Where is Storytelling Going?
There’s a new podcast episode with Nic Pizzolatto, the creator of “True Detective,” that covers a lot about the writing process, the so-called Golden Age of Television, and noir. Your ability to stick around for the whole two hours will probably hinge on your affinity for masculine navel-gazing, but there was one segment in particular that caught my ear—when Pizzolatto goes big with a theory about how we absorb art. I’m block-quoting for your convenience:
“What I think happens is that forms and mediums are replaced in the hierarchy of how people experience their narratives. I hope movies come back, and I love going to the movie theatre, and I love cinema of all kinds, but when you look at what the biggest audiences were, it was film and television that dominated the 20th century; those are the 20th century’s art forms.
“I think what often happens is a medium comes along and then, by arriving, it retroactively legitimizes the medium that was popular before it. So when Shakespeare was writing his plays, those plays were for the plebs, the commoners; the intelligent aristocrats, they read poetry and Greek and Latin. And then when we started serializing novels in periodicals, like Dickens and Dumas, well, those were for the hoi polloi and the plebeians—and what intelligent people did was they went and saw Shakespeare. And then cinema comes along and then it’s, ‘Oh, well, the cinema is for dumb-dumbs. Really smart people read novels.’ And then television came along and television was for dumb-dumbs and the really smart people they went to the cinema and the theater and read novels.
“And then the internet comes along and suddenly television is what the smart people are doing. The smart people watch television: “Didn’t you watch ‘The Wire’ and ‘Deadwood’? That’s the modern ‘War and Peace,’ you know.” These things have a way of just replacing each other and also legitimizing whatever the form was before them.”
(Please, by all means, insert your own ‘time is a flat circle’ joke here. I guarantee your efforts will be better than mine.)
He’s right about the Tolstoy-television analogy, by the by. Whenever someone says they’ve never read “War and Peace” because the length is intimidating, I’ve always insisted it’s entertaining as hell, virtually a soap opera with some beautifully weirdo philosophy mixed in. I think I’ve convinced exactly zero people to pick it up.
Stepping back, if we buy into Pizzolatto’s argument about poetry -> plays -> novels -> movies -> TV, with attendant cycles of disrepute and legitimacy, it’s worth asking: what’s coming next, especially given the growing buzz that “prestige” television has begun to eat its own tail? And that’s where I’m a bit stuck.
You could make an argument that video games are the ascendant art form in this context, that auteurs like Hideo Kojima and Neil Druckmann are pushing the limits of interactive narration into new and fascinating directions. There are standout examples like “The Last of Us” and its sequel, which have more moral ambivalence and emotional firepower than most stories in other mediums. Sure, much of the playable dreck you download to your mobile device isn’t worth your time—but you could say that about plenty of movies and TV shows and novels, as well. Given the number of gamers worldwide, the form is clearly dominant—it just needs to make more inroads with what Pizzolatto called “the intelligent aristocrats.” Quick, spin up more university courses and Atlantic thinkpieces on how “Halo” is the modern Odyssean epic!
There’s a darker alternative, as well: the short videos that inundate us daily, the TikTok clips and Instagram reels, are becoming the dominant artistic medium of the century. That’s terrifying, if only because it means that, over the course of 2,000 years, we’ve gone from Livy to Shakespeare to Tolstoy to Scorsese to… some random dude on the internet smashing himself in the face with a hammer for the clicks. Quite an implosion in the last decade, in other words. And while social-media advocates like to opine that gifted creators can pack a lot of information into just a few seconds, you can’t make the argument (with a straight face, at least) that “clips” carry the thematic or storytelling weight of a 400-page novel or three-hour movie.
Or maybe the next art form hasn’t arrived yet, and we’re in the liminal space between cultural eras. If you’d approached a peasant in central London circa 1600 and told them, “I know you love plays, but serialized novels are really going to crush everything as the medium for common conversation, and you don’t even know it yet,” they’d probably reply: “Who is’t art thee and wherefore art thee dressed so strangely? Receiveth out of mine own visage!” Then they’d try to burn you as a witch.
But seriously, none of us know where this is going—and given the tide of AI slop that’s swamping everything, we can only hope there’s more of a premium placed on things that’re genuinely human-created, whether that’s film or poetry or anything else artistic.
