Clash of Opinions

So, just went to see Clash of the Titans. My thoughts will probably not surprise anyone. It was very shiny, the action was good, there was an acceptable amount of cheese and...it was not a good movie. Well, it was not a great movie, certainly in the tradition it theoretically stems from.

First, it should be noted that the script was written independently, the director didn't even want to CALL it Clash of the Titans. It was supposed to be a totally different story, but the studios knew they'd make more money with a "remake." Furthermore, as many of my cohorts noted, it felt like there was a lot cut-out.

My father, upon hearing some of my initial comments, asked some insightful questions, which I will copy/paste here.

"Want to hear more - was it because the hero was in cropped hair and had an australian accent or because they monkeyed with original mythology and revised the stories? And really, is that so bad? Don't mythologies evolve over time and don't they serve the needs of the time and the societies in which they are told? Given the disparity between ... See Moreancient pagan Greek culture and our post Christian Western culture - aren't there numerous cultural gaps that are bridged easier by revising the story for our audiences to better relate or understand? Just asking."

To the first issue: To be honest, I don't care that poor Sam Worthington is forced to play the same character all the bloody time. Well, I doubt he's forced, I mean, he's basically Mr.BadassSciFi Guy now, and who wouldn't want to play those sorts of roles? If I could get type cast as a sword-weilding hot-chick, preferably one with snappy comebacks, believe me, I would not be bothered. And it's not like anyone else had even remotely Greek accents. Actually, I approved of a lot of the costume choices, the full togas, the rich fabrics. The only one I didn't care for was some of Io's outfits. A world of WTF for that thing that looked like she hooked a rug around herself.

For the second, and really more intense criticism, my good friend, and fellow history/mythology lover, Z, was visibly bothered by some of the alterations made to the "original"/"traditional"/known myths. This is thoroughly understandable, because they "monkeyed" a LOT. The Pegasus (or in this case, Pegasi) had absolutely no basis in the literature and the origins of Perseus were nudged a bit.

[Edit: It has been pointed out to me that, quite correctly that the story regarding Medusa was actually "correct" and so I apologize for not being more explicit about the plurality of Medusa's origin stories. Here is the Wiki entry.

In one version of the Medusa myth, Medusa who was very beautiful and very arrogant, boasted that she was even more beautiful then the goddess Athena. For this Athena became wrathful and cursed her that anyone who looks at her face would be turned to stone. In a late version of the Medusa myth, related by the Roman poet Ovid (Metamorphoses 4.770), Medusa was originally a beautiful maiden, "the jealous aspiration of many suitors," priestess in Athena's temple, but when she and the "Lord of the Sea" Poseidon lay together in Athena's temple, the enraged virgin goddess transformed her beautiful hair to serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn men into stone. In Ovid's telling, Perseus describes Medusa's punishment by Athena as just and well-deserved.

/end Edit]
The reason this is so frustrating is because the source material is already SO rich and epic, there doesn't seem to be any reason to change it. Quite simply, it couldn't be 'improved.' And I admit, it didn't seem to help much. They could have kept their basic storyline intact and maintained a closer version of the mythos, particularly Perseus and his birth.

There is another aspect though, that softened the frustration blow for me. There is no TRUE version in Greek mythology. Even in their own time, they maintained contradictory versions of their religion. Aphrodite has two different origin stories, yet the Greeks were not concerned by this conflict. To them, it was more important to keep everything, rather than risk losing even one. So, yes, the evolution of the story, the changing...it's actually very Greek.

What DID bother me is related to the last statement my father made.
A great deal is made in the movie, about sin and redemption. And of course, the entire premise is people being angry with the gods, wanting to rise up and say they wanted no part, and after all, didn't the gods really need them?

This is a VERY post-modern idea. It would never even OCCUR to the Greeks to question their place in the universe in respect to the gods. Like the "climate of opinion," there was a certain way they understood things to work. That the gods need worship to survive is very much a 20th century invention, masterfully penned by the likes of Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett and other people with funny accents.

However, this is another place where they (perhaps inadvertently) maintain a highly Greek tradition. There is no real conception of "sin" as Western Post-Christ people would understand it. However, the notion of "hubris" is very important to Greek legend. Most of the time, when a human is punished, it is for this flaw, for arrogance, for their presumption. Ajax is not punished for raping Cassandra, he is punished for doing so inside Athena's temple, at the very foot of her statue. Arachne is punished for competing with Athena, even though Arachne's weaving is superior and she wins the competition. Belleraphon is loved of the gods until he decides to take Pegasus to be with them. Time and again, the theme of pretentiousness and then destruction comes up in Greek mythology. "Pride goeth before the fall," as the Bible says. So, in that way, the movie does a fine job. The humans get all uppity and a lot of them die for it.

So there is my paradoxical review of Clash of the Titans. I can't say they got a lot "wrong" since there is no right, but they certainly ignored traditional literature, or else chose to alter it for reasons I did not quite understand. However, they got a lot of the SPIRIT of the lgends right, though that may not have been intentional.

From a technical standpoint, I was a bit disappointed that the special effects were not more hardcore. Considering that the original Clash of the Titans is one of those huge moments in science fiction/fantasy where special effects were taken to a whole new level, I hoped that this would at least try to keep up. It didn't need to be Avatar, but I expected better than The Mummy Returns. As someone said though "It was the longest metal music video ever!" Seriously, you could use virtually any shot as power metal album art, and should.

