Magic, Monsters, and Make-Believe Heroes: How Myth and Religion Shape Fantasy Culture 9780520967274

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Magic, Monsters, and Make-Believe Heroes

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Ahmanson Foundation Endowment Fund in Humanities.

Magic, Monsters, and Make-Believe Heroes How Myth and Religion Shape Fantasy Culture

Douglas E. Cowan

university of california press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2019 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cowan, Douglas E., author. Title: Magic, monsters, and make-believe heroes : how myth and imagination shape fantasy culture / Douglas E. Cowan. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: lccn 2018031120 (print) | lccn 2018032825 (ebook) | isbn 9780520967274 (ebook) | isbn 9780520293984 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520293991 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Fantasy films. | Fantasy games. | Fantasy. Classification: lcc pn1995.9.f36 (ebook) | lcc pn1995.9.f36 c69 2019 (print) | ddc 791.436/15—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031120 Manufactured in the United States of America 28 10

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For Joie, as always, princess and warrior-heroine . . .

Fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. —Ursula K. Le Guin

Contents

Preface 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Here Be Dragons Once Upon a Time . . . Imagining Magic Between Puer Aeternus and Vitam Aeternam The Mythic Hero: East The Mythic Hero: West Imagining the Warrior-Heroine The Stuff of Legends . . . Happily Ever After?

Mediography Bibliography Index

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1 25 50 75 97 118 141 163 186

195 201 219

Preface

When I was growing up, my parents often accused me of living more in my imagination than in the real world. And I’m not sure they were wrong. My nose always stuck in a book, my head in the clouds, as it were, I fought monsters, cast magic spells, flew spaceships, and saved the day in every story. Well, almost every story. Take, for example, my first attempt at being a superhero. It was—as it was, I imagine, for many others—short-lived. I was about five years old, and my growing comic book collection had convinced me that I understood exactly how Superman could fly. I knew that it wasn’t a feat of strength. Sure, in the early 1960s, Superman was lean and toned, but at that time he lacked the hyperbolic, indeed, comic musculature that came to mark so many other entries into the superhero genre. (Yes, I’m talking about you, Batfleck.) And even then I knew it wasn’t what would be described decades later as “the energy storage capacity of Kryptonian skin cells.” I’m with Leonard Hofstadter on that one. I mean, really, are you even listening to yourself? No, it wasn’t Earth’s lower gravity compared to Krypton, or its yellow sun, or any of the other theories that have been proposed to account for this extraordinary ability. It was his cape. At that age, I wasn’t about to let the fact that other superheroes had capes but didn’t fly spoil my fun. I didn’t think that the color made a difference, but fortunately I had a red beach towel, so color was a moot point. There was a large rock in our front yard that, though not as tall xi

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as a building, would do for a proof-of-concept test. It was just slightly bigger than me, and initial attempts to leap it had been unsuccessful. Satisfied with my plan, I tied my red beach towel around my neck, scrambled up the rock, and looked down from what appeared to my five-year-old self its towering height. Preparing for flight, already imagining myself soaring through the air, I repeated the mantra that introduced the Man of Steel every week on Adventures of Superman: “It’s a bird . . . It’s a plane . . . It’s Super—” “Douglas Edward Cowan, you get down from there right now!” Alas. My wings may have been clipped that day, my cape confiscated, but I can’t imagine my life, then or since, without stories of people who fly, who command dragons and fight monsters, who pilot spaceships, or who do any of the innumerable things our mythic imagination sets before them. I still remember, just barely into my teens, reading John Norman’s sword-and-sorcery science fantasy Assassin of Gor (1970) and weeping as the heroic racing tarn, Green Ubar, died in the arms of his rider, the mysterious Melipolus of Cos. At university, years later, when I should have been studying for tests or writing papers, I went, night after night, to the Odeon Twin and watched Star Wars again and again. To this day, when the Imperial star destroyer first drops into the frame, accompanied by John Williams’s magnificent score, the same thrill I felt so many years ago runs up my spine, and I just . . . smile. Stories have always been a part of my life. Indeed, as Stephen King says in On Writing, “Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around” (2000, 101). In many ways, this book is something of a love letter to the stories with which I grew up—or, if you prefer, on which I was raised—the stories that were, and continue to be, a significant part of my life-support system. “There are only two plots in all of literature,” novelist and critic John Gardner is reputed to have said. “A person goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.” No primary source exists for the quote, and various iterations of it have appeared in the decades since Gardner’s tragic death in 1982, but, in many ways, he’s not wrong. Neither is British journalist Christopher Booker, who insisted a generation later that “seven basic plots” box the compass of human storytelling: overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, and rebirth (2004). Some critics complain that Booker’s massive tome reveals not so much why we tell stories as what stories we tend to tell, but he too makes his point. Whether the answer is two or seven or something else—and no matter what the genre or medium—the point is

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that the boundless constellation of stories we tell are held together by the gravity of similar concerns. Like the four simple nucleobases that combine to form DNA and yield the wondrous kaleidoscope of sameness that is “us,” however many basic plots and themes there are generate the vast multiverse of human storyworld creation. This book is the fourth in a series I have written dealing with religion and various aspects of popular culture, though there is less that is explicitly about religion, per se, in this volume than in the others. With all the truly terrifying things in the world, for example, Sacred Terror (2008) asks why so many horror movies rely on religion to tell a scary story, while Sacred Space (2010) uses science fiction film and television to explore our conceptions of transcendent hope, our longing for a future bright with possibility and which is often framed in religious terms. America’s Dark Theologian (2018), on the other hand, takes an auteur approach and considers the religious imaginings of horror-meister Stephen King. Following almost naturally from these, Magic, Monsters, and MakeBelieve Heroes takes the broad spectrum of fantasy film, television, and participative culture as evidence of our ongoing need for a mythic vision, that is, for larger frames of meaning into which we continually write ourselves and through which we often give our lives direction and purpose. Over time, of course, we elevate some of these storyworlds to the status of “religion,” often taking them out of the realm of fantasy— a man living in a great fish for three days or another flying from Mecca to Jerusalem on a winged horse—and relocating them uncomfortably in the realm of “reality.” The vast majority of the few simple plots we tell over and over, however, remain as they are: stories told because we love stories and cannot get enough of them. Although it’s easy to dismiss them as merely didactic, for example, fairy tales offer us much more than simplistic warnings about “stranger danger” and why we shouldn’t go into the forest at night. If this is all there was to them, there would be little need for gingerbread houses, wicked witches, and elaborate stories about princesses and poisoned apples. The statement “don’t go into the woods, or bad things will happen” ought to be enough. But it isn’t. It never is. Why is fantasy important, then? Unlike literary novels or hard science fiction, why are we so eager to invest in storyworlds that, on the surface, can’t possibly be true? More than that, why do we continue to tell the same stories, over and over? To say, “Well, Hollywood has run out of good ideas, so they just recycle old ones” is no answer at all. It doesn’t explain why people crowd theaters to see impossibly long

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versions of The Hobbit or stand in line at bookstores for the latest Harry Potter novel. It doesn’t tell us why gamers—whether tabletop, video, or live action role-players—continually recreate essentially the same stories. And it doesn’t begin to explain why fantasy culture so closely resembles the stories much of humanity holds most sacred. That is, it doesn’t explain the mythic imagination, the principal means by which humans continually reconstruct and reinforce our place in the universe. Put simply, facts do not tell us who we are. Stories do. And we tend to tell the same stories not because popular culture has run out of good ideas but precisely because these stories are, in a word, fantastic. Before we begin, I’d like to offer an important caveat about the examples I’ve chosen and the works I discuss. That is, they are invitational, not exhaustive; exemplary perhaps, but hardly comprehensive. They are meant to encourage readers to explore those aspects of fantasy culture that excite them—Pathfinder instead of Dungeons & Dragons, or the Marvel cinematic universe (about which an entire book could easily be written) as opposed to Asian martial arts films—rather than consider that my choices bound out other explorations. A common criticism of books about film and television is that authors fail to discuss the favorite pop-culture products of different readers. Why choose the Arthur cycle of films, for example, instead of exploring the same issues through, say, the sword-and-sandal series of Italian Hercules movies, of which nearly twenty were made between 1957 and 1965? Why not consider Westerns as a fantasy genre, or spy thrillers? Surely such storyworlds as the Jason Bourne series or Salt or The Long Kiss Goodnight or the gold standard, James Bond, are as much fantasy as The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones? The answer is simple: no single book can consider every tale ever told and every movie ever made, and readers are well advised to mistrust anyone who claims to have written the complete guide to anything. That readers, viewers, and players respond differently to the diversity of popular culture available should be axiomatic. For tens of millions of people, James Cameron’s Titanic remains the apex of their cinema experience, their “favorite movie ever.” For me, it will never be anything more than three hours and fourteen minutes of my life that I’m never getting back, much of that time spent waiting for the damned boat to sink. Sorry, but that’s how I feel. It never spoke me in any way; its story never hooked me; its characters never engaged me. Certainly not in the way Ridley Scott’s Alien did when I saw it first in 1979, or Blade Runner three years later. When students ask if I have a favorite film, the

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choice is inevitably between those two. Like Sacred Terror, Sacred Space, and America’s Dark Theologian, my intent here is to invite more than to inventory, to suggest by example rather than insist on foreclosure. I hope that by following film critic Ado Kyrou’s sage advice that we “learn to look at ‘bad’ films” because “they are often sublime” (1963, 276), we come just a little closer to understanding why we tell the stories we do, and why we tell them over and over again. The fact remains, though, that some readers will be disappointed not to see their favorite novels, movies, television series, or fantasy games represented (or mentioned only in passing). If that’s the case, I would like to point out a simple fact and make a simple offer. First, fantasy culture is so amazingly diverse and so popular (in recent years it has surpassed both science fiction and horror in literary sales and feature film production), that merely listing the titles of all the books, movies, and games available would likely exceed the length of this book. That said, I hope you take what you find here not as the end of the discussion, but the beginning. Certainly, I could have considered the ways in which The Wizard of Oz has been (re)imagined, rather than Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. Not least in that wise would be John Boorman’s science fiction fantasy Zardoz (which is worth seeing if for nothing more than a ponytailed Sean Connery running around in a red Speedo). Second, instead of lamenting the exclusion of their favorites from this book, I encourage readers to apply such insights as they find to their own favorite aspects of fantasy culture, to see for themselves how they write their own ongoing story, and how those stories make their lives fantastic. And, with that, let’s roll for initiative!

chapter 1

Here Be Dragons

“Tell me a story . . .” Myths and legends, heroic quests and epic sagas, fables, fairy tales, and bedtime tuck-ins—all start from these four simple words. Indeed, writes Frank McConnell, “all the great narrative works of [humankind] begin with the demand from one primitive troglodyte to another, ‘Tell me a story’ ” (1975, 90). From our first attempts at narrative, which may have begun as early as a million years ago (Kearney 2002, 4), to the epic storytelling at the historical horizon and on to the most sophisticated forms of high fantasy television and modern shared-world fiction—that is, from Gilgamesh to Game of Thrones, from the cave paintings at Lascaux to live-action role-playing—we have been Homo narrans. The ones who tell stories. The ones who give texture and shape to our lives through the storyworlds we create and who, through story, order the scattered shards of our world into meaningful wholes. For decades, therapists have helped people resolve painful events and traumatic experiences through storytelling. Marketing companies and branding specialists work with clients to craft a “compelling story” for potential customers. Religious leaders begin weekly homilies with a story, engaging parishioners and connecting them with the day’s lessons. Storytelling affects our ability to recall things, often biasing our understanding with each retelling. And, perhaps most importantly, the more we tell a particular story, the more we come to believe the story we’re telling.

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“People think that stories are shaped by people,” writes Terry Pratchett in Witches Abroad, the twelfth in his celebrated Discworld series. “In fact, it’s the other way around” (1991, 8). “Once upon a time . . .” “It was a dark and stormy night . . .” “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit . . .” “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away . . .” “This is the Discworld . . .” All these are variations on a theme: the ubiquitous invitation to hear a story. For many, it’s that singular moment in a movie theater when the last of the house lights go out. The ads are over, the trailers unreeled, and a second or two of almost total darkness engulfs the audience, an instant of silence in which anything can happen. Pupils dilate; hearing becomes more acute. Almost unconsciously, we settle back. Our seats become the log by the campfire for the evening’s round of ghost stories, the gathering of the clan to hear Granny Meg tell her “tales o’ the auld country.” In that moment, it is as though the entire theater closes in and whispers, “Let me tell you a story.” “Stories matter and matter deeply,” McConnell continues, arguing that “make-believe stories,” whether literary, cinematic, or participatory, “are still the best version of ‘self-help’ our civilization has invented” (1979, 3; see also Boyd 2009; Gottschall 2012; Pinker 2009). That is, stories have always been far more than simply entertainment, and to dismiss them as such willfully ignores their deeper dimensions, their extraordinary power to shape human experience. Writing in the late 1970s, at the height of the first wave of human potential movements, McConnell beckons us back to the well of narrative from which humankind has drawn for millennia. “Even at the most unredeemed level of ‘escapist’ entertainment, cheap novels or trash films,” he concludes, “the didactic force of storytelling is still present” (McConnell 1979, 4). Stories, however, are not simply didactic, not intended merely to impart a moral or a lesson. They are also participatory and transformative. We resonate with stories because we so often write ourselves into them, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not. Commenting on the counterterrorism drama 24, which, for all its gritty realism, is as much a fantasy as anything else, philosopher Tom Morris points out, “my wife comes into the room and laughs when she sees me standing five feet in front of the TV, poised on the balls of my feet, ready to spring into action and help Jack if he ever needs it” (2008, xi). Full dis-

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closure: when I was binge-watching all eight “days” of 24, I would often tell my wife, “I have to go. Jack needs my help.” Whether through online fan fiction, elaborate cosplay, or dedicated accumulation of action figures, models, games, toys, and shared-world art and literature, millions of Trekkies around the world regularly write themselves into the science fiction franchise they love (Nygard 1999). Any number of Ringers, the Tolkien version of Star Trek fans, role-play their favorite characters and scenes from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (Cordova 2005). Begun in 1970 by a group of San Diego comic book enthusiasts, Comic-Con is now a bona fide cultural phenomenon, bringing together myriad aspects of science fiction and fantasy culture. Each year well over one hundred thousand people crowd the long, cavernous space of the San Diego convention center, many hundreds arriving in character as their favorite science fiction and fantasy heroes. Thousands of smaller conventions around the world attract fans equally devoted to the storyworlds they love and the stories in which their own lives find meaning. Whether it’s a blockbuster movie watched through 3-D glasses or a YouTube clip on a mobile device; a network television show or amateur online video; a role-playing game: tabletop (RPG), live action (LARP), or massively multiplayer online (MMORPG); or a graphic novel, a multivolume epic, or a trading-card strategy game—and whether it’s the profound amusement of the Discworld or a fairy tale’s dark make-believe— fantasy culture invites us into storyworlds often manifestly different from our own, yet reflecting remarkably similar concerns and experiences. Fantasy culture draws us into realms and planes populated by imaginary creatures, bizarre settings, and story arcs that whisk us away from our “normal” lives in the most astonishing, improbable, and entertaining ways. Whether we enter through the back of a wardrobe, a hole in the ground, an unseen train platform, or the simple act of reading aloud, fantasies book us passage into what Tolkien calls the “secondary world” (1966, 33–99), the world of Faërie (not fairies), the worlds of mythic imagination that are separate but not distinct from the “primary world” of traffic jams, utility bills, and dental appointments. From our species’ earliest mythic imaginings, these secondary worlds bring together three basic narrative elements. First, we glimpse some manner of what William James calls “an unseen order” ([1902] 1999, 61), a hidden realm lodged above, behind, or in between the ordinary spaces of the storyworld. Often, though not exclusively, the domain of supernatural forces, this is primarily the realm of mystery and magic.

