Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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

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.

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

John Ebert's book is essential reading for anyone even slightly interested in "visionary" film-- that genre of film that explores the imaginative and mythic possibilities of film, pioneered all the way back with George Melies, and carried on by such modern proponents as Kubrick, Coppola, Lynch, etc (where Ebert's focus predominates). He offers his keen scholarly insight into the mythic and sociological undercurrents of this still-evolving trend, which I found to be fresh and original. While one will inevitably disagree with some of his assessments ("The Matrix" as garbage?), that's actually some of the fun--and value--of works like this, since it forces one to formulate one's own views in response more clearly, and stimulate one's thinking in ways that straight consensus wouldn't.

There are a few notable omissions from his overview---horror films and experimental cinema surely deserve an seat at this visionary table--but then, a work covering every conceivable facet of this subject would have required a series of volumes rather than just one, so that may actually be a blessing in disguise. All in all, an important work on the premier art of our time--cinema.

Although Joseph Campbell died in the mid-80's, his greatest formative influences came when he was a young man, in the forms of luminaries such as Joyce and Mann in literature, Spengler in history and culture, Picasso and Klee in art. His greatest work, the four-part Masks of God series, was written in the 1960s. Although in his later years, perhaps with onset of his own late age and approaching death, Campbell became more interested in the evolution and structure of consciousness through time, and entertained more speculative and mystical answers to many of the questions he had wrestled with in the past, he was nevertheless an instinctual conservative and product of his time, his time being the positivistic years of the early 20th century. His Spenglerian view of Western high culture being in decline combined with his inherent conservatism to keep him from exploring many of the important forces at work in the second half of the 20th century. For although he himself thought Spengler rang the death knell of Western culture a few years too early, and failed to recognize the important contribution of modern art, he himself only ever saw two films, both by invitation. In a late 70s lecture I once heard, he still referred to them as "talkies".

And so as a great fan of Campbell, I often find myself wondering what Campbell would have said if he had been able to read Jean Gebser's magnum opus, The Ever Present Origin. Or if he had seen the evolution of his mythological theories not only in Star Wars (one of the two films he ever saw, along with Kubrick's 2001), but through the works of Kubrick, Spielberg, Aronofsky. Or if he could have read the works of the post-modern critical theorists Baudrillard, Virilio, Badiou. Or what he would have to say about zombie films and the fear of death. Or the internet and new media.

Mr. Ebert is taking the next step down the trail that scholars like Joseph Campbell have blazed. Campbell, Spengler, Mumford... in their day, these men were still concerned with categorizing facts and identifying historical patterns and forces, then elucidating them to the rest of us. It is hard to fathom today that it was not long ago that it would have been preposterous to claim to have identified historical patterns that applied equally to the social life of white European culture in the industrial age as to the pre-Aryan Dravidians of the Indus Valley, or of mythological motifs that governed the experiences of American Christians taking communion as well as Meso American Aztecs sacrificing humans. Today, this point of view is pervasive and common, but a hundred years ago this was not the case, and so many of our best minds were engaged in mapping the ground and naming the territory.

It is only today that our scholars are in a position to look at trans-historical global motifs in the diverse arenas of human action and comment on how they are at play in contemporary life. And this is precisely what Mr. Ebert does. He is one of the few scholars I know of who is doing this from a perspective other than the outdated (though still occasionally useful) Marxist one. Although his disappointment with the eroding force of materialist capitalism is apparent, I suspect he would share Adorno and Horkheimer's (as well as Spengler and other traditionalists from the right) pessimism about the cultural leveling and obliteration of value resulting from standard Marxism and multiculturalism (although that is me reading into his work). Mr. Ebert is a man who has read, taken in, and to a great degree understood the traditional, classical learning of Western culture AND the modern and post-modern critical theory that deconstructs and comments on that culture.

And so, like a good psychologist can listen to a patient's unique situation and identify common patterns playing out, we have an author here who is able to see universal motifs playing out in our most popular literature (film), and who can see in our reactions to 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina very expected reactions of a society at a particular phase in its development.

