Right at the start of The Crisis of Narration (2024), Byung-Chul Han notes that a tell-tale sign that stories are under threat is how stories have become topical. “A paradigm becomes a topic and a fashionable object of academic research only when there is a deep-seated alienation from it,” Han says. He has a point. “All the talk about narratives,” he says, “suggests their dysfunctionality.”
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Here’s another phenomenon to consider. Everyone is more worried than ever about deepfakes and post-truthing. But the media has been lying forever. It’s nothing new. The methods have changed, not the intentions, not the corrupt human nature beneath the intentions. To wax Baudrillardian, the main difference now is that we’re generally so alienated from the truth that we don’t know how to recognize it well enough to tell what the lie might be. Before, with the X-files, we could say, “The truth is out there.” Now, to speak in the register of a stoned hippie, the truth is “out there.” Way out.
Well, yes, stories are in crisis. They’re in crisis because we don’t know what to make of stories, and we don’t know what stories are to make of us. We have all kinds of data, so much we don’t know what to do with it. But even new stories lose their grip fast. In a recent rant about the changing state of Hollywood and audiences, the Russo Brothers, most famous for having directed the two grand finale movies of the Marvel Infinity Saga, said a lot about why they think audiences aren’t flocking to Marvel movies anymore. They had a theory—audience tastes have changed, they said—but it was, as can be expected from Hollywood bigshots, a bit flakey.
Still, it’s worth having a theory, even an attempted one, about what went wrong during and/or after Avengers: Endgame. We need a theory not because everyone should be watching Marvel movies—I’m not going to propose something so preposterous—but because it is a sign of our time. And it is precisely my business here to analyze and explain such a sign.
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I have commented on The Will to Meme and Man’s Search for Meming before, and Endgame was that sort of a movie. It was like revisiting an old friend’s home and seeing familiar pictures of your awkward younger self in one of his digital picture frames. You’re awkward now, of course, but you have yet to discover this. The movie in question was pleasant and diverting. But as I felt and later knew, it was also a narrative disaster. To retcon an easy-peasy technological time-travel fix onto a deeply felt, devastating, and unsolvable tragedy, which is what Avengers: Infinity War gave us, was nothing if not a cop-out.
The Russo Bros said somewhere that writing a story is about writing yourself into a corner. I like that idea. It reminds me of Leonard Cohen’s idea of the “wisdom of no exit” and what the Buddhist writer Pema Chödrön calls “the wisdom of no escape.” There is, writes Cohen, in an interview, he did for Shambhala Sun in 1994, “the consolation of no exit, the consolation that this is what you’re stuck with. Rather than the consolation of healing the wound, of finding the right kind of medical attention, or the right kind of religion, there is a certain wisdom of no exit: this is our human predicament, and the only consolation is embracing it. It is our situation; the only consolation is the full embrace of that reality.”
You’d think this is what the Russo Bros meant when they scripted Infinity War to end, after an epic battle against a powerful villain, with the catastrophic failure of the very heroes we’d been watching for just over a decade. The tragic ending was deeply felt because it wasn’t just the end of that one movie; it was the end of all the movies before it, which is what everything had come to. Despite all those heroes’ brilliance, ingenuity, and strength, they lost.
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This is something Han also talks about. If the world feels entirely contingent, with every outcome malleable, our sense of the meaning of things diminishes significantly. The world is, to us, a massive existential vending machine. How easy it is to flip through the various catalogs of digital archives and online stores and ask, as the Fight Club (1999) narrator does, “What kind of dining set [or x or y or anything else] defines me as a person?” Just pick Youtube as a case study. So many options. 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute. That’s one hour of video per second. No wonder people sit for hours not choosing to watch anything, flipping from one option to the next on YouTube or Netflix without committing because there’s so much choice. No wonder people are trained to see each other as interchangeable. Even marriage has become a whatever-fest for millions. 3 billion life-wasting hours are spent by 800 million ‘users’ every month. Users. That’s what you call addicts. I don’t know if these stats are accurate but they ring spiritually true. On the one hand, all the bottomless optionality might seem to grant us freedom. But it’s binding us, enslaving us, to meaninglessness. If everything is so changeable, why care? Choose whatever.
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I’m not saying, by the way, that the storytellers of that Marvel saga got nothing right. Even if I agree with Scorsese in thinking of them being more like theme parks than like movies, it’d be foolish to say there’s nothing meaningful in them. But any movie ending has a certain weight when it comes to interpreting what went before—and that specific Endgame ending was of such a nature as to render what went before simply much less weighty. That’s quite a blow for what is technically known as capeshit.
