On the Necessity of Bringing Back Old-Fashioned Storytelling
Movies and shows push us towards cynicism—something else is required if we want real cultural renewal
People used to post memes of John Wayne, or some other figure radiating masculine authority, juxtaposed against a male of indeterminate age wearing pajamas while sipping cocoa—with the heading “What happened to men?”
A thousand answers can be offered to that question—the Industrial Revolution happened, safetyism happened, banking happened, soy happened, “owned spaces” happened, etc.
Another explanation struck me after a) listening to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight on audiobook and b) watching The Green Knight on the screen and c) thinking about the profound differences. This: movies and shows happened. The screen happened. The televisual medium became the primary way we transmit values and entertain ourselves.
It’s not just what movies and shows we watch, but also simply the fact we watch movies and shows that is important. Sophisticated thinkers have long told us the medium is the message—which can be a hard concept to wrap one’s head around, just as it would be difficult for a fish to understand the water it swims in. But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the televisual medium tends toward a certain kind of story which, among other things, doesn’t bode well for masculine virtue.
Gawain vs Gawain
Long before electricity and gadgetry brought the “motion picture” into our lives, people transmitted culture in large part through oral tradition. They told stories, maybe around a fire, just one voice working on the imagination.
For most of us, the audiobook is the closest we can come to this experience, a sort of technological ghost of that tradition. It is not the same, of course. But when listening to an old story told by a great storyteller, you begin to understand the different kind of man that is cultivated by that tradition.
My attempts to describe the delight of listening to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (read by David Rintoul) will surely fall short. You simply know afterwards that you have been in the hands of a master. It is a quietly and mysteriously engrossing experience, one which heightens anticipation and the senses, quite the opposite of the wild overloads of the movie theater, all the lights flashing and the sounds blasting, which over time tend to leave the viewer a little bored. What was most surprising was that the bard could sing of Sir Gawain’s virtues, his deeds, his reputation for courtesy, his honor, and his religious devotion without ever needing to wink at the audience ironically, as if to establish that we don’t actually believe in those things. Even when Gawain fails to fully honor his covenant with Lord Bertilak, his failure is touchingly human, and Gawain is devastated afterwards for failing thus. The hero is offered as a flawed but deeply admirable model to us.
In a singular and mysterious and unexpected way, the experience speaks to the heart—largely because it has ambitions for you.
The recent adaptation of the poem on screen was less captivating and ambitious. Despite trailers which promised an old-fashioned story of honor and chivalry, The Green Knight proved to be the story of a bugman who cannot cut it. This Gawain is not honorable but instead “relatable”—and by that I mean he is weak. He doesn’t know what to do with a sword. On his journey to the Green Chapel he hardly puts up a fight as he is waylaid by three teenagers, two of them girls, who tie him up and leave him for dead along the road. In his doings with Lady Bertilak, he is revealed to be an indecisive coomer, completely overwhelmed by her advances (which the real Gawain expertly deflects). You could say movie-Gawain cheats on his girlfriend back home, who happens to be a harlot, but he isn’t even enough of an agent in his own life to make such a decisive choice; instead it just happens to him. Any nobility he shows with his final decision at the Green Chapel is really just the result of a cost-benefit analysis which tells him that dishonesty will lead to pain. He doesn’t do the right thing; he does the less painful thing.
The decline of Gawain as he is updated for the screen seems more of a feature than a bug. If not quite necessitated by the televisual medium, this development is still heavily pushed by the medium. We’ve seen evidence on the screen for decades, at least in movies and shows that aim for sophistication.
Heroes must be made “problematic.” Faith is presented mostly for the purpose of being mocked or debunked. Traditional wisdom is little more than a power game by white men who wish to control everyone else’s lives. And so on.
