A society is shaped by our popular stories. We look at stories ranging from Beowulf to the Hindu Gita. We also note the progressive takeover of our most popular stories to shape culture in their desired image.
A society is shaped by our popular stories. We look at stories ranging from Beowulf to the Hindu Gita. We also note the progressive takeover of our most popular stories to shape culture in their desired image.
The Stories We Tell
October 2022
Though I do not attend a comic con, nor would I dress as a superhero (not even on Halloween, for no one should see me in a bodysuit), I can talk with geekdom residents and nerds on a reasonably high level. I can also break down a cover 2 NFL defense and know that Jacoby Brisset is not the answer at Quarterback for any team, much less Cleveland, so the jocks rarely kicked sand in my face. But I know Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, the Marvel Comics Universe, and Harry Potter. Lately, there has been a lot of backlash against some or all of these stories being coopted for a specific purpose. It is not to update the stories, add something new to the genre, or even add some 21st-century CGI. There was one Dr. Who from the 1970s starring Tom Baker in the titular role where he fought insect-like creatures where the special effects looked like something a 15-year concocted in their garage. The costumes should have been embarrassing, but it was a good time.
What the new owners of all of this IP wish to accomplish is to use highly popular stories to advance their progressive messages. Frequent listeners to this podcast know that I have commented voluminously on the trend begun in the 1930 and 40s, of progressive historians coopting history to advance their ideals and policy goals. This is not new as I have noted historians for millennia have used history to advance their desired narratives and decision making. But there was a dichotomy between the academy and much of popular literature and entertainment. Now since the 1970s Hollywood actors came to increasingly embrace leftist ideology and on TV, with the likes of Norman Lear, the same on the small screen. But the movies, books and TV shows that paid the bills, the ones everyone wanted to see, still had a non-political, or even conservative ethos. While art movies with progressive themes were being made in the 1970s through the 2000s, the cinemas were still dominated by Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Dinosaurs, teen wizards and of course Super Hero genres. In 2007, a year that leftist Robert Redford made anti conservative screed called Lions for Lambs, the popular movies were about Spider Man, Shrek, Caribean pirates and Harry Potter.
Since the leftist activists and their democratic handmaidens cannot leave anything non-political, some genius came up with the idea that instead of making an overt leftist movie like The Big Short, what we need to do is remake Star Wars with woke ideals. Instead of remaking the Jeffersons or an updated version of the upper class Huxtables, we need blackish, a financially successful family who laments to end of Barack Obama’s term, as if he were the fount of said financial success.
The goal is, as the inimitable Critical Drinker, a Scottish YouTube star, movie critic and hedonist would say, popular entertainment needs to be infused by The Message, as he constantly notes in reverb.
What is so frustrating is that people, who are clearly not steeped in the lore, who do not know the stories, have taken over the content and are using it as a hobby horse for their political views. In just one example, literally on the day, I am writing this, the Bounding Comics blog notes, “the Star Trek franchise has become one of the most mocked properties on the internet in recent years, mired with controversies because of the identity politics constantly pushed by the show, books, and comics. For example, in a recent IDW comic, the writers perpetuated the franchise’s woke content by lecturing its readers on gender identity by using Vulcan characters as a vehicle to gaslight readers who aren’t obsessing over pronouns.”
Non-fans will ask what the big deal is. And on that den of erudite discourse, Twitter, some state uneviquocally that a comic book movie is for kids and should damn well stay that way.
Yet these are the same folks who tell you exactly where they were in 1985 when the Bears won the Super Bowl or the experience of seeing Phil Mickelson. But these are two different things, of course. One is accurate, and the other is not. True, but they are similar in their fundamental makeup; they are stories, different kinds of stories but a tale nevertheless.
In the unfortunate series finale of Game of Thrones, Tyrion crowns Bran King because, as the three-eyed Raven, he knows all of the stories. Infusing thoughts into the culture and deciding whether to invest in a ship, how to build a road, or negotiate a treaty would be two different things. Another example of Game of Thrones failing us in the last season, but Tyrion had one good point, stories matter.
