This is the era of splendid images. Literature is in decline and it seems that visual media has entered a golden age. However, it is interesting to note that film companies around the world, including those in Hollywood, are all suffering from a ‘story famine.’ In this magnificent era of story inflation, when people around the globe are gorging themselves on a glut of stories, some may wonder, “What story famine?” There are hundreds of cable channels on TV; global streaming services like Netflix, Disney, and HBO are springing up everywhere; and thousands of movie theaters are still in operation worldwide. On top of that, billions of consumers are ready to open their wallets wide for great TV dramas or films. The problem is that while the demand for more visual content is growing and the number of streaming channels has exploded, it has become harder and harder to find a captivating story that can be told through the visual medium with huge production costs. Whenever I meet film producers, the one thing they all say without fail is, “It’s so hard to find a good story to make into a film these days.” Which is why film studios everywhere are thumbing their noses at their audiences, churning out hundreds of movies a year by endlessly pulling out old blockbusters from their file cabinets to remake, rehashing the same stories in the form of sequels, and pouring astronomical production costs into stories so old and worn that anyone can plainly see how they will play out within the first five minutes. But what’s even funnier is that these movies we find so absurd are actually the best stories that film producers can find, carefully handpicked out of the tens of thousands of screenplays that make their way around the global film market every year.

        Robert McKee, renowned for his Story Seminar, declared in his book Story that the art of the story has steadily been on the decline in the twenty-first century.

        The power of storytelling is in decay, he argues, and today’s writers are unable to create stories with the same overwhelming force and beauty as writers of the previous generation. They instead scramble to fill the hollow shells of empty stories with flashy action, histrionic, lewd and violent performances, and all sorts of decorative shots packed with camera techniques.

        Is McKee’s claim too extreme? Well, even in this era of story inflation, it has become increasingly rare to see films like Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, and Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven—films whose stories confront the deep truths of dreamers and are told without any trickery. Filling that void now are these rowdy, two-hour films in which speeding cars smash into each other, machine guns spray bullets, and bombs explode to reduce city buildings to rubble—all for no apparent reason.

        Compared to previous generations of writers whose story consumption was limited to household appliances such as radios and black-and-white TVs, we are a generation that grew up consuming an unprecedented number of movies and dramas. We are also a generation that still craves and consumes a wide array of genres, as well as a generation that has been blessed and baptized with the sheer imaginative power of  writers and directors of earlier generations. But even as we devour stories in such huge quantities, we aren’t creating stories with the same overwhelming impact and beauty as writers of the past. This goes for films and novels alike. Moreover, this isn’t a phenomenon restricted to any one country—it’s a global trend. Advancements in scientific technology have fueled the development of media technology, which in turn has improved film production environments and led to a dramatic increase in the capital invested in filmmaking. However, the stories created by this generation are only stylish and ornate on the surface, flashy casings that are devoid of substance. That is why we feel a sense of emptiness as we consume all these countless stories. We’re not producing anything that comes close to the imaginative power needed to meet these demands in terms of quality or quantity. We’re living in an era that suggests we ought to have imagination in abundance, yet strangely enough, we’re instead experiencing its dearth. We’re like people on a lake dying of thirst.

        What exactly is the problem? There are probably many complicated reasons at play here. But if I were to choose the most apparent cause for this trend, it would be that people of this day and age live in an environment that is quite good in terms of consuming imagination but incredibly bad at nurturing it.

        As with everything in the natural world, a system must renew itself in cycles in order to be sustainable. In a natural ecosystem, plants are eaten by herbivores, herbivores are eaten by carnivores, the carcasses of carnivores are eaten by microorganisms, and those microorganisms become nutrients in the soil, allowing plants to grow. In the same way, the students who consume education grow up to become the teachers who produce education. In the case of publishing, the readers who consume books naturally cultivate both the imagination and language proficiency they need to ultimately become the writers, translators, and editors who produce future books. But while it is possible to maintain a healthy cycle that turns book-consumer readers into book-producer writers in the publishing world, there is an ironic mechanism in place in the film industry that makes it hard for the viewers who consume movies to become the directors who produce them. This is because, in contrast to the act of reading, which naturally fosters the imaginative muscle, watching movies is a passive, flaccid way to consume the imaginations of others without fostering an imagination of one’s own.

        As we all know, reading books is like making movies in your mind. A reader opens a book and reads the letters within. Letters are an effective tool for expressing the most information in the smallest amount of physical space, but they are very uncompromising. The reader must, without the support of any other visual or auditory aids, read one exacting word or sentence of the text at a time and start the imagination process within their mind—just as a film director creates images and landscapes or casts all the actors for the lead and supporting roles (as well as the extras), adding dialogue and music, and delicately arranging the space of the story in each scene. That is, reading is uncomfortable and arduous work that requires the reader to focus their imagination at every moment. As a person reads, they become both a writer and director. They become the lead actor playing their role. They become their own sound director and add in the dialogue and the music. They become a lighting director and modulate the story’s color and tone. They become a stage director and complete the mise-en-scène. Reading fiction is an art form that cannot be enjoyed if the reader cannot, from beginning to end, call upon their own imagination to internally visualize every last detail from the main character down to the arrangement of the forks and knives on the dining table. Moreover, with fiction, each reader creates a different version of the film in their heads. The cast will differ according to each reader, as will the stage design and the score, the movie’s tone and color. And so the images that readers mentally envision are singular and distinct. Thus, every reader in the world is someone who uses this uncompromising and vague material called language that the writer has left for them to produce, direct, and act in, allowing them to appreciate their own unique version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, which is to say that each of these versions is the only one of its kind in the universe. Unlike these film production environments with their astronomical production costs and enormous number of crew and equipment, this unique film born inside the reader’s mind relies entirely on one’s own incredible imagination and therefore doesn’t cost a thing to produce aside from some donuts and coffee. Inevitably, a portion of these readers who read these books and create these countless movies in their heads will go on to become writers.

