Narrative Summer

These days, stories are our only products. They are both packaging (say, the marketing narrative that accompanies the Air Jordans) and packaged (Air, a movie made about the product’s advent). Critic Parul Sehgal, in a recent New Yorker essay, writes that the presence of story can be most readily identified by “its insistent aura of piety”. Everyone is a storyteller, from journalists and musicians to chefs and politicians. Even law enforcement has a side to tell: Remember the Uvalde cops explaining why they didn’t enter the room?

Stories, so we are told, will save the day, whether they’re damage control or feel-good fables spun up by our chief storytellers in Hollywood. Now, amidst the ongoing screenwriters’ strike, Narrative Summer is upon us. There’s a discomfiting tension between the stories told on-screen and the stories that are plotted in boardrooms by entertainment executives. To borrow a plotline cliché, several major blockbusters have supposedly come to rescue the movie business in the nick of time.

Since June 2023, we have ended up with three unalike movies which have all been enrolled in the conveyance of a single story: that there is any coherent American cinema left to speak of. There is Sound of Freedom, an indie sex trafficking biopic of questionable accuracy and conservative origins which, after sitting on a shelf at distributor 20th Century Fox for several years, was released by an upstart called Angel Studios to $170 million in box office revenue and climbing; Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer; and, of course, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.

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