Greetings everyone, and welcome back! This week I’m going to try a little something different. I had planned on continuing last week’s #FandomFriday exploration, but — while this certainly could count as a fandom post — I’ve realized I’ve been spouting a lot of theory without providing much in the way of concrete examples. I can babble about long-haired myth theory all I want, but if it stays in the realm of theory I’m not sure how valuable it will prove for real people in the real world. So, this week, instead of theory, I’m going to try and give you a taste of the way I (a mythologist with a brain that can’t stop thinking about these things) recently experienced the derivation of mythic guidance from popular culture in a very personal way.
First, some backstory is probably in order. As a scholar of popular culture, it is kind of embarrassing to admit this, but I am WAY behind on the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe thing. To be fair, I’m not much of a movie or TV person. When I’m in the mood for brain candy (which honestly isn’t often because I’m pretty busy overall) I much prefer reading or playing it to watching it. Still, back in the day, I had seen the first Captain America film on a transatlantic flight. It wasn’t awful. Then, because I had a friend who likes to look at Chris Hemsworth (and after a few glances I had to allow she has a point), I watched the first two Thor ones. They were only moderately awful. Then school and travel and dissertations and general life requirements got in the way, and I just never got around to seeing any of the others.
Yes, I know. No Infinity War? No Guardians? Nope. Not a one. The closest I’ve come is riding the re-skinned Tower of Terror at Disneyland. Yes, writing this out certainly means I’ll have to give up my geek card — but to be honest, I lost it years ago when I publicly admitted I’d never seen a full episode of either The Simpsons or Game of Thrones in my life (shrug)
Anyway, years passed. One day on a holiday visit to my sister and her family, I was explaining to my eldest nephew why I didn’t much want to join him in seeing whatever the latest Spiderman iteration was at the time. Because he and I are a bit neuro-strange in some of the same ways, he totally understood and headed off without me. A few days before the end of my visit, though, he suggested that — even if I didn’t want to dive wholesale into the sprawling MCU — I might want to check out the movies that featured Doctor Strange. He said he really thought the character would appeal to me. Considering that the two of us have quite enjoyed sharing stories with each other over the years (he turned me on to the Dragon Age games, I turned him on to the Mistborn novels), I took his suggestion seriously.
This conversation bubbled up into my memory this past week, when I found myself in the mood for about a movie’s worth of brain candy, so I queued up the Doctor Strange feature film and settled in. (I will admit that the fact that I like looking at Benedict Cumberbatch probably contributed to this decision 😁 )
My nephew was right! I did enjoy it. It was silly fun, but it was exactly the sort of silly fun that — when you’re a person cursed with an awareness of how powerful stories can be in creating your own reality — gets into your head and sticks with you until your psyche has winnowed through and pulled out the things it needs to make sense of its current place in the world.
As is typical after my brain-candy binges, I had a hell of a time getting to sleep that night (this is one of the reasons I don’t do it very often, because I really like my sleep). I started to almost clinically observe the moments that kept coming up again and again as my brain chewed through the movie. Clearly these moments were resonating with something important knocking around inside my unruly head.
Here’s a sampling, with some minor analysis:
ANCIENT ONE: Each of those maps was drawn up by someone who could see in part, but not the whole.... You're a man looking at the world through a keyhole.
I mean, if you’ve read through any of my wordy woolgathering about frameworks here on this blog, you should have no difficulty seeing why this felt like an important statement to me 😀
STRANGE: Teach me! ANCIENT ONE: No.
Joseph Campbell talks about the ‘refusal of the call,’ and while it was definitely there in Strange’s earlier dismissal of chakras and acupuncture, this was such a clever inversion of the idea that (although, true to the breathless cinematic medium, it only lasted a moment) I found it unexpectedly delightful. It was at this moment that I decided I *really* liked this Ancient One character.
STRANGE: How do I get from here to there? ANCIENT ONE: How did you get to reattach severed nerves, and put a human spine back together, bone by bone? STRANGE: Study and practice, years of it.
Although this glimpse of a scene is really just a more-intellectual version of the “martial arts training montage” trope, the idea still felt powerful. There is SO much to be done and learned and experienced in this big wide world of ours. I’m getting to the point in my life where I’m going to have to start accepting that there are projects, things I once believed important, which I’m just not going to be able to get to before I die. The sentiment behind this cinematic exchange MIGHT be one that could make me want to work harder to get to as many things as I can in the time I have left — if I were to accept the story it suggests I tell about myself. In staring at the ceiling I came to the frustrating realization that, as a result of some fairly significant shifts in my professional and personal life over the last ten years or so, I’ve been choosing a different story. That story goes something like “I’m older now, I’m tired, I have less energy, I’ve accomplished a great deal in my life, and maybe it’s time I’ve earned the right to settle down and stop bothering with doing all of that work. No one would blame me. It’s not like I don’t have a PhD and a long career…” On and on and on.
I’m sure it’s clear how Doctor Strange’s teacher would view such a capitulation. Making that connection in my head made me feel a little ashamed. (sigh) Mythic guidance, anyone?
DORMAMMU: You cannot do this forever. STRANGE: Actually, I can. This is how things are now. You and me, trapped in this moment, endlessly. DORMAMMU: Then you will spend eternity dying. STRANGE: Yes. But everyone on Earth will live. DORMAMMU: But you will suffer. STRANGE: Pain's an old friend. . . . . DORMAMMU: You will never win! STRANGE: No, but I can lose, again and again, and again, and again, forever. And that makes you my prisoner.
Yes, yes, I know, I know. This sort of self-sacrifice is a hoary old cliché, never mind the hero’s flippant submission to torture in order to save others. But clichés are clichés for a reason. This exact concept of heroism is something that makes appearances in a hundred different forms in my own fiction, and is something I always find powerful when I encounter it in that of others. Although I know perfectly well it’s a story — I have never been tortured, and I’d definitely crack like a walnut in fifteen seconds — this kind of mythic fortitude resonates very strongly with something that has always been present in my image of what heroic people do. We can blame the glut of fantasy literature that filled my childhood here, or the Odyssey, or any number of seventies-and-eightes-era Saturday morning cartoons, but — regardless of what might have rooted the idea so deeply in my psyche — it’s definitely there. I experienced in this scene the mythic thrill this concept never fails to give me, and my mind worried at it pretty much all night.
There were certainly other moments that captured my imagination, but this is getting long; those three should be enough to illustrate my point here: whether or not we are aware of it, the stories we take in affect us. The ones that thrill us, that keep us up thinking about them at night, are the ones that become the mythic vocabulary used in the constant re-creation of our own stories, and they way they do that definitely influences the way we see the world.
Of course, every mind is put together differently, every person has widely different life experiences, and every identity is as unique as a fingerprint, so the process of discovering mythic meaning in popular culture is going to be different for everyone. But we cannot escape the fact that this is something that human minds do. This, to me, is the real power of myth.
Next time, I plan to lean more into the ecocritical realm of my scholarly interests, so look for the beginning of a multi-part examination of the ancient origins of the modern myth of wilderness.