That aside, what interests me here is the worldview embodied in the Marvel Infinity Saga. Brian Godawa long ago wrote a book called Hollywood Worldviews (2009). It’s still a good book to consult because of the argument proposed there. We’re never just watching movies; we’re imbibing worldviews. And the worldview that turned a promising story into a big fat lie is the one I want to attend to here. A worldview helped those writers along. They shoved aside the truth-telling exercise of Infinity War that confronted audiences with the fact that not everything in life works out. This same worldview gets a different spin in another Disney movie called Encanto (2021). I’ll call it the no-responsibility worldview, but I’ll explain why later.
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Everyone around her must recognize how special she is, even though it’s obvious from the get-go that she’s average. She is affirmed as a kind of miracle, although there’s not much reason for this. It feels in the end like the protagonist who drove the entire plot was working her way towards the narrative equivalent of a participation award. Yes, there are things, from a storytelling perspective, the movie gets right. But the worldview behind this agenda-affirmative care is wobbly.
I’ve pointed out that worldviews underpin stories. This is to say that stories have, at their core, an educational value. It sounds dull when I say it like that, but it’s true. Every story is built around learning. Stories are not mere sequences of events. Stories are, in essence, accounts of imaginary or real people whose values are challenged by events that force them to decide to act. Often, they have to decide whether to keep or modify, or change their previous values system. “Values, the positive/negative charges of life, are at the soul of [the storyteller’s] art,” says Robert McKeen in his book Story (1999). “The writer shapes story [just as we shape our lives] around a perception of what’s worth living for, what’s worth dying for, what’s foolish to pursue, the meaning of justice, truth—the essential values.”
Yes, building a story and a life around lesser values is possible. However, McKee himself mentions how this causes a crisis for storytellers. When the ethos is a realm of absolute relativism, why bother?
The story is all about ethics.
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One way of understanding a story, given all of this, is that a story, and so life itself, is about a character living out a particular constructed ethos—that is, a way of interpreting the good—while needing a better understanding of and relationship with the primal ethos. The necessity of reattuning and adjusting to the primal ethos becomes apparent through conflict. In other words, in the face of conflict, it becomes apparent—although the characters in a story may not fully recognize this—that their understanding of the primal ethos has been wrong. Their constructed ethos has failed or is failing them.
One of the main ways we learn to cope with the world is through developing a persona. Something like the enneagram of personality helps to show how this persona is tied to definite values—in fact, to warped values in the form of vices. Personality itself is, in other words, the method we use to obtain what we care about. I get this idea from George Kelly’s personality theory (1955). Kelly posits that as we grow up, we are like little scientists who generate and test hypotheses. The hypotheses that hold up become settled as part of our personality construct—our unique take on the constructed ethos. We tend to then take these tried and tested hypotheses from childhood onto adulthood, assuming that they’ll hold up.
Echoing Kelly, Chuck Palahniuk says this in his book Consider This (2021):
“Some egghead [by whom he probably means Kelly, although he doesn’t cite him] pointed out how people decide the nature of their world at a very young age. And they craft a way of behaving that will lead to success. You’re praised for being a strong little kid so you invest in your strength. Or you become the smart girl. Or the funny boy. Or the pretty girl. And this works until you’re about thirty years old. After your schooling is over, you recognize your chosen way of winning has become a trap. And a trap with diminishing rewards.”
It soon becomes more than apparent that the original set of hypotheses we grew up with isn’t sufficient. Happenings carry a weight of necessity and this weight demands that we become conscious. That’s quite a demand! In consciousness, hard-earned through great suffering or great love, adaptation becomes possible. But it is not inevitable.
We all know people like this who haven’t adapted. Think of someone you first met way back. Even then, it was clear that her theory of coping in the world was built around the vice of vanity. That’s an enneagram three problem. She believed, back then, that if you worked insanely hard, kept your self-image up, and flirted with the right people, everything would work out. Imagine you see her years later, expecting a shift. We all grow up, don’t we?
