I am home in the evening after a productive day at work and an enjoyable dinner with good company. I feel pleasantly tired and I want to watch a movie. I turn on one of the streaming services I subscribe to and scroll through the long list of titles. Nothing appeals to me. I either don’t relate to the topics or I find them utterly implausible. A few look promising in delivering a powerful experience, yet it’s not one that I find pleasant (I don’t enjoy horror, for example). After twenty or so minutes of scrolling, I turn off the tv and settle with a non-fiction book. (At the moment this is “The Matter with Things” by Iain McGilchrist.)
This could be a satisfying end to a short story. Except after months and even years of the above scenario repeating regularly, I really, really want to watch (or read) a good story: what we call a fictional drama (or comedy), an experience that stirs me somehow, moves me, elevates me, fills me with excitement and wonder.
Why? Why do I want… need… seek to experience this? Why doesn’t a good non-fiction book suffice? Why is a story the answer to this desire?
I have been pondering this question for many years. Not just for narrative art, but for art in general. The man-made we add to what we encounter in the world around us, and not simply all man-made, but the things we do that seem to have no physical function or purpose. Like a bedtime story or a lullaby. Why not just count sheep or stay silent? And even when one acknowledges a lullaby as a very practical thing, why does it work? What kind of activity is listening to a picture of words or a rhyme? How do we even know what a melody is? And why do I want to know these things?
I want to know because I think it is deeply connected with the reason I can’t find a good movie to watch. It seems the society I live in (North America) can no longer produce a compelling, satisfying story. I would also extend that to all the arts. Somehow over time we, collectively, have lost (or rejected?) the knowledge of what a story is. Consequently we no longer know how to create one. We put characters and plot points together, yet they don’t satisfy, like junk food that fills the stomach and excites the palate, but contains no nutritional value. The scary part is junk food eventually harms us!
In most of the 20th century, art is treated as anything you can get away with. There are many reasons, some of them very good ones, for how that came to be, yet are there no specifications for art at all? If art stirs emotions, and emotion isn’t arbitrary, then isn’t it necessary for art to possess certain qualities? Can art lacking in specific qualities eventually harm us?
Art and the Invisible 