TITANIC NEAR-MYTHS AND CURIOSITIES

 I wasn't expecting to write more than a quickie piece on DC's first TEEN TITANS title, which lasted (not counting three try-out stories) from issue #1 in 1966 through issue #43 in 1973. And this is still only a selective view at best, at that.                                                                 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

      

What prompted me to revisit this moldy oldie from my youth was my having reviewed all five seasons of Cartoon Network's TEEN TITANS teleseries. In this post, I evaluated the mythicity of the fifth-season episode "Revved Up" as "good," stating: 


'In the 1960s TITANS comic, the writer introduced a villain with the improbable name of "Ding Dong Daddy," who executed crimes with the help of specially rigged vehicles. This was a rare (for the time) shout-out to a cartoon character outside the boundaries of four-color comic books: the artistic persona of Earl "Big Daddy" Roth, a caricaturist renowned for weird monsters driving fast cars. REVVED UP introduces the animated Ding Dong as a guy who somehow gets hold of a secret treasure owned by the Teen Wonder himself. When Robin and the other Titans try to reacquire the mysterious item, Ding Dong compels them to participate in a car-race-- and Cyborg, who dearly loves his T-car, is more than happy to oblige.'                                                                                                                     I didn't adequately explain why I thought the episode had better than average mythicity, but it later occurred to me that I'd implied that the mere use of the imagery of the artist Roth and some of his caricatures alone conferred mythicity. I could have corrected the language of the post, and no one would have noticed but me, but I thought I could expand on my thoughts better in an ARCHIVE post. What I was trying to get across was that the images of "Big Daddy" Roth and his creations were not mythic in themselves but only accrued sociological mythicity as representations of the "car culture" of the time. I felt "Revved Up" tapped into some of the same sense of humans' fascination with high-velocity vehicles. That fascination comes across by the way the Titans, Ding Dong Daddy and other malefactors cpme up with inventive car-creations, albeit with a certain degree of reflection about how cars work in the first place. (Without that reflection, "Revved Up" wouldn't possess any more mythicity than an episode of WACKY RACES.)                                                                                                       

So much for the TITANS cartoon episode, but what about the original comic book, to which the cartoon occasionally paid homage? In the title's seven-year-run, it was comprised of three periods: "Wacky Titans" (the one all the fans joke about for its un-coolness), "Relevant Titans" (wherein some of the heroes put aside their costumes and tried to have more "street-level" adventures), and "Spooky Titans" (wherein the heroes reassumed their costumes but tended to get involved in markedly supernatural difficulties). Ding Dong Daddy appears in the third issue of the "Wacky Period," but it's one of the better issues on which writer Bob Haney and artist Nick Cardy collaborated. There's still a lot of bad "hip" dialogue that made the Wacky Period so celebrated for its nuttiness, but the plot's not that different from one of Bill Finger's Golden Age tales about Batman and Robin trying to keep young boys on the straight and narrow.                                                                                                 

  The story opens when an automated car robs a bank in Gotham City and escapes the Dynamic Duo, managing even to outmaneuver the Batmobile. By dumb luck, a governmental education committee asks the Teen Titans to investigate a high incidence of dropout high-schoolers, right in River City (OK, not really). From typical teen Danny, the heroes learn that many local teens are deserting school thanks to the high pay they earn at Ding Dong Daddy's car shop. Ding Dong is a crook of course-- he must be, since he's contributing to the delinquency of minors-- but Haney doesn't bother describing what sort of business the villain's using as his cover for his nefarious activities-- like, does he repair vehicles, or does he sell both cars and motorcycles of his own personal design? What he really does in his crime-career is to design other vehicles, like the bank-robbery buggy in Gotham, to pull off automated robberies. It's the sort of crime-career that only makes sense in the world of superheroes and their "pattern villains."                                                                                     

One might expect that once the Titans pay a call on Ding Dong, he might just quell his criminal activities and lay low. Instead, the superheroes' advent functions like a thrown gauntlet, and he sends forth three different gimmick-vehicles to confuse and confound the Titans. When Robin spies on the "Hot Rod Hive," Ding Dong sics thugs on the Boy Wonder and puts him in a death trap-- the sort of thing that practically begs a visit from the local constabulary.             

                                                

Instead, the Titans respond with a flanking attack, masquerading as ordinary bike-riders and talking Danny into getting them jobs at the Hive. The heroes don't do a really good job of staying undercover, since they use their special powers to stomp some nasty bikers who have nothing to do with the main story. (Note the bizarre headgear Nick Cardy gives to the bad bikers.) What's to keep any dropout loyal to Ding Dong from exposing the Titans to the villain?                         

                                                                                                                                              

  Nevertheless, the subterfuge works, in large part because the wig-wearing Wonder Girl distracts the maker of crime-cars by shaking her moneymaker for him in private. In jig time the heroes are able to expose Ding Dong's criminal nature to his student-employees, who are duly aghast at being involved in felonious doings. Ding Dong unleashes one last gimmick on the heroes-- a killer gas pump, of all things-- and then River City can go back to the status quo. I don't believe Ding Dong appeared again until the cartoon show, but he's a decent enough pattern-criminal, given a little novelty by the Roth caricature and by the fact that there aren't that many vehicle-themed villains.                                                                                                       

As I said, I'm not going to attempt an overview of even one of the TITANS periods, but I will note a few other curiosities in the Wacky Years. Beast Boy, who was a vital member of the super-group in the 1980s, only got one guest-appearance in the 1966-73 run, when he tried to join the Titans in issue #6. The main story's not very good, and the art by Bill Molno is subpar, but the page I reprint above does show writer Haney seeking to emulate a little of Marvel's "misunderstood hero" trope, which was on fuller display in DOOM PATROL, where the animal-imitating teen originated.  For good measure, the letters column for the issue contains one letter of no particular consequence from future pro Mark Evanier. Also, a continuity-minded fan asked the editors of TITANS if Wonder Girl would get phased out since she'd been written out of the WONDER WOMAN series by Robert Kanigher, which event I addressed here. The TITANS editors did not respond to the continuity confusion.     

                                                                                           
Finally, just for grins, here's a page from the first appearance of the Mad Mod, who got more than a little exposure on the TEEN TITANS cartoon show. Haney and Cardy introduced the character, whose raison d'etre had more to do with fashion-gimmicks than with mind-control-- and who was apparently Cockney, since he had the habit of dropping his "H's." Though I rather doubt that any Brit of any linguistic division went as far as Haney's depiction, since Mad Mod even laughs without the use of the "H-sound," going, "'Aw, 'Aw" or occasionally "'Ar, 'Ar."  

PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 3

 Since I'm not sure I'll finish STORIES ABOUT STORIES, I skipped Chapter 3 and read Chapter 4, at least in part because it concerns Attebery's antagonistic relationship to Joseph Campbell.

