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

by John, David Ebert (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"…a profoundly erudite look at the deeper meanings of cinema…Ebert weaves a tale as engrossing as the films he analyzes." -- Leonard Shlain, author of The Alphabet vs. The Goddess

Product Description
What do Star Wars and Lord of the Rings tell us of our mythic past and our attitude to modern technology?

John David Ebert’s Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons - Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society 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.

From the author's introduction

As one who takes delight in the study of culture, I see today’s new myths coming to us in the form of celluloid. Joseph Campbell, by contrast, coming out of the Modernist generation, saw the new myths of his time emerging in the literary apotheosis of the novel under the pens of James Joyce and Thomas Mann, and in the art of Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso. Film, in those days, was still a minor art, considered not one of the highbrow arts at all, but a diversion for the masses. Oswald Spengler compared it with the Roman mime shows of the days of the Empire and Campbell thought so little of it that, with the advent of the talkies — which he and his colleague at Sarah Lawrence, the art and film critic Rudolf Arnheim, dismissed as a decline into realism — he completely avoided the medium until the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. Later, when George Lucas invited him to see his Star Wars trilogy — which, after all, had been based on The Hero with a Thousand Faces — he remarked, "I thought real art had died with Joyce and Picasso, but I guess I was wrong." .

It is my contention in this book that film, with the aid of myth, is expanding and developing the great themes of the Western canon, and that it was not until the late 1960s and 1970s, when filmmakers began to make conscious use of myth, that this process began. And by "conscious use of myth," I mean, for example, that filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas and George Miller drew inspiration for their narratives from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, while Francis Ford Coppola structured the climax of Apocalypse Now upon the model of Frazer’s myth of the slain bull god-king in The Golden Bough.

From these four examples of the deliberate use of myth, five of the most successful films of all time were created — 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Apocalypse Now, Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Road Warrior — which then spawned hordes of secondary imitators whose work did not bear the direct influence of mythic scholarship, but were mythologically inspired nonetheless by way of their being affiliated to these five films. To this secondary group belongs such films as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Altered States, The Last Wave, Dune, Jacob’s Ladder (inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead), the Star Trek movies and others.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Cybereditions Corporation (June 2, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1877275743
• ISBN-13: 978-1877275746
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #463,739 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Treatise on Visionary Film, April 9, 2006

By	Ray Grasse (Chicago, Illinois) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

3 of 3 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)

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.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliant Mirror, December 14, 2005

By	Gershon Reiter "Gershon Reiter" (Israel) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.