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For the most part, these varied unseen orders remain the sole province of the storyworld, though, occasionally, their power evolves into religious belief and spiritual practice in the real world (see, for example, Cowan 2012; Possamai 2012). Next, we meet the cast of characters who brave these fantastic realms, both seen and unseen. Sometimes eager for the journey, other times setting out only reluctantly, intrepid heroes invite us to join them on their quest. Finally, alongside our heroes, we encounter various supernatural creatures, forces, and powers. Some try to be helpful (a White Rabbit to lead the way) while others are evil and treacherous (a Stoor Hobbit enchanted by a magic ring). Many are disturbingly ambiguous—a small boy appearing in flash of fairy dust—and some, simply put, are monsters. All of these elements, though, are essential to the evocative power of the fantasy storyworld, and if one is missing or drawn less vibrantly than the others, the entire narrative suffers for it. It loses some of its ability to conjure the world in our imaginations. “For believable characters to exist,” writes Mark Darrah, executive producer of the Dragon Age fantasy franchise, “they need a believable world. This goes beyond the ground they stand on” (in Gelinas and Thornborrow 2015, 9). As the house lights dim, then, as the television warms up or the video game loads, as the first page is turned, consider just a few of the ways in which we create magic, monsters, and make-believe heroes, the sine qua nons of fantasy culture and the mythic imagination.

“this is no game . . .”: dungeons & dragons Narrator the empire of Izmir has long been a divided land. ruled by the Mages, an elite group of magic-users, lowly commoners, those without magic, are little more than slaves. Izmir’s young empress, Savina, wishes equality and prosperity for all. But the evil Mage, Profion, has other intentions.

The opening narration ends, and, as we must, we find ourselves in a dungeon, with a dragon. Wooden capstans creak and grind, pulling heavy chains taut, as leather bellows huff and chuff in the background. Skeletal remains litter the floor. A bleached skull rests atop a sluice box, while the rush of water powers a complicated array of gears and arcane machinery. Dominating the center of the room, turning relentlessly on

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its axes, stands a large, bronze armillary sphere, its triple rings orbiting an ornate staff with a dark green stone cradled at one end. Enter Profion, the evil Mage, his scarlet cloak billowing as he sweeps down the worn stone stairs like an eldritch diva. He speaks, and a spell not heard in a thousand generations echoes through the chamber. Once empty, the armillary void is suddenly filled . . . with dragons. “Yes! At last!” Profion hisses exultantly, gazing upward and clutching the staff, its gem now glowing with malevolent power. “Release him,” the Mage commands. Cringing minions struggle to raise a heavy portcullis. Hideous roars echo from the darkness, and all but Profion shrink in fear. The green dragon emerges, fierce and proud, enraged by captivity. It immolates the closest servants as they scatter in panic, but Profion does not waver. “Come to me,” the Mage orders, raising the staff high above his head. The huge beast takes two lumbering steps, its massive claws furrowing the granite flagstones. Bellowing in frustration, the dragon tries in vain to stretch its wings, unable to seek the freedom of the Feywild, yet powerless to kill the one who holds it in thrall. “You have the power of the immortals,” whispers Profion’s awestruck lieutenant. “You can control dragons.” He can’t, of course, for dragons of any color only offer themselves in service willingly and for the moment, preferring death to enslavement at the hands of mere mortals. Courtney Solomon’s 2000 film, Dungeons & Dragons, follows the basic gameplay of its source material, arguably the most popular fantasy role-playing game in the world. The opening narration is the Dungeon Master’s introduction to the adventure, setting the backstory and establishing the challenges the heroes must face. Here, they seek the near-legendary Rod of Savrille, an ancient artifact said to control red dragons, the most dangerous in the D&D storyworld (Mearls, Schubert, and Wyatt 2008, 74–85). It is this film’s version of the Death Star, its Ark of the Covenant, its One Ring, its Iron Throne, its Dark Crystal. And, at all costs, Profion must not gain the Rod, for with it he will entrench the power of the Mages and reinforce the apartheid of Izmiri society. Like D&D players “rolling up” characters, a motley band of adventurers sets out to save the day. Indeed, anyone familiar with fantasy role-playing games will recognize the different races (human, dwarf, and elf) and character classes (rogue, wizard, and fighter). The tavern where the rag-tag company plans its mission could easily be the Inn of the Prancing Pony (The Lord of the Rings), the Mos Eisley cantina (Star

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Wars), or Ankh-Morpork’s pub, The Mended Drum (Discworld). Sundry guardsmen, villagers, thieves, and dungeon dwellers serve as nonplayer characters (NPCs)—story fodder for such story as there is. And, though the dragons are monstrous, Profion is the boss-monster, the final challenge, the hardest to kill, and faced only at the end of the journey. Indeed, this is a classic D&D campaign: rooms must be escaped and NPCs defeated; traps must be avoided or passed; lesser monsters vanquished; locks picked, puzzles solved, and treasure stolen. Successfully gaining the various elements of the quest, our heroes hope to survive with enough experience points to level-up at the end of the film. All that and the movie tagline: “This is no game.”

“eventually we follow our true nature . . .”: dragon age: redemption Prologue (text) In the world of Dragon age, humans hold power through their church, the Chantry. the church’s warriors, the templars, strictly regulate the use of magic, as Mages are easily corruptible by demonic possession. the Qunari, a race of formidable “grey giants,” forcibly convert humans, dwarves and elves alike to their rigid philosophy, the “Qun.” Disobedience is never tolerated. Mages from both cultures often become pawns in the unending conflict between Qunari and Chantry. . . .

Like Dungeons & Dragons, the six-part web series Dragon Age: Redemption begins in a dungeon. Although there is no immediate prospect of a dragon, there are monsters enough. In a rude cell, a prisoner lies bound to a rack. His ears betray him as an elf: Yevven the Keeper, for many years a wielder of magic among the forest peoples of Thedas. Now, his eyes are glassy with pain, his bruised skin sheened with sweat and blood. A rasp of steel whickers as a long blade slides from its sheath. Once again, the hulking torturer steps in, bending to his work. In the language of the Chantry, however, one of the two religious traditions battling for dominance in the Dragon Age storyworld, Yevven is not being tortured, merely “examined.” Suddenly, from outside the cell come the unmistakable sounds of combat. “The prisoner is escaping!” someone yells, and the jailer turns as the heavy, iron-bound door bursts inward. Stepping through the dust and smoke, a vision of hell itself. Towering above even the tallest

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humans, with long white hair and an imposing set of horns, the greyskinned Qunari looks every inch the medieval image of a devil. Barely noticing the others in the cell, he approaches Yevven and picks up the torturer’s knife, still wet with elven blood. “Amateurs,” the Qunari says, shaking his head in disdain. Based on the bestselling video game franchise Dragon Age and produced in partnership with the game company BioWare, Dragon Age: Redemption was created by Felicia Day, an actor, writer, producer, and prolific internet entrepreneur of all things “Geek & Sundry” (Day 2015). Although each episode contains less than ten minutes of action, Redemption is a wonderful example of minimalist storytelling that relies on audience familiarity with the fantasy genre, a detailed backstory drawn from the Dragon Age games, books, and shared-world fiction, and our generalized ability to fill gaps and maintain a sense of narrative coherence (see Gaider 2013; Gelinas and Thornborrow 2015). More than that, it reinforces the basic elements of fantasy storyworlds: there is magic, there are monsters, and, however flawed, there are heroes. Despite the eagerness with which the actors attack their parts—excepting Doug Jones, who plays the Qunari with a delicious, understated menace (as opposed to the scene-chewing abandon of Jeremy Irons as Profion in Dungeons & Dragons)—the story is well-plotted enough that even someone unfamiliar with the Dragon Age universe can enjoy it. Which is to say, whatever we may think of the story itself, it succeeds in evoking the storyworld and invoking the questions that drive the mythic imagination. The plot is relatively simple: a rogue Qunari Mage called “the Saarebas” (Jones) has escaped the Chantry’s custody. Using a mystical artifact known as the “Mask of Fen’Harel,” he plans to rend the veil between the worlds, raise an army of demons from an unseen realm called “the Fade,” and usher in a nightmare age of evil and despair. Both the Chantry and Qunari have dispatched agents to recapture him, the latter sending an elven assassin named Tallis (Felicia Day, who looks the very quintessence of a wood-elf); the former, Cairn, a Templar dedicated to the mission of his church (Adam Rayner, the strong, but tragically flawed hero). As in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, they are joined by other adventurers, in this case a young elven magic-wielder (heir to the title of Keeper) and a Reaver, a supernaturally enhanced mercenary who lives only for the pain and bloodshed of mortal combat. The final battle takes place at the ritual site chosen by the Saarebas for a de rigueur blood sacrifice. “For the first time in my life,” he cries, “I am not the weapon. I wield it.” Recruiting legions of the dead as foot

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fig.1 Cairn and Tallis agree to hunt the Saarebas together in Dragon Age: Redemption (2011).

soldiers for his unearthly apocalypse, he begins the incantation to open the door between the worlds. Destroying the Mask of Fen’Harel, though, Tallis disrupts the ritual and saves the world (such as it is). Minions are killed, betrayals revealed, and sacrifices made. In this game, however, there are no winners, per se, and no one is left untouched or unharmed. Moments after the Templar dies defending her from the Saarebas’s magic, Tallis faces the Qunari, who is now magically collared and at her mercy. “Why? Why this?” she asks him. “Why not just escape and live your life?” the SaarebaS I had the means to do harm, so I took it. It was almost . . . involuntary. how could I deny my function? the Qunari made me this way, as they have made you. tallIS You’re right. No matter how hard we fight it, eventually we follow our true nature. You can’t be faulted for that. and neither can I. (tallIS kills the SaarebaS.)

If one of the perennial functions of storytelling is to remind us of who we are, another is to encourage us in the quest to find out who we can be. In the Dragon Age storyworld, religion is the paramount reality and

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magic the supernatural threat—quite the reverse of Dungeons & Dragons. Indeed, Dragon Age franchise creators have gone to extraordinary lengths to evoke a religious world easily as complex and conflicted as any we find off-screen or AFK (“away from keyboard”). “Thedas would not be what it is without religion,” writes David Gaider, one of Dragon Age’s principal storyworld creators. “Faith in a higher power drives the history and politics behind every nation on the continent” (2013, 111). Characters are identified, given meaning and purpose, and ultimately challenged by their relationship both to the religions of the world they can see and to the unseen order of the Fade. Raised by the Qunari, Tallis is their weapon, the enforcer of their will. By killing the Saarebas, though, by disobeying their orders to return him alive, she risks becoming “Tal-Vashoth,” an apostate who will be left with neither name nor calling, an outcast from the only community she has ever known. The Templar, Cairn, on the other hand, is caught between his religious vows and his desire for vengeance. Prior to his initial capture by the Chantry, the Saarebas destroyed Cairn’s village, killing his entire family, including Cairn’s sister, who died in the young Templar’s arms. Thus, for each of Dragon Age: Redemption’s main characters, the hunt for the Saarebas is the journey toward who they really are. The battle at the ritual site is the moment on Dagobah when Luke Skywalker confronts his shadow self in the Dark Side Cave or when Xena the Warrior Princess meets her own violent doppelgänger in the Dreamscape Passage. This is the moment when Sarah Williams sets out through the Labyrinth to the castle of the Goblin King or when Sarah Connor offers her hand to the Terminator she has sworn to destroy. This is that incomparable moment when Sam Gamgee finally puts aside the role of Bag End’s gardener and takes his place as Tolkien’s “chief hero” (1981, 161). This is the moment of mythic imagination when we realize, once again, that all we are is not all we can be, that following our “true nature” is always a journey, never a destination. This is the path of the fantastic.

gaming conventions: setting the limits of fantasy The mythic imagination encompasses more than the simple transmission of cultural values, though this is often how we interpret the function of “story.” Fairy tales are more than just warnings to stay out of the forest,

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fables more than morality plays about living a good life, and epic sagas more than extended exercises in discovering who’s really the “hero” and who the “monster.” Stories gain their depth—and storyworlds, their evocative power—not so much in the telling, but in the retelling and reenvisioning of familiar narratives. “That variety and novelty can be found only at the place of identity,” writes literary critic Northrop Frye, “is the theme of much of the most influential writing in our century” (1971, 29)—and, I would argue, the most influential writing humans produce in any age. That is, difference—tellings, variants, and versions—becomes significant only when we know a story well enough to ask what’s been changed, to wonder why it’s been altered, and to reflect on how our experience of the story is affected by its departure from the familiar. Michael Cohn’s 1997 film, Snow White: A Tale of Terror, for example, could easily have been a pure psychological study of a woman’s jealousy and insecurity erupting in the presence of a younger, more attractive rival. Nearly everything that happens onscreen can be explained as the product of the Queen’s deepening psychosis, though as we will see, Cohn is willing to push his telling of the classic fairy tale only so far. However familiar or unfamiliar the version or telling, we tend to resonate with parts of a given story, rarely with all of it. Whether we know it or not, we ask ourselves, “Who are we in this story?” Both Dungeons & Dragons and Dragon Age: Redemption are far more than simply film and video, and more than the games on which they are based. Each invokes a richly detailed storyworld, and both are grounded in the participative storytelling of role-play fantasy. The audience is presented with the characters as imagined by the filmmakers, but each film gives us different options for identification. Solomon’s storytelling encourages us to pick a character in the main party; nothing in the film suggests we should identify with Profion or his dour enforcer, Damodar. Drawing on the Dragon Age universe, Day’s storyworld is more ambiguous, the lines between good and evil drawn with considerably less clarity. For all its monsters and magic, its elves and barbarians, Dragon Age: Redemption invites us into a world that looks remarkably like our own, a world filled with less-than-heroic characters, less-than-optimal choices, and less-than-perfect outcomes. Indeed, turning for a moment from film to tabletop or game console, the intertextual nature of these storyworlds encourages viewers to continue their own stories within these fantasy worlds, and beyond. One of the first significant changes Dungeons & Dragons creators Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax introduced to tabletop gaming was the ability to “roll

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up” characters, to choose who you will be and how you will behave in the evolving storyworld of the game (see Cover 2010; Ewalt 2013; Fine 1983; Peterson 2012; Witwer 2015). Each player selects not only the race she will play, but also the character class, preferred weapons, special abilities, and, most significantly, the character’s moral and ethical “alignment.” Using nothing more than the readily available Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set, newcomers to D&D can go on their own quests, playing a Lightfoot Halfling named Milo Goodbarrel or a female hill Dwarf named Finellen Ironfist (Mearls and Crawford 2014c). Since D&D is a cooperative game—the object being less to “win” than to succeed as part of a team—who we are in the game matters a great deal. Players choose between good, neutral, and evil alignments, each with different valences. “Chaotic good” characters, for example, “act as their conscience directs, with little regard for what others expect,” while “lawful evil” characters “methodically take what they want, within the limits of a code of tradition, loyalty, or order” (Mearls and Crawford 2014b, 122). Immersed in the video game Dragon Age, players choose from any of the races in that particular franchise storyworld, playing as characters devoted to their religion or as rogue Mages determined to breach the Fade. Many role-playing video games follow similar conventions. As in Dragon Age, creating a character is the first major action a player takes in Skyrim, the fifth entry into the popular Elder Scrolls franchise, or in the wildly popular World of Warcraft (see Bainbridge 2010; Corneliussen and Retburg 2008; Nardi 2010). In this case, that character is personalized right down to musculature, skin tone, and facial hair, as well as scars and tattooing. Rather than simply play the character assigned by the game, as one does in first-person shooters (FPS) such as Halo or Crysis, role-playing games invite participants deeper into the storyworld experience by creating the characters they will play from the ground up, as it were, and resulting in a deeper investment in those characters. As storytelling has done for millennia and literature for centuries, film, television, role-playing games, and participatory media regularly bid us to identify with, even emulate one or another character from fantasy culture—partly because it is fantasy, but partly because it accesses and ignites the mythic imagination in each of us. Whether for a child’s trick-or-treat outing or an adult costume party, the tradition of dressing up on Halloween is only the most obvious example. Consider cosplay and the fan convention phenomenon. Why do some participants dress as villains, others as heroes, and still others as

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relatively minor characters in well-known narratives? Out of the entire Star Trek universe, for instance, why would a middle-aged woman choose to cosplay “Andorian Guard #28” (possibly a reference to the original series episode, “Journey to Babel”) and not a character more central to the franchise storyworld? As we see in Trekkies, however, Roger Nygard’s delightful look at Star Trek fandom, many enthusiasts do just that, wandering between the merchandise booths as unremarkable, though remarkably detailed, Borg drones or as unnamed “red shirts” doomed to die so the named characters can beam back to the ship in the nick of time. Similarly, at Tolkien-themed events, all the races and faces of Middle-earth are represented: hobbits and elves (of course), heroic humans and dwarves (naturally), several wizards (supernaturally), but also more than a few orcs, goblins, and at least a Ringwraith or two (see Cordova 2005; Gilsdorf 2009; Stark 2012). As with cosplay and fan conventions, in role-playing contexts, being “in character” means far more than simply being in costume. Most important here is that these character choices not only determine how the game is played, but they often shape the game’s goals, victory conditions, and outcomes as well. That is, within the narrative confines of the storyworld, players write the story even as they write themselves into it. Many role-playing game systems, such as Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Numenéra, and Fantasy AGE (the RPG engine for Titansgrave), encourage players to develop dossiers for their characters, compelling backstories that will support and guide the choices they make throughout the game, and on the basis of which the game master can develop the story. Although specific game mechanics limit the abilities of various races and classes in different ways, each of these systems is nothing more or less than cooperative storytelling. Rather than simply moving tokens around the board collecting houses, hotels, and railroads, each player is expected to role-play within the boundaries of the character she’s created. As actor Wil Wheaton, designer and game master for Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana, says, “Player characters are fundamental and integral to the story, and they can and will change it while they play” (2015a). Indeed, the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons includes a new rule, “Inspiration,” which the Dungeon Master can use to reward players for bringing their characters to life in particularly convincing ways. “No matter how hard we fight it,” fantasy culture whispers to us, “eventually we follow our true nature.” Much of this, though, depends on how we limit fantasy and attempt to explain it.

