I have a confession to make. Iāve watched all four seasons of the show Sweet Magnolias on Netflix.
Yes, I know. Iām a 46 year old male. A grown man by all regards. And I marathoned the entire thing with my wife and daughter this winter. I should be watching cool, edgy shows like Succession or The Bear. But I got totally caught up in the fictional universe of Serenity, South Carolina.
We almost quit watching. Like three times. Maybe more. The script felt artificial. The small-town warmth was ratcheted up to an uncomfortable level. Therapyspeak was unavoidable. The characters said things to each other that no one in my universe would actually say. Yes, kind things... without the escape hatch of a cutting remark or a knowing winking glance at the camera. Nobody was in on the joke because it wasnāt a joke.
So, I noticed, after quite a few episodes, that Rory, Alex, and I would manufacture our own snark from the sidelines of the sofa. Weād supply the irony the show refused to provide. A character would say something genuinely tender and one of us would mutter something sardonic just to release the pressure. It felt like a reflex or a pressure valve. A way that we were saying: Yeah, we know this is super corny. You canāt fool us!
Except... We kept watching. And somewhere around the third season, I relaxed a bit. I stopped fighting the cringe and caught myself thinking: these people are just... genuinely nice to each other. And not in a nothing-bad-ever-happens kind of way. They went through real challenges in the show. But they chose (I know, this is weird, get ready) decency. They said the sincere thing. And the show let them do it without winking, deflation, or an ironic counterweight.
We finished the show a month ago or so and I keep thinking about it. I really became aware of how addicted to snark Iāve become without even knowing it.
And then I stumbled across a concept that gave me a word to describe what I was noticing in my own internal landscape at this moment: metamodernism.
Iāll try my best to summarize:
Modernism - roughly the late 19th through 20th century was the age of naive confidence. Science, progress, reason, and grand narratives about humanity successfully marching forward and upward. Superman and Hulk Hogan are two big modernist characters in my mind. Fundamentalism was born in the modern world as products of the Reformation and the scientific method smooshing together.
Postmodernism - the hangover from modernism. Starting in the mid 20th century and reaching full cultural saturation by the 1990s, it took a sledgehammer to all of that. Grand narratives were shown to be just power plays in disguise. It saw truth as being constructed. And it held irony as the only honest response to a world that kept failing its own promises. Seinfeld is the perfect postmodern artifact: intentionally a show about nothing and proud of it.
I was born in 1979. I remember the last gasping breaths of modernism with movies like Superman and characters like Hulk Hogan. Then, I remember growing into the most snarky phase of life (adolescence) in the snarkiest period in history (the 1990s). Seinfeld was THE show. Then came Friends. Etc. Irony was the water we swam in.
Then, it happened... On July 7, 1996, at the WCW pay-per-view āBash at the Beachā in Daytona Beach, Florida, Hulk Hogan moved to the NWO (āNew World Orderā) after drop-kicking his good-guy buddy, Randy Savage. Above the boos of the crowd, he announced to the fans (well, ex-fans now) that he was tired of being the āgood guy.ā He called the fans ātrashā and āsentimental.ā And he declared that he was the biggest name in the business who didnāt need the āHulkamaniaā facade anymore. This may have been the defining cultural shift from modernism to postmodernism. The Bash went down at the cultural peak of postmodernism... It was downhill from there with South Park, The Matrix, 90s grunge, and the rest of it.
I gotta say, postmodernism had a point. The grand narratives of modernism were often covering for something. Its certainty was often borrowed confidence masking unexamined power plays. The critique was justified.
But thereās something that cultural theologian Paul Anleitner (who turned me on to this whole thing) and others have noticed:
Weāre exhausted.
Yes, the deconstruction of postmodernism was a natural next step. But it didnāt build anything good, true, or beautiful.
You can only live in the rubble of the building for so long before the nihilism stops feeling like liberation and starts feeling like imprisonment.
This is where (ready for another fancy philosophical word?) metamodernism comes in.
