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To get the measure of the gap between the preponderant narrative approaches of the last three decades, picture the difference between Nolan’s Batman trilogy and the work of Quentin Tarantino, probably the totemic oeuvre of 1990s filmmaking. There is a peppering of motivation in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, but these movies are marked out by their noisy immediacy, their commitment to what is happening – a hold-up in a diner, an ear-slicing, John Travolta’s opiated shuffling in a 1950s-themed cocktail bar – rather than to why things are taking place. These are flat texts that open out onto no expanded universe other than that of the world of cinema itself, a mass-cultural antirealism. Traumatic motivation is only ever played sardonically, as in the case of Bruce Willis’ vaguely guilty boxer Butch: there is no origin story, nor is there any requirement for one. Elongated passages of prefatory storytelling like Bruce Wayne’s search for redemption and revenge in a Himalayan school for ninjas in Batman Begins are effectively unthinkable in the narrative economy of the 1990s. 

Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel Trainspotting is another instructive test case. Renton is an addict, Begbie is a psycho: there are infrequent suggestions as to why (the novel’s title derives from a passage in which Begbie runs into his down-and-out father in a long-derelict railway station), but for the most part the reader is required to sit patiently with the narrative’s episodic present. In 2012, contrastingly, Welsh published Skagboys, an overlong prequel rooted in material that had been wisely excised from Trainspotting. Skagboys offered over 400 pages of context for its chronological successor, but, for those familiar with Trainspotting, it was as likely to supplant the immediacy of the original novel as to supplement it. 

Three compatible explanations for the backstory era present themselves. The first is commercial motivation: prequels provide a fairly dependable method of extracting money from an apparently overworked franchise, of course, but reboots, origin stories and sundry other expansions of a narrative universe are also ways in which studios and publishers can strengthen their hold on a character, particularly one over whom no real legal copyright can be asserted. Ridley Scott’s 2010 Robin Hood, for example, attempted to serve up a toughened, paysan Robin, who is forced into outlawdom by his somewhat inadvertent impersonation of a nobleman. It is a film absent of the camp carnival of 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, with a script that thinks it’s doing its audience a favour by rubbing their noses in the dungy reality of the Middle Ages. Simultaneously, though, this return to origins is a way of asserting legitimate ownership over the legendarium in question. If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know how gratuitously it sets the viewer up for a sequel which has, fortunately, never materialised. 

The second explanation is ideological, insofar as it documents the way in which a hegemonic political agenda filters into mass culture. Traumatised heroes – Christian Bale’s Batman, Craig’s Bond, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine – are automatically excused their subsequent actions. If Bond crosses a line in an interrogation, if Batman causes enormous amounts of collateral damage in his pursuit of Bane or the Joker, it is because they came to the situation painfully, always already wronged and therefore always already in the right. Their acts come about not through volition but through compulsion and, in fact, they would much rather not have to employ violence. Trauma serves as a form of capital that can purchase the use of exceptional violence; there is nothing accidental in how the prevalence of this trope surged after 9/11, a period in which the United States (and the United Kingdom in turn) presented adventurist wars in the Middle East as the obvious consequence of their own wronging.

Brooke-Rose claimed of Tolkien’s exhaustive world building that its intention was to be “as plausible as possible within the implausible”: in other words, its scrupulousness betrays an anxiety about how just much imaginative force fiction actually has. The more work that is put into arresting disbelief at the level of fine detail, the less confident a narrative might appear to us. This is certainly the case for much contemporary world-building in sci-fi and fantasy, but it also holds true for the origin stories and reboots that signpost their own realism through the appeal to misery: returning to Casino Royale or Batman Begins 15 or so years after their respective releases, one might well perceive the unflinching stances of their contextualising moves, attributes they received significant praise for at the time, as unjust and ineffective efforts to browbeat an audience into belief. When it is most effective at soliciting our investment, narrative leans neither too hard on extensiveness – as an exasperated William Gibson once said of Neuromancer’s characters, “I don’t know what they eat […] A lot of krill and shit” – nor on the cheap disenchantments of grittiness.

But if we’re now in a position where context is on the limit of becoming passé once more, what will emerge to replace it? Are dominant narrative forms now set to pendulate between the Nolanesque why-is? and the Tarantinoesque because-it-is indefinitely? It is a little glib to note as much, but the world of the last ten years seems to have been increasingly constituted of ruptures, events and narratives that emerge in quick and unlikely ways, then burgeon and escalate at astonishing pace (one thinks, of course, of the pandemic, but also of Californian wildfires, the brief flourishing of ISIS, or the meme-driven stock-exchange panic earlier this year). There is an intensity to all of this stuff that at once demands more seriousness than the because-it-is mode can offer and shrugs off the pieties of contextualising why-is? foregrounds. It is coherent in so far as all of these phenomena seem related, if obliquely, but it is also radically incoherent – and more properly traumatic in the theoretically canonical sense – in that there is no established narrative approach that might be applied in the service of its redescription.

The era of backstory was dedicated to the production of consistency – of motive, of psychology, of geography – in narrative. Although it often manifested itself in the sphere of genres like fantasy, its logic was fundamentally realist in that it aspired to mimetic thickness. But there is, in the proto-modernism and modernism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, historical precedent for the rejection of dense narrative world-production when culture is confronted by the demands of the traumatic new. From impressionism onwards, much of what was subsequently categorised under the modernist heading sought not to redescribe but to incorporate the intrinsic difficulty of redescription: paint was smeared and blurred on the canvas to index the unreliability of subjective perception, narrators stuttered and found not representational accuracy but the inadequacy of words when called upon to produce it. 

Another way of thinking about the prevalence of overconstructed narrative worlds in the early 20th century might be as a compensatory effort in the teeth of the traumatic, a surfeit of description that unconsciously is an attempt to apologise for an inability to redescribe the traumatic. The realist technique’s notorious struggles with suddenness, shock and evental inconsistency has been masked by its contextual loquacity, but this loquacity might also tell us, in a coded fashion, of a coming stylistic break. While a simple recapitulation of modernist approaches would be absurd – blurred paint can no longer produce or reproduce shock and we expect a measure of shiftiness from all of our narrators now – it is perhaps the case that all this world-building has merely been a prelude to techniques more geared to the present. ◉