But before getting to anything about Campbell, it occurred to me to relate Attebery's definition of myth as "any collective story that encapsulates a worldview and authorizes belief" to one of the first "mythographers" I evaluated on this blog, Eric Gould. In the work referenced here, Gould coined a term I've often used, "mythicity," but he did not share Attebery's broad valorization of any mythic tale simply because it "authorized belief."

The fact that classical and totemistic myths have to refer to some translinguistic fact-- to the Gods and Nature-- proves not that there are Gods, but that our talents for interpreting our place in the world may be distinctly limited by the nature of language.

In my own essay I registered my disagreement with Gould on that point. Nevertheless, Attebery seems to have vaulted over the epistemological question, "what authority does religious 'belief' possess, even if it expresses the collective worldview of a given tribe, nation, or ethnicity?" I would be the last to validate the Doubting Thomas  fallacy of the materialists, "If you can't dissect the risen body of Christ, that means no such body ever existed." But I think belief can be epistemologically valid insofar as its narratives reproduce epistemological patterns that are, in a sense, common to all human experience, not just to particular human groupings. For me at least, that transcendence of particular cultures trumps the "limits of language" that Eric Gould finds so disconcerting.

At base, I believe that Joseph Campbell shared this belief in such patterns, though he was, as I've said elsewhere, rather scattershot in his hermeneutics during his unquestionably distinguished career. But since Campbell and some of his fellow travelers are not validating myth based only upon whether the myth-narratives "authorize" a particular group's "belief," it's not surprising to me that Atteberry implicitly dismisses many comparativists that came into prominence in the 1960s, lumping together "Claude Levi-Strauss, Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye, and Mircea Eliade" as proponents of "myth criticism." Attebery is initially a bit circumspect about pinning down what he doesn't like about myth criticism, though immediately after these citations he brackets the myth-critics as sharing "the assumption that all myths are psychically available to modern writers and readers." Attebery does not at first raise the Barthesian specter of "appropriation," the idea that it's wrong to pilfer cultural artifacts from cultures not one's own. The author's initial reticence may come about because he segues from talking about the cultural influence of the myth-critics (presumably in America and Western Europe, though Attebery doesn't specify) to discussing the concomitant rise of the mass-market proliferation of the fantasy genre in the same decade and thereafter. But when he turns his attention to Campbell's HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, it's clear the author has that devil Appropriation on his mind.

The problem with Campbell's monomyth as an analytical tool  is that it always works because it simplifies every story to the point where nothing but the monomyth is left. It ignores the many mythic stories that do not have questing heroes, and it leaves out the culturally defined values and symbols that make each tradition unique.

I disagree with only one part of this statement. As I may have said elsewhere on this blog, I have not read HERO in several years, and have not ever reviewed it, but I think it the least epistemologically valid of his works. If I had my way, Campbell would be much better known for his "four functions." But I must admit that Campbell's concept of an over-arching "super-myth," while fallible in many ways, had the effect of getting a lot of people to check out that particular book, including (allegedly) George Lucas. 

Yet Attebery makes the opposite mistake. When he bestows upon traditional myths a uniqueness that sets those stories apart from other cognate stories, he makes the same mistake Barthes did in MYTHOLOGIES. Long before there existed either "capitalist" or "post-industrial" cultures, so-called "traditional cultures" constantly swapped or stole story-ideas from each other. Did Norse Odin precede Germanic Wotan? No one knows, and no one should care. The same principle should apply to the intermingling of elements from disparate cultures in order to craft modern magical fantasies. We would not have a LORD OF THE RINGS if Tolkien had not synthesized many myth-traditions, not least the very disparate traditions of Celtic tales and medieval Christian religion. Alan Garner's WEIRDSTONE OF BRISINGAMEN is nowhere near the greatness of RINGS. But Garner's synthesis was a good one, and does not deserve to be downgraded because (according to Attebery) he "mixed mythologies indiscriminately," with "Nordic dwarves, Celtic elves, a Tolkienian evil force named Nastrond, and a Merlinesque wizard who guards a cave of sleeping warriors like those of the Germanic Frederick Barbarosa." It's odd that Attebery should invoke a 12th century German ruler in concert with a "Merlinesque wizard," rather than referencing the "sleeping warrior" myths about King Arthur, who's more frequently associated with Merlin.

In the end, the argument comes down not to logic but taste. Attebery clearly prefers modern fantasy authors to pick some corpus of culturally related myth-stories and to build from that corpus. But as I said, Tolkien himself did not do this, and as yet I have not seen the author critiquing the Oxford don on the same terms he uses toward both Campbell and Alan Garner. I too can think of many bad admixtures of disparate traditional stories, but that does not prove that "mix and match" is a bad strategy in itself. I also think Atteberry wants authors to stick to particular mythoi so that he can judge better if the creators do what he thinks most valuable: ringing in modern interpretive changes to traditional lore. 

If I make it through another chapter, I plan to address one of the major omissions in Attebery's schema: the differing dynamics of oral culture vs. written culture.

COMPRESSING CONCRESCENCE

 Though I'm sure I've made assorted comments on both the ARCHIVE and my movie-blog about the many difficulties in adapting prose works into other media, it seems I've not codified anything regarding how the process of cross-media adaptation affects mythicity. The 2023 essay MASTERING EPISTEMOLOGY probably comes closest to providing possible criteria.

I have been reasonably consistent about showing how different literary works display different levels of mythicity because their authors either do or do not render the four epistemological patterns with a sense of their complex possibilities. In 2018 I dubbed the process of mythic coalescence as "concrescence," and attempted to link it to the Aristotelian concept of "the unity of action," even though I almost immediately revised that standard phrase into a "unity of effects."

From this basis, a successful translation of a work's mythicity would have to maintain concrescence, though inevitably the second media effort must alter much of the first work's content. Often this means leaving out content that supports the original work's symbolic discourse, and so, while the media translation may reproduce the original's lateral meaning, it's unable to achieve the same vertical meaning.

Nevertheless, I have seen examples where a given secondary work must adumbrate a primary one, but still manages to achieve concrescence of the symbolic discourse, and thus realizing high mythicity. 

There are probably assorted examples, but the one that most comes to mind is the 1925 silent film adaptation of Rider Haggard's novel SHE. In my review I noted the impossibility of a film of standard feature length being able to deal with all the detail of the book. But I judged that the filmmakers had managed to keep ENOUGH details to keep a commensurate level of conscrescence. Of the 1925 film I wrote:

Though the film is only able to suggest bits and pieces of the novel’s romantic grandeur, on the whole its co-directors manage to suggest at least some of that grandiosity despite the lack of dialogue. They did so by resorting to silent cinema’s potential for suggesting more than it shows, and as a result the city of Kor, of which we see very little, comes alive through the bearing of the queenly Ayesha.

I speak of “bearing” rather than beauty, because actress Betty Blythe is only fair in the looks department, never seeming to be a truly bewitching figure. But the script does let this version of Ayesha be a true sorceress, rather than just a sexy white queen. For all the divergences between book and movie, I was impressed by the fact that the script kept a vital scene, When Ayesha curses a female rival, she does so by touching the other woman’s hair, so that the imprint of the queen’s fingers whitens the hair touched.

