The Tao of Mumbling Together: Mumblecore and Metamodern Spirituality

“Let’s make a movie about our daily lives, where nothing much happens. Kind of like Seinfeld, except we aren’t only ironic. We joke with each other a lot, but we’re sincere, too. We talk about little things, often inconsequential ones. We make up the dialogue as we go, and we may say ‘um’ too much. But we’re trying to connect. That’s where the open and relational spirituality comes in. God is in the connections, not somewhere in the sky. Let’s call it The Tao of Mumbling Together.

The Tao of Mumbling Together
Mumblecore and Metamodern Spirituality

Jay McDaniel
8/21/2026

I love Seinfeld. The odd thing about Seinfeld is that, in some ways, nothing really happens. There is no dramatic plot, but the banter among the characters reveals a certain kind of humanity—and also a pervasive irony. Greg Dember regards Seinfeld as a classic example of postmodern comedy. Its final word is irony, not sincerity.

By contrast, he points to post-postmodern films that share something of Seinfeld’s attention to ordinary life and seemingly inconsequential conversation but also contain an important element largely missing from it: genuine intimacy and shared feeling among the characters. They are, as he puts it, metamodern films. The feeling is sincere, not simply ironic. Dember associates this sensibility with mumblecore, which he understands as a kind of metamodern aesthetic—not necessarily funny all the time, but often tender and poignant.

Mumblecore is, I now realize, a contested term. I am not qualified to judge whether or not it is useful. What I appreciate is the idea of mumblecore and what it might reveal about the spiritual significance of ordinary conversation, awkward intimacy, and small moments of human connection. Let us call it “The Tao of Mumbling.”

Here, “mumbling” has both a vocal and an emotional meaning.

1. Vocally, it is the hesitant, understated, seemingly improvised way in which people speak in ordinary life, amid inconsequential conversations.

2. Emotionally, it is the difficulty—and sometimes the courage—of trying to express what we feel, desire, fear, and mean to one another.

There's something beautiful about this, maybe even sacred. There are bonds of felt connection amid, not apart from, the mumbling. The mumblins is part of the Tiny.

Consider, then, the broader context of Dember's insight concerning mumlecore. In Say Hello to Metamodernism!, he identifies eleven qualities that, in his view, embody a metamodern aesthetic sensibility. You will find all of them in a section below. One of them is what he calls the Tiny, otherwise described as metamodern minimalism. As an example, he points to mumblecore.

Mumblecore films are not Hollywood produced sagas. They focus on everyday lives and relationships, typically those of mostly white people in their twenties. They feature naturalistic settings, improvised or loosely scripted dialogue, small casts, minimal plots, and, as Dember emphasizes, a sensitivity to one another’s interior lives. It is this last quality that links mumblecore especially closely with metamodern, as opposed to postmodern, aesthetics.

True, some say that mumblecore is now a thing of the past. It influenced independent filmmaking but has since been replaced by other genres. Perhaps so, perhaps not. What interests me is Dember’s observation that, in mumblecore films, nothing much happens, but felt connections arise between the characters. There is something sincere in their exchanges. The sincerity lies in hesitant exchanges, awkward silences, small disclosures, and imperfect attempts to understand another person. These exchanges are part of the Tao of Mumbling in the two senses named above; vocal and emotional.

The Tao of Mumbling carries within it a kind of spirituality that is easily overlooked when we assume that spirituality must be about things big, deep, expansive, and epic. For my part, I see something of this everyay life spirituality in what you might call "the sacrament of the present moment." It has a Zen feel to it. This sacrament is not fixed or necessarily preplanned; it happens in the moment itself, bubbling up from relationships.

Living within this sacrament does not consist simply of paying attention to the cup of tea, the fire in the stove, or the mountains in the distance—all to the good. It also means becoming mindful in interpersonal relationships: in listening, speaking, hesitating, responding, and sharing silence. The present moment is not only about first-person lived experience; it is also about second-person dynamics: I-Thou relations.

