Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 3
As Barthes argued [in Mythologies], the themes of humanities earliest
stories, known as myths, continue to permeate and inform pop culture’s story-telling efforts. As in the myths of Prometheus, Hercules, and other ancient heroes, Superman’s exploits revolve around a universal mythic theme—the struggle of Good and Evil. This is what makes Superman, or any action hero for that matter, so intuitively appealing to modern audiences….The word “myth” derives from the Greek mythos: “word,” “speech,” “tale of the gods.” It can be defined as a narrative in which the characters are gods, heroes, and mystical beings, in which the plot is about the origin of things or about metaphysical events in human life, and in which the setting is a metaphysical world juxtaposed against the real world. In the beginning stages of human cultures, myths functioned as genuine “narrative theories” of the world. That is why all cultures have created them to explain their origins….The use of mythic themes and elements in media representations has become so widespread that it is hardly noticed any longer, despite Barthes’ cogent warnings in the late 1950s. Implicit myths about the struggle for Good, of the need for heroes to lead us forward, and so on and so forth, constitute the narrative underpinnings of TV programmes, blockbuster movies, advertisements and commercials, and virtually anything that gets “media air time.” (2002:47-48)
Marcel Danesi, Understanding Media Semiotics
Arthur Asa Berger
The Same Old Story
Speculations on Myth and Media
Will the new electronic media lead to the end of reading? Will “old fashioned” print narratives become obsolete as legions of children and adolescent abandon comic books, stories and novels to spend all their time watching television and fiddling with Gameboys and various game-playing mini-supercomputers like the X-Box and Playstation? These questions might seem reasonable, since there has been an incredible rise in the popularity of video games, for example. But it is unlikely that we will abandon other “old” media and replace them with “new” media. Just as television didn’t destroy radio and radio didn’t destroy newspapers, video games are unlikely to turn print (and the narratives they carry) and other electronic media into niche media. One reason the “old” media will continue to flourish, I believe, is because they are full of narratives that do such a good job of providing us with modernized and camouflaged versions of ancient myths, of dealing with our need for living mythically.
Narratives Pervade Our Media and Our Lives
We have to make a distinction between stories, that is narratives, and the media that make these stories available to people. The fact is that narratives, of one sort or another, pervade the media. For example, in his book The Age of Television, Martin Esslin estimated, in 1982, that the average male television viewer watched more than 12 hours of drama per week and the average female watched almost 16 hours of drama per week. The average American, he suggested, “sees the equivalent of five to six full length stage plays a week.” (1982:7)
That’s because, he explains, television—the most popular medium—is essentially dramatic. He writes: (1982:7)
One the most obvious level television is a dramatic medium simply because a large proportion of the material it transmits is in the form of traditional drama mimetically represented by actors and employing plot, dialogue, character, gesture, costume—the whole panoply of dramatic means of expression.
If you look at television from the perspective of a dramatic critic, Esslin suggests, you can gain a better understanding of television’s essence as a dramatic medium (this applies to the cinema, as well) and various aspects of its social, psychological, and cultural impact.
We swim, like fish, in a sea of narratives—or, to use Michel de Certeau’s metaphor, we walk, all day and every day, through a forest of narrativities. As de Certeau explains in The Practice of Everyday Life: (1984:186)
From morning to night, narrations constantly haunt streets and buildings. They articulate our existences by teaching us what they must be. They "cover the event," that is to say, they make our legends (legenda, what is to be read and said) out of it. Captured by the radio (the voice is the law) as soon as he awakens, the listener walks all day long through the forest of narrativities from journalism, advertising, and television narrativities that still find time, as he is getting ready for bed, to slip a few final messages under the portals of sleep. Even more than the God told about by the theologians of earlier days, these stories have a providential and predestining function: they organize in advance our work, our celebrations, and even our dreams. Social life multiplies the gestures and modes of behavior (im)printed by narrative models; it ceasely [sic] reproduces and accumulates "copies" of stories. Our society has become a recited society, in three senses: it is defined by stories (recits, the fables constituted by our advertising and informational media), by citations of stories, and by the interminable recitation of stories.
We are, it seems, story-making and story-loving beings and these stories do more than amuse and entertain us—they teach us about life, they offer models to imitate, and they can, in some cases, reinforce our battered egos. There is good reason, then, why narratives are so dear to us.
Narratives, of every genre, pervade our lives—from the conversations we have with friends to the television dramas and films we watch. It is narratives that teach us about the Devil and about God and everything in between. It would not be too far removed to suggest that in addition to being homo ludens we are also homo narratus—story telling men and women.
I will deal with a number of aspects of narratives here: narratives and fairy tales, narratives and genres, narratives and myth, the gratifications genres provide, and narrative genres and myths. I will suggest that, in essence, all stories are variations on the narratives that we find so intoxicating when we are young—fairy tales. I will consider the formulaic aspects of genres and also argue that generally speaking there is a mythic element hidden in our stories of all kinds: in the elite arts, in popular culture, and in everyday life, because although we think logically, we live mythically.
Defining Genres
Fairy tales, we must remember, are a kind of story—or in the language of media criticism, a genre, a French word that means “kind” or “type.” In his essay “Television Images, Codes and Messages, “ Douglas Kellner discusses genres and their role in our mass-mediated culture:
A genre consists of a coded set of formulas and conventions which indicate a culturally accepted way or organizing material into distinct patterns. Once established, genres dictate the basic conditions of cultural production and reception. For example, crime dramas invariably have a violent crime, a search for its perpetrators, and often a chase, fight, or bloody elimination of the criminal, communicating the message “crime does not pay.” The audience comes to expect these predictable pleasures and a crime drama “code” develops, enshrined in production and studio texts and practices. (Televisions, 7, 4, 1974)
These conventions make is easy for audiences to understand what happens in a text and easier for writers to create these texts, since they can assume certain expectations on the part of audiences and use formulas, with minor variations, to satisfy these expectations.
