The Modern Myths
Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination
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The Modern Myths
Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination
With The Modern Myths, brilliant science communicator Philip Ball spins a new yarn. From novels and comic books to B-movies, it is an epic exploration of literature, new media and technology, the nature of storytelling, and the making and meaning of our most important tales.
Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time—fun and fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball shows, we are still writing them—and still living them—today. From Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman, many stories written in the past few centuries are commonly, perhaps glibly, called “modern myths.” But Ball argues that we should take that idea seriously. Our stories of Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes are doing the kind of cultural work that the ancient myths once did. Through the medium of narratives that all of us know in their basic outline and which have no clear moral or resolution, these modern myths explore some of our deepest fears, dreams, and anxieties. We keep returning to these tales, reinventing them endlessly for new uses. But what are they really about, and why do we need them? What myths are still taking shape today? And what makes a story become a modern myth?
In The Modern Myths, Ball takes us on a wide-ranging tour of our collective imagination, asking what some of its most popular stories reveal about the nature of being human in the modern age.
Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time—fun and fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball shows, we are still writing them—and still living them—today. From Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman, many stories written in the past few centuries are commonly, perhaps glibly, called “modern myths.” But Ball argues that we should take that idea seriously. Our stories of Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes are doing the kind of cultural work that the ancient myths once did. Through the medium of narratives that all of us know in their basic outline and which have no clear moral or resolution, these modern myths explore some of our deepest fears, dreams, and anxieties. We keep returning to these tales, reinventing them endlessly for new uses. But what are they really about, and why do we need them? What myths are still taking shape today? And what makes a story become a modern myth?
In The Modern Myths, Ball takes us on a wide-ranging tour of our collective imagination, asking what some of its most popular stories reveal about the nature of being human in the modern age.
An audiobook version is available.
368 pages | 53 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2021
Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory
Reviews
Excerpt
HOW CAN A MYTH BE MODERN?
We can start almost anywhere, and there’s no virtue in being highbrow about it. So why not with the 2004 movie Van Helsing, starring Hugh Jackman as the famous vampire-hunter? Aside from his name and calling, this youthful, dark-locked, brawny action hero has nothing in common with Dracula’s venerable nemesis in Bram Stoker’s novel. It’s not only the bloodsucking count he’s pursuing but a legion of monsters that includes Frankenstein’s creature and the brutish Mr. Hyde. We know we are in safe hands here, for Jackman and his screen lover, Kate Beckinsale, are genre stalwarts, much as Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Boris Karloff, and Bela Lugosi were in their day. The texture of the movie is familiar too: comic-strip gothic, lit by moonlight and bristling with razor-fanged CGI beasts, the framing and aesthetic echoing the graphic novels of Frank Miller and Alan Moore. The imagery is iconic: here is Dracula’s castle, much as it was in the 1931 Lugosi movie directed by Tod Browning. There is Frankenstein’s electrified laboratory, full of sparks and shadows, where Karloff ’s creature rose up in the same year. And here comes the flat-headed monster himself, his patchwork skull apt to fly open, in slapstick fashion, to reveal a sparking brain. We forgive Van Helsing for becoming a werewolf and killing his paramour; heroes these days are prone to such things.
Van Helsing is a stupendously silly homage, about as scary and unsettling as a soap opera, and I rather enjoyed it.
There doesn’t, though, appear to be much we can learn about our modern myths from this sort of good-natured romp, with its relentless computer-game dynamic, cheap sentimentalism, and makeshift, Frankensteinian mosaic of motifs. Surely it does for these myths only what Ray Harryhausen did for the classical myths of Greece, turning them into a parade of cinematic effects with not a care for coherence or poetry. (I don’t mean that in a bad way.)
Still, you know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You know what Van Helsing, in its clumsy, carefree fashion, is up to. You know that the seam it is exploiting, the language it is using, is indeed that of myth.
