tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-460474552118769771.post9053326336701917936..comments2024-02-28T09:34:58.074-08:00Comments on NATURALISTIC! UNCANNY! MARVELOUS!: THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960)Gene Phillipshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11495562795211277146noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-460474552118769771.post-27321354478700108162022-04-28T07:50:53.098-07:002022-04-28T07:50:53.098-07:00Quick correction: I don't think Tolkien ever u...Quick correction: I don't think Tolkien ever uses the term "sub-world;" I probably made that up out of his concept of "subcreation," in which an author plays God by imagining a fantasy-world like Middle-Earth or Narnia, emulating the "primary world" but emphasizing whatever imaginative creations the author wants to include. I'm extending that concept to include secondary worlds that have a strong likeness to our own worlds but also to some extent operate by their own imagined rules.Gene Phillipshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11495562795211277146noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-460474552118769771.post-1737976318545546672022-04-27T11:54:36.988-07:002022-04-27T11:54:36.988-07:00You're welcome; always good to hear from you o...You're welcome; always good to hear from you on these matters.<br />I think the closest I ever came to explaining the difference in mythic discourse between a "superior" work and a "good" work appears in the first paragraphs of MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2:<br /><br />"To my knowledge, no written work of fiction provides a mythopepic discourse denser than that of Herman Melville’s MOBY DICK. This sprawling tale is replete with many threads of mythopoeic vertical meaning, ranging from the relationship of white men to colored men (which theme preoccupied Leslie Fiedler) to the nature of fate (Fedallah’s MACBETH-like prophecies). But all of these meaning-threads are subordinate to the master thread, which, if removed, would unravel the whole kit and kaboodle. The master thread for MOBY DICK consists of the myth of the Hunter and the Hunted—with the additional fillip that the Hunted is either God or the agent of God’s inscrutable will, so that the Hunt itself is inevitably doomed.<br /><br />All of the subordinate vertical threads of MOBY DICK are so well developed that the author could have made stand-alone stories out of any of them. This is not generally the case, however. Of the thousands of other narratives that possess strong mythopoeic meaning, most of them possess no more than a single strong master thread."<br /><br />LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT is one of the "good" works. It develops its "master thread"/theme of (say) the inevitability of the Death of Innocence thoroughly, but there are hardly any "subordinate" threads of discourse about anything else. Even the thread of "class warfare" that's important in VIRGIN SPRING doesn't develop into much of anything in HOUSE.<br /><br />Now. VIRGIN SPRING is not on the same level as MOBY DICK, though Melville had the advantage of working on, shall we say, a much larger canvas. Yet it's impressive how SPRING's authors wrought the movie's master thread, "cruel nature vs. indifferent God", out of a source that seems to be no more than a typical medieval melodramatic ballad. <br /><br />I feel like I did write somewhere that a story has greater potential to become mythic when the narrative has some potential to engage with mythico-religious concepts, so SPRING's medieval setting is an advantage. But of course a lot of actual medieval works, like the Swedish ballad, don't take advantage of that advantage.<br /><br />Tolkien's idea of a "sub-world" has some relevance, too. Another work I recently graded as "superior" was Tarantino's KILL BILL. It's obviously set in modern times and barely says anything about religion as such, unless you count vague references to kung-fu disciplines and Japanese sword-arts. But I found myself noting that the narrative is largely divorced from quotidian reality. Almost everything in the narrative takes place in a "sub-world," which despite resembling our reality, is all about these wild, superhuman assassins who fight amongst themselves like, well, the superheroes to whom Bill compares them. The master-thread there is Tarantino meditating on what, if anything, morals and ethics can possibly mean to such larger than life demigods. Tarantino adds other "bachelor-threads" that complement his master-thread-- he could've made a totally distinct story, say, by concentrating on the quasi-feminism theme-- and many of those side-threads are rich as well, far richer than any subordinate thread in LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. So I guess I would say that a good work only needs strong discourse in the master thread, while a superior one needs strong discourse even in the bachelor-threads. (Off the top of my head, one of the few other discourses I remember labeling as superior in that respect was BLADE RUNNER, fwiw.)<br />Gene Phillipshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11495562795211277146noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-460474552118769771.post-43572156227118733642022-04-26T15:42:54.253-07:002022-04-26T15:42:54.253-07:00Excellent essay. Thank you for posting!
I noti...Excellent essay. Thank you for posting! <br /><br />I notice that the mythic rating for the Bergman film surpasses that of Craven's. Does this generally happen because of the different genres chosen? Or is it the setting? I would guess that Bergman is able to use mythic ideas and symbols to make his discourse because this is facilitated by the story's medieval setting, while Craven may be limited by the gritty modernity of his own. For example, when the water flows from where the daughter rests, the father could interpret that as a kind of good omen because of he was a "man of his time." But such miraculous relief could not occur in Craven's setting because the audience would find that to be out of place, for "all goodness and virtue has departed" (as you wrote on the post for the Craven film).AT-AT Pilothttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08542516243211094101noreply@blogger.com