Whitestone Motion Pictures

bad candy

10:07AM by Brandon McCormick  |  Cetagories: Blogs and Thoughts

“But it tastes good.”

 
That’s a quote from the back of my brain when standing in line at the supermarket, not a hunger pang in my entire body, looking longingly at the carnival of candy before me. The concept that they’re made to be eaten and ingested are the bare requirements to call these little packaged goods ‘food’. But it’s not food, it’s bad candy.

But it tastes good.

And that’s about it. Despite what the advertisements tell you, you can’t live off it. It puts nothing good into your body, and eat enough of it, and you get fat. Plain and simple. These rules apply in other places as well.

You don’t have to look very far to find junk food splattered all over the place. We call it entertainment, there are other names for it, but this is polite conversation.

These pieces of pedestrian entertainment are bad candy because they prey on what is dishonest, wrong and ugly. People delve into reality shows to find the worst in people, and consume it until their bloated. It is much easier to play to what enrages us or disgusts us than it is to inspire someone, or make someone fall in love. We’ve become lazy. Story has almost been all but forgotten from the face of ‘entertainment’. Bad candy puts nothing good into the world, and nothing good comes from it.

And don’t misunderstand ‘good’ with ‘happy’, all you need to to is read Poe and see a master at work to see what a good story can be. From a time when stories were weaved, not assembly lined. You’ll not find insights into the world around us in TMZ or Entertainment Weekly. You wont see them on reality television or Michael Bay movies. Yeah, that’s right, I went there.

To understand what went wrong, we must first understand the way it’s supposed to be. The power of story is to teach us and to push us. Make us ask the difficult questions in life and show us how to live our lives. To inspire us to change the world around us and to do the right thing, to love and be loved. To explore the things that frighten us, and to walk through the mysteries of our own heart. But now, all we see is how horrible we can be to each other, how exploitive and hateful. It’s more than mere catharsis, but a putrid factory cranking out nothing more than pure drivel. An entire generation growing up on nothing but bad candy. Then everyone throws their hands up in the air and wonders what’s wrong with the world today. A society can always be defined by the stories they tell.

The remedy? Creating something new and telling a new story. This is the call to the artist, the mantel of the storytellers. We have an opportunity to tell the story of what is true, what is good and what is beautiful. These aren’t merely subjective qualities that can be scrutinized out of anything, these are absolute to the artist’s soul.

The artist that sits back only to complain is just as much part of the problem. Get up and create something. Don’t take offense, become the offense. This generation’s story has been lost, it’s been edited for content and formatted to fit your screen. It’s the sacred task of the artist to find a new story, one that becomes our own and that we can pass on to our children and children’s children.

 
The thoughts and opinions DO necessarily represent those of Whitestone Motion Pictures Inc. Have a problem with that or an encouraging thought, drop it in the comments.