It should be said from the outset of any kind of review of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, released by Disney in March 2010, that it is not a remake of the Disney animated movie of the same name. Nor is it yet another adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s books. It is conceived to be more of a sequel that begins on the threshold of Alice’s emergence into adulthood at an unexpected engagement party. Alice, overcome with the idea of marrying an English lord, who has terrible digestive problems and an overly, dominating mother, runs into the nearby woods chasing a white rabbit wearing a waistcoat. She crawls under the roots of the tree, following him – a very sensible thing to do – and immediately falls down a dreadfully long tunnel full of debris and finally landing in a room of doors, the threshold to Wonderland. Throughout her journey, she encounters several of Carroll’s more memorable characters, taken from both “Alice” stories, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Initially, she is told that she is the “wrong Alice” or “hardly Alice,” and is only waiting to wake up from this dream. Wonderland becomes her land of unconscious, and her heroic adventure – taken straight from Joseph Campbell – her process of individuation. As ubiquitous as the symbolism has become in American popular culture, Burton’s revisioning recreates the psychic playground to reflect the struggles and torment reflective of the current American climate.

Can an Alice be an Archetype?

There have been several recreations of Alice on the screen, most notably the Disney animated feature of 1951, which cemented the characters into the American mythic landscape. These characters and symbols were also associated with the 1960s counterculture – as noted by the Jefferson Airplane – her constant shrinking and enlargement are handy metaphors for the drug experience. (She does eat mushrooms, after all !)

For all of its bizarreness, Alice’s journey is one of an archetypal hero. She receives her call to adventure following the white rabbit, passes the test of the threshold by passing through the impossibly small door, then undergoes a series of trials and meets many magical helpers from the eternally smiling Cheshire Cat and the beloved Mad Hatter, to name only a couple. She then faces the boon guardian, the Red Queen of Hearts, who, following Disney’s original adaptation, is a combination of two characters in the stories, and her Jabberwocky. Alice escapes the queen in order to return home. Carroll’s journey through the looking glass lacks the accidental fall into the journey and is often ignored in favor of the “Wonderland” symbolism, and many of the characters, such as the wrathful Red Queen and the chess pieces are interwoven. This does alter the stories, creating an Alice mythos that extends beyond the scope of Carroll’s vision.

Alice does not individuate in the stories, which emphasize her curious, playful, childlike nature. Adults pass off her adventure as childish fantasy, and her ability to travel through the looking glass is an extension of the nurturing atmosphere her parents afforded her imagination. Walt Disney’s adaptation emerges during the eras when fantasy life was “relegated to the nursery,” as J.R.R. Tolkien describes. In contemporary American culture, fantasy life sits below the surface of the collective psyche – just below – and it bubbles into conscious life on a regular basis, as evidenced by the successes of Harry Potter, Star Wars, Disneyland, and even the recent Avatar. Fantasy is becoming, increasingly, the culturally-sanctioned outlet for unconscious projection. Adults and children all tune to fantastical elements to act upon their psyche’s desires. Some participate in fantasy communities – from Renaissance festivals to Fantasy football – or play video or LARP games, or watch movies. In all cases, the need is to escape the realities of conscious existence in favor of allowing the unconscious to play. This does have the potential for unhealthy behaviors, such as only living for the video game, and confusing the barriers between the game and everyday life.

C. G. Jung, however, would encourage the fantasy behavior – as long as it is used in a healthy manner. Playing in the psychic playground allows one to tap into the unconscious in ways similar to Active Imagination or sand play techniques help in therapy. The real – REAL – danger, I suggest, isn’t the confusion between reality and fantasy; but, rather, the appropriation of external images into one’s personal internal reality, but that is a discussion of another time.

In Burton’s version, Alice does individuate. She enters Wonderland, technically Underland according to its inhabitants, on the threshold of major personal change and returns ready to take charge of her own life. In Wonderland, she has to regain her “muchness,” the characteristic of her youthful curiosity that fuels her heroic power.

Innocence and Wonderland (Innocence in post-war America versus Burton’s call to arms)

Since September 11^th, 2001, any illusion of innocence in America has died, forcing the Dream Makers to scramble within the new paradigm. Arguably, innocence was mainly a cultural illusion to give the image of peace and stability following the two World Wars and the Great Depression. The 1950s are characterized (stereotyped) as sanitized, with the perfect house, the perfect family, and everything was perfectly squeaky-clean. Of course, this image is propagandistic balderdash, but it is into this paradigm that Alice emerges. Now, we are in a new paradigm. As though collectively denying the “War on Terror,” Wonderland is the land of escape. However, Burton’s Wonderland is one fraught with war. Since Alice’s last visit, as an eight-year old young girl, the Red Queen has become the dominant force of Wonderland (or Underland). She has dethroned her sister, the White Queen, and executed a reign of terror on the land that has left forests burned and barren, and the subjects with the fear of displeasing her – in any way at all – because then one would lose one’s head. The Queen’s beheadings are her defense mechanism against the full consciousness reflective of her bulbous head. The beheaded head would become a floating stepping stone in her castle’s moat. The only hope the “Resistance Movement” has – i.e. the supporters of the White Queen and anyone eager for the reign of terror to end – is a prophecy in the Oraculum, “being a columdrial compendium of Underland,” that on Frabjous Day, Alice will rise up as the champion of the White Queen and slay the champion of the Red Queen, the Jabberwocky.

