Sebastian Milbank wonders why modern pop culture is running out of stories
You’re wandering around London in the evening with some friends; boredom has set in and (with a surge of nostalgia for the early 2000s) somebody suggests going to see a film. So you make your way in and choose between the latest Star Wars, Bond or Marvel offering, and three hours of quips, CGI fight scenes, cod psychology and vague gestures towards diversity later, you’re left £20 poorer and with a splitting headache. We’re in the age of the franchise, and suddenly nobody has any new stories to tell. What’s going on?
Commercial incentives are at play of course, but even on the many streaming services that have pushed studios down the road of caution, nostalgia and remakes dominate. The (admittedly excellent) Stranger Things was quite unashamedly a work of 1980s nostalgia, as was the resurrection of The Karate Kid in TV show form.
The “Golden Age of Television” is often considered to have brought innovation and creative freedom to the small screen: shows such as The Sopranos, The Wire, Lost and Mad Men went beyond the more staid and conventional formulas that dominated many earlier TV shows. Television was now allowed to take the same kind of risks as theatre or film, it was “important” and “complex”. But this well too appears to be drying up.
The old model of TV was episodic and moralistic, with each conflict or problem neatly resolved at the end, and a lesson derived by the audience. The more open-ended, allusory style of today, with its long narrative arcs and ethically ambiguous resolutions, seems more sophisticated. But what if that old morally structured model, with its undoubted limits, also represented a renewable source of creativity, an engine that let new stories be told?
According to Aristotle’s Poetics, the purpose of drama is moral persuasion, and dramas make sense to us because they possess an essentially ethical logic that plays upon our emotions. Plot here is understood as mythos – a symbolic structure that defines the driving logic of the narrative and is necessarily informed by the nature of the protagonists. This question of character is seen in terms of ethos and is so literally ethical – through the interplay of good and bad characters, and the consistent portrayal of their habits and traits.
A spate of “dark” narratives and “complex anti-heroes” have given audiences the thrill of novelty, but the result has been a degradation of our collective ability to tell stories. Unable as we are to agree on the nature of the good, the stories we tell are now as contested and ambiguous as the society we live in. Even comedy has suffered, as nobody can agree on what is absurd or shameful without someone losing their job or staging a protest.
Until we again have a shared vision of the good, we can expect either moral relativism, or a slew of superheroes and creaky remakes from a more ethically coherent age.
Sebastian Milbank is a PhD candidate in Theology at Cambridge, completing a thesis on citizenship as a theological concept in the ancient world. He writes on religion, ethics, politics and church affairs. He is currently working for The Tablet, having been awarded the second Newman Internship.
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