Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society [Paperback]

John David Ebert (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1877275743 | ISBN-13: 978-1877275746 | Publication Date: June 2, 2005

John David Ebert's Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons examines how movies since the late 1960s have developed a "myth of the machine" for our contemporary society. Modern technology, Ebert argues, has created a new environment which raises problems that our modern myths, in celluloid form, attempt to resolve by presenting a number of possible scenarios ranging from "demolition" of the machine, as in The Lord of the Rings, to "symbiosis," as in the Star Wars films. Ebert examines films such as Apocalypse Now, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Videodrome, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and A.I. for answers to the question how modern man can retain his humanity while living in a society which is increasingly dominated by the technology he has created.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

From the Foreword by William Irwin Thompson

John Ebert has found a very interesting way to track the transformation of Western Civilization that sneaked up on us while we were looking at television.

About the Author

John David Ebert is an independent scholar who is the author of Twilight of the Clockwork God: Conversations on Science and Sprituality at the End of an Age (Council Oak Books, 1999). Formerly, he was an editor with The Joseph Campbell Foundation, and he has published numerous articles and essays in periodicals like The Antioch Review and the Utne Reader. Currently, he resides in the Southwest.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Cybereditions Corporation (June 2, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1877275743
• ISBN-13: 978-1877275746
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,817,901 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Mythos of the Information Age, February 25, 2010

By 

Benton Rooks - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society (Paperback)

John David Ebert writes from the last dying tradition of the generalist. The fact that this book is not more popular, or that the reviews on amazon for books by Mumford, Spengler, William Irwin Thompson and Jean Gebser are still ultra-scarce, is indeed the crime of the times.

See we actually need people like Ebert. They are not some luxury that we can throw away just because academies have specialized to the point of no return and the well-rounded individual is a completely forgotten and lost concept in the tyranny of the scientific mythos. We need Ebert because he has the ability to use different disciplines as a toolbox for reading the complexities of the techno/media environment we live in. He shows the fish the water that they swim in, and that is of incredible value when the waves our constantly pummeling our minds with static noise. Ebert also knows that regardless of content -- after Mcluhan we can say that it does not matter what plays on the mediascape. The fact that it is a constant barrage on our numbed extended nervous systems becomes the real issue at hand. This is only an alarmist theory for someone who does not have concrete examples of the psychological devastation that things like ELF radiation can have on the body, mind and spirit. (And I am told Ebert plans to use precisely that evidence in exposing our Cult of the Dead celebrity culture with concrete examples from Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, a-la Ballard and his Atrocity Exhibition)

Mechanical Dragons represents an attempt to use mythology as a weapon through the medium of film in rendering the technoscape transparent. Ebert has the extremely rare gift of near perfect balance in the left and right hemispheres in the brain. He does not sacrifice his artistic/intuitive image-reading right brain qualities for the left brain rationality and over-interpretation that most critics succumb to. Instead he possesses extremely stylistic and beautiful prose that perfectly coincides with dynamic, vital, and non-dogmatic interpretations of myths as they relate to some of the greatest films ever made. This is a kind of poetics that I have not seen performed anywhere else.

We need Ebert because he gets to the roots of things. He revitalizes the mega-myth, that grand narrative of archetypal Mythology in an age that doesn't know gadget-fetishes are a contemporary lived myth in the most harmful sense of the word. He digs to find what has crippled and crumbled civilizations in the past so that people can be aware when its happening again (like some horrendous train wreck). He also knows that we can agree with Mr. William Thompson when he says that unless our own bodies can become spirit operating at the speed of light -- able to consciously evacuate when necessary -- we shall end up trapped by technocracy as in the Gnostic myth of the fall of light into matter. ("I'm Stuck" -- Cronenberg would be proud.)

His conclusion -- that our souls and psyches must be grounded in a long standing perennial tradition and philosophy to survive the new revival of the medieval dark age -- is one that we need to heed more now then ever.

See my interview with John David Ebert On Youtube @ User : SingleEyeMovement

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons, August 10, 2005

By 

John Lobell (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society (Paperback)

In the introduction to his "Understanding Media," McLuhan wrote that his editor "noted in dismay that `seventy-five percent of your material is new. A successful book cannot venture to be more than ten percent new.'" Ebert's "Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons" presents a lot of new material, but when the world has changed and few have noticed, there's a lot to cover.

To understand Ebert's book we have to address change, as in technology (biotech, computing, nanotech, quantum theory, etc.) is about to change us as a species. And a lot of the traditions that used to help us with change, like European intellectuals, the literary novel, and academia, are nowhere to be found.

