It’s strange that the tipping point for sceptics has been Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder. Any film that features Guns’N’Roses needledrops and Russell Crowe playing Zeus in the style of a sleazy taverna owner alongside a stage four cancer subplot is bound to have some tonal hiccups, and a backlash against the ubiquitous Waititi was in the diary, but it’s still a fun night at the pictures, with a winning lead, a stacked cast, a superb villain and more good jokes than most comedies. Even when the podcast The Big Picture recorded an episode “Five ways to fix the Marvel crisis”, all the panellists agreed that it was the second-best Thor movie (after Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok) and the second-best movie of the MCU’s phase four (after Spider-Man: No Way Home). It pulled in $382m in its first week. Yet a cloud of disappointment has coalesced around it. I was asked by another publication to write an article about how badly Waititi had botched it. I replied to say that I had a really good time and would they like a more positive piece? They would not.

The thunder god has become the lightning rod for a growing sense of frustration and fatigue with the whole enterprise. With the notable exception of Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian, most of the best critics have effectively given up attempting to engage with the MCU, settling for either glib quips or weary contempt, and I don’t hold it against them. Now even enthusiasts such as the Big Picture crew are feeling restive.

Three years ago, it was all roses. In the unlikely event that Disney had decided to leave billions of dollars on the table and wrap up the MCU after Avengers: Endgame in 2019, it would have been acknowledged as the most successful franchise of all time. Not every movie was great, or even good (have you seen Thor: The Dark World?), but mastermind Kevin Feige pulled off a trick that nobody had even attempted before: a 22-movie arc culminating in the colossal pay-off of the most successful movie ever made (at least until a Chinese reissue of Avatar nudged it into second place). As the first person to work out how to translate the interconnected serial storytelling of comic books to the screen, Feige turned average moviegoers into avid completists.

So what exactly is the MCU doing wrong? Everything all at once, apparently. It’s both too frivolous (Thor) and too ponderous (Eternals); too basic (Black Widow) or too complicated (Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness). It’s either overburdened with setting up characters and plot threads for future movies or insufficiently concerned with the big picture; it provides too much fan service or not enough. Back in 2014, when Edgar Wright was dropped from Ant-Man, the complaint was that the MCU’s corporate vision smothered the identity of individual directors, but now that indie darlings such as Waititi and Oscar-winner Chloe Zhao are encouraged to put their own stamp on things, other problems arise.

One thing everyone can agree on is that, thanks to Covid delays and streaming wars, there is far too much material: six movies in the past 12 months and seven Disney+ shows in the last 18. When I was a kid, I would have wept with joy to see just one decent film about a Marvel character. Now I feel like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice of Goethe’s poem who enchants a broom to fetch water and ends up almost drowning. Having worked though the most obvious characters in its IP arsenal, Marvel Studios is currently trying to get audiences hooked on the B- and C-list; I used to read far too many comic books and even I barely remember the Eternals. They are burning through talent at a ridiculous pace, hiring actors as exciting and watchable as Awkwafina, Brian Tyree Henry, Barry Keoghan, Kathryn Hahn and Florence Pugh, but not always using them wisely. Watching Moon Knight squander Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke in a dud story was one of the year’s more dispiriting viewing experiences. It’s like hiring a Bentley to drive to IKEA.

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All this surplus generates a powerful sense of déjà vu. Too many plots rely on either processing trauma or repairing broken families and all of them must, by law, climax in an almighty dust-up involving rushed and patchy VFX. Even the winking humour, so fresh and delightful in the first Avengers movie, can feel rote. Bradshaw defines it as “a highly contained form of restricted self-satire or auto-undercutting that is always offset by the huge CGI intergalactic action scenes”.

A bigger problem is that there appears to be no centre and no direction. Cornerstone stars Robert Downey Jr and Chris Evans have bowed out, while their most obvious successor, Chadwick Boseman, has passed away. Samuel L Jackson’s Nick Fury, the original man with a plan, has disappeared. The Avengers have disbanded. Thanos is dead. Without this connective tissue, which gave even the mediocre installments a reason to be there, it’s unclear why any of this stuff matters in the long run. Everything that is supposed to raise the stakes — the time travel, the multiverse, the quantum realm, prehistory, gods, demi-gods, eternity itself, and all manner of cosmic foofaraw — ends up lowering them. “The Blip” caused half the population of the universe to vanish for five years, but we don’t like to talk about it.

Beyond the hardcore fans, the sense that you have to catch them all in order to appreciate the overall vision — indeed, the idea that there is an overall vision — has evaporated. There is at once too much continuity to keep track of and too little cohesion. Whereas the end-credit stings used to tease a larger strategy, they now feel like empty promises. Will we ever again see Brett Goldstein as Hercules or Harry Styles as Eros? Will we care if we don’t?

