Greek Mythology 201: What the Movies Miss

This. SO this.

achaeanpunk's avatarAchaean Punk

If you’re anything like me, you’ve likely noticed this by now. Flashy visuals, postmodern takes on how god (or in this case the gods) don’t care/may as well be dead, trying to be hyper historical without a sense of what makes the story what it is, extreme fashion choices or drab all-white ensembles that look like they came directly out of Party City, and twenty new takes on Zeus that all seem to ignore one of the most fundamental (and disturbing and thus understandingly ignorable) pieces of his character.

The Greek Myth movie.

Between every strange, well-meaning, or outright deviating interpretation, Hollywood has hit the books again and again with entirely mixed results. I hesitate to say that there have been any interpretations of film myth that have really hit the mark, but there are things heading in the right direction, and things I wish we’d avoided entirely.

So…

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On C.S. Lewis being an “Old Western Man”

“If we look at the various creative impulses that went into Lewis’ fantasies, we will see how they all come together in Perelandra. We can start with Lewis the self-confessed ‘dinosaur.’ As we have seen, he disliked modernity and its ‘goods’ – in particular the glorification of technology, the social ideal of equality and the liberalism of present-day theology – and turned, like his friend Tolkien, toward medieval cultural values; his description of William’s theology as ‘Nicene, hierarchical, severe,’ might equally apply to his own. He was particularly alienated from the humanist character of contemporary literature and criticism; and most of his own literary criticism is concerned rather with allegory or myth than the novel. In his inaugural lecture, De Descriptione Temporum, as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English literature at Cambridge in 1954, he described himself as an ‘Old Western’ man, by which he meant that by preference he belonged to a culture which (as far as he was concerned) ended about 1830.”

From Modern Fantasy by C.N. Manlove.

[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, and goodreads.]

We are now on Ello beta. Please come say hello!

We have no idea what we're doing, but we look cool doing it. We're @blablablaandgabbler
We have no idea what we’re doing, but we look cool doing it, right? Right. We’re @blablablaandgabbler

Our novel’s cover now has Miley Cyrus nipple pasties because why the hell not:

Yeah, so, this happened:

Venus wanted to show Miley how it's done.
Venus wanted to show Miley how it’s done.

Miley probably doesn’t care, though.

[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, and goodreads.]

Read the first five chapters from THE AUTOMATION for free on Goodreads:

HECK YES!
HECK YES!

[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, and goodreads.]