The Hazard of Modern Myth-Making

myths are all well and good until you expect somebody to live up to them so [Applause] [Music] this is an odd topic and I'm not not too sure we'll be able to articulate what it is that's on my mind but let me start with why I'm talking about this so after having put it off for a while because of the very mixed reception it initially got I have now finally seen the film the Grady show the Hugh Jackman musical movie about PT Barnum and the there was a lot going on in terms of you know the the praise and the criticism of it so just to briefly before I get into my main topic I will say I enjoyed the movie actually quite a bit it was a lot of fun I enjoyed the soundtrack I think it's one of the better movie musicals in a while and I mean that very specifically in terms of wording in so far as it's been a long time since I've seen a musical that takes as much advantage of the fact that it is a movie as this there are plenty of musicals out there that I enjoy as movies but ultimately they do very little to differentiate themselves with what will be done with that exact same thing on a stage whereas this I thought took incredibly good advantage of the visual medium plus I liked the songs so sue me but the thing was the the main sort of I mean you know there were people who just you know didn't like it or did like it but sort of what became the lightning rod for that film was the issue of PT Barnum himself so the film very much feeds into the myth of PT Barnum and the myth of PT Barnum especially as the film presents it is a man who built himself up from nothing with a desire to bring joy and happiness to as many people as he could and who gave a meaningful and empowering outlet to a great deal of downtrodden people who were his his performers that's the film the reality of PT Barnum is without going into a ton of detail let's just go with much more complicated than that and there's a lot of argument to be had about to what degree was there any philanthropy and what he was doing and to what degree was he simply taking advantage of his performers and you know there's there's arguments to be made all over the place but it certainly is the reality at the very least is not the clean-cut story that the film presented and that seemed to rub a lot of people the wrong way that that this film was taking someone who a lot of people feel is not someone to be admired and presenting an empowering story built around him and his life in his pursuits and they a fair number of people basically took a fundamental objection to that and while I had while I did enjoy the movie I can't say that anybody's wrong for feeling that way because yeah that is what we did and that gets me into what I want to talk about in general which is myth making modern-day myth making now when people you know talk about oh the modern-day mythology you know they'll mention like superheroes or whatever and that's not really what I'm talking about I'm talking about the ways in which we as a society through our entertainment our history classes just the way we discuss things take figures who were real people and build up the myth of them in a way that is that is either disregarding or very selective of the reality of them and it's an interesting thing that goes on and I find my self sort of going through this whole thing in my head and and we'll see if I if I can bring it out in any way that makes sense so one of the things about mythology at all I mean you know you go way back much of mythology was built around you know trying to explain the world certainly your creation myths and anything like that but you know a big part of mythology also were tales of heroes you know Greek mythology you had Hercules Egyptian mythology you had figures like Osiris and you know yet things that were contributing to you know building a myth of how the world functions but there were just stories of you know mythical figures who did great things and funnily enough you go back to a lot of those myths and the characters actually aren't as heroic as our modern day standards but it presents you some with someone to aspire to in some ways that someone who exemplifies some great element a great ability of strength a great sense of justice you know something great about them and I do think having points of reference for that is important like for just reciting for a society and for us as individuals growing up to have that just just grab on to you know our myths they actually matter they are actually important because we can our myths allow us to create the ideals and that's more sort of more modern myth making because like I said classical myths those characters who sometimes especially like really look into Hercules one of these days yeah not a nice guy but as we've gotten more into modern times myths tended to be much more about embracing the ideal embracing you know true heroism purity can fiction and things of that nature those became our myths but as we came to be able to explain more of the world and how it functioned we moved away from the fantastical myths because you know they we knew that that wasn't how the world worked so you you didn't really get new Herculean type stories you know you had that you had the Arthurian legend but then as you got into you know something like the Renaissance and then forward from there you know we started to build our myths around people real people not you know people of very dubious historical merit which Arthur kind of is Robin Hood certainly is or who likely never existed at all like Hercules or a lot of those sort of classic myths but you know taking real people who we knew real facts about the building myths around them so coming forward into the modern age some of the figures that we have built myths around obviously I mentioned the greatest showman so PT Barnum is a nice recent example we can almost sort of see modern myth-making in real time with that film but some other things to talk about Columbus a lot of myth-making around that guy in terms of what his trip to the Americas and where he landed what it meant what he was trying to do what he did once he got here awful lot of myths