I recently did a thing that streaming video has made not only possible but inevitable: I watched Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie from 2023 close on the heels of Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, and it put me in mind of Greek mythology.
My first thought was a bit more in the vein of American mythology, however.
Apollo 13 was made in 1995, two decades before the current cultural shock and shift that came via the #MeToo movement, George Floyd, and the disruptions of the pandemic.
When I first saw Apollo 13, I just took for granted the stirring, American classical sound track, the noble astronauts led by Tom Hanks (our modern-day Jimmy Stewart), and the faithful, tearful, helpless wives waiting by the radio and television for news that the loves of their life were safe.
This time, and especially after Barbie, I kept wondering if there would have been such a big crisis at NASA over this explosion onboard the spacecraft, or if there would’ve been an explosion at all, if only some women had been allowed to be aerospace engineers in 1970.
Right?
In 1995, I did not see the NASA control room as exclusively male, and the helpless spouses as exclusively female. I just saw reality.
This time, one hundred percent the opposite.
Now, this is not to diminish the accomplishment of the real Apollo 13 team that brought home 3 astronauts safely from a hundred thousand miles away using duct tape and bailing wire.
No, the thing I noticed, more than ever, is that American mythology will never be the same again. It is broken.
You know that American mythology is broken if you watch old movies (like I do) and most of the time you cringe at the white-male-centeredness of it all.
You don’t have to be left-liberal or “woke,” or a feminist, or some type of intellectual, to notice it.
Most American cinematic stories have had white men at the center of them, like a sun, with people of color (when they are present), women, and other marginalized folk orbiting around them.
Nowadays, there is much more of a push to tell the stories of those orbiting characters rather than the solar white men. And there is an uneasiness about the stories, because they are not like what has come before.
What has come before is increasingly no longer our story.
This also happened with Greek mythology.
It didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen everywhere in Greece. Life is more complicated than that.
But there came a time when the ancient Greeks no longer took their mythology for granted, and began to experiment with telling stories in a different way.
Hollywood is its own time and place, and for the Greeks, Hollywood consisted, as far as we know, in Athens at the Theatre of Dionysus, in the form of Greek tragedy.
Somewhere around 500 BCE, some folks in Athens got the bright idea to have a play competition. They solicited submissions, chose three playwrights to produce a trilogy of tragic (sad ending) plays and one “satyr” play (a comedy, to lift the mood after the heavy tragedies), and then during the great festival of Dionysus, the god of temporary insanity and role reversal, the whole city turned out to watch the plays. At the end, the plays would be judged and one playwright given the honor of 1st place in that festival.
In essence it was the Oscar competition and award ceremony all in three days.
From the beginning the subjects of the plays were dominantly from Greek mythology. Plays from recent history were performed, but apparently they were few in number. From the Trojan War to Jason and Medea to Theseus to Heracles, this was the creative material with which the playwrights worked.
And it was glorious.
For about a hundred years, or about the same time as we have been making talking movies, the playwrights of Athens turned out trilogy after trilogy of serious plays, and many of them were brilliant. We’re talking about Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy (Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides), the Oedipus plays by Sophocles (not a trilogy, but amazing anyway: Oedipus the King, Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus), and the wildly creative plays by Euripides (most notably Medea).
We call this time the Golden Age of Greek literature, and it corresponded with Athens as a regional military and political superpower.
Then there was a big war—a big change in fortune for Athens, the Peloponnesian War. This war was ruinous for Athenian power, prestige, and indeed just basic day-to-day life. At the end of it, Greek mythology was broken.
To be sure, people still gave sacrifices to the Olympian divinities, still wrote and produced plays, still told the stories. But there was a palpable change in the attitude toward the stories.
No longer was Greek mythology thought of as more or less a proud heritage to be preserved and celebrated, pointing to the wisdom of prior ages and the worth of the divinities to be worshipped.
Hard times meant that no one was so naive as to think that Zeus was going to punish evildoers or that prayers to Poseidon would produce a safe voyage. Playwrights like Euripides had explored the absurdity of the Olympian system during the war. They set the stage for unbelief.
The emergence of Plato the philosopher, who argued that the myths were shameful in showing gods and heroes as fallible, further closed the door on Greek mythology as something to be taken seriously.
Greek mythology eventually became a curiosity, as Alexander the Great expanded the Greek world through his conquests in west Asia and Egypt, making being Greek less about homes and families in Greece itself and more about big cities, social mobility, new ideas, new religions. Scholars started to study and catalogue all the variants of the stories. The vital life of Greek mythology as a cultural touchstone for Greeks faded.
Similarly today, the political upheavals of the last 5-10 years have changed American entertainment. We do not look on what we once knew as reverently as before. There is no consensus on what constitutes a good story.
We all know we are polarized in America between those who believe that the wake-up call of the last few years is a good thing, and those who don’t.
Mythology is a huge part of that polarization. All cultures need stories that reinforce common values. If we can’t gather together and celebrate who we are as a people, that can be a real problem.
I’m not offering any solutions. I think that in general we are in for more of a rough ride culturally, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. But I do think that eventually we will need to come to a consensus about what America is and what it stands for.
Athens didn’t collapse because its mythology broke. It continued on in a diminished form for a hundred or more years before finally the Romans reduced it to a sleepy university town.
So it’s not like we’re on the verge of apocalypse if we don’t find a new golden age of American mythology.
No. It’s more like we’re on a voyage to the moon where a big explosion has happened.
Hopefully this time we can all contribute to bringing the ship home safe.