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Ancient, Modern and Future Myth
Hero. Feature film produced and directed by Zhang Yimou, 2004. I asked my husband to pick a film we should go see together, and he picked Hero. I knew about the film, but really didn’t know what to expect. It’s famous for hitting the American market with all Chinese actors speaking Chinese with English subtitles. It’s been in major theaters for weeks—astonishing success considering the subtitles. Visually, artistically, this film is magnificent. It is a cinematography extravaganza, melding animation and live actors with only a few minor glitches. The visuals keep you spellbound. The camera work, framing and composing shots, lighting, scene transitions—all absolutely top notch. As usual, I sat through the end credits and was not surprised to see an Australian unit credited—but most of the credits went to Chinese sounding names. At least the lettering was in English. With all the breath-holding I did, it’s a wonder my mind registered the story at all, but actually I think that the story is what I’ll always remember about this film. It is the story of how China got to be named China. It is about the ending of the war of the provinces, a war depicted as about oppression, injustice, and the usual things people revolt against. It’s about an emperor finally establishing an ironclad central control and creating a superpower, a gigantic territory of varied cultures. But mostly it’s a love story—love between two professional assassins, a man and a woman who have given their lives to the highest spiritual ideals their culture knows. When it comes to the Orient, the idealism behind the martial arts can overpower the action—and that’s what happens in this film. This film takes an old legend (which may or may not have a grain of truth in it) and creates a modern myth using high-tech means. China is China today because of the love, spiritual and carnal, of a world-class swordswoman. Woman! This film started me thinking about myth, legend, and the binding forces of cultures. The modern world has seen several large countries fly apart into warring tribes the moment the iron grip of central authority is removed. The fragments in most cases don’t share a common mythology. Mythology is usually defined as the stories of the gods and heroes, where heroes are the sons of gods by humans. But those stories are usually stories about how natural forces or vast, massive political, social, and religious institutions came to be. Hero is such a story, and the figures are depicted as having superhuman fighting abilities, just as are many martial arts masters. The film does not depict them as sons of gods and humans, but as real people who perfected spiritual and physical arts to exceed all human expectations. The sf/f genre focuses on the story of the hero archetype. I, myself, have a novel from Ace titled Hero under my pen name Daniel R. Kerns, and my article in Five Seasons of Angel edited by Glenn Yeffeth, contends that Angel is no Hero at all but a victim. The Hero “myth” or archetype is the root of American culture. Our founders were larger-than-life Heroes, as the popularity of the Western on TV showed. And today, the modern “Western” is usually set out in the galaxy somewhere else. Carol S. Pearson is a Senior Scholar at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the author of numerous books, including The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes and The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By. Her very political web-published article, “Can the U.S. Wake Up From Its Hero Trance—in Time?” discusses how America is manifesting some of the paradigms we’ve grown used to in our fiction—and that is the root of the political response to challenges leading us to war. Read that essay after studying the film Hero. The Canadian subsidized Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing company has brought us a brilliant page-turner of a fantasy titled Even The Stones by Marie Jakober about a kingdom which has “gone wrong” because the followers of one god closed the temples of a goddess. The crown princess vows to re-open the goddess’s temples, and in fulfilling that vow, she turns loose political forces that change everything. It is a novel of mythic scope and profound meaning—and even so, it’s a can’t-put-it-down page turner about love and mystical marriage. Yes, you begin to see. The popular movie about the origins of the name China is about heroism and love, the TV show Angel (and Buffy too) is about love standing against evil, Even the Stones and many other popular novels I’ve touched on in this column blend heroic action plots with romance and true love founded in ethical and moral behavior. And we are beginning to raise this mixture of genres to the level of an American myth. Trekkies2, the docudrama sequel to Trekkies I’ve mentioned before (hey, I’m in it!) shows us that the TV Trek Universe has indeed become an American myth, a story of larger than life Heroes (fans) who have changed the world with their fanfic and films adding love to action-drama. In other cultures, the story of “how things got this way,” tells children they can’t change things. But in American culture, the story of “How The West Was Won By Gene Roddenberry” only spurs our children to grow up and change the world again. American mythical figures are merely role models to be exceeded, not icons to be venerated. One such mythical figure is known to hundreds of thousands as The Rebbe. The real life story of what this hero accomplished in the middle of the 20th century is told by veteran journalist Sue Fishkoff in The Rebbe’s Army. And this non-fiction mythical figure started something uniquely American that is still gathering steam a decade after his death. Who is The Rebbe? Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh man to head the Chabad-Lubavitch Chassidic movement. Lubavitch is the name of the town where this Chassidic group originated, and Chabad is an acronym for the source of their basic philosophy—Chokhma, Binah, Da’ath—three of the Sephiroth on the Tree of Life. The core of their philosophy is unconditional love and acceptance. The core of their lifestyle is providing opportunities for Jews to perform the deeds commanded in the Torah—lighting Sabbath candles, donning teffillin, teaching their children, and so on. They provide free Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services—where most synagogues charge hundreds of dollars for a seat. “You don’t have to pay to pray,” is their motto. And they are equally accepting of non-Jews who observe the Seven Laws given to Noah: No idolatry, No blasphemy, No murder, No forbidden sexual relations, No stealing, No eating the limb of a live animal, and To set up courts of law to enforce the other six. The core of Chabad worship is to approach G-d through joy and happiness. They do not attempt to convert non-Jews, and they do not try to make everyone who comes to their schools and services into Lubavitchers. Look up a local Chabad on www1.chabad.org and drop in for a Friday night or Saturday morning service. Chances are you will see a widely diverse crowd of people, many who can’t even read the prayers in Hebrew, and some who are not much interested in praying. Look again at the list of Chabad centers on chabad.org. Most are not twenty years old. The Rebbe’s Army shows both the energy and success Chabad’s love and acceptance method has met with, and the sometimes negative reactions of other Jewish organizations to that rampant success. Fishkoff is not Lubavitch and gives us a fair, even-handed journalistic look at this organization from a very objective, external perspective. Because of that external perspective, she makes no effort to analyze why this movement, composed of real people as imperfect as the rest of us, is so astonishingly successful. Readers of this column, however, may be able to see deeper because this book is so well written. Read Even The Stones, then The Rebbe’s Army, and watch the film that survived in the American market, Hero. Can you see what the next American myth that binds all America’s diversity into a unity might be? Send books for review in this column to: Jacqueline Lichtenberg, email jl@simegen.com for instructions. |
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