Film as Religion, Second Edition. John C. Lyden
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yet that alternate reality is still integrally connected with the world of the everyday, and hence its vision is relevant to it. To understand this more fully, we must examine how the notions of myth, ethos, and ritual apply to film.
Myths about Myth
Rehabilitating the Notion of “Myth”
The term myth is so laden with negative connotations that it is practically unserviceable for the study of religion. But its use persists, and it also continues to be used in reference to films, largely due to their narrative form. It may be helpful to rehabilitate the term by uncovering the ways in which it might be usefully applied to religion or film. To do so, we must first purge it of some of its unfortunate associations and acknowledge the ways in which the concept has been used to oppress or condemn as well as romanticize religious and cultural phenomena. We will also critically examine certain scholarly approaches to myth that have been helpful in giving insight into religious phenomena. As with definitions of religion, every definition of myth is a construction of the scholar’s imagination and as such cannot provide total objectivity about the phenomena it seeks to delineate. Nonetheless, some definitions seem more helpful in giving us a genuine understanding of religion, and certain characteristics of these definitions can be applied to the phenomenon of film as well. The definitions of myth are themselves myths, created by scholars of myths, but these myths about myths may help us understand the stories we are trying to hear.
From its origins through the present day, the word myth has often been held to mean “a story that is not true.” The Greek philosophers who began to doubt their myths as providing literal histories of their gods sought to find some meaning hidden beneath the obviously false surface details, often accepting either the allegorical view that the stories were really about natural phenomena hypostasized as personal beings or the euhemeristic view that the stories were historical accounts about humans that had been exaggerated to divine proportions—they sometimes sought ethical content in them as well. They applied the term myth to those stories they no longer believed as history, or they invented new myths (which were not believed literally either), as Plato did.1
In modern Western usage, however, the term myth has usually been reserved for the stories of religions other than one’s own, as few wanted to allow the connotation of falsehood to the stories of their own religion. Those who did analyze biblical stories as myths, such as David Friedrich Strauss in his Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835), incurred the wrath of Christians who felt that the truth of their religion was being attacked by this method—and in fact, Strauss and others did dismiss the historical truth of many biblical stories, although they sought (like their Greek forebears) to find some “deeper” truth within them. Early Christian allegorical interpretation had done the same thing, of course, but not to such an extent or in such a way as to suggest the primitive nature of the biblical authors. Christian allegorists such as Origen had held that some things are false as literal statements in the Bible because God wished us to look deeper than the surface to find an allegorical truth; modern mythological interpreters of the Bible, on the other hand, hold that the biblical authors used mythic language because they lacked the modern sophistication to express the same meaning in a demythologized form. They believed not only that the factual details of the stories were literally false but that the authors of them were too primitive to know how to express their ideas in the “proper” philosophical form.
Yet those who were uncomfortable viewing biblical stories as myths were often happy to view stories of other religions in this way. Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900) was among the first scholars to extensively examine other religions through this concept, essentially claiming that myths were allegorical accounts of natural phenomena that were erroneously accepted as referring to historical beings. The idea that a myth was an “error” to be dispelled by a more “scientific” understanding was reiterated by Edward Tylor (1832–1917) and James Frazer (1854–1941), both of whom viewed mythic ideas of supernatural beings as “primitive” and finally dispensable. In this way, they assumed an evolutionary framework for the history of religion, according to which earlier ideas were displaced by more sophisticated forms of rational monotheism and, ultimately, by a scientific worldview. It is now commonly recognized that such an evolutionary schema oversimplifies history and falsifies data (e.g., ignoring the fact that monotheism often precedes polytheism in cultural development) and also is obviously prejudicial in its judgments on cultures that hold with ideas of magic and myth.2
Another aspect of early myth theory was its association with cultural chauvinism and racism. Even though Müller was not enamored of the mythological worldview and basically viewed it as one left behind by Christianity, he did hold that the Indo-European or “Aryan” languages were much richer in myths than the Semitic languages of the Bible—and this view was utilized by those who came to celebrate Aryan culture and denigrate “Semitic Jewish” culture in Germany and elsewhere. Ernest Renan (1823–92) exalted Aryan culture over the Semitic to the point that he held that even Jesus was not really part of Jewish culture; this attitude finally led to books like Hans Hauptmann’s Jesus the Aryan (1931), which claimed Jesus was crucified by “Semitic Jews.” The so-called German Christians who supported the racist ideology of National Socialism even wanted to replace the “Jewish” Old Testament with more suitable “Aryan” mythology as a background to the Christian New Testament. “Mythology” came to be associated with fascism and extreme nationalist politics, as right-wing groups sought to establish a religious basis for their claims of racial superiority.3
In this way, the study of “mythology” underwent a not-so-subtle shift as it moved from being a negative method that rejected the historicity of religious stories to a positive method of exalting particular religious stories for their cultural value. The odd thing about this transition was that it still basically associated “myth” with nonbiblical religion, although it was now held to be good rather than bad. Few people considered that there might be more similarity than difference between the miraculous stories of the Bible and the stories of other religious traditions.
Psychological Interpretations of Myth: Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell
Today, many people who have overcome the scientifically motivated denigration of myth as “false history” have come to appreciate it not as a source of political or racist ideology but as an expression of a healthy psychological need for stories that define our identities and values. This development can be traced in part to Carl Jung (1875–1961), who as a psychologist departed from Freud’s ideological critique of religion as he came to see its positive benefits. He believed that mythology utilized a series of universal, archetypal figures (e.g., the wise old woman, the brave hero, the mother goddess) that reappear in stories around the world, expressing the experience of the “collective unconscious” of humanity.4 Whereas Freud believed that individuals suppress details of their personal histories, which then emerge in the activity of the individual’s unconscious (e.g., in dreams), Jung believed that there are many symbols in consciousness that cannot be explained simply as a result of the individual’s history. For this reason, he asserted the existence of a “collective unconscious” that preexists all individuals and societies and so has the character of an a priori part of human nature. This approach is in effect an attempt to overcome Freud’s reductionist view of religion by admitting that it refers to something bigger than the individual psyche and its neuroses.
But Jung’s understanding of religion still has reductionist elements to it. Although the collective unconscious and its archetypes transcend individuals, they are still understood through psychological categories that confine religion to an internal experience—albeit an internal experience of our species as a whole. Although myths may seem to be about external realities, they are in fact “symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche . . . mirrored in the events of nature.”5 Even the story of Jesus is ultimately not about a historical individual so much as it is the exemplification of a psychological archetype.6 Jesus represents the fully integrated “Self,” the ideal of the mature and “whole” person we all seek to be; the details