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Limiting Fantasy In one sense, fantasy has no limits. All fictional narratives, all our storyworlds, and, some contend, much of what we consider the “real world,” are fantasies. Although ostensibly based in reality and reflecting a world we more or less recognize, crime procedurals still ask us to suspend our disbelief about that world in significant ways. It may be immensely satisfying to watch Jethro Gibbs and his crack team of NCIS agents solve complex cases within the narrative frame of a single television episode, but we know that isn’t how things work in the off-screen world. Serious crimes are solved through painstaking police work, months, even years of collaborative effort, and, in the end, not a little luck. Hardly the stuff of action-adventure offered on a weekly basis. Similarly, though stranded in a line of shipwreck narratives stretching from the Odyssey and Rime of the Ancient Mariner to Lost in Space and Stargate: Universe, Gilligan’s Island is no less a fantasy than Lost, its dark, complex, and often confusing doppelgänger. We know going in that any plan the castaways hatch to escape “their tropic island nest” is doomed to fail, regardless of what the Professor creates out of bamboo, coconuts, and parts scavenged from the shipwrecked Minnow. Yet, despite significant lack of initial network confidence, to this day Gilligan’s Island remains one of the most popular “magical situation comedies” in American television history (Marc 1997; Johnson and Cox 1993; Schwartz 1998). Rather than being put off by its fantastic premise, we are drawn in to the fantasy of its story. In all these cases, trading our belief in reality for the pleasure of an hour’s entertainment, we readily forgive any slight insult to our intelligence as we tune in week after week, year after year, often watching favorite episodes over and over. We accept that it’s fiction, we’re aware of the fantasy, and we even know how it ends—yet we remain emotionally, viscerally, and often intellectually engaged. “Are you not entertained?” Gladiator’s Maximus Meridius still demands of us. “Is that not why you are here?”—on the couch, in your seat, or in the stands. That is, we are continually captivated by the story. Consider another example. Anyone who has ever been in a fight—or even been hit relatively hard—knows the fantasy that is professional wrestling. No one in real life takes the kind of beating regularly suffered by characters in the squared-circle world of make-believe and returns to the ring, not just weekly, but often several times per week. The show must go on, though, for it is a show—it is a story—and tens of millions of fans not only

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embrace but also remain deeply invested in both its fantasy violence and the violence of its fantasy (see Barthes 1972; Lincoln 2014). In many ways, though, as a genre, fantasy “asks us to pay something extra,” to accept the work as a whole on the grounds that its events could not happen (Forster [1927] 1954, 159). “Rocket ships are SF,” declares Thomas Disch in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, while “magic carpets are fantasy” (1998, 3). It is “the fiction of the heart’s desire,” adds David Pringle, suggesting, though, that “we can divide fantasy fiction into as many categories as we want” (1998, 8, 19; see also Mendelsohn 2008). “Fantasy is true, of course,” warns Ursula Le Guin. “It isn’t factual, but it is true” (1979, 44). Fairy tales and animal fables; “lost race,” “lost world,” and “lost time” stories; epic battles involving wizards and witches; Arthurian legends and postapocalyptic landscapes; superheroes and supervillains—all are caught by fantasy’s web and ask us to accept things that cannot be so. “You’ll believe a man can fly,” ran the tagline for Richard Donner’s 1978 film, Superman: The Movie. We know it isn’t true, yet we’ve been lining up for superhero comic books, graphic novels, movies, video games, toys, and ephemera since the Man of Steel first appeared on Earth in 1938 (see Tye 2010; Wright 2001). Similarly, from the hundreds of peplum (“sword-and-sandal”) films that dominated European screens in the late 1950s and early 1960s, endlessly retelling stories of such heroes as Hercules, Samson, and Goliath (Cornelius 2011), to the stop-motion genius of Ray Harryhausen’s The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Clash of the Titans (Rovin 1977), fantasy culture is often synonymous with “sword-and-sorcery” storyworlds. “The sheer magic of Dynarama,” proclaims the poster for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, “now re-creates the most spectacular adventures ever filmed.” Few in the late 1950s were fooled by Harryhausen’s stop-motion Cyclops, two-headed Roc, or firebreathing dragon, but 7th Voyage proved so popular that it was nominated as one of the American Film Institute’s Top 10 Fantasy Films. These are only the most recognizable elements of the fantasy genre; there are others, many of which we will consider in due course, more than a few we will be forced to overlook (but only for want of space), all of which, though, turn on the mythic trifecta of magic, monsters, and make-believe heroes. Writing about fantasy is, in many ways, more difficult than either horror or science fiction, both of which have relatively well-established generic conventions. “Non-horror films,” for example, “may frighten the audience to tell their stories, but horror films tell stories to frighten

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the audience. In the former, fear is a side effect; in the latter, it is the object of the exercise” (Cowan 2008, 17). We have little difficulty identifying horror culture. Likewise, science fiction has at least some readily recognizable boundaries. In hard sci-fi, for example, scientific explanation or exploration of the natural world is intrinsic to the plot, and nothing is permitted that could not be logically inferred. Tron, The Lawnmower Man, even Ghost in the Shell may have seemed the height of computer-generated fantasy when first released nearly a generation ago, but they look considerably less so now, as we move closer and closer to fully immersive computer environments. While speculative fiction, such as John Boorman’s Zardoz, often turns on more sociological or psychological extrapolation, both are driven by the creative engines of possibility. “Whether implicit or explicit, every science fiction story, novel, film, or television show begins with two words: What if? What if we could travel faster than light and explore the stars? What if we could achieve immortality through cloning, transhuman augmentation, or computer uploading? What if the machine-beings we create seek their own evolution? What if those we have dominated in whatever fashion suddenly return the favor?” (Cowan 2010, 270). Although there are numerous examples of science fiction/horror hybrids (e.g., Ridley Scott’s masterful Alien) and fantasy/horror fusions (e.g., Scott’s Legend), fantasy itself boxes the compass on a much broader, less well-defined field. In Rhetorics of Fantasy, her superb “tour around the skeletons and exoskeletons of the genre,” literature scholar Farah Mendlesohn distinguishes four species of fantasy: “the portal-quest, the immersive, the intrusive, and the liminal. These categories are determined by the means by which the fantastic enters the narrated world. In the portal-quest, we are invited through into the fantastic; in the intrusion fantasy, the fantastic enters the fictional world; in the liminal fantasy, the magic hovers in the corner of our eye; while in the immersive fantasy we are allowed no escape” (2008, xiv). Often labeled “high fantasy,” immersive fantasies take place in worlds, cultures, and civilizations entirely separate from our own, existing “in place,” as it were, in their respective storyworlds. From Fritz Leiber’s Nehwon and the tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser to the Seven Kingdoms of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, from the Underdark of R. A. Salvatore’s Legend of Drizzt to the Forgotten Realms explored by legions of D&D adventurers, and from Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea to Anne McCaffrey’s celebrated Dragonriders of Pern series, these immersive fantasies are self-contained storyworlds.

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Despite the fact that thousands of LARPers gather regularly to enact their favorite scenes from the Tolkien universe, and thousands more cosplayers attend fan conventions in full Ringer regalia, Middle-earth remains an immersive fantasy. Although critics and commentators often point to the “medieval-esque” character of Middle-earth, unlike, say, J. K. Rowling’s Potterverse or Bill Willingham’s sprawling graphic novel, Fables, Tolkien’s storyworld has no connection with our own. The teachers, carpenters, homemakers, and lawyers who dress as wizards, hobbits, elves, and orcs bring Rivendell to life in a setting that is not its own, the residents of Middle-earth appearing in our world only as live action role-players or cosplayers. Going home after a particularly captivating movie or a rousing D&D adventure, we may wish we were stepping out into the Shire or the streets of Baldur’s Gate, but the smell of the parking lot, the noise of the traffic, and the utter normality of the crowds soon remind us that these are fantasies. Portal-quests, on the other hand, invite us to enter from our world into the fantastic, occasionally as captives or victims, but, as we shall see, more often as the heroes those worlds need us to be. When little Dorothy Gale “was halfway across the room,” writes L. Frank Baum in his beloved The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, “there came a great shriek from the wind and the house shook so hard that she lost her footing and sat down suddenly upon the floor. A strange thing then happened. The house whirled around two or three times and rose slowly through the air. Dorothy felt as if she were going up in a balloon” (Baum [1900] 2000, 22). On the other hand, when she sees a rabbit-in-a-waistcoat disappear “down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge,” it never occurs to seven-year-old Alice not to follow. “The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down what seemed to be a very large well” (Carroll 2000, 12). Finally, “this must be a simply enormous wardrobe!” thinks eight-year-old Lucy Pevensie as she explores the old clothes cabinet in the Professor’s house. “Then she noticed something crunching under her feet” (Lewis 2001, 113). Instead of the mothballs she expects to find or “the hard, smooth wood of the floor of the wardrobe, she felt something soft and powdery and extremely cold. ‘This is very queer,’ she said.” To say the least. Whether it takes us to Oz, to Wonderland, or to Narnia, each of these is a magical doorway from “our” world into “theirs,” from the real to the fantastic. They are flying carpets whisking us from what we think we

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know to what we must come to accept. In this, portal fantasies are always a function of the unexpected: an ordinary wardrobe opening into a magical forest; a rabbit-hole so deep that Alice wonders if she might “fall right through the earth!” (Carroll 2000, 13); a cyclone whirling a small Kansas farmhouse “hour after hour” and far, far away (Baum [1900] 2000, 24). Through the eyes of these three young girls—who represent the child in each of us who loves to explore dark and hidden spaces—we are taken and transported from one world into another. Unlike immersive fantasies, whose reality in our world is always limited to our ability to bring their characters to life for ourselves, portal fantasies are predicated on the existence of a conduit from one world to the other. Forced to pigeonhole films into less-nuanced, but more easily understood award categories, the American Film Institute defines “fantasy” as “a genre in which live-action characters inhabit imagined settings and/or experience situations that transcend the rules of the natural world.” Notwithstanding the AFI’s requirement for “live-action”—few would argue that Ralph Bakshi’s animated Wizards is not a classic of the fantasy genre—“situations that transcend the rules of the natural world” land us in the realm of what literature scholar Jan Alber calls “the unnatural narrative.” Explaining Fantasy Relying heavily on the work of Czech literary theorist Lubomír Doležal (1998), Alber defines “unnatural narratives” as “the various ways in which fictional narratives deviate from ‘natural’ cognitive frames, i.e., real-world understandings of time, space, and other human beings” (2013, 449). Put differently, these are “physically impossible scenarios and events, that is, impossible by the known laws governing the physical world, as well as logically impossible ones, that is, impossible by accepted principles of logic” (Alber 2009, 80). Think Profion’s magic spell seeking to control the green dragon, or the Saarebas ritually opening a portal to the otherworldly Fade. Think the various things Alice eats and drinks during her sojourn in Wonderland—cake, mushrooms, a potion that tastes like a mix of “cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffy, and hot buttered toast” (Carroll 2000, 17)—each of which dramatically changes her size and thus her perspective on the world around her. Or, if you prefer, think the (im)possibility of dragons, the Fade, or Wonderland altogether. Two things we should note here. First, whether they acknowledge it or not, Alber and his colleagues respect Arthur C. Clarke’s now-famous

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Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” That is, the “unnatural” is always a function of perception and the “known laws governing the physical world.” Once we understand these laws, it’s not that what seems “unnatural” suddenly becomes natural, but that we recognize it as such. Our perception changes. Our point of view shifts. Simply because we don’t understand something doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily “magic” (see Cowan 2005a). Second, despite what he describes as the “long tradition” of denigrating fiction as (at best) a waste of time and (at worst) a threat to one’s moral or psychological health—a practice dating back at least to Plato but revived with depressing regularity by a variety of moral crusaders— Alber argues for the particular value of unnatural narratives. Not only does a story about things that cannot happen “widen our cognitive horizon by urging us to create mental models that move beyond realworld possibilities, it also challenges our limited perspective on the world and invites us to address questions that we would perhaps otherwise ignore” (Alber 2013, 456). That is, rather than simply be entertained by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or the Inkheart trilogy, unnatural narratives invoke the mythic imagination and invite us down the rabbit-hole with Alice, through the wardrobe with the Pevensie children, or to read aloud with Mortimer and Meggie Folchart—and so to write ourselves into the story. Paraphrasing G. K. Chesterton, Neil Gaiman introduces his wonderful, disturbing novel, Coraline: “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten” (2002, v). More than that, through tellings and retellings, variants, versions, and reenvisionings, we come to understand the denizens of the mythic imagination differently and in greater depth. That is, as historian of religion Gary Ebersole writes, myths, mythologies, and mythistories are not “timeless and static structures but dynamic agents in the ongoing process of the creation and maintenance of a symbolic world of meaning” (1989, 6). Although the “unnatural narrative” helps define fantasy in certain practical ways, Alber’s usage is still somewhat limited—and limiting. Working not so much to understand the effect of storytelling or how different social groups value the stories they tell, he tries instead to explain how “readers naturalize unnatural scenarios” (Alber 2009, 81). That is, how do we make sense of stories that, on the surface, don’t make sense?