So where secondary adaptations are concerned, they may not be able to duplicate the concrescence of the primary work, but they CAN muster a lesser concrescence with its own integrity. For a forthcoming film adaptation review, I will use the term "secondary concrescence" unless something better comes to mind.

 

 

HOW MANY WESTERN MYTHS HAVE I FOUND?

I stated in the previous essay that on my two main review-blogs I had not devoted much space to any isophenomenal westerns, mythic or otherwise. Despite this caveat, I did devote two long posts to two such non-fantastic western works:

RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE

DJANGO UNCHAINED

So of the all other westerns, or western-associated productions I will list here, they will all have some metaphenomenal content.

Not all of them take place, however, within the same era as the traditional western, or even as the so-called "Eastern western," which concerned the American Revolutionary era. I find that western iconography spans three broad periods:

THE PRE-WESTERN ERA

Stories fitting this heading take place prior to any major European incursions in any of the Americas, North or South. Typically this will concern only stories about Indian tribes who have not yet encountered any persons associated with the colonial efforts from the 16th century onward-- though I would have no problem with stories in which Indians met Viking travelers or even Phoenician sea-traders. In literature, there's really only major pre-western narrative.

THE SONG OF HIAWATHA

In theory, certain comic-book series like Gold Key's TUROK SON OF STONE and DC's SUPER CHIEF would qualify for this category, if they possesses the sort of mythopoeically rendered epistemological patterns that constitutes good mythicity.

Then at the other end of the temporal spectrum, there is--

THE POST-WESTERN ERA

This includes any narrative with western iconography taking place after the dawn of the twentieth century, whether or not the narratives takes place in the American West or even in any physical place corresponding to the North and South American continents. In addition to 20th-century stories with some major connection to western story-tropes or icons, this category can also embrace so-called "space westerns," though the significance of the trope or icon has to be very strong. I for one do NOT deem STAR WARS a "space western," even though the series used western tropes (like the "cantina scene") from western cinema. And I would not regard the entirety of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Mars series" of books to be space westerns either, though the first one counts, because its 20th-century protagonist starts out his narrative fighting wild Indians. So the first book qualified for high mythicity.

A PRINCESS OF MARS

And so does this Osamu Tezuka take on Western mythology:

CAPTAIN KEN

I also include here stories where some significant character uses western iconography, even if some other genre is dominant. Thus the story in SPIDER-MAN #10 is predominantly a superhero story, but it is "western-adjacent" because one of the villains wears a ten-gallon hat and twirls a lasso as his only weapon.

THE ENFORCERS

Finally, I come to the meatiest category, taking in all narratives centered within the domain of the Americas from the 16th through the 19th centuries, though obviously not all of these have western iconography. (For instance, stories about the Civil War take place in the same time-frame as the "winning of the West" stories, but only a few of these tales are likely to boast strong western tropes or icons.)  All of my other Mythic Westerns are as follows:

HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER

INCIDENT OF THE PALE RIDER 

THE LONE RANGER AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD

THE NIGHT OF THE VICIOUS VALENTINE

PURGATORY

THE RANGERS VS. TOMAHAWK

RANGO

THE SHAMAN

SCALP HUNTER

Technically, SCALP HUNTER, one of the "Son of Tomahawk" stories, is not a metaphenomenal story, and might better be listed alongside Django and the Purple Sage Riders. I've also left off this list all of the individual "good" episodes of the teleseries KUNG FU. This program sported a high percentage of stories with either a "good" or a "fair" mythicity rating, and so I prefer to associate the series as a whole with my next category: all the "fair" westerns that weren't quite epistemologically complex enough to be good, but which at least included important myth-motifs.

THE LONE RANGER (1938)

MACKENNA'S GOLD

THE MARK OF ZORRO (1920)

THE MARK OF ZORRO (1940)

THE MASK OF ZORRO

THE WHITE BUFFALO

ZORRO'S FIGHTING LEGION

ZORRO THE GAY BLADE

And finally, I made brief reference to a very "post-Western" storyline in THE WEST COAST AVENGERS here.

I may add to this list over time, as I encounter new "good myths" or "fair myths" worth collating.

MYTHICITY ACCORDING TO GENRE-DISPERSAL

 In the American academic criticism of both prose literature and film, so-called "myth criticism" is fairly spotty, without a dominant theoretical voice. Not that I would want everyone to sound the same. But there were a better general understanding of what distinguishes mythopoeic discourse from didactic discourse, authors like the ones who assembled this travesty might have a harder time promoting their drivel.

I believe American film criticism has one important advantage over its prose kindred, though. Because of the way commercial films were and are marketed, film critics have paid more attention to the ways mythic content can be expressed according to genre-expectations. No one has to my knowledge ever attempted a myth-history even for American popular films, and thus every interested critic, be it Raymond Durgnat, Richard Slotkin, or Geoffrey Hill, simply focuses on whatever genres or genre-products each finds most rewarding.

As a generalization based on personal reading, I find that three genres have generally attracted the most attention from myth-critics: horror, science fiction, and westerns. There's considerably less focus upon war and crime/mystery/espionage, except where critics have concentrated a particular creator with a particular genre-specialization, as with Hitchcock. And although one might argue that even silent film employed characters one might call "superheroes," understandably this quintessential comic-book genre has remained out of favor with most critics.

In comics criticism, I would say the bulk of myth-criticism has focused upon particular characters, be it perennials like Superman and Wonder Woman or relative upstarts executed by a particular creator, as with Frank Miller's Daredevil. So when I state that the bulk of comic-book criticism focuses upon superheroes, I'm talking about such focused examinations, and not so much on seeing myth broadly, through examinations of overall genre expectations. At least I'm not aware of any parallels in comics criticism to Slotkin's 1992 GUNFIGHTER NATION, which embraced a wide variety of frontier/western narratives of the 20th century.

I'm not thumping my own tub to claim that my blog seems to be the only one that has searched through the majority of comic-book  genres In Quest of Myth; it is, as far as I know, simple unadorned truth. Despite my efforts to be open to all generic forms, though, there can be no doubt that I too have found myth-discourse most often in the comic-book genre of the superhero. Probably the superhero-tale's nearest rival on this blog is the horror comic, with considerably fewer exemplars in the domains of science fiction, teen humor, and westerns.

Now, this is not so much the case on the blog I've dedicated to metaphenomenal film. Movies and television episodes with a "good" mythicity rating may actually be stronger there for both "horror" and "science fiction" than they are for "superheroes," though again, I have not attempted a precise breakdown, nor do I tend to do one.