The first problem is in shaping Alice into that champion. When she re-enters Wonderland, she is accustomed to doing what she is told – as a good, English girl should – and is nearly convinced that her fantastical dreams are symptoms for insanity. She is curious, but lacks courage. In a pivotal moment in the film, she chooses to rescue the Mad Hatter from the Red Queen, rather than proceed immediately to the White Queen as she is expected to do. She boldly tells Bayard, the dog helping her in her escape, “From the moment I fell down the rabbit hole, I’ve been told who I must be … I’ll decide who I’ll be from here… I’ll make the path.” She tricks her way into the Queen’s court by pretending to be someone else, rescues the mythical vorpal blade that is destined to slay the Jabberwocky, then escapes with the Queen’s precious Bandersnatch to the White Castle. Though still hesitant to don the armor of the Champion, and still convinced that the entirety of Wonderland is a dream, Alice, nonetheless, develops an affection for the only world that does not perceive her as bonkers.

This is the psychological seduction of the unconscious and of fantasy. Jung dove deeply into his own fantasy/unconscious, as evidenced by the monstrous work of art that is the Red Book. He encouraged his patients to analyze their dreams and engage with art and myth in order to develop a relationship with the unconscious. In doing this, a process he called “individuation,” one could become a fully individual. This does not necessarily mean one would become a unique snowflake in the pool of androgyny (though Jung would encourage that as well, being concerned about collective think, as evidenced in his commentary on the Nazi Party’s involvement across Eastern Europe) but rather undivisable – in-divid-ual – meaning that consciousness and unconsciousness are operating in unison, and not in the opposition that causes psychosis.

Alice was very near this point when she returned to Wonderland. She believed her dreams to be nightmares that recurred nightly for as long as she could remember. She questions her mother on the way to her un-engagement party whether that was normal: shouldn’t people dream different things each night? What she was experiencing were memories. She had completely forgotten Wonderland. She had forgotten her friends and the adventure she had there. Too often, this is the cause of identity crisis. Children are encouraged to leave their fantasy life behind in favor of more adult matters, such as jobs, college, marriage, and even to become a parent someday. “Reality” has no room for fantasy.

Is Wonderland just a Figment of Our Imagination?

This is where I last left off with this essay , so I leave you, dear reader (all two of you) with this question.

Alice is a nice inspiration for this. Disney’s animated feature is a handy, condensed version of Lewis Carroll’s two Alice stories, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and most of the versions of Alice that have hit the screen since 1951 follow a similar formula. Let’s face it, Carroll’s stories are whimsical and entertaining, but their episodic nature does not make for good cinema. One could argue that, well, that’s the point. These and similar stories aren’t meant to be made into films, so why mess with a tried and true literary medium? BUT, speaks soon-to-be-doctor me, cinema and television are the modern purveyors of myth. Sure, any one could read the books, but we’ve turned into such a visual culture that we would rather see it on the screen. There are many examples of this throughout cinema’s history, but notably the recent books that have made it to the screen: Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Twilight, The Vampire Diaries. We can have the argument that Hollywood is trying to cash in on the fads these books represent, but were that the sole raison d’etre for these versions, I don’t think they would be nearly as successful as they are. We want the visualization, so once one is available for us, we eat it up. Sure, we may complain about the liberties the filmmakers took with the story, but ultimately, we keep going back for more. A few of the books-to-screen adaptations will stand forever as the perfect adaptation, don’t anyone dare touch it (though I would really love to see a better version of The Wizard of Oz); others will find themselves revisited every generation or two (such as The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles or Narnia).

And Alice. Disney’s version may have given us an approach to the stories that is tangible for screen, but it is not the only version available. There are different versions of the same story—Alice falls down the rabbit hole, Alice has an adventure through Wonderland, Alice returns home in time for tea. Recently, however, a few versions take Alice to new levels. In my own fanaticism, I’ve watched a few different versions of Alice in Wonderland, just to see a new take on Wonderland. A few noteworthy adaptations stand out: Phoebe in Wonderland, Malice in Wonderland, Alice (Woody Allen), and Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton). In all four of these adaptations, Alice’s story is rewritten to suit the heroine who inevitably has lost a part of herself along the way and needs to go to Wonderland to reclaim whatever she has lost. Wonderland in all of these versions is an imaginary realm that takes the heroine out of the mundane reality she is struggling to cope with, and forces her to face her demons and decide whether or not she is going to continue living according to the rules of reality or to define her own path, effectively bringing Wonderland into the “real world.”