I hope I am not being condescending when I suspect that few among Van Helsing’s target audience—hormonal adolescents eager for violent action, sexy vampires, and spectacle—will have read Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. These are stories that everyone knows without having to go to that trouble. They have seeped into our consciousness, replete with emblematic visuals, before we reach adulthood. I met Robinson Crusoe in a black-and-white French television series from the 1960s, in which nothing much seemed to happen save for the discovery of that momentous footprint in the sand; like many of my generation, I can hum the theme tune today. Frankenstein arrived as a glowin-the-dark model kit of the Karloff incarnation, arms outstretched to claim his next victim. (It was not actually “Frankenstein,” of course, but his monster, although the box didn’t tell me that.) The stingray alien craft of George Pal’s 1953 movie The War of the Worlds were ominous enough to distract us from the wires from which they dangled. Dracula—well, he was Christopher Lee, everyone knew that.
This cultural osmosis is how we learn our modern myths. For myths are what these stories are, and to suggest (as some purists do) that the Hammer films or Hollywood adaptations traduced the “real” story is to miss their point. In this book I propose that the Western world has, over the past three centuries or so, produced narratives that have as authentic a claim to mythic status as the psychological dramas of Oedipus, Medea, Narcissus, and Midas and the ancient universal myths of creation, flood, redemption, and heroism.
Myths have no authors, although they must have an origin. They escape those origins (and their originators) not simply because they are constantly retold with an accumulation of mutations, appendages, and misconceptions. Rather, their creators have given body to stories for which retellings are deemed necessary. What is it in these special tales that compels us so compulsively to return to them? Each age finds different answers, and this too is in the nature of myth.
Why are we still making myths? Why do we need new myths? And what sort of stories attain this status?
In posing these questions and seeking answers, I shall need to make some bold proposals about the nature of storytelling, the condition of modernity, and the categories of literature. I don’t claim that any of these suggestions is new in itself, but the notion of a modern myth can give them some focus and unity. We have been skating around that concept for many years now, and I can’t help wondering if some of the reticence to acknowledge and accept it stems from puzzlement, and perhaps too a sense of unease, that Van Helsing is a part of the story. Not just that movie, but also the likes of I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Zombie Apocalypse, as well as children’s literature and detective pulp fiction, not to mention queer theory, alien abduction fantasies, video games, body horror, and artificial intelligence.
In short, there are a great many academic silos, cultural prejudices, and intellectual exclusion zones trammeling an exploration of our mythopoeic impulse. Even in 2019, for example, a celebrated literary novelist dipping his toe into a robot narrative could suppose that real science fiction deals in “travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots,” as opposed to “looking at the human dilemmas of being close up.” It is precisely because our modern myths go everywhere that they earn that label, and for this same reason we fail to see (or resist seeing) them for what they are. As classical myths did for the cultures that conceived them, modern myths help us to frame and come to terms with the conditions of our existence.
Evidently, this is not all about literary books. Myths are promiscuous; they were postmodern before the concept existed, infiltrating and being shaped by popular culture. To discern their content, we need to look at comic books and B-movies as well as at Romantic poetry and German Expressionist cinema. We need to peruse the scientific literature, books of psychoanalysis, and made-for-television melodramas. Myths are not choosy about where they inhabit, and I am not going to be choosy about where to find them.
We can start almost anywhere, and there’s no virtue in being highbrow about it. So why not with the 2004 movie Van Helsing, starring Hugh Jackman as the famous vampire-hunter? Aside from his name and calling, this youthful, dark-locked, brawny action hero has nothing in common with Dracula’s venerable nemesis in Bram Stoker’s novel. It’s not only the bloodsucking count he’s pursuing but a legion of monsters that includes Frankenstein’s creature and the brutish Mr. Hyde. We know we are in safe hands here, for Jackman and his screen lover, Kate Beckinsale, are genre stalwarts, much as Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Boris Karloff, and Bela Lugosi were in their day. The texture of the movie is familiar too: comic-strip gothic, lit by moonlight and bristling with razor-fanged CGI beasts, the framing and aesthetic echoing the graphic novels of Frank Miller and Alan Moore. The imagery is iconic: here is Dracula’s castle, much as it was in the 1931 Lugosi movie directed by Tod Browning. There is Frankenstein’s electrified laboratory, full of sparks and shadows, where Karloff ’s creature rose up in the same year. And here comes the flat-headed monster himself, his patchwork skull apt to fly open, in slapstick fashion, to reveal a sparking brain. We forgive Van Helsing for becoming a werewolf and killing his paramour; heroes these days are prone to such things.