Beowulf has a sort of Nordic superman fighting first Grendel the monster, then the far more formidable mom of said monster. But there is a lot more to it. Based on these Nordic tales, Lord of the Rings was not just about a bunch of freaks, including a wizard, an elf, a dwarf, a few swordsmen, and some quasi-midgets setting off on adventures. At its core, the story was really about sacrifice, courage, and, most of all for me, friendship. There are a lot of wags commenting on the relationship between Sam and Frodo, so much so that the series ends with Sam firmly in a heterosexual relationship with the comely Rosie. But again, today’s politics intruded into the core friendship at the saga’s heart. Friendship is a different thing. It is not fraternal and rests on the choices of two people with shared interests and values who also value each other’s company. We are social creatures, and friendships constitute a critical aspect of our humanity. Harry Potter has magic and wands and wizards and such.
But it is also a coming-of-age tale and, again, about friendship. It is about growth and accepting the challenges of life and that magic word again, sacrifice.
As the late, great historian Thomas Cahill states, “The worldview of a people, though normally left unspoken in the daily business of buying and selling and counting shekels, is to be found in a culture’s stories, myths, and rituals, which, if studied aright, inevitably yield insight into the deepest concerns of a people by unveiling the invisible fears and desires inscribed on human hearts.”
I lovingly quote Cahill here and note that he died this week at the age of 82. I will be providing a podcast episode on him in the coming weeks.
I began by citing Lord of the Rings because I just recently concluded Amazon’s billion-dollar 8 episode prequel to the Lord of the Rings, and I have to ask whether any of the showrunners read the three books, The Fellowship of the Ring, Two Towers, and Return of the King, that constitute the epic. Of course, they read it but did they READ it? Because the Rings of Power by Amazon is missing something vital. There was a great episode in the original Star Trek. This episode, called the Squire of Gothos, features a super being called Trelane who kidnaps members of the Enterprise crew and holds them hostage in what appears to be an 18th-century chalet. Yet it is all form,
MCCOY: You should taste his food. Straw would taste better than his meat and water, a hundred times better than his brandy. But, of course, nothing has any taste at all.
SPOCK: It may be unappetizing, Doctor, but it is very logical.
MCCOY: There’s that magic word again. Does your logic find this fascinating, Mister Spock?
SPOCK: Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected. In this case, I should think interesting would suffice.
KIRK: You don’t find this unexpected, Mister Spock?
SPOCK: That his food has no taste, his wine, no flavor? No. It simply means that Trelane knows all of the Earth’s forms but none of the substance.
This is the problem with the cooption of stories by people who do not appreciate why the stories were great, to begin with. They want the form because that will attract interested parties, but either they do not know the substance or, as seemingly in many cases, do not care to discern it.
Another Spock quote could be attributed to the people who coopted Tolkien, I object to you. I object to intellect without discipline; I object to power without constructive purpose.
Tolkien was a man who knew the forms of Nordic and Anglo-Saxon legends, but more to the point, he knew the substance. Here is an abstract from Hugo Joly Morin’s” Beowulf” and the Influence of Old English on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” “J.R.R. Tolkien, then an Anglo-Saxon professor at the University of Oxford, published his second novel, titled The Lord of the Rings, in 1954. While a full-time professor, Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, an uncommon fact for the third best-selling novel ever written with more than 150 million copies sold. Reading The Lord of the Rings, however, it is clear that the academic context in which the novel was written contributed greatly to its complexity, depth, and aesthetic prowess. Tolkien being an expert in Anglo-Saxon, nearly all of the names employed in the novel share Old English roots. Moreover, perhaps the greatest and best-known work in Old English was the heroic epic poem, Beowulf. Tolkien is often said to “have helped to rescue the poem for posterity’’1 by not only writing one of his most important essays on the subject, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, but by basing a lot of The Lord of the Rings on the Anglo-Saxon poem.”
