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March 1997, Week 3

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Subject:
From:
JULIANN E JENKINS <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Fri, 14 Mar 1997 16:11:35 -0500
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On Fri, 14 Mar 1997 09:15:46 -0600 "Steven Mintz, U. Houston"
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Inspired in part by our on-going discussion
"why students hate
> westerns," I have reread Richard Slotkin's three-part
> study of the creation, dissemination, and functions of the American
> myth of the frontier from the 17th century to the 1980s.
> Slotkin presents a provocative analysis of the nature of myth in
> modern society, and Hollywood's role in defining and spreading
> these myths. I would be very interested in your comments
> and reactions.
>
> If I might simplify his intricate argument, myths, in his view,
> carry a heavy charge of symbolic meaning and resonance.
> While rooted in historical "realities," myths outlive the material
> conditions that produce them and serve as primary organizing principles
> of our historical memory. Over time and through constant repetition,
> these myths become part of our common language and serve as deeply
> encoded and powerfully evocative sets of metaphors, which both define a
> sitation and prescribe our response to it. As examples, he cites
> the 17th century Indian captivity as a model for the Iranian hostage crisis
> and Custer's "Last Stand" as a model for early U.S. defeats in World War II.
>
> In modern society, he argues, the process of mythmaking is the
> commercial product of a cultural industry. And while such myths
> arise from a process of natural selection, in which producers and
> consumers interact, commercial popular culture tends to present
> the mythology of certain identifiable communities of cultural producers,
> and thus reflects the folklore of the movie industry, journalists,
> hack writers, and so forth. Thus rather than reflecting the "national
> mind," myths tell us a great deal about the assumptions and ideology
> of certain influential groups.
>
> Implicit in the frontier ideology, he argues, are certain assumptions
> about a unified "us" versus a savage "them"; the necessary
> costs of progress; and the idea that violence can serve a purifying,
> even regenerating function.  Myths, he emphasizes, are elastic (for example,
> one can evoke the figure of Jesse James in a populist attack on powerful
> economic interests), but for all their flexibility, myths are also
 ideological.
> Thus in the case of the frontier myth, Slotkin argues that it helped serve
> in complex ways to rationalize the processes of capitalist development.
>
> I'd be interested in your thoughts.  Is Hollywood in some sense the
> custodian of our "collective cultural unconscious"? Can one speak of
> a way that it uses myth to disseminate a distinctive ideology?
>
> Steve Mintz
 
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