Is Every Story Political?

There’s a hot topic that comes around the internet every once in awhile which debates whether all stories are inherently political. Some say that stories should never be political, since the story would then implode due to the writer’s biases. Others say stories must be political, and therefore writers should embrace the political nature of what they tell. As an experienced writer, I figured I’ll throw my hat in the ring when it comes to this topic.

To start off, I’m going to apply a weird but strict rule to this blog post: I’m not going to give any specific examples of stories. The problem with stories is that they are all most certainly subjective, and these debates tend to fall apart when we start talking about our feelings on certain titles. This is because it begins to take us into semantics and “my literacy is better than your literacy” arguments which cannot be proven or disproven. I once had someone insist to me that Midsommar is not a horror movie. I then pointed to the distributor’s label of “horror” on the metadata. They told me the distributor doesn’t get to decide genres. I have since stopped talking to this person.

There has to be some level of universal understanding when it comes to art, and I think its political nature is something that is a valid thing to argue about. A lot of this boils down to semantics as well, but in this case we’re looking less at the semantics of stories and more about the semantics of politics. Depending on how widely you scope the word — to include purely social issues such as gender and race, or character studies of the poor versus the rich — you can make anything political. But this is cheating and makes a rather boring answer, so I want to keep a separation between “social” issues and “political” issues — i.e., the construction of states and how they are managed, which is the popular definition of the word. To make it clear, this would mean that a film centering around race would be a social issue since it can be attached to a culture or collection of countries, whereas a movie about a country’s healthcare system would be political.

However, that doesn’t prove all movies aren’t inherently political. Here’s another lens of looking at this problem: what if we don’t think of the movies themselves, but the way they are perceived? The film Barbie [1] would count as a social movie under our ruling, but since it came under widespread fire by the US Republican Party, it would mean that its reaction was political. And if the reaction is political, that means the film was politicized — whether or not it had any intention to be.

It feels as though more and more movies (and music, and games…) are now falling under this shroud of reaction politics, and I feel like you could make the argument that any movie can be perceived as political because of it. I don’t see this version as cheating, because no semantic rules were broken — it just depends on how people react to something, and whether they see it with a political coating on their own. So, by this lens, all stories are political.

But this is just another take, and honestly I wouldn’t die on this hill. I’d love to hear others opinions on this, so if you feel strongly about it, mention it in the comments!

[1] – Yup, I already broke my rule. Whoops! But this time I’m talking more about circumstances surrounding the movie, so hopefully we don’t fall into the semantics mess.

[Image omitted]