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Nick Kolakowski is the author of several crime novels, including “Where the Bones Lie”, “Payback is Forever”, „Maxine Unleashes Doomsday“ and „Boise Longpig Hunting Club“ as well as the Love & Bullets trilogy of novellas. His work has been nominated for the Anthony and Derringer awards, and his short story “Scorpions” appeared in The Best Mystery and Suspense 2024. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including Mystery Weekly, Shotgun Honey, Rock and a Hard Place Press, and more.
His „Payback is Forever“ (Shotgun Honey 2022) is inspired clearly by the novels of Richard Stark. Our review here (in German). – See also his Hell of a Mess. A Love & Bullets Hookup.
Nick Kolakowski, geboren 1980, aufgewachsen in Washington. D.C., hat Geschichte in Chicago studiert. Er schreibt Romane, Kurzgeschichten, Lyrik und Essays, viele davon über Crime Fiction und verwandte Themen. Seine Texte erscheinen u. a. in der Washington Post, in Shotgun Honey, North American Review, The Evergreen Review, Rust & Months. Kolakowski lebt in New York City. Eine Besprechung des von Parker inspirierten „Payback is Forever“ in unseren Bloody Chops.
Bei Suhrkamp auf Deutsch: Love & Bullets.
His essays with us.
His website nickkolakowski.com
His column „Smoking Gun“ with us:
‘Salem’s Lot’ and the Horror of a Stephen King Adaptation
„Rebel Ridge“: Calmly Burn the Whole Thing Down
‘Monsieur Spade’ and the Faustian Bargain
John Woo is Remaking ‘The Killer.’ But Why?
The Newest ‘Ripley’ Series is Stunning and Flawed
‘Sugar’: Not the Neo-Noir Revival We Need
Moral Redemption in Noir: Is It Possible?
What Makes Jack Reacher Tick?
‘True Detective: Night Country’ Tries to Make the Familiar into Something New
Is David Fincher’s ‘The Killer’ a Comedy?
Rewatching ‘Drive’: Gosling as Noir’s Apex Predator
Elmore Leonard – City Primeval
Cormac McCarthy Used Crime Fiction’s Tropes to Make Masterpieces
Parker: Donald Westlake’s One Amazing Trick
Cosby, Winslow, Pruitt: Three Heavy-Hitting Thillers for Summer
Weed-Based Crime Thrillers are Going Up in Smoke
‘The Last of Us’: Crime in the Post-Apocalypse
What Made “Glass Onion” and “Knives Out” So Popular?
Jordan Harper’s One-Two Punch of Crime Fiction Deserves a Wide Audience
‘True Detective’ Season 2: Was It Better Than We All Thought?
From ‘Touch of Evil’ to ‘True Detective,’ Long Shots are Crime Films’ Secret Weapon
Michael Mann, again: What Michael Mann Teaches Us About Enduring Crime Fiction
„Heat 2“ – How Do You Craft a Sequel to a Masterpiece?
4 Ways Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” Novel Stands Out From the Film.
On „Heat“: Manhunter Takes Down Thief: How Michael Mann’s Early Career Led to ‘Heat’
The Most Honest Nihilism – on „The Way of the Gun“
No, Time to Die – The latest James Bond movie digs into the fatalism at the iconic spy’s core.
Cormac McCarthy’s Overlooked Masterpiece? – „The Councelor“
„Nightmare Alley“ – How Guillermo del Toro’s Film Alters a Masterpiece Noir Novel
David Cronenberg – The Carnal Crime of “A History of Violence” and “Eastern Promises”
With Parker, Donald E. Westlake Pulled Off Crime Fiction’s Most Spectacular Magic Trick
Guy Ritchie’s Return to Crime Films is Worth Watching
(29) Alex Garland’s ‘Civil War’: Hint of Things to Come?
(30) David Lynch and the Beautiful Weirdness
(31) ‘Where the Bones Lie’ and the Engine of California Noir
(32) “Den of Thieves 2”: Stealing from the Best
(33) White Lotus and the Gentle Art of Hating Your Protagonists
(34) Neal Stephenson