Why is this such a powerful image today? Despite all the efforts of our feminist grandmothers, many women (and men) are still struggling with their identity within society. It’s not that we necessarily find ourselves marching to work a la Metropolis, but that we aren’t finding meaning in the world we live in. Whether we’re 15 or 45, this usually comes as an indication that it is time for something to change, if only we knew what and how. Alice’s story reminds us all that a little play can go a long way, but her journey to Wonderland isn’t just about play. Wonderland is an underworld or an otherworld, depending on how one wants to read the archetype. At some point in any journey, the hero has to go to this under/otherworld and find the missing “boon,” as Joseph Campbell describes it. When we apply the hero’s journey to our own lives, we all have to go through a period of struggle, darkness, or challenging difficulty in order to enrich our lives. These periods coincide with life crises—midlife, quarter-life, or otherwise. It’s all part of the process. Along the way, we may grow short or we may grow tall; we may follow rabbits or get lost in mazes. Alice’s adventures are thus metaphors for the life that awaits us.

The Artist is a film for film buffs, but I’m not going to spend this post describing the film. It’s beautiful, and deserving of all the awards it has won and is sure to win as the cinema award season comes to an end. The two themes that stand out are: finding your voice when it has been taken away from you and coping with transition.

The film is set in the shift from silent film to sound. The main character, George Valentin, found his voice silenced. He was a prominent actor, resembling Douglas Fairbanks, and found himself shut out of the studio because he didn’t want to easily convert to sound. This makes sense. He’s a silent film actor who has made his entire career speaking through his body language. We learn in the last lines of the film that he has a French accent, which is likely part of the reason he is unwilling to convert to sound. His story is not unique to Hollywood’s history. Several actors found themselves unemployed after the switch to sound because they had unpleasant voices for the film technology of the time. Singin’ in the Rain brings this issue to life, with the blonde silent beauty facing public humiliation because her voice is nasal with a thick New York accent. But, when you love something so much, how do you just walk away? George falls into ruin and depression. The two things keeping him going are his loyal dog and his unrequited love for the film’s heroine, Peppy, which he isn’t even willing to admit to himself for most of the film. Peppy helps him find a new voice through dance. The underlying message is that a lost voice can be refound, and likely it’s resting right under your nose requiring a change in perspective of what your voice looks/sounds like.

For all the study I’ve put into early Hollywood history, I failed to link the switch to sound as coinciding with the stock market crash that launched the Great Depression (but I did catch the themes of cinema during the Great Depression). The switch to sound was a major turning point in Hollywood because it involved embracing new technology and changed the face of cinema permanently. The stock market crash and the Great Depression were both major turning points in American history. Rather than change the face of the culture permanently, as we saw with sound technology, what we see with the Great Depression is an indicator of how slowly a paradigm shift can occur (and how much faster this shift has been compared to those of 2000 years ago!). The 15 years of the Depression brought the optimism of the Roaring Twenties to an end. The events of the Depression helped create government policies to prevent such a major depression from happening again. Americans are understandably frightened of economic depressions, though we tend to forget that depressions are part of the natural cycle of economics. The Depression made the events of the World War II possible—not in the sense of causality, certainly, but that the Depression primed the cultural psyche for the American involvement in the war to happen, and was punctuated with a blast of technology that changed the American temperament and relationship to war permanently. War is a cultural cathartic release. Von Franz notes that war is the confrontation with culture’s shadow, but war is also an expression of the culture’s shadow. Notice the last 10 years, the acceleration of America’s mythic transition, war has been a cultural release, as opposed to a full-on confrontation with the shadow. We’ve been fighting an ideology, not an easily identifiable enemy.

Where am I going with this? It’s not about the end of the world or any kind of apocalypse, but it’s about change. Change is inevitable. Films and other myths such as The Artist remind us that we can pull through, individually and culturally.

