The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [15]
What you are seeing on the screen really isn’t he, and yet the “he” comes. Through the multiple forms, the form of forms out of which all of this comes is right there.
MOYERS: Movies seem to create these large figures, while television merely creates celebrities. They don’t become models as much as they do objects of gossip.
CAMPBELL: Perhaps that’s because we see TV personalities in the home instead of in a special temple like the movie theater.
MOYERS: I saw a photograph yesterday of this latest cult figure from Hollywood, Rambo, the Vietnam veteran who returns to rescue prisoners of war, and through violent swaths of death and destruction he brings them back. I understand it is the most popular movie in Beirut. The photograph showed the new Rambo doll that has been created and is being sold by the same company that produces the Cabbage Patch dolls. In the foreground is the image of a sweet, lovable Cabbage Patch doll, and behind it, the brute force, Rambo.
CAMPBELL: Those are two mythic figures. The image that comes to my mind now is of Picasso’s Minotauromachy, an engraving that shows a great monster bull approaching. The philosopher is climbing up a ladder in terror to get away. In the bullring there is a horse, which has been killed, and on the sacrificed horse lies a female matador who has also been killed. The only creature facing this terrific monster is a little girl with a flower. Those are the two figures you have just spoken of—the simple, innocent, childlike one, and the terrific threat. You see the problems of the modern day.
MOYERS: The poet Yeats felt we were living in the last of a great Christian cycle. His poem “The Second Coming” says, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” What do you see slouching “towards Bethlehem to be born”?
CAMPBELL: I don’t know what’s coming, any more than Yeats knew, but when you come to the end of one time and the beginning of a new one, it’s a period of tremendous pain and turmoil. The threat we feel, and everybody feels—well, there is this notion of Armageddon coming, you know.
MOYERS: “I have become Death, the Destroyer of worlds,” Oppenheimer said when he saw the first atomic bomb explode. But you don’t think that will be our end, do you?
CAMPBELL: It won’t be the end. Maybe it will be the end of life on this planet, but that is not the end of the universe. It is just a bungled explosion in terms of all the explosions that are going on in all the suns of the universe. The universe is a bunch of exploding atomic furnaces like our sun. So this is just a little imitation of the whole big job.
MOYERS: Can you imagine that somewhere else other creatures can be sitting, investing their transient journey with the kind of significance that our myths and great stories do?
CAMPBELL: No. When you realize that if the temperature goes up fifty degrees and stays there, life will not exist on this earth, and that if it drops, let’s say, another hundred degrees and stays there, life will not be on this earth; when you realize how very delicate this balance is, how the quantity of water is so important—well, when you think of all the accidents of the environment that have fostered life, how can you think that the life we know would exist on any other particle of the universe, no matter how many of these satellites around stars there may be?
MOYERS: This fragile life always exists in the crucible of terror and possible extinction. And the image of the Cabbage Patch doll juxtaposed with the vicious Rambo is not at odds with what we know of life through mythology?
CAMPBELL: No, it isn’t.
MOYERS: Do you see some new metaphors emerging in a modern medium for the old universal truths?
CAMPBELL: I see the possibility of new metaphors, but I don’t see that they have become mythological yet.
MOYERS: What do you think will be the