Contents
Bloodsucking seducers and the walking dead, vampire academies and witchcraft schools, platform number 9 ¾ and portals through the looking glass, fairies and witches. The occult in pop culture carefully adjusts to technological progress and social neuroses.
What was otherworldly in the 90s, just ah! Light, kind, came to the aid of those in need, averted misfortune. Timur and his team, and not the product of an unknown world, hostile, in fact, to man. “Ghost” with young Demi Moore – and that says it all. The groom, loving from beyond the coffin, saved his beloved by comically contacting her through the charlatan adventurer Whoopi Goldberg. And love prevailed. Or, at worst, independence. So Alice at Woody Allen, after visiting the eastern healer, acquired the ability to be transported to different places, for example, to the couch in the office of an unfaithful husband, in order to carefully (and treacherously!) find out what was hidden from her. And so she lost her worthless illusions and began a new life – not a “baby” housewife with a rich man, but a mature autonomous person. And in general, all magic was purely “practical”, as in the mystical comedy “Practical Magic” with the young Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock, where the witch sisters, if anything, conjured, it was happiness in their personal lives.
The world then believed in happiness. He stood on the threshold of a grandiose breakthrough, he dreamed of new possibilities, the fruits of technological magic, he opened one after another the hitherto locked doors. A little more, and we could hope to talk on the videophone. Or send thoughts to another continent, so that they reach the addressee in the blink of an eye … And dreams come true. The Internet has entered the life of an ordinary earthling, and with it e-mail and Skype. The mobile phone will now show the location of the child, so that no Alder King can carry the child beyond the dark forests.
Angels fade
Our world has reached a new technological level and has become more convenient. More comfortable, but not happier. On the contrary, he experienced tragedies and upheavals that were unimaginable before. Having avoided major wars on its territory, North America did not suffer the trauma of 11/67. And the world of harmonious death, into which the heroes of Patrick Swayze went in “Ghost” and Robin Williams in “What Dreams May Come”, was replaced by a world of aggressive and ruthless death. As in the super-popular TV series The Walking Dead, the plot cyclicity of which is almost narcotic: they ran away from a crowd of people infected with a virus that turns a person into a zombie, took refuge in an abandoned prison (hospital, poultry farm), fought the zombies that had penetrated there too, the zombies bit someone one of the heroes, new zombies are coming, the heroes have fled, found shelter, bitten … And so on, six triumphant seasons and XNUMX episodes.
And they no longer make films about angels – and how many there were! Comic, scandalous, even fallen. But always useful to us mortals. Michael with John Travolta, Dogma with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, City of Angels with Nicolas Cage, Sky Over Berlin with Bruno Ganz, Otto Zander and Nastassja Kinski, Constantine: The Dark Lord with Keanu Reeves… And now there are no angels in the movies. Because it became obvious that they were not. No one saves us and no one will save us. And films about the beyond now tell not about miraculous rescues, but about dramatic overcomings that are given to lonely heroes lost in a hostile reality by exerting their last strength. Yes, and their opponents are not the same – not noble, insidious, hellish. Nasty heroes now have opponents. Like the walking dead, mindless slobbering zombies.
Waltz with a vampire
But there are new allies. It used to be that vampires were vile ghouls, cyanotic bloodsuckers, with clawed fingers and sharp ears. And now the vampire is a sex symbol. The hero in the heroic saga “Twilight”, about a girl and her immortal chosen one, who constantly sacrifices something for the sake of his beloved and even – oh knight! – could refuse sex for the safety of his beloved. That is, to sacrifice men’s everything. Eternal, he voluntarily renounced the eternally masculine … And nothing else in our time could tell him the status of a prince on a white horse. It can be seen that in women of the whole world, despite practical feminism, their great-grandmother-fundamentalist still lives, and she whispers: “A man needs only one thing from you … a man needs only this …” And therefore, when they see a man even on the screen, able to reject “this” … their heart melts. And results in box office mega fees. Every dollar invested in Twilight is paid back a hundredfold with the heart. And the living blood of our era, when it is easier to look for romance and sincere sexuality in the “areas of darkness” – where sociality ends, and with it the place assigned to you in society and the corresponding code of behavior and even feelings.
Metaphor of reality
In the meantime, the female part of humanity was languishing with a passion for elegant alpha male vampires, our favorite story is unfolding in Russia. The plot is about trampled national pride, about the trauma of the collapse of the empire. And before that, for ten whole years, he peacefully dozed in the depths of the epic about day and night patrols. Because the mystical “Patrols” is actually a story about the world behind the scenes. The fact that the world is ruled not by kings and democratic leaders, but by secret forces. “Patrols” are trying to discover the hidden spring of being, which, of course, is not triggered by our decisions and actions. It is outside of us, and it is driven by omnipotent hostile forces, whose home is darkness. Distant, located, for example, across the ocean.
Almost the main event in today’s mass culture, the Game of Thrones series, appeals to the actual emotions of a contemporary. Its realism on the verge of naturalism clearly speaks of the materiality of a seemingly fictional fantasy world. Wargs-seers, white walkers and dragons of Daenerys are only anesthesia for the viewer. Because in fact this is our world, engulfed in economic crises, military conflicts, “divine” terror and a general fear of the future. Fantasy here is a metaphor for a completely earthly existence.
Like the mystical in cinema in general, it only responds to our, sometimes pressing, needs. And generously distracts us from them.
In horoscopes we are looking for ourselves
Why are horoscopes always in fashion? They give us a sense of our own importance and make the world predictable, says semiologist Hugues de Chanay.
“We are all looking for ourselves, our identity, we listen to everything that has to do with us. Even on the page of the horoscope, addressed to many people at once, we find something about ourselves, something that concerns us personally. The horoscope is based on the idea that our inner self is connected to the cosmos; it makes us feel more valued and protected. It always comes true, because ultimately we create it ourselves. We say to ourselves: “I don’t believe in this, but I’ll still look,” and unconsciously apply predictions to our lives. The horoscope allows you to relax and not make intellectual efforts. By reading it, we unwittingly create a forecast of future events for ourselves, and this makes life more predictable. W. Sh.