The Age of Promiscuity

Narrative and Mythological Meme Mutations in Contemporary Cinema and Popular Culture

Doru Pop

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2018
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498580618
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book presents an original and engaging look at contemporary popular culture, opening with the provocative idea that this is a day and age of complete exhaustion of ideas, images, stories, and myths. Questioning the effects of content recycling in cinema and other media, the author further elaborates on the repurposing of cultural junk, the reassembling of narratives and myths. The thought-provoking hypothesis proposed in this research is that we have entered an age of cultural promiscuity.



By analyzing the mutations of myth-making practices and connecting them with larger cultural manifestations, the author explains these transformations as integral to the development of a myth-illogical imagination. Cinematic and mythological representations in mainstream Hollywood films have reached a point of amalgamation with no return, which marks the beginning of a "fourth age of representations," where signs and meanings are manifested in illogical permutations. This is more explicit in films that commingle aliens, cowboys, undead American presidents, and zombie nazis, joining together in the same narrative ghosts, werewolves, and vampires, aggregating disjoined storylines and historical fake facts, all coalesced in an orgy of empty burlesque and infantile masquerades.



This interdisciplinary research combines cultural studies, film criticism, art and myth interpretations, bringing into the debate multiple concepts from related fields such as critical theory and media criticism. The book also opens up to innovative approaches from a wide array of academic disciplines, offering researchers, students and those fascinated by the transformations happening in contemporary cinema an interpretative tool based on a revised dialectic approach. The conclusion is that we are now victims of a zombie semiotics. Meaning-making in contemporary culture, politics, and aesthetics is dominated by a process of incessant desecration of significations, specific to the total mishmash of representations analyzed here.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Credits
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Nothing New in the Western Mind?
• PART I: Mythologies Amalgamated
• 1 The Transmutation of Ancient Heroes and the Reappropriation of Myths in Contemporary Cinema
• 2 From Centauresque to Incongruously Burlesque: Retrofitting and Infantilizing Mythologies
• 3 Mythological Meme Mutations: The Puerile Patriarchs of an Infantilized God
• PART II: Double Dark Mirrors in Cinematic Representations
• 4 Avatars, Surrogate Identities, and Other Posthuman Transformations
• 5 Spare-Parts Heroes, Recycled Narratives, Reused Visualities, and Other Recuperated Histories
• 6 Modern Monsters, Parasitical Stories, and Narrative Viruses
• 7 Desecration of Cinematic Bodies and Zombie Semiotics
• Conclusion: Excursus, or A Final Walk into the Desert of Significations
• References
• Index
• About the Author