Showing Myth

One more post, the last one!

I was in a lecture called "Same but different: how media morph narratives." The lecturer led us through a passage from "The Lord of The Rings" in three different media formats. (the book, the movie, and a video game)

At some point, the lecturer made the comment that "film killed myth." (Whether this is his perspective or someone else's I am not sure) Its kind of a "video killed the radio star" idea. The idea is that stories or myths - whether we're talking about actual epic myths like Gilgamesh, The Iliad, Beowulf, anything really, all the way up to books and stories of the 20th century such as Lord of The Rings - cause us to use our imaginations and to essentially put together the story in our minds and, therefore, they contain an element of mystery. In these mediums, the author can give vague, evocative descriptions of places or people, and leave it up to the audience to co-create with him and decide what these evocative descriptions actually look like. This way, if something is supposed to be scary, it is definitely scary, because each person can picture what would scare them the most. If it's meant to be beautiful beyond description, then the audience all have the ability to create in their minds the place or person that they would find to be beautiful. There is no prescription of "scary" or "beautiful" because it is given to the audience to see it however it is most effective for them.

Then film came along and started to prescribe, more or less. Film has the ability to very easily take away these vague, evocative imaginings and replace them with the director's idea of scary or beautiful and leave it at that. The audience can't participate in a film, they can't contribute their own ideas, they can't help co-create the people and the setting, etc.

The example he gave was this: In the Lord of the Rings there is a creature called the Balrog. (this is the big demonic creature that Gandalf confronts on the bridge in the mines of Moria in the first book/film) The book describes this creature in very vague terms. More or less, all that we have are Gandalf's words: "it is a creature of shadow and fire." This description can mean all sorts of things to all sorts of people, and carries an incredible depth of mystery. However, if we have seen the Balrog in Peter Jackson's film, we have a pretty clear picture of what it looks like. That image was only one man's (or one creative team's) vision of the Balrog, but now most of everyone sees the same thing when they read the words "creature of shadow and fire."

So did film kill myth? What does it do to our collective imaginations to have most of our stories shown to us, instead of co-creating with the myth-tellers and story-writers?

Now I love a good film as much as anyone. For those of you who are film-makers, come to the defence of your medium. What can film do for the story that print cannot? Are there examples of directors who seemed to be aware of their ability to kill the imagination and were very conscious of this in their work? Alfred Hitchcock perhaps (because he left the horror to the imagination)?

I don't know that much about film history. Tell me.