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If you follow these things, you will know that Martin McDonagh' s new play The Pillowman - it's about torture, fratricide, child murder, totalitarian law enforcement, and lying - is being celebrated as a "spellbinding stunner" (The New York Times) and is the hottest ticket on Broadway. For all its cleverness, however, it is ultimately just one more fashionable example of the dismaying hold irony has over our culture. As we really do torture terrorists at Guantanamo, as nine year olds really do murder eleven year olds in New York, as the global disparity between rich and poor widens, as cultural war threatens our civility and the media make a mockery of journalistic integrity (they recently paraded the convicted criminals of Watergate to offer "objective" witness against the "treachery" of revealed deep throat whistle blower F. Mark Felt), McDonagh spins tales within tales about the darkest places in the human spirit without meaning a word of what he says or illuminating any of these sorrowful matters, and our popular culture sinks deeper and deeper into the distancing consolations of irony.
Irony is the postmodern form of conspicuous self-consciousness and suits our era's puerility - its fey aestheticism and political cynicism to a tee. It is complacency's rationalization, disengagement's excuse, the alienated spectator's self-justification. The ironic bystander (the phrase is redundant) is the citizen's jeering nemesis and the poet's wily shadow trying to make sure that truth and beauty and goodness, those stalwarts of the world before it was disenchanted, do not re-infect the post-modern's cool voice with hot earnestness. Or make us think too hard or feel too keenly. While intellectuals work - Stanley Fish making irony respectable, Richard Rorty wrapping it in the cloak of privatization to minimize its political impact, Jedediah Purdy laboring more recently to expose its costs to community - artists play, assuring that irony endures and spreads in sanitized screen violence (Kill Bill or Sin City), television news wryness (The Daily Show), knowing Broadway shows (The Pillowman) and teen consumer advertising (the beer commercials, for starters). For irony allows us to armor our self-consciousness, and make our moral puzzlement and anxiety seem almost virtuous - though we can only utter the ν word ironically.
As Claire Colebrook has noticed in...