The Decline of "Metanarratives"

“… the declining significance of religion. Post modernism has been particularly critical of the metanarrative or Marxism and its claim of absolute truth, as it has been of any theory, which tries to read a pattern of progress into history. The consequence of this is that post modernism rejects the claims of any theory to absolute knowledge, or of any social practice to universal validity.” (Baudrillard, 1991, web)

A metanarrative is simply a story about a story, therefore within the overall plot a number of different stories are told, which makes it difficult to determine what a narrative is trying to tell us, as it is fast changing with no 100% focus on one plot or story.

This type of film making is not seen in mainstream cinema today, due to the problem that audiences either switch off or are not interested with the story. “24 Hour Party People” does have strong metanarratives eg the stories of ‘Tony Wilson’ and the Manchester night club ‘The Hacienda’. Although the strong metanarratives in this film go against Strinati’s suggestion that Post Modern texts do not focus strongly on metanarratives, Strinati’s other 4 points are strongly represented and it is clearly a postmodern film.

The stories within the story are an important part of 24 Hour Party People narrative.

As we can see in this last clip Michael Winterbottom, used this style of narrative throughout his most recent film ‘9 Songs’, although this film had a much slower pace and less of a story plot, he had a number of stories mashed together within a ‘sex – centric’ narrative.

“24 Hour Party People” uses the character “Tony Wilson” to help carry the viewer through the story. Metanarratives conventionally makes it difficult for the viewer to understand due to the narrative being complicated and layered, with this film being a comedy based on a certain amount of reality it is difficult to follow or interpret the story, however it is important for the viewer to bring their own imagination when viewing postmodern film as it is just as important as the narrative, again the film has been created for each viewer to create their own nostalgia throughout the narrative.