Hollywood stories have been getting a bad reputation- ‘Hollywood’ being a catch-all for the big money film industry, here. The Rings of Power show, for instance, possibly had greater cultural impact in how its critics pulled it apart than in its direct legacy, and every year has its crop of terribly done films and TV shows, the reviews of which I follow at intervals, laughing at the absurdity. Some of the downfalls of these stories undoubtedly lie in the basic skill of their writers, but that’s so generic a statement as to be near useless. Many of these stories flop because their authors have not even the modicum of Christian morality (and aesthetic) which their audience expects, have had it expurgated it from their culture (thus the common phenomenon of their heroes being unlikeable and their villains occasionally heroic).

One cluster of problems endemic to these stories, however, is the joint questions of sincerity and authenticity.

Sincerity

I’ve talked about this one before. ‘Sincerity’ is the external part of this duo, in today’s formulation. A ‘sincere’ story comes from an author who engages in it fully and intentionally. A sincere storyteller (for sincerity resides in the storyteller) is one who really, truly wants to tell the story for reasons intrinsic to the deed: a love for the story; a desire to share that love; a belief in the story’s worth. Profit motive, duty, and more may factor in, but at the core the storyteller wants to tell this story.

Insincerity leaks through stories with an ease hard to believe. We’ve all experiences stories written entirely in order to convey information or a lesson, and we know there is something different about such stories, a lesser substantiality which puts them below their brethren. We’ve also seen stories clearly written entirely because the writer was contracted- to complete an ongoing story, to make a genre product, etc. These stories too ring hollow. Then, on the less mercenary side of things, we have those authors who manifestly write for self-indulgence, producing what some call Mary Sues. Writing as a personal fantasy, as a wish-fulfillment, tends in all but the most careful hands to produce something warped and insincere- a lack of concern for the story itself renders it ineffective for anything but the author’s real purpose, his fantasy. If you want to understand this, go read some fanfiction- looking especially for ‘romance’ stories involving the base story’s accepted Hot Character and a female insert.

Yet ‘sincerity’ isn’t the whole. We often find stories ‘insincere’ entirely on the basis of themselves- but ‘sincerity’ is strictly speaking a personal quality. A story is inanimate and unconscious; it intends nothing and therefore cannot be insincere in intention. What we’re referencing back towards is the author’s insincerity. We’re seeing that in the story- which begs the question: how does sincerity and insincerity show up in the story?

Authenticity

Authenticity resides within and inside the story itself. It’s like to sincerity, as we’ll see, and its lack is a common result of insincerity. It’s not guaranteed, by sincerity, however; writers can enter into the work with full sincerity and produce something of patent inauthenticity, a result of lacking craft.

Authenticity is the story’s self-coherence. Our world, God’s creation, is the model of this authenticity. All within it connects to God with consistency; all within it relates to everything else in it in a way eventually logical, once it’s fully understood. Physics, personal relationships, and aesthetics may be immensely complicated, but they come together at the base into a coherent whole, a coherence we can recognize on an instinctive level in many places. Of course, there are local disturbances, ‘ugliness,’ but from a sufficiently broad view even these become part again of the patterns and coherence of the whole, driving towards the world’s final purpose: a story to Him.

Fiction is ‘secondary creation,’ as Tolkien put it. We who write stories are creating limited imitations of the creation around us, imitating God in that world (Gen. 1:28; Eph. 5:11). ‘Authenticity’ is the coherence of those secondary creations: that every part of them relates properly to every other part in light of their wholistic purpose (purposes). A coherent story turns every part of itself towards that purpose, communicating that purpose. Competence, in great part, is learning how to train every part to that purpose, making the story more coherent to its end.

Artistic sincerity is a particular purpose- the desire to create a specific instance of beauty, a vision of a story’s core which all the rest of the story pursues. If an author seeks this beauty (which is itself a proclamation of God and implies therefore a proclamation of His truth, lest the theologian be dismayed), his story will become authentic in proportion to his competence.

If he seeks another purpose- wish-fulfilment, money, or theological agenda (such as socialism or the rebuttal of transubstantiation)- he can achieve authenticity, but the story will no longer be primarily art and story. It will be a personal fantasy, a product, a tract (or propaganda). If the story is then presented as a work of art, as films and TV shows are usually presented in theory, the audience will perceive the discrepancy between the professed purpose- the story- and the lived purpose- the author’s actual goal. The result can be soulless stories like the recent Superman film (according to various reviews I’ve seen), which has the aura of ‘product’ and communicates, to many who went seeking a story, that the author merely wanted commercial success.¹

Many people don’t go to stories in order to experience stories, with a desire for true beauty and to participate in a secondary creation. They go for sensory thrills (lust and fear/ shock are two particularly obvious goals, here), for product and its nostalgia (esp. with franchises), for wish fulfillment. Low-grade bodice-ripper romance fiction is an old example of this (and obscene smut a modern iteration). The story isn’t the point for either side, and so the audience is fine with a relative-to-complete lack of artistic authenticity. The story is authentic to their purpose, and that’s all they want.

If we want good stories, even great ones, however, we must attend to ‘authenticity.’ Does a story cohere within itself?

The factual elements are a substrate of this, at once utterly essential and sometimes disposable (people can forgive blurred facts, on occasion even errors). A story should simulate physics; it should remember characters’ names and existences and characteristics; it should maintain object permanence, in commission and omission. Plot holes should be closed up. The people in the stories should cohere with their world, both in how they agree with and in how they contrast with their context- cultural, personal, and physical.

The stylistic coherence of a story is another element. What tone does it maintain? Does its style further its pursuit of purpose? The factual elements should be coordinated by and with the stylistic choices- tone, word choice, cadence, and other facts of prose, with formatting and length.

The characters and themes of the story, too, should be ordered to the great artistic purpose. Character should not be opportunities of self-indulgence; theology should not be a chance to preach. No, they should be reflections of God and His creation, real within their limits.

The essence of authenticity is that the whole maintains its level of reality across the whole, never breaking with itself or its highest end.

Conclusion

The problem of Hollywood, quite often, is this: the authors are not sincere artists, for all they produce purported ‘art.’ The authors are sincere, but they are sincere activists, sincere money-grubbers, sincere in their self-congratulatory fantasy (this last tends to show up whenever race or gender are made material to the discussion). Their stories, therefore, do not value artistic authenticity, the coherence of their secondary creations. Facts need not be consistent; style is merely the author’s whim; theme and character are malleable to the moment’s whim. All this rises from the true purpose of the story- ideological, pecuniary, or narcissistic. The result is a hollow, broken story, cracked in half a thousand ways but cracked the worst in being merely a masquerade of story itself.

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Footnote

1. I’ve seen numerous instances where people state a preference for Man of Steel over the more recent Superman film. While part of this may be a recency bias against the most recent disappointment, it seems clear to me that a part of it is that Man of Steel spoke with sincerity (if perhaps lacking authenticity within), and people appreciate that, even if they find the message so sincerely portrayed to be repulsive or inappropriate. ↩︎