Possibilities emerging: Jess Hines on the disruptive power of stories
Jess Hines has worked in the film and broadcast industry in the UK and India for 20 years, including on films like Lagaan and Slumdog Millionaire, has written a bestselling book on Bollywood called Looking for the Big B: Bollywood, Bachchan and Me, and is the co-founder of Fingerprint Content. Jess is an expert in the overlap between politics, action and entertainment. She has led creative projects on climate change, renewable energy, air pollution and avoidable blindness in the UK, US and India, and has a passion for finding ways of using culture to create access to new audiences.
In this interview Jess reflects on the power that stories have to change how we think and behave in the world, and how they can help us connect or reconnect with a sense of magic and endless possibility.
This is the fourth in a series of possibility-oriented interviews published by Foundations Earth. We are currently engaging with active members of communities responding to our inquiry: ‘What if we could respond inclusively and effectively to planetary-scale problems?’ To learn more about our work you can visit our website or check out our inquiry.
At what crossroads do you find yourself at this moment in time?
I have been having a series of discussions with my children around this, because of their growing, emergent knowledge of what's going on, and their place in it, and what they're going to have to deal with.
I think that for me, my personal crossroads is around what I can do to affect the most amount of change in the least amount of time. Because everything that is in the area that I work in takes such a long time.
I don't know how many people reading this will be as aware of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as I am. However, there is a bit at the end of Buffy, that final season, where they have to take on the whole of Hell, basically, opening up in Southern California. Rather than there being one slayer per generation, they go large, change the rules and awaken all of the slayers in the world at once, and they give them all the same powers. There is this moment where rather than there being one person fighting evil, every possible person in that generation who could have become a slayer is then one.
So for me, the crossroads is: how do I do that? How do I trigger the maximum number of people in the business of storytelling to become the storytellers that we need, to be able to tell the stories that will help us get through to the next phase of our planet's history, in a way that is positive and allows for there to be a generative idea of how we can live, rather than it being all doom and gloom. So that's my crossroads: how do I do that?
Thanks a lot. What is it that is enlivening you that you see hatching or growing wildly in the commons?
The marginal spaces, the unwanted and wastelands that fall outside of institutional control are where the most exciting things happen for sure. What excites me is that what is happening there, what has been happening there, is also finding its way into the mainstream, into a wider consciousness. Which is always the way of these things, but perhaps what is different now is that the types of marginal and liminal places are increasing - it’s not just what the kids are doing in XY or Z city in USA, but what different cultures are doing around the world. The types of story that have lived on the margins for generations - those of the tribal and indigenous peoples - these are now being heard.
Which is essential because we need all of the stories and the types of storytelling and ways of seeing the world to reach everyone many times. And the ways that we have been conceptualising our world and our place in it have perhaps limited our ability to see how to change and adapt. Huge swathes of the habitable areas of the world are under the stewardship of indigenous peoples - we need to hear them and use their words to help structure our future. Because right now we are crashing the planet.
When you start working with stories from other peoples, one of the key themes is that there is no separation between humans and nature, because humans are nature, which is obviously true. But we seem to have forgotten – or be really good at forgetting – that.
Everyone hopes that culture can do everything, but they fear it does nothing, because it's really hard to measure. But actually, if you allow for the magic and the unknown, and the way that something will spark something in someone else [...] It's very freeing and it's really, really exciting.
Nice, thank you. When you're paying attention to the stories that you're hearing, that are about our interdependence with nature, how are you being affected by them?
I think for me, a lot of it is coming back to my own personal ability to connect into nature.
I grew up in Cornwall in the 70s and 80s, in a very small hamlet where there was only six houses and the school I went to had 30 children, from bottom infants up to top juniors. Everyone else's parents were either farmers or fishermen.
There's literally nothing to do – hundreds of miles nothing – and so my connectivity to the natural world was really intense. My first thing that I did was I would write entire life histories, illustrated life histories of the oak tree.
