Beschrijving
Popular stories didn't always revolve around good battling evil. When did that change, and why?
Director: Namir Khaliq (https://www.protostellarmedia.com/)
Producers: Adam D’Arpino, Tamur Qutab
Writer and narrator: Catherine Nichols
Today, popular storytelling is dominated by good-versus-evil paradigms – think superhero films, and the Star Wars, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises. In these narratives, the moral future of a realm, galaxy or multiverse must be protected from groups setting out to crush its most sacred values. However, as the US writer Catherine Nichols details in this video, which is adapted from her Aeon Essay, these sweeping moral narratives are essentially absent in the folk tales and myths of the Western world prior to the 19th century. Consider, for instance, Jack and the Beanstalk, the Three Little Pigs and even the Iliad, in which the conflict is simply over the characters’ personal standing or survival.
Featuring narration from Nichols and direction from the US filmmaker Namir Khaliq, the short explores how the rise of nation-states propelled this narrative shift, resulting in many popular stories being reimagined to fit this new values-based paradigm that encouraged social cohesion. And, perhaps counterintuitively, Nichols makes the case that the result has been, in many ways, pernicious, favouring ‘simple partisan thinking’ in which morality is reduced to who’s on the good team and the irredeemables who must be stopped at any cost.
Nikos Spiliotis - Love Waltz is under a YouTube Free license. / nikospiliotis