floatingstirnerhead replied to your post “I also like how that one reblog failed to address the conclusion of…”
Liberals love Harry Potter and The Hunger Games so much because it lets them live vicariously through resistance against a thoroughly evil bad guy that looks evil and doesn’t have any complexity so they don’t have to challenge the villains in our own world who often hide behind smiles and nice clothing.
Exactly, like, my first forays into theory stuff, particularly semiotics, were through narratology, and it always drove me up the fucking wall how, like, historically, stories/myths/fairy tails functioned as a way to talk about the world in a sort of realm of pure morality, like, demonstrating what either the individual or the society that produced them believes is right/wrong, good/evil, etc.
But then I found myself confronted by a particular paradox. If that is indeed still the case, why would, for example, a corporation pour millions of dollars into producing a film where a corporation is blatantly the villain? Like, yes, some such films have this sort of idea that the evil corporation is an outlier that must be brought down, but far more, what I’ve encountered kinda blatantly function to indict corporations and, to an extent, capitalism as a whole, and so for the longest time I was just like, the fuck?
When it hit me. It’s the fucking hyperreal. Like, in a largely secular world, mythology has become this sort of realm apart from “reality”, something that’s part of this, like, framework I’ve come to refer to as “Elsewhere”. Like, a film about an evil corporation is of course positing the potential existence of evil corporations, but then when people are confronted with that same concept in reality, we are told “that’s the sort of thing that only happens in movies/books/TV etc.” things which frequently depict our world, but facets of it that always exist “Elsewhere”.
Yes, evil corporations exist, but not here, only elsewhere. Yes, people band together to fight (like, actually fight) such evils, struggling to bring them down, but not here, only elsewhere. Yes, through that struggle, these people can win and create a better, more just world, but not here, only elsewhere. Thus, such narratives can harness people’s negative emotions towards what’s wrong with the world, and then make sure it all gets sublimated into buying movie tickets and merchandise.
Because in the “real world”, we need to accept that things like politics are a banal affair, something which can only ever be engaged in indirectly, via voting, phoning senators, etc, but never a realm wherein people are empowered to engage in direct action because that sort of thing only happens in the movies, in the realm of fantasy, elsewhere.
And the reason I call it “elsewhere” is that it’s part of a bigger social phenomenon where people in the first world have been groomed for decades to mostly act as passive observers. We hear about riots, civil war, revolution in the news, but it’s always “Elsewhere”. I was alive to see both the LA riots while living in California, and to hear about what was going on in Bosnia around that time, and even as a kid, I thought it was really fucking weird that news agencies had made a city I lived about an hour from seem just as distant as a country thousands of miles away. It’s like how Baudrillard said that the Gulf War never happened because we all bought into the idea that the press covering the entire thing on TV was a more authentic and “real” way to be experiencing the war when news media was presenting a very particular, Pro-US narrative about the war that distorted the reality of it to the point that it essentially didn’t happen because its place in history was erased and replaced by the media narrative.
The way we approach mythology today, as something mostly mediated through commercial products, forms what I would consider one of the core preservative factors of capitalism, by making myth less about didacticism (though it still is very much about that, though it tends to engage with it in more subtle and nefarious ways, like “300″ and all the films set in antiquity that came after it that glorified war over diplomacy as the second war in Iraq was getting fully underway) and more about escapism, about depicting a world where moral and ethical struggle aren’t meant to be a mirror on the “real” world, but a window into a separate one, a better one, a simpler one, one that we pay out the ass to catch glimpses of while our own world plummets further into darkness because we’ve been raised to believe that standing boldly against it is just the stuff of fairy tales.
jbbartram-illu
theartofmadeline
turnnoffyourmind
gummygunk