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In many cases, unnatural narratives are naturalized simply by reframing them as fables or fairy tales. This seems a distinction without much of a difference, though, and merely shifts the burden of interpretation. Alternatively, they can “be explained away as dreams, fantasies, or hallucinations” (Alber 2009, 82). Consider Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, a single-season spin-off of ABC’s popular fairy-tale retelling, Once Upon a Time. In the parent series, an evil spell has transported the entire European fairy-tale world to the modern town of Storybrooke, Maine. There, characters seek to recover their identities (find out who they are), break the curse (defeat the monster), and restore the balance between their world and the “real” world (complete the quest). In the Victorian derivative, Alice has finally returned from her lengthy sojourn in Wonderland, but when she tells her father about rabbits in waistcoats, mad hatters, and hookah-smoking caterpillars, he—not unreasonably—thinks she’s lost her mind. Committed for much of her adolescence to Bethlem Asylum (i.e., “bedlam”), doctors work to cure Alice’s “obvious” mental illness, although she knows (as do we) both that Wonderland does exist and that all such “impossible” stories are forever connected. Impossible stories, says Alber, can also be read allegorically, which is arguably the most common way of naturalizing them. Almost from the moment they appeared in print, for example, C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy and the Chronicles of Narnia have been hailed as peerless allegories of the Christian faith. Indeed, writes theologian Ralph C. Wood, if, “in reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, we fail to see that Aslan is a Christ-figure, we have missed the real point of the book” (Wood 2003, 5). As we will see, however, the important issue is not the telling of particular stories, but their retelling and reuse, not the recovery of urmeaning or an original source text, but understanding how and why meanings change, and how those changes reflect and refract the symbolic worlds they evoke. What happens, for instance, when a skeptic steps through the wardrobe and fetches up against the lamp-post in Narnia? Is nothing there? Is there no story into which he can write himself? If what he brings to Narnia won’t let him see Aslan as a Christ-figure, who, then, is the lion “so bright and real and strong that everything else began at once to look pale and shadowy” (Lewis 2001, 660)? Is there no place in Narnia for nonbelievers? Put differently, pace Wood, is there a “real point” to the story, and who decides what it is? Invoking the specter of post-structuralism and the “death of the author” most closely associated with Roland Barthes, what does happen

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if we assume a different readership or tell a familiar story from a different point of view? How would the chronicles of Narnia read if written from the perspective, say, of Jadis, the White Witch, or Tumnus, the faun? What more could they tell us? Gregory Maguire, for example, has created an elaborate series of novels based precisely on inverting the perspective of familiar fantasy storyworlds. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995) presents the titular character as something other than simply the villain in Baum’s famous novel, while Mirror, Mirror (2003) retells the tale of Snow White in the storyscape of Borgian Italy. Marion Zimmer Bradley, on the other hand, is best known for her magisterial The Mists of Avalon (1982). Retelling the Arthur legend through the women most important in his life— principally, his sister, Morgaine, and his wife, Gwenhwyfar—Bradley evokes a storyworld so compelling that thousands of modern Pagans regard her novel as something akin to a sacred text. This is not to say that Lewis didn’t intend Narnia as a Christian allegory. He did, and was so explicit about it that Wood’s point is all but tautological. But what other layers of the story are revealed once we suspend that requirement? Allegorical readings may be superficially satisfying, especially when we find a way to map our own social, psychological, or theological biases onto a particular story, but they ultimately reduce the tale’s ongoing mythic resonance, its ability to evolve beyond the obvious. That is, they often persuade us to stop reading, or at least to stop reading deeply. More problematically, once an allegorical reading convinces us that we’ve solved the problem, that we’ve found the interpretive key, it encourages us to stop asking questions of the text— and of ourselves. We no longer open the pages and whisper, “Tell me a story . . .” Certainly, some unnatural narratives can be read as cloaked descriptions of mental illness and deterioration. Roman Polanski shot his classic horror film Rosemary’s Baby in such a way that it can be interpreted either as a supernatural assault, which follows the plain sense of the story, or as a young woman’s regression to adolescence in the face of a pregnancy for which she is not ready and the overbearing presence of a dominant father-figure/husband whom she cannot please. Conversely, though often read allegorically, both William Friedkin’s The Exorcist and Stephen King’s Carrie ultimately resist this kind of naturalizing interpretation; too many points of view must be taken into account to dismiss them a priori as anything but the straightforward supernatural

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and paranormal struggles they purport to be (see Cowan 2008, 167–99; 2018, 23–27). Setting aside attempts to naturalize unnatural narratives, Alber’s final strategy does have potential for understanding fantasy storyworlds. Building loosely on elements of sociologist Erving Goffman’s theory of frame analysis (1974), he suggests that “processes of ‘frame enrichment’ ” can help us make sense of stories that make no sense. Consider this brief interchange from the second episode of The Big Bang Theory, a popular sitcom celebrating all things geeky and nerdy. The four male leads have invited their beautiful new neighbor Penny (Kaley Cuoco) to join them for “Thai food and a Superman movie marathon.” When theoretical physicist Sheldon (Jim Parsons) points out that a crucial scene in Donner’s Superman “was rife with scientific inaccuracy,” Penny smiles, at this point blissfully unaware with whom she’s dealing. “Yes, I know,” she says, nodding sweetly, “men can’t fly.” “No,” replies Sheldon, “let’s assume that they can.” A debate erupts about the Man of Steel’s aeronautical ability. leoNarD Your entire argument is predicated on the assumption that Superman’s flight is a feat of strength. ShelDoN are you even listening to yourself? It is well established that Superman’s flight is a feat of strength. It is an extension of his ability to leap tall buildings, an ability he derives from exposure to earth’s yellow sun. howarD and you don’t have a problem with that? how does he fly at night? ShelDoN A combination of the moon’s solar reflection and the energy storage capacity of Kryptonian skin cells. leoNarD (pointing off-camera) I have 2,600 comic books in there! I challenge you to find a single reference to “Kryptonian skin cells.” ShelDoN Challenge accepted.

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For Jan Alber, “frame enrichment” occurs when readers and viewers “stretch existing frames beyond real-world possibilities until the parameters include the strange phenomena with which we are confronted” (2009, 82–83). They make the world fit the story, rather than forcing the story to conform to the world. That said, does it really matter how Superman flies, as long as he saves Lois Lane (Superman), pushes the moon out of orbit to save Earth (Superman IV: The Quest for Peace), or destroys General Zod’s terraforming world engine (Man of Steel)? Probably not, but both Sheldon and Leonard attempt to naturalize what is clearly an unnatural narrative element in order to make sense of a world in which Superman can actually exist. Both try to explain the inexplicable. In this case, though, both Penny and Sheldon are correct: men and women don’t fly—unless they do. Penny doesn’t see a problem: Superman is a fictional character; he can fly if he wants to. How doesn’t really matter. For Sheldon, though, it matters a great deal. The unnatural narrative must be naturalized in a way consistent with the “known laws governing the physical world” of the Superman narrative. Paradoxically, for all her general lack of interest, nerd-neophyte Penny is able to enter into the storyworld more easily and completely than Sheldon, the ardent fan. For him, to make sense of a story that doesn’t make sense, the “existing frame” of the story must be extended “beyond real-world possibilities,” in this case to include “the energy storage capacity of Kryptonian skin cells.” While Alber’s concept of frame enrichment can help us interrogate the differences we encounter in well-known stories, it falls short, precisely because of what we might call the “Sheldon Cooper problem.” The principal goal of all these reading strategies is to help readers or viewers explain the inexplicable. Without such an explanation, Alber implies, we somehow lose access not only to the story itself, but to the storyworld the narrative intends to evoke. That is, if we can’t explain it, we can’t enter into the storyworld deeply enough for it to affect us. This, even for Sheldon, is clearly not the case. Our ability to hold natural and unnatural narratives in tension, without the need to resolve contradictions completely or permanently, is arguably the controlling facet of the mythic imagination. Indeed, this is one aspect of what makes it “mythic”: there are dragons, the Fade does exist, and superheroes do fly. Neither Alber nor his colleagues seem to have noticed, for example, that the most influential storyworlds in human history are based precisely on unnatural narratives, that these narratives must be held in progressively greater tension as society evolves, and that for billions of

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people it is their unnatural character that actually sanctions their authority. Consider the vast numbers of people who believe that the tribal god of a few Iron Age nomads spoke to one of their leaders from a small brush fire and issued commands which, more than three millennia later, continue to shape the lives of one-third of humankind. Almost as many people believe that an angel appeared to an illiterate merchant in seventh-century Arabia and commanded him to recover the original monotheism allegedly intended from the world’s creation. Half a world away, millions of others believe that this ur-faith was only restored after an itinerant treasure-seeker in upstate New York translated the “reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics” inscribed on a set of golden tablets and declared himself the Prophet. As a product of the mythic imagination, religion is not simply littered with similar examples of unnatural narrative, it is, in fact, predicated on them. The miraculous nature of Yahweh speaking to Moses from the burning bush, that Allah chose Mohammed as his final messenger, or that Joseph Smith was angelically led to the golden plates are not considered challenges to religious faith but are taken, by many believers, as proof of their faith. How could such things not be true, believers of all types ask rhetorically? Indeed, as the second-century Christian theologian Tertullian has been paraphrased: Credo quia absurdum. “I believe because it is absurd.” The apologetic argument for hundreds of millions of believers is that the stories must be true precisely because they sound so unbelievable, which is to say, they are so fantastic (see Cowan 2005b). Many believers rationalize these unnatural narratives by removing them from present-day experience. Quite willing to believe the gods spoke in ages past and prophets performed great feats of what, by any other light, would be magic, they are less likely to accept it when their next door neighbor claims to hear a divine voice and begins to build a rather large boat in the backyard. Again, however, this seems an explanation without an answer. Why continue to credence this set of unnatural narratives, when so many others have been abandoned? By contrast, other believers go to extreme lengths to naturalize unnatural narratives by proving that they are, in fact, not unnatural. Young Earth creationists, fundamentalist Christians who believe in a literal six-day creation and a universe just slightly older than six thousand years, have created a cottage publishing industry, a pseudoscientific enterprise, and an educational insurgency in support of their belief in a fundamentally fantastic story (Numbers 1993; Toumey 1994).

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Indeed, debates over creation myths are among the most telling examples of the convergence of factuality and fantasy as functions of social and cultural convention. On its face, the Garden of Eden story makes no more sense than does the Church of Scientology’s story of Teegeeack (i.e., Earth) or Terry Pratchett’s giant turtle A’tuin, on whose immense back stand four gigantic elephants that together support the Discworld. Why should one be thought more reasonable than the others? Because we know for a fact that there is no Great A’tuin, any more than a primordial Titan, Atlas? Because we know that the universe is only a tiny fraction of the 73 trillion years old that L. Ron Hubbard claimed in the science-fiction short story that evolved into Scientology’s creation myth? Maybe so. But the point is that these are no less fantastic, no less unnatural than a coherent, literal reading of the Genesis narrative (even were such a reading possible). They’re all magic carpets, as Thomas Disch might say. Each is a fantasy, an unnatural narrative, a counterfactual product of the mythic imagination. Yet, billions of believers, followers of any number of religious and spiritual paths, are content to leave this paradox unresolved, to hold natural and unnatural narratives in tension, to find some other way of extracting meaning than by explaining the problem away. This is one of the principal paradoxes of religious belief and practice: that in any other context their unnatural narratives would be regarded as bizarre and ridiculous. If taken at all seriously, they would be considered fantasy at best, delusion and madness at worst. As we will see, though, this is not dissimilar to the processes that ensure the survival of fables and folk legends, that is, as Jack Zipes puts it, “why fairy tales stick” (2006).

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Once Upon a Time . . .

Once upon a time, in the fairy-tale world of network television, Nick Burkhardt had it all. Young and handsome, he’s an up-and-coming homicide detective engaged to Juliette, a young and beautiful veterinarian. They seem poised to live happily ever after—until Nick learns he’s part of the Grimm bloodline, an ancient warrior family charged “with keeping balance between humanity and the creatures of myth.” No bookish collectors of folk and fairy tales, Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm were actually soldiers on the front lines of an age-old war between the seen and the unseen. Walking among us, it seems, are Wesen, the fantastic creatures we tell ourselves exist only in our nightmares: Hexenbiest (witch-beast), Siegbarste (ogre-creature), Spinnetod (death spider). In the Grimm storyworld, all the fears that live under our beds, in our closets, or just beyond the edge of the forest are real. “And you thought they were just fairy tales,” mocks the first-season tagline. Few humans can see Wesen for what they are, though, and Nick is a reluctant hero drafted into a war he does not want. His best friend in the fight is Monroe, a reclusive clockmaker, aficionado of fine coffee, and, oh yes, Blutbad, what the series calls a wolf-creature. As Grimm’s tale grows, becoming less a weekly monster hunt than a complex struggle between contending orders of reality, Monroe plays Virgil to Nick’s Dante, guiding him through the various levels of hell the young man’s life has become. In the first-season episode “Organ Grinder,” the scene is Monroe’s kitchen. Early morning light filters through the blinds. A Bodum rests on 25

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the counter, a well-worn butcher block commands the center of the room. This could be anyone’s suburban home—and that’s the point. What they both see (super)naturally passes all but unnoticed among most of the human population, a stark metaphor for the lack of awareness with which so many of us conduct our lives. Sipping one of Monroe’s custom blends, the baffled detective seeks advice from the affable werewolf. “Haven’t you ever tried to explain who you are to anyone?” Nick asks, desperate to tell Juliette what’s happening to him. “Isn’t there a way you could, you know, Blutbad for her? I could bring her over here, and you could, you know, just a little bit . . .” MoNroe No, no, no, No, NO! the vast majority of humans just can’t process that kind of information. they can believe in all kinds of stuff, you know? Gods, for example, angels and demons, and dinosaurs, and the big bang theory, and e = MC2, man. but that’s only because it’s not right in front of them. they’re not looking into the boiling core of the raw universe. So, you know, confronted with that kind of reality . . . a lot of brains just turn to mush.

Rather than an immersion story or portal-quest, Grimm is what Farah Mendlesohn calls an “intrusion fantasy,” a collision of worlds best kept separate, and usually “the bringer of chaos” to the storyworld (2008, xxi). “The trajectory of the intrusion fantasy is straightforward,” she writes, “the world is ruptured by the intrusion, which disrupts normality and has to be negotiated with or defeated” (Mendlesohn 2008, 115). From Japanese kaiju and Chinese kyontsi to Hellboy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Walking Dead, our various imaginings of the monstrous confront this rupture and attempt to manage the ongoing threat of disruption. For centuries, horror writers from Mary Shelley to H. P. Lovecraft, from Shirley Jackson and Angela Carter to Stephen King and Clive Barker have explored how we maintain the uneasy détente between the seen and the unseen. Setting aside Monroe’s curious inclusion of things we can see (or whose effects we can observe), the important point is that we believe in our gods and our demigods, our angels and demons, our fantastic invisible friends and foes, precisely because we are not confronted with them on a daily basis. Like the Superman mythos that so vexes Sheldon Cooper, intrusion stories present us with more of a challenge than either immersive fanta-

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sies or portal-quests. Dual-reality narratives, intrusion fantasies pivot on the interactions of one storyworld with our own. In Mendlesohn’s terms, if portal-quests are storyworlds we enter, intrusion stories such as Grimm, Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart trilogy, or television series such as Once Upon a Time bring well-known fantasy into collision with everyday reality. Similar to Fables, and competing with Grimm for audience share, Once Upon a Time spins familiar tales into a complex and extended intrusion narrative. Using Rumpelstiltskin’s magic, the Wicked Queen has cursed all the characters of our storybook imagination to live in the eternal sameness of Storybrooke, Maine. Everyone from the “Enchanted Forest” has shifted in place, time, and recollection: the fairy-tale princesses we have known and loved from childhood: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White; our favorite heroes and villains: Peter Pan and Captain Hook, Rumpelstiltskin, Pinocchio, Geppetto, and Jiminy Cricket. Even Cruella de Vil and Captain Nemo put in appearances. None, though, remember their former lives, and all live here, now, in our world, with no memory of the Enchanted Forest. Once again, both we and the characters are faced with the clash of worlds, a place on the troll-bridge spanning belief and skepticism. Only Henry, the adopted son of Storybrooke’s mayor (who is, in reality, the Wicked Queen) knows the truth. Carrying a book of fairy tales wherever he goes, Henry’s quest is to force remembrance, to recover memory, and so break the curse. The first person he must convince? His estranged mother, Emma Swan, the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming. As an infant, Emma was sent away in a magical cabinet mere moments before the curse fell in the Enchanted Forest, and only she can make time begin again in Storybrooke, only she can break Rumpelstiltskin’s spell. Like the subjects of so many other origin-myths—from Sargon, Moses, and Jesus to Kal-El, John Connor, and Buffy Summers— Emma is the mythic redeemer-child who is removed at birth from harm’s way, but who returns as an adult in the role of world-savior. Note, though, that even this becomes a matter of perspective. In these stories, rarely is ours privileged as anything other than the “real” world, and theirs the “intruder,” the realm of Faërie crossing into the land of the mundane. Other storyworlds, however, such as Peter Pan and Harry Potter, are hybrids that merge portal and intrusion fantasies. Their fantastic nature is precisely a function of two worlds competing, as it were, for the same space. Far more so than immersion stories, then, intrusion fantasies add the tension of worldview conflict—between

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wizards and Muggles, between Lost Boys and post-adolescents, between Wesen and humans. That is, between everything we’ve dismissed as “fairy tales” and all that we’ve been taught to regard as the “real world.” This is the frisson that ripples through us when another world rubs up against our own, when the shadows quiver, and we wonder whether there really are such things as monsters. At their most basic level, intrusion fantasies ask us to accept the dual realities of Edwardian London and Pan’s Neverland, of an English country estate and the world of Narnia, of King’s Cross Station and the Hogwarts Express, of European folklore and downtown Portland. While many critics still advert to Coleridge’s hoary “willing suspension of disbelief,” when we are considering fantasy something more profound than a moment’s simple incredulity is at play. Indeed, Tolkien regarded both the “willing suspension of disbelief” and the willingness of his own colleagues to rely on it for explanation as “a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed” (1966, 61). Rather than encouraging such suspension, Tolkien argues that “what really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’” (1966, 60; see Wolf 2012). She creates a world in which we can believe for the duration of the story, a world we will accept as real for as long as the tale lasts, an unnatural narrative we feel no need to naturalize. Instead of asking audiences to set aside their collective belief that “this just can’t happen,” Tolkien suggests that sufficiently compelling “secondary worlds” regularly create situations in which we wonder “Could this really happen?” and “What would happen if it did, if it happened here?” Speaking once again with E. M. Forster, unlike Izmir or Thedas, unlike Middle-earth or the Underdark, intrusion fantasies regularly ask us to “pay something extra” for admission to their storyworlds. And we are happy to pony up. Recent decades have seen numerous fantasies of this type find their way onto our pop-culture menu. With comic book and film franchises such as The Avengers and Thor, the Marvel universe has for decades traded in a fascinating hybrid of the superhero/action hero intrusion fantasy. Throughout the dark and brooding television series Supernatural, brothers Sam and Dean Winchester hunt down all manner of otherworldly villains invading our world. Like Nick and Monroe, they are frontline soldiers in an ancient war between the seen and the unseen. In The Subtle Knife, the second of Philip Pullman’s celebrated His Dark Materials trilogy, a doorway between parallel universes allows charac-

