Popular Culture Review Vol. 1, December 1989 | Page 24

Post-modernist works are seen by Gitlin as “pastiches.” He
calls the post-modern mode “compilation, recombination” (3).
When we look at a movie which was compiled, as this one was,
from a collection of articles taken from newspapers and magazines,
we further recognize why this film is considered post-modern. In
addition, critic Brian McHale explains that in literature, inter-views
between the author and the characters have become “especially
widespread in postmodernism, [and] amount almost to a postmod
ernist cliche” (213). McHale goes on to point out how the post
modernists have exploited the “roman a c le f ’ (206-9), an exploita
tion Byrne admits to partly in his title and certainly in his interviews
and in his book. In fact, Byrne apologizes for calling the film True
Stories and then having made up some o f what appears. On the
other hand, he scrupulously got permission from the real-life
people whose stories were told in the news papers and magazine
articles he used. True Stories puts together true stories and madeup stories, humorous— actually ridiculous— situations and charac
ters and highly sympathetic characters, music and dialogue,
documentary style and narrative style, realistic footage and obvi
ously fake footage, and, finally, a fascination with small-town
America, along with a cynicism of small-town America. Here we
ha