The story concentrates on Jung and his patient Sabina Spielrein. Without knowing too much about my history of Jung – I haven’t read a biography, I stay away from discussions such as The Aryan Christ because I believe all thinkers are the product of their times and environments, and I haven’t read Memories, Dreams, Reflections all the way through because I was frustrated by Jung’s arrogance – Spielrein is portrayed as Jung’s first psychoanalytic patient and the “guinea pig” for him to solidify his theories. Her analysis inspires Jung to meet Sigmund Freud, who was already published in the field of psychoanalysis, and their relationship becomes one of mentoring father to curious son and is one that fueled the fire for the psychoanalytic revolution of the last century. Jung makes the mistake of falling for Spielrien and launches into a sexual relationship with her after sending her to university at the prompting of a patient Freud sends to Jung. At this point, the story begins to follow two storylines. One is Jung’s relationship to Spielrein and the other his his relationship to Freud. Through Spielrein, Jung finds release, freedom, and an outlet for his growing theories. And in Freud, he finds a friendly face in a burgeoning field. The tensions between Freud and Jung are made evident from their first meeting. Some are economic – Jung is nonchalant about his wealth, which annoys Freud, who struggles with his status – and some are a matter of transference. Freud makes it clear that he sees Jung as his intellectual heir, while Jung doesn’t return the sentiments. It is in this last point that I feel the movie advertisements are misleading. The movie shows Spielrein as a catalyst for the separation between Freud and Jung, but not as the sole cause as the ads inform us: “Sabina Spielrein, the beautiful but disturbed young woman who comes between them.” What comes between the two thinkers is Jung’s willingness to embrace unscientific approaches in his psychology, whereas Freud held firm that only proven science was acceptable. I suspect that Freud’s adherence to science is the product of his Jewish heritage and a constant life-battle to be accepted.

Had this film, directed by David Cronenberg, not been about historical figures, based on historical facts, it could easily have fallen into cliché. But because this figures are so important, it adds a dimension to the film that only films “based on true events” can.

A little about the actors: As someone who is not a Freudian, I appreciated Viggo Mortenson’s portrayal of Freud. He made him human. Authentic. Kiera Knightly offered one of her best portrayals, and I would be disappointed if she didn’t get some nod from the award circuit. Occasionally “Kiera Knightly” leaked through her characterization, but she was able to bring Spielrein to life. Spielrien, it should be noted, was sent to university by Jung as part of her treatment. In an era when women were discouraged from going to school, she wanted to be a doctor and became a contributor to psychoanalysis in her own right. I can only imagine that if she had survived World War II, her contributions to the field would have greatly influenced psychology. And there’s Michael Fassbender as Jung. I’m not too familiar with Fassbender as an actor, but I did enjoy his performance in Jane Eyre. His portrayal of Jung captures Jung’s introverted awkwardness, his curiosity, and his internal struggles with his theories and his passions. In short, he came across less like the arrogant jerk I interpreted him to be in MDR, and more human.

This film is based on a play, “The Talking Cure” and a book, A Most Dangerous Game. It is interesting to note that in the acknowledgments at the end of the film, the Freud archives are thanked, but nothing with Jung.

I think that this film is a valuable contribution to the study of Jung. It makes the suggestion that Spielrein influenced his theories, especially the animus/anima, which I understand may not be wholly accurate, but we can forgive a little Hollywood license. The film is reverential in nature, not critical, but it does allow you, the viewer, to be the judge. There is some S&M sex in there, but it is portrayed discreetly. From the advertisements about S&M, I was half expecting this film to be comparable to Eyes Wide Shut. Jung and psychology are the focus, not the sex. We are even given hints that the sex is what fueled Jung’s theories to go in directions away from Freud and his sexual theories.

One last note, the film ends on the eve of World War I. In the obligatory “what happened next” notes at the end of the film, we are informed that Freud died from cancer after being forced out of Austria by the Nazis. Spielrein worked as a psychologist for Communist Russia, but died a widow, assassinated by Nazis in the war (she was Jewish). Jung lived a full life, died peacefully, outliving his wife, Emma Jung, and mistress, Toni Wolff. The note makes reference to his nervous breakdown in World War I, which is hinted by the end of the movie. This nervous breakdown, we know, sparked Jung’s theories into new directions.

People have made the case that television and movies and comic books are our contemporary myths, that popular mass culture provides our societies with the sort of sustenance provided to ancient societies by their stories. I am not experienced enough with myths and legends, either themselves or their histories, to venture an opinion on whether this is so, but certainly we cannot deny the effect of all the various media on our imaginations. From childhood on, we dream through Bugs Bunny and Harry Potter, we visit the shrine of Disneyworld, we chronicle the legendary exploits of celebrities through tabloids and TMZ.

Neil Gaiman is especially aware of this, as not only The Sandman but many of his writings, especially American Gods, show. What becomes of old gods, old beliefs, old myths? Where do they go when no-one is left to believe in them, when they are forgotten?

I’m not sure if that’s the direction The Sandman is taking, but its mélange of comic book culture and thousands of years of human belief and storytelling implies the question.

