When Entertainment Is Formulaic
John Ink2Quill
www.ink2quill.com

What do you do about an entertainment industry that has calcified, some say aged even? We’ve seen this happen in other big entertainment countries like with Bollywood, Nigerwood and many others. It is even common and normal to have some aging, up to a point. There is room for the trite and predictable in entertainment. Take the fairy tale for example. This is an entertainment genre that will never go out of still and suits well younger audiences.

But what happens when a majority of what Hollywood, for example, puts out is predictable? What are the reasons for this and is it acceptable? Well, the obvious answer to this is an unequivocal – no. When the artistic process has been completely suppressed and ideas are censored, endings are too contrived the artform itself goes through a death process. People will say that everything dies, even artforms, but the truth is that the artform in the case of high censorship is not dying per se but being suffocated. In the case of Hollywood we have reached a stage of extreme censorship. That is to say, characters nowadays have to be a specific gender, have a specific message, the story has to develop in a certain way (in many cases but not all). This removes the artistic process from entertainment.

Are there venues for those that want to create artistic things? There are but they struggle finding profit and a large enough audience even though there are many people looking for such things. That is why I have high hopes for a further development of the internet into a ‘place’ where visiting certain sites would be like visiting a different country. Developing the internet into a kind of new world like in the scifi masterpiece “Neuromancer”. No, granted, the risk of crime and organized crime could be high and I haven’t given the dangers of such a project much thought. But the benefits could be pretty amazing. Imagine someone who is stuck in bed or in a wheelchair to suddenly have a better working body in a world. That sounds exciting to me.

What does this have to do with a dying entertainment industry? Well, creating a place where people can create with little or no censorship would be a big boost to big ideas, new ideas, some even heretical ideas. And I do believe that that is exactly what Hollywood needs now.

So, the same way artforms have come and gone throughout the ages the art of storytelling will never go away. We remember music like jazz, folk, classical etc. that have come and gone from the spotlight but never completely left our culture. Pockets of places remain where you can still here the greatest songs and pieces of music from the past. With this new technology the music from the past would have its own world, address, place to find it just like the newer, more experimental forms would. I’m only seeing the positive now and it does seem that this new internet would be the perfect tool to revitalize a dying Hollywood.

John Ink2Quill

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