Last night I saw Batman: The Dark Knight at the IMAX Theater at the Minnesota Zoo. The tickets were a bit steep but it was well worth it in my opinion. The movie was both larger than life and also, surprisingly, a commentary on the times we live in.
I don’t want to ruin the movie for anybody who hasn’t seen it so I will attempt to discuss it in a spoiler free way… besides, the film itself is only an example of the topic I want to discuss and that is the power of myth even in today’s world. Maybe especially in today’s world.
If you have read this blog with any frequency, you’re aware that my researches have lead me to the conclusion that our modern religions exist as a product of groups of people getting confused about the difference between myth and history, thinking that the mythological stories of the past like Noah’s Flood and the Garden of Eden and the Passion of Jesus were actual historical events when they were actually symbolic, mythological stories meant to inspire us, to help us think, to give us a language to ponder the things in life that are hard to fathom.
In our modern times the old myths have either been relegated to the status of fairy tales by skeptics and intellectuals or revered as the one true history of the world by believers. No matter what side you look at them from, they have lost their true power. Our ancient myths no longer have meaning for us without being updated and retold. In addition, new times and new challenges do require some new myths.
Comic books are a great example of modern mythology. In the world of comics, larger than life heros battle larger than life villians and the real world we live in is the setting. It differs so little from the old stories of the gods toying with the mortal world as to be indistinguishable.
The Epic of Gilgamesh comes to mind. What was Gilgamesh, after all, but a superman, a powerful king who could have his way with anybody until he met his arch-rival Enkidu and they battled, became friends and then turned their combined strength against the demons and gods? There are echos of Gilgamesh in the relationship between Charles Xavier and Magneto in the X-Men comics, for example. Even in the Dark Knight, last night, Batman and The Joker are both presented as larger than life, beyond the norm, in some ways more similar than different. Chaos versus Order, Gilgamesh versus Enkidu, Jehovah versus Tiamat, personifications of concepts playing out their dramas again and again.
In the Dark Knight I was surprised to see so much commentary on our times and to see that so much of it highlighted the ambiguity of modern situations. In this too I see a return to ancient mythological roots. For some reason this country developed, over the second half of the 20th century, a simplistic “good guy/bad guy” approach to the world. There was certainty about what was right and what was wrong but that certainty has certainly broken down here in the 21st century. We’ve had a president who has traded being right for being sure of himself and a world in which everybody gets put into morally ambiguous situations almost every day. And now our mythology is reflecting that. It is showing us a world in which Batman, representing the minority voice of a hoped for return to order, finds that every move he makes escalates chaos and that truth seems to be echoed in the headlines we read. The more you attempt to impose order, the harder the forces of chaos will fight and chaos is more cunning than order so things get out of hand.
The movie does, however, show the power that we still hold, the power we still have to make the right decisions.
It’s a fictional battle between fictional characters in a fictional city but it couldn’t be more real. That, truly, is what mythology is for.
If, centuries from now, our 21st century artifacts were unearthed by archaeologists of the distant future they might believe that Batman and Gotham City were real, or at least that there was a kernal of truth in the stories. They might be right about Gotham, big stand-in for New York that it is, but Batman? We’ve never had any caped crusader like Batman. They would, of course, be making the same mistake that so many in the world of religion make today, a failure to grasp how powerful the human imagination is, how powerful the need for us to project our hopes and fears and conflicts into a mythological realm.
I almost hope that some day people think Superman was real, that Batman and the Joker are historical figures, and that these were more than stories, because truly, they are.
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