In our day, entertainment has lost its soul.
Okay, so that statement isn’t exactly fair. It’s a sweeping generalization, and there are definitely examples out there that are full of soul. This article, however, will not really deal with those examples except as a contrast to the soulless entertainment so prevalent in our day.
To understand what I’m getting at here, we’ll first have to examine what it means (in the context of this article) to lose one’s soul.
Definition of Soullessness
Much of what we learn and know in life is through reason. We see a problem, and we think through it with reason. We want to know how something works, so we take it apart, examine its constituent components, and reason out how they interact to make the thing go. We have questions about the universe, and we conduct experiments to determine what is legitimate and what is pure hogwash.
In the end, however, there are plenty of things that are more felt than thought.
Let’s take love, for instance. Through carefully examining the constituent parts of emotion—hormones, stimuli, evolution, etc.—we have a very scientific explanation for what produces the feelings of love we have for one another (or any emotion really). There’s plenty of hard evidence to support this.
The problems come when you say that’s all love is. You assert that there’s nothing more to it than a physiological response to this or that stimulus. It begins and ends with the observable. For whatever reason (cue eye-roll here), people don’t like this, and I would argue that it’s not merely because we’ve romanticized the idea of love and that our response is purely psychological. Rather, the fact that we detest such a data-driven explanation is because it has ignored the unseen-but-felt aspect of love.
It feels far better to say that pure love in its highest form is an expression of the soul. On a primal level, that expression is something we feel in song, poetry, and other forms of art to which the artist has given a portion of themselves. Without this unexplainable spiritual aspect of love, the scientific explanation becomes cold and empty—lifeless, without a soul.
To have no soul means it has nothing human in it. The scientific explanation of love uses data, but no heart. Entertainment today often has plenty of stuff that should work logically, but it lacks any soulful passion from its creators.
Soulless Entertainment
So, now that we’ve discussed what I mean when I say that entertainment has lost its soul, let’s look at how this has happened. It all begins with the fact that big names in the entertainment industry (and plenty of small names as well) have begun trying to figure out art by picking apart its constituent components and examining them to see how everything works. This is understandable, to a degree—they want to be successful, so they look at what art has done in the past to appeal to large audiences. It also isn’t new. Take any college level literature or art class, and you’ll see that the act of picking apart creative work has long been a favorite pastime of scholars, philosophers, and professors.
As old or understandable as it may be, there is a profound risk involved in examining art in this way. You may try to reduce it to those observable constituent parts and nothing else. Sure, you could make a thrilling video game or write a bestselling novel or create a blockbuster movie, but in the end, if all you have done is follow a formula, you have not created art. It is merely glorified manufacturing.
Now, that’s not to say that you did anything wrong. You could do everything right and still have not created art. True art requires the soul, and that will shine through—often in spite of having broken a few “rules,” even.
That’s not to say there’s no use for training or practice or theory. They can certainly improve art and make it more pleasant to behold. But they are not the soul of it. The soul of art is the soul of the artist given to his or her creations, and people can sense when you’ve given it your soul or not.
Why Does It Matter?
But you may ask yourself, “Why does it matter?” It’s a legitimate question. We see entertainers following formulas, whether that be the “awesome per second” rule in game design or the structure of a story in novel writing or rules of aesthetics in cinematography, and they are frequently very successful. They create heartless spectacles, not art, and those spectacles are actually quite entertaining.
Art may not make you rich, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. There is more to life than how much you earn or how comfortable your living situation is or how often you can afford to eat at fancy restaurants. Plenty of people manage to be happy being poor, while there are many wealthy folks who are absolutely miserable.
One of my favorite quotes of all time is, “I once met someone who was so poor that all he had was money.” Monetary success is no determiner of the value of life. By extension, it doesn’t really determine the value of art either.
The value of art is in sharing bits of your soul with others. Think of the last time you read a story you were sorry ended. Think of the last movie you watched where you walked out of the theater with an inexplicable sense of joy. Think of that one song that means everything to you, that one that stirs your heart or threatens to evoke tears whenever you hear it. Think of sunsets or the pleasant singing of birds in spring or the subtle play of summer breezes through your hair or the adventurous rush of autumn winds as they stir many-colored leaves into cyclones. Think of that one time that one writer suddenly got lyrical at the end of a blog post.
That is the soul of art, and it makes life well worth living.
What are your thoughts? Do you agree? Disagree? Think I’m full of crap? Let me know in the comments! Also please like and share this and spread the madness joy. All proceeds go toward correctional facilities for artless pop singers. Really.