 Now, the very fact that the NUM blog focuses only metaphenomenal film means that I almost never examine in detail one of the film-genres that earns the widest plaudits from academics: the western. Whereas horror, science fiction, and superheroes all might be expected to have heavy mythicity thanks to their evocation of metaphenomena, western narratives, even relatively simple efforts by "non-auteurs," often generate complex symbolic discourses even within purely (or largely) isophenomenal worlds. And I would say, again without making any attempt at a statistical breakdown, that western films do so much more frequently than other genres that tend to be dominantly isophenomenal, such as crime and mystery, romance, teen humor, and war.

I may come up with a theory to explain this discrepancy after doing more research into western-myth criticism as it exists, but for now, this essay serves mostly as a lead-in to my next essay: How Many Western Myths Have I Found?

MASTERING EPISTEMOLOGY

As I look over my various posts on both the topic of "epistemological patterns" and that of the "master thread," I don't think I ever managed to show how the former plays into the latter. 

I have been reasonably consistent about showing how different literary works display different levels of mythicity because their authors either do or do not render the four epistemological patterns with a sense of their complex possibilities. In 2018 I dubbed the process of mythic coalescence as "concrescence," and attempted to link it to the Aristotelian concept of "the unity of action," even though I almost immediately revised that standard phrase into a "unity of effects."

In 2020, I proposed "master thread" as a substitute for the familiar "theme statement" formulation, given that the image of a "master thread" could better account for all the "lesser threads" that might be tied into the dominant one. The essay was also the beginning of the end for the terms "overthought" and "underthought," both of which appear therein. Now, having claimed that master threads are either dominantly didactic or dominantly mythopoeic, I won't bother with those outmoded terms in future. But I didn't really set down how the process of concrescence depended on translating ideas and intuitions about the four epistemological patterns so that they become such a master thread.

Following the same pattern I'd used to argue THE LINE BETWEEN FAIR AND GOOD, I offered three types of "master thread" as they occurred particular stories on the same theme in the 2020 essay MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 3. This essay requires updating in line with the formulation of the necessity for epistemological patterns in the process of concrescence.

All three cited stories depend on the same type of master thread, which I stated to be "hero must defeat evil counterpart." The purpose of such confrontations are always to better define the hero's virtues as against the vices of the counterpart, and so the reigning epistemological pattern is psychological.

The first example, which had a *poor* level of mythicity, was "The Haunted Island" from CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN #43. I noted the various ad hoc elements of the story, but at heart its greatest weakness is that the "evil counterparts" aren't given any psychological grounding. The mutants, having survived weird transformations but continuing to live on, draw an irrational comparison between themselves and the heroic Challengers, simply because they think that the latter are also living on "borrowed time." The author can only explain this association by falling back on the makeshift rationale that the mutants have gone mad, which in theory frees the author from coming up with a plausible psychology for his villains.

The next cited story, with a *fair* level of mythicity, was "And So My World Ends," from JLA #71. This story actually had an editorial agenda behind it, as much as did "Haunted Island," in that the story eliminated all civilization on J'onn J'onzz's version of Mars and also provided an exit scene for the Martian Manhunter, who had lost his regular berth and was no longer a good fit in the JLA. But this time the writer gave the villain, Commander Blanx, a reason for his decimation of his homeworld: his utter contempt for the way his people have become "weaklings." This heightens the tragedy felt by J'onn as he mourns his world's fate at the hands of "one individual, sick with the need for violence."

And in the example of *good* mythicity, I claimed that "The Injustice Society of the World" was one in which the titular Society succeeded in showing their devotion to crime and evil just as intransigently as the Justice Society defend justice and goodness. None of the individual villains are any more "psychologized" any more than the heroes are. But I argued that the story was a landmark because the villains as a group were atypically portrayed as being just as super-competent as the heroic team, and they display their warped psychology by putting the good guys on trial for their opposition to criminal activity. 

All of these takes on the "evil counterpart" master thread are mythopoeic rather than didactic. But the level of concrescence rises according to the density of correlations that the author brings to all the respective evil counterparts, with the result that the first is not symbolically compelling at all, the second is only compelling in a limited way, and the third has been compelling enough that the Injustice Society remains a myth-presence to be reckoned with in current comics, while the other villains are either wholly or nearly forgotten.

NEAR MYTHS: THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN 1999 (1999-2003)

Though I gave higher mythicity ratings to two later iterations in the LEAGUE franchise, BLACK DOSSIER and the last third of CENTURY, I must admit that the first two episodes of the series, featuring both the formation and dissolution of this 19th-century "Justice League," are the most fun to revisit. 

The main reason for the greater fun quotient is almost certainly that in these stories Alan Moore was far more focused giving the reader the thrill of adventure rather than the Olympian perspective of satire. Moore and O'Neill still work in a sizable number of cross-references involving both fiction-history and real history, but herein there's no unwieldy attempt to weave together a couple hundred such quotations into a super-pastiche, possibly the most ambitious crossover of all fiction. Here the creators of LEAGUE concentrated on charting the interpersonal relationships of the five protagonists: Allen Quatermain of KING SOLOMON'S MINES, Mina Murray of DRACULA, Edward Hyde of DR JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE, Captain Nemo of 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, and The Invisible Man of the Wells novel of the same name. There's such a rich tapestry of dramatic interactions that in this work alone, Moore effectively usurps the title of "Master of Melodrama" from its preceding title-holder, and so wins the coveted award of "The New Stan Lee."

 

I joke, of course. Though I would consider such a title  complimentary, it would direly insult Alan Moore to be considered like Stan Lee in any way, since he's made it clear (particularly in the final pages of TEMPEST) that he holds nothing but contempt for the late Marvel writer-editor. And of course there are many differences between the dramaturgical strategies of both Lee and Moore. Yet the give-and-take between the often quarrelsome "Gentlemen" resembles nothing in comic strips or books-- not Caniff, not Eisner, not Kurtzman-- so much as it resembles the trailblazing "heroes with problems" mindset of Stan the Man. It's possible that Moore had some notion of deconstructing Marvel Comics, as he had in the "1963" series from 1993. If so, Moore was spectacularly unsuccessful, and for that many readers can be profoundly grateful.

LEAGUE does approach myth-status insofar as it crystallizes Moore and O'Neill's often contradictory feelings about their native country. On one hand, the United Kingdom was, if not the womb from which modern popular culture was born, the midwife to its creation, and this is reflected in the fact that four of the five Gentlemen were created by UK subjects, with Nemo standing as the lone representative of La Belle France. On the other hand, from the 17th century through the 19th, the UK was also a major player in the spread of imperialism, and LEAGUE's creators constantly remind the reader that they should never forget the jingoism and material exploitation that stemmed from the British Empire. And yet the quintet of heroes, despite their uneasy alliance to the Empire, never fall into the trap of being spokespersons for sociopolitical causes. Nemo is the great rebel who finds himself helping the Empire because he wanted adventure in his life once more. Quatermain is more or less dragooned into espionage by the officious Miss Murray, which ends up being a prelude to their erotic encounters. Monstrous Mister Hyde largely subsumes his alter ego Jekyll but evinces a more profound form of humanity than the good doctor did, while The Invisible Man betrays his comrades in order to forge his own empire.

