Movies and mythology Ancient themes still resonate in popular culture Archived article from Oct 26, 2001 By Dave Muha   By the time Beth Hirschman, a marketing professor with the Faculty of Management, was asked by an advertising agency to shed some light on why "Titanic" was doing such phenomenal business at the box office, the movie had already grossed more than $200 million. The question was similar to one she had fielded for another agency about NBC's perennially popular television drama "ER." Her answers are contained in a new book, "Heroes, Monsters & Messiahs -- Movies and Television Shows as the Mythology of American Culture" (Andres McNeel). "Apollo 13" is among the films Beth Hirschman discusses in her exploration of such recurring themes as humanity's love-hate relationship with technology. Photo by Nick Romanenko "The movies and shows that are most compelling to us are those that have mythic themes and deal with very central cultural issues," says Hirschman. "'ER,' for example, centers around life versus death, with a subtheme of technology versus nature. How can we keep ourselves from perishing?" Many of these themes date back thousands of years. "We have developed a lot of symbolic thinking around themes like good versus evil, life versus death and justice versus injustice," she says. "They are incredibly compelling to us, because they are the basic human issues." In the book's first chapter, Hirschman writes: "Myth tells us how men and women should behave toward one another in courtship. It instructs us on how to fight to obtain our goals and overcome obstacles. Myth tells us who the bad guys and good guys are, whom to emulate and whom to condemn." In this way, she observes, Americans have much in common with ancient civilizations. But in our society, the motion picture and television show have replaced the campfire story as the favorite vehicle for myth telling. In "Titanic," for instance, the first half of the film is a love story that draws on our societal distrust of highborn people. "In America, we don't like highborn people, because we believe in the underdog," says Hirschman. "We're worried about people with too much money and control. We have a lot of populist frontier mentality in our culture. "The moment the ice strikes the ship, though, we're into a horror movie. Horror movies typically take something from nature, like the shark in 'Jaws' or the tornado in 'Twister,' and turn it into an invading monster surrounding our civilization. In this case, the monster is the ocean." But while mythic themes may endure for centuries, audience perceptions do change. In writing a book that chronologically examines the most popular movies and shows from the last century, the author observed shifts in cultural values -- the biggest occurring in the early 1970s following the Vietnam War and Watergate. "That was our loss of innocence, and it hurt our culture worse than we knew," she maintains. "Prior to that time, we had vested goodness and justice and law and order in the government. The president and the military were always good. A policeman like Joe Friday of 'Dragnet' never sinned. Afterwards, 'M*A*S*H' and Archie Bunker came along. Policemen, judges and the military were corrupt. It was a terrible loss of faith for us." Hirschman notes that a show like "X-Files" that tells us to "trust no one," or a movie like "Mississippi Burning," where the sheriff is working with the Ku Klux Klan, would not have been accepted by audiences 35 years ago. "People would have been furious over it," she contends. "It would have been impossible to suggest. Now we readily accept it as true." For those looking at the bottom line, these insights have clear commercial consequences. Understanding the themes that an audience finds compelling and will accept as authentic can boost sales, not just in the movie theater, but also in the marketplace. "This is what brands are built on," says the professor of marketing, noting that Avis capitalized on the heroic appeal of the underdog in its highly successful "We try harder" campaign. It's the same theme that made Leonardo DiCaprio's character in "Titanic" resonate with movie audiences, she points out. But while she knows that advertisers are very deliberate about how they use mythic themes and cultural values to position their products, she wonders if the same is true of screenwriters. "I don't know if people who are writing scripts are doing this on a conscious level," she says. "Some of them probably do, because they have an insight into themselves. But I think that many of the excellent storytellers do it out of emotion rather than intellect. They are creating stories that are very satisfying or cathartic emotionally."

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