milk milky myth-making built up around that and to the point that trying to inject the nuance back in that got stripped out of it and have so many especially young big historical events the first the pilgrims the first Thanksgiving people like Abraham Lincoln you know who did great things many of these these people we make myths out of they did do great things but we mythologize them and we idolize them but they were people and if people are flawed that we have to be there is no such thing as a perfect human being with the possible exception of Fred Rogers like the world does not produce perfect people it just create it just produces people and sometimes people do great things but they're still flawed where I think modern myth-making gets us in trouble is we get we get invested in our myths because we put stock of ourselves into them we place a value our values into the people that we have built our myths around and so when those myths then get challenged by facts or at the very least with the full context to that mythologizing test or remove we get oddly resistant and oddly defensive about it you know why you got to ruin this thing or you know insisting that you know well no that's not true or that's not what's important or what-have-you and we get really weird sometimes like yeah as people as a society when our the myths that we favor get attacked because we have attributed a certain degree our values in to some of these myths then when the myth gets attacked we feel attacked and not I I don't want to get overly political with this but I do think this does lean into politics a little bit so like one of the big issues in America well yeah I say big there's a lot of big issues one of the persistent recent issues have been depictions of heroes of the Confederacy from the Civil War because in certain parts of the country there are statues of Confederate war heroes and there are places that still fly the Confederate flag and without trying to rehash and like go through that whole debate because there's a lot going on there's a lot to unpack but I do think part of the problem is that those figures have been mythologized in some of these areas and that makes it much more painful when somebody says you know we really shouldn't be celebrating these people because if you've been raised and taught and sort of living in this area and the society in this part of the country that has been mythologizing these people for their tactical prowess for their defense of their homes for their commitment to their feather fellow soldiers and brotherhood you know if you've been idolizing them for that being told well yeah but they fought to retain the right to own slaves we really shouldn't be celebrating that you end up taking that more personally then it's probably intended to be it especially gets tricky down in the south where you have people who have who know like that they know they know their own family tree well enough to know that they had relatives who fought in the Civil War and you know when you look at your own family history we all have a tendency to even if we don't even if we haven't had like specific stories passed down we tend to want to mythologize our own history as much as we possibly can and that includes the the history of the people on our family line who came before us ie it's it became a recurring thing would I forget what the show was but there was there was I think was a PBS show that basically did genealogy for celebrities and became a sticking point for a number of them whether or not they had people who owned slaves and their history and the thing was odds are Moe's a good chunk of them did whether they lived whether their family was from the south or the north odds are sooner or later that was gonna turn up it was a good shot at it and that's not an easy thing to hear no matter who you are because you you want to believe that you are good and part of that for many of us believes you want you want to believe that you come from good stock and good people and to have that myth attacked feels like an attack on you I think in many ways we live right now in the age of personal myth making not by design but just by where things are because you'd think about what social media is the way you curate what of yourself you put out on social media which thoughts you share which pictures you share in my case which videos I put out I'm I'm building a myth of me I'm selecting what parts of myself that I put forward in video form for people to look at and get a picture get a myth of Who I am because ultimately it's impossible to know every detail of any person so but the more that you know about someone the more context that you can have yeah the more the myth breaks down to pull it back to media and entertainment cuz media is a big part of mythologizing of real life people whenever there is a story that is beta know based on a true story even if it's something as exaggerated as the greatest showmen you know that which is obviously it's a musical it's very heightened like this is obviously not you know a a documentary I mean clearly that's always an argument with a piece of ended look it's not a documentary well there's few cases where that could be more obvious than by making it a big bombastic musical clearly this is not a documentary and yet at the same time if it is successful that solidifies the popular understanding of who PT Barnum was that solidifies his myth and that's kind of what happens when you have stories based on reality so when you have something like you know a film like Lincoln that's that solidifies what is the myth of Lincoln in our society and even more modern-day you know it doesn't always have to be deceased people you know you can have things like the blindside you know solidity or I mean I he was deceased by the time it came out but you know he wasn't when they started making it American sniper was very much about the myth of Chris Kyle and what always comes up in these things is the inaccuracies because the sacrifices that honestly we have to make in order to have an entertaining film because life is and a person's life is messy is not clean is not a smooth narrative