What happens when all our dreams get copyrighted? When belief is little more than an accumulation of Twitter stats? Should Dream get a Facebook page?

If you’ve read any of my previous blog posts, then you know that I fully agree with the first part of this observation. Popular culture is the transmission of cultural mythology, and has been since the dawn of history. An important distinction, however, should be made here: “popular culture” has come to refer to the aspects of culture that are popular or embody the post-modernist pop style, but “popular culture” has long meant the aspects of culture that are distinct from either the culture of the elite (“high culture”) or religious bodies (“sacred culture”). I also contend that since ancient cultures did not distinguish between these aspects of culture, it is an error to treat their mythologies as more sacred, real or correct than today’s popular culture. I’m not going to spend my time arguing that the separation of culture is a product of our history, blah blah blah, but I would argue that we in America have swung the cultural pendulum into the popular realm, not to diminish the high or sacred culture, but to emphasize that a large portion of American myth is now transmitted through popular culture. To understand what is going on with our cultural mythos, one only needs to turn on the television (which reflects what Cheney was discussing in his post).

He concludes with that fabulously juicy question: “What happens when all our dreams get copyrighted?” In the context of his post, “dream” has a double meaning, since the Sandman centers around Dream, or the “god” of dream. (One of my post-doc blog projects is to blog my way through the Sandman; the stories are so rich!)

Anyway, this question is a valid question to ask. With the boom of the Internet, fan culture has gone in new, creative directions. Fan culture has long been influenced by popular culture, but the Internet revealed that those who write fan fiction or produce fan art are not alone, creating a community of people who are in copyright violation. Some companies have tired to shut down fan expressions, whereas some have reached a compromise seeing the fan community as potential free marketing (which worked well for Harry Potter).

I haven’t surveyed people about their dreams, but I have chatted with fans. That the myths of popular culture are so potent that people feel the need to create their own versions of it (iconography) suggests that they are speaking to some unconscious level, likely tapping into the stuff that dreams are made of. Indeed, I can testify to having Disney dreams when I sleep at night, and feeling a strong connection to the Disney mythos when I am awake – this is how dreams work. I do wonder what happens when our dream imagery is tied so firmly with established stories (I call them “prefabricated mythologies”). Given the number of regurgitated story motifs, I’d say that there is some creative stagnation, but then I wonder if this is part of the transition and the dying of the old ways.

I understand and respect copyright laws. They protect the interests of the company and/or the artist, but these laws also entitle these entities to a certain amount of control over the people. In the apocalyptic scenario, copyrighted dreams will eventually lead to the shut-down of creativity, which also leads to the shut-down of the people. I doubt it will go that direction, because human nature is human nature, and humans are inherently creative.

America has been in transition easily since the end of World War Ii. While there were plenty of events in the first half of the 20th century that shook the foundations of American myth, World War II marked a major tipping point. The world was brought under a global banner for the first real time in human history, the world population grew to the highest proportions known, and war technology reached a destructive peak. It’s no accident that the Cold War years were filled with fear, paranoia, youth rallies, civil rights, and the shift from homogeneity to diversity. Nor is it any accident that as the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War officially came to an end that Americans turned those same issues into updated versions under the banner of Terrorism. As our fear is projected onto matters more and more elusive, culture becomes unstable.

So I do not believe that the world is going to end in 12 months, but something is going to have to change. My inner hippie would like to see the change come without violence, but this probably won’t happen if what the media reports is true. 2011 revealed that this transition is a global event, and this is the message of Walt DIsney’s Cold War myth: It’s a Small World. Those four words have probably already evoked the theme song and it will be stuck in your head all day. But consider this as you hum this catchy tune: It’s a Small World reminds us that we are all fundamentally the same. It’s okay to embrace cultural differences, but not to overlook humanity.

See, what we are witnessing in current events isn’t a new myth or anything like that. Rather, what we are witnessing is the continuation (perhaps culmination) to a mythos that has been in play in the modern world for some time now. We’ve seen uprisings, debates, concern over government control, unrest in the Middle East… None of this is new. Sure, there are some new factors, such as media barrage and social networking tools. Major change cannot happen overnight. Notice how many times “change” has happened overnight and how quickly we revert back to the “old ways.”

The conflict we are seeing is the emergence of a new mythology and the unwillingness to let the old one go. This is indicative of a period of change, which, if history is any indication, can last a couple hundred years (or longer depending on transmission of information and military action).

