KEY POINTS:
Sincerity has never been cooler. Yeah, right. We live in the age of irony, an era of double entendres and self-reflexiveness where a sentence without a subtext is only half dressed.
It's there in our text messages, our adverts, our slogans, the ironical tone that's the default setting for all of our communications. The delight with which we've taken the Tui billboards to our collective bosom is indicative of the importance of irony in contemporary human interactions.
The only way to communicate with the hyper-aware consumers of the current self-conscious generation is with a nudge, nudge and a wink-wink as those canny marketers from the brewery in Mangatainoka have established.
This intimate familiarity with irony has its benefits; it's made us astute observers and discerning consumers of media for one thing. We take the news that's told to us with a grain of salt, listening as we do with one ear constantly cocked for the bits we aren't hearing. We're aware that narrators, whether on the telly, the radio or a billboard, aren't inherently reliable and we're always looking out for the disjunct between what is being said and what's really meant.
Understanding irony has made us sharper certainly, learning how to operate within an ironic idiom gives us a keener understanding of the uses and possibilities of language, but our increasing reliance on irony is causing us to miss out on some of the joys of life as well.
The joys of life? What a hackneyed phrase.
Many of you dear readers may be reading this with a hand hovering over the page, ready to skip past a worthy paean to simple pleasures and on to the slightly devilish and infinitely more enjoyable interviews conducted by my colleague Michelle Hewitson on the back page. Don't worry; I'm not about to fill up the rest of this column with a hymn to feeding fluffy ducks and skipping through crisp piles of autumn leaves.
On the contrary, I think ducks are stupid and ungainly and I know rats often hide in those pretty piles of leaves.
Sentimentality is despicably lazy minded, but thankfully, can usually be cured by a good dose of HRT. But it isn't simply an either-or proposition. I reject the idea that being cloyingly sentimental is the only alternative to a terminally ironic view of the world.
"I am large; I contain multitudes" says Whitman's Everyman. Surely then there is room within us to accommodate a realistic view of the world, tempered with an optimism that makes life bearable, enjoyable almost?
I ask this after watching Mike Leigh's latest film. A long-time provocateur whose main concerns are the cruelty and goodness of human beings both individually and en masse, Leigh has an instantly recognisable style as a film-maker. His stories are set in real places, and populated by real people. We know they're real because they aren't dressed up. The locations are resolutely unpretty, the characters look and sound like most of the rest of us, except a few, such as Johnny in Naked, who are far more savagely articulate than most of us could ever be.
One could be forgiven for expecting the requisite dose of irony when such a pioneer of social realism decides to call his latest film Happy Go Lucky. And yet the film deals with a central character who is exactly that. It is the story of a high-spirited young woman whose life is by no means perfect, yet who views the world with optimism and compassion. Watching such a woman inhabit a recognisable environment, meeting and interacting with different sorts of people, is at times an unbearably tense experience.
We all know what happens to such people in our nasty, brutish world, don't we? The rules of an ironical universe dictated that the title of the film can't be anything but a bitter joke. When was the last time goodness and compassion paid off anyway? Even Oprah's been stung by her charitable enterprises.
And yet, Leigh remains as surprising and as original a film-maker as ever. Without giving away too much, he and actress Sally Hawkins have managed to craft an absorbing story around an astonishing lead character who manages the seemingly impossible feat of being hopeful and self-aware at the same time. In our present times, when meaning what one says is the hallmark of utter gaucherie, that's refreshing to say the least.
