Hollywood's remake machine has set its sights on Clash of the Titans. The remake itself is not what bothers me, since this movie was never a favorite of mine, despite my love of myth and legend. Strange versions of the Arthurian mythos bother me more. I am, however, concerned that this adaptation of an adaptation, like the light of mirror in moonlight, will have myth-obsessed fanboys up in arms about its (no doubt gross) misrepresentation of the mythological canon.
Let me say this up front: I love myths and have been reading them since I was eight years old. I started with Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, and Norse myths; moved to Yoruba and other African myths; and once was mocked in grade school for reading the tales of the Aboriginal Dreamtime in a book which featured Aboriginal art (which lacks the same modesty taboos as contemporary pseudo-Victorian society). Once I had moved on from Bullfinch, however, I learned from Graves and translations of the Greek tragedies and epics that ancient authors and poets felt no compunction at changing the narrative of a myth in order to illustrate their desired point. The backstory of Oedipus at Colonus cannot be exactly the same as the ending of Oedipus Rex, and the version of Oedipus in the Iliad is less flawed than the Oedipus of the tragic stage.
The outrage of the mythological fanboy, therefore, is not only unwarranted, but even untrue to the spirit of the nature of myth. The last outburst of such outrage I can recall occurred at the release of Disney's Hercules, which made the radical change of having Hercules as the son of Hera and therefore a god without terrestrial access to his own godhead. At the time, many complained that this was some desecration of the Herculean canon, although that canon includes Hercules as sage and barbaric, irredeemably stupid and unexpectedly crafty, in love with women and in love with boys. The syncretism of the Herculean mythos from the tales of strongmen of many cities prohibits a single interpretation of his character.
This lack of canonical exclusivity, it seems to me, is characteristic of myth in general. Although there may be general outlines, the teller of the tale is free to stretch or diminish portions to suit the point which he desires to make at that telling. Since Hollywood desires only to entertain (as judged by ticket revenue), it is natural that it would bend the tale in the ways most suitable to that purpose.
Fanboys have no right to complain that something as fluid as myth should conform to their preconcieved standards, although they are free to dislike it.
2 comments:
I agree with you to some extent: myths are meant to be syncretic, so that there's always a lot of discontinuity between Apollo the Lord of Reason and Apollo the Bringer of Plagues.
So it probably could be fairly said that there's never a TECHNICAL reason for dissing a freewheeling use of a myth-image. I've said many times that I think films and comics birth all sorts of myths, even if they aren't religious in nature. For me Marvel's Thor doesn't have to be very much like the archaic Thor (which he isn't) to be mythic in nature.
That said, I think the untrueness of a mythic representation in modern fiction can be a factor in giving an AESTHETIC reason for why (as you say) one doesn't like something.
I'm no fan of Disney's HERCULES, in part because I found it overly predictable. I can give it a pass on making Hercules the son of Hera: that's just our own modern myth-system generating its own taboos. But I really, really didn't like their taking a satyr to be their trainer-of-heroes. I won't say that there's no chance in hell it could NEVER have been done so as to satisfy me-- but I think that's a real (for me) failure, in that satyrs are usually expected to be lusty gadabouts w/o much heroism in their souls.
My subjective aesthetic prescription is that if you're going to go way against a received notion of a myth, you ought to work extra hard to justify it, rather than just doing it because it's fun to quote a schtick from "Rocky."
Thank you,
Mr. Phillips.
1) I'm not sure your first example counts, as Apollo is the god of health (sublet to Asclepius) and therefore also a god of lack of health.
2) True. The Thor in SANDMAN is a much closer representation to the "original" Thor.
3)I never claimed that Disney's HERCULES was an excellent film, or that it was free of the usual proprietary Disneyfication of common intellectual property. We poor myth-lovers have few enough genre films as is. And it's still closer than TROY.
4) True, It would have been better to use a centaur rather than a satyr. Centaurs, however, traditionally are majestic rather than comic figures.
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