Suffering

I was reading the book you see to your left--transcript of an interview by Bill Moyers of Joseph Campbell--and, as usual when I read Campbell, got my mind blown.

If you aren't familiar with Campbell, he was one of the world's foremost experts in mythology--its meaning, the common threads woven through myths from around the world and throughout time, and how they are still relevant in our daily lives.

Campbell always seems to provide food for thought. Many times when reading one of his books I'll encounter a paragraph or even just a sentence or two that will strike me as very profound, and lead to further thought outside of the context provided in the book itself. Many times he manages to add a missing piece to something I was working on.

Such was the case today, when I ran across the section where Moyers and Campbell talked about the significance of Christ's suffering on the cross in Christian mythology. Basically--and I'm terrible at explaining abstract concepts, I much prefer to demonstrate them in the context of a story or something--he said that the humanity in Christ and the deity became merged because of his suffering. That the yearning of god for man and man for god were unified in his agony.

For some reason I found that to be very profound, and I started thinking about love and suffering. It seems to me that love is not possible without pain, and the more deeply one loves, the more pain one feels. Also, the more pain one is willing to feel.

For example--I have a dear, dear friend who suffers from migraines, and another medical condition that causes her a great deal of pain. I love her, deeply and completely, and if I could I would take her pain away, even if it meant I had to experience it myself. I would not only do it, I would do it gladly--even as I felt the pain I would know it was pain that she was not feeling and my joy at giving her relief would offset any pain I felt. It's quite different from me experiencing my own pain--for example, the pain of this twisted ankle I've had for a week or so. That pain is personal and only involves me and I'd gladly get rid of it if I could--as long as getting rid of it didn't cause someone else to have to experience it. (Ankle's a lot better, btw, thanx for asking.)

This is, of course, really only part of it. Another part is the desire to consume and be consumed by the object of one's love. For example--imagine, if you worship some deity, that this deity is a sun, and its love for you is its heat. It's overpowering, inconceivable. It'll consume you. You'll experience intense agony while this happens. But it's an agony you crave, because while it consumes you, you are becoming one with it, experiencing its total and overwhelming love for you. Like a drop of water in an ocean--it merges and becomes mingled with the rest of the water until it is indistinguishible from all the other drops of water.

This is the missing piece for a story idea I've been struggling with for a while now. It fit into the hole in the puzzle with an almost audible click!

I do hope that makes some kind of sense---and if you were wondering, my atheism is still intact. It's just a fascinating and, I think, illuminating idea, especially when applied outside of the context of religion.

Anyway, if you haven't read Campbell I recommend you do so. He'll blow your mind, too.

The Screenwriter as Shaman?

Anyone who knows me knows I have this . . . well, not obsession, I'd say, but a keen interest in how mythology develops, evolves, and affects society.

As such I read a lot of Joseph Campbell (and I recommend him to you if you are one of the four or five people who haven't indulged yet). I was reading an interview between Campbell and the reporter (and Campbell student) Bill Moyers called The Power of Myth, where they were discussing how movies in a way replace the role of ritual in our modern existance.

Rituals are important, even for non-religious people like me, because they mark a boundary. Once a boy goes through the circumcision ritual of the Australian Aborigines, for example, he knows that he is now expected to act like a man, and childish behavior is no longer tolerated. It's a traumatic experience that carries with it a physical reminder.

We don't have anything like that anymore in our culture, which Campbell felt (and I sort of agree) causes a lot of problems. There is no longer a dividing line between childhood and adulthood, other than the arbitrary one of the age of majority. There is nothing one can point to and say, "See, I am now a man." Or woman.

Campbell felt that, in a way, movies replaced that experience, and it occurred to me today that he was right. Campbell felt that this was not necessarily a good thing, as screenwriters and filmmakers are in this to make money, not initiate people.

I do believe, however, that there is a genre of film that *could* serve this function, almost accidentally.

It's not an original idea with me--if I remember correctly, Stephen King mentions it in his book Danse Macabre--but it seems to me that horror movies can become sort of a replacement.

Think about it--they're rated R so children can't get in. Good ones are a traumatic experience. Afterwards you feel . . . different. If it's one of the really *good* horror movies. Good horror movies almost *have* to have the same qualities of those rituals I was talking about earlier. If they don't then they aren't *good* horror movies.

I'm talking about one of those films that makes you forget you are watching a film. One of those that has you trembling during the opening credits. One of those that makes you forget there are other people around you in the theater.

Alien did that to me. So did Jaws. But I'm talking now about films that did that to *you*. A film that may utterly terrify me may just bore the hell out of you. And vice versa--I found The Exorcist dull and never did see why it was so frightening to so many.

I'm attempting something like that with what I'm working on now--hopefully it'll be considered an initiation type film. And that's going to be what I call really *good* horror films from now on--initiation type films.

What do you think? Am I way off base? What would you consider your initiation type films?