Modern Fiction Isn't Just Political, It's Incompetent

in which I break down some of the most underlying flaws in modern storytelling

I’ve ranted before about the malignant narcissism, as well as the gross politicization present in the vast majority of modern commercial fiction, but there’s something else lurking under the surface, making current stories an insufferable drag, and that is the small fact that nobody actually knows how to tell a story anymore.

I don’t mean, necessarily, that the creators of contemporary fiction (particularly film) can’t come up with an interesting situation or unique characters (though this is debatable); what I mean is that they don’t know how to make these story elements function together as a cohesive mechanism. Instead, they use cheap tactics like flashy, heightened action (often unearned), or lots and lots of sex to distract you from the fact that nothing much is happening. Who needs complex, intricate scenes that layer plot, character, and world development in a seamless and entertaining blend of mechanical efficiency when you can just bang your action figures together—in one way or another? And pacing? Don’t make me laugh.

To offer an example of the sort of general incompetency I’m talking about, observe this scene comparison between Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and Amazon’s Rings of Power. This isn’t merely an issue of Current Thing Politics oozing into every committee-produced piece of fiction like black sludge from the abyss; it’s a matter of an incredible, almost shocking deficiency of basic storytelling talent. There’s no reason we should have to press pause on one story element to focus on another. Regardless of political or social themes, we shouldn’t have to set aside character in order to have an action scene, and we shouldn’t have to put up with flat exposition or stilted and contrived interactions to generate plot momentum or provide insight into the characters. One of the most fundamental aspects of good writing is learning how to make a scene (or a paragraph or a sentence) do more than one thing at a time. Either these people are stupid, or they think you are.

This has been called the Marvelfication of story: the notion that you can squeak by on fireballs and CGI spectacle to compensate for your inability to keep more than one ball in the air—which, by the way, is your job as a storyteller—and your audience won’t notice. However, even Marvel is beginning to suffer from this, as Phase 4 has seen characters lose their humanity and plots become convoluted, making each new release feel like some AI-generated pile of everything that came before. It’s all mangled and weird, and I’m sorry, but at some point, it becomes impossible to smooth over the lack of story using the same, tired shock-value tactics your audience has seen a thousand times before.

Let us contrast this incompetent sludge with a story that demonstrates stunning and near-flawless efficiency: The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Every scene juggles plot, character, action, and setting in a tight and invisible dance that keeps the story clipping along at a brisk pace and progresses the characters along their arcs, all while maintaining the highly specific mood that makes the Pirates films so unique and memorable. This impeccable precision is a mark of true storytelling genius, and it appears to be all-but lost by our contemporaries.

Even the better examples among recent releases display these faults. For example, Amazon’s Fallout, while solidly in the “decent” and “watchable” category, falls short of being really great due to an apparent inability to balance multiple characters and storylines. While Lucy and The Ghoul were both fairly well-rounded and showed reasonable depth of character, Maximus felt flat with a piecemealed backstory by comparison—even though he was obviously meant to be a character with equal prominence in the narrative. Likewise, the ball was dropped on the Brotherhood plotline in favor of developing the Vault plotline, when, clearly, both were intended to carry narrative weight.

The question, of course, is—what has caused this epidemic of incompetency in storytelling? Is it the fact that so many of these stories are produced by a board rather than an individual with creative veto-power? Too many cooks in the kitchen? Perhaps. Is it a matter of the people behind the production of these stories being such zealous harpies that they’re simply too blinded by their woke politics to see obvious plot holes? Maybe. Or perhaps they’re just lazy. But I think that, underneath these possible contributors is another factor, and that is a lack of appreciation for the functional art of the past—to say nothing of the culture and tradition that produced such art. There is no desire to study and learn the craft from authors and stories of the past—no desire to interrogate them for the reasons for their functionality; instead, the modern mind wishes to become fully “unburdened by what has been,” apparently inventing “what could be” out of whole cloth. Unfortunately, this has left many of our stories unburdened by humanity, talent, and even basic logic.