SHAUDAWN'S BLOG

Shaudawn

Firefly as American Mythos (part 1)
Wednesday, January 3, 2007

I’ve contemplated a lot of books and movies that have challenged me deeply. But never until Firefly has a television show ever done the same. From the first time I knew I was hooked, I knew that Firefly was destined to be an American mythos.

Years ago, Joseph Campbell talked about the move Star Wars as a prime example of mythology. Based on Jung’s ideas of archetypes as deeply engrained symbols that stir a person to the primal depths of their subconscious, mythos used those archetypes in such a universal way, people of a culture – sometimes even cross-culturally – could find a deep, ‘spiritual’ meaning to them. Campbell could see a pattern of stories, from the deeply religious scriptures to the common urban legend, and identified those symbols. It wasn’t that they were untrue fairy tales. In fact, Mythos tells Truth more deeply than ‘objective history’ because, clouded in some subconscious code, timeless elements of the human condition exist that lead beyond the illusion of objectivity.

George Lucas admitted that Star Wars: A New Hope was based on those mythological elements Campbell mapped out. And in many ways, it does contain those elements that stir the soul in a young man about growing up, facing magic, alien landscapes, and even death itself for the Great Cause. As a kid born in 1970, I found Star Wars as mythos, though I didn’t know it at the time.

Here’s how it is, though. Myths, like Earth-that-was, can get used up. Star Wars was good for me as a kid because, back then, I couldn’t understand beyond black hats and white hats. Finally dragging itself out of Vietnam, I wonder if America needed that paradigm where good was always good, evil was always evil, and good always triumphed. For me, at least, that’s how it was. Until...

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