Living through Celebrities. Can there be an Upside?

      Laderman asserts that celebrity fame is "a pervasive and powerful force in modern society, magnetizing and tempting millions of people... a historically unique, curious, cultural phenomenon." Curious the phenomenon is indeed. Why are humans driven to obsessively follow and emulate celebrities? They are our fellow human beings, set apart only by the fact that their faces, words, and opinions are broadcasted across the nation due to their success in film, music, and sports careers. The idea that this phenomenon is "historically unique" is not accurate. In his chapter Laderman traces the roots of our current celebrity fascination. In the 17th century saints were idolized. Their stories provided a type of myth in which they were the heroes performing miraculous acts. In today's society, celebrities have replaced the saints as the heroes and it the media's re-approporation of their lives as myths that explains our obsession.
     Just like mythical and apocalyptic movies, celebrities provide the possibility of excitement and escape for the average American. Celebrities have personal relationships with clothing designers, professional makeup artists to enhance their natural beauty, access to trendy restaurants... the list goes on. Celebrities, so it seems, are living the dream and through them, we can realize our fantasies. In the midst of her monotonous weekly routine, the suburban housewife can find an escape in the tabloids at the local Stop & Shop. This experience is even more thrilling than a movie because it is more tangible. These are real living people who were born in average households just like the rest of us. Their rise to fame provides inspiration that we too can achieve fabulousness. Although not likely, I could go on a reality TV show and have all of my dreams realized as was the case with Kelly Clarkson, Kim Kardashian, Honey Boo Boo, and Snooki. Religious idols may offer spiritual and morel guidance, but we cannot relate to them as we can celebrities. We begin to rely so heavily on these connections however, that it becomes difficult to separate our lives from theirs, reality from fiction. Numerous BuzzFeed articles and Facebook posts appeared in the wake of Ryan Gosling's engagement announcement as thousands of hopeful girls across the country faced the harsh reality that their (imaginary) romance with the star was officially over. People shed tears over a celebrities passing as if they were close personal friends. Many even have surgery to adopt a celebrity's physical features.

        Overall, society's increasing fascination with celebrities has been viewed as a devolution. Among all of this criticism, is it possible to uncover any positive effects? As Laderman notes, celebrities can serve as our moral compasses. Just as we idolize them, we scrutinize their unethical behavior. When celebrities are caught stealing, doing drugs, and getting in car accidents is it widely publicized, often resulting in lost contracts and endorsement deals. Celebrities can also use their power to promote charities and social awareness campaigns, so much so that it has almost become an expectation. The billions of dollars and countless hours celebrities dedicate to these causes is certainly admirable. The only question is, are they doing it for the right reasons? In the end, these charitable acts just further further improve their image.  In fighting AIDS and adopting children from Africa celebrities earn one more reason to be idolized. They appear almost saintly.

Lost in Translation: Guru English

What are some of the repercussions of mash-ups from different myths when you try to take one world-view and tell it in a completely different culture and language? This is what Jane Iwamura grapples with in The Oriental Monk. Asian figures like the Dalai Lama and the samari both have become stereotypes and idealized icons in our Western culture. Instead of looking at the nuances of traditions and the characteristics in these people, Americans take a sound-byte of information. We condense everything down, and repeat that morphed image or phrase so much that we believe it was the original – we make myths.

I’d call this cultural reframing: consciously or not, we reframe these new and Orient cultures with our Western conceptions. In America, we like things that are new but not too new and “alien” so we conform ideals that fit into our Western, secular, and subtly-racist culture. Within this interplay between exoticism and appropriation, we mash-up a “wide range of religious figures (gurus, sages, swamis, masters, teachers) from a variety of ethnic backgrounds (South Asian, Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese)” (Iwamrua) into a homogenized ‘Oriental Monk’ figure, for example.  

Our language too, is a mash-up. Words are adapted, shortened, and taken from other culture and transformed into English. And as we do, these words are culturally reframed to fit into our vocabulary of Western values.