The MCU is currently struggling with all the ways in which movies are not like comic books. Marvel Comics has always been kept afloat by its big hitters — Spider-Man, the X-Men — while lesser characters have been regularly rebooted, replaced or temporarily shelved. The best work often arises when a new creative team is given a waning character on the verge of cancellation and allowed to take some risks. Failure is always an option on a comic-book budget, and characters can take several years to fulfil their potential. It’s taken as read that some readers will drop out as they get older while the diehards will accept the fact, inherent in a universe that has been around for 60 years, that everything changes. As Marvel scholar Douglas Wolk writes in All of the Marvels, “no creator expects that their readers are familiar with the whole Marvel story to date…What the story wants from you is not your knowledge but your curiosity.” Movies simply cannot afford to sprawl, experiment and confound in the same way.

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For all that, I have to say that I’m still having a fun time at the pictures. Maybe it’s MCU Stockholm syndrome but let’s remember that it’s hard to make one effective blockbuster, let alone (so far) 29. The last movie I watched before Thor: Love and Thunder was 2003’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, an astonishingly bloodless remix-cum-travesty of its two predecessors. None of the post-James Cameron Terminator sequels is better than average; the same goes for the post-James Cameron Alien movies. There are as many bad Star Wars movies as good ones and the content keeps coming. Fox’s attempts at the Fantastic Four were disasters, as were the studio’s last two X-Men films. The DC Extended Universe is chaos. The Transformers franchise is almost entirely dreck. Even now that the writers and directors of the last two Avengers movies have re-teamed for the Netflix spy thriller The Gray Man, its Rotten Tomatoes score is lower than any MCU movie bar Eternals.

You get the picture. I’ve noticed that when friends with older children seek recommendations for solidly enjoyable family movies, MCU is always the no-brainer suggestion because even the worst entries have some memorable moments and a base level of competence. If Kevin Feige is like an ambitious juggler who drops a ball every now and then, most of his competitors are regularly left empty-handed.

Feige’s current problems, then, are imperial ones. He runs an overextended superpower which has probably already peaked but cannot stop growing. It can’t be healthy for a single franchise to exert such hegemonic dominance over the box office and the cultural conversation but nothing looks capable of supplanting it. The curious upshot is that the MCU is too big to fail and yet too big to succeed to the extent that it did with Infinity War and Endgame. While it’s not beyond the wit of Feige and his collaborators to braid all these loose threads into a satisfying narrative rope at some point, that task is becoming exponentially more difficult. The most obvious solution to MCU exhaustion would be for it to slow down and do less, but empires, famously, aren’t very good at that.

Crooner, an angelic-looking 24-year-old YouTuber from Southern California, has a lot of experience with Replika. In 2019, as part of research for his undergraduate thesis, he signed up for a programme that involved early beta testing of the app. He wanted to study the philosophy of AI.

“Replika claims to be therapeutic,” he told me, “but there’s something sad about how it takes you away from other humans. I honestly predict more and more guys will be earnestly falling in love due to AI girlfriends and abandoning real romance.” He very much believes in love. He thinks the internet needs more of it.

I discovered Crooner on Twitter, when we were both tagged in a thread about internet culture. He responded to one of my comments with a link to a YouTube video. “I have a theory about incels,” he wrote.

Crooner’s videos analyse the digital spaces we inhabit. One of them opens with him putting on a shirt and tie, fixing his longish, floppy locks, and then sitting behind an enormous plate of spaghetti and two flickering votives: a candlelit dinner. The word “nervous…” scrolls across the bottom, before a Zoom prompt appears. “Emily has entered the waiting room.” Emily, a telegenic blond, fills the left half of the screen. Crooner offers her something to eat, a gesture across cyberspace, and they go on to discuss her thoughts about Rapunzel, phenomenology, and their shared history of taking e-relationships offline.

This video is part of Crooner’s “E-Girl Museum” series, which features split-screen interviews with female YouTubers. Crooner is very interested in e-girls, who have had a profound impact on his sense of self, his romantic life, and even his creative pursuits. “They’ve been more real to me than IRL girls, in a way, if that makes sense, in the space they take up in my imagination,” he says with direct, cheerful conviction.

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Incels are very interested in e-girls too. So interested, in fact, that on incel forums, which I have spent a lot of time researching, discussion of them is essentially forbidden, restricted to a very specific context: references must be broad, and broadly negative. Anything else is considered “simping” — an offence punishable with a ban. Incels resent the attention lavished on these young women, and endlessly criticise their insatiable desire for attention, their licentiousness, their greed. OnlyFans creators, the ultimate e-girls, represent everything wrong with the world: narcissism, female privilege, sexual depravity, and financial abuse.

