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. 16