Metamodernism isnāt a return to naive pre-critical confidence. Itās not modernism with the bad parts scrubbed out.
Itās what happens when a person ā or a culture ā passes through the postmodern deconstruction and comes out the other side still thirsty for a story to hold them together. Still wanting real meaning. Still willing to say the sincere thing out loud, even knowing how cringey it sounds.
Some have called this āinformed naivetyā or āsecond naivety.ā Iāve also seen it put āironic sincerity.ā Anleitner calls it āembracing the cringe.ā Iām partial to this because it makes more visceral sense. You know the cringe. Itās that feeling you get when someone says something genuinely earnest and you donāt have a sarcastic reply ready. Rather, you just let the moment be real. When somebody says or does something nice or sappy, you bite your tongue, embrace the cringe, and let their kindnessā¦ just be. (This is so hard to do!!!)
Sweet Magnolias is basically a Netflix series made of cringe. And somehow it has millions of viewers who, coming from a heavily postmodern world, have very refined cringe detectors (theyāre currently working on their fifth season!).
Thereās a part of the show that really hit me... Of course, it has to do with the local church (yes, an ELCA church - I actually discovered this show through an article in our denominationās publication, Living Lutheran), led by a Black woman pastor. Attended happily by teenagers who seem neither traumatized by religion nor performing their liberation from it. The congregation is warm, traditional, and grounded. The Pride flag is visible in one quick shot in one scene that I noticed, but you had to be looking for it. No one makes a speech about it. The show doesnāt pause to congratulate itself.
I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. For the pastor to deliver a monologue about anti-right justice. For a teenager to have a crisis of faith that a progressive adult would stoically deconstruct. There are gay couples in the show, but no one postures about how āwelcomingā they are of them. Theyāre just part of the friend group and church community. No biggie. The church in the show is just... A church. A good one. Doing what churches are supposed to do, without needing us, the viewers, to applaud (but applaud, I did).
That, too, felt like a pressure valve releasing. Not the irony valve this time, but the exhaustion valve. The one that builds up every time something wholesome gets conscripted into a culture war. Every time inclusion has to performatively announce itself as a shot across the bow to count. Every time a church has to perform its welcome so loudly that the welcome itself gets lost in the battle cry.
The show just... included. And then it moved on. As if a Black woman leading a thriving, welcoming, traditional congregation with happy teenagers in the pews was simply normal. As it should be. Which it rarely gets to just be, on screen or off, without becoming a statement against something else.
The show was making sincerity and inclusion un-cool. On purpose. And I think this is the most honest way to portray it. Because it really should just be the most old-hat thing ever.
Hereās what I think was actually happening on our couch as we watched the show...
The irony we added from the sidelines of the sofa wasnāt just cheap rejection. It was a decompression chamber. A way of saying yeah, we know this is uncool so that we could safely keep watching anyway. The snark was like the antibody, but the sincerity was still getting into our bloodstream, doing its work, feeding something in us that the antibody was supposed to defend against.
Weād been so marinated in postmodern irony; in the assumption that the knowing smirk is the only honest response to earnestness; that unmediated sincerity triggered an emotional immune response. But the show kept being sincere. And we kept watching. And eventually, my immune system got tired and allowed something else to get in.
That something was the possibility that people might actually be decent to each other. That kindness isnāt just naivety. That you can speak it and mean it.
I agree with Anleitner and others who say that the culture is shifting in a way that makes sincerity palatable again. Maybe the long postmodern exhale is coming to an end (for now, at least). It seems that people are starting to breathe in again, cautiously and with appropriate self-awareness. But genuinely.
Maybe what we need isnāt less earnestness now, but more. Offered without apology and with full awareness of how unfashionable it is. Given with enough warmth that the immune system eventually lowers its defenses.
In Joy,
Jonas+
We can only hope and pray we are beginning once again to walk in peace and love as Jesus did. Beautifully written. Hope you Alex and Rory are doing well.