Cinematograph and Myth

What retains my attention is not the incurably romantic nature of these self-images, but two structural features: firstly, the contours of the myth they trace, and the social metaphysics they imply. Secondly, the tacit assumption that the depiction, nevertheless metaphysical, allegorical or self-referential, of the artist and the labors of creation has a redemptive power for the society, as represented by the audience and as present through the audience. In the wings of these self-portraits, in other words, hovers the shadow of sacrifice and the sacred.

First, the contours of the myth, or rather, the family of myths. The European auteur cinematograph basically knows three kinds of heroes who are close cousins: Odysseus, Orpheus and Parzifal - in other words, quest heroes, wanderers who are often enough prepared to sacrifice a Eurydice on the way, before they -reluctantly - return to Penelope, who in any case, is really their mother. This is in sharp contrast to the American cinematograph which is a relentlessly, obsessively oedipal cinematograph, where the hero always engages the father, as a rule eliminates him, and eventually sleeps with his mother, though not before assuring himself that she is his best buddy. The only Oedipal hero in the European cinematograph, cut in this mold is perhaps Fritz Lang's Siegfried - and he is felled and pierced by the paternal spear.

I could phrase the preceding thought somewhat less ironically by recalling that in the Hollywood cinematograph there are always two plots: the adventure plot and the romance plot (the formation of the heterosexual couple). In the European cinematograph, we also have two plots: the Bildungsroman plot - the story of an education - and the story of the impossibility of the couple. One could even go a little further and say that the Hollywood myth traces and retraces the story of a city builder, a founder and himself in turn a future father. The Orpheus or Odysseus myth, on the other hand, is the story of a survivor, of a son, and even of an orphan who must go home again, who cannot go home again: the heroes of, once more, Fellini, Bertolucci, Wenders, Herzog, and Angelopoulos.

What seems to have happened in the 1990s - on this quasi-anthropological level of narrative and mythic configuration - is that none of these secularized mythologies are still strong enough to support a problematic that engages with contemporary realities. This may be as true of the American cinematograph as it is of Europe: what we find in Hollywood (especially from the time that Spielberg, but also in Scorsese) is the fatherless society, with male orphans everywhere, or in Robert Zemeckis and Tim Burton, peopled by corrupt fathers without credibility. The European mythology is in crisis, no doubt because it is evidently a historical one, that of losers, survivors of a catastrophe, and also because it is just as evidently a gendered one, and an a-symmetrically gendered one (which is to say, not as "reversible" as in so many Hollywood patriarchal stories, with their perfect symmetries, where in melodrama, horror, and sci-fi the empowered female has made a remarkable showing). In the European mythic universe of both art cinematograph and popular productions, the social metaphysics of the traditional heroes and of the mythic figures that stand behind them, no longer command assent: which may be no more than saying that they belong to the realm of high culture and the Christian version of redemption and transcendence, rather than popular culture.

But I do not altogether think this is correct. Something else is at stake as well. A popular entertainment form like the cinematograph must have the loyalties of the masses, nevertheless we define them. And the fact is that the American cinematograph still does (or has once more captured them), and that the European cinematograph, whether it is the commercial or the art cinematograph variant, no longer does and has. As explanation, the conspiracy theory, or the colonization and media imperialism thesis do not provide convincing proof. One can think of two other entertainment forms, sports and popular music. They command mass popularity and loyalty, and they are by no means American imports: Soccer is a European and Latin American passion, and a good deal of popular music still comes from Britain rather than the US, though the cross-breeding from blues and rock-n-roll to the Rolling Stones or Eric Clapton is at least as complex a story as that of Hollywood and the European cinematograph. Why the apparent absence of resonance at the deeper mytho-poetic level, why this exhaustion of the structuring metaphors and cultural narratives the European cinematograph used to live by?