little miss sunshine as allegory

Here's a nice throwback, an article I wrote for The Daily Trojan about 2 years ago. Still a nice intro to New Sincerity.

This article has been a long time coming with many false starts and incarnations. I struggled with how I would articulate the nature of New Sincerity, if I could, whether it would be a masterfully-written work of academia that showcased my raw genius, or if I would just keep it as material for my future best-seller. I decided against writing something academic because firstly, I'm only a borderline genius. More importantly though, it would have been counterintuitive to essential New Sincerity. This movement is about simplicity and accessibility, not lofty and isolating intellectualism. In New Sincerity, simplicity is a revelation. As far as my future best-seller goes, the future is now. Shh, quiet revolution.

I could gallivant through broad definitions of Modern and Postmodern experience to explain New Sincerity's correlation to the prior, but its redemption is in its symbiotic relationship to the biggest moneymaker in our history, mass media and entertainment. Thus, it works best to discuss New Sincerity through the narrative lens of Little Miss Sunshine, and it as an allegory for New Sincerity's compromise of Modern and Postmodern thought. Let's get this journey started with Richard (Greg Kinnear). He's an unemployed, wanna-be self-help guru banking on his pseudo "7 steps to success" book to enlighten his living situation. Obvious irony here: although with good intention, Richard self-righteously claims that he's found this efficient, almost scientific process to achieve happiness, but conversely, he's not happy himself and his family isn't either. Metaphorically, Richard is Modernism.

Modernism, or the Age of Enlightenment, gave emphasis to reason and the powers of scientific explanation. Nature and our existence were hierarchical systems that could be deciphered into a logical, linear structure. Modern thought gave us a swagger of idealism and a divine purpose to progress society with our rationale. But, then came Post-Modernism A.K.A. Dwayne (Paul Dano), and all that divine purpose and idealism was deflated by existentialism and the discoveries of Einstein, physics, and modern science. Even though Dwayne is eternally a part of Richard by relation, he is a complete, decentralized reaction against him. Referentially, there's Dwayne's vow of silence in the name of Nietzsche, but more so, it's his cynical sarcasm when writing responses to the actions around him and his color blindness that are the most symbolic of Post-Modernism. With social construction, what we thought we knew was invalidated and as a result, we became skeptical of ourselves. It crippled our collective esteem, and to compensate for this intellectual letdown we became cynical, using sarcasm as a kind of defense mechanism. Dwayne is color blind because the colors, the beauty, and the art of life in Post-Modernity are hollow, constructed nuggets of nothingness.

Then, there's Grandpa (Alan Arkin) and Sheryl (Toni Colette), experience and nature, the two consistencies in our transience. Grandpa is empiricism, the John Locke, the David Hume. Basically, the fundamental role of experience in the formative understanding of how we are to live. The man has accumulated a crap load of experience and knowledge in his day, but, still, he's a neglected and discredited source in the family. We sometimes forget the past experiences we've accrued. New ain't always better, naw mean? Sheryl is essentially mother nature. She might play second fiddle to all these arrogant, dynamic concepts, but she's the accommodating, stubborn glue that holds this baby together. She's able to aid Frank in recovery simply with her soothing, un-judging demeanor. No rhetoric necessary. Funny though that when she gets frustrated she erupts like a ferocious natural disaster.

Frank's (Steve Carell) role in Little Miss Sunshine is the most intriguing because he's the figure in white, or for lack of a more encompassing word, the prophet, the seeds of change. Firstly, he's a Proust scholar. Proust being the novelist of Remembrance of Things Past, really an exploration of memory, time, perception, reality, and free-will and destiny, basically every WTF in our existence. Moreover, he's coming from the darkest of places, attempted suicide, and emerges as the harbinger for this family's breakthrough to happiness. He's able to do this because of his ability to empathize with each character's perspective. He respects Grandpa's experience, understands Dwayne's feeling of isolation, relates to the Richard's idealism, and is endeared by Olive's purity (Abigail Breslin). Despite his personal flaw, he understands an idea of compromise between this sometimes divergent soup. Postmodern sarcasm wasn't a bad thing, but the cynicism that was coupled with it is.

Then, there's the sunshine, the encapsulation of New Sincerity, Olive. In an mass-mediated culture of rising self-commodification, Olive's journey is to Orange County for a beauty pageant, the epitome of artificial commodification (in both concept and location?). But, her family's guidance, their coalescing of past mistakes and triumphs, helps her to embrace her true self, to self-commodify as a way of self-empowerment, to be a knowing product. New Sincerity is essentially the negotiation of commerce's inevitable influence on our own humanity.

I didn't coin New Sincerity. I call it the Age of Compromise. If po-mo was the deconstruction, New Sincerity's the reconstruction. But, really, as Andy Hsi (Beef On Tuesdays columnist) calls it, it's the Age of Humanity. The first time we've had a concept of what humanity actually intimates. New Sincerity is exactly how it sounds: to be sincere, even if we are products, because that's our closest compromise to nature and intelligence. In the wake of The Number 23 (it in itself so early-21st century Po-Mo) think about this: the year 2006. 2 divided by 6 = 3 infinity. Redemption. Make it or break it time, man.