Tolkien admired the way that Beowulf, written by a Christian looking back at a pagan past, just as he was, embodied a “large symbolism” [1] without ever becoming allegorical. He worked to echo the symbolism of life’s road and individual heroism in The Lord of the Rings. The names of races, including ents, orcs, elves, and place names, such as Orthanc and Meduseld, derive from Beowulf. The werebear Beorn in The Hobbit has been likened to the hero Beowulf himself; both names mean “bear,” and both characters have enormous strength. Scholars have compared some of Tolkien’s monsters to those in Beowulf. Both his trolls and Gollum share attributes with Grendel, while Smaug’s characteristics closely match those of the Beowulf dragon.
Here are some Beowulf Quotes:
“Death is not easily escaped, try it who will; but every living soul among the children of men dwelling upon the earth goeth of necessity unto his destined place, where the body, fast in its narrow bed, sleepeth after feast.”
“You hold power with balance, with the wisdom of mind… And you shall bring peace to your people for a long time to come, a source of strength to the heroes.”
“Defend your life now with the whole of your strength. I shall stand by you.” One can find echoes of the friendship between Sam and Frodo in this passage.
One of the greatest storytellers, or at least in our western canon, was the Greek Aesop. “A Lion lay asleep in the forest, his great head resting on his paws. A timid little Mouse came upon him unexpectedly and ran across Lion’s nose in her fright and haste to get away. Roused from his nap, the Lion laid his huge paw angrily on the tiny creature to kill her. “Spare me!” begged the poor Mouse. “Please let me go, and someday I will surely repay you.” The Lion was amused to think that a Mouse could ever help him. But he was generous and finally let the Mouse go. Some days later, while stalking his prey in the forest, the Lion was caught in the toils of a hunter’s net. Unable to free himself, he filled the forest with his angry roaring. The Mouse knew the voice and quickly found the Lion struggling in the net. Running to one of the great ropes that bound him, she gnawed it until it parted, and soon the Lion was free.” You laughed when I said I would repay you,” said the Mouse. “Now you see that even a Mouse can help a Lion.”
These are so-called “children’s fairy tales,” but the point is to impart a lesson. Supposedly for children, but I think many adults should go back and reread these. For example, here is one from China. A fox sees a crab sidling along. The fox boasts that he can easily outrun the crab on just four legs.
The crab admits as much but asks if he can fasten something to the fox’s tail, it might make more of a match.
The arrogant fox agrees to believe that nothing attached to his tail will mean his loss. So the fox feels something on his tail but begins to run fast anyway and still runs like the wind. After a while, though, he tired out but was still convinced he had bested the foolish crab. Only then does he realize the crab was affixed to his tail and did no running while his opponent is now all in. So the crab lets go and immediately runs faster than the tired fox.
The Bible contains religion, but in a genuine sense, it is an epic story. And in the old testament, especially Genesis, the story of a family, or clan really, of Abraham. The story was so good that much of Genesis also appears in the Koran (Ibraham).
One of the most celebrated Hindu texts is the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita is set in a narrative framework of a dialogue between Pandava prince Arjuna and his guide and charioteer Krishna, the Personality of Godhead. At the start of the righteous war between Pandavas and Kauravas, Arjuna is preoccupied with a moral and emotional dilemma and despair about the violence and death the war will cause in the battle against his kin.[2] Wondering if he should renounce the war, he seeks Krishna’s counsel, whose answers and discourse constitute the Bhagavad Gita. Krishna counsels Arjuna to “fulfill his Kshatriya (warrior) duty to uphold the Dharma” through Karma’s “selfless action.” The Krishna–Arjuna dialogues cover a broad range of spiritual topics, touching upon ethical dilemmas and philosophical issues that go far beyond the war Arjuna faces
Here are some passages:
“You have the right to work, but for the work’s sake only. Never give way to laziness, either.
Be even-tempered in success and failure: for it is this evenness of temper which is meant by yoga.
Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such fear in the calm of self-surrender. Seek refuge in the knowledge of Brahma. They who work selfishly for results are miserable.”
The crossover of religion and stories is pervasive because the ones doing the writing (or, in the case of the Bible, passed the stories orally down through the ages) understood the power of stories.
Progressives fully understand the power of stories and how they shape our ideas and ideals. That is why they have been so militant in recent decades in coopting the most popular of them for their purposes. Even poor Harry Potter, bereft of the woke ethos, had its own creator, after publications were complete, declare that the beloved Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore was gay. And not just gay but the original bad guy, Grindelwald, was his lover. Before Harry vs. Voldemort, the fate of humanity was to be settled by Dumbledore on the good side and the odious Grindelwald on the other.
Despite JK Rowling making exactly zero direct references to Dumbledore’s sexual proclivities in the books, she retroactively turned an epic confrontation into a lover’s tiff to appease the unappeasable vokesters.
I say unappeasable because though Rowling, by all appearances, seems to be a strong advocate for gay rights, she also stated that men are men and women and women, gay or not. The trans community reacted with thoughtful discourse and reasoned arguments. But, of course, they didn’t. They responded with anger, diatribes, resentments, and attempted cancelation.
What the progressives have figured out is that the normal bludgeon of politics is not sufficient. Hence the takeover of Hollywood. Conservative, manly John Wayne is out, slovenly slacker, but oh-so-woke Seth Rogen is in.
And yet reality has a way of poking through. The best-selling movie of the year features Tom Cruise reprising his role as Pete Mitchell, the ace pilot, and tough guy, and Maverick is not exactly lacking in testosterone.
This is not a screed against movies starring gay characters. The current movie flop, Bros, touted itself as the first gay romantic comedy, a first conveniently forgetting Jeffrey from years ago, and In and Out from decades ago. In the former case, it featured Star Trek’s Patrick Stewart playing slightly against type. Think Captain Picard meets the cast of Extreme Makeover. In and Out was a hilarious movie with a compelling story and charismatic, likable actors, something notably lacking in Bros. Instead, it is that Maverick did not explore his feminine side or that he needs to be saved by someone more progressive than himself, as is now the case with all of the new Star Treks. The cast is undoubtedly more diverse, but the story holds true to what we liked about the movie 30 years ago. Could there be a story of a gay pilot who saves America? Sure, just not this story and not this pilot.
The issue is the visceral reaction when a writer, or in this case, a cabal of corporate executives, alters our stories beyond recognition to score cheap political points. We could go the other way, instead, by turning the peace preaching Jesus into something else. Today the Temple, tomorrow the whole city! Yeah! Let’s make him something more Maccabean (the Jews who fought the Seleucids in the 100s BCE) and less Gandhian. Then let us have kick butt moves and watch him knock in some Pharisee skulls – you bet, boyo.
If that sounds slightly absurd, Amazon’s billion-dollar Rings of Power took Galadriel, a non-action figure in Lord of the Rings, and turned her into a female version of Liam Neeson’s Brian Mills of Taken fame. She has a unique set of skills, and by golly, she uses them – not to discern the threat to middle earth, to provide valuable gifts to unlikely heroes, or reject the thought of absolute power, but instead to Kick, Orc. Butt. Why? Because they wanted a female protagonist who does the things men used to do but better. In Rings of Power, Humans get not one but two female leaders. And the men get to watch. You know, just like Beowulf.
I was thinking of the movie about Elizabeth I of England called the Golden Age. At one point, when the Spanish Armada is sailing up the channel, Elizabeth dons armor and gives an impassioned speech to her army. It is compelling, but no expectation should the Spanish land, 120-pound Elizabeth will take to the field and start going Tudor Rambo. However, a valiant queen could rally her army to battle, and that was enough. The same movie has Elizabeth later watching, without armor, the destruction of the Armada during a storm, belying the Spanish king’s opinion that somehow, God is on his side. I am not for censorship; I just want progressives to build their own damned stories and leave the existing ones true to their original ethos.