   

The creators choose the opponents just as deftly, and also from the pages of British fiction-writers. The first six-part adventure unites the Gentlemen against two master criminals vying for power, Conan Doyle's Professor Moriarty and a devil-doctor who is clearly supposed to be Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu (but whose name is still trademarked and so can't be casually invoked even for pastiche purposes). The second six-parter, which chronicles the dissolution of the unstable team, is arguably even better as the Gentlemen cross swords with the heat-rays of H.G. Wells' Martians. Some of the dramatic turns are all the more impressive given that Moore has testified (in an interview for Jess Nevins' A BLAZING WORLD) that he did not have a long-term plan for both sequences. He suggested a future conflict between Hyde and Invisible Griffin in Book One before he even knew how said conflict would play out in Book Two. Mina Murray, the former victim of Dracula, bore the wounds of the vampire's brutal assaults on her throat, and this visual depiction later dovetailed impressively with certain parts of Allen Quatermain's backstory as elucidated by original creator Rider Haggard.

There are a few dozen "guest-stars." Some are preludes to more famous figures of later eras, such as the unscrupulous Campion Bond, whose perfidy prefigures Moore's trashing of his descendant James later on. But most of the guests are icons from famous fictional works, with even a few American ones, like Auguste Dupin and John Carter, making the cut. In the later volumes I could complain of Moore and O'Neill's treatment of Ian Fleming's Bond, and even more, of their maltreatment of Haggard's She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. But in GENTLEMEN 1999, I found their every choice note-perfect, just as I found that O'Neill's art captured the mythic vraisemblance of the Victorian era. 

I should note that crossovers, like popular fiction, really took off in the 19th century, with Scott's IVANHOE ringing in as one of the first, combining its fictional hero's exploits to those of Robin Hood. Haggard and Verne each wrote one famous crossover, with the former having Quatermain meet She, while the latter revived Nemo to encounter the castaways of the Mysterious Island. But GENTLEMEN 1999 is definitely one of the greatest pastiches, even if it's arguable that the "super-pastiche" of later years may turn out to be just as overburdened as... 

(Yes, I will say it...)

...THE MARVEL UNIVERSE!!!!

CURSED FROM THE EARTH

 In the comments for my essay on THE GHOST OF KRYPTON PAST, AT-AT Pilot posted the following:

What is the mythical significance of the fire-fall crystals and Kryptonite? Why is it that the remaining fragments of his doomed planet hurt Superman? Is it supposed to be interpreted as a painful reminder of a past that he wishes he could forget? But of course, Superman has been written to be appreciative of his Kryptonian roots, with the Fortress of Solitude serving as a museum for his mementos. (The one time I can recall Superman distancing himself from his Kryptonian self was the last issue of the Byrne series, where--if I recall accurately--Superman asserts that he is now earth's son, not Krypton's.)

Kryptonite may have the most involved backstory of any element in the Superman mythos. 

One of the most egregious mistakes about kryptonite is that it was introduced because Superman was so mighty that he had no weaknesses. That may be true of Superman as he had developed in 1949, when kryptonite officially entered the comics-canon in SUPERMAN #61 (1949). However, the Superman who had been produced for DC by the studio of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster did not need a specific weakness. Throughout the eight-or-so years that the studio elaborated the nature of the Man of Steel, the hero was occasionally seen being stymied by energy-rays or mental powers. (The moderately famous "Powerstone" story even shows him being briefly mesmerized by the hypnosis of guardian serpents.) I don't know at what point the hero became so godlike that he could fly into the heart of Earth's sun without taking harm, though I'm reasonably sure that it took place after DC kicked Siegel and Schuster to the curb in the late 1940s. But the point is that Siegel himself never thought of his pre-eminent creation as being invulnerable in the way later DC editors defined the term.

And yet, in 1940 Siegel birthed the basic idea of kryptonite in a story rejected by DC's editors and then squirreled away in a vault for the next fifty-plus years. "The K-Metal from Krypton" only came to the light of day because in 1994 Mark Waid, working on staff for DC, encountered the story in the files and made known its contents to comics-fandom. It's been further theorized that though DC never published the story (except for a very brief excerpt in a 1960s annual), Whitney Ellsworth made all Superman material available to the writers of the 1940-51 SUPERMAN radio serial, and that one of those writers used Siegel's K-metal story as a template for the 1943 episode "The Meteor from Krypton," in which the name "kryptonite" was first used for the radioactive mineral that could bring death to Krypton's only surviving son.

Since the Siegel story was not completed at the time of its composition-- though the aforementioned site provided a modern interpretation-- we can't know exactly why Siegel introduced the K-metal. But as I mentioned above, Siegel's Superman did not need a specific weakness, because he was already vulnerable to a handful of esoteric menaces. The most likely reasons are that (a) Siegel wanted to inject a new level of drama into Superman's adventures, in part by revealing his identity of Clark Kent to Lois Lane, and (b) to get that drama, the hero would find his mighty powers endangered by metal from his homeworld. Siegel could have conjured up any kind of power-draining entity or material, but I'm sure that on some level he appreciated the irony of Superman being weakened by a fragment of his own world. Indeed, on page 15 of the modern interpretation, Clark Kent muses that originally he derived "great strength and powers from the planet," which might be the only time Siegel had ever advanced that particular explanation of Superman's powers.

I'm not aware of any examples from folklore or myth in which a hero's strength is either increased or depleted by contact with native soil. The only example in which native soil increases a character's mojo would seem Bram Stoker's 1897 DRACULA. To the best of my knowledge, Stoker made up the idea of the vampire needing to rest in his native Earth out of whole cloth. But there can be no question that Stoker gave the idea special significance, for I just happened to cover the matter in depth in my 2008 AA essay A MOVABLE FEASTER. I wrote in part:

Early in the novel, Dracula tells Jonathan Harker:

"Why, there is hardly a foot of soil in all this region that has not been enriched by the blood of men, patriots or invaders."

Naturally, at that point in the novel, the vampire does not dwell on how this "blood-enriched" earth is going to make it possible for him to pick up stakes (so to speak) and invade merry old England. But much later in the novel, Van Helsing goes into greater detail about Dracula's literal need for earth that has been sanctified (as well as ensanguinated) by the past:

"There have been from the loins of this very one [Dracula] great men and good women, and their graves make sacred the earth where alone this foulness can dwell. For it is not the least of its terrors that this evil thing is rooted deep in all good; in soil barren of holy memories it cannot rest."

So in Stoker's mythos the sacred earth of Dracula's Transylvania is replete with both "the blood of the heroic dead" and "memories of great men and good women." Blood, then, is not just plasma and platelets in Stoker's cosmos, but rather the objective correlate of life itself, a sort of vitality that doesn't vanish with the deaths of individual humans but which seeps into the earth and sustains the life of a vampire quite as much as feeding off the blood of the living. This "sacred earth" explanation may explain how Dracula and his vampire brides managed to survive without exsanguinating every last mortal left in the region, especially given that Stoker's Transylvania often seems like a barren Hades-on-Earth, lacking the vitality that Dracula praises in past generations of his land. Stoker, in formulating this notion of the vampire needing to take his native soil with him when he departed for other climes, was thus overcoming the folkloric notion that a vampire had to return to his grave. Thanks to Stoker, Dracula could take his grave with him as he travelled.

