Last week we talked about the role I feel the creeping influence of New Thought – more commonly known as “manifesting” or “affirmations” – had in the collapse of American storytelling. I originally intended to include a short discussion of what an affirmation film looks like but things got a bit out of hand. Last week’s post was nearly double my usual target length for an essay on writing without that section. It was already late and adding another 1,200 to 1,500 words to it wasn’t ideal. So this week you get that part of things.

Today we’re going to look at Captain Marvel (2019), a film from the MCU that was released near the peak of that franchise’s popularity. Also, a film I had not watched until just a few weeks ago. The things I do for this blog…

The story of Captain Marvel revolves around Carol Danvers (portrayed by Brie Larson), an American fighter pilot who is kidnapped and brainwashed by an alien race called the Kree so that she will use her abilities in service to their interstellar empire. 

In the beginning of the tale Carol was test flying a faster-than-light craft when it crashes, irradiating her in supernatural energy from the engine when it explodes. Instead of dying instantly, she gained superpowers. The energies that suffused Carol came from the Tesseract, one of the MCU’s six Infinity Stones, objects that govern the universe. 

As a fallout of this, Carol suffers from amnesia and is discovered by the Kree. They brainwash her to believe she is a Kree soldier and her different appearance and superpowers are a result of an accident. She wears a regulator that helps her use her powers safely and is told to control her emotions. She’s put under the command of a superior named Yon-Rogg, who answers directly to the Kree supercomputer called the Supreme Intelligence.

Eventually Carol returns to Earth, the lies that have been told to her are revealed and Carol chooses to control her power no longer. She awakens to her true potential, beats Yon-Rogg and throws the Kree off of Earth. 

As a story this narrative is not really interesting. Carol goes through the each stage of the narrative without playing much of an active role. She goes from place to place, listening to other people tell herself about herself. The events of the story in the present don’t have a lot of thematic ties to her past, revolving largely around Carol hunting a lost Kree on Earth while dodging shapeshifters called Skrulls. These events catalyze her learning she’s been brainwashed but don’t do much else.

However, as a vehicle for New Thought concepts the story is very interesting.

The first element in this is the kind of power Carol has, power drawn from the Tesseract and, from there, from an Infinity Stone. Carol is a literal conduit for a cosmological force. This is about as direct an analogy for the manifestation belief that you are a shard of the divine as you can get without putting the concept directly into the story.

The story itself, however, doesn’t establish this right away. It begins by showing us the “illusions” that Carol is surrounded by, the things that keep her from expressing her full potential right away. The movie opens on her talking with Yon-Rogg. In the course of this discussion he tells her not to get angry, avoid fear and most of all, don’t express humor. These are all framed as things that interfere with a soldier’s duties. Finally, Rogg points to her heart and tells her to stop thinking with that. Instead he points to her head and tells her to think with that, instead.

In affirmation calculus, clamping down on emotions is a way to cut you off from the divine, as negative emotions are signs you’re far from the source of your power and positive emotions help you draw out divinity. This is the first “lie” that New Thought insists people are taught. Modern society makes people too intellectual and too emotionless.

This leads directly to the movie’s second illusion, which comes about when Carol meets the Supreme Intelligence. Most of this exposition has more to do with the film’s plot than its themes, but it ends with an illuminating line. The Intelligence warns Carol, “What was given can be taken away.”

Manifesting is all about using the power you already have to get what you want using the divinity that is yours already. Since all things are divine by the nature of the universe, your divinity cannot be lost. However, the fear of losing something is presented as one of the most negative emotions a person can experience and one of the things most likely to keep you from realizing your own divinity.

The Supreme Intelligence directly threatening Carol in this way is an empty threat in this calculus, to be sure. But just making the threat can keep her under control.

Both of these themes are occasionally reinforced throughout the movie, especially in a flashback sequence where we walk through a jumble of Carol’s early memories. In this sequence she’s repeatedly told she can’t, or she’s too emotional. As Carol begins to remember her life on Earth she asks Rogg about it, who tells her she’s getting emotional and she should remember her training.

Finally, when Carol knows the truth and confronts the Supreme Intelligence about what happened to her the computer tells her, “Remember… without us…you’re weak. You’re flawed. Helpless. We saved you. Without us… you’re only human.”

Carol replies, “I’ve been fighting with one arm tied behind my back. But what happens… …when I’m finally set free?”