but if you're gonna make a film you kind of need one even if you're not gonna like sugarcoat it and make sure there's a happy ending you still got a format so there's a beginning middle end and there's a through line some people don't have a clear through line to their lives I'd argue most of us don't but you still need one so you pick and you choose and you create a mythology so what's the answer because I don't think the answer is to necessarily you know avoid myth maze like I said I think myths have value I think where we put our stock where we take our inspiration from we need something to take it from you know we do need that so I have to wonder with something like the greatest showman would it have been better if it was very clue clearly inspired by PT Barnum and it was a PT Barnum s character but that it but they gave him a different name they made him an original character taking influence from Barnum and he and his life in his circus and all that but not say not having him be hi I'm Petey Warren in the movie would that have been better in terms of mythologizing in terms of the concerns of people who look at and go we should not be you know assigning to this guy that you know this image of this hero of the downtrodden maybe maybe just changing and having it not be you know the real guy maybe that would help but at the same time I don't know because I think there's a potential damage if all of our heroes if all of the myths that we look up to are all distinctly fictional so like I do think there is a value in calling superhero stories the modern-day mythology we have built these superheroes into mythological level figures and to be you know exemplars of some thing that we deem to be a value you know exemplars of a sense of justice Captain America exemplars of intelligence with Tony Stark exemplars of strength applied with compassion with Superman you know we have all these I do think that there is there is value there but if all of our myths were not we're not in some way tied to real people do we make the ideals to distance wood the wood a world in which we only ever are completely blunt and flat and don't mythologize real people and we have our ideals always be in fiction is that a world where those ideals seem less attainable because well there's no real person that I can look up to because they're all these flawed messy people who sometimes get some aspects of their life and their pursuits right but you know you can't idolize that and I suppose the question is is the idolization of a real person more damaging than not having a real person to ground an ideology in IE not believing that real people can hold ideals and live up to them I don't know III really don't that like I said this is something about I'm going back and forth on and it's just mulling it over in my head because it it was a funny thing and it was part of why I resisted seeing the greatest showmen for a while because I knew about that aspect of it that it mythologize is a flawed controversial figure and yet it's a film that I liked my daughter liked she loved the song this is me which is you know absolutely a I refuse to be ashamed of Who I am and I refuse to be ignored and it's a wonderful it's a great song it's a terrific message and I'm glad she has that yeah at the same time she has it in a story tied to this man who is not what the film presented him to be it's a mix everything we do is a mix I much like our hero our people cannot be the ideal of their myth the entertainment that we produce and that we take in also can't be perfect it never will be which is an odd thing for someone like me to point out who tends to nitpick and and I try not to over focus in zero in on flaws but I'm rarely one to gloss over them it can seem like I'm looking for perfection and I'm not because I don't think it exists I don't think it exists in people I don't think it exists in art I don't I don't believe there is such a thing but that doesn't mean that I don't believe that my pointing out flaws or issues in something means that therefore it's worthless if we don't acknowledge the flaws of something well that's now we're just blinding ourselves like there are you know my favorite movies are not flawless movies they've got issues because everything has issues every person has issues and yet that is such a existential quandary to live in all the time like everything is flawed that that that is a that is a path it can be a rabbit hole that you can really tumble down emotionally and existentially depending on you know the kind of person you are and just how your brain works so for that reason I think again there is there is a value in seeing only the beauty in something seeing only the best of the myth and yet that can also be damaging I think I'll wrap up there because I don't have like I can't have a greater point that I'm building to because I can't come down on a firm answer for this and at this point I think I would just keep reiterating the same thing I've said for the last few minutes so I'll wrap up there this was a weird one because for some reason I wanted to talk this out but I think this is probably the most weirdly abstract and philosophical I've gotten on here I have no idea if anyone even gonna stick all the way through this because this is turned out to be a weird one but if you did thank you power to you if you stuck wit me through this yeah whatever your thoughts are on anything that I have just gone on about if it even made sense drop something down in the comments let's talk about it um there's also you know links and buttons and a whole bunch of things and like they take you places and they do things beyond down there so go ahead and check those out if you want to otherwise folks it just leaves me to remind you that you're the council I just run the meetings and until next time this council is adjourned [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Council of Geeks

Views: 11,502

Rating: 4.9475217 out of 5

Keywords: barnum, greatest showman, myths, myth making, modern myth, biopic, true, fake

Id: 9QMikqQMgi4

Length: 25min 23sec (1523 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 29 2018