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ters to travel back and forth, changing events in both worlds (see Freitas and King 2007; Wheat 2008; Yeffeth 2005). Brandon Mull’s fivevolume children’s fantasy, Fablehaven, presents folk and fairy-tale creatures gathered for their own protection in the “the last stronghold of true magic,” the eponymous Fablehaven sanctuary. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series brings all the characters of Greek mythology into conflict with (and within) the modern Western world. For a delightful twist on this same theme, Marie Phillips’s Gods Behaving Badly (2007) is well worth the price of admission. In Bill Willingham’s Fables, a dark power has exiled all storybook folk, both human and nonhuman, from the Faërie “Homeland.” Like Andrew Lang’s rainbow collection of “fairy tales,” which were published between 1889 and 1910 (see Tolkien 1966, 33–99), any creature even vaguely mythical finds a place in Willingham’s storyworld. Human fables (or those able to maintain human form) live together in a Manhattan apartment building that wonderfully resembles the iconic Dakota. Bigby Wolf serves as the sheriff, Snow White is the mayor, and Old King Cole is, well, the king. Nonhuman fables—the Three Little Pigs or the Three Bears, for instance—live upstate in a protected compound known as “the Farm.” Nothing about Fables, though, is as it seems. Riffing on Orwell’s Animal Farm, for example, rather than the sweet young girl who wanders in for some porridge and a nap, Goldilocks is a borderline psychopath bent on inciting Bolshevik-style revolution among the Farm’s fable creatures and then installing herself as dictator. In Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love, a spin-off comic book series by Chris Roberson and Shawn McManus (2010), the eponymous princess is actually a highly skilled secret agent carrying out covert missions on behalf of the fairy-tale folk. Post–Stargate SG-1, actor Amanda Tapping produced and starred in Sanctuary, a science fiction fantasy based on premises not dissimilar to Fables and Fablehaven. Born in the mid-nineteenth century but given all but immortality through the experimental ingestion of vampire blood, Dr. Helen Magnus (Tapping) uses her talents, intellect, and considerable resources to manage a group of “sanctuaries,” institutions designed to protect and study “legendary” creatures. Rather than mythical, though, Sanctuary’s assumptions mirror those of the Grimm storyworld and take questions of cryptozoology seriously. Magnus believes that all the creatures we have mythologized are not, in fact, supernatural, but “abnormal”—another perspectival bias such intrusion fantasies almost inevitably highlight. Rather than monsters, per se, they are evolutionary

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mutations that split off from our common ancestral lineage millennia ago. Ranging from mermaids to werewolves to Magnus’s best friend and confidant, a Sasquatch, “abnormals” manifest abilities we simply do not yet understand. Taking a slightly different tack, more X-Files than Supernatural, though with considerably more humor than either, Syfy’s Warehouse 13 pits a secret government agency against historical artifacts that are imbued with occult power and which threaten the security of our world. From Alice Liddell’s looking-glass to Attila the Hun’s helmet and Beatrix Potter’s tea set, Artie Nielsen (Saul Rubinek) and his team track down, neutralize, and store these objects in the thirteenth of a series of warehouses whose lineage stretches back into antiquity. Like Hellboy’s Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, intrusion fantasies such as these invite us into the world of “the ones who bump back” against all those things that go bump in the night. Each of these particular storyworlds is predicated on the kind of survival hypothesis exemplified in the work of Egyptologist Margaret Murray (1921), the notion that we have encoded in fables, folk legends, and fairy tales our encounters with real creatures, real beings, and forces with whom we share the world, but which we have forgotten, eliminated, or forced into hiding. Intrusion fantasies provide a framework of meaning for things people claim to have experienced, but which we are at a loss to explain. As Monroe the werewolf tells Nick the detective, they remind us that many of these creatures can be seen, as he says, “if we want to be seen. Which, by the way, accounts for a great many of your legends.”

the cauldron of story Society is the great “cauldron of story,” to use Tolkien’s lovely phrase (1966, 52), the cultural stew-pot in which these various imaginings of ours are mixed, mingled, and served up hot. However, writes Jonathan Gottschall in The Storytelling Animal, “we do not know why we crave story. We don’t know why Neverland exists in the first place” (2012, xiv). Clearly, we enjoy stories, we delight in them, and they affect us deeply, often for a very long time. I may not remember every story I’ve ever read, but some remain as emotionally vivid to me now as they were when I first encountered them decades ago. We use stories to pass the time, to reduce stress and expand our minds, to instruct our young and reinforce appropriate moral and ethical sensibilities. More than that,

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shared stories bond social groups together. Consider how many times you’ve felt included (or excluded) from a conversation based on nothing more than, “Hey, did you see X on TV last night?” or “Did you see the new Y movie?” or “Have you read the latest Z novel?” Following the work of literary theorist Brian Boyd (2009) and psychologist Steven Pinker (2009), Gottschall argues that one of the principal evolutionary advantages of story, particularly unnatural narrative and make-believe adventure, is its function as a prototype for life, a kind of “flight simulator” for the real world. “Fiction,” he writes, “is a powerful and ancient virtual reality technology that simulates the big dilemmas of human life.” That is, storytelling “allows our brains to practice reacting to the kinds of challenges that are, and always were, most crucial to our survival as a species” (Gottschall 2012, 67; see also Saler 2012). We are hard-wired, as it were, to appreciate a good story, especially when it poses a dilemma, problem, or conflict in which we can see ourselves. For millennia, fiction has served as our rehearsal for many of life’s most profound questions. Consider the moral quandary posed to any number of undergraduate philosophy classes: Given the chance, would you kill someone if you knew you could get away with it? And, if so, whom would you kill, and what do you think would happen to you if you did? Drawing on the noir genre, Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso’s DC comic book, 100 Bullets, asks precisely this question. “In the attaché is a gun, and one hundred rounds of ammunition,” says the shadowy Agent Graves. “All untraceable, all yours. Do with it as you see fit. If you act on this information, you will have carte blanche. I’ve seen to it that no law enforcement agency can touch you” (Azzarello and Risso 2000, 14). How hard is it not to write ourselves into that story? What we would do if presented the opportunity to take the ultimate revenge on someone—with no personal consequence at all? Similarly, Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s manga, Death Note, follows the fortunes of Light Yagami, a Japanese student who gains supernatural power over life and death. By eliminating those he considers criminals, Light hopes to usher in a millennial age of peace and good will. As he learns, though, things are rarely that simple. In 11/22/63, Stephen King uses the artifice of time travel to explore the consequences of a world in which John F. Kennedy was not assassinated that terrible day in Dallas. Stories such as these, King suggests, are always “an act of willed understanding” (2008, 533), and, indeed, he writes, “only through fiction can we think about the unthinkable, and perhaps obtain some kind of closure” (2015, 268).

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For Scott McCracken, an important part of this “act of willed understanding” is genre. From dime-store detective novels and horror stories to science fiction, manga, and anime, genre’s significance “lies in its ability to supply a pattern or structure which mediates the relationship between self and society in a particular way” (1998, 12; see Frye 1963, 21–38). Recognizing that no artistic creation emerges in isolation from its cultural or political context, literary critic Fredric Jameson suggests that genre constitutes something of a “[social contract] between a writer and a specific public” (1981, 106). The questions, then, become: What pattern is supplied in any particular cultural situation, and what social contract enacted? More than that, what happens when the pattern is disrupted, when this implied covenant between author and audience is broken or altered? What happens when things go wrong? Despite our pattern-seeking predilection for the familiar, complaints about the supposed dearth of new ideas coming out of one entertainment genre or another are commonplace. One movie looks like another, that television show is nothing but a reboot, this novel rips off someone else. That is, in the great cauldron of story, one bowl of stew tastes like any other. Without doubt, many of these complaints are valid, but the grumbling doesn’t address the more basic question of why we replicate stories at all, why we change them in the retelling, and, most importantly, why we continue to invest in their repetition. Put differently, if we are so weary of the same stories told over and over, why continue to line up for tickets, click to view content, and wait impatiently for the next installment, no matter how we felt about the last one? (Yes, we’re talking about you, George Lucas.) Why do we continue to take our seats in the theater of the mind and whisper not just, “Tell me a story,” but “Tell me the same story”? To begin to understand this, we need to distinguish between different “species of sameness,” as it were, between variants and tellings. Variants and Tellings Although they are not always entirely discrete categories, following the work of folklorist A. K. Ramanujan (1991), a telling describes a story for which we have no identifiable ur-text, while versions or variants describe storyworlds for which there is an established original. The stories of Cinderella, Briar Rose, and Little Snow White may have evolved into standard forms, but their originals are lost to us. They are tellings.

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True, certain tellings have become canonical—Grimms’ fairy tales, for example, or their saccharine Disney counterparts—but canonicity is always a function of a story’s reception and circulation within a particular social and cultural setting. It is canon because a particular group accepts and passes it on as canon. Versions and variants, on the other hand, have an authoritative text to which we may refer: Peter and Wendy, for example, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, or The Lord of the Rings. While no definitive ur-text exists for either the puer aeternus or the nonsense tale—or for the epic quest itself—the specific stories of Peter, Alice, and the Fellowship of the Ring are available, and provide limit-cases for later versions of the original. Each of these, however— telling and variant—presents its own temptations and challenges. Variants, especially film or television adaptations of well-known literary works, can lead us down the rabbit-hole of fidelity criticism, the notion that because we have an identifiable original, it should exercise narrative authority over subsequent versions. Here, the temptation is simply to compare the adaptation to the original and highlight the differences and similarities, as though that alone answers any questions we might have. In this instance, the goal is usually to demonstrate the superiority of the literary original over the cinematic imitation. Indeed, in their introduction to The Encyclopedia of Novels into Film, John Tibbetts and James Welsh suggest that while “movies do not ‘ruin’ books,” necessarily, they do, more often than not, “misrepresent them” (2005, xix). That is, for them, movies very often get books “wrong.” Considering various adaptations of Beowulf, for example, philosopher Stephen Asma argues that “even if Beowulf is a pastiche of Christian revisionism mixed with Norse paganism, it’s important to locate the precise nature of the amendments” (2009, 98). The original provides a framework for interrogating and, perhaps, understanding later versions. “In the original story Beowulf is a hero,” Asma writes, but in Robert Zemeckis’s 2007 film “he’s basically a jerk, whose most sympathetic moment is when he finally realizes that he’s a jerk. It’s hard to imagine a more complete reversal of values” (2009, 101). This inversion, Asma suggests, reflects a significant cultural shift in how we regard the nature of the Other. “In the original Beowulf,” he continues, “the monsters are outcasts because they’re bad”; banishing them to the “cloud of misted moors” beyond the village is an act of self-defense for the villagers. “In the new liberal Beowulf,” Asma counters, “the monsters are bad because they’re outcasts”; that is, dehumanizing Grendel and his mother, representing them as monsters, reinforces the self-identity of the villagers as

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not-monsters (2009, 101). This is a shift in perspective we will see more than once. For those who pursue fidelity criticism, the measure of an adaptation’s worth lies in its “faithfulness” to the original (Desmond and Hawkes 2006). Fans of high fantasy ranging from the Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter to The Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire regularly (and often acrimoniously) engage in online debates over the varieties of difference between film and text: the fusion or elimination of characters, plot additions or deletions, the collapse of narrative timelines, and the reorganization or even reinvention of storylines. Some critics, in almost fundamentalist fashion, hold to a de facto preeminence of the written word, while others are thrilled to embrace the reinterpreted aspects of a film or television version. For the former, the onscreen realization of a favorite story may conflict with the image they have carried for years, while for the latter, a film or television adaptation can very easily become itself canonical. This is the variant’s second challenge: the problem of the authorized version. Published in 1937, The Hobbit is one of the most beloved novels in English literature, and since its debut, it has been high fantasy’s infection vector for countless millions of readers. Bilbo’s journey to Smaug’s lair deep in the Lonely Mountain, the rescue of the dwarfs from the giant spiders of Mirkwood, and the climactic Battle of Five Armies has everything one could ask for in a fantasy adventure: wondrous magic, terrifying monsters, and unlikely heroes. More than two generations later, following the worldwide success of his Lord of the Rings trilogy, director Peter Jackson released his three-part adaptation of The Hobbit. In theaters, each of the first two parts was nearly three hours long, while the third was well over two. Put differently, it is possible to read the original novel aloud to your children in less time than it takes to watch Jackson’s version with them. Yet, given the supply-side nature of modern popular culture, it’s almost axiomatic that, having seen the movies, millions of people around the world now feel no need to read the book. For them, Jackson’s films have become the “authorized version.” “Adaptations may replace novels,” Tibbetts and Welsh complain, for people “who are not disposed to read or who simply find it more convenient to locate inferior Hollywood adaptations on videotape”—or, now, stream them online—“than take the time to read the originals” (2005, xviii). And why would they read? Don’t they “know” the story already? Perhaps not. Those familiar only with Jackson’s adaptation may not realize that the principal female lead, Tauriel, the head of Mirkwood’s elven guard,

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does not appear in Tolkien’s original. She was created for the films, particularly the second and third installments. While Jackson and his production partners had what they consider legitimate reasons to add her character—not least an attempt to balance the novel’s almost entirely male dramatis personae—her appearance outraged many Tolkien purists. For those who know only the film version of the story, however, Tauriel has become canonical. Simply because they know no different, she is part of their “authorized version” of The Hobbit. Or take the dwarven company’s captivity in the goblin caves. As a child, when I first read the novel, this was one of the most frightening sequences—far more so than sneaking into Smaug’s lair or even the desolation of Esgaroth. In Jackson’s hands, though, the goblin sequence becomes something of a cabaret number, a song-and-dance fest that looks more like an outtake from Jim Henson’s Labyrinth than the life-or-death escape story portrayed in the original. Yet, again, for the millions of people who have only seen the films, this becomes the authorized version. The problem becomes even more acute with revised or director’s cut versions of popular films. For those of us who thrilled to the original Star Wars in 1977, Han Solo (Harrison Ford) will always have shot first in the Mos Eisley bar, no matter how George Lucas digitally manipulated the scene when the film was rereleased a generation later. Similarly, which version one sees of Ridley Scott’s iconic Blade Runner (itself only loosely based on the Philip K. Dick original, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) determines whether main character Rick Deckard (also played by Ford) is a human or, at least potentially, a replicant like those he has been tasked to “retire.” If variants present us with problems of fidelity criticism and the authorized version, tellings often involve us in something of a Woozle hunt for the ur-text, the true original. We tell ourselves that if we can narrow down the differences, if we can plot the core similarities retained over time and across cultural tellings, then perhaps we have come close to the prototype story. The assumption here, which is often left unstated, is that a story’s true significance resides in this recovered original, that somehow what it meant in the beginning must control what it means now. Like the fidelity critical approach, the premise is that, once established, this original should exercise authority over later tellings. “Origins,” however, writes classicist Eric Csapo, “do not explain why any particular event or experience”—or, in our case, any particular story—“was considered significant enough to merit so many retellings. What has to be explained is not the event behind the myth, but the