During this sequence Carol removes the regulator that the Kree gave her and manifests her true abilities, allowing her to defeat all the Kree in and around the planet without significant effort. This sequence is obviously the moment when Carol realizes she is divine and embraces it. With the power of the cosmos on her side she easily tramples over the lies that tried to hold her back. This is the emotional and narrative climax of the film.

As climaxes go, it’s not a very inspiring one. There’s not a whole lot of build up to Carol’s decision to stop controlling herself and cutting loose. She just goes around talking to people until she decides to change sides. Her self control is never shown as an impediment, keeping her from connecting to the people around her. In fact, most people who meet Carol like her immediately. She manages to make her way through life just fine before finding “freedom” so it feels as if she just has an epiphany and chooses to do something else.

That’s a feasible path for a person to go down in real life but it isn’t the most satisfying story to hear. Carol’s personal journey is surrounded by events but those events don’t feel very impactful either. She meets Nick Fury and Phil Coulson, agents of the SHIELD organization that runs day to day things in the background of the MCU. She meets some Skrulls, one named Talos being the most important. Most importantly, she meets Maria Rambou, her former wingman in the Air Force.

These characters are the third interesting New Thought thread in the movie. Fury, Coulson and Mari all serve as reflections of Carol as she goes through her journey. It’s harder to see with the first two, as they are already preestablished characters who are written somewhat in line with their previous appearances. Discrepancies can be papered over by pointing out both men are younger in Carol’s story than they are in other portions of the MCU. Maria is a new character and her presence is more informative.

We never see Maria Rambou on her own, pursuing her own ends. When she speaks it is almost always to Carol, almost always about Carol. She’s not an independent character, but rather a mouthpiece to speak affirmations into Carol until she’s ready to sustain them on her own. Consider one of Maria’s longest lines of dialog in the film:

“You are Carol Danvers. You are the woman on that black box risking her life to do the right thing. My best friend… who supported me as a mother, and a pilot when no one else did. You’re smart and funny, and a huge pain in the ass. And you are the most powerful person I knew, way before you could shoot fire from your fist. You hear me?”

Even when Maria talks about her own life in that line it is entirely about Carol’s impact on it. Carol is the only person who matters. It’s eerie, but very indicative of how manifestors look at other people.

Skrulls are another interesting element in the film. They can shapeshift, making them a simple metaphor for how affirmations shape our lives. They want to be someone else and then instantly manifest it, something that is noteworthy in affirmation culture. The fact that Skrulls are recast from definite villains in the comics to sympathetic figures in this film plays into the positive ideas the writers have for this idea. The fact that it might bother other people is never explored.

In fact the film doesn’t engage with many of the questions the movie sets forth. It doesn’t ask the hard questions about when emotions are more important than self control or vice versa. The movie isn’t interested in the effects Carol’s long disappearance might have on her friends and family. It doesn’t ask about the nature of the Kree-Skrull conflict. The idea that shapeshifters who lie about their appearance on a daily basis might be naturally more dangerous than people who don’t is hinted at but never expanded on. Carol simply strolls through all these things, decides how she wants to see them and proceeds as if her assumptions are true. These assumptions are never challenged.

In short, the movie simply manifests around its protagonist.

When Captain Marvel was first released I didn’t see much point in watching it. While I’ve enjoyed many offerings from the MCU I’ve never sought to partake right away and I’ve found the franchise in general to be a mixed bag. It has some high highs but there are very low lows in there as well and Marvel’s hit rate was fairly average to begin with and has declined drastically over the last five years. Captain Marvel was definitely near the beginning of that declining trend and reviews of the film didn’t inspire me to check it out. Now that I finally have watched it I don’t imagine I’ll go back to it again.

I don’t think Captain Marvel was the first New Thought film. There are probably many others, some that I suspect are much older than this one. Yet going back and looking through it was very informative for me. I hope you’ve found this discussion of the film’s religious threads interesting but we’re not quite done with it yet.

You see, affirmation culture isn’t just about manifesting the story. It’s about manifesting positivity around that story. That’s very, very important. So, if you’ll spare me just a bit more of your patience, in the next week or two we’ll take a look at how critics reacted to the movie, both positively and negatively. More importantly, we’ll take a look at how the critics reacted to each other, and try to draw some conclusions from that.

Since this will require a bit more work than just watching a movie and pulling up the film’s script I’m not sure when I’ll have this final installment into the New Thought Saga prepared but it will be before we return to fiction again. In the meantime, thanks for reading!

