Understanding the Metamodern Mood

Why, when we look at contemporary pop culture—movies, music, TV, campus protests, meme culture, and TikTok (especially TikTok)—does the word “incoherence” often come to mind? Why does so much today feel random, disconnected, contradictory, aimless, and altogether void of coherent logic and purpose?

Part of it is that social media’s inherent denarratived randomness has powerfully shaped a schizophrenic cultural consciousness. We see the world as we see our scrolling feeds: one random thing after another, ephemeral and quickly forgotten, providing mild amusement and occasional resonance but without an anchoring narrative that offers lasting satisfaction. As Byung-Chul Han puts it in The Crisis of Narration, digital platforms provide “media of information, not narration. . . . The coherence from which events derive their meaning gives way to a meaningless side-by-side and one-after-the-other.”

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Charles Taylor’s concept of “cross-pressures” also helps explain the situation. Contemporary people are bombarded from all directions by information, ideas, experiences, affinities, and spiritual quests—each pulling them in a different direction. Naturally, the experience of cross-pressured life (and its artistic expression) tends to be dizzying, conflicted, and incoherent.

One term academics, artists, and critics have started to use to explain what’s going on is “metamodernism.” For Christians and church leaders, knowing what this term describes—and especially how it finds expression in pop culture—will be helpful for our mission.

Metamodernism: What It Is

Metamodernism is what came after postmodernism, which is what came after modernism. If postmodernism cynically reacts against and deconstructs modernism, metamodernism reacts against modernism and postmodernism, affirming and critiquing aspects of both. Metamodernism opposes the “either/or” bifurcation of modernism and postmodernism. It refuses to choose between sincerity/certainty/hope (modernism) and irony/deconstruction/nihilism (postmodernism). It values both, even if—or perhaps precisely because—such a synthesis is, in the end, illogical and incoherent. Metamodernism accepts this incoherence because it values mood and affect (how I’m feeling / what I’m resonating with) more than rigid logic.

If this seems like a “have your cake and eat it too” philosophy, that’s sort of the point. Shaped by the endless, have-it-your-way horizons of the internet (a structural multiverse of innumerable “truths”), metamodernism is a worldview as wide open and consumer friendly as the smartphone. Take or leave what you want, follow or unfollow, swipe right or left: it’s your iWorld, so make it a good one.

Metamodernism is a worldview as wide open and consumer friendly as the smartphone. Take or leave what you want, follow or unfollow, swipe right or left: it’s your iWorld, so make it a good one.

The nice academic term for metamodernism’s hyperconsumerist, bespoke toggling between seemingly contradictory ideas is “oscillation.” The metamodern outlook constantly oscillates between the poles of modernism and postmodernism. This has the effect of making the metamodern posture impossible to pin down and ultimately hyperindividualistic. Each person, in any given moment, might swing multiple times between deconstruction and construction, truth and relativism. It seems to depend only on a vague mood disposition mixed with a cautious sense of avoiding “all-in” commitment to any one direction.

Here’s how one writer describes it:

Metamodernism considers that our era is characterized by an oscillation between aspects of both modernism and postmodernism. We see this manifest as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism, a moderate fanaticism, oscillating between sincerity and irony, deconstruction and construction, apathy and affect, attempting to attain some sort of transcendent position, as if such a thing were within our grasp. The metamodern generation understands that we can be both ironic and sincere in the same moment; that one does not necessarily diminish the other.

This last oscillation—between irony and sincerity—is especially noticeable when you start to look at contemporary pop culture.

Metamodernism in Movies

The best analysis I’ve seen on metamodernism in movies is a video essay by media critic Thomas Flight (embedded below). It’s long (about 40 minutes) but well worth the time if you’d like to learn how the cerebral concepts of metamodernism show up in concrete ways in contemporary movies.

Flight highlights Top Gun: Maverick as an example of a recent “modernist” film and gives an array of examples of “postmodernist” films (Pulp Fiction, No Country for Old Men). Among his examples of “metamodern” movies are the Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans (2022), and most of Wes Anderson’s filmography. These movies are characterized both by postmodern reflexivity (self-aware movies about the artifice of movies) and sincere appreciation for real, uncynical emotional encounters, both a postmodern suspicion of narrative optimism and an unabashed desire for the possibility of a “Hollywood ending.”

Three Recent Examples

Once you understand metamodernism, you start to see it everywhere in movies and TV. Here are a few examples of “metamodern movies” from the last year.