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criteria of social selection, and not the moment of conception, but the process of preservation” (2005, 161–62). We need to ask both how stories change in tellings and variants, and in response to what social pressures and cultural demands. Indeed, as Émile Durkheim proposed in The Rules of Sociological Method, “when one undertakes to explain a social phenomenon, the efficient cause which produces it and the function it fulfills must be investigated separately” ([1895] 1982, 123). Thus, the tellings and retellings of popular stories can be neither anchored to nor explained in terms of their originals. It is precisely in their reuse, their reinterpretation and re-presentation, their recirculation in the cauldron of story that we taste the significance of difference. The Significance of Difference “Comparison,” writes historian of religions Jonathan Z. Smith, “has been chiefly an affair of the recollection of similarity. The chief explanation for the significance of comparison has been contiguity” (1982, 21). Certainly, this calls onto the scholarly carpet the work of mythographer Joseph Campbell, who declared that his most well-known work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, is explicitly “a book about the similarities” between myths and legends, folk tales and fairy lore, indeed, between unnatural narratives of all types (1968, viii). That Campbell was aware of the often vast differences between his sources, however, is equally clear. He knew that different cultures produce widely varying versions and tellings. He knew that stories inevitably change over time. He admits as much. In terms of Hero’s primary goal, though, these differences simply didn’t matter. By concentrating on the similarities of stories we’ve told over and over, by excluding their differences as distracting at the very least and irrelevant at most, Campbell hoped to uncover the very ur-texts of humankind’s mythological imagination. He was seeking some “vast and amazingly constant statement of the basic truths by which man has lived throughout the millenniums of his residence on this planet” (Campbell 1968, viii). This is the elusive “contiguity” served by Campbell’s focus on resemblance and his elision of contrast. When analyses are predicated on similarity, however, and interested only in what correspondence can tell us, “the issue of difference has been all but forgotten” (Smith 1982, 21). Smith’s famous essay “In Comparison a Magic Dwells” urged scholars to take a very different approach, to see the value of difference as an analytical tool. That some framework of resemblance is necessary for reason-

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able investigation and evaluation is not at issue. We need to know a story well enough to recognize what’s different and to wonder why it’s been changed. If we don’t, then we are left floundering for any interpretation at all. That said, contra Campbell, for Smith, the significance of comparison lies in explaining the difference between versions of something, not simply in pointing out their similarities. “Comparison,” he writes, “is, at base, never identity” and “requires the postulation of difference as the grounds of its being interesting” (Smith 1982, 35). To examine Smith’s contention and explore the significance of difference, the nuances of telling and variant, let us consider three of the most beloved stories in Western culture, what we might call “the princess diaries”: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White.

reading the princess diaries According to Tolkien, a common misconception about fairy tales is imagining that because they are so often about children, they are intended only for children. Any interest adults have must derive either from an unfulfilled longing for their own childhoods (i.e., nostalgia), an unwillingness to accept the mundane seriousness of adulthood (i.e., immaturity), or, perhaps (though Tolkien never went this far), an unhealthy interest in adolescent boys and girls (i.e., creepiness). As a general statement, none of these could be further from the truth. Indeed, Tolkien regarded this “childhood-sentiment” as “a dreadful undergrowth of stories written or adapted to what was or is conceived to be the measure of children’s minds and needs. The old stories are mollified or bowdlerized, instead of being reserved; the imitations are often merely silly” (1966, 65). This may be true, but comparing the “imitations,” looking for the shades of meaning encoded in difference, invites us once again to “pay something extra” and ask what we can learn from these fantasy stories we think we know so well. “Who Are You?”: Cinderella In its most basic form, the “Cinderella story” is the tale of a poor girl who makes good, marries well, and, as a result, lives happily ever after. In popular culture, the trope has come to represent anyone or anything that overcomes great odds and triumphs in the end. In terms of Cinderella herself, from animated and live-action films to plays and Broadway musicals, from adult cosplay to Disneyland’s “Bibbidi Bobbidi

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Boutique,” where little girls “can be transformed from head to toe into little princesses” (and little boys into princes), the story has been retold countless times and in every conceivable genre (see Zipes 2006, 91–128). Disney released its classic animated feature in 1950, and, though it quickly became the canonical telling in our culture, it took only a decade for comedian Jerry Lewis to spoof the story in Cinderfella (1960). A generation after that, Pretty Woman (1990), Garry Marshall’s romantic fantasy about a kind-hearted prostitute and a wealthy-customerturned-suitor, became one of the most famous of the modern Cinderella tellings. After the Ball (2015) relocates the fairy tale to the world of high fashion, billing itself as “a modern Cinderella story, with crossdressing,” while Elle (2010) tells the story in terms of an aspiring singersongwriter. Although more canonically faithful, Ever After (1998) shifts the narrative focus and links the main character’s appeal more to her headstrong nature and concern for the kingdom’s less-fortunate than to her extraordinary beauty and good fortune with glass slippers. Once Upon a Time’s telling, however, “The Price of Gold,” casts Cinderella as a pregnant waitress about to become a single mother. In the Enchanted Forest backstory, just as she was preparing to leave for the ball, Rumpelstiltskin murders her fairy godmother and forces his own magical deal upon the unfortunate young woman. She would indeed marry the prince, but someday Rumpelstiltskin would want something in return. Now in our world, she is desperate to break the contract and avoid giving her baby up to Rumpelstiltskin’s Storybrooke alter ago, Mr. Gold. Turning even further to the dark side, Stephen King’s breakout novel, Carrie, has been described as “essentially the Cinderella story tricked up with telekinesis and bloody special effects” (Hogan 1986, 268), while another critic considers it “the story of Cinderella-gone-bad; there is no Prince Charming to come back to fit the glass slipper onto her foot and take her away from a life of suppression” (Davis 1994, 22). Instead of marrying the prince, this Cinderella burns the kingdom to the ground. Some tellings add to or change just enough of the story’s plot to explain why things happen, to alter our perspective on a well-known tale. Often, these differences provide greater insight into secondary and supporting characters. The opening narration in Disney’s 1950 animated Cinderella, which is based on the Charles Perrault telling rather than that of the Grimm brothers, tells us merely that it was the “untimely death” of her father that ultimately revealed her stepmother’s “true nature”: “cold, cruel, and bitterly jealous of Cinderella’s charm and

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beauty.” Blending families, however, is rarely easy, and abused, ignored stepchildren are hardly a historical anomaly. Indeed, these brute facts of human family dynamics may explain why “Cinderella’s domestic situation is iconic” (Daly and Wilson 1998, 2), why it warrants so many tellings and retellings. Imagine, for a moment, though, the stepmother’s position: her new husband has died, and she is left suddenly alone, with no partner, two daughters of her own, and a stepchild she barely knows, let alone loves. More than that, she’s saddled with the cost of running a large estate but has no business income to support it. Disney’s 1950 telling makes her cruelty a function of jealousy in the face of a younger, more beautiful rival, something we see also in both Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. In this case, though, Cinderella is not her rival, per se, but someone who stands in the way of potential suitors for her own ungainly, less-attractive daughters. This is not a family story we tell over and over because it’s uncommon, but precisely because it’s not. Without the framework of the familiar, the notion of difference is meaningless. Sometimes the difference is subtle, but significant. Released two generations after the animated film, Kenneth Branagh’s 2015, live-action telling of the same Disney story changes just enough of the prologue for us to understand Cinderella’s stepmother more clearly, even more sympathetically. Soon after his marriage, as he prepares to leave on another business trip, “Ella’s” father takes her aside. Quite naturally, she doesn’t want him to go. She doesn’t know her new stepfamily and she misses her own mother, who has recently died. “Your mother’s here, too,” he assures her earnestly. “Though you see her not, she’s the very heart of this place. That’s why we must cherish this house, always, for her.” What neither sees, however, is his new wife, Ella’s stepmother, listening just outside the room, and learning in that moment that she will never truly be the mistress of the manor. She will never know the full measure of her new husband’s love, and every glimpse of her stepdaughter will serve only to remind her of that fact. As Ella’s father leaves, never to return, the young girl seeks comfort from her new stepmother. “Oh, you needn’t call me that,” the older woman replies. “‘Madame’ will do.” Although it’s easy to read this brief scene through the lens of simple jealousy that marks the 1950 telling, it actually reflects the kind of subtle change Asma points out in Beowulf. In the original Disney film, we are encouraged to see the stepmother as monstrous because she is “cold, cruel, and bitterly jealous”; that is, her “true nature” makes her an outcast in terms of the story and the expectation of our response to it. In

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Branagh’s telling, however, which was written by Chris Weitz (who also adapted The Golden Compass for the screen), the stepmother’s callousness and cruelty are functions of her inability to see herself as anything other than second place in heart and home. It is this sense of rejection that hardens her toward her stepdaughter and ultimately makes her an “outcast.” More than that, it invites the audience to identify more closely with Ella’s stepmother, to pity rather than to vilify her. In other tellings, the issue is one of “true identity.” That is, who (or what) is “Cinderella”? What will she become when she’s finally revealed? Magic creates the illusion of identity: the carriage, the horses, the beautiful blue dress that is all but emblematic of the Disney princess, the glass slipper that is the mythic icon in the story. Though Cinderella is admonished to be “good and pure,” physical beauty is what first captivates the prince or hardens the hearts of her stepfamily. In the Disney telling, that’s all we need to know. Beautiful girls get the prince; less attractive women, whether physically or psychologically, are left to watch from the sidelines. Some tellings alter the tale so dramatically that, though recognizable, it hardly seems the same story. The Grimm episode “Happily Ever Aftermath” has Nick Burkhardt investigating a rich woman’s mysterious death and not only reverses the canonical Cinderella story, the one in which magic and goodness overcomes the wickedness and cruelty of the stepfamily, but turns it inside out. At a gala fundraiser one evening, Arthur Jarvis, a supremely eligible Portland bachelor falls in “love at first sight” with a beautiful young woman named Lucinda, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. They marry, move into a palatial mansion, and begin the process of living happily ever after. Unfortunately, within a few years, with Lucinda’s inheritance left to her stepfamily, a Ponzi scheme renders her and Arthur all but penniless. They live the modern version of the fairy-tale life: wealth, power, and prestige, but it is falling apart from the inside, hollowed out by the loss of their finances and overextended credit cards. The lifestyle they are about to lose is the episode’s metaphor for the façade that Lucinda has maintained as the perky, devoted wife. Indeed, Arthur’s “love at first sight” has blinded him to her “true nature.” The Grimm reality is that both Lucinda and her godfather, Spencer, belong to a species of Wesen known as Geolterblitz, literally, “bat out of hell,” a sociopathic creature that tortures and kills its prey with highpitched screams. “As long as she got everything she wanted,” Spencer explains to Nick, “it worked. But she has no conscience. She’s uncontrollable, and she made those people’s lives miserable.” That is, in this

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telling, Cinderella is the monster, the one cast out from the family for their own protection. A “legendary liminal being,” Lucinda exists caught between two fantasies: the fantasy of the life she created and that continued as long as her desires were fulfilled, and the fantasy of her own true nature, which ensured that she could never be satisfied. “She said she never loved me,” Arthur laments, when he finally realizes that their fairy tale is over and that there will be no happy ending. “Hello, Godmother”: Sleeping Beauty For Sleeping Beauty, the next chapter in the princess diaries, the question is not what constitutes the true self, but what it means to have true love. In Disney’s 1959 animation, the princess Aurora can only be awakened by “true love’s kiss,” an act of devotion based on the “love at first sight” trope, and which became, for decades, the coin of the realm in the Magic Kingdom and beyond. However, as the tagline for Disney’s 2014 liveaction film Maleficent warns us, “The story is not quite as you’ve been told.” Rather than Cinderella’s tiny glimpse of the stepmother’s motivation, Maleficent’s point of view is that of Sleeping Beauty’s principal villain, the wicked fairy whose curse doomed the princess to a century’s sleep. In this it asks the question: where do bad fairies come from? Once again, the broad structures are familiar; it’s the same story, after all. King Stefan and Queen Leah have a daughter named Aurora, and all the kingdom rejoices. Various good fairies bring an assortment of gifts, but before the last is bestowed, a wicked fairy interrupts the ceremony, and the curse that creates “Sleeping Beauty” is cast. In the animated film, Maleficent simply appears at court in a burst of green flame, her imperious pride wounded at not being invited to the celebration. “You weren’t wanted,” Merryweather, the blue fairy, tells her firmly. Once again, as with Cinderella’s stepmother, the implication is that Maleficent is considered an outcast because of her wicked nature. We learn no more than that, and for decades, nothing more was required than this simple fairy-tale tautology. In the end, good magic strengthens true love, the prince’s kiss awakens the sleeping princess, the wicked fairy is destroyed, and the royal couple—well, you know the rest. Robert Stromberg’s 2014 film embraces both the iconography and aesthetics of the Disney original. Indeed, in the title role and costumed by Anna B. Sheppard (for which she was nominated for an Oscar), Angelina Jolie is the very live-action image of the animated character. This telling, however, places Maleficent’s origin story front and center,

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and by doing so, renders both Sleeping Beauty and Prince Charming almost incidental to the plot. Here, the darkness falls not because of a love that will never have the chance to flourish, but as the consequence of love betrayed, the false promise of “true love’s kiss” instead of its fulfillment. Rather than a tale of two families blended, Maleficent is the story of two domains: the human world of castles and kings, and the Faërie realm, filled with magical creatures who need for neither. An uneasy détente exists between these worlds, bridged for a time by the love of a fairy for a human. An intrusion story set within an immersive fantasy, when the “vain and greedy king” invades the enchanted forest in search of treasure, its chief protector, Maleficent, drives his army back, warning him never to cross the threshold again. Metaphorically, she becomes the dragon, the mighty and terrible “winged creature” who must be slain in order to win the fairy-tale throne. Worse than kill her, though, a human commoner, Stefan, trades on Maleficent’s love for him and betrays her, taking with him what she values most: her wings, which is to say, her freedom, her identity. As he ascends the throne, what is implicit in Cinderella is made explicit here: Maleficent is not outcast because she is a monster but becomes monstrous because she was herself cast aside and betrayed. The brutal theft of her wings takes her from Maleficent to malevolent. This, the film says, is where bad fairies come from. Many years later, while awaiting the fulfillment of the curse and having watched over Aurora as her putative “fairy godmother,” Maleficent tells the young girl, “There is an evil in this world,” and its seeds are planted in treachery. More than this, Stromberg’s telling inverts the notion of “true love’s kiss,” the one thing the Sleeping Beauty canon assures us can break the curse, but the one thing Maleficent knows does not exist. Though there is a prince, he hardly matters—and is onscreen as little more than comic relief. “Haven’t you ever heard of love at first sight?” he asks the three fairies incredulously, but this time the canon is empty. Phillip and Aurora may have fallen head over heels in adolescent love, but his kiss has no effect on the sleeping princess. However important Maleficent’s backstory, it is precisely here that the two Disney tellings diverge most significantly and shift from origins to endings. It is not love at first sight that matters most but love that grows to displace hatred. Standing at Aurora’s bedside and gazing down at her magically sleeping form, Maleficent confesses her true love for the child she cursed, then gently kisses her on the forehead. This is “true love’s kiss.” “Hello, Godmother,” Aurora says, opening her eyes.