        However, the audience that consumes movies has no need for imagination, brainpower, or a keen sensitivity. This is because the incredible, composite art form that is film shows us all the characters and landscapes we have to imagine outright through overwhelming visuals and sound, leaving us with nothing more to do than sit back in our armchairs and relax. Compared to reading, watching movies is so ridiculously easy that the viewer never flexes their imaginative muscles. Even worse, while each reader imagines their own distinct characters and backdrops, each viewer of a film sees the same images. Oversaturated, identical images can be our best friends when creating clichéd works and our worst enemies when they impede the growth of our individual imaginations. And we are already exposed to tons of identical imagery compared to previous generations. We lack the muscle needed to imagine and reconstruct the world. This is the fundamental problem that makes it difficult for film consumers to become film producers.

        According to neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, the brain did not evolve to think but was instead made to effectively manage the body’s stores of energy through a process called allostasis. The same way we fear bankruptcy due to unnecessary daily spending, the brain also extremely dislikes when the body expends unnecessary energy. It hinders survival. From this perspective, reading requires a lot of energy and puts tremendous strain on the brain. As mentioned, the sheer number of elements a reader has to imagine for themselves as they read novels is huge. On the other hand, moviegoers are incredibly efficient with their energy. They can simply sit back and watch. They don’t need to exert themselves to generate images; there’s no need to establish the actors and no need to insert the sound. Which is why, according to the dynamic energy budget theory, humans instinctively prefer watching movies to reading books.

        So what sort of future will this energy-efficient medium usher in for humanity? In the natural world, there is a highly energy-efficient creature called the sea pineapple. When sea pineapples reach their larval stage, they lead an extremely active life, using their brains and nervous systems to swim around in search of food and a good habitat. However, once they find a suitable environment to settle in, such as on rocks or among seagrass, the sea pineapples use their suckers to embed themselves on a surface and stop moving, living the rest of their lives in that spot, filtering and eating the food that floats by. And then they eat their own brains because, by then, the brain is no longer of any use to them—it’s just an organ that wastes a lot of energy.

        All living things are conservative beings. We never do anything that requires us to use more energy unless we absolutely have to. Doing so would be extremely dangerous for our survival. Reading is an activity that cannot function without the power of the reader’s imagination, while movies are an energy-efficient medium that can be enjoyed easily without having to force the brain to imagine a single thing. Does anyone really need to read energy-inefficient books in this era of such captivating visual media? My answer to this question is, “Yes.” It’s like asking all of humankind, “Would you rather live as a well-fed pig? Or a hungry Socrates?”

        Currently, the largest industry on the planet is the story industry. This story industry—extensively linked to the publishing, film, drama, game, animation, advertising, broadcasting, fashion, character, and many other industries—is much larger than the semiconductor industry and even larger than the defense and energy industries. It is an industry based on visual media and is set to grow even more in the future. However, as mentioned, in order for a system to be sustainable, it must be cyclical—for visual media to remain in its current golden age, it must be continuously supplied with fresh imaginative power.

        I believe that literature is at the center of this vast story industry. And I believe that literature should be much more classically literary in form as opposed to being well suited to screenplay adaptations for movies or TV dramas. If some film director or producer reads a novel and thinks, “Hm, this would make a good movie,” they will fail because they clearly know nothing about novels or movies. That is not the role of fiction. If you’re looking for a textual source that can be used as a movie, you need to find a good screenplay rather than leaf through a novel. The novel doesn’t aim to pinpoint the best, definitive image out there, but to disperse itself and produce an infinite number of images in the minds of that one story’s readers. In contrast, a movie brings together directors, writers, actors, producers, cinematographers, and others to discuss, debate, and coordinate in order to create a unified body of work. In other words, in this enormous story industry, literature is tasked with differentiation, while visual media is tasked with integration. Literature and video neither assume a confrontational form in relation to each other nor are they absorbed into each other to become one and the same thing. Rather, they push and pull at each other, interacting in their own ways.

        It is the power of imagination that has placed humankind in a special and unique position relative to other animals in the natural world. Imagination is not delusion, nor is it fantasy. It is thorough, intricate engineering that turns dreams into reality. Humanity has come this far with the power of the imagination, and we will reach the future we dream of on the strength of it. If we were to lose the power to imagine and reconstruct the world, we would begin to miss out on certain truths of life and fall apart from within. It is time, then, to pose a serious question about what we are losing while we are so dazzled by the flashy images of the twenty-first century.

        “How will we recover our lost imaginations?”

Translated by Paige Aniyah Morris

Kim Un-su won the Dong-A Ilbo New Writer’s Award in 2003 with his novella Breaking Up with Friday. His first novel Cabinet won the Munhakdongne Writer’s Award in 2006, and his 2010 novel The Plotters was selected by TIME magazine as one of the 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time. His 2016 novel Hot Blood was made into a feature-length film, and a television series based on The Plotters is currently in production at Universal Studios. Kim’s works have been translated and published in thirty countries.