What is this old mythology, you might ask? It’s the mythology of the hero and the idea of an adventure to destroy a specific evil. I do not need to provide examples of this motif, since it is everywhere. I would venture to suggest that this motif is the result of the utopian dreams that emerged in the Renaissance. Prior to the Renaissance and the conquest of the New World, hero stories involved some sort of epic battle, a dramatic rescue, or the finding of a lost item. Following the discovery of the New World, the hero’s journey gradually morphed into the destruction of an evil (known or unknown) to parallel the utopian goals of Manifest Destiny and American claims to the lands of the West. Once the West was “conquered,” the stories were less literal (cowboys versus Indians) and turned into metaphors of good and evil. English fantasy is an excellent example of this shift. The evils of Tolkien and Lewis deal with archetypal evils, making them applicable to any cultural situation (and thus timeless!). But, I would like to underscore the point that although the American psyche is unique in the world, it is still connected to the Western psyche at its roots, such that the evils of the Old World are the same as the evils of the New World, because that is the tradition we have inherited.

What might the new mythology look like? A friend of mine believes that the new mythology will look something like The Last Airbender. This is a story not about destroying evil, but about restoring balance. The point isn’t to destroy the fire people, but to end the domination of one element over the others. This is very different than destroying a specific evil, such as Frodo’s journey in The Lord of the Rings, because it acknowledges that evil is not something that can be completely eradicated. Evil is a part of human nature. It’s an outdated (Victorian/Enlightenment) concept to consider that we can completely shut down evil forces. This is what Jung was advocating with his emphasis on the shadow. Knowing the shadow is to know that evil exists – within yourself no less. Knowing the shadow also means coming to terms with your own nature, and the nature of all humanity.

*****

In a similar vein, I started watching, at the persistent recommendation of a couple students, Grimm and Once Upon a Time on Hulu this week. I’m not too far into either show yet, but I see the promise of both of them. I’m fascinated by the use of the Disney fairy tales in Once Upon a Time and the crime-solving aspect of Grimm. However, what I am most fascinated by is the recent wave of fairy tale reimaginings that has hit the cinema as of late. The potency of fairy tales is that they can be retold in different times and places, but this wave seems somehow different. While many of the stories are given a modern component, there is something dark and gothic about the approach. As though the hero figure of the story isn’t just having a fairy tale journey toward a happily ever after but, rather, that the story itself reflects the times and our hope that we are nearing the end of the darkness of our cultural suffering. Of course, we’re not, but these stories remind us of the power of hope and belief whenever times are tough, and also the power of story to speak to our deepest fear and give voice to our concerns. Stories speak in a metaphorical language, especially fairy tales, which is why the psychologists (Jung and otherwise) have devoted a lot of time to exploring their psychological power.

If my read on what is happening is even somewhat correct – and I am very open to the likelihood that I’m missing the mark by a gazillion miles – then the new myth will invite revisionings of fairy tales that will make stories very different than what we currently believe the formula to be. This discussion is already happening with regards to the female hero adventure and whether or not her story can fit the mold, which most conclusions deciding that it cannot. Couple this with Campbell’s claim that what happens next is a return to a matriarchal world, the dawning of the age of Aquarius, and the vehement apocalyptic themes in movies, television and video games, we can see that the shift is already happening. And that’s what makes this particular time so fascinating, if not more than a little scary.

I have been thinking a lot about this statement you made on your blog over the summer:

And, while I’m happy to be a book-thumping mythologist and an arm-chair psychologist, it’s time to get some new scholarship published that isn’t just reciting or repackaging the same old theories that have been tossed around for 100 years now. In other words, stop theorizing and start doing. I’m still working on my plan of action for this step.

Have you figured out a plan of action yet?

Since this is a very appropriate question, especially as I slough ever closer a conclusion (to my dissertation, that is), I took a moment to jot down and answer. And here it is:

I’m not sure I have a specific answer, especially since somehow suggesting an answer seems to me to be a major act of hubris. But, as I read the Tweets about the Occupy movement, I’m more convinced that something needs to happen. The Occupy movement is great in that the youth are finally doing, but it falls short in that they don’t have a unified front of what they are protesting, which is what I’m afraid is going to happen when all the mythologists start doing something. "Saving the world" is an awfully big challenge.

It seems to me that the best course of action is for each mythologist to identify a particular aspect of "the world" s/he wants to see fixed and utilize the tools available for them to move in a direction of healing. For example, I’ve become fascinated with the idea of the Cold War instigating a paradigm shift in American myth and how our response to it constructed the environment we’re currently living in, one based on Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality. So then, my question is whether we can break down the simulacra and restore groundedness in some sense of reality without totally shattering America’s idealistic, Romantic, utopian views. My current tool, since I’m not formally published in many places, is to blog my thoughts, but to also construct lectures in my classes that invite students to think about these very questions and consider plans of action. Granted, only a few students actually walk away with any semblance of a plan, but I hold to the ideal that if I can sink into a couple of them, then they will spread the word and so on. I’m not expecting a quick fix, which is definitely not what we need–though I do think we need a mythic Band-aid in the interim as we realign our thinking, and that’s what really great myths these days are providing, such as Harry Potter or LOTR or Star Wars or whatever. They make us think about good and evil, love and hate, and model for us how to handle those emotions.