But Crooner sees it differently. “They play these roles, maybe a Rapunzel type, or the manic pixie, the chaotic e-girl, who compels the boy to save her. This forces him to shape up. It gives him the chance to become a hero.” He isn’t interested in judging anyone, or in identifying their dysfunction. I tell him that the story of Rapunzel is thought to represent Borderline Personality Disorder resulting from narcissistic parental abuse. He laughs, and then acknowledges that a staggering proportion of e-girls talk about having the disorder “compared to normie spaces”.

“I play this kind of ‘searching lover’ young man,” Crooner explains. “I do some philosophy too, but I’m showing people my quest for the holy grail.”  His videos and his timeline are filled with depictions of knights: young men in medieval armour. One of his most popular tweets bears the image of Leonardo DiCaprio from Romeo and Juliet, dressed in chainmail for the masquerade ball, alongside the Knight of Cups tarot. It says: “You’re not an incel. You’re an Arthurian Knight on the Quest for the Holy Grail.” His Twitter handle is @heropilled.

“This is what me and my friends, who I’m calling the e-Romantics, are onto right now: trying to flesh out the right mythos for the incel.” He believes that incels are in dire need of a different narrative about themselves and who they could be.

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Flandalff the White is one of Crooner’s friends, and his aims are similar, though he is more private. “I think there’s a way to help lift men out of the ‘swamp of sadness’ so many are stuck in. I managed to crawl out of it myself, so I feel I may have a few insights that might help.” He is producing a series of YouTube videos based on an 800-tweet thread. Before he agreed to speak to me, he wanted to make sure that I wasn’t going to characterise him as “anti-incel”. “Incels are my brothers,” he said. “We all sink, or we all float, together.”

Another member of the collective is Tanner, who is edgier than both Flan and Crooner, with an ironic sensibility and a penchant for shitposting. He wouldn’t tell me anything about himself, but he snarks about US politicians of nominal significance, so he’s probably American. In addition to caustically funny satire about “mid-girls” and “coomers”, he writes on Twitter about how Romantic Love was a signature invention of the Middle Ages, a reaction against Christianity. He believes that the e-relationship is “one of the last bastions of romance in the modern age”, because it involves an obstacle to overcome: the distance. “There is a courtship and then a heroic process against the odds.”

After speaking to the e-Romantics, I decided to test-drive some of their content by retweeting it for my own followers, many of whom are incels. They have responded favourably so far to ideas of knights and grails and quests: “That seems wacky. Weird. But fun.” From this crowd, any response at all is noteworthy; one of curiosity rather than cringe is monumental. The e-Romantics seem to be doing something right.

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What they’re doing right would be called, in the field of countering violent extremism, a “counter-narrative”. Several organisations have tried it. The Google-backed tech start-up Moonshot CVE offered the “Redirect Method”, for example, which involved a series of short videos designed to “undermine the extremist narrative” of white supremacism and Islamism. These ostensibly inspirational stories from ostensibly credible messengers were recommended for users who searched certain keywords online. I haven’t seen these videos myself — they’re not publicly available — but after the programme was deployed in 2019, abysmal results were reported.

The alternative narrative of the e-Romantics seems a better fit for incels — better than impersonal propaganda, and also better than the mantra they hear everywhere else: “Just focus on yourself!” We constantly prescribe self-improvement, self-realisation and self-care — elevating and encouraging selfishness as the noblest, healthiest pursuit, while pathologising intimacy and devotion as “codependency” and overearnest attempts at connection as “harassment”. Maybe the root of our relational difficulties is the 21st-century maxim that our most aspirational, “final form” is one of cold, navel-gazing contemplation.

There is clearly hunger for the “hero pill”. The Marvel Universe, and fantasy programming in general, is endlessly expanding. But romantic love is often minimised in these recent iterations — written off as too heteronormative, sexist, ableist. Chivalry is practically a hate crime. But the need to give one’s life meaning, the call to heroism and adventure, is still alive and well in all of us. And in young men, it seems, it can turn into something very dark. Today’s anti-heroes are very appealing. After all, being someone powerful and evil is better than being no one at all.

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Crooner understands where this can lead. “The incel has will but he lacks power, so he manifests his power through ideology, through fascism,” one of his videos explains. But, he goes on, this isn’t the path to happiness. “Have you noticed that fascist statues never smile? They’re not live-laugh-loving.”

I asked Crooner about the dangers of encouraging incels to risk their hearts. Perhaps, for some, the romantic quest might actually be futile; perhaps it will just lead to rejection.

“That’s the quest,” he says. “You don’t lose if you get rejected. A hero has to suffer. You just go on to the next part of the quest. In the meantime, you create. That suffering makes you level up. You can create something beautiful. It’s all about the desire. Keep following that.”

