|
The American Gods Part 2
Many months ago, I began an exploration of what can only be called "The American Mythology." With this installment, I would like to continue this exploration.
The neo-westerns of the 1960's destroyed a once-bold American Ideal. With the arrival of more anarchic directors such as Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, God-like heroes such as Shane would never again come from Mount Olympos. This created a void, one which I believe must be filled for the healthy development and movement of our society. In my opinion, this legacy of Myths has yet to find an heir.
Many would disagree with me, and for the last forty years those-in-the-know have been hedging their bets and laying in the line with the realm of science fiction.
Of course, this is not the actions of Hopeless men throwing their faith to the winds, hoping for relief from anywhere. There are many analogous elements between the bygone Western and Science Fiction, its potential bastard grandson.
First is in the location. The power of the Western was held, for more than a century, in a fear and awe of the unknown. This is a commonality to all the world's mythologies in History. The pull of Odysseus to the Greeks was that he was facing inhuman, often super-human, adversaries. The simple fact was that no one quite knew what the frontier was in America. Looking west, they just saw a vast emptiness. It's the most heroic of us who choose to brave the unknown frontiers, and seeing Ethan Edwards actually SURVIVING in this climate is the stuff that legends are made of. Look up at the night sky, and it becomes obvious what the allure of Science Fiction is as a maker of myths. Captain Kirk said it himself: "Space, the Final Frontier." We Americans have done something no other society ever could do: we conquered and civilized our unknown frontier. We're in great need for a new "unknown" to tell stories about, and the greatest unknown is outside of our planet.
It's important to recognize, of course, that these stories, the makings of mythology, are rarely taken as a truth in any culture. Athens was build for the Goddess Athena, and so were twenty-some other cities. Interesting to note: each city worshipped a DIFFERENT Athena. The actions of Gods and Men in "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey", as well as in the Western, were seen as idealizations, never as truth. They were artistic endeavours which highlighted the morality of the society as well as its value structure. Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" is a myth, not literal truth, and such is the same with any mythology.
Great location and the opportunity for a representation of ideals. It's all there in Science Fiction, and for this reason many see the genre as heir-apparent to the throne.
I cannot agree with this. The one thing Science Fiction has been lacking for has been the very lynchpin. It needs a hero. It needs a personification of ideals, and it needs that hero to strongly live those ideals. It needs the hero to come from our society as we see it, yet live outside of it. This hero must be something higher than man: human, yet not. Dave Bowman from "2001" approaches it, but comes nowhere close to breaking the barrier. By and large, those who have worked with the genre have either injected it with no heroism or turned their story into such a hackneyed lump of chaos that it is impossible to discern a value system from it. This has been the case time and time again.
Except once. Oddly enough, the one that's come closest to mythology has been a Japanese import. Shinichiro Watanabe's 1998 television series "Cowboy Bebop" did everything right. It presented Western elements, yes, but took it one step further. It brought us into the deep unknown of space. It presented a human character who proved higher, one who lived beyond the bounds of society. This man was Spike Spiegel, perhaps the most perfect mythological hero seen in the last 2000 years. In short, the series did everything right, and the subsequent 2001 film furthered the saga of the 26-episode series.
It worked because Spike seemed amoral only by his profession and by necessity. It showed a society corrupted, and a character with the ability to alter that. Its villain was every bit the equal of Spike, and it was that very villain who sought to corrupt society. In the final episode, Spike puts the cap on his status as a hero by demonstrating his unwillingness to face the villain, yet the necessity to do just that. Spike was faced with a scenario where he had to live as a hero, and heroes do not have choices. Over the course of the series, Watanabe created what I can only call the beginnings of a new mythology, and I can only regret that it may never be repeated.
In short, we're floundering. We're a society who, like so many before us, have found reason, science, and logic. All fine and good, but unlike any other society we've abandoned everything else in favour of those three. We're become bankrupt souls. We've defeated our parents, our Gods, and our teachers, but we did it all without thinking about the consequences. We're facing the consequences, and we're hurting because we never made plans for what we'd do once we'd defeated the old ways. We've lost the ability to revel, to hold ideals for behaviour in any sense of uniformity, and we are fast approaching a time where we must find a new way or die.
What is the solution? Where are the new American Gods? I simply can't provide a single yellow pill for us all to swallow, not one that doesn't involve a complete re-definition of our world. Humans are versatile, but societies are not. I just don't know.