessly idiosyncratic
that dream is (80-1). In fact, Jay Cocks, writing in the same issue
of Time, suggests that Byrne is not attacking at all; instead he is
exercising his “knack for making the everyday seem paranormal
and the bizaiTe just something on the lee side of ordinary” (81).
Still there’s that other side of the message: True Stories as a
“Middle-American Grotesque” (Coulson 26), a “casually selfconscious attack on the status quo” (O ’Toole 70). Here’s where we
must consider the pathological liar who claims to have written all
of Elvis’ songs, to have slept with Burt Reynolds and JFK and “the
real Rambo”; here’s where we meet the “cute woman” who turns
all goo and gush when she sees babies, who must be surrounded by
pinks and lavenders at all times, and who doesn’t like Louis Fyne
because he’s got “all that sadness” in his life.
One way of dealing with this apparent contradiction in the
style o f the narrator and in the tone o f the film is by recognizing the
film as a text in post-modernism. In Todd G itlin’sAfew York Times
article, he writes that post-modernism “relishes the blurring of
forms . . . , stances (straight-ironic), moods (violent-comic), cul
tural levels (high-low).” Gitlin stresses that post-modernism
“neither embraces nor criticizes, but beholds the world blankly,
with a knowingness that dissolves feeling and commitment into
irony” (3). This combination of blurred edges and blank attitude
describes True Stories perfectly.
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