Once again I take keys in hands (in place of Charlie Brown's "pencil in hand" whenever he would write his "pencil-pal") and look back at the things I wrote on this blog and its companions.
Some of the essays I liked best included:
MYTH AND SEXPLOITATION, in which I examined some of the works I already analyzed for their mythic content and showed how the myth-concerns of those works also played seamlessly into their passion for sexploitative content.
DEATHBLOW AND DEATHMATCH-- Though I formulated my concept of the combative mode near the start of this blog, guided largely by some salient if brief remarks by both Kant and Frye, this essay is the first time I attempted to codify how the combative mode is expressed through popular story-tropes. The essay immediately afterward, QUANTUMS OF SOLIPSISM PT. 2, further elaborates the tropes in terms of the "vector terminology" I borrowed from Alfred North Whitehead.
LIKE A TROPE, ON THE WIRE was a new attempt to summarize my NUM theory and to relate it to the history of literature as articulated by Aristotle and misinterpreted by people who misread Aristotle.
PROBLEMS VS CONUNDRUMS represents my effort to find a more elegant way to restate some of my earlier formulations regarding what I called "lateral meaning" and "vertical meaning."
KNOWING THE IDEA FROM THE CONCEPT focuses upon finding new terminology with which to analyze the *quanta* through which the two vertical potentialities are expressed in fiction, with the "idea" being the quanta through which mythopoeic thought is expressed, while the "concept" is the quanta through which didactic thought is expressed.
And in December, starting with STALKING THE PERFECT TERM: ENTER PRIMES, EXIT COES, I devoted numerous posts that month to "an anatomy of the crossover," a subject that's interested me for years, though only in the previous year of 2020 did I conceive of terms, "stature" and "charisma", for the different operations of Prime and Sub characters/presences. I anticipate writing more on this topic in 2022, though I confess I may be reaching a point where my system is about as all-embracing as it can get.
Most of the mythcomics I analyzed were works I'd read at least once before, though a few items, like Ernie Colon's THE MEDUSA CHAIN, proved more rigorous than I'd perceived in the initial reading. I don't think I encountered any new-to-me works in 2021 that I liked as much as my 2020 discovery of NISEKOI, although ELFEN LIED and THE SONS OF EL TOPO probably rate as my foremost discoveries for last year.
My favorite movie/TV reviews of 2021 included:
The BEAUTY AND THE BEAST episode "To Reign in Hell," which may inspire me to make a full examination of all three seasons of the teleseries within year 2022.
Perennial old favorite FIEND WITHOUT A FACE.
The two-season NISEKOI teleseries.
GODZILLA VS. KONG, because I'd been waiting for fifty-something years to see the titans of Japan and the U.S. to square off in a city-smashing donnybrook.
The first two Tobey Maguire Spideys, here and here, which certainly helped me out when it came to consider NO WAY HOME.
The two Keaton Bat-flicks, here and here.
"WAXWORKS," which at present reigns as the first true "monster mashup."
THE TRIUMPH OF HERCULES, my favorite Italian peplum.
The fourth episode of BEWITCHED, which finally put into perspective for me why this often mediocre show had such strong resonance for many though not all TV viewers.
And one of the best adventure-serials of that form's glory days, THE SPIDER'S WEB.
Naturally, a lot of my movie/TV viewing for the year was driven by cogitating about what movies I wanted to cross-reference on THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA, which has been going since June. I have not yet made more than a couple of attempts to cross-promote the blog, so not surprisingly OPERA doesn't get much attention, though still a little more than my other two "junk-drawer" blogs. For the time being I'm still committed to OPERA, though. In my mind at least, OPERA builds on Northrop Frye's comment that the critic, like the natural scientist, tries to examine all phenomena, going on the theory that a "total coherence" exists between all of the relevant subject matter. In the hands of ideological critics, this was often a means of deriding, say, even the best BATMAN productions by having a big laugh at how stupid the TV show was (or seemed to be). I'm aware that even old-time fans aren't ever going to be deeply invested in the analysis of a creaky old serial like JUNGLE DRUMS OF AFRICA. But there's a sense in which understanding anything-- be it a genre or a physical phenomenon-- requires that the analyst must see everything, good, bad and mediocre, as comprising facets of Shelley's "dome of many colored glass," doing everything possible to stain that monotonous white radiance of Eternity.
4 comments:
I wanted to thank you for the great content you continue posting, and of course wish you a Happy New Year. The kind of critical analysis you provide is not one that is common in fandom, and here is hoping more appreciators of "lowbrow" entertainment will embrace it so they could better articulate what makes such lowbrow fare into good art, instead of depending on political rhetoric or some timid defense about guilty pleasures.
I really like that you provided a sort of index here, and I hope you one day sell an e-book with all your essays organized.
I keep looking at the Archetype and NUM blogs noting the titles you've rated as having good or high mythicity. I think you've mentioned that high-art films are not usually mythically potent, but I wonder if you would post a review in the future of Elephant Man (which you've mentioned briefly in a past post) or any other other "high-brow" film you find worthy of note.
Thanks again for keeping the blogs going. Looking forward to your new writings this year.
Thanks very much, Pilot; your comments help out a lot. I don't know if I'll ever launch a critical book but I have thought for some time that I might take a shot at podcasting.
I think there are a handful of high-art films that venture into the realms of myth, but it's likely that they're rare for two reasons: (1) because it often costs a lot of money for live-action films to duplicate the subject matter of traditional myths, and (2) because the critical preference for representational realism, articulated for prose fiction in the previous three centuries, has dominated the film-criticism world as well.
I'm trying to find time to review Bergman's VIRGIN SPRING, which I recently re-watched. It's one of the few celebrated Euro-films that uses archaic myths to comment upon metaphysical problems.
I'd be interested in a myth-critic podcast, for sure. I assume it would be a more casual approach than the essays here in the Archive, which would be fine by me, as I'm frankly not very educated on the philosophers cited here (but I do like looking up their work and learning something new).
Looking forward to your take on Virgin Spring. I watched it but did not comprehend it. I'd also like to know how you'd compare it with Craven's Last House on The Left (which you've of coursed reviewed at NUM).
I hope the occasional philosophy-essay grabs you, since I can well understand that my reading-interests are all over the map and it's a long shot that any readers will happen to have read the books I review. Thanks again for your interest.
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