What mumblecore highlights is that ordinary conversations in which nothing much seems to happen can nevertheless be sites of sacred presence. A conversation need not reach a decisive conclusion, disclose a universal truth, or advance an epic story to possess spiritual significance. Sometimes the sacred is found simply in two or three people trying, however awkwardly and incompletely, to become sensitive to one another’s interior lives.

Sometimes they can be articulate. They do not mumble. But sometimes they struggle to find the right words. They may hesitate. Indeed, they may mumble. There is a spirituality—a sensitivity—even in this mumbling: in the open space that emerges between two people who are trying to talk, who cannot quite understand what the other is saying, but who nonetheless remain together and enjoy the conversation. The felt bonds are vague, hesitant, sincere - and sometimes also funny and ironic.

The spirituality at hand is horizontal, not vertical. These moments possess no obvious grandeur. They do not announce themselves as revelations. They do not take us to higher places or give us panoramic views of transcendent truths. In the horizontal sacred, the sacred does not descend from above or rise from the depths. It happens sideways, in the open between one person and another.

And if there is indeed a transcendent source—a divine Mother in whom the whole of life unfolds, a cosmic Bodhisattva who shares in the sufferings of each and all seeking their well-being, a God whose very essence is not overiding power but rather tender love - then this vertical reality finds itself in the smallness, the tininess, of such interactions. We find the vertical in the horizontal, The Mother becomes incarnate in the mutual care.

This care is the Tao of Mumbling.

How Mumblecore Got Its Name

AI Generated

The legend begins at the 2005 South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin. Several low-budget, performance-centered films about young people and their uncertain relationships were being shown there, including Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation, the Duplass brothers’ The Puffy Chair, and Joe Swanberg’s Kissing on the Mouth. Because the films seemed to share a sensibility, people began wondering whether they constituted a new cinematic movement.

According to Andrew Bujalski, he jokingly asked Eric Masunaga, the sound mixer on his film, what this supposed movement should be called. They were drinking in a bar when Masunaga spontaneously suggested “mumblecore”—presumably because the characters spoke in an informal, hesitant, understated manner, sometimes mumbling through conversations rather than delivering polished dramatic dialogue. Bujalski later repeated the word during an interview with IndieWire, and it stuck. He subsequently joked that he had “accidentally unleashed” the name, even though he insisted there was no organized movement and thought the term was ridiculous. BFI, The Guardian

The deeper meaning of the name may be captured by the film critic David Denby’s observation: the sound in these films is often perfectly clear; “it’s the emotions that mumble.” The characters struggle to say what they want, what they feel, and what they mean to one another. Thus, the “mumbling” is not merely vocal. It is emotional and relational: the awkward, tentative sound of people trying—and often failing—to make contact. The New Yorker

Eleven Modes of the Metamodern Aesthetic
Greg Dember

Empathic Reflexivity, including Linda Ceriello’s Life-as-Movie
The Narrative Double Frame, or Raoul Eshelman’s Performatism
Oscillation Between Modern and Postmodern Dualities
Quirky
The Tiny, or Metamodern Minimalism
The Epic, or Metamodern Maximalism
Constructive Pastiche
Ironesty
Normcore
Over-projection, or Anthropomorphizing
Meta-cute

A Sense of Intimacy

To me, it is no coincidence that mumblecore emerged as a genre during the same time that metamodernism arose. I feel mumblecore feeds into the overall metamodern trend, despite it having certain postmodern characteristics. It’s disruptive of certain norms of filmmaking, it rebels against grand statements, and the stories are largely – like the classically postmodern series Seinfeld – about nothing.

I would argue that many of the films labeled as mumblecore differentiate themselves from postmodern fare by inhabiting an intimacy and sense of caring about the inner lives of the characters and the intricacies of their relationships with each other.

- Greg Dember, Say Hello to Metamodernism