All of the preceding reminds me of my busted ass new theory.
Those ancient dudes that I studied back in the day, they talked about gods and whatnot, doing all sorts of crazy things. Like Zeus would turn into a bull and and run down a bunch of Spaniards soaked with spittle and smelling of semen. The gods had distinct identities and a handfull of specific stories to tell. Ovid's Metamorphoses tells several common tales, like Narcissus and Echo, and puts his own spin on it. The characters could be plopped into things like the Iliad or the Aeneid, and they could update the stories with references to current-day deals, or even invent new plots of their set characters. Like in the Aeneid, which was written in the early Augustan days includes a reference to a divine lineage, that Julius Caesar and, by extension, Augustus were actually the descendents of gods. Meanwhile, Hera can get all jealous and fuck with Aeneas and all that business. You had dramatis personae, ya know.
Well, I think that this impulse lives on today, but instead of gods, we've got celebrities. God isn't really a part of our common narrative in art or anything (apocalyptica and Lebowski aside, Jesus doesn't have a starring or even supporting role in most movies), so we have a whole host of minor deities who, thanks to the wonders of typecasting, have their own identities independent of whoever they are. So if you go see a Schwarzenegger movie, you'll see a strong, relatively taciturn fellow who likes to kill lots of people.
And when you talk to non-movie people, they all talk about how they go to see the Drew Barrymore movie or the like. They see movies based on actors, not directors (the favorite of the smirking class) or writers (the favorite of....well, the writers). They want to get their Julia Roberts, the hot chick who's not so hot as to arouse envy, who's feisty and even bagged Richard Gere in that one movie.
Thankfully, there's synergy in our entertainment media, so you can get heaping helpings of the same narrative in People or TV Guide or Entertainment Weekly. Golly, that Colin Ferrell is a randy lad! That Russell Crowe is such a rogue!
And so there's typecasting, which actors bitch about but is a necessary component of their mythic status. They are not individual human beings anymore, they are types, characters.
That's my busted-ass theory. Now with hyphenation!
When studying in school, the point was thrown at me again and again that it's a tempting trap to fall into, to draw too close a parallel between the modern you know and the ancient you don't.
Which makes perfect sense. I mean, it's far too easy to see similarity where there is none, and to fill in the unknown with the familiar. It's a trick of human cognition. Or so they say.
However, if one were to thoroughly vet one's ideas for hidden contextual bias, one would never say anything. And then, when the water cooler has heard the last talk of last night's CSI:Miami (CSI spins off, much like Survivor, with additional locations. I am hoping for a Seventh Heaven: Las Vegas where the father presides over a drive-through chapel and Jessica Biel does a guest appearance as the naked, lewdly gyrating slut I wish to god she truly is), well, what will one say?
Posted by mattb at July 29, 2003 11:20 PM