Film as Religion, Second Edition. John C. Lyden

The Hainuwele myth, too, does not fail in its efforts to view foreign cargo as equivalent to native products; it simply did not convince the whites to share equally with the Ceram, which may not have been its purpose. Myth is a strategy for dealing with a situation, and the measure of its effectiveness may not be in the objective political changes it makes but in the attitudes it evokes in those who tell it. Such attitudes may bespeak more reconciliation and wholeness than incongruity and tension, as people generally tend to seek wholeness rather than conflict. Smith holds that by playing with incongruities, myths provide “an occasion for thought”—but it is not altogether clear what one is supposed to think in such a situation of incongruity.40

      For example, he discusses how the Aranda of Australia are initiated into the mystery of the “bull-roarer,” which they have thought to be the voice of Tuanjiraka, a monster responsible for all pain and suffering, but is in fact a piece of wood whirled at the end of a string to produce a frightening sound. Initiates are told that they should not believe in this monster, as it does not really exist; Smith concludes that it is “the incongruity between the expectation and the actuality that serves as a vehicle of religious experience.”41 But it is hard to see how this in itself is very enlightening to the initiates. One could instead conclude that they are being taught that suffering does not come from any supernatural being but that it is simply the nature of life—a lesson we might all find intelligible, even helpful, in learning to view pain as a part of normal existence and not as a punishment. This message could help people deal with the conflicts created by suffering rather than simply observing or enshrining such conflicts and the incongruities related to them.

      Wendy Doniger

      Wendy Doniger is yet another contemporary scholar who has written a great deal about myth, especially from her viewpoint as a scholar of Hinduism. A myth, in her view, is a story with “religious meaning”—in other words, a story that deals with “the sorts of questions that religions ask” about “such things as life after death, divine intervention in human lives, transformations, the creation of the world and of human nature and culture—and basically, about meaning itself.” This is not meant as a terribly precise definition, as Doniger does not want to limit what might be considered “religious,” although she assumes we all have some idea of what is to be associated with that term. A myth also has no author, as by the time it becomes a myth, its origins are always placed in the distant past; it is a story that has always been and so cannot, properly speaking, ever be heard “for the first time.” But myths are not isolated in a distant past, as they are retold because they are perceived as remaining relevant to subsequent ages: “Myths encode meanings in forms that permit the present to be construed as the fulfillment of a past from which we would wish to have been descended.” A myth must also be part of a mythology, a set of myths with overlapping characters and events. In this way, the myth and its themes are reinforced in the memory of the group.42

      Doniger has also insisted that there is no “monomyth.” It is not the case that there is one myth endlessly repeated with variations in the world’s cultures. She is well acquainted with the tendency of myth scholars to overgeneralize about the content of myths and to ignore the details of individual stories. At the same time, she does not wish to give up the task of cultural comparison, as there may be some similarities that can be found among myths from diverse cultures and religions. If myths deal with basic questions about the meaning of life, it may be because they deal with basic human experiences such as “sexual desire, procreation, pain, death,” which are universal, although understood in different ways in different cultures.43

      Words like true and false do not apply very well to myths, Doniger notes, as the historical referent for such stories is perhaps the least important measure of their value for a culture. Even cultural stories that include “impossible” situations such as a reversal of gender roles or the absence of death serve to demonstrate the undesirability of such situations and thus the necessity and “truth” of the actual order of things: “They preserve for us the cultural ‘truth’ that women should not work in the fields and men should not keep house, or the philosophical truth that we must die.” We are “better off” with the way things are, according to such myths, as they show us how the world would be less perfect if it were different. Myths in general might be considered “true,” she allows, not in the historical veracity of the events described but in the fact that they represent a culture’s understanding of the central questions of life.44

      The Western tendency to distrust the value or truth of myths, Doniger holds, is related to our tendency to discount alternate “realities,” such as those experienced in dreams. From Plato to Freud, dreams have been viewed in Western thought as expressing our “lower” desires but not an objective reality.45 In Hindu thought, in contrast, the line between waking and dreaming and between reality and illusion is blurred, as is shown in numerous myths; Doniger gives two examples from the text of the Yogavasistha. King Lavana dreams that he is an untouchable for sixty years, with a full set of memories of this time, then wakes up only moments after he fell asleep in his original body, but he is unable to dismiss it as complete illusion as he finds the place where he “lived” and the other people from his “dream,” who are able to verify all the details of his life there. The Brahmin Gadhi likewise dreams he is an untouchable who becomes king, but when he is discovered to be an untouchable, he kills himself—only to awaken as himself once again. He similarly is able to verify the “reality” of his dream by visiting the place where he was king.46 Both stories are interpreted within the Hindu text as demonstrating the fact that all life is an illusion or dream from the point of view of the ultimate and, in this way, to show that the distinction between “dreams” and “reality” is itself an illusion. The rigid duality between reality and unreality that characterizes Western thought is absent in Hindu thought, according to Doniger, as there are many kinds of “reality” that include concrete experience, visions, dreams, memories, past lives, and fantasies, all of which “would have to be set out at various points on a spectrum that has no ends at all.”47 All types of stories have value, then, and not only those that deal with what we normally regard as “real.”

      One can see that Doniger’s view of myth might apply well to film, as film also trades in the confusion between reality and ideality, suggesting that there might be “truth” even in narratives that do not deal with historical events insofar as they have the appearance of reality during the viewing experience. Films are also “true,” following Doniger, in the sense that they deal with the central questions of our culture about gender roles, sex, love, child raising, purpose in life, and death. Indeed, they deal with all the concerns of our culture and its struggles to define its worldview, morals, and identity through various stories. It might be questioned whether the filmic myths get repeated as much as traditional myths, as the stories change from one film to the next. However, as we have already noted, people do view films multiple times in some cases, and also there is a certain sameness and predictability to some films—especially those that conform to the patterns of a genre—so that audiences can expect something like the same story or at least one that is part of a general “mythology.” This does not mean that the differences are unimportant or that they negate the ability of films to tell meaningful stories (as early film-genre theorists held) but that these exist as variations on certain well-known themes, such as the romance, the adventure, the tearjerker, and the horror film.

      Doniger does note the parallels between popular culture and traditional mythology, especially in science fiction and children’s literature (which often utilizes the forms of fantasy). She also allows that “great films have mythic dimensions and often become quasi-myths in our culture.”48 But she also claims that modern Americans who have rejected their traditional religious cultures are left with “an emasculated mythology of atheism and solipsism, a degraded mythology that is found not in churches but in films and children’s books.” She admits that even this secular mythology has a community of sorts, in, for example, Star Trek conventions and online groups, but holds that “there is no group that will hold them responsible to live in a certain way because of these myths.”49

      Doniger’s judgments on popular culture reflect a certain amount of prejudice that may be groundless. There is no reason to assume that people who practice the “religion” of Star