against storytelling
A couple weeks ago, Facebook rebranded to Meta, which some have pointed out sounds like the Hebrew word for dead. In the keynote announcing the change, Mark Zuckerberg explained that “the word meta comes from the Greek word meaning beyond. For me, it symbolizes that there is always more to build. There’s always a next chapter to the story.”
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When did the word story start to sound so empty? Was it Big Tech or writers’ workshops or neoliberalism or Madison Avenue that exhorted everyone to tell their story, that everyone has a story to tell? That brands were stories, that people were stories, that history was one big story? I don’t know if stories themselves have changed all that much, but the kinds of things people call story and storytelling certainly have.
Last year, the new CEO of WarnerMedia, Jason Kilar, sent an internal memo announcing restructurings and layoffs in the company. In addition to action items and news of termination, it contained a kind of mission statement:
we are missionaries that ultimately believe we can and will change the world through story. […] Because of the gift that is the internet, we have what I believe is one of the greatest opportunities in the history of media, which is to deliver our beloved stories and experiences directly to hundreds of millions of consumers across the globe.
For Kilar, entertainment is evangelism, where stories are not told or passed down but delivered and consumed. Story is something subscribed to, like a belief or a streaming service. Kilar’s coupling of “stories” with “experiences” also presages Meta’s further blurring of the two. Zuckerberg describes the metaverse as allowing “creators to connect different physical locations into cohesive, augmented reality storytelling experiences like guided tours or scavenger hunts.” “Stories and experiences,” “storytelling experiences”—these are the opaque cousins of Disney+’s “climactic story event.”
This rebranding of audiovisual experience-bundles as stories likely has much to do with the film industry’s IP craze, in which movies are not stories so much as opportunities to sell merchandise, toys, licensing deals, and theme park tickets. The mega-blockbusters, the celebrity-stocked cinematic universes, the ludicrous adaptations of children’s books and board games, the prequels for characters from Tony Soprano to Willy Wonka to Buzz Lightyear. It is almost cliché to say that the big-budget films of today are necrophilic, self-generating, and nostalgic to the point of delirium. Whether any of them are good movies is beside the point. An obvious reason story feels attenuated is because all the “beloved stories” are being wrung dry for cash.
But the weird corporate deployment of story has implications for the filmmaker as much as the filmgoer. In the same way that creator has become a more cool-sounding label for the beleaguered freelancers of the information economy, story gives non-narrative content (a cadaver, a virtual scavenger hunt, an Instagram Story) a cultural importance that words like product or information don’t have. Calling people who do not tell stories storytellers not only cheapens the difficult task of crafting a narrative but also obscures the tedium and precariousness of labor and blurs the line between work and non-work. A videographer without health insurance making social content for minor celebrities is not a storyteller; calling her one will not help. If anything, it’s almost an insult, suggesting with the pretense of storytelling that generating soon-forgotten assets for the wealthy and powerful is in fact a noble task. Which is cool, which is fine, which is a way to make a living. But it is not a noble task.
As someone who could in theory be called a visual storyteller, perhaps I feel betrayed to some degree, weary from old idealisms. Perhaps I’m simply elevating a private concern by trying to look for signs of it in the culture. Stories, after all, are what I used to want. Story is the first love of any book-child who sat rapt at their parents’ feet while a tale was told. A story didn’t even have to be good to make time stand still, to make it tremble and bend with anticipation. I used to think that they were inherently important, that there was something almost sacred to them, and I devoured them and studied them and sought to forge and gather them myself.
I’m not sure I want that anymore. Recently I asked someone who also works in production what kinds of things they wanted to work on. “I just want to tell stories,” they said. I did not say: “Why?” I did not say: “What kinds?” I had no idea what they meant. I don’t think they did either.
At production companies, in English departments, on Twitter, in ad campaigns, in career talks, in casual conversation, the value of story is too often a given. This insistence that stories are good for us, that they are instruments of change, is a persistent feature of the loose application of story by the managerial class. Kilar’s notion that WarnerMedia “will change the world through story” offers no suggestion for how it might change, or why recycling the same old stories is the way to do it. Presenting the award for Best Picture at the 2020 Oscars, Jane Fonda declared that “Nothing is more important than raising awareness, right?” and “Here are the films that made the greatest impact this year,” as if anyone thought Ford v Ferrari (2020) was making us better people or creating social change. I have no idea what she meant by impact. I don’t think she did either.
My favorite writer of short stories, Joy Williams, gets at this blind faith in a 2014 interview with the Paris Review:
The question was, Why do short stories matter and why should we value them? What a retro question. It sounded like something out of the 1940s. I was too weary for a reply, but I think they probably don’t matter all that much. A herd of wild elephants matters more. And which stories are we talking about? There are so many of them.
When pressed to say something more, she said: “What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes[.]”
Narrative is one of the primal ways we make sense of our lives; stories themselves won’t desiccate or disappear. But that doesn’t change the fact that story is often just a way of conjuring an audience for a spectacle with no purpose. Or one where the purpose—500 bucks to watch a corpse get opened up, eight bucks a month to watch The Falcon and the Winter Soldier—is profit.
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Bodies don’t actually tell stories, or at least dead ones don’t. They contain clues—tattoos, pacemakers, missing gallbladders—but they are not storytellers. No dead thing ever spoke again from the grave. But when he was alive, in 2015, David Saunders told things to the oral historians at the World War II Museum. His stories are plain but precious and spoken through long pauses and labored breathing. They were given freely, small shards of the past delicately borne into the future. A noble task, indeed.
I know exactly where I was. I was dove huntin with a twelve gauge shotgun. And there were six other men with me. And one of em’s wife came to pick me up, pick us up, and she was cryin and she said the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. I said, You’re kidding. And the rest of em said, Yeah they bombed Pearl Harbor. What’d they do that for? They wanted to destroy America, I guess. […] And we didn’t know what to say. I said, Well there goes my membership in the dove huntin club [laughs] because I know I’m of the age. In one more year I’ll be gone. And they said, No, don’t look at it that way, you might be the lucky guy. And I said, Maybe so.
ben tapeworm