I always felt like the walls between the worlds were thinner than people realised. Whether that be the natural world, or the spirit world. I don't know, something was wrong with my brain and my vision, but I used to have these moments of everything tunneling away really fast, like I was looking at things from very far away. Or time would slow down, I’d go into a kind of trance that made all my movements appear really slow. Or I could see the energy and the vibrations that plants and things have - the world would shimmer. Anyway, I just felt, often, part of being in a slightly separate space between the everyday world and the 'extra-natural' world. Not sure if I’ve ever shared that before.
Where I grew up, there were a lot of standing stones. When I got older, I understood the idea of the ley lines and the different patterns of energy around the world, around the earth.
For me, it's about allowing myself to go: you know this. You know this at a cellular level, and you know what's right, and you know that this is something that everyone else could tap into, if they allowed themselves to do it.
This is probably not for everyone's consumption, but when you're pregnant, everyone gets you to do all these endless exercises with your core, and to practice your kegels, and practice your this-that-and-the-others. And basically, what you realise when you're actually giving birth is it's not about control; it's about knowing what's going on inside you with enough clarity so that you can let go and open.
I do feel like there is this thing about people being able to let go, into that understanding of the fact that there is magic around us [...] that it is touching us all the time. We just have to let ourselves feel it. And I think that that interdependence between us and the world, and the fact that we are nature and nature is us, is something that I feel is growing in myself as I let myself go more and more into it – at the same time as doing producer things - budgets and contracts; endless, endless hours on the phone with lawyers.
So there is the practicality of being able to get stuff made and out into the world, and at the same time allowing the understanding of the magic to seep back through.
The Merry Maidens Stone Circle in Penzance, from Praveen Goonathilake (available here)
What you just said there about letting go felt like a declaration of possibility, which is my next question: What declaration of possibility can you make that has the power to transform our response to planetary scale problems?
The possibility for me is the fact that we as humans – what we do best is storytelling. For better or for worse.
Stories are not sweet. They have immense power to shape our world in profound ways, for good or for bad. Stories enable wars and exploitation, prejudice, greed and the insanity of late-stage capitalism. Think about the slave trade, imperialism or even smoking. These were all sanctioned and perpetuated by stories that framed our position in the world in a particular way.
Politicians know that politics lives downstream of culture and that if you want to change the politics of the time, you have to change the culture it lives in. Stories do this.
Stories have power because we invest energy in them. Religions rise and fall. Myths and legends and teaching construct the world and give it meaning. Until they don’t.
When we fall in love we spin worlds out of the glorious golden gossamer threads of our miraculous chemistry. We map. We plan. We will futures into existence because we want them. We form islands of meaning where before there was nothing.
We fall in love with the person and the potential of the person and what is possible if we combine our potential futures and create newness together. It drums into existence our own locus of gravity and what is generated together is a fierce ‘fuck you’ to entropy. Falling in love is as monumental as a star nursery ever could be.
But if one or both people stop believing in the story, the maps fade. The once-bold naming of places and things and ways to be lose their legibility and the lands disappear back beneath the waves.
The potential is the fact that the most powerful set of stories that get told every day are the small stories that we tell each other and ourselves.
It's the stories we tell each other and the mosaics we piece together out of shared experiences and collective chatter. These stories often do not have fabulous narrative arcs, tragic heroes or quests of dramatic daring do.
These stories are the ones we gather in, it's the collecting of berries not the hunting of beasts, it is the quieter quilting of our lives; the small exchanges and the subtle shifts.
And this is not the storytelling equivalent of choosing public transport versus choosing not to drill in the Caspian basin.
Messaging is important but the people who tell the tales are more so – and we all have people who listen to and hear us. It is these types of stories that make religions rise and fall, for nationalism to flare and fizzle. It is these funny, sad, personal yarns that feel insignificant or minimal at the time that actually change the world.
What courage is required of you in that storytelling?
What I can do is [...] around allowing people to understand that their stories have power, and have meaning, and have the ability to change the world. It may seem like you're alone in the dark, but the stories will light the way out.