1. The Fall Guy (2024)

This recent Ryan Gosling action blockbuster epitomizes metamodernism. The “movie within a movie” plot follows a stunt man (Gosling) who, while on a film set in Australia, gets tied up in real-life peril as well as real-life romance (with Emily Blunt, who plays a film director). The Fall Guy is heavy on postmodern reflexivity and constant self-referential jokes about Hollywood. It’s hyperaware of its artifice.

And yet the film’s central romance is sweet and sincere and appeals to the audience’s nostalgic hunger for earnest, straightforward love stories in movies. In the film’s (spoiler alert) happily-ever-after ending, Gosling says, “What we got is even better than the movies.” The ending is simultaneously sincere and ironic, playfully acknowledging its “Hollywood ending” cheesiness, even as it gives audiences permission to sincerely love and desire such an ending.

2. Love at First Sight (2023)

This Netflix rom-com was a hit with audiences last fall, likely because it embodies the metamodern approach to ironic but sincere romance. The film follows a young woman and young man who meet on a flight to London and, you guessed it, fall in love. The Hallmark-esque plot is unabashedly cheesy but knows it, and this is the key.

The film is just self-aware enough to make it palatable to metamodern audiences who’d otherwise find its love story too naive. The film’s postmodern street cred is reinforced when one character regularly breaks the fourth wall, speaking to the audience in a wink-wink way. Yet this ironic detachment is interspersed with heaps of sincerity and real moments of emotional affect. “We know love stories like this don’t happen in real life,” the film communicates. “But it feels good and right to desire that they do.”

3. Barbie (2023)

Greta Gerwig’s record-breaking blockbuster showcases the “OK with incoherence” nature of metamodernism. The film constantly oscillates between detached, ironic self-awareness (“Yes, we know how ridiculous it is to take seriously a movie about plastic dolls”) and earnest attempts at meaningful reflection (“How might we see ourselves in Barbie’s and Ken’s existential conundrums?”).

As I wrote last summer, Barbie is disorienting yet “at ease in its contradictions.” I found the film unsatisfying due to its incoherent, “have my cake and eat it too” approach to questions of gender. But clearly, most audiences didn’t mind. Indeed, Barbie’s box-office dominance is the clearest signal yet that metamodernism has gone mainstream—and needs to be taken seriously.

Metamodernism’s Implications for the Church

Much more needs to be written about metamodernism’s implications for culture and Christianity, and I hope to revisit these questions in subsequent essays. But for now, here are two brief reflections on the “so what?” of this admittedly cerebral concept: one observation of concern and one reason to be encouraged.

1. Aversion to Logic and ‘Adjusted to Incoherence’

I’ve long been haunted by a phrase Neil Postman used in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death to describe the way television had eroded our logical faculties: we’d become “adjusted to incoherence.” How much more is this the case in the social media era? And this is indeed what metamodernism reflects.

Metamoderns have become so adjusted to incoherence that they no longer recognize inconsistencies and seem not to mind art, politics, philosophies, and activism rife with internal contradictions. This explains the illogical phenomenon of “woke jihad” that has become ubiquitous on college campuses of late: kaffiyeh-clad hipsters who denounce the patriarchy and promote LGBT+ equality even as they declare solidarity with patriarchal, anti-LGBT Islamist terrorists.

Metamoderns have become so adjusted to incoherence that they no longer recognize inconsistencies and seem not to mind art, politics, philosophies, and activism rife with internal contradictions.

This is but one of countless examples of our adjusted-to-incoherence culture, which shows up in metamodernism’s oscillation between contradictory ideas (can you really believe in both absolute truth and relativism?).

The biggest challenge here is that many metamoderns don’t flinch when their illogical views are pointed out. They aren’t bothered by the internal incoherence of their contradictory stances. This will no doubt pose new challenges to Christian pastors, church leaders, evangelists, and apologists: How do we disciple people toward a coherent, consistently biblical view of the world when they’re increasingly at ease in whatever contradictions best suit them?

2. Real Desire for Meaning and Certainty

Likely because metamodernism is fundamentally subjective, it contains within it an awareness of subjectivity’s limits. Relativism won’t ultimately satisfy. There has to be more than me and my oscillating mood.

This is why the certainty and optimism of modernism appeals. Metamodern people have seen the unsustainability of postmodern deconstruction, and they desire construction. They want to believe problems can be solved and progress can be made. Even as they’re suspicious of absolute truth in theory, their existential reality leads them to desire it. After all, to construct anything, one must have foundations.

It’s here that Christians can find a hopeful inroad with metamodern seekers. Insofar as our faith offers solid foundations and, as a result, demonstrates ongoing construction in a world of deconstruction, it holds natural appeal. The church is well positioned to meet people in the acedia of postmodernity’s afterglow and invite them into a time-tested community of truth, growth, and purposeful mission.