More Movies and Mythology

I happened to come across one of my favorite movies the other day and realized I had not put it on my top ten movie list. I felt bad about that, so I am redeeming myself by putting the movie here. It is a movie by Terry Gilliam, who is very much an acquired taste. The artistic director for Monty Python, his directed movies tend to be big, fantastic, and commercial failures. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Time Bandits, and Twelve Monkeys are all movies that you struggle to decide what is real and what is fantasy. My favorite of all, though, was The Fisher King in 1991.   

 
               

When you combine Terry Gilliam and Robin Williams, you have no idea what you are going to get, but this movie is delightful in so many ways. Jeff Bridges and Mercedes Ruehl are perfectly paired (Ruehl won an Oscar for the film)  and Amanda Plummer and the late Michael Jeter both play off-center parts that are amazing. Netflix it if you can or stop by your local Blockbuster (are they still in business?) and you will enjoy it.    

I originally watched The Fisher King for one reason. I had been watching The Power of Myth by Bill Moyers on PBS. It debuted in 1988 and consisted of 6 interviews with Joseph Campbell about the place of mythology in the modern world. It was a fascinating series. It discussed the place of the hero in the world, a topic that Campbell addressed in his book The Hero With A Thousand Faces. That title appears prominently in a quote from George Lucas:  

I came to the conclusion after American Graffiti that what's valuable for me is to set standards, not to show people the world the way it is...around the period of this realization...it came to me that there really was no modern use of mythology...The Western was possibly the last generically American fairy tale, telling us about our values. And once the Western disappeared, nothing has ever taken its place. In literature we were going off into science fiction...so that's when I started doing more strenuous research on fairy tales, folklore, and mythology, and I started reading Joe's books. Before that I hadn't read any of Joe's books...It was very eerie because in reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces I began to realize that my first draft of Star Wars was following classic motifs...so I modified my next draft [of Star Wars] according to what I'd been learning about classical motifs and made it a little bit more consistent...I went on to read 'The Masks of God' and many other books.    

That may be why I enjoyed the original Star Wars movies so much. It's all about the mythology.  

Mark Rosewater, head designer of the Magic: The Gathering trading card game, cites Campbell's "The Hero's Journey" as a major inspiration for "The Weatherlight Saga," an epic storyarc that went from 1997 to 2001, and spanned multiple cardsets, comic books, and novels.  

And Richard Adams in one of my favorite novels Watership Down uses quotes from  The Hero With A Thousand Faces to introduce each chapter.   


Campbell passed away in 1987, right after the Power of Myth was filmed.  

If you look up Joseph Campbell on YouTube, you can find several videos of Campbell talking about his work. Watch some of them if you get  chance. They are worth the time.