The courage that is required of me is to be able to stand up and basically fight for people to be able to do that, to be able to have the space and time to be able to tell the stories that we need to get there. It's not all on me, but that's what I can do. So the courage that is required of me is to, every day, stand up and say: this is what we need to do.
To not give into the dark or feeling hopeless but that I need to remind people all day every day that it is stories that can save the world. That takes courage because it means you are wedded to hope, and to maintain that marriage? That is harder each day.
And what do you want or need from your community or communities to make that happen?
Having [things] reflected back, or seeing what other people are doing, is always encouraging and inspiring. If you see people creating great art – or even crap art, but [art] that makes a point – that kind of gives you the hope. Because there's nothing else. So I think what I need from them is for people to keep finding the ability to express their own hopes and dreams around climate, the end of the world, in a way that allows me to feed off.
I’ve just read a really great short article. I don't know if you've read Ben Okri’s new book about climate called Tiger Work. It is the best thing I've read about climate in a long time. He talks about [how] what we have now is a moment of creative existentialism, which has to be driven by love and by hope, because if we are creating in the end times, what is it that we're going to be creating? And how is it that we do what we need to do in a way that is marks in the sand, is the ability to etch down for future generations to be able to see that we tried to be good ancestors? I think that could be something that gives me courage – the ability to be a creative existentialist.
And what would you want or need from your community, to be driven by that hope?
One of the things that you learn working in Bollywood is that "more is more" - nothing succeeds like excess baby. I knew one creative whose response to most situations was that it wasn't enough, "Is there a shortage?" was one of his favourite phrases.
I feel like that around stories. I mean, stories aren't, in themselves, going to push us over a planetary boundary. So I think that we can sort of be wanton in our consumption and our creation of those. And I think that's what I need from other people.
I’m feeling an urge to ask you: at what crossroads do you think we stand in terms of our storytelling?
I honestly think that the other side is winning. And I say ‘other side’ very clearly – that there is another side who is telling a different set of stories, where everything is either trying to delay, obfuscate, push back, keep things as they are. I think we have no real conception of the amount of money and effort being put into keeping things as they are [...] Sometimes it can be a bit depressing, but I think it's just something that we need to acknowledge, and I think that we tend to get swept up in our own sort of specialness. Whereas the harsh truth is that, whilst we may very well be fabulous good humans doing fabulous good things, the other side is winning - and winning hard. If it wasnt, we wouldnt be on such a go-slow on anything to do with positive change.
If you go outside of the deep green pool, people don't have any real sense of urgency, or any sort of understanding of what the timescale is [...] So I think that my fear is that we are on the backfoot in a way that we just do not understand.
I also think that, I mean, I know that humans can do this. I know that we've got the tech now to be able to do what we need to do technologically [...] but will we do it in time, so that we avoid the worst excesses of climate change? Can we stop ourselves from having to go through that moment of purge? I don't know. But I know that we will get there eventually.
Okay, the final question from me: what meaning has been made for you, or not, in this conversation?
I tend to make meaning very slowly - with gentle turnings - like a fine wine (har har) or, more probably, a smelly blue cheese.
I think the way that this has helped with that continued accrual of meaning is to confirm my own bias for the wastelands and marginal spaces as being the place I’m psychologically happiest for a reason - because they totally rock. I often think that if I was brutally murdered and dumped in an exhaust encrusted lay-by or a shallow gravelly ditch, or on the tide line in a remote bay, that it wouldn't be so bad really. I’d be home for a whole new layer of hardscrabble adventurers, plants and animals, and corals and things. A place that gives energy and life to those who only know how to be the first into a hostile environment.
So, I could get behind that. I’m here to try and provide that for those storytellers on the margins, or who want to tell tales that are not the mainstream. And that’s a good place to be. Alive or dead. Ha.
This interview was conducted by James Lock, with editing support from Sam Walby and Jack Becher.
Learn more about Jess’s work at Fingerprint Content or connect via LinkedIn.
Find out more about Foundations Earth on our website, or check out our organisational summary and core inquiry.
