Media, Myth, and Society

A. Berger

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781137301666
• eBook ISBN: 9781137301673
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Using a cultural approach to classical myths, this book examines how they affect psychoanalytic theory, historical experience, elite culture, popular culture, and everyday life. Berger explores diverse topics such as the Oedipus Myth, James Bond, Star Wars, and fairy tales.

1

The Myth Model

Abstract: I define myth, discuss how some prominent scholars have used the term and introduce the “myth model,” which I developed to help readers see how myths inform our various aspects of culture. The myth model takes a myth, discusses its manifestations in psychoanalytic theory and suggests how the myth can be applied to historical experience, elite culture, popular culture and everyday life. I use the myth model to deal with the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and the Oedipus myth. I also discuss with the narrative nature of myth, the way myths can be found in different genres and the gratifications that various genres provide.

Berger, Arthur Asa. Media, Myth, and Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137301673.

As Barthes argued [in Mythologies], the themes of humanities earliest stories, known as myths, continue to permeate and inform pop culture’s story-telling efforts. As in the myths of Prometheus, Hercules, and other ancient heroes, Superman’s exploits revolve around a universal mythic theme—the struggle of Good and Evil. This is what makes Superman, or any action hero for that matter, so intuitively appealing to modern audiences. . . . The word “myth” derives from the Greek mythos: “word,” “speech,” “tale of the gods.” It can be defined as a narrative in which the characters are gods, heroes, and mystical beings, in which the plot is about the origin of things or about metaphysical events in human life, and in which the setting is a metaphysical world juxtaposed against the real world. In the beginning stages of human cultures, myths functioned as genuine “narrative theories” of the world. That is why all cultures have created them to explain their origins. . . . The use of mythic themes and elements in media representations has become so widespread that it is hardly noticed any longer, despite Barthes’ cogent warnings in the late 1950s. Implicit myths about the struggle for Good, of the need for heroes to lead us forward, and so on and so forth, constitute the narrative underpinnings of TV programmes, blockbuster movies, advertisements and commercials, and virtually anything that gets “media air time.”

Danesi (2002: 47–48)

The Greek work “mythos” means story. In addition to the excellent definition of myth we find in the quotation from Marcel Danesi, we find a useful definition of myth in Raphael Patai’s Myth and Modern Man. He describes myth in the following terms

Myth … is a traditional religious charter, which operates by validating laws, customs, rites, institutions and beliefs, or explaining socio-cultural situations and natural phenomena, and taking the form of stories, believed to be true, about divine beings and heroes … Myths are dramatic stories that form a sacred charter either authorizing the continuance of ancient institutions, customs, rites and beliefs in the area where they are current, or approving alterations. (Patai, 1972: 2)

He adds that myths play a an important role in shaping social life and writes that “myth not only validates or authorizes customs, rites, institutions, beliefs, and so forth, but frequently is directly responsible for creating them” (1972: 2). I will not be considering the popular use of myth as false or unfounded beliefs. Instead, I will be focusing on the cultural, psychological and social meanings of myths as narratives and the way these narratives inform so much of our lives—as reflected in my myth model.

I will show that myths and mythological themes can be found in many films, television programs and other texts carried by the media and in other aspects of culture. I have chosen a number of classic texts to deal with in this book. Films and television programs and all aspects of popular culture are born, live, and die so quickly that I decided to focus on “classic” texts that have great cultural resonance, even though readers of this book may not be familiar with them. All of the texts I discuss can be seen on DVDs, downloaded from the internet or found in bookstores and libraries.

Now, as a preface to the different perspectives on myth that I offer later in this book, let me say something about narratives in general, narratives and genres, and the role of narratives in media and popular culture.

Narratives pervade our media and our lives

With the rapid development of new communications technologies such as video games, mobile phones and tablets such as the iPhone and iPad and its many Android competitors, a question suggests itself—will the new electronic media lead to the end of reading and our interest in myths? Will “old fashioned” print narratives become obsolete as legions of children and adolescents abandon comic books, fairy tales, myths, and novels to spend all their time watching television, texting one another, and occupying themselves with video games and various game-playing mini-supercomputers like the XBox and PlayStation?

These questions might seem reasonable, since there has been an incredible rise in the popularity of video games. But it is unlikely that we will abandon myths. Just as television didn’t destroy radio and radio didn’t destroy newspapers, video games and other electronic media are unlikely to make us abandon television, film, print, and the various kinds of narratives they carry, and the myths that inform them.

One reason the “old” media will continue to flourish, I believe, is because they are full of narratives that do such a good job of providing us with modernized and camouflaged versions of ancient myths and of dealing with our need for living mythically. We may not realize that we are living “mythically,” but the argument of this book is that myths inform all cultures and have a profound, though hidden, impact on our lives in many different ways.

We have to make a distinction between stories, that is narratives, and the media that make these stories available to people. The fact is that narratives, of one sort or another, pervade the media. For example, in his book The Age of Television, Martin Esslin estimated, in 1982, that the average male television viewer watched more than 12 hours of dramatic narratives per week and the average female watched almost 16 hours of dramatic narratives per week. The average American, he suggested, “sees the equivalent of five to six full length stage plays a week” (1982: 7).