I once saw a Pacifica dissertation defense for a project constructed around using myths to help children of soldiers cope with their parent’s injuries (physical and mental). This student constructed a puppet stage play with the container of children asking an old wounded vet about why Daddy acts weird or why he had to lose a leg, and the old vet would respond with an older myth that answered the question, but the myth was used in the context of getting the children to connect their own situation with the myth and figure out for themselves the solution they were asking for. This particular model works great for younger kids, but I wonder how well it would work for older kids and adults. My concern with this latter example is that it pulls myths out of time and place (which is the point, according to the laws of archetypes), and I find that mythologists who use this practice ignore/overlook America’s own mythology altogether. I know this is a matter of opinion (and possibly national pride?), but overlooking American myth (not the same as Native American) reinforces the hyperreality by constructing a false relationship to myth that ignore the fundamental aspects of American culture.

I’m not really sure yet what overlooking American myth means yet. In the majority of my readings, the idea of American myth is something relatively recent, so maybe this is also something that will turn around.

Mythologists who toe the line between technology and myth are in a unique position. I think there is a lot of promise for a fusion between the two, but I haven’t yet figured out what that end goal should be. Pacifica recently launched the Study of Myth, which is supposed to be a discussion forum for all things myth, with a preference for the same conversation within the already established (ruts) discussions happening at Pacifica, the Opus Archives and the JCF. But discussion forums only go so far. Somehow, I almost wonder if an "Occupy Myth" movement is the next way to go. Except, rather than occupy a park, we occupy liminal space and democratically vote on our list of demands from the Cosmos and develop ways to take myth out of the discussion/educational forum and make it practical to everyday life. And to move away from the "Hero’s Journey" formula, because that formula cannot apply to everyone’s personal experience.

This is as far as I’ve thought. What are your thoughts, Dear Reader?

The first question to the validity of this claim lies in the word “sacred,” which evokes a particular connotation in scholars depending on how they relate to sacred traditions. My inner post-modernist holds the opinion that there are some definitions (okay, many definitions) of terms that have gotten outmoded in the modern American world. “Sacred” is one of them. The traditional definition is specific: that to be “sacred” something has to have a divine/religious connotation, and that nothing outside of this connotation can be ascribed with “sacred” meaning. But there are some situations that manifest and are ascribed as “sacred” by the person holding the experience. This understanding of “sacred” is not a generic blanket term for all experiences, but is housed entirely in the individual experience.

Going a step further, there are certain experiences of the numinous that some people claim to have from non-religious modes of the “sacred.” This does not diminish the experience as something mis-guided, etc. Rather, it begs a redefinition of terms to acknowledge the individual experience.

Disneyland is one such place that evokes a sense of the sacred” in some people. You can see it in their eyes and in the reverence they hold for the place, drinking up all of its offerings, not just running from shop to attraction to shop to lunch (i.e., consuming the park). Sure, they are sometimes hard to find in a typical Disneyland visit, when everyone in the immediate vicinity is tired, hot, thirsty, and looking overall grumpy. It’s easy to claim that no one is happy in Disneyland, because so many children are crying and so many adults are yelling at each other or their kids. But for every 10 unhappy families, you can find a couple or two (perhaps they have kids) who are drinking the environment of Disneyland as though they were drinking from the Cup of Life. A churro becomes a sacrament. The fireworks becomes a display of the gods.

But there is nothing natural about Disneyland. In fact, almost the entire landscape is unnatural – either constructed or imported from regions beyond Southern California. I attempt to allude to the unnaturalness of Disneyland in this essay, while also arguing that it is through this unnaturalness that the experience is to be had:

Tamara Andrews suggests a new perspective of  nature mythology that is especially apropos to a discussion of psyche and nature as they play out at Disneyland: “Most people are familiar with the phenomenon of the mirage, an illusion that appears where images are displaced or distorted under specific atmospheric conditions. The mind’s eye takes over. Perhaps such vision is what is necessary to understand nature mythology from a modern perspective” (xiii). The Disney park is not itself an illusion, but that design of the park at play with the senses is. Through the efforts of the Imagineers, Disney’s design engineers, it sometimes appears as though magic really does happen, that birds can talk and sing, or that a little fairy dust can make one fly to Never Land. It is, thus, necessary to read Disneyland as a fairy tale, with all of its psychological implications, not just as an abomination of nature, as critics are wont to proclaim. Disneyland may embody capitalism, but the park is a playground for the imagination. It allows people to interact with the stories and characters they love, and thus embody the closest thing to a mythological canon American has to offer, á la fairy tales and the Western frontier.

