The Fredösphere

Those of you who devote your lives to memorizing the content of this blog will remember I am a fan of the book The Seven Basic Plots.  Author Christopher Booker drew much information from the anthropologist Joseph Campbell, one of the world's top authorities on myths and a man who famously influenced George Lucas' development of the Star Wars story line.

Long have I intended to watch Joseph Campbell's PBS specials, hoping an answer to the following questions would I find:

What is the purpose of myth-making in a culture?  What is its job?
What lessons can modern fiction writers learn from the ancient myths?

Finally, I've done it.  My local library has several Campbell videos to choose from.  I began with Mythos.  It's a 3-disc series but my library owns only numbers 1 and 3.  The first disc examined the psychological foundation of myth.  Campbell is an engaging speaker, with deep knowledge and a rare knack for teaching.  I found this part of the series very stimulating, even though much of it I didn't buy, as it relied heavily on Jungian and Freudian concepts which have lost much of their scientific cachet.  (Thad, my friend the psychology professor, tells me that the use of drugs in psychiatry has not so much refuted those two giants as rendered them irrelevant.)  The third disc was less interesting to me as it simply described certain myths without the  kind of analysis I was hoping for.  Here, Campbell's bias became more obvious, which is:  all traditions are equal and equally glorious, except the European/Christian tradition which is uniquely bad.  At the point Campbell mentioned "Jesus Christ" and "the speed of light" in the same sentence (by way of refuting the Ascension as a historical fact), thereby dropping a notch in my estimation.  That's one of my rules:  never fully respect anyone who uses the words "Jesus Christ" and "the speed of light" in the same sentence.

Were my questions answered?  No, not completely.

I moved on to another, more famous PBS video:  Bill Moyers' interview of Campbell at George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch, titled Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth.  This was even less interesting.  It quickly devolved into Hindu apologetics.  That's fine if that's what you want, but maybe they could have given the video a more honest title, like maybe Joseph Campbell and the Power of Hinduism and Buddhism Which Are Religions Far Superior to Christianity With All It's Annoying Dogmas and Neurotic Fixation On Sin.

Were my questions answered?  No, not at all.

My search for enlightenment continues.  I'll give one of Campbell's books a try.  I think I'll start with The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which I believe was the starting point for George Lucas.  In the meantime, I'll have to rely on this brief summary of "the hero's journey," complete with disco cheezeball Star Wars soundtrack:



So now I'm thinking about writing a story about some warrior dude who rips the arm off a monster.  A monster who wears black and breathes noisily, and uses an ill-defined, magical "force."  And whose name is Grendel.  Or Darth Grendel.  Or. . .well, obviously this is just a work in progress.

Labels: Culture, Fiction, Religion