Stuart Voytilla's book Myth and the Movies, a useful resource for creative writers, uses the notions of archetypes and “the hero's journey” to illuminate the deep mythic structure of major Hollywood movies. The book, aimed primarily at screenwriters, offers an easily digestible analysis of fifty classic films from a wide array of genres including westerns, film noir, horror, and romantic comedy. In addition to his concise prose and useful plot summaries, Voytilla literally graphs out the progression of the hero's path throughout each film, even listing the exact time at which the hero passes every milestone along the way. He rightly advises his readers to view the films in question prior to reading his text and smartly chooses films that should be available at your local video store.
Given his intended audience, Voytilla's book is by no means a scholarly text. But in the place of simple intelligent exegesis, we occasionally find reductionism to an extreme. While at first this stylistic choice may seem to be an easily dismissed minor problem, it belies a deeper issue, one that lies at the heart of our popular understanding of myth.
The first consequence of his reductionist approach is the misleading equation of myth as “hero journey.” Certainly, Voytilla's use of Joseph Campbell's model of mythic structure is justified given the kinds of movies he examines. Classical Hollywood cinema is marked by literal and metaphorical tales of lone protagonists slaying monsters in order to save kingdoms or rescue damsels in distress. The paradigm holds true for ancient and modern stories alike, so it has a fair degree of validity. The issue here is that by reducing myth into “hero's journey,” the complex nature of myth becomes obscured. There is no sense of the historical, regional or cultural specificity of a particular myth or myth cycle. At times, Voytilla does attempt to weave in contextualizing statements about American culture and how genre films reflect the zeitgeist. But he leaves us with pat observations unsupported by factual data.
Voytilla's definition of myth focuses on the organization of myth. He opens his book stating that “All stories consist of common structural elements or Stages found universally in myths, fairy tales, dreams, and movies” (5). By his logic we must pose the following question: if all stories contain these identifiable narrative steps, then what makes myth a special kind of story? He offers no answer. Perhaps the question is too academic. Maybe it's just semantics. But are we splitting hairs? I think not. It is important to discern the nature of myth as a unique form and mode of story telling. All myths are stories, but not all stories are myths. And what of archetypes? While Carl Jung's term has entrenched itself in the mind of the modern myth analyst, are there not other ways of examining and defining characters and their function within myth?
The second issue with Voytilla's overly simplified approach is that it neglects the rich scholarly work on myth and archetypes upon which Campbell himself based his own work. It is not necessary to write in academic prose to communicate more complicated ideas. The work of Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp, of Canadian literary scholar Northrop Frye, and of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss are all pertinent to Voytilla's mission. Myth and the Movies includes a bibliography, which, at the very least, could have included references to these other texts whose work paved the way for Voytilla's own project. Screenwriters and other readers of this helpful resource could find equal inspiration by discovering other methods of story analysis. Voytilla misses the opportunity to expose his audience to a rich literature on the very subjects he examines.
During my brief tenure as a visiting assistant professor at Emory University in Atlanta, I had the good fortune of being able to teach courses that allowed me to incorporate mythology into my syllabi and to expose my students to Campbell and his aforementioned predecessors. The first course, entitled “Visual Culture,” explored the role of the image from ancient petroglyphs, through Renaissance painting, up to the recent technological advancement of merging of digital cameras with cell phones. The second class, my personal favorite, addressed “Fantasy, Fairy Tales and Folklore.” In both, I attempted to introduce the undergraduates to mythology in terms of indigenous history, cross cultural comparison, and contemporary usage with popular culture.
To my great dismay, I had discovered that many of these well-educated 18 and 19 year olds had little exposure to and interest in mythology. Some had never even heard of Medusa! Their general ignorance of mythology told me that educators and parents alike have neglected the classics. But even more striking, I learned that as voracious media consumers, these young adults lacked a common cultural experience of exposure to mythology as a form of popular entertainment. Some students did have a small degree of familiarity to myth (in the guise of legend and fairy tale), but not in the sense of historic tradition. They may have been familiar with the three-headed guard dog Fluffy from the Harry Potter books, but they had no idea that J.K. Rowling was simply offering a new name for Cerberus. Like archeologists at a dig, when the students unearthed the rich layers that compose each character and plot structure, they were continuously surprised and delighted.
The great travesty of classes like these is that there is always so much more to explore, so much material excluded. I believe that in introductory courses such as mine it is most pertinent to expose students to the Greek and Anglo myths that have come to be foundational to contemporary American culture and narrative. To my great regret, I chose to limit my incorporation of Egyptian, Hindu, and Nordic mythologies.
