A culture or society may not be defined by its myths but it is nevertheless fascinating to try to explore the way in which patterns and motifs recur throughout a society's stories, and to seek some underlying meaning within these traditions. The ancient Greeks had their own particular mythology as did the Scandinavians, the Celts, the Maori, the Australian Aboriginals… every traditional people in fact. The dominant tropes, symbols and structures exhibited by mythologies vary from people to people but every community seems to require some kind of mythology, to bind it together and to help it make sense of the world. Fairy stories, for instance, such as the story of Cinderella who marries the king, can be considered a more recent, Christian-era European mythology that promulgated the consoling idea that upwards mobility was possible in an era of social stratification. Mythologies change over time and it may be possible to learn something about a people from the stories it tells and consumes. In this post, I want to talk about a few modern mythologies and hazard some guesses about what they say about the world we live in now.
The first trope I wish to discuss is the story of a war between Good and Evil, a war in which the whole of creation is at stake, where Evil wishes to eliminate Good utterly from the world and vice versa. This narrative form is common to almost all modern Fantasy works – obvious examples include The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and the Harry Potter series. It is so common today that it is easy to forget that it is a twentieth century invention, that it was created principally by Tolkien. The trope of a war between Good and Evil does not really feature in traditional mythologies - in ancient Greek mythology, for instance, the gods are as willful, capricious and morally ambiguous as ordinary people and, in the Iliad, the Trojans are presented as sympathetically as the Greeks. It is tempting to see this trope as originating during the Christian era, with Christianity's tendency to divide the world into polar opposites (virtue and vice, God and the devil, heaven and hell, truth and falsehood, Church doctrine and heresy)… except that the trope of a war between Good and Evil did not really gain traction until a time when the Christian mythology (along with many other great meta-narratives such as those used to justify the British empire) was disintegrating. It would also be tempting to see the trope of a war between Good and Evil as a metaphor for the Cold War - it was Reagan (I think) who described the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire' after all – except I think it is more likely that it was Reagan who borrowed his rhetoric from Fantasy fiction rather than the other way around. Both of these tempting suppositions must be wrong. I would argue that the emergence of this trope, and of Fantasy fiction in general, occurred as a reaction against a world that had become increasingly rational and morally relativistic, at a time when Christianity was in decline. In an age of science and moral relativism, the simple absolutes presented by Fantasy fiction were enjoyed as an antidote.
The trope of a war between Good and Evil is, of course, not the only modern mythology. Another common myth is the myth of the 'superhero'. Superman is a quite a lot like Hercules or Thor, a man of massive power who vanquishes monsters or giants. The difference is that Superman uses his strength to save ordinary people from natural disasters or criminals, a vocation that never occurred to Hercules or Thor. Superman is a kind of savior figure; superheroes are almost always vigilantes. And they are members of the community they serve and protect; Superman is secretly Clarke Kent, Spiderman is secretly Peter Parker. It is tempting to assume that America summoned the 'superhero' trope out of its collective imagination because people had become much more afraid of crime in the 'fifties then they once were…. but again this supposition must be wrong. The problem with it is that the Middle Ages were vastly less safe, vastly more violent, than the twentieth century, and villagers then felt no need to invent superheroes. It is almost as though modern citizens in the twentieth century invented the idea of the 'superhero' because they didn't need one.
The anthropologist Levi-Strauss has argued that many myths associated with a culture are variants of each other, according to rules 'of symmetry and inversion' (I take this quote from a book by Patrick Harpur). Superman dresses gaudily and gains his power from the sun; Batman only works at night and dresses as a bat. Superman is an extraterrestrial who has descended to earth as a child; Batman is an ordinary man who was 'made' by the murder of his parents. Batman is the purer vigilante. Superhero stories are also stories of Good versus Evil but Batman, who is a good guy, deliberately associates himself with darkness and fear as though, by doing so, he can hold them at bay. Bruce Wayne is like the child who dresses as a vampire or witch at Halloween. But every good guy needs a bad guy and, in the two best Batman films, his adversary is a homicidal clown. The Joker is an inversion of Batman - for one thing, he takes nothing seriously while for Batman everything is in deadly earnest. The Joker does not just pose a physical threat to the Batman, he poses an existential threat - he threatens to expose the absurdity of Wayne's play-acting. In a way, the Joker is more real than the Batman.
Earlier in the post, I said that modern citizens invented superheroes because they didn't need them. Real life Jokers, super villains from whom we require protection, simply don't exist in our world. And neither, in fact, do real life vigilantes. Is it not strange that, in the twentieth century when vigilantes disappeared from the real world (at least in America and Europe), they returned in our stories?
The last myth I want to investigate are 'vampire' stories. Vampire myths have been around a long time. Bram Stoker did not invent the idea of the vampire but Dracula is the definitive text. Yet the type of vampire fiction on which I want to focus is typified by films such as The Lost Boys and Near Dark. Before I discuss these films, I need to make a sociological point. In primitive cultures, people were divided into children and adults and engaged in initiation rituals when passing from one life stage to the next; in the 1950's though, in Western society a third category was invented, the category of teenagers and young adults. Children now sought membership in this social group, the group of peers slightly older then them, and their way of achieving this was through a flouting of adult rules – through drug use, graffiti, long hair, rock music, piercings, tattoos, casual sex… To be initiated into the world of the cool kids, one needed to transgress. And this is what these vampire films represent. In both films, the young male protagonist is unwittingly initiated into the world of the vampires, either through a bite from an attractive female vampire or by accidentally drinking vampire blood. For a time, the protagonist lives outside the safe adult world with its moral regulations but, in both, he somehow and with help escapes the clutches of the vampires and he returns to society as a human. Both films at their ends reject teen culture. And yet these films were both made in the late 'eighties when teen culture was arguably at its strongest. Is this not also strange?
I think I have reached a point in this post where I can draw some conclusions. It is tempting when interpreting the mythologies of a culture to assume that the mythology somehow represents that culture. But this is not the case. The dominant myths are in fact concerned with everything the culture excludes. If the dominant culture, what Jung calls the 'collective consciousness', represents the Ego, stories emerge out of the Shadow instead. In a world of science and moral relativism, we enjoy the magic and absolutes of fantasy fiction. In a world that no longer requires vigilantes, we seek out vigilante stories. In a world which celebrates and exalts teen culture, we take pleasure in vampire stories that present teen culture as dangerous. Myths in some strange way act as a counterbalance to the culture; for instance, the more violent the literature, the less violent the society. Perhaps we can examine the culture of a society by interpreting its stories backwards. The culture is in key respects the exact opposite of its stories.
This is perhaps a provocative thesis, although it is one I have hinted at before in this blog. I may return to this idea in a later post.
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