to dismiss it as complete illusion as he finds the place where he “lived” and the other people from his “dream,” who are able to verify all the details of his life there. The Brahmin Gadhi likewise dreams he is an untouchable who becomes king, but when he is discovered to be an untouchable, he kills himself—only to awaken as himself once again. He similarly is able to verify the “reality” of his dream by visiting the place where he was king.46 Both stories are interpreted within the Hindu text as demonstrating the fact that all life is an illusion or dream from the point of view of the ultimate and, in this way, to show that the distinction between “dreams” and “reality” is itself an illusion. The rigid duality between reality and unreality that characterizes Western thought is absent in Hindu thought, according to Doniger, as there are many kinds of “reality” that include concrete experience, visions, dreams, memories, past lives, and fantasies, all of which “would have to be set out at various points on a spectrum that has no ends at all.”47 All types of stories have value, then, and not only those that deal with what we normally regard as “real.”
One can see that Doniger’s view of myth might apply well to film, as film also trades in the confusion between reality and ideality, suggesting that there might be “truth” even in narratives that do not deal with historical events insofar as they have the appearance of reality during the viewing experience. Films are also “true,” following Doniger, in the sense that they deal with the central questions of our culture about gender roles, sex, love, child raising, purpose in life, and death. Indeed, they deal with all the concerns of our culture and its struggles to define its worldview, morals, and identity through various stories. It might be questioned whether the filmic myths get repeated as much as traditional myths, as the stories change from one film to the next. However, as we have already noted, people do view films multiple times in some cases, and also there is a certain sameness and predictability to some films—especially those that conform to the patterns of a genre—so that audiences can expect something like the same story or at least one that is part of a general “mythology.” This does not mean that the differences are unimportant or that they negate the ability of films to tell meaningful stories (as early film-genre theorists held) but that these exist as variations on certain well-known themes, such as the romance, the adventure, the tearjerker, and the horror film.
Doniger does note the parallels between popular culture and traditional mythology, especially in science fiction and children’s literature (which often utilizes the forms of fantasy). She also allows that “great films have mythic dimensions and often become quasi-myths in our culture.”48 But she also claims that modern Americans who have rejected their traditional religious cultures are left with “an emasculated mythology of atheism and solipsism, a degraded mythology that is found not in churches but in films and children’s books.” She admits that even this secular mythology has a community of sorts, in, for example, Star Trek conventions and online groups, but holds that “there is no group that will hold them responsible to live in a certain way because of these myths.”49
Doniger’s judgments on popular culture reflect a certain amount of prejudice that may be groundless. There is no reason to assume that people who practice the “religion” of Star Trek follow its dictates any less regularly than American Roman Catholics follow the dictates of the pope or that their community is less (or more) able to enforce its strictures. All religious communities show the remarkable ability of humans to avoid their own rules as well as sometimes to follow them. There seems no reason to dismiss the religion of popular culture out of hand because it is alleged without evidence to lack morality, commitment, or community, though these judgments are common. As modern fandoms develop and the study of them increases, more scholars (including myself) have taken them seriously as expressing coherent worldviews and values.50
William Doty
William Doty is one scholar of myth who avoids making blanket judgments on popular culture and who sees the mythic dimensions present in a range of human activities outside of what is normally called “religion.” In particular, he rejects the common rationalistic dichotomy between myth and science, as he believes science itself has become a modern myth through which we understand the world. We believe that we have left myth behind and so entertain the “myth of mythlessness,” when in fact we have simply invented a new, scientific myth based in the rejection of transcendence (just as traditional myth was based in its acceptance). In either case, an untestable assumption based in a particular worldview determines what conclusions one will reach about the reality or unreality of the transcendent.51
Doty questions the common dichotomy between biblical stories and myths, as the biblical authors themselves used mythological materials to develop their understandings of, for example, the divinity of Jesus.52 We cannot so rigidly distinguish “our” stories from “theirs,” nor distinguish “history” from “myth” as neatly as some scholars would like. All our understandings of events are already colored by a particular mythology, but this does not mean that myths are “false” distortions of history. They are “fictional” in the sense that they are made and represent an interpretation of events, but “fictional need not mean unreal and certainly not non-empirical” or incomprehensible, as “the most statistically driven science is shaped by the values of the underlying mythical orientations of cultures.”53 In our history and science as much as in religion, we cannot directly reproduce the object of study without importing our interpretations of it into our analyses; there is no pure objectivity in any discipline, and so all modes of knowing are “fictions” created by us to help us understand the world. We should not denigrate the religious interpretation in relationship to the scientific or historical, as we need a variety of languages and methods to express our varied understandings of reality.
In addition, Doty recognizes the mythological dimensions of popular culture. Aided by postmodernism, he points to the “shattering of a coherent worldview” in Western thought that has brought about a radical “de-centering” in our experience.54 No longer are we able to naively assume that we know what “reality” is or that our systems of thought can reproduce it. Deconstructive criticism looks for multiple meanings rather than a single one in a narrative and does not assume that there is a single “reality” referred to by it; the various meanings in a text are released and critiqued. In Doty’s view, “To deconstruct the mythic text would similarly be to expose the structures by which it works, to lay out the possible alternative futures to which its gestures might lead, to show how its expression is molded and shaped by its cultural contexts.”55 Although Doty thus uses deconstruction as a method of ideological critique, he does not propose abolishing myth altogether as some more reductionist forms of criticism have, largely because he realizes that myth will always be with us in one form or another. He does not then approach myth either totally negatively or in a “value-neutral” fashion but via a “progressive, prohumanistic” method that argues we can reenvision “those oh, so rewarding mythical resources of our common inheritance.” Doty makes it clear that he is “not interested in merely sustaining a conservative status quo that represses the mass of our population” but rather hopes “to stimulate ethically involved forays into the possible futures toward which mythological materials give us hints and promises.”56 His utopianism allows him to realize the value and necessity of a mythic worldview in constructing a new future and makes him willing to look in a variety of places for materials to reenvision it.
Conclusions
These four theorists all offer ideas about myth that can be fruitfully applied to the study of film as religion. With Eliade, we can see that films are mythological in the sense that they create an alternate world, a sacred apart from the profane, and that we enter into a separate space and time when we view a film; this relates to the idea that film offers a sort of alternate reality experience, as noted in the previous chapter. On the other hand, Eliade’s tendencies to view most myths as cosmogonies and to rigidly distinguish myth from history have been found limiting in the study of religion—just as his assumption that all “real” religions have a transcendent referent may be questioned. He views the
