“The arts are in the dark, because nobody knows what it means to really live anymore.”
That was just one of the nuggets I gleaned from Robert McKee’s Story Seminar this past weekend in New York. Vilified by some, adored by others, McKee is considered a guru among Hollywood screenwriters, but the seminar had value for anyone in the communications world, anyone who needs to capture people’s attention with compelling narrative.
An avowed atheist and all-around curmudgeon, McKee is open with his disdain for organized religion (not “spirituality,” he assures us). However, what I found most interesting was his decidedly traditional view of storytelling and how it reflects the broken human experience. McKee has run from his Catholic upbringing, but he has been unsuccessful in divesting himself of all remnants of a biblical worldview.
His frustration with Hollywood movies is not one of style, but one of form: McKee’s complaint is that Western people can’t tell good stories anymore. Why? Because good stories are forged in the heat of adversity–something Westerners have essentially eliminated from their cushioned lives. Good stories, whether or not they end with the bad guy getting away, must be wrapped around a moral spine of the author’s belief in something. It is stories of sin, redemption, consequences, temptation and love, that people resonate with, McKee contends, not ambiguously artsy pieces, created by people who don’t really believe much of anything, who let their tales wander aimlessly toward unresolved endings.
McKee’s is an interesting insight that reveals the inconsistency of a world without God. The search of the soul for meaning, consistency and truth is a search for God Himself. As Augustine said, “We were made for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.”
