Sheesh. Now I’m going to risk signaling my virtue. Puh-leeze, that’s not what I mean b the following . . .
I really can’t remember when my wife and I started “abandoning” the movies. It was well before the Covid stuff. But the reasons are still there in memory, namely (a) the gratuitous sex and graphic violence, (b) the thinness of the plots and shallowness of the characters, (c) the repetitiveness of the narratives. We’d often leave the cinema marveling that we could have written such a screenplay ourselves! Why were we still living in obscurity??
We still have this attitude toward most of the offerings on the various video-streaming services. We avoid HBO entirely, because it insists on putting the most raunchy sex scenes in its offerings, which have absolutely no bearing on the plot. Even if they did, why must we dive into others’ sexual escapades in order to get to the next plot advancement?
It is still possible to find entertaining, even edifying cinematic/video entertainment. But, you have to search for it. You need to crowd-source recommendations. My brother, for example, touted Foyle’s War. We found it on Acorn TV via Amazon Prime Video. I agree with my brother. What a fantastic dramatic series!
So, what is a good alternative for visual entertainment? The answer is really very, very old - imaginative entertainment delivered by voice. The monuments of human literature were bardic - not only in the sense of their poetic features, but also in the simple fact that they were auditory. They were spoken aloud to an audience who listened, an audience which participated in the story by contributing their own imaginative responses to what they were listening to as the narrator delivered his tale.
The narrator, of course, was often mother. Or grandmother. But if father or grandfather got into the act - well a whole 'nuther dimension of imagination might be evoked in the listener.
I’m not claiming that today’s narrators need spin the tales out of their own heads. All they need to is learn to read out loud in a way that is free of ticks, monotones, and verbal flaws. It’s worth the effort.
And there is a crowd of fantastic story tellers out there - both modern and ancient. But, I’ll stop here to avoid topic drift.