~Peace out~

Mind Vomit #1

School has started, and this is probably the heaviest workload I've ever had. I need to read three to six books a week, plus around 150 pages of articles or more, plus 30-100 pages in text books, plus write two articles a week, plus keep up with Economics homework. Virtually all free time is spent reading and taking notes. You can probably already tell I both love and hate the situation.

"My head is full of thoughts, my ears are full of stars..."

I'm learning and reading a lot of interesting stuff, and I want to share it, but the act of forcing it into coherent and cogent processes is a bit beyond my capacity while I'm studying and then past my interest when I'm not. The neverending paradox with blogging I've found. So I give you Mind Vomits, hopefully encouraging some discussion, maybe helping me arrive at new thoughts, and maybe just being silly.

First, I give you the idea of "Heritage." The dictionary gives a woefully dull definition involving inheritance that has little to do with the emotional and psychological connotations of the word. Try this one:

"Heritage is that part of the past which we select in the present of contemporary purposes, be they economic, cultural, political or social." (Graham, et al)

See, History does not equal The Past. Historians are not chroniclers in that they objectively write down This Happened, followed by That, ad infinitum.
For one thing, that would be so wretchedly BORING. What historians generate are "historical documents," that is, something about the past. This does not need to be in writing. Museums, artifacts, highway signs, tours, lectures...there really is no difference between academic and public history, whatever the elitists will tell you. And these historical documents much often have more to do with the time period in which they are written than they do with the time period they are written ABOUT.

I think that people have an impression that some are "outside" of their environment. What springs to mind is philosophers, historians and religious writers. I think we work under the presupposition that such people are transcendent, that their circumstances do not touch them. This is easy to understand when you think of how many of our underlying beliefs stem from such individuals. People want to believe their religion is The Truth, and that is much more difficult to swallow if one thinks it was influenced by events thousands of years ago. It stops being so universal then.

But everyone has an argument and the way things are interpreted now is not the same as they will be ten years from now, regardless of the event in question.

Public Historians, those that work outside a classroom or lecture hall or research room think that Academic Historians (those that work INSIDE all those places) live in an ivory tower, with little connection to the real world. Academic Historians think Public Historians are a bunch of crazy SCA/Reenactment buffs out there making them look bad.
Okay, so it's really not that hostile (usually), but there is certainly a perceived difference, which is unfortunate because in the end, they are doing much the same thing.

So that's History 493: Public History.




Intellectual History is the one that is going to kill me. Tons of very dense reading and I'm not sure I'm always thinking about the concepts in the "correct" way. In fact, as I type, I should be reading a hundred pages in my text book. >.>

But a certain concept, a certain way of thinking, what we would call "a climate of opinion" or a zeitgeist has got me thinking. This is called the Great Chain of Being. It is the notion that all of creation falls along a continuum from least perfect to most perfect. Not that anything CAN be perfect, simply more perfect than others. Plato wrote of Matter and Form. Matter was what we perceived with our senses, while Form was where Truth resided, where the real essence of creation was. Aristotle claimed this made him an escapist, but the idea of imperceptible essence is a long perpetuated one. Later, this notion would be Christianized into the Great Chain of Being as it was understood during the Renaissance. Now the continuum was from most material to most spiritual, with Hell being the most materialistic thing (it was at the center of the Earth at the time too) and God being the most spiritual.

As you can imagine, artists LOVE this idea.



One draw was that there is an "everything in its place" mentality, which makes the universe nice and orderly. Of course, it also says that humans are teh uber, and reinforces the notion of domination over the rest of the world, but it meant no one had to wonder about their place in the world, at least on a cosmological scale.



This led me to ponder some elementary but fundamental lines of thinking.

Is the concept of a raison d'etre or "reason for being" or purpose of existence, or whatever way you'd like to contrive it...incompatible with free will?

Can we have a purpose but be required to find it for ourselves?

If we did know it, could we choose not to do it or is it tied into who we ARE, and to not fulfill it would be to stop being ourselves?

If we chose not to fulfill it, would that be considered sinfully wrong?



Obviously, on some level, this is a theological question, dependent on your view about a personal Creator. Maybe our function is dictated by our circumstances. I think most people prefer to think they are here for a reason.

So that's Intellectual History. We're going to be reading Nietchze, Darwin and Freud soon. Be afraid.

Finally, there is History of the Religion in Early America, or How the White Man and the Native Went Like Whoa Over Each Other's Faith.
Right now ,we are reading a biography of a Mohawk from Canada who became a Jesuit. She is actually up for sainthood still, which I think is pretty cool (the process of canonization has always fascinated me). She died at 24, it always seems a prerequisite for holiness, dying young. There are some very interesting discussions about the effect of constant, immediate death on the methods of missionaries. Smallpox was still demolishing the native populations, which caused many well-meaning missionaries to despair, not only out of sympathy for the pain and suffering of the those dying and their loved ones but also for all the souls lost to eternal condemnation.
It is also interesting to note that probably the only reason Catherine Tekakwitha is NOT a saint is because at the time the idea that a "savage" could reach such a high degree of holiness was completely anathema to the understanding of the universe of her contemporaries. Savage and Saint just did not go together. There was an exception. At Catherine's side as she died were two French Jesuit missionaries. One worked fervently to get her sainted, believing her worthy even before she died. The other was far more conservative and skeptical, believing it impossible for God to choose such a person. He respected her, certainly, she was very special. But saintly? Both men knew her, both saw the same things, and both wrote biographies of her life. Same event, two different perspectives, and let me tell you, it makes a radical difference.

Well, I don't think I can justify not doing homework anymore. I hope this has raised some questions in your mind. As always, feel free to comment and we can have a conversation.

~Peace Out~