That’s because, he explains, television—the most popular medium—relies on narratives and is essentially dramatic. He writes:

On the most obvious level television is a dramatic medium simply because a large proportion of the material it transmits is in the form of traditional drama mimetically represented by actors and employing plot, dialogue, character, gesture, costume—the whole panoply of dramatic means of expression. (1982: 7)

If you look at television from the perspective of a dramatic critic, Esslin suggests, you can gain a better understanding of television’s essence as a dramatic medium (this applies to the cinema, as well) and various aspects of its social, psychological, and cultural impact.

We swim, like fish, in a sea of narratives—or, to use the French critic Michel de Certeau’s metaphor, we walk, all day and every day, through a forest of narrativities. As de Certeau explains in The Practice of Everyday Life,

From morning to night, narrations constantly haunt streets and buildings. They articulate our existences by teaching us what they must be. They “cover the event,” that is to say, they make our legends (legenda, what is to be read and said) out of it. Captured by the radio (the voice is the law) as soon as he awakens, the listener walks all day long through the forest of narrativities from journalism, advertising, and television narrativities that still find time, as he is getting ready for bed, to slip a few final messages under the portals of sleep. Even more than the God told about by the theologians of earlier days, these stories have a providential and predestining function: they organize in advance our work, our celebrations, and even our dreams. Social life multiplies the gestures and modes of behavior (im)printed by narrative models; it ceasely [sic] reproduces and accumulates “copies” of stories. Our society has become a recited society, in three senses: it is defined by stories (recits, the fables constituted by our advertising and informational media), by citations of stories, and by the interminable recitation of stories. (1984: 186; emphasis in original)

We are, it seems, story-making and story-loving beings and these stories do more than amuse and entertain us—they teach us about life, they offer models to imitate, and they can, in some cases, reinforce our battered egos. There is good reason, then, why narratives are so dear to us. As we will see, many of these narratives draw upon ancient myths in a modernized and camouflaged form.

Narratives, of every genre, pervade our lives—from the conversations we have with friends to the television dramas and films we watch. It is narratives that teach us about the Devil and about God and everything in between. It would not be too far removed to suggest that in addition to being homo ludens we are also homo narrans—story telling men and women. And, as we shall see, many of these narratives are based, to varying degrees, on classical myths.

I will deal now with various aspects of narratives and I will suggest that, in essence, all stories are variations on the narratives that we find so intoxicating when we are young—myths and fairy tales. I will consider the formulaic aspects of genres and also argue that, generally speaking, there are mythic elements hidden in our stories of all kinds. We find mythic traces in the elite arts, in popular culture, and even in everyday life, because although we think logically (at least some people do some of the time), we live mythically, though we are generally unaware that this is the case. That may be because many of these myths are lodged deep in our unconscious and not available to inspection by us.

Defining genres

Fairy tales, we must remember, are a kind of story—or in the language of media criticism, a genre—a French word that means “kind” or “type.” In his essay “Television Images, Codes and Messages,” Douglas Kellner discusses genres and their role in our mass-mediated culture:

A genre consists of a coded set of formulas and conventions which indicate a culturally accepted way or organizing material into distinct patterns. Once established, genres dictate the basic conditions of cultural production and reception. For example, crime dramas invariably have a violent crime, a search for its perpetrators, and often a chase, fight, or bloody elimination of the criminal, communicating the message “crime does not pay.” The audience comes to expect these predictable pleasures and a crime drama “code” develops, enshrined in production and studio texts and practices. (Televisions, 7, 4, 1974)

These conventions make it easy for audiences to understand what happens in a text and easier for writers to create these texts, since they can assume certain expectations on the part of audiences and use formulas, with minor variations, to satisfy these expectations.

In our everyday lives, we often make our decisions about what kinds of television shows to watch, films to see, or video games to play, on the basis of how we may feel or upon certain attractions a genre holds for us. And we decide to watch certain television programs or go to certain films because, in part, of the pleasures the genre has for us. For complicated reasons people develop a fondness for certain kinds of stories. When we are children, fairy tales are very important for us, because, as Bruno Bettelheim has explained in The Uses of Enchantment, fairy tales have great therapeutic value for children. When we are older and more complicated beings, we move on to more complicated kinds of stories, such as myths, with different kinds of characters that provide different kinds of gratifications.

Gratifications genres provide

Let me offer, here, a chart listing of some of the more important gratifications genres provide audiences. The “Uses and Gratifications” approach to mass-mediated texts focuses on the social uses audiences make of the texts they see and the psychological gratifications these texts provide, as contrasted with a focus on the effects of exposure to texts and genres. Some of the earliest research in this area was described as follows by Katz et al.:

Herzog (1942) on quiz programs and the gratifications derived from listening to soap operas; Suchman (1942) on the motives for getting interested in serious music on radio; Wolfe and Fiske (1949) on the development of children’s interest in comics … Each of these investigations came up with a list of functions served either by some specific contents or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1  The Myth Model
• 2  The Structure of Myth
• 3  A Sociological Analysis of Myth
• 4  Psychoanalytic Approaches to Myth
• 5  The Semiotics of Myth
• 6  Hercules (aka Herakles) and Hercule Poirot
• 7  Heroes Against Monsters: Theseus and David
• 8  Odysseus/Ulysses and Athena
• Coda
• References
• Index