One of the big things I’m noticing in looking at these different folkore & mythology programs is something that’s always gotten to me in this field: a fixation with the past. As though folk culture and mythic stories of the past are more important or somehow more authentic than what we have now in the form of pop culture. To me, this is just ludicrous. I certainly understand the point and validity of examining the historical roots and underpinnings of the stories which rule our lives now. I’m not questioning that. But I am questioning how culturally important and relevant it is to immerse yourself completely and utterly in things that are so far away, when there is so much going on right in front of us. I’m not saying don’t study history at all, or just to ignore things that are distant. Cause those things certainly provide important perspective and other contexts from which to think. I guess I’m more just trying to articulate a trend I see in this field which I don’t particularly love.

Even folklorists who do seem to take a shine to contemporary pop culture almost always seem to do so disdainfully. Take this article about Star Wars and Spider Man as Monomyth. The author at one point quotes somebody who says:

We are living in a time between the myths. The compelling narratives of times past are not holding our energies the way they once did. So, there is some hope a new mythic vision will emerge.

This drives me completely crazy, when people say we are living without guiding stories, or that we should sit around on our hands waiting for somebody to come along and “make us a new myth”. To me, people who despair in this way are making two major mistakes: (1) they clearly are not involving themselves in pop culture and (2) they are attempting to apply out-of-date models of culture to ours.

As to point #1, that they aren’t involving themselves in pop culture: perhaps what they are doing is analyzing contemporary cultural artifacts intellectually, rather than allowing themselves to be affected by them on the emotional levels which is their native language. Another quote from that article:

As a film scholar who founded Boston College’s cinema studies department, Professor John Michalczyk believes many popular films fall short of real mythic status.

While a movie like The Scorpion King has mythic pretensions, it merely parades lifeless mythic cliches that lack the timeless gravity of moral tales.

He questioned whether Hollywood treatments of timeless mythic themes could compare in depth and universality to the original ancient models that inspired them.

This is just crazy to me. What does “mythic status” even mean in the first place? In my mind, that’s a term that academics made up to denigrate certain styles of story-telling. Secondly, myths essentially ARE cliches. They are amalgamated characters which represent a sort of averaged out version of a human. Archetypes in other words. There is no “depth of character” to somebody like Zeus. He represents a style of expression of a pattern of energy, NOT a human person. He’s horny and capricious, and he’s essentially a cardboard caricature with very little depth or dimension. And the thing is, that’s fine. Just like it’s fine in movies like the Scorpion King.

Another one:

Michalczyk suggested many contemporary artists are too secularized and distracted by popular culture to make art or films with a genuine mythic resonance.

“Myth is a sacred story. But these days I feel there’s less of a touching of the human heart than imitating the outlines of myth itself.”

Again, what does mythic resonance mean? Does it mean it touches people? That people enjoy it? Because that’s why pop culture exists, because it touches people and they enjoy it. It speaks to something in their lives which is important. It is NOT a distraction. I feel like folklorists, more than anybody, ought to be able to critically examine issues like this, and realize that it’s all the same as what went on in the past, but the style of the culture has just changed.

Which leads me back to point #2 above. That our culture is different now than it was. It functions differently. One of the easiest ways to understanding this, I think, is to look briefly at art history. In ancient artwork, the name of the artist, their personal identity were unimportant. All artists worked with an established cultural style and depicted culturally significant stories and culture-heros. It’s not until thousands of years into the game when we start to be able to recognize individual artists, and their identities become important. Maybe around the Renaissance, maybe earlier, this begins to happen. But at this point, they are all still working essentially in the same styles, or slight variations thereof. And they are still depicting the stories of the culture, although perhaps they more consciously begin to put their own personal spin on it. Then you have the gradual evolution into modern art, where the artist’s identity completely overtakes both their style and their subject matter.

This same developmental process occurred throughout, history, I think. Leaving us where we are right now, with our enormous proliferation of subcultures. And yet, even with the emphasis on our own individualized personal story, we still all have a relationship to “big” stories. Whether that’s in the form of news media or entertainment or what-have-you.

Anyway, I could go on and on about this, and plan to. But that’s it for right now.