Van Helsing is a stupendously silly homage, about as scary and unsettling as a soap opera, and I rather enjoyed it.
There doesn’t, though, appear to be much we can learn about our modern myths from this sort of good-natured romp, with its relentless computer-game dynamic, cheap sentimentalism, and makeshift, Frankensteinian mosaic of motifs. Surely it does for these myths only what Ray Harryhausen did for the classical myths of Greece, turning them into a parade of cinematic effects with not a care for coherence or poetry. (I don’t mean that in a bad way.)
Still, you know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You know what Van Helsing, in its clumsy, carefree fashion, is up to. You know that the seam it is exploiting, the language it is using, is indeed that of myth.
I hope I am not being condescending when I suspect that few among Van Helsing’s target audience—hormonal adolescents eager for violent action, sexy vampires, and spectacle—will have read Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. These are stories that everyone knows without having to go to that trouble. They have seeped into our consciousness, replete with emblematic visuals, before we reach adulthood. I met Robinson Crusoe in a black-and-white French television series from the 1960s, in which nothing much seemed to happen save for the discovery of that momentous footprint in the sand; like many of my generation, I can hum the theme tune today. Frankenstein arrived as a glowin-the-dark model kit of the Karloff incarnation, arms outstretched to claim his next victim. (It was not actually “Frankenstein,” of course, but his monster, although the box didn’t tell me that.) The stingray alien craft of George Pal’s 1953 movie The War of the Worlds were ominous enough to distract us from the wires from which they dangled. Dracula—well, he was Christopher Lee, everyone knew that.
This cultural osmosis is how we learn our modern myths. For myths are what these stories are, and to suggest (as some purists do) that the Hammer films or Hollywood adaptations traduced the “real” story is to miss their point. In this book I propose that the Western world has, over the past three centuries or so, produced narratives that have as authentic a claim to mythic status as the psychological dramas of Oedipus, Medea, Narcissus, and Midas and the ancient universal myths of creation, flood, redemption, and heroism.
Myths have no authors, although they must have an origin. They escape those origins (and their originators) not simply because they are constantly retold with an accumulation of mutations, appendages, and misconceptions. Rather, their creators have given body to stories for which retellings are deemed necessary. What is it in these special tales that compels us so compulsively to return to them? Each age finds different answers, and this too is in the nature of myth.
Why are we still making myths? Why do we need new myths? And what sort of stories attain this status?
In posing these questions and seeking answers, I shall need to make some bold proposals about the nature of storytelling, the condition of modernity, and the categories of literature. I don’t claim that any of these suggestions is new in itself, but the notion of a modern myth can give them some focus and unity. We have been skating around that concept for many years now, and I can’t help wondering if some of the reticence to acknowledge and accept it stems from puzzlement, and perhaps too a sense of unease, that Van Helsing is a part of the story. Not just that movie, but also the likes of I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Zombie Apocalypse, as well as children’s literature and detective pulp fiction, not to mention queer theory, alien abduction fantasies, video games, body horror, and artificial intelligence.
In short, there are a great many academic silos, cultural prejudices, and intellectual exclusion zones trammeling an exploration of our mythopoeic impulse. Even in 2019, for example, a celebrated literary novelist dipping his toe into a robot narrative could suppose that real science fiction deals in “travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots,” as opposed to “looking at the human dilemmas of being close up.” It is precisely because our modern myths go everywhere that they earn that label, and for this same reason we fail to see (or resist seeing) them for what they are. As classical myths did for the cultures that conceived them, modern myths help us to frame and come to terms with the conditions of our existence.
Evidently, this is not all about literary books. Myths are promiscuous; they were postmodern before the concept existed, infiltrating and being shaped by popular culture. To discern their content, we need to look at comic books and B-movies as well as at Romantic poetry and German Expressionist cinema. We need to peruse the scientific literature, books of psychoanalysis, and made-for-television melodramas. Myths are not choosy about where they inhabit, and I am not going to be choosy about where to find them.
Awards
The Mythopoeic Society: Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies
Won