He’s right. Love inspires human greatness. Unrequited love, especially, produces a lot of the best art. And for the e-Romantics, this isn’t about countering violent extremism. They’re not focused on crime prevention or tackling misogyny. They’re just “a ragtag bunch of internet weirdos” without any agenda, who want to change the online landscape so that they can enjoy it more. “It’s our space,” Crooner says. “We live here. Why not make it what we want?”

“As you know — two objects can occupy the same space and time — if they vibrate at different speeds!” Allen explains with a superhero’s typical fondness for exclamation marks. “My theory is, both Earths were created at the same time in two quite similar universes! They vibrate differently — which keeps them apart!” As the fastest man on (his) Earth, Allen vibrated so fast that he “tore a gap in the vibratory shields separating our worlds!”

Allen’s account of the physics may have been somewhat unreliable but readers didn’t flinch. Two worlds, two Flashes? Got it. That was how DC entered what the science-fiction writer Michael Moorcock would soon christen the “multiverse”.

Right now, the multiverse is box-office gold, as Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness collides with the extraordinary word-of-mouth hit Everything Everywhere All At Once. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has already been universe-hopping in Spider-Man: No Way Home and Loki; DC will follow suit with next year’s The Flash. While writing Everything Everywhere All At Once, directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known collectively as Daniels) saw multiverse storylines in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Rick and Morty and worried that the concept would be old hat by the time their movie was out. Not a bit of it.

The multiverse began as an alternative answer to a confounding question. In the Twenties, experiments in the revolutionary new field of quantum mechanics demonstrated that sub-atomic particles such as electrons behaved as if they were in many places at once, like a waveform. Yet as soon as they were observed, these myriad coexisting possibilities concertinaed into a single, measurable state, which we call reality. How? In the traditional Copenhagen interpretation, the act of observation itself causes a phenomenon known as waveform collapse. This made sense to quantum physicists but not to anybody else.

One sceptic was Erwin Schrödinger. In 1935, he illustrated this paradox with a “ridiculous” thought experiment. A cat is placed in a box with a vial of lethal poison which will only break open if a radioactive atom decays. The odds are 50/50. If it were equally possible for the atom to have both decayed and not decayed until it is observed, Schrödinger argued, then it would be equally possible for the cat to be both alive and dead until the instant that the box is opened. Yet we instinctively feel that the unseen cat must be either alive or dead at any given moment, not alive and dead.

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In a 1952 lecture, Schrödinger said something that he warned might seem mad: what if all the possibilities were real but we could only apprehend one of them? The quantum theorist, he said, talks about probabilities and alternatives. “The idea that they may not be alternatives but all really happen simultaneously seems lunatic to him, just impossible.”

Five years later, an American doctoral student called Hugh Everett proposed what became known as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, later developed by Bryce DeWitt and David Deutsch. In this theory of the waveform, every possible outcome of every event, right down to the subatomic level, spawns a new universe. So the release of the poison in Schrödinger’s box splits off another universe: the cat is dead in one but still alive in the other. There are, in fact, innumerable cats in innumerable universes. In some of these universes, Schrödinger dies in the First World War, or is never born, and nobody has even heard of his cat. As John Gribbin puts it in his book Six Impossible Things: “an electron in a distant galaxy confronted with a choice of two (or more) quantum paths causes the entire Universe, including ourselves, to split. In the [many-worlds] version, there is an infinite variety of universes (a Multiverse) corresponding to all possible solutions to the quantum wave function.”

The popularity of the multiverse in superhero stories has less to do with physics than commerce. DC and Marvel embraced the concept as a means of rehabilitating old characters, fixing continuity errors and rewriting history. In the world of the central narrative (Earth-One in DC, Earth-616 in Marvel), numerous rules had to be obeyed (Don’t kill Spider-Man!) but in other universes writers could do whatever they liked. The problem was that these new universes accumulated their own inconsistencies while lowering the stakes across the board. If anything can happen, somewhere, then, as the nihilistic antagonist of Everything Everywhere All At Once says, “nothing matters”. The whole thing became such a mess that in 1985, DC swept the board clean and abolished the multiverse in Crisis on Infinite Earths. This comic-book take on waveform collapse was a neat solution, if mind-bogglingly genocidal if you thought about it for a minute.

By making the multiverse central to its Phase Four, the MCU runs that same risk of making the action both bewildering and inconsequential. Fortunately, the new Doctor Strange is anchored by a simple question asked by Scarlet Witch: “If you knew there was a universe where you were happy, wouldn’t you want to go there?” Demented by grief and regret, she says yes, of course. The rest of Sam Raimi’s movie, drenched in a 12-certificate brand of Lovecraftian interdimensional horror, tells us why she’s wrong.