To be sure, Stoker never has any scenes which directly prove Van Helsing's assertion about Dracula's dependence on Transylvanian soil-- that is, scenes like having Dracula try without success to sleep in English soil. But apparently whatever "blood-memories" in Dracula's native soil nourish the vampire, that vitality can be trumped by a greater vitality, as Van Helsing uses holy wafers, presumably blessed by the Catholic Church, to make some of Dracula's earth-filled coffins useless to him. (Side-note: the "holy water" device popular in many later vampire-tales appears nowhere in the original novel.) Still, the original folklore-limitation does crop again with respect to Dracula's only vampiric convert in England, for apparently Lucy Westenra can't just go anywhere she likes, but is obliged to return to her mausoleum at daybreak. Stoker does not emphasize her dependence on being close to English soil, but one must presume that she has some such dependence on returning to her original grave.

 I think it's pretty likely that by 1940 Jerry Siegel had read DRACULA, though I don't know that he ever committed to posterity any comment on Stoker's greatest work. A long time ago I read a vampire story Siegel did for his 1930s series DOCTOR OCCULT, but I don't recall any special Stoker quotes therein. But writers are packrats, and I think it very likely that he picked up the symbolism of "beneficial earth" from Stoker and later transformed it into "inimical earth" for his superhero.

Oh, and though it has nothing to do with the derivation of kryptonite, the title of this essay I rook from the King James Bible, wherein God tells the murderous Cain that he's "cursed from the earth"-- meaning not that the earth is literally poisonous to Cain; just that the earth won't give him sustenance. Readers of this blog should know that a day without a myth-quote is like a day without sunshine.

THE MASTER THREAD OF DISNEY'S "STAR WARS"

If one wanted a cogent, concise summation of the many failings of the Disney STAR WARS trilogy from 2015 to 2019, I for one would recommend this Youtube video by "So Civilized," entitled THE STAR WARS SEQUELS: DISNEY'S ANTI-TRILOGY. SC lays out the many missteps made by the creative teams, which I will abbreviate to the respective directors: J.J. Abrams for THE FORCE AWAKENS and THE RISE OF SKYWALKER, and Rian Johnson for THE LAST JEDI.

I fundamentally agree with SC on his essential thesis, which I'll boil down to "Abrams was too respectful of Lucas's NEW HOPE and EMPIRE; Johnson was too disrespectful of the whole mythos with nothing to put in its place." He doesn't elaborate what virtues of George Lucas these two latter-day creators fail to emulate, though a separate video, THE PERFECT STORYTELLING CLARITY OF STAR WARS, provides a good counterpoint to the ANTI-TRILOGY essay.

But, now that I've agreed with SC about all the storytelling flaws of both Abrams and Johnson, how do I make them line up with my own estimation of the three Disney flicks, since I rated the mythicity of LAST JEDI as "poor" while I deemed FORCE and RISE as "good."

Of course, I've championed a lot of works that have all sorts of surface flaws-- as seen recently in my reviews of grungy trash-films like BLOOD SABBATH and BLINDMAN-- because I consider that mythopoeic discourse can be formed even in the near-total absence of dramatic or didactic excellence. My criterion for mythopoeic discourse is that I have to be able to find a "master thread" around which the author(s) organize(s) his symbolic correlations, as explained in my essay series on the subject, starting here.

Interestingly enough, So Civilized has nearly nothing to say about the thread that most interested me, as I noted in my review of FORCE:

... it’s an interesting psychological touch that the script, by having Luke be Kylo’s teacher, makes him the symbolic offspring of the Luke-Leia-Han triangle

And this concatenation is echoed in Abrams' conception of Rey:

 ...Rey displays aspects of all of her parental influences, combining Han’s talents for piloting and scrounging, Leia’s feminine hauteur, and Luke’s instinctive connection with the Force.

I didn't comment in the FORCE review about the intimations of a romance-arc between Kylo and Rei. Yet this comes to fruition in JEDI, and I find it significant that even though Johnson downgrades almost every conceit Abrams raised-- Rei's mysterious parentage, the future significance of the Jedi, et al-- he never seeks in any way to tear down the blossoming quasi-romance between these two offspring, both literal and figurative, of the Luke-Leia-Han triangle.

 I failed to note this thread's development in my 2019 review. But in my recent re-screening, I must admit that Johnson seems fully aware that he cannot undo the growing "fellow feeling" between Rei and Kylo, even though she's seen him ruthlessly cut down a man who was Kylo's real father and Rei's wished-for surrogate parent. Johnson seems at least moderately aware that when he has Kylo betray and murder his mentor Snoke and invite Rei to join him in ruling the galaxy, he has fulfilled the intimations of a similar ambition voiced by Darth Vader to Luke in EMPIRE-- even though RETURN OF THE JEDI patently ignores Vader's earlier scheming against his mentor Palpatine.

In RISE, Abrams re-asserts his trope about Rei's special destiny, though in much the same way that Luke's destiny had dark roots. Just as Luke found out that he was the seed of an evil father, Rei learns that she's the granddaughter of the source of all Sith evil. I didn't feel that Abrams cared that much about that big revelation, and Palpatine's whole rap about "strike me down with your hate and I'll be reborn" fails to carry much resonance. But the repeated encounters of Rei and Kylo make up the trilogy's master thread, and Abrams puts far more effort bringing this trope to life than any of the pallid plotlines about Finn or Poe or even Threepio's supposedly comical loss of memory. In my review of RISE I noted:

As soon as renegade Kylo Ren encounters Rey, it's clear to every SW-savvy character that he's going to seek to convert her, as Palpatine successfully swayed Anakin Skywalker and as Anakin, in the guise of Darth Vader, failed to suborn Luke Skywalker. I suspect that Abrams may have formulated some specific ideas about Kylo's personal motives, and that Disney executives didn't want to delve into LOST-style psychodrama, so that in a psychological sense Kylo appears half-formed at best. However, Abrams does succeed in making Kylo a metaphysical complement to Rey, particularly when Kylo himself tells Rey that they comprise a "dyad," like the two sides of the Force. This yin-and-yang unity, though true to some of George Lucas's real world inspirations for the fictional Jedi, resembles nothing in the way Lucas treated the interactions of Palpatine-Anakin and of Vader-Luke, where it was clear that one character would dominate the other. Kylo, in his ceaseless attempts to draw Rey into his sphere, seems to be seeking some deeper consummation. To be sure, Abrams backs off on making the sexual aspects explicit, save for a suggestive final kiss between young Jedi and young Sith as the latter is about to perish.

