Story Stew

The world has fallen on hard times.  Perhaps this is where the obsession with fairy tales comes from.  And it isn't just me.  So many books and movies that are coming out now find themselves set in those timeless kingdoms, those places we recognize although they have never been real.  For awhile, back when I was in high school, the tendency seemed to be fleshing out the old narratives with details, aka Ever After and the Gregory Maguire books, making characters that had once been simply good or bad more complex, with more needs, and history, and secrets.  The fairy godmother was REALLY Leonardo DaVinci.  The Wicked Witch of West simply had a skin condition...
But I see now that films, books, art, and even fashion are reaching back into that primal stew where stories come from, and thus so many things have become deliciously strange, dark, image oriented instead of dialogue driven, focused on feelings and not facts.  As much as I love this, I do find it is a little discomforting to see these things, stories that don't follow a narrative too closely, that seem more like dreams, that I understand without being able to explain why.  Sometimes I understand why a character is about to do something cruel, or crazy, or self-destructive without needing a character map or a line of weak dialogue.  Archetypes are humming and glowing on the screen and off the page, with the life they've had since we sat down around the fire to comfort and teach each other with stories, and it seems we have returned to a place where we trust our own understanding rather than asking for explanations.  No need for exposition about the politics or economy of this particular long ago and far away.  We are just peaking in, as viewers, as children wanting to be told a story, not as grown-ups who want to know why someone is being a bad parent, or monarch, or crone in the woods. Perhaps when things get tough, we need our narratives to be simpler, our monsters to be uglier, our solutions more definite and final. 
Or maybe we are just in a place where our own needs are more childlike, as the world around us becomes less certain, a place where everything seems new, and things we thought we knew have to be figured out again, and on our own this time.  Maybe all the help and advice that was coming from the system that sustains us seems to be less dependable now.  Without someone telling us how to be in the world, without any definite path to success, we have to turn back to our own insides for answers.  What makes me successful?  What makes me good?  What is my work in this world? 

Maybe the bum on the street is starting to look less like a burnout, and more like his previous incarnation as the hermit, the wise man.  Maybe it isn't that he doesn't understand us.  Maybe it is that we've forgotten that we understand him.