Blog/2026-07-10/It's not that deep

Teenagers have always been reflexively "too cool to care". But now, contemporary media also adopts this reflexive detachment to its own detriment. When Joss Whedon popularized the "moment of gravitas; silent beat; ironic comment" technique, it was perhaps novel, but now it's everywhere and often inappropriately so.

Julie and I put on the live-action version of Avatar: The Last Airbender and one scene in particular stuck out to me for its incongruity - though much of the show is written in this "I'm ironic and not serious" style. One of the scenes has an ostensible true believer in an Earth-element spirit talking to a water-element caster. She's praying to this spirit in its visible form of a particular flower and she says "I'm talking to a flower. Is that weird?". This anxious uncertainty of the acceptability of one's true religious belief is a characteristic of post-religious Western countries. It doesn't make sense in a world where these spirits do canonically exist and magic is commonplace. It's as incongruous as the Pope going "O Father in Heaven! I know you're omnipresent but hopefully you're close enough to a speaker to hear (nervous giggle)".

Now, obviously there are big productions that do take things seriously: Dune or Oppenheimer. The latter particularly committed to its dramatic register entirely, as did Maverick to its boys-and-planes style, and though Dune imports contemporary gender issues in an anachronistic way it still believes in its premise. What seems to play the differentiating role between the ones that are earnest and the ones that aren't is that the latter have characters that are constantly aware that they're performing on a stage: Amita is not asking Katara if it's weird she's talking to a flower; she's telling the audience that she's doing a thing that would be weird in their context.

Of course the moderating arguments are that there are now vastly more shows and movies than there were before and so we should expect median quality to dip; and I am selecting from the low-end of the quality distribution here after all. And it could just as well be that I'm aging out of the audience for many of these things. Or that I'm making a mistake by watching a remake of a thing meant for children that's written relatably to today's children.

These things might all be true, but I still can't shake the feeling that the lack of earnest treatment of stories will make our storytelling tradition much weaker - and that would be a loss for the way we pass narratives onwards to successive generations.