In our everyday lives, we often make our decisions about what kinds of television shows to watch, films to see, or video games to play, based on how we may feel or upon certain attractions a genre holds for us. And we decide to watch certain television programs or go to certain films because, in part, of the pleasures the genre has for us. For complicated reasons, that I will discuss later, people develop a fondness for certain kinds of stories. When we are children, fairy tales are very important for us, because, as Bruno Bettelheim has explained in The Uses of Enchantment, fairy tales have great therapeutic value for children. When we are older and more complicated beings, we move on to more complicated kinds of stories, with different kinds of characters that provide different kinds of gratifications.
Gratifications Genres Provide
Let me offer, here, a chart listing of some of the more important gratifications genres provide audiences. The “Uses and Gratifications” approach to mass mediated texts focuses on the social uses audiences make of the texts they see and the psychological gratifications these texts provide, as contrasted with a focus on the effects of exposure to texts and genres. Some of the earliest research in this area was described as follows by Katz, Blumler and Gurevich (1979:215):
Herzog (1942) on quiz programs and the gratifications derived from listening
to soap operas; Suchman (1942) on the motives for getting interested in serious music on radio; Wolfe and Fiske (1949) on the development of children’s interest in comics…Each of these investigations came up with a list of functions served either by some specific contents or some medium in question: to match one’s wits against others, to get information or advice for daily living, to provide a framework for one’s day, to prepare oneself cultural for the demands of upward mobility, or to be reassured about the dignity and usefulness of one’s role.
In my chart I deal with genres rather than with individual texts and suggest the various uses and gratifications genres provide.
Uses and Gratifications / GenresTo satisfy curiosity and be informed / Documentaries, News Shows, Talk Shows, Quiz Shows
To be amused / Situation Comedies, Comedy Shows
To identify with the deity and divine / Religious Shows
To reinforce belief in justice / Police Shows, Law Shows
To reinforce belief in romantic love / Romance novels, Soap operas
To participate vicariously in history / Media Events, Sports Shows
To see villains in action / Police Shows, Action-Adventure Shows
To obtain outlets for sexual drives in a
guilt free context / Pornography, Fashion Shows, Soft Core Commercials, Soap Operas
To experience the ugly / Horror shows
To find models to imitate / Talk Shows, Action Shows, Award Shows, Sports Shows, Commercials
To experience the beautiful / Travel Shows, Art Shows, Culture Shows (Symphony Concerts, Operas, Ballet)
One of the difficulties of the uses and gratifications approach is that it is very difficult to quantify the uses people make of genres and tie events in a given text to this or that gratification. Nevertheless, it is quite obvious that people listened to radio soap operas (the subject of the study mentioned above by Herta Herzog) and watch soap operas on television because they provide a number of gratifications to their viewers.
The Fairy Tale as the UR-Genre
I have suggested, in my book Narratives in Popular Culture, Media and Everyday Life, that we see the fairy tale as an UR-genre. In a typical fairy tale you might find monsters and other kinds of strange creatures (horror), someone searching for a missing damsel in distress (detective), someone flying on magic carpets (science fiction), someone fighting villains or opponents of one sort or another (action-adventure hero), and a hero marrying a princess he has rescued (romance). The basic genres, can be seen then, as spin-offs emphasizing different aspects of the typical fairy tale…and, as I shall argue, certain myths.
In the chart that follows I offer suggestions about that formulaic aspects of some important genres: the kinds of characters we find in them, their plots and their themes, and so on. Thinking about stories in terms of their formulas, and what happens in certain genres, helps us understand something about their appeal.
This chart shows some of the basic conventions found in formulaic genres. These
conventions establish what a genre means for people and enable them to understand
the texts without too much expenditure of intellectual effort. Of course some works
in a given genre are more formulaic than others; there is some latitude within
genres for experimentation, but most mass mediated texts tend to be formulaic.
I assume that people learn the conventions of various genres as they are exposed to
them.
Genre / Romance / Western / Science-Fiction / SpyTime / Early 1900s / 1800s / Future / Present
Location / Rural England / Edge of Civilization / Outer Space / World
Hero / Lords, Upper Class Types / Cowboy / Space Man / Agent
Heroine / Damsel in Distress / Schoolmarm / Space Gal / Woman Spy
Secondary / Friends of Heroine / Town people
Indians / Technicians / Assistant Agents
Villains / Lying Seeming Friend / Outlaws / Aliens / Moles
Plot / Heroine Finds Love / Restore Law and Order / Repel Aliens / Find Moles
Theme / Love Conquers All / Justice and Progress / Save Humanity / Save Free World
Costume / Gorgeous Dresses / Cowboy Hat / Space Gear / Trench Coat
Locomotion / Cars, Horses, Carriages / Horse / Rocket Ship / Sports Car
Weaponry / Fists / Six-Gun / Ray Gun
Laser Gun / Pistol with Silencer
Genres also come and go. At one time, in the seventies in the United
States, there were more than thirty westerns being broadcast on television each week,
and numerous western films. In contemporary America, there are few westerns being made for television or film. This is probably because the conventions of the genre no longer resonate with Americans and because other genres have evolved that do a better job of providing the gratifications people are looking for from media. Let me offer a case study here, on the romance genre. I take my point of departure with Janice Radway’s excellent book, Reading the Romance