You’ve seen, at an electronic distance, so many signs of her success, all well-composed and Instagram-perfect. And yet, in person, you realize there was no shift. She’s the same person you’d met so long ago. Only her hope for the future is gone. She’s now miserable living her well-curated life. And, unfortunately, the pain she’s in hasn’t yet brought about actual consciousness. She thinks—this is fairly common—that her situation, a mass of all kinds of problems, is everyone else’s fault. Strange, though, how, with so many different problems, the only common denominator is her. With various relationships in tatters and signs that her career hopes aren’t working out, she’s worried she won’t be able to afford the Botox she needs to keep looking like a woman who uses Botox. She hasn’t seen yet that those old coping tools she’d taken on as habits when she was very young aren’t working anymore.
A good story is about letting the persona die. The mask isn’t real, and to convince ourselves it is, well, that’s to buy into a lie. A good story is about transcending the ego and becoming a Self. It’s about working towards fullness, wholeness, Wisdom. A good story is sophiology. It’s concerned with enlarging personality, which is, to wax Christian, about submitting to God and his Providence. It’s about seeking integration in the face of chaos and disintegration. It’s about being and doing what is truly good and wholesome—in the midst of life’s many perplexities and sufferings.
It’s a dialectic of a kind and it’s there to be found, if you’re looking out for it, in daily life. You start with a certain sense of order. Chaos happens. The unknown and unexpected appears. Should you choose to, you get to create a new equilibrium. This is the yinging and yanging of life. Another way of looking at this is that you have a certain persona and you have to enlarge your personality—that is, build character—to deal with the challenges and complexities and perplexities of life. Don’t defend your ego. Don’t protect your persona. It makes for a bad story because it’s dishonest.
A good story starts with repentance. We are all bound to sin, to what the ancient narrative experts called hamartia. We miss the mark. We have, in fact, a fatal flaw of a kind. That’s what hamartia means. Yours may be anger or pride or vanity or envy or avarice or fear or gluttony or lust or sloth. I mean, we all have many of these but persona is built mainly on one of them. When we face difficult events, we tend to respond in predictable ways, depending on the persona we’ve built. But the real point is to start wondering if the default is just us leaning into our sin, resting in the character flaw as if it’ll save us. Facing it is the best option because it’s the first step to overcoming it. Admitting that we’re broken is crucial to becoming whole.
There are three possible options in any story. Firstly, there’s the static story, where being true to and taking responsibility for yourself is the positive outcome and being stuck in a rut and refusing responsibility is the negative one. All the lessons offered by conflict are rejected. Secondly, there’s the negative story, where the character is overcome by his flaw. The lessons of the conflict are rejected or fail to land; and the character is worse-off. This is usually what happens to the villain, but it’s pretty common in everyday life too. Thirdly, there’s the positive narrative. The character overcomes the flaw. He repents and gives up defending the flaw and grows as a result. In other words, the lessons of the antithesis are assimilated.
You can pick almost anything in life, any event or task, and look at it from this perspective. You can attempt a Stoic or Ignatian examen and figure out what you’ve done—what you did well and where you may have gone wrong—all while you consider what kind of person you’d like to become. Did you respond virtuously? Did you default to ego-defending? What damage did you cause? Can you repair it? What can you do differently next time a similar event arises?
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There is a terrible consequence to all this. We are trapped thinking, many of us, like the writers of Avengers: Endgame. Our choices seem more and more to be of little consequence, even though this is untrue. And with so many conveniences, the events we might grow through are taken away from us. We allow this. This is a choice. Resistance is smoothed out. We know that this has meant, as the research of Jonathan Haidt and Abigail Shrier has shown, a tremendous decline in mental health. If your locus of control is taken from you by a society of safety and blame-shifting, you’re guaranteed to be unhappy. You’ll start thinking like Mirabel in Encanto. You’ll think that you don’t have to grow, that everyone else should change, not you. But this is also untrue. Soon enough, and before we even know it, we’ll become extras in our own lives. Ressentiment is anti-story and anti-life.
Contra Endgame and Encanto and the worldview beneath such things, you, me, we have to take responsibility for where we’re at, even if that is in the space of no exit. This is the protagonistic shift that must happen in all of us, the move from being a passive observer to being an active participant. Unless we are active in facing the world, unless we take on the truths, even the difficult truths, of the world presented to us, we are just extras. It is only the active ones, the ones who take responsibility, who can be protagonists. Only the protagonists can become heroic. It is only the heroic who are truly conscious. It is only the truly conscious who can perceive meaning enough to grant life the value it deserves. It is only the heroic, the conscious, the meaning-finders who can turn a dying civilization around.