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Everything Everywhere All At Once also asks if there is a happier version of you, to a much wilder, funnier, sadder effect. Daniels have spoken about wanting to write a film that explored family dynamics, mental health and existential anxiety in the playfully philosophical spirit of Kurt Vonnegut, Charlie Kaufman and Douglas Adams, which is quite different from wanting to make a multiverse movie and working out what to put in it. In place of rock-solid superhero IP, their film gives us a fraught Chinese-American family which runs a failing laundrette. For Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), preoccupied by “laundry and taxes”, the multiverse is not a known entity but a mind-bending revelation.

True to its title, Everything Everywhere All At Once is a whole lot of movie. It’s an absurdist comedy, a psychedelic action movie, a tender domestic drama, an allegory for the immigrant experience, a meta-commentary on cinema and a profound meditation on choices, regrets and the purpose of life. Whichever way you slice it, the grit that makes the pearl is Evelyn’s dissatisfaction with where her life has ended up, shadowed by the haunting awareness of bad decisions and wasted opportunities. “Across the multiverse, I’ve seen thousands of Evelyns,” says one version of her husband Waymond. “If you can imagine it, somewhere out there it exists.”

As far as we know, we are all blessed and cursed with only one life. We have opportunities to correct course or repair damage but every decision we make, from what to have for lunch to who to marry, is fundamentally irreversible. The 1998 romcom Sliding Doors, a multiverse movie in disguise, has become synonymous with the notion that an apparently insignificant decision or random incident can end up defining the course of a life.

Equally, the world has a single history. We all have to live with what has happened. In his novel Player Piano, Vonnegut describes “Why did it have to happen?” as “the question humanity had been asking for millenniums, the question men were seemingly born to ask”. Indeed, one character kicks off Doctor Strange by asking that very question: “Did it have to happen that way? Was there any other path?”

The appeal of the multiverse is that nothing had to happen, because in other universes it didn’t happen. It dramatises the contingency of history. Anything and everything could have been different and, somewhere out there, it is. “It’s a very confusing time,” says Stephanie Hsu, who plays Evelyn’s daughter Joy in Everything Everywhere All At Once, “so a multiverse story is a way of tapping into this question of, ‘Why is this reality the way that it is? Is it the only reality and does it work?’”

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It seems to me that whenever something dismaying happens in the world, many people react by throwing themselves into the political multiverse. When a leaked opinion revealed that the Supreme Court was poised to overturn Roe v Wade and enable state legislatures to outlaw abortion, the sadness and outrage on Twitter produced a rash of counterfactuals that would have denied the conservative justices a majority: What if the Democrats had found a way to seat Merrick Garland in 2016? What if Hillary Clinton had won? What if Ruth Bader Ginsburg had retired under Obama rather than dying under Trump? What if? If only…

This happens all the time. Fans of Jeremy Corbyn routinely describe him as the best prime minister we never had. Democrats still torment themselves with the knowledge that a few thousand votes in Florida would have handed the White House to the environmentalist Al Gore rather than the neoconservative George W Bush. Geopolitical analysts, both professional and amateur, dream up scenarios in which Putin never invaded Ukraine. Covid partisans argue over whether lockdowns should have happened earlier or not at all, and what decisions in Wuhan might have obviated the question of lockdowns in the first place. We spend a lot of time mentally exploring the roads not taken — but is it time well spent?

Fundamental to politics is the desire to imagine a better future, and then to act to bring it about, but counterfactuals imagine a better past and present and there is nothing to be done about them. Compounding the impotence of the exercise is the fact that most of the people speculating on what could have been have never been in a position to make the fateful decision. I guess some people find it helpful to process the shouldas, wouldas and couldas, but to me it’s a form of horrendous masochism because it is too late to do anything and you never had the power to do anything in the first place.

The only useful counterfactual is the kind that teaches us lessons for the future. Modelling might-have-beens for Covid, for example, can help to prepare us for the next pandemic. More often, however, the exercise is about assigning blame and claiming foresight. It’s not so much “If only this hadn’t happened” as “If only you had listened to me”. Trump’s election victory in 2016 has been variously pinned on Hillary Clinton, the media, non-voters, Russian interference, James Comey and Susan Sarandon, to name just a few. The possible culprits behind Jeremy Corbyn’s failure include Blairites, Remainers and the media (again), as well as Corbyn himself. In the realm of counterfactuals, humility is a rare commodity. It’s unusual to find somebody who declares that if their advice had been heeded, then things would have been much worse.

The multiverse remains just a theory, albeit an increasingly popular one, because the existence of other universes has neither been confirmed nor disproved and, many quantum physicists argue, never can be. Some say that therefore it is not a scientific hypothesis at all but a philosophical concept. If, like the Flash, we could move between worlds, then we could know for sure where every possible branch in the road would have led and settle every argument for good. But we remain firmly stuck in the only universe we have ever known.