This book, in particular, is built around what Mr. Ebert sees as the central struggle of modern man. We have spent centuries building a machine to care for us and keep us safe in a dangerous and chaotic world - a machine that includes not only technological devices, but ordered governance, regimented lives, civil infrastructure, etc - but we now find ourselves enslaved to our creation, feeling like none of us, not even all of us together, can control it. We could rise up and attempt to destroy it - though it will fight back, and probably win, for we seem to have been clever enough to have built it with powerful immune systems - but taking control back in order to put it to conscious ends simply seems impossible. More and more, we find that the machine seems to be self-aware and malevolent, even as it turns us into something like automatons. For example, it is almost universal in our free country (the USA) that a perfectly law abiding working man or woman will tense up and become nervous when he sees a police car in the rearview mirror. Our pulse increases and our vision narrows, our body goes into the same mode it would if we were confronting a bully or enemy, despite the fact that the police officer in fact exists specifically to serve the law-abider and keep him safe. Turn on the news on a random day and you are sure to see a report of some law-abiding citizen, somewhere, getting droopped or tazed by an officer for what turns out to be a breakdown in communication or misunderstanding. The cop is not a swastika-adorned goosestepper; he is just a man going home to his family that night, same as the schmuck he tazed and threw in a cage. Both the citizen and the officer are simply acting out their roles, both are confused and insecure and afraid of the other. The machine turns us into its robot slaves acting out our parts even as it seems to act with more intention and consciousness than we do. We have spent centuries building it, only to realize that we have built it from the inside and are now trapped. Like any prison, we alternate between periods of bored anxiety and awkward or violent interpersonal relations. Most people don't know their hatred and fear of the machine, can't name it. But it bleeds out neurotically, in our dreams, international relations, and personal lives, as well as in our popular literature (primarily movies). The book is about the broad issue, but uses the narrative vehicle of reviewing several classic films from this perspective in order to get its point across.

Mr. Ebert deserves a wide audience. It should be clear that I'm a big fan. His books and website are, it's true, a little like liveblogging the apocalypse. It's a tough job, but I'm glad someone is doing it.

Ebert sees the movies as a modern Delphi, enunciating the gods'-eye-view of the story we've been living without consciously grasping it. He's wonderful on the move from the highbrow to the populous ("Here Comes Everybody"). Media, whether string quartets, oil on canvas or print novels, have Spenglerian lifespans, and most for Ebert are passed now into self-conscious abstruseness, their energy played out. But film has remained vital, and thanks to a visionary infusion from Joseph Campbell and James Frazer, is playing a prophetic/initiatic cultural role using spectacle to reach the spiritual subconscious. ("2001" is a millennial annunciation, "Close Encounters" its sequel.)

As he says:

'This is why the public responds with such avidity to films like "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", "Star Wars" and more recently, "The Lord of the Rings": because these films are fulfilling an unconscious yearning of the public for connection with a vanished mythological condition that is no longer taught in schools, which have shifted over to a largely vocational and technological, rather than humanistic curriculum. The psyche, meanwhile, is starved for myth, but the conscious mind doesn't realize it until it sits down in the theatre with a mythologically inspired film.'

The story we have been telling ourselves, from "Star Wars" to "Bladerunner" to "Videodrome", is of how we will save ourselves from our own machine nightmare. Film itself seems ambivalent about whether civilization and the human soul can survive. Ebert tends to decline though -- how nice to see someone truly able to grapple with the mythology of the end of the West, unflinchingly seeing the current illiteracy as proof of the coming wind-down to a new Dark Age, with historical examples from the ancient classical and Egyptian civilizations to back the point up. A million alert spots on his part illustrate our battle with the Thou-less mechanism, from the décor of the room in which Dave Bowman undergoes his transformation (it's the farewell to the enlightenment rationalism, so its furnishings come from that era) to the 'new female dragonslayer' phenomenon, which revives Hindu myth -- kudos for knowing Taarna in "Heavy Metal", and for making it to the end of "Alien 4"!

In his review of Jackson's "Return of the King", Ebert implicitly recognizes that film is becoming played-out and 'is about to vanish', but in general he remains more optimistic about the form than I, who haven't been in a cinema since 2003 -- since marrying spirit and soul for real became my pastime, I no longer enjoy being programmed by accountants. I think the logic of Ebert's position is that the strain of movies like "The Village" or "Sky Captain" to find something to say is proof of the wind-down; he claims to enjoy them.