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“Hello, beastie,” Maleficent replies, using her double-entendre pet name and setting the stage for an entirely new authorized version of the story. If Maleficent rewrites Sleeping Beauty with the tagline, “The story is not quite as you’ve been told,” two tellings of the last of the princess diaries illustrate again how the same story can be told, but how different its central message can be. “The Fairest in the Land”: Snow White Disney’s 1937 animated classic, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, is regarded as one of the most important films in American cinema history. Audiences flocked to see it when it first arrived in theaters, and, at a time when a child’s admission was around twenty cents, Snow White brought in more than $8 million on its original release. It was the first film to offer tie-in merchandise and to release its soundtrack as a separate recording. Both of these parallel marketing measures ensured that themes encoded in the film would resonate long after the theater’s house lights had come up. At least as important is how Disney adapted the Grimm fairy tale and domesticated it for an America just beginning its climb out of the Great Depression. Consider some of the film’s central messages. “Whistle while you work”—that is, as long as there was work to be had, be grateful. “Wishes really do come true”—as long as the magic well echoes your dreams back to you. “You gotta admit, it’s pretty clean fun”—as long as your mother is there to point the way to the washtub. Escaping the wicked Queen and taking refuge with seven dwarfs she initially mistakes for little children, Snow quickly establishes herself as their surrogate mother. Indeed, from the moment she arrives at the cottage, she reinforces their positioning in the film as children. Nowhere is this more obvious than the famous “washing up” sequence. Consuming nearly 10 percent of the film’s total run time, it replicates a nightly scene in countless homes around the world. Once again, if we tell stories because they are familiar to us, in many cases, we use these same stories to reinforce roles we are expected to play on life’s stage. “Wash?” demands Grumpy, when Snow White orders them to clean up before supper. “I knew there was a catch” to letting this altogether too perky young woman stay. When the dwarfs lie about washing up, Snow demands to see their hands. “This will never do,” she tells them sternly. “March straight outside and wash, or you’ll not get a bite to eat.” Like a mother enforcing personal hygiene on her small children, this unwanted houseguest has essentially threatened to send the

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homeowners to bed without any supper. An unimportant detail, though, since for the millions of children who have seen the movie in whatever format, the dwarfs learning to wash with soap and water is, arguably, the story’s principal didactic moment. How hard is it to imagine parents using this scene to emphasize good hygiene at home? See, it’s just like the seven dwarfs, they say, as this child or that grumpily objects to the evening ritual. As Doc says at the end of the scene, “You may be cold and wet when you’re done, but you gotta admit, it’s pretty clean fun.” And for most of the entries Disney wrote into its princess diaries, that’s the message: good, clean fun. Not always, however. While Maleficent rewrote Sleeping Beauty with the tagline, “The story is not quite as you’ve been told,” and focuses on the main character’s origin story, Michael Cohn’s made-for-television Snow White: A Tale of Terror marketed its telling as: “The fairy tale is over.” Titles, subtitles, and taglines such as these are important parts of pop culture “paratext,” ancillary information with which entertainment products regularly come bundled (see Gray 2010). They prime us for what to expect from a film, television series, or video game; they set the emotional valence for the experience to come. We know going in that in Cohn’s telling, for this Snow White, there can be no happy ending. Although Cohn changes other aspects of the story—the dwarfs are actually a motley group of social outcasts living in a derelict church and mining gold for a pittance—its psychological heart beats with the often tangled and twisted relationships between mothers and daughters. In Cohn’s film, rather than a celebration, the Snow White character is born of tragedy. En route to their home, her parents are in a terrible carriage accident, and her mother is grievously injured. “You must save the baby,” she pleads with her husband, Frederick. “She is coming.” Faced with the worst choice a husband could make, to save his unborn child, he must sacrifice his wife. Pain fills his eyes as he draws his dagger and delivers the infant by crude Caesarian section. The blood that covers the snow and marks the beginning of the tale is not the three pristine drops recorded in the Grimm telling, but a horrific river of birth-blood that ushered the tiny child into the world even as it carried her young mother out. The baby girl is named for her mother, Lilliana. Since its release more than three generations ago, Disney’s Snow White has become the authorized version of the story—fairy-tale canon for countless millions of fans. How many would be surprised to learn, though, that there is no stepmother in the Grimm telling? Rather, it is

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Snow White’s mother, the beautiful and vain Queen, who “became pale with envy,” who “hated Snow White” from the moment the magic mirror announced that her daughter’s beauty surpassed her own. It was her own mother who ordered the young girl taken to the forest and murdered (Grimm and Grimm 2014, 171). Although, as we will see, this kind of parental behavior is not uncommon in the Grimm fairy tales, few twentieth-century audiences would have been willing to accept it in anything other than a straight-up horror film. So the Disney telling placed the action at one maternal remove. Enter the stepmother. A few years have passed, Lilliana is growing, and Frederick has decided to take the Lady Claudia, played by Sigourney Weaver, as his new wife. As is the case with so many fairy-tale stepmothers, few in the household—especially Lilli—are inclined to welcome her. “Do you still love Momma?” Lilli asks her father, as they prepare for Claudia’s arrival. “Always,” he replies. She knows that her father has arranged to remarry, and she quite naturally fears that her own mother will be forgotten. As she rolls a freshly picked apple across the desk to him, we can see that she will never allow that to happen. Indeed, in their first meeting, Lilli all but refuses to acknowledge Claudia’s existence. In many ways, this is the same stepmother we met in Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella: not trying to take a mother’s place but rejected nonetheless, no matter what she tries. When Claudia arrives, Frederick introduces his daughter by her full name, Lilliana, something that cannot but serve as a constant reminder to Claudia that she will never be “mother,” never the first love of her husband’s life. Even the manor house itself seems to resist her presence. From the portrait of Frederick’s late wife and the servant’s snide remarks about “Lady Hoffman’s favorite view” from a window, everything reminds Claudia of the woman she will never be and can never replace. The first mirror Claudia encounters in her new home is warped, like a funhouse distortion, and presents a disturbing, disfigured refraction. Her own mirror, the legendary magic mirror, is contained in an elaborately carved armoire—almost an upright sarcophagus—and introduces another twist in the maternal plot: the enduring influence of Claudia’s own mother. “What would Mother say if she could see me now, here?” she asks her mute brother, Gustav. “Would she be happy for me? Would she smile? Or would she be angry, knowing that the world that so despised her has embraced me?” Even at that point in the story, the

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mirror reflects an obviously younger Claudia (more the Weaver of Alien and Ghostbusters than later entries into either franchise). We also learn, though, that rather than being the vain, scheming stepmother of other tellings and other tales, she really does love Frederick. She really does want to be part of his family. As she and her new husband lay in bed together during the closing of the wedding ceremony, and the household passes by, offering their blessings on the union, Lilli throws a drink in her new stepmother’s face. There will be no peace between them. Though their relationship is strained throughout the years Claudia is married to her father, Lilli’s principal rejection of her stepmother is always through the explicit invocation of her longdead mother. “Is my face like hers?” she asks a maidservant, continuing, “My father worshipped her, didn’t he?” At the tipping point in the story, Claudia is finally pregnant and anxious to produce a suitable heir for her husband. Even though it took nearly a decade to have another child, Frederick has done nothing but love her, provide for her, and stand by her as she struggled to find her place in the Hoffman household. In that day and age, many men, especially minor noblemen, would have long since found a reason to put Claudia aside for another. “Lilli,” Claudia asks, when they argue over what the younger woman should wear to a party that evening, “why must we struggle so?” Claudia has chosen a dress for Lilli to wear, one she wore herself “as a girl.” Lilli, though, wants to wear “something special.” She will have no part of her stepmother’s wardrobe. Defying Claudia yet again, Lilli chooses to wear one of her mother’s old dresses. Instead of brilliant red, she attends the party in, as it were, snow white. Refusing to don the costume of the stepdaughter, she appears as the image of the late mother and wife. Late to the party, she enters during Claudia’s solo performance of an aria, once again drawing attention away from the older woman, as all eyes in the ballroom are fixed on her. She approaches her father as the very reflection of his dead wife. FreDerICK lilli, why are you wearing your mother’s gown? lIllI I wanted you to be proud of me. FreDerICK You look so like her.

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As he cups her cheek, the camera cuts to Claudia, who is suddenly all but forgotten and clearly devastated. Her song is left unfinished, and Frederick orders the orchestra to play as he dances with his daughter/ wife. Once again, Lilli has taken attention away from Claudia and focused it on herself and her long-dead mother. As Claudia watches them dance, Lilli’s hand laid on her father’s heart, it is difficult to see this as anything other than him dancing with his first wife. Claudia’s panic and anxiety rise. She begins to hyperventilate and quickly collapses, going into premature labor. The boy is stillborn, and the trauma has left Claudia barren. The mirror-cabinet opens on its own, but no longer does she see beauty, but a woman in the depths of distress and despair, locked in the unimaginable grief of the loss of a child. ClauDIa why is this happening to me?

This time, for the first time, she hears the mirror call her name. Uncertain initially where the voice is coming from, this moment begins Claudia’s descent into madness. The image in the mirror reverts to her younger, more beautiful self. MIrror-SelF You are beautiful. Your face is perfection. ClauDIa Is it? MIrror-SelF I will always tell you the truth. there’s so much to envy. they have always envied you. ClauDIa they? MIrror-SelF Your enemies.

We so often see in the mirror less what’s there than what we want to see, what we’re desperate to see. In fact, this film reminds us, the mirror only rarely tells us the truth. When Lilli comes to see her stepmother a few days later, she is wearing the party dress Claudia originally chose for her. Now that the damage is done, now that the threat of another child is gone, she can

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step into the role of stepdaughter. Too little, though, and far too late for any of them. lIllI I know we’ve never gotten along, and that I’ve pushed you away. ClauDIa From the beginning. lIllI I must have blamed you for so many things. but I never meant to hurt you. Can you forgive me? ClauDIa (looking at lIllI for the first time) You’re such a lovely girl, lilli. I don’t think I ever realized how lovely you are, until now.

It’s important to note here that Claudia does not forgive Lilli, and despite all appearances, there is very little that’s likeable about this telling’s Snow White character. She may realize that she has finally pushed too far, but it’s too late. As Claudia’s madness takes hold, as the mirrorself gains more and more control, there can be no forgiveness. Now, there are only enemies. No longer about “the fairest in the land,” this is a battle for dominance between stepdaughter and stepmother, a battle lost forever in the moment of her son’s death. In Cohn’s film, Lilli’s mother and stepmother are dark mirrors of each other—the former she never knew, the latter she will never accept; the former died giving birth to her, the latter blames her for the stillbirth of her own child. Though Claudia’s behavior from that point on is reprehensible, the differences in the tellings make her character more understandable. We don’t condone what she does, but we’re not left without sympathy for her pain. Once again, Claudia is not the wicked stepmother because she is evil—which is the clear and simple premise of the Disney telling. Weaver, who was nominated for an Emmy for her performance and dominates the screen throughout the film, plays her as a woman spiraling into psychosis. In this, she is almost a pure study in rejection, postpartum depression made intolerable by the death of her son, mounting paranoia and fear of losing her husband’s love—all of which become focused on the stepdaughter she did not want, whose love she cannot hope to win, and whose mother she will never be able to replace.

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Despite the intense psychological valence of Cohn’s telling, this remains, at the end of it all, a fairy tale. While far darker and more complex than many tellings, Cohn will not let the weight of the story rest entirely on Claudia’s deepening insanity. There is magic afoot well.

chapter 3

Imagining Magic

Nissa rested for a moment, listening. Even as a Planeswalker, the Summoning weakened her, but she was recovering rapidly. Like all her people, she drew strength from the land—the feel of moss beneath her feet, the fragrance of the trees, the magic of bird-song in the deep-green canopy above. Gradually, her breathing slowed, became more regular. The sickness that came with Summoning was almost past. Closing her eyes, she willed herself to stillness, casting her thoughts out into the forest. Something else was here; she could feel it. She knew. The coppery scent of sorcery drifted uneasily among the pine and spruce. She touched the leather bag at her side, ensuring the artifact was safe. Elves and humans alike had given their lives for it. To most, it seemed an ordinary metal dish—dingy, bent, worn with use, the kind of thing one kept for beast scraps. Carried for centuries by both the mighty and the meek, however, both victors and vanquished, the Brawler’s Plate gathered together the frenzy of a thousand battles. In the right hands, that power rose up when called, serving those to whom it was pledged. Her people needed it now, and Nissa Revane knew that she would need the strength of the land itself if the plate was to help them defeat . . . “Hello, I’m Sean, and welcome to Spellslingers, the show where I play Magic: The Gathering with my nerd friends.” The scene described above is not from a fantasy film but is my own bit of fan fiction based on the first few turns of one such Spellslingers game. From 2013 to 2015, professional video gamer Sean Plott hosted the half-hour program 50

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fig.2 Guest Janet Varney plays the spell Enshrouding Mist against host Sean Plott on Spellslingers (2015).

on Felicia Day’s YouTube channel, Geek & Sundry. In each episode, he invited a minor celebrity guest to play Magic with him. The game is edited, a few rudimentary special effects added, and the content uploaded. Sometimes he faced experienced players; other times he introduced new players to the game. Throughout, Plott wisecracked goodnaturedly with his opponent, commented to the camera on gameplay, and offered instruction on its intricacies. In the manner of convergent culture since Disney first merchandized Snow White, Spellslingers is, at one and the same time, promotion and marketing for the game and its producers (Wizards of the Coast, and its parent company, Hasbro), serial programming and an advertising platform for Geek & Sundry, upkeep content for avid Magic players around the world, and, not unimportantly, an entertaining and nonthreatening introduction to the game itself. Fielding creatures such as Furnace Whelp, Gray Merchant of Asphodel, or Elvish Mystic; using artifacts like Brawler’s Plate and Juggernaut; and slinging spells that range from Firestorm and Entomb to Intuition and Enshrouding Mist, players duel in what might seem little more than an enormously complicated version of the classic card game War. When all is said and done, the high card takes all—unless, of course, you have Deathmist Raptor, a 3/3 creature with Deathtouch . . . and Megamorph. Think of chess for a moment—sixteen pieces per side, sixty-four squares on the board, a hoary tradition of moves with such arcane

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names as Giuoco Piano and the Nimzo-Indian Defense, rules understood and agreed-to by both players (excepting en passant, which still confuses people). Or take poker—fifty-two cards (if we don’t include the joker, and who does?), a rigid hierarchy of scoring combinations so well known that, in many places, “counting cards” is considered only slightly less than a capital offence. Now, consider Magic: The Gathering. First released in 1993, Richard Garfield’s phenomenally successful trading-card game has no “deck,” per se. Rather, a bewildering (and constantly growing) array of more than sixteen thousand unique cards provides the pool from which players construct their own, often highly customized decks—of which fewer than forty individual cards are used in any one game. Players build (or “draft”) their decks based on personal play style (combat strength over guile and sorcery, for example), affinity for one or another of the Magic multiverse creatures (I prefer dragons over cats), or aesthetic appreciation for the cards’ gorgeous artwork and accompanying mythology. Sometimes players use sealed decks, the contents of which are unknown until opened, or they build decks from a particular core set of cards or according to specific game mechanics. In any event, in each game, neither player knows which cards the other holds or whether his own deck will contain the creatures, auras, artifacts, and enchantments necessary to counter his opponent’s spells and deck strategy. Although the basic rules of gameplay are relatively straightforward, the combinations in which cards may be played—and according to which they interact with each other—are staggering, and a clear part of the game’s appeal. All of this is guided by Magic: The Gathering’s golden rule: “When a Magic card contradicts the rulebook, the card wins” (Tabak 2013, 15). In less than two decades, Magic: The Gathering (M:TG) has evolved into a prime example of what media scholar Henry Jenkins calls “convergence” or “participatory culture” (2006a; see also Jamison 2013; Jenkins 2006b; Lancaster and Mikotowicz 2001). Now counting more than ten million avid players worldwide (though Wizards of the Coast claims twice that number), it includes official and aftermarket tie-in merchandise, literary and video fan fiction, a tabletop board game, comics and graphic novels, novelizations and a collection of stunningly beautiful coffee-table art books—all supported by a plethora of social media dedicated to everything from gameplay hints and deck-building instructions to online gameplay and “unboxing” videos of new card releases. In addition to gaming conventions and M:TG cruises, the professional

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Magic: The Gathering tour circuit comes complete with live-streaming and expert commentary (Eggebeen and Husney 2015). More than forty M:TG Grand Prix tournaments host tens of thousands of players and fans in venues ranging from Manila to Mexico City and from San Antonio to São Paulo. Finally, every week in towns and cities around the world, players gather in their local game shop for Friday Night Magic. They show off their card collections, break out trade binders, test their deck-building skills against other players, and participate in a community built entirely on a card game and an evolving fantasy multiverse— that is, on magic, monsters, and make-believe heroes.

the sine qua non of fantasy It could be argued that fantasy gaming—organized gameplay based explicitly on fantasy characters, mythical domains, and the magical nature of their interactions—dates back to early Tarot play (see Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett 1996; Decker and Dummett 2002). In late modernity, though, its advent is commonly marked by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson’s iconic Dungeons & Dragons; Gygax’s earlier attempt at the genre, Chainmail; and their innumerable imitators since (Cogburn and Silcox 2012; Ewalt 2013; Lancaster and Mikotowicz 2001; Peterson 2012; Witwer 2015). In all of these, at least as significant as the gameplay itself is the invitation to play the hero, cast magic spells, slay the dragon, and continue the “once upon a time” of the game’s backstory— or, in the case of so much fantasy gaming, the “it was a dark and stormy night as we approached the crypt through the festering swamp” aspect of our mythic imagination. As one Magic: The Gathering enthusiast puts it, this sense of participation in a much larger story is key to enjoying the game. “Without any backstory or any flavor to the game whatsoever, the cards are just game pieces. Rather than having a ‘Serra Angel’ or a ‘Shivan Dragon,’ you may as well have Card #4 and Card #37. I don’t think it’s essential that every player knows who Urza is or where Jamuraa is or anything like that, but the backstory provides a world for people to understand and connect with, as well as providing an overall aesthetic to the game” (Tran 2015; see Hsu 2016; Martin 2004). Indeed, the M:TG multiverse has introduced a variety of alternate timelines that allow the game not only to expand its visual and commercial appeal (by constantly introducing more card sets) but also to explore increasingly sophisticated fantasy landscapes and complex storylines associated with its gameplay. In the three-set “Khans of Tarkir”