In the late 1800s, South Asian Buddhists and Hindus sought to connect with those who could “only connect in English.” So they translated Hindu texts into English but then spun off different meanings to make them more accessible to the Western mind-set. And from this, as scholar Srinivas Aravamudan writes, Guru English was born.

You’ve probably heard it. Mindfulness, esoteric, auras, spiritualism, magnetism, energy fields. These words are mash-ups from a number of religious teachings, yet exist without a “sociological basis or doctrinal core.” With these words, secular Westerners could conceptualize and believe in certain Hindu teachings that at the time were considered primal and unclean. For Westerners, these words are catchy and easy to say; they played off scientific movements of the day, but had a credible and ancient past. Therefore, these “mutants and recombinants to jostle, proliferate, and clash within the confines of a common theolinguistic frame.” In the hazy space of East-West connection, these words modify Hindu and Buddhist teachings into “scientific” and Western jargon.

Certain things have been lost in this transmission of teachings. With these words, we see a theolinguistic slippage and a muddying of theological teachings. Sometimes we have to ask, what do these words even mean? When we hear the term prana, do we think back to the ancient Bhagavad-Gita and Patanjali? Or are is it a mix of breath, force - spirit - vitalism - healing - America's physical culture and alternative medicine. Similarly, the term “God” in Guru English can signify a "God" (Isvara, Yaweh, Vishu, Allah, Kali), the individual Self (soul)-realization (Hindu atman-brahman), or the Superself. Guru English is a mash-up that can mean almost anything, but it is seen as syntax grounded in ancient Eastern teachings.  

Many Eastern conceptions have been, perhaps, lost in translation due to this Guru English and preconceived Western notions. It is important to know that we not only tell myths with our English tongue, but our English words are constructed myths as well.

Apocalypse Vs. Reality

            As Elaine Pagel writes people read their own “social, political, and religious conflicts” into apocalyptic myths. Filmmakers love to create disaster movies showing wide scale societal devastation based on cultural and societal fears.

The Day After Tomorrow is an archetypical apocalyptic myth. It shows a total societal rearrangement caused by a large-scale catastrophe. Like all apocalyptic myths, the date it occurs is not specified, but still immediate enough to create a sense of concern. That allows it to take a slightly prophetic tone. The science behind the film is absolutely nonsensical, but the filmmakers clearly see climate change as an issue of concern. They just don’t want to let facts get in the way of a good story.

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth film serves as a much more direct, prophetic, apocalyptic statement. Rather than allowing getting carried away with the spectacle, Al Gore relies on facts to show the realities of climate change. His predictions are nowhere near as drastic as the ones in The Day After Tomorrow. But they allow the audience no illusions. His message is climate change is happening, and there is nothing you can do about it.

These films base themselves around a similar cultural fear: global warming. But The Day After Tomorrow made $652 million dollars, while An Inconvenient Truth made about $50 million. That shows that in our society, we are more comfortable with myth than fact. The Day After Tomorrow takes society’s fears about global warming and exaggerates them to a point where they look like something out of The Book of Revelations. An Inconvenient Truth is much more jarring and uncomfortable, because it shows global warming as a fact, rather than a myth. Both films warn of an apocalypse by similar means, but audiences are more comfortable with that warning when it’s wrapped in a layer of myth, rather than fact.

The Visualization of Myth

How are myths visual? Originally, myths existed only as verbal stories as they were passed down from the older generations to the new ones. With myths arrived the art of storytelling, since the myths were often stretched and enlarged according to the person that was telling them. The history of myth is thus intrinsically related to the history of human creativity and imagination. As soon as the first paintings appeared, myths started operating not just as verbal, but also as visual mediums. In today’s world, film acts as the perfect medium for the visualization of myths. It offers the perfect environment for creativity, mashup and preservation of myths. Film is also an extension of storytelling, it has the power to create identities and portray myths that construct sacred worlds. 