Although occasionally seeming almost apologetic or self-justifying on account of his prodigious learning and philosophy, when warmed to his topic Ebert writes with great unselfconscious panache and loves to make the reader smile with profound connections. I recommend taking the time to see the world his way for a while, especially if you grew up with these movies as I did. It can trigger soul things.

John Ebert's remarkable book, Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons, does to movies what Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces did to myths. This is a mouthful, I know, but Ebert delivers. Armed with vast knowledge of our cultural past and a profound understanding of our present, he ventures into the world of "celluloid myths" (that Campbell pretty much dismissed until, as pointed out in the book, George Lucas turned him on to his Star Wars trilogy) and comes back with the boon. And what an incredibly rich and enriching boon it is.
Ebert uses his vast knowledge of myths, and practically everything else, to reveal the mythic dimension of some our most popular movies. As he maintains in the book, the first conscious incorporation of myths in movies, what he calls celluloid myths, was initiated by Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which (according to the author) was inspired by Campbell's Hero. All the films discussed in the book are heirs to Kubrick's 1968 masterpiece: "2001 was the first major presentation of a theme that would come to be reiterated in film over and over again, namely that of the battle of an individual human being against an impersonal system that is threatening to dehumanize him, whether that system is defined as the megalopolitan city, the meta-national corporation, or technology in general . . .All are reworkings of Bowman's battle with HAL."
What I really liked about the book is that it doesn't dissect the movies to death, but rather provided enough insight so that I wanted to see many of these movies again. Before finishing the book, I couldn't wait to get the DVD's of the first two covered movies, Apocalypse Now (Redux) and 2001. The "guided tour of the films of David Cronenberg" even got me to the point where I want to take a second look at his movies, which (the ones I saw) I generally find hard to watch. I guess this best describes what the book did for me. Somewhat like the shield in Perseus and the Gorgon Medusa, it functions as a mirror that allows us to see the Mechanical Dragons that have become such a prevalent part of our movies (and our lives) and how they're slain by our Celluloid Heroes. It updates many of our most popular myths as never before.

With a white-hot strike to the center of the frozen, sterile and inert films that typifies modern Hollywood, John David Ebert reignites the passion, grandeur and vision that make film the most compelling, and relevant form of mass entertainment today. By distilling the great films of yesterday and today, Ebert manages in clear, distinct and entertaining prose to explain and explore why film has surpassed the novel as the preeminent purveyor of myth and wonder in our society.

His journey is precise and with an overall purpose, however, one may skip to chapters that hold special interest, for me, I found that reading the entire book was far more satisfying, even when I arrived at dissimilar conclusions than Ebert. For example, Ebert has long been an admirer of David Croenenberg, a director I find distasteful and vulgar in many respects, but in reading Ebert's exploration of Croenenberg's films, I found a new prism in which to view the director, and upon seeing his latest work A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, watched the film with a deeper sense of what he was trying to achieve.

For me, myth has always been the cornerstone of all great art, whether it be visual art (painting), films, novels, I find that all such works are enriched by a foundation that embraces the great mysteries and universal connections which are the lynchpin of myth. Ebert's gift is the uncanny ability to take interesting films and dissect them at a historical, mythological and sociological level, deepening our understanding and appreciation of what makes certain films imprint the mind with images that recur and haunt and amaze us. What's even more interesting is that many of us watch these films with only a subconscious understanding of why they grip us in their web, which is actually the point. Myth is anything but conscious, it's wellspring is the imagination, the realm of dreams and nightmares and visions, and as such, need not be fully understood to be effective. Ebert's gift is to be able to show us all the facets that arise from the world's myths, whether rooted in Western or Eastern culture, his erudition, knowledge and ability to make them all cohesive is amazing. He's a good writer, a better thinker, a good critic, a better scholar.