Europe has left the scene. Today, looking at European/American culture wars, one is tempted to think of a quiet retirement community disturbed by rowdy teenagers with noisy motorcycles. The bikers can be dangerous, but we are not going to hear anything new from the retirees.

Academia has collapsed. We might have hoped that in a period of profound change academia would be on the case. Not. The contemporary PhD thesis, article, and book in cultural studies is typically written by putting poststructuralist jargon in a word randomizer and printing out the results to signal that one is a member of the tribe. (One such randomizer, Pixmaven's Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator, is available online) Which leaves it to the nonacademic "independent public intellectual" to analyze our culture. John Ebert is a leading member of this vital group.

And the literary novel has ended. Myers' "A Reader's Manifesto" looks at the state of the contemporary literary novel, the pretentious kind that wins awards and gets reviewed in literary magazines, and finds that it has degenerated into gibberish-"some of the most acclaimed contemporary prose is the product of mediocre writers availing themselves of trendy stylistic gimmicks." Ebert makes a related point at the beginning of "Celluloid Heroes" where he writes: "Surveying at a glace the current states of western literature ... compared to its state in, say the first half of the twentieth century, what strikes one is an appalling decline in overall quality."

Ebert's conclusion? A culture chooses an art form in which to invest its energy. That art form has a period of vitality and then falls into decline. The literary novel has fallen into such a decline, and has been replaced by movies.

Ebert's interest is in what he calls the "visionary movie" since 1968 (think Speilberg, Kubrick, Coppola, Lucas, Cronenberg, Tarkovsky, Scott, Cameron, etc.), and its focus on the impact of technology on our culture and ourselves as human beings. His approach is to treat movies as mythologically informed literature.

Despite the rejection of mythology in much of academia, it appears that our filmmakers have retained their mythological literacy, whether through subliminally absorbing the classics, or actually reading them. Ebert observes that in "Apocalypse Now," Coppola shows Kurtz reading Eliot's "The Hollow Men," which was inspired by Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," also the source of the plot of the movie, while the camera picks up Frazer's "Golden Bough" and Weston's "From Ritual to Romance" on Kurtz's desk.

What do we mean by mythology? We might describe a mythological position, particularly as taken by Joseph Campbell, as the notion that the structures and patterns of the energies of the cosmos that pour into the phenomenal realm are revealed in our myths, literatures, and arts.

Ortega y Gasset wrote:
"[T]he political or cultural aspects of history are... the mere surface of history; that in preference to, and deeper than these, the reality of history lies in biological power, in pure vitality, in what is in man of cosmic energy, not identical with, but related to, the energy which agitates the sea, fecundates the beast, causes the tree to flower and the star to shine."

It is this cosmic energy that Ebert identifies in the great visionary movies of our time. Thus Visionary movies are mythologically based and assume that there are archetypal patterns in the course of empires and nations, in our becoming fully human, in the human/technology interface, and in the cosmos itself. Academia today, with its poststructuralist viewpoint, takes Locke's "tabula rasa" position and is profoundly anti-essentialist, vehemently denying transcendence and archetypal patterns. Ebert's book is a refutation of this position.

From Ebert's point of view, the role of the movie critic becomes to approach movies with a background of literacy adequate to unpacking them and helping us in our readings of them. Ebert does this. Few other movie critics can.

So, should you buy this book? Here is how to decide: Write down a list of your top sixteen films. If five or more overlap with Ebert's list, order the book immediately. Here is Ebert's list.

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. Apocalypse Now
3. The Star Wars movies
4. The Godfather movies
5. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
6. Alien
7. Blade Runner
8. Videodrome
9. Raiders of the Lost Ark
10. The Shining
11. The Exorcist
12. A.I,
13. Schindler's List
14. The Road Warrior
15. Titanic
16. Jaws

Another test is that if you enjoy the books of Joseph Campbell or William Irwin Thompson, you will love this book. You can see more of Ebert's work at the website, CinemaDiscourse.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Visionary Movies, September 25, 2008

By 

John David Ebert (United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society (Paperback)

REVIEWED BY PROFESSOR WILLIAM DOTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA:

A disclaimer at the beginning: I have been in touch with the author for several years, counseling and advising as his analytical genius has ripened into the fabulous array of learning in this book. It is so stunning that it has led me to reconceive totally my own approaches to what is slightingly termed "popular culture" (we so need a better term -- one sees the dilemma especially in that wicked nineteenth-century distinction between "high" and "low" -- yet this distinction is now outgrown as our mass-mediated culture finds elegant waiters at toney restaurants dressed in the cowboy blue jeans that were prohibited at public schools in my childhood in high-mountain New Mexico).