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last ten years or so trying to figure out how the art of storytelling has entered into such a prolonged decline. Any art form goes through swings and roundabouts, of course. Mediums ebb and flow. Trends are just that, trendy, and the public rarely hews to them for a long time. However, beginning somewhere around 2012, stories in all forms began to slip in quality in pronounced, drastic ways.

It began with novels and comics, where most storytelling trends begin. These are low risk mediums outside the mainstream, where experimentation is quick and cheap. However, over time this bizarre collapse in quality began to spread. What happened? Was it some kind of mass psychosis? A conspiracy of cultural revolutionaries? Perhaps the Aztecs were right after all and 2012 was just the end of the world as we knew it.

I have not been alone in my quest to understand the change in culture. Many, many other people have tried to analyze the trends and crack the code and, over the last five years or so, a few conclusions have been reached.

First, and most importantly, it’s not just a question of a decline in talent, although a certain amount of that has certainly taken place. However, some of the people producing terrible stories have produced excellent work in the past. Now they do not. Furthermore, the ebb and flow of talent is a part of any artform but this kind of collapse in artistic merit far outstrips the norm. So there has to be more to it than a question of talent.

Most pundits suggest artists have fallen into the grasp of a political ideology, a form of Marxism that reduces stories to a myopic obsession over the oppressed and the oppressor. This singular focus squeezes out many of the typical elements of good story. Character details, choices, consequences and more are all obscured behind the grandiose narrative of terrible, oppressive society and the virtuous but downtrodden masses.

There’s merit to this notion as well, because any kind of orthodoxy like this is going to put blinders on creatives that strips them of their ability to think artistically about their story. However, many great artists have fallen into this orthodoxy and still told great stories. This could even be a kind of Peter principle. Only so many good storytellers are out there and the bad ones are more vulnerable to this kind of groupthink, so we will see more stories toeing the party line doing terribly. While I think this is a factor I don’t think it’s the whole story.

About a year ago I wrote about the Empire of Southern California, which I believe is another part of the puzzle. If you want the full details you can read about them in the linked post but the highlights are simple. Most of our storytellers come from a handful of isolated, insular cultural centers like SoCal or university campuses. That limits their experiences to a very narrow sliver of real life. As a consequence they’re unequipped to tell stories that appeal to the majority of people. I still think that is the case. But when I wrote that blog post I said I still didn’t think I had all the pieces of the puzzle.

You may suspect, based on this long introduction and the title of this post, that I believe I have the missing piece.

If you did suspect this, you are correct.

In 1937 a man named Napoleon Hill published a book titled Think and Grow Rich, a book that has had a profound impact on American culture in the roughly ninety years since it was published. That may come as a surprise to you, since most people I’ve spoken to have never knowingly heard of Hill or his work. The reality is, they have heard his work. They just don’t know it.

The truth is Napoleon Hill’s schools of thought have infiltrated a breathtaking swath of modern American thought. Everything from self help to multilevel marketing groups draw on his ideas. Many self styled “Christian” preachers actually draw on his ideas as gospel and many of the most powerful and wealthy denizens of Silicon Valley, Hollywood and DC swear by some variety of Hill’s theosophy.

The high priestess of Hill’s religion is known to practically every American and she wields incredible power among the nation’s largest cultural power brokers. If you haven’t guessed who she is I’ll give you a hint. She owns her own TV network, which she uses to promote Hill’s gospel on a regular basis.

Her name is Oprah Winfrey. She calls herself a Christian but what she preaches is the power to manifest. So what does that mean and why is it bad for storytelling? Let’s break it down.

The technical term for Hill’s theosophy is New Thought. It contains ideas which he updated for the modern age but they are not really very new. Since New Thought is a clunky term I am generally going to abbreviate it to “manifesting” or “affirmation” as these are the core ideas of the movement. The basic idea of manifesting is that you can think about a thing and reality will warp around you until it becomes real.

This is possible because you are divine.

Let me stress that I am not exaggerating nor am I making a joke, manifesting is a theological assertion grounded in the belief that all things are fragments of the divine and the divine is what creates the world we see around us. Since we are supposedly divine we have within us the power that creates the world. All we have to do is become aware of that power then apply it by manifesting the world we want to live in. In short, we can think and grow rich.

The simplest way to do this is with words. Affirmations are generally cited as the easiest way to begin exercising the power of manifestation. Repeating phrases like “I am healthy” or “I am loved” over and over supposedly sharpens one’s powers until these simple truths manifest. To do this we must be in touch with the divine. 

