Frank Darabont’s Parable of the Collapse of Civilization

By John David Ebert

The idea of a mist full of monsters which traps a group of people inside of a small grocery store is a wonderful image of hyper-rational late capitalist society coming up against the world that it has excluded and repressed in order to be built up: the realm of gods, demons, devils and archaic matriarchies which demand human sacrifice. As Jane Ellen Harrison writes in her analysis of early Greek religion, the primary offerings that were made to the cthonic gods were not made in order to get the gods to come down and do their bidding, but rather to make them go away. This was the early idea of religiosity in pre-Homeric Greece, and it is also the idea suggested in this film by one of its lead characters, a wacky, female Christian fundamentalist who believes that the mist has been sent by God as a punishment for the sins of atheistic capitalists. Read the rest of this entry »

Walt Disney’s Shrunken Ancestors  

By John David Ebert 

The various optical tricks and spatial distortions which Walt Disney utilized in the making of his theme park often conceal ideas and philosophical views about the world. Take, for instance, the spatial distortions of Main Street, USA. “Main Street was a function of clever foreshortening,” Neal Gabler writes in his masterly biography of Disney. “The lower floors of the shops were nine-tenths scale, the second floors eight-tenths, and the third seven-tenths. As for the rest of the park, Walt wrote an old acquaintance that the “scale of objects varies according to what and where they are’– what he called a ‘matter of choosing the scale that would be practical and still look right.” This kind of miniaturization “underscored the sense of nostalgia because it associated the past and the fantastic with the small and quaint. ‘[P]eople like to think their world is somehow more grown up than Papa’s was,’ he said.” (Gabler, 533) Read the rest of this entry »

Marilyn Monroe, or Venus Redux  

By John David Ebert

It could be said that Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the non-reproducibility of an actor’s aura misses a certain point, since it was by means of the very technological process of filming and then projecting upon a gigantic screen the images of actors like James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando that conferred upon them auras of mythic grandeur which they would not otherwise have possessed. Benjamin, it seems, did not understand the essentially myth-making power of film. Read the rest of this entry »

Sunshine: A Review by John David Ebert

The director of this film, Danny Boyle, is no believer in technological progress. Indeed, the film concerns an ever increasing series of technological disasters and systems failures that grow more urgent as the plot unfolds, each disaster giving rise to the next like a series of Russian dolls placed one inside the other. On the ship’s mission to deliver a payload that will reignite a dying sun, anything that can go wrong does go wrong. Boyle does not leave us with any confidence that our technologies will save us, despite the film’s Pyrrhic victory at the end. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by John Lobell

As the liberal arts in universities comes to be dominated by critical and visual studies, the ability of mainstream academia to respond to movies, particularly visionary movie, is diminished.

Critical and visual studies, while providing insights into some cultural issues, fails to penetrate deeply into the individual narrative psyche or the cultural narrative psyche.  Indeed, there is no recognition of the existence of psyche in the field.  In response to this, I propose a course on mythology and movies, which I am posting here. 

While this posting is in the form of a college course outline, it is meant as a primer on how to think about myths and movies.  Comments, criticisms, additions, and deletions are welcome. Read the rest of this entry »

« Questioning the Nation: Ambivalent Narratives in Le Retour au désert by Bernard-Marie Koltès

Heroes, Gods, and Myths: The Myths That We Create and How They Create Us; Volume 2, Number 1 Fall 2008 »

Heroes, Gods, and Myths: The Myths That We Create and How They Create Us

Published in Working Papers - a graduate publication of the UPenn Department of Romance Languages [LINK]

Welcome to the third Working Papers roundtable discussion. In this issue, devoted to myths, gods, and heroes, our contributing authors analyze the rewriting of religious myths, the confrontation of conflicting conceptions of nationality and belonging, and the intertextual nexus through which Greco-Roman mythology meets Modernism. To complement their analyses, we asked experienced scholars who have devoted their careers to the study of myth to further interrogate these notions with us.

In the space below, John Ebert, John Izod, and Samuel Brunk give us their definitions of, and thoughts on, myths, religion, and heroes. Read the rest of this entry »