Corpsey
bandz ahoy
What does the popular mythology of our time tell us about our time?
('OUR' here admittedly means 'WESTERN CULTURE')
Allowing for the fact that I may be reading into things that don't require reading into:
ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE
And apocalypse in general. No doubt this is to do with our fear of global warming, and perhaps also the saturation we experience, via news media, of terrible news. Maybe it's even a sort of utopian idea in disguise? Life has become so complex and tangled up that we would like everything to be reduced to a bare bones survival situation.
Zombies in particular are an interesting cultural phenomenon. Part of it is the joy of being able to shoot people in the head without feeling guilty. I think the rise of zombies in the popular imagination has to do with overpopulation (and again with the media populating our minds with other people even if we live in a hamlet in Surrey). We feel there are multitudes of hostile people 'out there'. This also has a cultural dimension, of course, as vividly illustrated by the recent issues around mass migration from the middle east to Europe. (Katie Hopkins openly fantasising about machine gunning boatloads of migrants.)
Zombies also feature in Game of Thrones, one of the most popular myths of the current era. In fact, as well as being all about dragons and all about backstabbing politicians GoT is all about Climate Change, and the fear of mass migration. Obviously 'The Wall' has become particularly charged as an image in recent years.
SUPERHEROES
YES, this could just be a fad, a consequence of CGI advancing sufficiently to make superheroes seem more credible, but there's surely something in the idea of superpowerful people offering a morally ambiguous way to fight crime/disorder which resonates with us more today than it did in, say, the 90s, when superheroes were less common on the big screen and were basically just camp escapism for kids when they were. The themes of surveillance, terrorism, vigilante justice etc. are of course consciously pursued by films like The Dark Knight and Civil War, but the point is these CAN be pursued without financially harming these movies, and perhaps give them a wider appeal and allow them to make a greater impact than the campy superhero movies of old.
I am rather too ill today to do this thread idea justice, but you get the point and can no doubt improve on it. I was also going to bring up HARRY POTTER, which is in many respects derivative of old myths but, it seems to me, is rather unique in fantasy fiction for DA KIDZ in making direct parallels between its villains and fascism. Again, like GoT, this is a myth which seems to be increasingly resonant in our orrible times.
('OUR' here admittedly means 'WESTERN CULTURE')
Allowing for the fact that I may be reading into things that don't require reading into:
ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE
And apocalypse in general. No doubt this is to do with our fear of global warming, and perhaps also the saturation we experience, via news media, of terrible news. Maybe it's even a sort of utopian idea in disguise? Life has become so complex and tangled up that we would like everything to be reduced to a bare bones survival situation.
Zombies in particular are an interesting cultural phenomenon. Part of it is the joy of being able to shoot people in the head without feeling guilty. I think the rise of zombies in the popular imagination has to do with overpopulation (and again with the media populating our minds with other people even if we live in a hamlet in Surrey). We feel there are multitudes of hostile people 'out there'. This also has a cultural dimension, of course, as vividly illustrated by the recent issues around mass migration from the middle east to Europe. (Katie Hopkins openly fantasising about machine gunning boatloads of migrants.)
Zombies also feature in Game of Thrones, one of the most popular myths of the current era. In fact, as well as being all about dragons and all about backstabbing politicians GoT is all about Climate Change, and the fear of mass migration. Obviously 'The Wall' has become particularly charged as an image in recent years.
SUPERHEROES
YES, this could just be a fad, a consequence of CGI advancing sufficiently to make superheroes seem more credible, but there's surely something in the idea of superpowerful people offering a morally ambiguous way to fight crime/disorder which resonates with us more today than it did in, say, the 90s, when superheroes were less common on the big screen and were basically just camp escapism for kids when they were. The themes of surveillance, terrorism, vigilante justice etc. are of course consciously pursued by films like The Dark Knight and Civil War, but the point is these CAN be pursued without financially harming these movies, and perhaps give them a wider appeal and allow them to make a greater impact than the campy superhero movies of old.
I am rather too ill today to do this thread idea justice, but you get the point and can no doubt improve on it. I was also going to bring up HARRY POTTER, which is in many respects derivative of old myths but, it seems to me, is rather unique in fantasy fiction for DA KIDZ in making direct parallels between its villains and fascism. Again, like GoT, this is a myth which seems to be increasingly resonant in our orrible times.
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