To get in touch with the divine we have to vibrate at higher frequencies, which bring us closer to our true natures. We vibrate at higher frequencies when we experience joy and love, so we focus on those emotions, we affirm ourselves and the world itself bends to our whims. It might sound like there’s more to it than that but there’s really not.

This is because affirmations and manifesting are fraudulent ideas.

However, many, many people have bought into this fraud and believe it whole heartedly. Oprah isn’t the only one. Again, it has wormed its way into a huge number of places. I’m not going to break all of that down in this blog post. If you want an introduction to the history of the New Thought movement I recommend Melissa Doughtery’s book Happy Lies, which I read as my starting point for understanding the concepts.

What’s important for today’s topic is the effects that an affirmation mindset has on creative work. In my experience, they are entirely toxic.

The first, greatest example of that is the demand for positivity. Now in general the concepts of joy and love do not have to equate to positivity but in creative circles that is an association that has become very pernicious. When a creator is discussing a story their thoughts tend to hinge on how positive the discussion is.

Creators of failed projects will often blame their failure on the widespread discussion of the weaknesses of their project. Talk around many of the recent flops in the realm of scifi and superhero franchises are good case studies. The failure of Star Wars projects like The Acolyte or DC films like The Flash are often blamed on Internet critics spreading negativity. Conversely, people who speak highly of projects are credited with positivity. They are trying to help the project manifest, so they are viewed kindly.

All this means that the creators of failed projects cannot hear any kind of needed, critical feedback. This, more than anything, is the greatest weakness of the affirmation mindset regarding creativity. A creator who cannot stand critical feedback is already a failure. Let me reiterate, if you are trying to manifest a successful story you will fail. Just sitting and muttering to yourself is not the way to make a story come about, you must work relentlessly and be open to feedback, revision and hard, hard work.

Things only get worse from there.

If anyone who achieves a state of joy and love is uniquely in touch with their divine nature then anyone who contradicts them is a blasphemer. Clearly, they aren’t in touch with the divine. After all, if we all are shards of the divine spark when we are in touch with the divine we should all agree. In this way affirmation culture is given a pass for viewing anyone who contradicts it as evil. Far from god. Worthy of any and all condemnations that fall upon them.

Many people have noted the hostility of creators towards audiences over the last decade or so and with good reason. However, the source of this hostility is often blamed on mundane factors. An entitled background. Cultural siloing. A lack of appreciation for the economic realities of the situation. However, since learning about the details of manifesting, my view on the situation has changed radically and I now believe it’s much simpler. Most creatives view their critics as ontologically evil because by taking issue with mainstream creators in any way they are resisting attempts to manifest the divine.

Thus the rift between creator and audience widens.

Yet at a fundamental level, even if the impulse to fight with critics and vilify feedback were resisted I don’t think the gap between affirmation culture and American culture could ever close fully. (I stress American culture here mostly because it is American culture that has gone through a nosedive in the last decade.) It is true that in American culture there is a spirit of exceptionalism, that we are special. However, the notion that we have all we need within us already, that the spark of the divine will change reality if we only attend to it, runs contrary to our culture at large.

Americans value hard work, hustle and adapting to circumstance. American men, in particular, are always on the lookout for the next thing coming up in the world around them. The idea that we magically have everything we need within us already is highly counterintuitive to us. That has created an ever growing rift between the culture at large and our storytellers. Feedback on the technical shortcomings of story craft will not close that gap.

The idea that words can change reality is very intoxicating to the creative mindset. Making your way through the world by artistic craftsmanship is incredibly difficult and those who achieve it might really feel like they’ve cracked some cosmological secret. As someone still looking for a way to break out from the pack, I sympathize. 

Yet it’s not true.

The people who have become drunk on manifestation as the secret to success, wealth and virtue have strayed far from reality and that makes them dangerous in more ways than one. In the arts, it puts them at odds with their audience and unable to improve. Thus, their work rots on the vine. As with many issues caused by misguided religious movements, correcting the errors will take time, patience and grace from men and God. The first step is realizing the problem is there. The next will depend on the individual.

Every person tries to usurp reality in their own small ways. Find where you’ve done it and get back in touch with the way things really are. Then make the best work you can while confronting your shortcomings and, most importantly, don’t fall for the false promises of affirmation culture. It will take a long, long time but eventually things will change.