BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… STORIES FOUND & TOLD. “These are the classic monster movies, like Frankenstein,” Dustin is saying, pointing to several shelves full of DVDs. “Over there, the formation of Western civilization. Here, action films. There, horror. Here, documentaries.”
Associate editor Dustin Burkett is giving me a tour of his film room. In the new StateoftheOzarks Magazine, film and book recommendations are a regular segment. Film is now part of my job description. I glance up. On top of the bookshelves are displayed classic VHS tapes, cover art composed of classic lines and vintage colors, the style of a 20th century finding its way. I pick three films, feeling like a child again.
The mechanical parrot in its brass cage flaps its wings and squawks. One of the kids in town must have dropped in a quarter. I didn’t know any of the kids in town, being a home schooled country kid. As a treat, we rent videos on special weekends. I always hoped by the time we got to the corner gas station-turned-convenience store-turned soft-serve ice cream dispensary-turned lottery-beer-and-video mart, that they would not have already rented out what I wanted. There were no guarantees on a Friday afternoon. Animated classics, fantasies, aliens, dinosaurs, dragons, and magic were in high demand on a random March weekend in the 1980s. I turn back to the wall of VHS tapes, just another eight-year old boy looking for The Sword in the Stone.
“It’s just a movie.” I disagree. Film is a shared language, stories like fire, a sacred rite of sorts, warming us, making sense of a world forever gone mad. Stories are how civilization is built.
“Don’t sit too close to the TV.” Fortunately, nobody ever told me that, unless my head was blocking the view of a football play, at which point my mom would have just scooped my toddler self up and out of the way. The flickering light of the big faux wood Magnavox TV was a campfire of sorts. It was there I watched every Bugs Bunny, every Scooby Do, every Ducktales, every Star Trek available. Even today, when I mention Ducktales to people of my certain age, I can watch their eyes light up. Not because I remember the show — I am inconsequential to their story — but because they remember.
Today, we’re enduring a season of very small screens and an age of prequel-sequel-reboot-franchise slop. It’s a time when risk — and storytelling is a risk — has been minimized by taking the greatest risk of all: telling stories that aren’t really stories but instead the contemporary equivalent of a young child saying, “And then THIS happened.” Principle, risk and core civilization have been replaced with critical deconstructionist essay.
Deconstruction can do many things. It can hector, belabor, scold, and demand. What deconstruction cannot do is inspire and that is the power of storytelling. To reach into the past, to reach into the deep, dark well of our own souls, to look around us, eyes wide, set cynicism aside, and then reach to the heavens — though we be but mortal clay — and tell something very old but also very new. It is an imperfect process.
The blush sky at twilight is a special kind of grandeur. Venus winks into light in the far western horizon. High above, Jupiter is chasing the moon. From this mountain, over and across the deep holler, I see the lights of a semi truck tracing the ridge. Beyond? A big lighted mountaintop billboard. Beneath, in the dusky heat of a late March night, an Arkansas cowboy’s boots sound hollow as he walks into a gas station. The quiet, the overlooked, the forgotten, the magnificent, in fleeting moments the spark of the divine may be seen in them all, again, in stories found and told.
— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks
© StateoftheOzarks 2026
