Film Courage: What is a myth?
Christopher Vogler, Hollywood development executive, screenwriter, author and educator: A
myth is a lot of things to a lot of people but I think the basic way I interpret this term is
that it's a story but it's a story that has a metaphorical dimension. A myth (like most
stories) is also a metaphor. What I mean is it's taken that way by the audience. The audience
listening to a fairy tale or reading a myth or seeing a movie version of any of these things
tends to look at it with a self-referential eye. People are profoundly self-centered and
they think everything should be about them so they're looking for themselves in the story or in
the myth. I think the difference between myth and story is simply that myths have another dimension,
they access us in another world beyond our normal world. This might be something supernatural or
something uncanny it might involve the world of fairies or mythical creatures or the gods
and the myths tend to deal with those more philosophical questions and almost religious
questions about why are we here who made us how are we supposed to align ourselves with those
greater forces than ours although I think every story has some mythological dimensions to it
what is a fairy tale ah a fairy tale is a is a specialized kind of story sometimes you can find
overlaps between myths and fairy tales but I have to respect the scholarship of Professor
Tolkien who wrote The Lord of the Rings books of course who was very specific about this idea of
the world of fairy and said that there there should be certain requirements met or certain
things need to be in the story before we can really call it a fairy tale and the term is
used very broadly to incorporate things that don't have a supernatural aspect to them but usually it
means there is some kind of penetration of our world by another world a world that's populated
by other kinds of spirits and creatures who have different values and different powers than we have
and a fairy story is a a story that allows us a little light into that darkness and it lets us
do some thought experiments that's how I look at it it that it allows us to imagine what if
there was another world populated with fairies what if there was another world where Giants
lived and where people could fly and live forever and so forth these are kind of speculations that
we like to put into story form and imagine what what would it be like if these things were real
how have classic myths and fairy tales influenced a contemporary storytelling oh I think that the
classic myths and the fairy tales have had a huge impact I would say one of the strongest vehicles
for this was of course the Walt Disney Company because Walt Disney himself had a certain kind of
faith in the fairy tales that there was something of value something meaningful in them and
he sort of elevated them into another kind of art form when he started doing things like Snow White
which was building on other work he had done in short cartoons where he would address or give you
an interpretation of some well-known fairy story but he really went for it with Snow White and
it I think alerted people to the fact that this is a kind of a mine it's it's a a a vein that we can
access and we can pull out of that all kinds of entertainment from a comic book type stories to
kind like profound things that deal with the same kind of questions or similar setups that you find
in the fairy tales but reinterpret it for modern audiences and sometimes put into modern dress that
can be a very entertaining and actually useful aspect of of making entertainment out of fairy
tales because I think this is an important aspect of it that these things are useful that they were
involved they were developed and they've been cherished in the first place because they meant
something and they were useful to people to interpret their own lives in comparison to
these fanciful worlds that are depicted in myths and fairy tales so people found something useful
that they could take back into their own ordinary everyday lives by imagining these other worlds and
comparing you know what's possible in this life and what's possible maybe in these other imaginary
worlds and I think that's just a fun aspect of it that people like to play these games in their
minds and but are also looking all the time for some kind of meaning out of it that applies to
me you know it's again very self-centered people will want to know what does it mean
to me at this time in my life and there's a lot of study that's been done about fairy tales in
the arena of looking at how the fairy tale is interpreted at different stages of life there's
a an important writer Bruno Bettelheim who wrote a book called The Uses of Enchantment which is
something that the animators at Disney I know are very aware of and he says that fairy tales
mean different things at different times in your life and that we're constantly you know casually
but in some kind of careful way going back and looking at them again as our perspective changes
as we age so the fairy tales have this evergreen aspect to them that they they come back to us they
come around again and we see them anew and I think that applies on our great domestic fairy tale The
Wizard of Oz that's one that people get something out of as a child as a young adult as an adult and
as an older person you look back at that story and you can still mine out of that valuable insights
would vampire stories or stories about witch hunts fall into the fairy tale realm or no because some
of that is actually based on history well I think that when we get into the territory of vampires
and werewolves and the various monsters and creatures zombies and things like that
you're in the same universe as the fairy tales because they're populated by all sorts of
monsters and scary creatures such as I've just mentioned but there is a fascination with that
that I think is it's akin to what people do with the fairy tales people are very interested in
the borderline between life and death and that's one of the issues that comes up in horror stories
that are often dealing with the limits of life and maybe suggesting to us that these boundaries that
we've been taught may not be quite so firm and that there may be more movement along the scale of
life and death and that's deeply disturbing to us but it's also fascinating and it's something that
we want to study and know more about so I think there's a lot of focus in the culture right now on
looking at the borderline between life and death because it's not so sharp as it used to be and I
think people are finding you know literature and entertainment to be ways to explore those things
all right I think you've mentioned Mary Shelley's Frankenstein too in the fascination
with a creature that couldn't be contained and is grotesque but has a life of its own and can't be
stopped kind of thing yes well Frankenstein is an interesting case because I've always related
him to a kind of a teenager you know that that he has a lot of the problems that teenagers have his
body is large and it's awkward he doesn't know what to do with it he feels all kinds of urges
that he can't really process and so he's going through a kind of adolescent surge with all these
hormones and and other chemicals racing around in his body and you know he wants to be free but you
know is restricted and and can sometimes act out in violent ways so I think you know that's one way
to read stories along the line of Frankenstein is is that we're exploring and reflecting back always
there's a mirror in these stories that reflects back something that we all have had to deal with.