If you didn't hear, Disney's Snow White, in addition to being a critical failure, was a box-office bomb.
With a worldwide haul of only $185 million, it stands to lose Disney hundreds of millions of dollars.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, last month we got A Minecraft Movie, a soulless load of corporate "product" being enjoyed ironically as a GenZ meme movie cruising toward a billion in revenue.
That begs the question:
In the short term, I'm sure we have about 12 Minecraft sequels to look forward to.
In the long term, though, the cultural landscape is looking pretty bleak.
One thing has never been clearer: it's time for new stories. Our world is starving for them.
We all have something to say — some emotion to capture in words, blooming that spark of imagination that spreads like wildfire.
This isn't anything new. Humans have always been storytellers — we take after our God like that (He is the ultimate storyteller, after all). Yet we've fallen far from the shores of Troy, the fields of Rohan, the asteroid fields of Alderaan (rest in peace), and the dunes of, well, Dune. Now, we savor the benign stagnation of another remake; advertisements for Snow White or the newest Star Wars slop seem more like threats than enticements.
While we sit back, aghast at the horrid potential of Disney's parasitism, many still seem content with sitting down at the cinema for (at best) a middling motion picture or (at worst) a blatant violation of average sanity and common sense.
The peculiarity of this is the willingness for the consumer to be spat upon, again and again, always hoping that the new drivel will be better than the last.
Our stories seem like reruns of a show that should have ended years past. It is a rather new phenomenon that our culture seeks to enshrine the patron saints of past imaginations instead of seeking out the new, the bright, and the untold. The great myth, in all of its glory, is dead. We killed it with the umpteenth sequel, the remake, and the reimagining.
This quiet crisis of culture should scare those who recognize the importance of imagination, and it is largely due to the popular conception of the story. We don't create stories anymore. We rebury old cultural artifacts in the playground sand and feign excitement when we unearth them with our own hands.
Here's the question:
How do we recapture that firelit mystery that draws our minds to wander to places unknown?
In short, we start anew.
No good story came about from prying eyes or corporate boardrooms. We must let imagination - ever so intimate - to reign as the guide for creative folks.
Don't brush off the old parchment, but find a new page in the cultural conscience. Find myth again. Our current mythology is a voided space, cordoned off with crime-scene tape. Our cultural imagination refuses to allow our storytellers to build their own pillars by which to hold up the world.
In the market of opportunities, it is an irony that the field of storytelling seems to lack the most imagination. This isn't for the lack of takers; we have many an artist willing to burden themselves with the world, but we lack a culture willing to take a chance on the uncomfortable.
To build a new myth, we must allow our storytellers to cut us. No more adaptation, no more rewriting, no more reruns. More than just moralizing, our storytellers must diverge from the traditional beats of the treaded path.
We must also be patient. We cannot be a culture that prides itself on expression if we are impatient with the results, or dissatisfied with the methods. This is the path of the storyteller, cutting through the detritus and underbrush, that must be tread without grand expectation.
Give the storytellers a chance. Let them fill our chests with tales of heroism or tales of woe.
Let's turn our backs on the numbing cold of emotional apathy, and let their fires burn once again.
About the Author:
Owen Lee is a major Chesterton nerd and graduate student expert on the Russian Revolution. Teaching in his hometown of Toledo, Ohio, Owen holds a Master's Degree in History, along with a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science. When not working, he enjoys spending time with his wife watching shows, reading, writing, and playing video games.
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Not the Bee or any of its affiliates.