As Laderman writes, “films provide myths that frame and make sense of basic, universal dilemmas faced by finite, mortal humans and serve as touchstones for making sense in a cruel, painful world full of suffering, injustice and chaos” (p.9). Films, just like myths, tell us where we come from and how should we act. Their messages can be thought of as religious since they teach about order, meaning, purpose, and identity. For instance, E.T: the Extraterrestrial (1982) teaches us about the value of friendship, Into the Wild (2007) about finding happiness etc. Nonetheless, films borrow directly from existing hero, creation, journey and other myths and present them from a different perspective, in instances like The Godfather (1972)- the succession myth, Forrest Gump (1994)- journey myth and The Matrix (1999)-hero myth. Unlike a verbal story, the visual representation of a particular myth through a film cannot be changed as it stays consistent every time it gets “retold” (re-screened). At the same time, different films may portray the same myth in a different way. Film is thus a visual representation of space and time that helps preserve the sacred worlds created by myths.

Once Upon a Dream

Once upon a dream, Aurora sings in the woodland that she will find her prince in the 1959 film Sleeping Beauty. And out of this romantic, idealized fantasy, a gorgeous prince appears and begins singing back to her: hooray, true love! As the story goes, Aurora was cursed by the evil Maleficent, and on her sixteenth birthday, Aurora pricks her finger on a spinning wheel and falls into a death-like, enchanted sleep. Yet the prince defeats the evil witch-gone-dragon and with true love’s kiss, the spell is broken. “True,” heterosexual love is what saves Aurora; her father’s or fairies’ love doesn’t quite cut it. Like so many of these 1950s Disney stories, the male protagonist saves the day. Second only to Dumbo, Aurora has the second-to-least amount of speaking lines for a Disney character.¹ So she’s sweet, beautiful, and needs saving. These “family values” don’t look great in today’s society, but back in the 1950s, they reinforced the political and social structure of the day.

Today, Disney is going through what some may say as a slight identity crisis. How do you uphold Disney’s traditional values while still remaining current? This is an issue myths undergo (think of Adam and Eve modern adaptations) and film, like any myth, needs to be retold, reshaped. So Disney released Maleficent this year. Here Disney features strong female characters, including Maleficent. She is multi-faceted: neither purely good or evil. She was terribly wronged by romantic, “true love” and seeks revenge on her perpetrator. So Aurora’s father also has a character make-over, and becomes more evil as the movie goes on. Like the original, Aurora is cursed and lives in a wooden cottage, but she’s visited in dream-like adventures by Maleficent, who has watched her cursed victim grow up with somewhat loving eyes. In the end, is it the boy prince, who Aurora barely knows, who saves the day? The strong Maleficent shows a maternal, unwavering, and true love who’s power can break any curse.

As the family structure in America changes, Disney needs to spin new adaptations of family movies to remain relevant. Maleficent shows that Disney is trying to reclaim its somewhat sexist past and create more female-centered stories.      

             

       1.  http://news.moviefone.com/2014/01/27/sleeping-beauty-facts/

Anakin Skywalker and Jesus

        Films often rely on biblical stories to help tell their plot. Many times films adapt commonly known myths into their stories. A great example of this is with Star Wars and their use of the story of Jesus. In the prequel trilogy, Anakin Skywalker (future Darth Vader) has many similarities to Jesus. First off is their births, as both were born without a father and have a mother who is central to their development. Both have foreign men arrive and anoint them as special (three wise men and Qui-Gon Jinn). Anakin is also known as the “Chosen One” and he is supposed to bring “balance to the Force.” Of course, Anakin gets corrupted and falls to the Dark Side until the end of Episode 6 where he sacrifices himself to kill the Emperor and bring down evil (bringing peace to the cosmos/galaxy). Anakin is a major example of how movies adapt religious stories. He also is a good example of the continuous fight between the cosmos and chaos, and how myth must tread the line between good and evil. The analogy of Anakin to Jesus has helped Star Wars have such a religious following with Darth Vader being one of the most popular characters that fans dress up as. A major question for filmmakers is about how close can they make their stories resemble biblical stories, or do they always have to slightly change the story before they can put it into the film? Also, is it a necessity for filmmakers to have some type of religious connotations in their films?