As a professor, I know I'm not alone in the complaint that the good stuff never gets taught because we're too busy trying to convey the basics. The college professor curses the high school teacher who decries the state of elementary education. The buck gets passed and we're all poorer for it.
We are at a stage in the culture of US education, but also as global citizens where the education of the young adult must be not only learn the classics but must also learn the indigenous American folktales as well as the foundational stories from other lands and peoples. We know ourselves and our neighbors by the stories we tell, by the myths that bind us as a community. At every step, we must incorporate some minimal level of cross-cultural knowledge. Given that myths are the cipher to a cultural system, there are few better ways to learn.
Voytilla's book shows us that myth is at work deep in our most popular form of story-telling, Hollywood movies. His analyses are like x-rays showing us the mythic skeleton. For me, the study of film has been the launching pad for my re-immersion into the realm of myth. As a child I read and was read to, but also had some powerful movies influence me. And as a child I was not able to decipher the mythic codes at play in my favorite films. Instead I had a direct link to myth insofar as the films I watched were based on myths. Films like Clash of the Titans were just as important to my growing sense of myth. The explicit retelling was key but also it was a populist experience. I was not alone in my room reading Hamilton or Bulfinch. No, I viewed such films with thousands of other people, young and old. Directly and indirectly, we had a common experience and reference point, which is an essential part of the individual's encounter with myth. One may be profoundly affected by myth on a personal level, but myth is to be felt by a community and shared.
Over the last decade, there have been a number of shows and films that have drawn from the wellspring of myth. To highlight just a few: TV shows like Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995), Xena: Warrior Princess (1995), and most recently Charmed (1998); mini series like The 10 th Kingdom (2000), The Odyssey (1997), Arabian Nights (2000), The Mists of Avalon (2001) Merlin (1998) and Jim Henson's “StoryTeller: The Greek Myths” (1990); animated movies like Quest for Camelot (1998) and Disney's Hercules (1997); and adult live action features such as First Knight (1995), Mighty Aphrodite (1995) and The Fisher King (1991).
In recent years, there have been a handful of successful non-Western (i.e., non- Greek/Anglo) independent films including the Inuit Atanarjuat (2001), New Zealand's Whale Rider (2002) and the Oscar winning animated Japanese Spirited Away (2001).
Across the Pacific, Disney Channel Asia has committed to producing its first local animated series of short stories entitled “Legends of the Ring of Fire.” The program will consist of short adaptations of indigenous folklore drawn from different countries in Southeast Asia including Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Korea and the Philippines. The cartoons can be seen on the Disney Channel around the world.
Despite the interest and success of such non-Western projects, it seems that Hollywood still loves all things Hellenic. Troy , starring Brad Pitt, has just completed shooting and should be on screens May 14, 2004. Alexander the Great , starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicole Kidman, is due out in 2005. Furthermore, there are at least three different films currently coming through the pipeline based on Greek mythology.
Titans, a feature film currently in development at Propaganda Films, will tell the tale of Perseus who fights both Medusa and the Kraken in order to rescue Andromeda, the beautiful daughter of King Cephus. Another film project in development at New Line also carries the name Titans. This coming of age story recasts the Greek gods Zeus, Hera, Poseidon and Hades as human teenagers who become gods as they defend ancient Greece against the marauding Titans. Warner Brothers Pictures is currently developing a remake of the 1981 feature Clash of the Titans, which starred Laurence Olivier as Zeus and Mark Hamlin as Persues.
I welcome Hollywood's investment in the Greek myths. Likewise, I am grateful for the Anglophilic trend with The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, the Harry Potter series, and the evergreen interest in Arthuriana. The entertainment industry churns out retellings of myths and legends and we consume. But we consume differently than we once did. I think it's safe to say that those who watched Citizen Kane in 1941 were not of a mindset ready to dissect the characters and structure that way people today are. When Time and Newsweek run feature stories piecing apart the mythic roots of The Matrix Trilogy, we know we're in a different mode of viewership.
As Hollywood continues to roll out new television shows and movies directly or indirectly based on myths, the academy should seize the opportunity to use those products as a launching pad into the history, literature, art and science related to that myth. The study of pop culture and media constantly comes under attack, but what critics fail to understand is that such study leads to a better understanding of ourselves and others, and of the past and present. The cumulative effect is better preparation for the future. As viewers become more educated about myth in movies, it behooves the entertainment industry to explore new options instead of staying in the same old territory. Swapping myths is an essential form of cultural cross-fertilization. We must continue to open ourselves to myths from other lands and peoples.
