“The medium is the message.”
I’ve wanted to dislike Marshall McLuhan because of this quote for a very long time. The only thing stopping me is that I’ve never actually read McLuhan, only heard him quoted. So really, my complaint isn’t with McLuhan, but with the folks who use his quote to condemn rock music (because it’s performed by childish men with long hair, yellow sunglasses, and who tend to scream on stage while dancing something that can’t be anything but perverted).
But I realized something today: this quote describes one of the reasons why I have a tough time liking postmodern fiction.
Watch a postmodern movie (say, Broken Flowers, or Happy-Go-Lucky, or The Darjeeling Limited). Maybe this is just me, but I’ve left these films (and countless others, not to mention the stories) dissatisfied. I keep searching for an indicator of where we are in the story, but it never comes. It’s just suddenly over, and then I’m left to figure out just what was going on after the fact.
This doesn’t inherently condemn them. What does, however, is that all too often they a) don’t have a coherent message and b) have very little resembling a consistent storyline.
What’s a storyline? Well, let me put it this way. I’m all about focusing on characters and plots. Without both, a story is usually sunk. But let’s face it, we (as humans) are cerebral beings. We need a theme. Just having the same person in every scene, or a similar problem over and over again isn’t enough. There needs to be an overarching question, and by the end of the story, there really ought to be an answer which displays some sort of growth. (Are the exceptions to the rule? Of course. But they’re almost as rare as third nostrils.)
Which brings us to the message bit. I’m not looking for a neat and tidy moral—not every story needs to (or should be) a replica of one of Aesop’s fables. But with every theme goes a message. Or, put another way, the answer. Which is where many postmodern stories get in trouble. They just don’t have one, and their inability to properly end a story shows it. They don’t have any other option than to crash land a story because they don’t understand themes or storylines.
This probably doesn’t all make sense, but I’m working on it. And not to take down postmodernism, or even postmodern stories. Simply just to extol the simple story, the one that even a child could love. Because life is anywhere near as confusing as many postmodern pagans would have us believe.