Ebert's scope/s must be emphasized at the outset. I have never read an analyst who -- in the most brilliant chapter of the volume -- shows how Spielberg and Kubrick have been filming cosmologies, cosmogonies that rival Hesiod's, and are further complicated in that they are -- pace Ebert -- strongly influential upon one another. Were I more "with it," I could imagine teaching chapter 12, "Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg: A Study in Polarity," in my course on Origin, Emergence, and Creation Myths.

Displaying an amazingly comprehensive compass from Spengler to Campbell and Margulis, Ebert may be one of the few cultural analysts around who can blithely skip from supposedly "Celtic" materials to Egyptian, Assyrian, and even Paleolithic analogues to celluloid fantasies of the master filmmakers of our era. The Spielberg-Kubrick chapter alone is adequate reason to own this book. Ebert sees the two of them as, in effect, writers of our contemporary Zeitgeist-ial scriptures, contributors along with many other filmmakers to contemporary mythic expression.

Personally rather ignorant of cinema, I often had to grab my huge film compendia to figure out who various characters named were, and I haven't a clue as to the reference to "Maxwellian demons" (221). But the author is clear that "our contemporary situation involves the challenge of living in a society dominated by machines, and our psyche's response to this challenge is expressed by the myths of our popular culture, in which machines are personified as living beings" (222). "And so the problem of living in a mechanical/electronic society is what the new myths coming to us in celluloid form are attempting to deal with, for it is a problem that has been appearing with more and more obsessive frequency since the 1960s, and shows no signs of abating" (223). His first sentence asks "What are the new myths?" (1), and after expositing just how they appear in many films, he concludes that the auteurs are "busy dreaming up myths to hold our society together for a little longer" (223).

Such "conscious use of myth" (5) is what makes directors such as Kubrick and Lucas differ from Modernist authors and artists: Joseph Campbell, for instance, saw James Joyce and Thomas Mann, Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso as providing the new myths of his own time, completely ignoring film, which he considered "a decline into realism" (3). Quite in contrast, Ebert proposes that "Film [...] is a Gesamtkunstwerk [an all encompassing artistic product] that has taken up the frayed threads of the drama, novel, classical music, symbolist poetry, painting and acting, and woven them together into a new integral art form" (4).

This author's penchant for inserting all sorts of sources into one of his thematic nets is remarkable. In commenting on our culture's phenomenon of gigantism ("an attribute of both cultural and biological forms signaling that they are about to vanish" (196), he refers to the eighteenth-century Great Chain of Being, Darwin's theory of evolution, the temples at Luxor and Karnak, and the gigantic arches of decaying Rome. Then we have the Paleolithic, the Eleusinian mysteries, the Mesopotamian New Year's Festival, and monastic activities of Lindisfarne and Iona, before reference to the ouroboros in Kekulé as well as Homer, Tibetan sandpaintings, Dante, Jung, Milton, Mann, the Byzantine iconoclasts -- alongside the films Close Encounters, Star Wars, and The Lord of the Rings (196-98).

"These films are fulfilling an unconscious yearning of the public for connection with a vanished mythological tradition that is no longer taught in schools, which have shifted over to a largely vocational and technological, rather than humanistic curriculum" (198) -- part of Ebert's repeated sermon about the dangerous loss of human culture and history before the increasing onslaught of applied technology and commercialism, a theme as well in his book of interviews, Conversations on Science and Spirituality at the End of an Age, 1999.

The author is most exercised by the "visionary" filmic tradition established by George Melies at the dawn of cinema (as opposed to the "realistic" projections of the Lumières brothers; 19). Many enormously important artists such as Werner Herzog and Akira Kurasawa surface often in the book, as classical masters of modern film. What is so useful about this book is the ways Ebert -- who must have an astonishingly rich ability to remember scenes and themes and perspectives -- elucidates influences and revisions of the giants' productions. That of course is what makes traditional culture, folklore, mythology alive, as in Campbell's most famous citation: "The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change" (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1968-2nd ed., 4).

So far as I am aware, no one before Ebert has attempted to read the entire sweep of contemporary cinematic productions (or at least those he most admires) with respect to the levels of mythical consciousness they represent. Nor have they patiently tracked, as this author displays in a marvelous appendix, "The Evolution of Visionary Cinema Since 1968" (227-55), the lines of the direct cinematic inheritances and influences of key films (such as Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Godfather, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Jaws, Star Wars, Close Encounters, and many others).

In some ways a rather cranky book: Ebert is sharp-tongued especially about the ways the humanities are by-sided in the massive onslaught of applied technologies in our time. But as an academic "on his side," I can only cheer fervently the ways he shows how contemporary films are replacing the traditional scriptures of our cultures. This volume will be an important reference tool for some time to come.

--William Doty, author of Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals