Respect for the past

Photo by Jaredd Craig on Unsplash

“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a variation of that, and it’s true. The past includes a lot of things that look different to us today, and many of them are bad things.

But it’s not universally true. Newer isn’t always better. Capitalism developed in the 16th century, while Communism is a much newer artifact, coming out of the Victorian era.

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Now, tell me which one sucks?

Storytelling is another case where newer isn’t always better. Sometimes, a reinvention of a story lands well with the audience. A lot of times, it doesn’t.

Over at Hot Air a couple of days ago, Christian Toto talked a bit about that, and he offered up some thoughts as to why , in Hollywood, stories get remade for “the modern audience.”

Woke helps explain the race and gender swaps that come with the rebooting territory. Arrogance plays a hand here, too. The modern writer thinks they knows better than their predecessors. Sure, you created a story that captured the imagination of whole generations, but watch this!

That mindset also devalues the past and puts the present in sharp focus. We know better now on every level, so those old stories must be updated at all costs. Plus, the screenwriters may crave tales to call their own, but the bosses insist they build upon existing fan bases, not creative new ones from thin air.

They’ll do as told, but only on their own terms.

Among many mainstream storytellers, there’s this view that the noble virtues of past stories have no place anywhere near our tales of today. Instead, we should be creating stories with the nihilism of George R.R. Martin, even though the real nihilism is in the odds of him ever finishing the damn series.

Characters like Snow White have to be self-rescuing princesses. Star Trek Academy couldn’t be content with a Klingon interested in healing instead of killing, but they had to make him gay as well. Oh, and make the rest of the series suck. Let’s not forget that.

There are a plethora of examples, and to list them all would require me to get into bookwriting mode, which I simply have neither the time nor the energy to deal with right now.

Besides, we all know it. We’ve all seen them.

The past isn’t universally good. They didn’t get it right all of the time. The Birth of a Nation was a thing in film, after all.

Now we apparently have Lesbian Space Princess, which is terrible in its own way, from what I understand.

Anyway, my point is that the past isn’t universally good.

However, it’s not universally bad. It gave us tons of amazing works. Just today, my daughter, who has never been a big reader, finished Pride and Prejudice as part of our homeschool lit curriculum.

When I asked her if she would read it again, her response was, “Yeah, probably.”

She didn’t have to, and she knows it because she’s said as much in the past, but she did. She did because Jane Austin spoke to her in a way that other authors haven’t. That’s something from the past that is good just as it is.

Today, they’d do far worse than put zombies in the book. They’d decide that Elizabeth doesn’t want to be married, that marriage is terrible, and instead Elizabeth and Darcy decide to shack up so she can pursue her career as a butterfly documentarian or something.

Yes, it would suck, but someone out there with no respect for the property may well be getting offered a chance to write about that property. How do you think that would go?

I get that you don’t always understand why people did things a certain way, or why people feel the appeal of a character that makes no sense to you. If you’re a writer and you can’t comprehend that, either say you can’t do it or find a way to come to understand it, because the past is worthy of respect, too.

A time when stories were as much aspirational in as much as anything else, if not more, isn’t a terrible thing. The chivalric romances weren’t just about entertaining people at court. They were mechanisms used to teach, much like Christ’s parables or Aesop’s fables.

Not everyone needs to see themselves reflected on the screen, but that’s especially true when it comes to people’s lives and personalities. They want heroes and villains. They want conflict and victory. They want to feel good from time to time, damn it.

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And like it or not, the past recognized that fact.

We, however, have failed to preserve why that matters.

Is it any wonder that so many people think the world and humanity are awful and that the extinction of the species is a good thing? It’s insane, but we live in an insane world, and few enough people have anyone to look up to anymore. Real people are flawed, and the woke have taken our superheroes and ground them into dust.

They can’t have respect for the past.

They can’t because the past would make it impossible for anyone to respect the woke today.

Suprise! No one respects them now.