I don't know how much of a Freudian J.J. Abrams may be now or has been in the past. He's written scripts that suggest Freudian content, particularly for LOST, but he's certainly done other scripts that don't pursue that sort of content. But it seems logical to me that either he or his collaborators on FORCE looked at the way Lucas had resolved the romantic angle of his original trilogy and wondered what might have happened had some of the offspring of both Light and Dark sides of the Force came together as Luke and Leia had not. I'm not saying that Abrams was engaging in nothing more than "shipping" forbidden romances, though there were be nothing wrong with it if he were. Rather, I think he had some notion of showing the dramatic costs of Rei's choice to pursue the rigorous destiny of a Jedi, which arguably put her apart from ordinary humankind. This gave Rei a kindred nature with the obsessed Kylo, who certainly had been all but overwhelmed by the weight of his heritage, and who may have chosen to imitate Darth Vader as an act of rebellion against his father, mother and uncle. I'm not saying Abrams totally succeeds in evoking all the dramatic potential of this psychology, but there's something more than mere imitativeness in his attempt to capture the complexities of Lucas's wonder child.

LIMITED AND LIMITLESS CREATED HE THEM PT. 4

My last post (for now) on the subject of the limited/limitless dichotomy concerns a certain irony about the many concepts of archaic myth. On one hand, this sort of authorless myth is the essence of literature's combinatory mode, in that its unknown creators allowed their imaginations to roam freely in spawning stories about the Earth being formed from the bones of giants or giant bird's-eggs. And yet, the most developed forms of myth are also grounded in the world of limitations, as the mythmakers often invoke what I call "epistemological patterns," which are based in observations about the ways of human psychology and sociology, and of the ways of nature both in cosmological and metaphysical aspects.

As seen in my paraphrase of passages in Susanne Langer's PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, the author disparaged the humbler forms of folklore in favor of her idea of myth-stories:

...the psychological basis of this remarkable form of nonsense [the fairy tale] lies in the fact that the story is a fabrication out of subjective symbols, not out of observed folkways and nature-ways [in "myth," with which Langer contrasts fairy tales].-- Susanne Langer, PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, p. 173.

In subsequent essays I've remarked that I have found a great deal of mythicity-- i.e., storytelling tropes linked with epistemological patterns-- in folktales and fairytales as well. Langer's not totally wrong, though, because full-fledged myths tend to develop their myth-ideas more thoroughly than do folk-stories. In a strange anticipation of the "high art/low art" dichotomy mentioned in this essay-series' first installment, myths were canonical "high art" and the tales were the "low art" that few cultures sought to preserve. 

Yet while modern "high art" does reference epistemological patterns as well, it does so with what Frye calls "high seriousness" as well, which often (though not always) obstructs the free flow of the imagination. In contrast, modern "low art," even though its basic form is comparable to that of simple-constructed folktales, demonstrates a greater tendency to develop its myth-ideas freely. This probably comes about because modern low-art stories are no longer being crafted for an oral audience, and so the raconteurs are more likely to weave together simple plots with involved myth-ideas-- one example being the delirious Origin of the Golden Age Hawkman.

LIMITED AND LIMITLESS CREATED HE THEM PT. 1

On January 13 reader AT-AT Pilot helped spur a new line of inquiry by writing the following in the comments-section of TAKING STOCK OF 2021:

I keep looking at the Archetype and NUM blogs noting the titles you've rated as having good or high mythicity. I think you've mentioned that high-art films are not usually mythically potent...

I don't doubt that I've said something along those lines, and since it reminded me of my various essays on "work and play," I scanned some of those posts first. I found this section in 2019's CONVERGING ON CONCRESCENCE PT. 2:

I have to reiterate that it's always possible for an author to "dumb down" the expressive symbolism in a narrative in order to get across some limited didactic message. When an author does so, he has to some extent sacrificed "play" on the altar of pure "work" by making the narrative function as persuasive rhetoric. That said, creators who have deep reservoirs of imagination may still at times produce narratives that have the qualities of mythic play even though the authors are trying to convert an audience to some position.

This essay was not in itself a statement of principles regarding the various forms of "high art" and "low art," but I've certainly analyzed the differences between those literary categories many times over the years, and the earliest ARCHIVE essays on that theme are probably the two THEMATIC REALISM essays from 2008.

Here's a relevant section from Part One:

Coleridge's example of the Arabian Nights tale is, like the JUSTICE LEAGUE story I critiqued, not especially concerned with morals as such-- or at least, not to the extent that the ANCIENT MARINER is. Both tales are, in a formal sense, "escapist," though I note that I use the word non-pejoratively. Neither Gardner Fox nor the Arabian Nights scribe existed in a time before fiction had been used for didactic moral purposes, of course, but both stories can be fairly regarded as "vacations from morals." It is not that the protagonists of the tales do not perform actions that the reader considers "good" rather than "bad," but that there is not a true moral dialectic as such.

By contrast, a tale like Coleridge's MARINER, or (to give a superheroic parallel to the JLA tale) WATCHMEN, are clearly tales that are much concerned with analyzing the ways mortal men deal with the moral elements in life, no matter how fantastic their situations. There's nothing wrong with this kind of fiction, and I don't necessarily share Coleridge's opinion that MARINER would have been improved by lacking a moral, especially since he proved himself more than able to summon such a non-moralistic expressiveness in poems like KUBLAI KHAN. However, there is in comics-fandom a considerable prejudice toward a belief opposite to the one Coleridge expresses: that a narrative is *always* superior because it addresses specific dialectical moral issues. Not only is not the case, it can be a prejudice that falsifies the genuine polysemous quality of literature, as I'll show with another example in Part II.

And here's some similar discourse from Part Two:

I noted earlier that much of what we deem to be “real literature” can be distinguished by its thematic commitment to what Freud famously called “the reality principle,” no matter whether the narrative in question portrays a “realistic” version of the world (Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE), outright fantasy (Ursula LeGuin’s WIZARD OF EARTHSEA), or something between the two (Pynchon’s CRYING OF LOT 49). The same principle obtains with those works that fall squarely within the category of “thematic escapism,” which is oriented on what Freud calls “the pleasure principle” and wish-fulfillment. One may envision a middle-ground between the two categories for works that may strike a balance between these opposed themes, but it would seem beyond question that there are notable works that are polarized enough to belong far more in one camp rather than the other. 

 

I also stated in Part Two that both "thematically realistic" and "thematically escapist" works could be rich in mythicity, and I still believe that, though in recent years I've moved more toward aligning literary works with newer terms like "cognitive restraint" (for "realism") and "affective freedom" (for "escapism.") The aforementioned dichotomy of "work and play" has also been around almost as long as realism/escapism, and I wrote a series of three essays, whose main point I summed up in the 2015 essay PLAYING WITH FUNCTIONS:

In the third essay of the series THE ONLY DEFINITION OF ART YOU'LL EVER NEED, I started from Jung's proposition that art should be fundamentally defined as "play," but that so-called "serious art" and "escapist art" respectively would have to be separated out as "play for work's sake" and "play for play's sake."

FUNCTIONS also correlates this work/play dichotomy with my formulation of the four potentialities, but I'll put this matter to one side for the moment, in order to address some possible deficiencies in my definition of realism, and how it might be better elucidated with reference to my titular categories of "the limited and the limitless."

 

 

FROM ELFLAND TO NEW YORK CITY

 

I mentioned last year, in my review of the BEAUTY AND THE BEAST episode “To Reign in Hell,” that on occasion I’d contemplated the possibility of subjecting that series to an episode-by-episode analysis as I’d done with a few select teleserials. I’ve now re-watched the first season of the 1987-90 show, and I’ve decided that despite the artfulness with which BEAUTY was crafted, it’s more appropriate just to do seasonal overviews of the show on the NUM blog. But since I generally don’t post on theoretical matters over there, I’m going to descant a bit about the nature of the program, in part because BEAUTY was a great favorite of mine back in The Day.

In my “Reign”-review, I devoted almost half the essay to explaining the show’s setup, so I’ll repeat that explanation here:

As of this writing I’m not sure where the 1987-1990 series BEAUTY AND THE BEAST stands. During my contemporaneous viewing of the show, I remember thinking that it did offer a great deal of mythic material. In effect, the show took the romance-dynamic of the literary fairy tale, probably with strong reference to Cocteau’s cinematic adaptation, and transferred that sensibility to the mean streets of New York—or rather, transplanted it beneath those mean streets. This was “the World Below,” an urban faerie-domain beneath the Big Apple. In place of sprites and deathless queens, this world of subterranean tunnels became a haven to all the outcasts from the normal world above—sort of a demi-America within America. The outcasts, almost always attired in quasi-European garb, are led by a spiritual patriarch known only as “Father,” but Father recognizes only one of his children as his True Son, and he’s the greatest outcast of all. Where the original “Beauty and the Beast” had the beastly protagonist cursed by faeries, Vincent is condemned by biology to have the strength, claws, and face of a lion-made-human. And though Vincent does not rule his bizarre domain the way the Beast of the short story ruled his isolated mansion, he becomes the sole focus of the one outsider who comes and goes from the underworld with impunity. “Beauty” Catherine Chandler, a young lawyer is brought to the Tunnels by "Beast" Vincent to save her life, who subsequently forms a “soul connection” with the tender yet passionate lion-man.

But I also said, just before getting into the review proper:

I suspect that BEAUTY AND THE BEAST deserves to rate with the other three programs I mentioned above: as a show with a high incidence of high mythicity episodes. For now, I’ll concentrate on this 1988 offering.

This suspicion may yet be justified by either of the last two seasons, but only a few episodes of Season One qualify as high-mythicity narratives. The problem in my eyes is that the show’s transitions between its two settings—mundane New York City and the “Elfland” of the World Below—mitigates against a strong concrescence of mythic ideas.

The World Below, a.k.a. “The Tunnels,” bears only a mild relationship to the enchanted mansion where the original Beast of the literary fairy tale dwells; in a deeper sense, the subterranean domain is symbolically identical with the faery otherworlds of Celtic myth. These fantastic realms are almost pictured as existing underground, which by itself suggests a strong identity between the people of faerie and the spirits of the dead. All of BEAUTY’s subterranean dwellers begin as inhabitants of the mundane world above, but rather than passing through the veil of death, they are reborn into new lives, laboring to keep their commune-like existence secret from ordinary mortals, aided only by a network of “helpers” who also guard the secret of the Tunnels while still continuing to live in the surface world. In Season One at least, the World Below harbors no supernatural wonders, with the exception that some characters boast gifts that one might explain as “psychic.” Further, the European attire of the dwellers, couple with a marked capacity of some of them to recite Shakespeare and Wordsworth, makes this “demi-America” into a crypto-Europe, not unlike the uncanny environments one finds in the Gothic works of Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, and, most importantly, Edgar Allan Poe.

However, a difficulty arises whenever the stories transition into New York. Most fairy tales, whether spawned in folklore or literature, make the mundane world as sketchy as possible, so as to focus on the wonders of faerie. But New York, the domain of heroine Catherine Chandler, must boast at least the broad trappings of reality. The base conflict of the series is that, while the leonine Vincent can occupy the World Below and enjoy a semblance of normalcy, his spirit, at once gentle and savage, cannot possibly prosper within drab reality. In the original fairy tale, the Beast’s story ends when he loses the vesture of animality and becomes a man who can marry the Beauty in her world. But there are no miracle transformations for Vincent, and thereby rests the “impossible love” of Vincent and Catherine.

The first season of the series ends with Catherine considering the possibility of turning her back on the mundane world, and of attempting to live with Vincent in the Tunnels, at least on a trial basis. This development of course would have eliminated the main conflict of the series and the show could have ended in a manner not unlike the climax of the fairy tale. However, the writers found a rather clever way to prolong the agony, by making Catherine Chandler into a Woman with a Mission. Catherine, a child of privilege, suffers trauma and is “reborn” in a different sense than the Tunnel-dwellers: she becomes a do-gooder, obsessed with the holy mission of saving innocents from injustice. A few of Catherine’s altruistic missions are undertaken on behalf of the Tunnel-people, and when this is the case, the potential for mythic symbolism is high. But more often, Catherine defends the banal citizens of a jejune New York, the sort of New York one could find in any bland television cop-show.

It's not that it’s impossible to lend a mythic aura to people and places that would usually be deemed mundane; one can find “big-city” myths in everyone from Faulkner and Dos Passos to Chandler and Spillane. But as I also commented in the “Reign” essay, episodic TV shows are turned out on an exacting schedule. One might argue that the writers of BEAUTY were doing pretty good just to keep building up the Gothic world of the Tunnels, without expecting them to re-imagine the mundane Big Apple as well. Nevertheless, Catherine’s enemies—who inevitably become the enemies of her protector Vincent—are comprised of a boring amalgamation of thieves, pushers, grifters and serial killers, and their presence undermines a lot of the mythic potential of the stories. For that matter, most of the “innocents” are not that symbolically complex either.

Returning to the matter of metaphenomenality, the World Below is usually depicted as an uncanny dominion, just as Vincent’s lion-like appearance is implied to be a freak mutation, albeit one with some rather advantageous abilities. His fangs and claws are just barely within the boundaries of the uncanny, but the empathic bond Vincent shares with Catherine clearly belongs to the world of the marvelous, and so that phenomenality holds sway for every episode.

I think the mythopoeic potentiality was important to the writers, but not quite as much as the dramatic potentiality. Everything in the series had to revolve around the “impossible love,” and thus even episodes weak in myth were capable of generating intense dramatic situations, far more than one could ever find in “any bland television cop-show.” Thus I find that BEAUTY AND THE BEAST most deserves praise for its mastery of dramatic concrescence.