The Death of Enchantment: Why Hollywood No Longer Holds Ushttps://pjmedia.com/jamie-wilson/2025/08/26/the-death-of-enchantment-why-hollywood-no-longer-holds-us-n4943034When you open a book, you’re entering that spell alone. You give the author your trust: Take me somewhere, carry me, don’t break the illusion. But when you walk into a theater, the spell is shared. You’re not only trusting the film to guide and absorb you — you’re trusting it to let you share the experience with a roomful of strangers. That is something deeper than entertainment. It’s a kind of communion. Hundreds of people, hearts beating together, gasping, laughing, even crying in unison.
That shared spell is fragile — and sacred. It is the invisible current that makes the hair rise on your arms during the opening crawl of Star Wars, or makes a whole theater hold its breath as Simba is raised aloft on Pride Rock. In those moments, we believe together.
But when the storyteller breaks trust, the spell collapses.
Disney as Case Study
No company understood the story spell better than Disney.
From the beginning, Disney specialized in creating communal enchantment. Their films were not lectures or checklists; they were invitations to believe together.
* "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937): the first full-length animated feature, plunging audiences into terror, wonder, and redemption.
* "Bambi" (1942): children and adults alike gasped together when the shot rang out. That moment seared itself into cultural memory.
* "Cinderella" (1950): the archetypal fairy tale, told so purely that it became the definitive version for millions.
* "The Little Mermaid" (1989): the start of the Disney Renaissance, reigniting communal delight with unforgettable music and mythic heart.
* "The Lion King" (1994): perhaps Disney’s last universally shared myth — audiences still gasp together when Simba is lifted on Pride Rock.
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What Happened to the Spell?
For decades, Hollywood’s spell worked because two forces pulled together: art and money.
The art impulse pushed filmmakers to innovate, to reach for beauty, to treat story as craft worth perfecting. The money impulse demanded discipline — pacing, clarity, immersion — because a film that didn’t move people wouldn’t sell. Art alone was indulgent, and money alone was formulaic, but when art and money aligned, you got classic stories: "Casablanca," "The Godfather," "Star Wars," "The Lion King."
Then, in the 1960s, something shifted. Postmodernism seeped in. Film students were trained not only to create but to deconstruct — to pick stories apart until much of the beauty and magic was stripped away. At the same time, they were swept up in politics, convinced that art could and should change society. Put the two currents together, and a new realization dawned: stories carry the power to shape lives. And so they decided to wield that power consciously. Now there was a third impulse on the stage: social change. Art gave way to money, and money yielded to agenda.
And when the main measure became agenda, the spell began to collapse. Studios stopped trusting story to speak for itself. Writers and directors were no longer trusted to tell the best tale; they were tasked with carrying the “right” message. The script became a Trojan horse, hollowed of wonder, stuffed with ideology.
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What Audiences Feel
When the spell is broken, audiences don’t frame it in terms like “postmodern Trojan horse storytelling.” That would never occur to them. Instead, they just know they didn’t like the story. It bored them, or it felt unreal, or they couldn’t get into it. Sometimes they even felt insulted, as if the storyteller thought them too stupid to notice the strings.
Continuing with Disney as an example, while Walt Disney was definitely an idea man and a technical innovator, he made those qualities serve him as a storyteller. Disney and Hollyweird generally have thrown away telling stories well, not trusting stories to communicate the "right message" and have heavy-handedly focused on the "right message".
