Film as Religion, Second Edition. John C. Lyden
Читать онлайн книгу.
phenomenon that deals with an imaginary fairyland but not our real (societal) lives.20 If Geertz is right, religion and myth connect the real and the imagined, the everyday and the ideal.
Geertz’s efforts to utilize sociological analysis in a nonreductive way also contrast with the methods of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who expanded the sociological approach through the use of structuralism and linguistics. Geertz found Lévi-Strauss to be influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea of the “noble savage,” a romantic construct of “primitive” life as more moral and natural than life in our modern industrial society.21 This effort to romanticize and idealize pretechnological societies fails to understand individual cultures as it reduces them all to forms of the primitive archetype within ourselves, which Lévi-Strauss would like to see modern society recover.22 This reduction of all myth to a universal, “primitive” archetype has resonances with Campbell’s view and shares the same problems.
It is apparent that we need a better definition of myth than many of these views offer, one that avoids romanticizing or defaming it, that is neither sociologically nor psychologically reductionistic in viewing it merely as a by-product of social or psychological forces, and that views myth as neither irrational falsehood nor a basis for racist and fascist ideology. Geertz’s view points the way in his notion that myths unite the ideal and the real, a notion of how things could be with a pragmatic understanding of how they are. Myths can help people deal with life’s problems and also provide hope for a better day. Several other thinkers have offered significant ideas about myth that may help in developing a more positive and useful notion of the concept; four of them will now be considered, as well as the possible application of their views to popular film.
Mircea Eliade
It would not be an overstatement to suggest that Mircea Eliade (1907–86) has had a greater effect on the academic study of comparative religions than any other twentieth-century figure. He based much of his own understanding of mythology on a stark contrast between the Western “historical” view of time and the cyclical view of time found in other (especially archaic) religions. Mythology, to Eliade, is primarily cosmogony in that it gives an account of creation in a distant primordial time. This time of creation, however, can be accessed ritualistically through the retelling and reenacting of the myth of creation, in that such reenactment brings one outside of ordinary time and space to the sacred realm in which creation can once again occur.23 Eliade found that people whose lives are closely linked with nature (e.g., via agriculture) see the repetitious patterns of life and death in the seasons and believe that they can effect new life and so the new season by tapping into the power of creation. Through the myth of sacred origins, one can be returned to that time in order to bring its power to bear in the present of ordinary time. In such religions, time is viewed as cyclical rather than as linear. Even rites of passage have this cyclical character, in that each new generation must pass through the same stages of development in life as the previous generation and so make use of the same sacred power of new life.24
This cyclical view of time differs from that found in Western religions in that the latter find the sacred not in the constant repetition of creation outside of ordinary time but rather in ordinary historical time. God comes into history in biblical religion, making it possible to speak of a linear progression toward a fulfillment of history as God has planned it. History drives toward its completion, whether it is understood as the return of Israel to the Promised Land or the return of Jesus as the Messiah. There are elements of repetition in Western religion, of course: for example, the Jewish reenactment of the Exodus experience at the Passover Seder or the Christian reenactment of the death and resurrection of Jesus in Holy Communion. But these rituals always have an eschatological component in that they point forward to a final liberation in a distant future rather than backward to the creation in the distant past. It is not through returning to origins but through anticipating the end of history that meaning is found in biblical religion.25
This drive toward the fulfillment of life within rather than outside of history has now been secularized, according to Eliade, in political movements such as communism and fascism that seek to bring their own visions of societal perfection into the present. These movements are dangerous in that they have lost all connection with the sacred, so that while the historicism of Western religion is still linked to a transcendent reality, the secularized form of it believes that perfection is attainable here and now.26 In practice this means that historicism is now linked with political ideologies that seek to subordinate all culture and society to their own visions of the future, often through violent means. Eliade therefore seems to favor the mythic (cyclical-repetitious) view over the historical (linear-progressive), in spite of the link between historical thinking and Christianity. His preference is for a “cosmic Christianity” such as that practiced by the peasants of his youth in Romania, which viewed Jesus more as the lord of nature than of history and emphasized the cyclical nature of seasons continually renewed by the divine power of Christ more than a final transformation of history to his kingdom.27
Eliade has also applied his understanding of myth to Western popular culture, albeit in a limited way. He notes the mythological aspects of the Superman comic books, as the man of steel represents a modern hero in disguise (as mild-mannered Clark Kent) with whom readers can identify: “The myth of Superman satisfies the secret longings of modern man who, though he knows that he is a fallen, limited creature, dreams of one day proving himself an ‘exceptional person,’ a ‘Hero.’” Detective novels also offer a modern version of the battle between good and evil so that the reader, “through an unconscious process of projection and identification . . . takes part in the mystery and drama and has the feeling that he is personally involved in a paradigmatic—that is, a dangerous, ‘heroic’—action.”28 Whether reading or going to the movies, modern people escape from ordinary profane time and enter a “sacred” space and time.29 But even though the modern person is unavoidably and perhaps unconsciously religious, Eliade laments the fact that modern people deny the sacred, believing that they “make themselves” without any reference to a transcendent reality (as existentialism puts it).30 He would say that their religiosity is a diluted and desacralized faith that seeks fulfillment in the world rather than beyond it, and therefore, in his view, popular culture cannot have a transcendent referent.
Eliade’s analysis of myth is possibly more comprehensive than any that preceded him, and it has much to commend it, but it has also been criticized for romanticizing the “primitive,” as other theories have, and for overemphasizing the contrast between Western “historical” religion and the more “mythical” religions that allegedly have the cyclical notion of time so crucial to Eliade’s analysis. Perhaps myth is not primarily or only about creation and its repetition.31 Must mythology be understood as effecting an “eternal return” to the time of origins, outside of history, or can it sometimes be understood as incorporating a historical dimension? Francisca Cho has pointed out that Chinese “mythology” does not fit Eliade’s criteria, as the dichotomy between historical and mythical time does not exist in Chinese thought. Rather than define myths as stories that narrate a creation story in order to help us escape history, she suggests that we understand myths as providing archetypes that are models for “creation in the present.” In this way, “the creation narrative can be traded in for a creation function.” The basic purpose of all types of myths is to “provide patterns for living a life,” and this can be done with or without a rejection of the historical.32
Discarding the dichotomy of myth and history might also help us see the mythic dimensions of Western religion, not only in its attempts to escape history but also within its historically presented stories. We have seen the tendency to separate myth from Western religion, which may serve either to protect Western religion from mythological analysis (where myth is viewed as bad or false) or to critique Western religion as less “true” than the more “mythological” religions (where myth is viewed as good). Such dichotomies have served the value judgments of those who made them, but they have not necessarily served the goal of better understanding religion. This is not to say that Eliade engages in the sort of simplistic judgments on Western religion that mark the less scholarly work of, for example, Joseph Campbell; in contrast to Campbell’s anti-Western bias, Eliade criticizes Western secular historicism (communism, fascism) but not religious historicism as it is found in Judaism or Christianity.33