The kind of recipe for success that a soft-drink company might guard with fierce vigilance, a movie company puts online for all to see. Emma Coats, a former storyboard artist at Pixar, sent out a list of the company’s “22 Rules of Storytelling.” I confess, I thought there was just one—“whatever works”—though it’s no surprise to learn that Pixar, a Disney subsidiary, has codified its process to a programmatic uniformity.*

Some of the rules are psychological exercises that don’t relate to composition but to a writer’s self-knowledge. (“10. Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it”; “20. Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?”) Others have to do with practical aspects of writing and have no apparent impact on results. (“11. Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone”; “17. No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on—it’ll come back around to be useful later.”) And some are utter hucksterism, intended to start the writer off with premises so bland that the results would have to be… well, a Pixar movie. (“1. You admire a character for trying more than for their successes”; “16. What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.”)

Pixar films make me feel as if I were watching the cinematic equivalent of irresistibly processed food, with a ramped-up and carefully calibrated dosing of the emotional versions of salt, sugar, and fat. But the fulsome orthodoxy of the twenty-two rules goes far beyond a single company’s flavor spectrum to a crisis that is endemic to the modern cinema, that is, in fact, one of the strange, unintended consequences of cinematic modernity: the very notion of “storytelling” and the obsession with characters and whether they’re admirable or likable.

I’ve gone down this road before, suggesting that the story is the equivalent of a musical melody or an architectural framework: a basis, not a goal; an element that may either be charmingly memorable or ingeniously conceived, but that is merely a starting point for a significant work, not a result. And just as the marketing of a variety of processed foods turns the ostensible foodstuff into a delivery system for its additives, the story-processing that the Pixar list outlines turns movies into a delivery system for a uniform set of emotional juicings, and the result, whether for C.G.I. or for live-action films, is a sort of cyborg cinema, a prefabricated simulacrum of experience and emotion that feels like the nexus of pornography and propaganda.

The paradox, however, is that the most appalling examples at hand aren’t those of the ostensible purveyors of cinematic fast food. They’re those of the sludgy middle ground of earnest dramas and so-called art films, whether produced here or in other countries—and the first sign (although in no way a definitive one) is in the credit: “Written and directed by…”

One of the best things accomplished in classic Hollywood was the separating of the work of the screenwriter from that of the director—although some, such as Orson Welles and Joseph Mankiewicz, were equally adept in both realms, and although, credits be damned, the strong directors inevitably had a strong hand in making or changing (or discarding) the script. And it wasn’t just Hollywood: many of the classic works from the age of Italian neorealism (such as “Open City,” “Bicycle Thieves,” and “Chronicle of a Love Affair”) had many cooks on the screenplay broth. The result was to bring multiple perspectives into play, to create (as if journalistically) an ample world of incident on which the movie would be based—and to which the director could then respond as immediately and as critically as if to the world itself.

The problem with many (again, far from all) writer-directors is the sense that they devote more time, energy, emotional involvement, and free thought to the creation of the script than to the direction of the film, which, so often, comes off as the mere enactment and illustration of that script. It may be plain that I’m writing in endorsement of the art of the director, the so-called auteur—but that’s where the paradox comes in. One of the seminal texts of the politique des auteurs is by François Truffaut—the 1954 critical essay “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema”—and, after his rant against several of the most prominent figures of the French movie industry at the time, he puts forth his brief honor roll:

Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Becker, Abel Gance, Max Ophuls, Jacques Tati, Roger Leenhardt; these are, nevertheless, French cineastes and it happens—curious coincidence—that they are auteurs [authors] who often write their dialogue and some of them themselves invent the stories they direct.

And so it has happened: the age of the auteur has long been in full swing, the director is the acknowledged champion of cinematic art, but the script is nonetheless often the dominant factor in the on-screen results—all the more so, all-too-frequently, in independent or low-budget filmmaking. One reason is purely practical: the writing and revision of a script are virtually cost-free, so aspiring and struggling filmmakers have the most incentive to polish and rework it when that’s the object on which potential financiers are being asked to bet. Often, years are spent developing and refining a script which is then shot in weeks; the problem isn’t that the speed of direction kills—it can make for a thrilling spontaneity and immediacy—but that, when the script has been built with such solidity and has become an object of obsession for a year or more, it becomes not the springboard for filmmaking but its objective, and constrains the filmmaker to be its illustrator, which is exactly the feeling conveyed by many films. The very transition of screenwriters to direction often signifies the desire to protect one’s own script—rather than to have at it again with the sort of creative destruction with which strong filmmakers approach a script.

Just as the processed-food industries have refined their techniques over the years, so have the studios—and that’s why, despite the current golden age of cinematic idiosyncrasy, the gap between studio and independent productions (including big-budget ones with Hollywood-tested directors and actors) becomes ever greater. (The genius of Steven Spielberg—and I say this with no irony intended—is in his ability to grow processed food in his own garden and to do it with love.) As we moderns become more isolated—more occupied with our virtual lives, more distracted by a greater flow of information and stimulation—the emotional comfort food that the rules provide and the illusion of human connection by way of stories become all the more alluring. And that’s why, in the age of the Internet, the success of TV series is self-perpetuating: the plethora of online discussion they spark drives viewers further into online isolation and makes them all the hungrier for contact with characters and their stories.