One might object that I shouldn’t impose my desires for a heroic narrative on this particular film: just because they didn’t make the film I wanted to see doesn’t mean it’s a bad film. This is often a fair pushback. But that’s pretty much my point. It’s not just that the filmmakers chose a particular approach to Gawain, but that the choice was almost made for them. In many ways, this Gawain educates us about what the televisual medium does to a story. Hollywood is increasingly incapable of making a morally ambitious and heroic film or show which seeks to elevate the viewer in the way old stories did. Not heroism, virtue, and courage, but skepticism, irony, and subversion is what this film, and the televisual in general, tend toward.
And, of course, those who watch movies like The Green Knight will become very different kinds of people than those who encounter the old story.
I can think of a few factors which might push the industry this way.
Money is one. Because the medium is so expensive—the production budget of Avengers: Endgame was $356M, not counting the expense of marketing the film—you get gatekeeping by elites. Those with big money determine what stories are to be told, and genuinely heroic narratives do not fly with these people, nor with the fashionable types whose approval they seek. Rather, the subversive faux-sophistication of Game of Thrones or the popcorn irreverence of Avengers is what interests them. Let’s not forget that almost twenty years ago Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ had to be independently financed and five years ago Zack Snyder got run off the set of Justice League for apparently being more ambitious than his corporate backers could tolerate.
Scale is another, related reason. With so many involved in the production of a movie or show, I can imagine it being difficult to find key people willing to contribute to an unfashionable project. The iron law seems to go something like this: the bigger a production grows, not just of narratives but of anything, the more likely it will fall into line with the values of the day, which in our case means mediocrity. Heroic values don’t really work at scale.
Then there’s the risk inherent in ambitious presentations. The many moving parts (script, direction, acting, etc) involved mean more chances to get something wrong. As is the case with so many “faith-based” films, to misfire with ambitious material means an embarrassing disaster—“cringe,” as the kids say. Thus, the televisual encourages lower aims and/or self-deprecation; it’s best to laugh at yourself in this medium, the way they do in the Fast and Furious franchise.
This risk is accentuated by the speed with which the medium changes. Fragmentation occurs in the quick trends. One consequence: most of yesterday’s films age poorly, which beckons mockery. (This, if I remember correctly, is the premise of Mystery Science Theater 3000.)
In these ways and others, the medium tends toward a nit-picking, fault-finding, wise-cracking disposition on the part of moderately clever viewers. Hunting for plot holes and inconsistencies becomes a favorite pastime. Watch Screen Rant’s Pitch Meetings on Youtube if you don’t know what I’m talking about. Perhaps this is proper, given how thoughtless so many productions are, but nevertheless it contributes to my argument that there’s something about the televisual that contributes to a smallness of soul.
Of course, this attempt at analysis is obviously woefully incomplete. Other forces are at work, which I don’t have space to explore. I haven’t even considered the effect of the written word itself, which also seems to tend away from the heroic. What I mean to show is the presence of mechanisms within the televisual which influence the story. The medium puts fingerprints all over its stories, with tremendous consequences for the audience.
What This Means
There is a practical takeaway to these reflections. If we wish to cultivate manly, heroic sentiments rather than skepticism and non-values, we need to bring back the older form of storytelling.
The project might start with dedicating ourselves to listening to audiobooks. I aim to build a library of all the great epics and songs and the heroic novels, with the intent of listening to them frequently on long walks: The Iliad, Beowulf, The Song of Roland, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, other Arthurian romances, Lord of the Rings, and others.
Reading to children from old books must also be part of the program. Their formation must be driven more by the old ways than by the new. And eventually we ought to try our hand at performance, memorizing great stories and cultivating the skills to tell them compellingly.
The upside is cultural renewal, younger generations that have been reared on the kinds of stories that ignite the heart. The downside is more effort required of us: we cannot simply tune in to the cultural transmissions provided by coastal financiers and their actors. Isn’t it this the larger lesson we’re leaning regarding everything in these wild times? We must learn to do the work ourselves, rather than counting on others, who most certainly don’t have our interests at heart, to do it for us.