The new directions that myth is taking appears to be pointing us toward the importance of the individual experience in conjunction with the collective. Discourse for the last 100 years (at least) has explored these as unique from each other, but really they work in symbiosis. What happens in the collective shapes the individual, who then contributes to the collective. So to write off something that a small percentage of the population holds, perhaps unconsciously, as sacred, is to overlook both the impact of that experience and what is has to suggest about the collective that such an experience could exist. On the collective level, Disneyland bespeaks to America’s consumerist behavior. On the individual level, Disneyland offers an outlet for domestic pilgrimage and ritual, celebrating not a god – one of the few sacred landscapes to do so – not even celebrating a mouse. Disneyland celebrates the American Dream, from Manifest Destiny to Innoventions. The American Dream, I suggest, is America’s religion. It’s the only common belief held by all of her citizens. Perhaps this Dream has gotten tarnished in the last few years, but only because the reality of our situation is falling very short of the Dream.

Going in a different direction, Disneyland once had an attraction that projected images of America in a 360-degree theater. It disappeared long before I first visited Disneyland, but this film was used in the 1950s at a World’s Fair to sell America to the rest of the world. The scenes used were landscape scenes from the Rockies, Mount Rushmore, and others. The emphasis was on the land not the people. Through this film (and it’s children and grandchildren, such as Soarin’), Disney reinforced a long-standing American mytheme that connects our identity with the land of the country or our region. Broadcast at Disneyland, this Circarama film was the ultimate meta-myth of American sacred tradition.

So did I happen to learn anything over the course of this summer write-a-thon? One of the biggest reveals to me is that I am, at my heart of hearts, a culture theorist with a particular affinity for popular culture (notably, film). By “culture theorist” I mean someone who looks at the symbiosis of all culture elements to understand the entire package, not just with a concentration on one particular element. Rather an ironic statement, given that I’m writing about Disneyland; however, in the course of writing about Disneyland, I make it a point to root everything into a cultural context. As a “culture theorist,” I recognize that the influences of culture shape the direction that the development of myths take. Myths don’t emerge in a vaccuum, believe it or not.

Which leads to another great revelation: I’m a post-modernist. I think I entered the project believing that I was a romantic rogue scholar, but I see now that I am firmly a post-modernist, albeit a “happy” post-modernist rather than a deconstructionist. This is, I think, a side-effect of culture studies branching off from anthropology and sociology to look less at “social theory” and more at “what actually is going on.” Very few successful post-modern culture theorists are romantic about whatever they write about. Reverential, perhaps, but not romantic in the true sense of the term. Maybe “phenomenologist" is a word to drop somewhere in here.

And, while I’m happy to be a book-thumping mythologist and an arm-chair psychologist, it’s time to get some new scholarship published that isn’t just reciting or repackaging the same old theories that have been tossed around for 100 years now. In other words, stop theorizing and start doing. I’m still working on my plan of action for this step.

The chapters I worked on were 3 chapters right in the middle of the beast, dealing with issues of the cultural shadow, waste land, and fairy tale, all three of which lead me in the same direction: the Cold War as a major turning point in America’s relationship to myth and culture. We are in a very unique point of time and everyone would like us to believe that it’s all going to Hell in a hand basket, but there are plenty of myths out there that can help us cope with the paradigm shift. Disneyland, I offer, is just one among many. it’s definitely among my favorites, but it is not the only one and we could argue whether or not it’s the best one. At a place like Disneyland, we can experience the full complete spectrum of modern post-Cold War American myth, which is probably why Disney parks rank among some of the world’s most popular theme parks. They speak to those, like me, who are visual, kinetic, visual-kinetic, and they speak on the metaphoric level.

Which also leads me to a couple of isms that have made a home in my dissertation: consumerism and globalism. Both are typically read as bad things, but both I support. Consumerism is at the very heart of what it means to be American, so the consumptive behaviors aren’t something worth criticizing. The problem of consumption is the point when it becomes a neurosis, which is where we are today. We’re addicted to consuming because we believe that our stuff defines who we are. But I don’t hold Disney at fault for that, because they are simply offering product. It’s still up to me and you to choose to consume it. Then there’s globalism, which is usually criticized as one culture exerting dominance onto another. A new type of globalism is emerging, and this is the one worthy of the term in my opinion, and this is a globalism where myths of different cultures are fused together. Equally. No dominance. And this is the direction I see the new myth taking.

So what is the next step? Dissertation Autumn begins in a week after I’ve taken a small relax and experienced the D23 Expo. By the end of Dissertation Autumn, I should be at the end of my dissertation, which also means that by the end of Dissertation Autumn, I should have a new theme for this website in the works.