One would assume that such an examination of myth and films would be dry and turgid, but just take a look at chapter 3, which is an interview Ebert did for a magazine. The discussions range from APOCALYPSE NOW to GODFATHER 3 to 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY, and the way Ebert breaks them down is incredible. On APOCALYPSE NOW, he describes the film as a hero's descent into the underworld, mirroring some of Dante's INFERNO, and then in the same sentence, makes a segue to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, where the sun god Ra, journeys down a river through a kingdom of the dead, encountering obstacles until he reaches the Lord of the Dead, Osiris. Sounds convuluted? You're wrong. Ebert makes the transition so seamless and obvious that I actually started laughing with sheer intellectual enjoyment at what he was saying. In the same chapter, Ebert takes on the notion that many of these mythological symbols are accidental and not planned by the creative artist, and again provided brilliant analysis. For some, Ebert agrees, these symbols are certainly not always intentional, but he goes on to say that they spring for a universal source of creativity that is tied directly into the mythological wonder that occurs when the creative spirit is open to anything. So, though Kubrick certainly knew what he was doing when the ape throws the bone that becomes a spaceship, other artists arrive at the same powerful symbols through their own inward journey, which manifests itself as something that has existed for thousands of years. If you're confused by this, don't worry. Ebert breaks it down far more eloquently than I can, that's why he writes about myth and I try to tap into them in my day-job as a screenwriter.

A few nitpicky comments so as not to give the impression that I agree with EVERYTHING Ebert writes, that would make me a less-than critical thinker, which I hope I will always be. I wish he'd gone more into the Western and its mythic underpinnings, specifically films like THE WILD BUNCH, THE SEARCHERS, RED RIVER, ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, and THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, all of which seethe with classical mythological symbols and images (John Wayne standing in the open doorway at the end of the Searchers as civilization occurs within the house, while he's forever isolated from such comforts). Also, Ebert has a list of films he considers notable, and while "best ever" lists are always subjective, it's still a fun way to measure your tastes against others to see what you have in common and more importantly, what you don't agree on. Ebert has a top 16 of his generation, topped by 2001, and including JAWS and TITANIC. Every film on the list has been at least tangentially or substantively discussed in the book, but as with any list, there are some head-scratchers for me. I wouldn't include all 3 original STAR WARS films, I would only include EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, and leave it at that. I would drop VIDEODROME, AI, and SCHINDLER'S LIST (Ebert has a great affinity for SPIELBERG, a director I think is visually brilliant, but intellectually facile). Other than that, the list isn't bad, considering Ebert limited himself to "my generation" freeing himself from having to go back to a number of other great films. He pretty much starts his list from 1968 and moves forward, leaving the omission of WILD BUNCH (1969) as a puzzler, but subject to lively debate. That's what makes the book great, Ebert lays out the foundation of these visionary films and their directors and then invites you to do your own investigation and arrive at your own conclusions. His, he states with force and logic and conviction, no getting around that. But the whole point is for you to leave the book wanting more and going back to favorite films and having a second, third of fourth look, seeing new symbols, new connections, previously unnoticed.

The idea that visionary films have replaced great novels as the preeminent creative force of our time is one that bears more exploration. In the old days, you had great writers like MANN, JOYCE, PROUST and HESSE. Now, you have prose stylists masquerading as "serious" writers, with nothing visionary and interesting to contribute. they write mostly to impress their brethren, the audience be damned. I'm no Thomas Wolfe fan, but I agree with his manifesto years ago, that today's writers have abandoned great, realist stories in favor of fancy prose and post-modern angst that makes for empty reading. Films admittedly have their share of bad writers and bad directors, but on the other hand, there are more interesting and talented and risk-taking artists in filmmaking today than in literature. You have SPIELBERG, TYWKER, VINTERBERG, CUARON, SALLES, COPPOLA (he has one last masterpiece, trust me), SCORSCESE, JACKSON, CARO, CAMERON, et al. They represent a vital, powerful force that is driving the great films of today and tomorrow. If nothing else, Ebert's book leaves you awaiting the next, great work of these artists, knowing it will draw on symbols and touchstones that go back thousands of years, to our universal connection. And that's all we really care about when we view art. We want to be moved, touched, transported, entertained, frightened.

Awed.

Ebert knows this.

So should you