Not to spoil either movie, but both Everything Everywhere All At Once and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness wind up rejecting the escapism of the multiverse by suggesting that every alternative version of us has its own problems and that the most decent and rational choice is to learn to live better in our own universe. I think that’s the wisest response to the temptation of political counterfactuals as well: Here we are, like it or not. What do we do now?

I wonder what Lumet would make of studios greenlighting entire movies to “state the reasons”. Largely thanks to Emma Stone’s spiky charm, the 101 Dalmatians prequel Cruella made $233m on its release in May. If Hollywood can rehabilitate a puppy-skinner who is basically called Cruel Devil, then all bets are off. Following prequels to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ratched) and The Sopranos (The Many Saints of Newark), get ready for the origin stories of Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story and Gru from Despicable Me. The ubiquitous Timothée Chalamet is currently shooting the Roald Dahl prequel Wonka. Now that Netflix has acquired the Roald Dahl Story Company, the only obstacle to a Young BFG movie is that he would sound too much like a rapper.

Blame, in part, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which bucked William Goldman’s “Nobody knows anything” maxim by building a series of interconnected movies into Hollywood’s dream scenario: a safe bet. Constructing a universe around beloved IP is the business model of our times, besides which inventing characters and worlds from scratch looks like a terrible bother. But the MCU has six decades of comic-book mythology to work with and, because it had a plan from day one, relentless forward momentum. Most IP-juicing requires starting with well-known movies and working sideways or, increasingly, backwards.

For the Star Wars empire, whose first three prequels notoriously depleted global supplies of exposition, that means Solo and Rogue One, both set prior to the Star Wars movies that people fell in love with. For The Wizard of Oz, the blockbuster musical Wicked asks how those witches ended up so mean. Meanwhile in the world of superheroes, Joker reaped 11 Oscar nominations by presenting Gotham City’s murderous chaos agent as the product of bullying, insufficient mental health care, urban decay and toxic showbiz. Not so judgemental now, Batman.

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Some of these are successful entertainments but, nonetheless, ones that nobody asked for. I doubt that any child has ever watched the Wicked Witch of the West and thought, “Huh, what’s her story?” Most of these stories were originally written before the rise of pop psychology, when it was OK for a character to be wicked or bizarre without inviting an investigation into nature, nurture and the long-term consequences of trauma.

It’s not that there are no successful attempts to mine a character’s past for information that might decode their behaviour. Citizen Kane’s Rosebud or Vito Corleone’s salad days in The Godfather Part II are gold-plated arguments for the value of an artful backstory. But screenwriters are obsessed with providing damp-squib answers to questions that nobody was asking. I enjoy reading interviews with the people behind prequels as they try to justify the exercise without admitting that the only important question these movies are answering is “How can we squeeze more money out of this IP?” Ever wondered how Han Solo got his name? Me neither. Turns out he was alone a lot. Cool.

Television has its own version of rubber-ducky syndrome, now that flashbacks are de rigueur and grief has replaced alcoholism as a short cut to depth of character. Baptiste was already the most depressing cop show on TV — Camus of the Yard — before they killed off Baptiste’s daughter and his hallucinations of a stuffed toy elephant turned tragedy into accidental comedy. Another recent BBC procedural, Vigil, was grippingly assured in the present-day scenes but drifted off course in the flashbacks. It was as if writer Tom Edge didn’t trust us to believe that a woman would feel uncomfortable investigating a murder on a submarine (pretty stressful!) unless she had previously experienced her own watery calamity. Watching these shows back-to-back with Mare of Easttown, I began to wonder if a shocking bereavement was a requirement of the job. It feels a little crass to milk grief so frequently, and unnecessary, too.

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How much do we need to know about a TV detective to be invested in a whodunnit? Columbo had an indelibly eccentric personality (mostly improvised by Peter Falk) but no stated first name and no private life except for a wife we never saw (unless you happen to have watched the flop 1979 spin-off Mrs Columbo). Columbo was what he did, and that was enough.

What Lumet and Chayefsky were really getting at with their rubber-ducky quip was the pretence that explaining everything is akin to psychological veracity. We are all shaped by our experiences, good and bad, but rarely in a clear or simple way. Psychotherapists don’t identify one essential turning point in a client’s life (“Hmm, Dalmatians, you say?”) and then close the case. Sometimes, one can know every factor and still encounter a terrifying, unilluminable void at the heart of a personality. In real life, not everybody who does appalling things is misunderstood.

There is, of course, a humane liberal impulse to understand how circumstances can corrupt an individual; how the abused can become the abuser. It is the job of psychologists and the criminal justice system to get beyond the idea that certain people are irredeemably sinful, and the task of historians to fathom how seemingly ordinary people could become complicit in atrocities. Authors such as Gitta Sereny (who wrote about the Nazis Albert Speer and Franz Stangl and the 10-year-old child-killer Mary Bell) and Gordon Burn (who chronicled the serial killers Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West) dedicated their lives to interrogating the problem of human evil.

Disney and Warner Brothers, needless to say, are not engaged in that painful work but in the trivialising of trauma to give profit-seeking entertainment a veneer of psychological curiosity. It is both morally dubious and narratively absurd. In storytelling, villainy often has a theatrical boo-hiss quality that requires no elucidation.

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Why is Cruella a canicidal fashionista? Because otherwise Dodie Smith’s story would have been just a bunch of dogs running about. Why is the Joker a cackling killer? Because the joylessly uptight Batman needed an antithesis. In Frank Miller’s 1986 graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, a pompous psychologist appears on a talk show with the Joker to argue that he is not so much evil as horribly mistreated. The Joker promptly kills him, and everybody else in the room, with glee.

It’s true that Miller was a law-and-order conservative who enjoyed poking fun at bleeding-heart liberals but, like Christopher Nolan, he also knew that the Joker is compelling because he is beyond understanding. Ridley Scott squandered a great deal of time and money on making two prequels to his own Alien, even though the unknowable menace of the creature was what made the 1979 movie such a taut shocker. More often than not, additional information makes antagonists less intriguing.

As one of the showrunners of Lost, Damon Lindelof was as responsible as anybody for the backstory epidemic, creating a time-hopping narrative tangle that concluded with a crushing disappointment. He was then a co-conspirator on the Alien prequel Prometheus. On his next show, The Leftovers, he learned his lesson and leaned into his characters’ reactions to the mysterious disappearance of 2% of humanity rather than the reasons for the event. Trauma was the cake rather than the icing, and therefore taken seriously. In becoming so comfortable with complexity and ambiguity, Lindelof made one of the finest shows of the decade. The theme tune of the second series summed up the ethos of the whole show and the reason behind its success. It was a song by country singer Iris DeMent: Let the Mystery Be.

Meanwhile, column inches continue to be generated by whether or not the next 007 should be a woman, and Superman is now bisexual. Just as reliable as the output of these franchises is the grumbling about our apparent inability to come up with fresh new stories.

The usual explanation given for the domination of franchises over new material is that media industries like a known quantity. But what if the real problem lies deeper? What if, in truth, we’re no longer able to come up with new stories because we’ve turned storytelling itself into a branch of influencer culture?

This was the unsettling implication of last week’s water-cooler debate: “Kidneygate”. A long New York Times essay told the strange story of Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson, two aspiring writers now embroiled in a bitter dispute.

Dorland donated a kidney to a stranger, then created a Facebook group to talk about her “journey”, and shared it with her writing group. Larson, a member of the same writing group, then wrote a short story depicting an egotistical and implicitly borderline racist woman donating a kidney. When Dorland learned this, she began an increasingly monomaniacal campaign of lawfare against Larson.

Like the dress that was either black and blue or white and gold, the story prompted a lot of debate. When does taking material from the world around you stop being legitimate and become invasive? Do we “own” our own stories? Or as the NYT put it: “Who is the Bad Art Friend?”

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But perhaps the question should be: would you trade a kidney for a shot at immortality? For while on the face of it Kidneygate seems to be two women arguing about art, in truth it’s about the only form of immortality on offer since the internet killed literature: clout.

Once upon a time, the way to get famous as a writer was to publish a book. But the internet inverted that. The print publishing industry today is both bigger than ever and more beleaguered than ever by competition from other media, not to mention the ocean of free digital content. The result is diminishing returns: more than 188,000 books are published every year in the UK alone, but only 5% of authors sell enough to earn more than £30,000 a year.

Against that backdrop, not unreasonably, publishers are more likely to be interested in people with the sort of profile that will help market their work. There are countless talented writers out there; the decisive factor in who gets the book deal is often being an existing player in public conversation. In other words, the swiftest route to becoming a famous author today is already being famous for something else.

That means aspiring writers need that indispensable resource for an attention economy: “clout”, which translates roughly as “the number of eyeballs you can persuade to notice you online”. And chasing clout is indisputably a skill, albeit not a literary one.

Building up clout can be done several ways, but perhaps the two most common are emotional exhibitionism and identity-politics controversy. Expert wielders of clout attract fans and haters in equal measure, set people arguing among themselves and then leverage the resulting public profile for real-world power or earnings.

One such expert clout-engineer is Nikocado Avocado, real name Nick Perry, a YouTube celebrity famous for his “extreme eating” or “muckbang” videos. Nikocado Avocado’s content is voyeuristic in the extreme. Categories on his channel include “Fights”, “Emotional” and “Upset Feelings” among others. More importantly, he has 2.6 million subscribers — a store of clout that translates into serious earnings. In 2019, his net worth was estimated at $3m.

It’s almost impossible to go too far with this kind of content. The only unforgivable crime, as far as consumers are concerned, is being caught faking the emotion. “Mommy vlogger” Jordan Cheyenne was recently pilloried after she accidentally uploaded an unedited video of herself and her child, in which she could be heard encouraging her child to act like he was crying. She has since deleted her channel.

In the more traditional cultural spheres of academia, politics and literature, competition for eyeballs drives clout-chasing identity politics controversies. These can be guaranteed to spice up any otherwise dull policy debate with angry culture war clicks, while handily boosting the profile of the would-be activist. Perhaps the consummate operator in this mode is the US Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who attained meme status recently by appearing at the $30,000-a-ticket US Met Gala in a white dress with “TAX THE RICH” scrawled across the back, then blamed the criticism she received on racism and sexism.

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In every case, though, the core feature of clout-chasing is that it centres not on what you say, but on others’ perception of who (or what) you are. And here we see the heart of Kidneygate: a dispute over who gets to use the organ-donation story as a means of cultivating their public self.

If Nikocado Avocado figuratively spills his guts for those who follow his channel, Kidneygate saw someone spill them literally — and then post about it on social media. Dorland created a Facebook group to collect the applause she expected to receive. She walked in a local parade as ambassador for organ donation. She even created a hashtag: #domoreforeachother.

Larson, in contrast, wanted to use the kidney-donation story alongside her own Asian-American ethnic identity to boost her profile with a short story about “white saviour” politics. That is, she wanted to apply the clout-rich filter of American racial politics to this highly emotive content, in order to increase her own standing in the world of fiction-writing. And it should have worked: before Dorland’s legal action scuppered the offer, Larson’s work had been selected for “One City One Story”, a Boston literary award that would have seen her short story distributed free all over the city.

I’m just about old enough to remember the Before Times prior to mass social media. Back then, we still clung to the idea that writing was about immortality — an idea captured by Shakespeare: “So long as men can breathe and eyes can see/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

Now, though, writing a book is just part of the “media mix”. Where fame used to be a means of getting your message out, now messages are a means of getting your fame out. In September, CBS launched The Activist, a show that turns political activism into reality TV — and where successful activism is measured “via online engagement, social metrics, and hosts’ input”. Never mind making a tangible real-world impact: like successful writing, successful activism is measured in clout.

And once you’ve attained enough of it, you can pivot effortlessly from reality TV to book-writing, perfume launches, politics or whatever. The only condition is that, like Harry and Meghan, you continue to feed gobbets of personal tragedy, emotional intensity, marginalised identity or some other kind of emotive content to the clout machine.

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Do this, and the whole media mix is yours. It’s not just the raft of celebrities flocking to write children’s books. The 22-year-old poet Amanda Gorman made history earlier this year as Biden’s inauguration poet, as much for her look and ethnicity as her aggressively bland poetry. Shortly after the inauguration, she signed a modelling contract.

And this pipeline works just as well in reverse. Transgender model Munroe Bergdorf has a threadbare literary track record, having attained clout mostly for being photographed wearing clothes, or for public rows with corporations and gender-critical feminists over identity politics. And yet Bergdorf received a six-figure advance from Bloomsbury for the “memoir and manifesto” Transitional.

The true message of Kidneygate, then, is not about art but what art now serves. It signals that if we allow it, the world of letters will irrecoverably join cinema, music, politics and activism as mulch for an online economy of attention.

And the Faustian nature of the bargain is increasingly clear. A culture powered solely by the hunger for intensity will devour any form of culture that isn’t already literal pornography. For in a raw economy of attention, the aesthetic or moral value of your work is irrelevant: what matters is emotional intensity and the power to generate discussion. Whether it’s politics, art, literature, music or simply people’s personal lives, the clout economy will transmute it, by a kind of reverse alchemy, into pornography of the self.

Before pivoting to YouTube emotional exhibitionism. Nikocado Avocado dreamed of being a concert violinist. Before pivoting to organ donation for clicks, Dawn Dorland dreamed of being a celebrated author. But there’s little clout to be gained through working hard at creating beauty for a common cultural domain. No wonder one in five British children want to be social media influencers when they grow up. And when everyone’s so busy crafting their online selves, no wonder there’s no creative energy left to dream new shared stories, leaving us nothing but zombie franchises crudely gingered-up by the culture wars.

Will we rediscover an ability to resist donating everything — even our organs — to the clout machine? I hope so. If we don’t soon regain a measure of digital self-restraint, the endpoint of every aspiration will be emotional porn. Or perhaps we could call it Kidneygate culture: a never-ending livestream of lost and miserable souls self-defining, fighting, crying, binge-eating or quite literally eviscerating themselves, all for our voyeuristic pleasure.