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block, for example, the eponymous set (released in September 2014) takes place in a world “dominated by five powerful clans where dragons have been hunted to extinction” (Wizards of the Coast 2015). The “Dragons of Tarkir,” on the other hand, was released several months later and imagines a very different future for Tarkir’s world, one in which “the defeated clans are ruled by five legendary dragonlords” (Wizards of the Coast 2015). “Fate Reforged,” the third set of cards in the block, but which was published between the other two, takes players back a thousand years in Tarkir’s history to the epic battle that would decide between the two other timelines. This is the fantasy world where heroes and villains fight magical battles, the domain of mythic imagination in which millions of players are deeply invested—and not simply in terms of which card combination can beat another. Whether we are talking trading-card or role-playing games, novels such as Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series or Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, video game franchises like The Elder Scrolls or Dragon Age, a popular television program about three sisters who just happen to be the most powerful witches of all time (Charmed), or films such as Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, in many ways magic is the sine qua non of fantasy; the two are inextricably linked. “If there’s anything that differentiates epic fantasy from other genres of fiction,” write philosophers Jon Cogburn and Neal Hebert, “it’s magic” (2012, 133). But it is important to note that this does not mean epic fantasy alone. It is Maleficent’s spell that sends Aurora to sleep, Tinker Bell’s fairy dust that brings the Darling children to Neverland, and the Blue Fairy’s magic that turns Pinocchio into a real boy. From poisoned apples and bewitched spindles to glass slippers and an all-knowing mirror, magic suffuses and animates the myths, legends, folk stories, and fairy tales we tell over and over. Often inherent in the heroic monomyth, which we will discuss later, magic is the “region of supernatural wonder” through which the hero must inevitably wander; it constitutes the “fabulous forces” with which she must contend in pursuit of her quest (Campbell 1968, 30). In fantasy culture, magic is the linchpin of the unnatural narrative—whether the tellings are literary, cinematic, or ludic. As Dungeons & Dragons players gain experience in their campaign, characters with magical abilities learn to cast increasingly formidable spells. Cure Wounds, for example, is a first-level spell that allows one player to heal another, while the much more powerful Forcecage, which traps one’s enemies in “an immobile, invisible cube-shaped prison,” is available only to players who are at least seventh level (Mearls and Craw-

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ford 2014b, 243). Early in a game of Magic: The Gathering, a player might cast Bump in the Night, a spell that causes his opponent to lose three “life” (i.e., points), and which can be played at minimum cost. Only much later, once he has built up significantly more “mana” (i.e., power), could he cast In Garruk’s Wake—a spell that destroys all his opponent’s creatures, regardless of their size. Once again, it’s important to remember that players in each game are not simply matching scores from a player’s handbook or laying down cards with competing numerical values. They are not simply rolling dice against one another or playing the high card from a specific deck. For tens of millions of players worldwide, fantasy gameplay is far less about hit points, spell slots, mana cost, or life total— the basic game mechanics—than it is about actively participating in ongoing ludic storytelling that is grounded in specific fantastical narratives. They are the heroes of their own adventures. Consider the 2014 D&D module Hoard of the Dragon Queen, which pits a band of hardy adventurers against the shadowy Cult of the Dragon. For most of their history, the dragon cultists have lain low and “focused on making undead dragons” (Baur and Winter 2014, 5). Annoying, perhaps, but hardly apocalyptic. Lately, however, they have sent agents throughout the lands of the Sword Coast in search of five legendary dragon masks—“one for each chromatic dragon color” (Baur and Winter 2014, 5; see Kenson 2015). Each mask allows the wearer to communicate with dragons of that color, but “when all five are brought together, they magically merge into a single Mask of the Dragon Queen” (Baur and Winter 2014, 5). With this supremely powerful magical artifact, the cult can release its dread goddess, the Dragon Queen Tiamat, “from her prison in the Nine Hells” and lay waste to the entire continent of Faerûn (Baur and Winter 2014, 5; see also Winter and Winter 2014). Or, take Out of the Abyss, written by celebrity Dungeon Master Chris Perkins, who is also the principal D&D story designer at Wizards of the Coast. “Captured by the Drow!” read his initial instructions to the players. “You wouldn’t wish this fate upon anyone, yet here you are—locked in a dark cave” (Perkins, Lee, and Whitters 2015, 5). Rather than the sun-dappled Sword Coast, this adventure begins in the Underdark, a terrifying world of tunnels and caverns far below the surface. This is the domain of the Drow, the infamous dark elves, among the most fearsome of enemies in the Forgotten Realms. Here, rather than the Dragon Queen, players must defeat the horrific Lolth, the Demon Queen of Spiders, goddess of the Drow, and “a villain as deranged as the Queen of Hearts” (Perkins, Lee, and Whitters 2015, 2). Indeed, Perkins tells us

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that he “was reminded of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass” while preparing to write the module. “That’s when I decided our Underdark tale was going to draw inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s works. We would paint the Underdark as an insanely wondrous domain into which our heroes must descend” (Perkins, Lee, and Whitters 2015, 2). “Have fun with it,” he concludes, “and may the stories of your players’ harrowing exploits be as wonderful and unforgettable as any great novel!” (Perkins, Lee, and Whitters 2015, 2; see also Salvatore 2004, 2015). That is, do not simply play the game; continue the story. Finally, moving from D&D back to M:TG, from Faerûn and the Underdark to the many planes of Magic: The Gathering’s complex multiverse, consider Innistrad. Here, in this Lovecraft-inspired world, gothic “horrors stalk in the shadows and scratch at the door in the night. Humanity is beset on all sides” (Wyatt 2016, 11). But the danger comes not with the resurrection of an ancient dragon queen or the rise of the Drow from their dark places deep inside the Earth; “the tragedy of Innistrad is that all its evils, all the scourges that threaten humanity, actually spring from humanity itself” (Wyatt 2015, 53). Sometimes, the cards and their backstory tell us, we are our own worst enemies, and our fiercest battles must be fought against our own “sinister reflections” (Wyatt 2015, 53). Even humankind’s protectors, the angelic hosts led by Avacyn, the warrior archangel and “the source of all protective magic” in Innistrad, are not as they appear. Even angels, it seems, can lose their way (see Cowan 2008, 69–71). It all depends on how we imagine magic.

imagining magic For thousands of years, those who claim control over supernatural forces—a fierce red dragon, an otherworldly army, a brigade of buckets, mops, and brooms—have been the object of fear and fascination. Fascination because, in our heart of hearts, so many of us are enchanted by the possibility of such power; fear because those forces so often operate outside of our control and threaten to overwhelm everything we hold dear. Although court magicians, sorcerers, and soothsayers have found their place in any number of societies, our fear of magic has most often been embodied in the witch, who is regularly portrayed as the quintessential outsider. For thousands of years and in countries around the world, if “you shall have no other gods before me” (Ex 20:3) is the

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theory, then “you shall not suffer a witch to live” (Ex 22:18) has often been the practice. Magic, sorcery, and witchcraft have informed our popular imagination for many hundreds of years and have found their way into different varieties of popular culture. Rather than the indistinct notion of mass culture or the artificial distinction between high and low culture, popular culture is determined by the consumption, circulation, modification, and, most importantly, the recirculation of prevalent tropes, themes, and ideas. That is, what makes something popular—what makes it meaningful—is not what the thing is, necessarily, but what people take it for and what they do with it. In terms of imagining magic, through the poems we recite, the stories we tell, the games we play, and the movies we watch, we reflect, refract, and reinforce a profound insecurity about supernatural energies and beings, an anxiety that manifests in number of ways. Principally, we fear magic; we attempt to domesticate it; we resist it when we can, or we convert it when we can’t; and, lastly, we embrace it. This is anything but an evolutionary progression, however. Rather, these are mutually intervailing social relationships that reflect, through the stories we tell and the games we play, our ambivalent rapport with these magical forces. Take, for example, the famous “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” scene from Disney’s 1940 animated classic, Fantasia. Based on Goethe’s 1797 poem “Der Zauberlehrling,” though a number of tellings long precede even this (Luck 1999), Mickey Mouse is cast as a lowly servant in the dark halls of a powerful magician. Fascinated by the illusions his master conjures seemingly from thin air, Mickey decides to call on this same power—one for which he is neither trained nor ready—when it’s time to clean up. Donning the sorcerer’s iconic pointed hat, he begins to make a little magic of his own. Casting a spell to animate a broom and equip it with a couple of buckets, Mickey settles in for a nap while his magical minions do his chores for him. His dream-self conducts the very forces of the universe to the magnificent strains of Paul Dukas’s music, and it isn’t long before he loses complete control of these supernatural powers. The sorcerer’s lair begins to flood. Mickey wakes in horror, but he cannot stop the magical broom. Even when he chops it into splinters, they still possess his original magic and quickly grow into an entire regiment of brooms armed with countless buckets. As Mickey desperately searches for a counterspell in his master’s grimoire, the music crescendos, and a vast whirlpool appears in the center of the floor. Just before the apprentice is

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engulfed entirely, the real sorcerer appears. Cymbals clash as he pushes his hands outward, forcing the waves apart (and appearing here not unlike Moses). The waters recede, and he rescues his sodden pupil. Although the mage is not happy about any of this—giving Mickey a swift swat with the broom to enunciate the point—he recognizes the fascination that magic holds for his young trainee. But he also impresses on Mickey the respect with which these forces must be treated. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” reinforces the fact that because magic can so easily spin out of control, we would do well to fear its power. Fearing Magic: Hansel and Gretel Since the dark days of the Middle Ages—and in our time, from B-movie horror such as Cyril Frankel’s The Witches (“What do the witches do after dark?”) and John Moxey’s The City of the Dead (“The thrills, the chills of Witchcraft today”) to the Halloween stereotype made famous by Margaret Hamilton’s iconic performance in The Wizard of Oz—rather than the sorcerer, our fear of magic has been embodied in the witch. Almost always a woman, her magical powers are outside the domain of social control and are often believed to derive from a deal struck with the Devil himself. According to the Malleus Maleficarum, history’s most infamous witchhunting manual, “witches meet together in conclave” and “the devil appears in the assumed body of a man,” demanding in return for magical powers only that the prospective witch “abjure the Faith,” “forsake the holy Christian religion,” and “never venerate the Sacraments”—a bargain that placed her in opposition to God and outside of salvation (Kramer and Sprenger [1486] 1971, 99, 100). While this set the tone for the witch’s more abstract menace, the imminent threat she posed is the one most remembered in legend, fable, and story: the danger to children, the most vulnerable members of society. Although a number of other fabulous creatures have been known to devour children—dragons and giants, to name just two, perhaps the folkloric memories of child sacrifice to local gods—in the mythic imagination, the quintessence of “stranger danger” is the witch. And in this, few stories resonate more than “Hansel and Gretel,” which, like many fairy tales, is much more complex than we often imagine. Ask any number of people to tell you the story of Hansel and Gretel, and many will be a little foggy on how it all begins. They often start with the siblings lost in the dense forest, perhaps already nearing the witch’s cottage. They may not know (or may simply have forgotten)

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that it was Hansel and Gretel’s own mother who first sentences them to die, and that their home was no more a place of safety than the gingerbread house. Considering the children little more than two extra mouths to feed, their mother demanded that her husband abandon the children in the woods. When we forget this important prologue, the story is reduced to little more than an “old woman [who] was really a wicked witch on the lookout for children and had built the house made of bread only to lure them to her” (Grimm and Grimm 2014, 47). Unlike so many modern horror stories, stories in which the Devil may appear, but God is conspicuous by his absence, for Hansel and Gretel, salvation resolves our fear of witchcraft through an explicit appeal to the socially approved source of supernatural power. When the witch commands Gretel to check the temperature of her dreaded oven, the terrified little girl stands in the kitchen weeping “bloody tears” and praying, “Oh dear God, help us children get out of this predicament!” (Grimm and Grimm 2014, 48). Her prayers are answered when God inspires her to trick the witch into climbing into the oven herself, “where she miserably burned to death” (Grimm and Grimm 2014, 49). The children are saved, the witch is dead, and the proper supernatural order reestablished. Absent divine intervention, two much more recent tellings of the basic Hansel and Gretel story demonstrate other ways in which our deeply embedded fear of witchcraft continues to circulate in popular culture. First is the notion that witches, witchcraft, and malevolent magic continue to represent real danger in the modern world. In this, consider The Blair Witch Project. Produced for an estimated $35,000, Blair Witch grossed more than $36 million on its first weekend of theatrical release in 1999, and it became the standard-bearer for a glut of “found footage” horror films that followed. Shot on Hi-8 video and 16mm film, it was intended to look like a documentary rather than a feature film. It is, however, sheer Hansel and Gretel, though without the happy ending: several young people venture into a dark forest, but never return. A year later, the recovered film and video suggest that they are the latest victims of the legendary Elly Kedward, the Blair Witch, who had been banished from her small Maryland community two centuries earlier for luring children to her house and stealing their blood. In this, then, we have a Hansel and Gretel tale set within a Hansel and Gretel telling. Blair Witch filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sànchez leveraged a number of important aspects of storytelling in their film. Among these is the popular, if undeserved, belief that myths, legends, and folk tales all have some basis in historical fact, a grain of truth lost somewhere

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in the sands of time. Some stories are based in an historical event or circumstance, but many aren’t. Telling the difference, though, becomes difficult, especially when filmmakers exploit public credulity by deliberately blurring the distinction between fiction and reality. Indeed, next, prior to its release and for some time after, Myrick and Sànchez refused to deny that The Blair Witch Project wasn’t a documentary based on actual found footage. Finally, over time, social psychological processes such as source dissociation and confirmation bias shape how we understand the stories we’re told. That is, on the one hand, we tend to forget where we learned things; we dissociate the source from the information. Thus, a film that looks like a documentary becomes a documentary in our mind; a fictional movie becomes “something we saw on television”—perhaps the news, perhaps a documentary, we can’t recall (see Arkes, Boehm, and Xu 1991). On the other, when we want to believe something is true, we tend to privilege information that supports that belief and discount any that doesn’t. These processes can have such a profound effect that even when the fictional nature of The Blair Witch Project was established, many people simply refused to accept it. “It’s all a lie. It’s a hoax,” began one letter the filmmakers received. “Well, this guy figured it out,” said Daniel Myrick, perhaps relieved the joke was finally over. The letter continued, however, “You had it wrong. Here’s the real way they were found.” Indeed, so compelling is the power of the unnatural narrative that “some believers have organized search parties to look for the fictional documentary crew” (Breznican 1999). If the possibility of magic’s reality keeps the fear of witchcraft in popular circulation, ridicule is one way its cultural power is decreased. If we can laugh at something, we are less likely to be scared of it. Laughter becomes the pail of water thrown on the Wicked Witch of the West. Although ridicule can take a number of forms, one of the most potent inverts “accepted categories of cultural interpretation” (Cowan 2005b, ¶2). It takes something regarded as powerful and reduces it to powerlessness. That is, “it marginalizes the target group and reduces its status both in the eyes of those doing the ridiculing and (presumably) their intended audience” (Cowan 2005b, ¶1). We laugh at the monsters rather than run away from them. Like The Blair Witch Project, Walt Disney’s 1993 comedy Hocus Pocus is also a Hansel and Gretel story set within a larger Hansel and Gretel narrative. During the seventeenth-century Salem witch craze, the three Sanderson sisters are hanged as witches—notably for luring children to their home and consuming their life essence in order to retain

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their own youth and beauty. Like Elly Kedward, they may not literally eat the children, but the fairy-tale allusion is clear. Three centuries later, the sisters have returned, unwittingly freed on Halloween by town newcomer, Max. Played consistently for laughs by Sarah Jessica Parker, Kathy Najimy, and Bette Midler, the witches wreak havoc in modern Salem until the children themselves resolve the crisis. As in the Grimm tale, the parents are of little use. At a community Halloween party, for example, all the adults in Salem are enchanted by Winifred Sanderson (Midler) singing her own version of the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins classic, “I Put a Spell on You.” In the end, though, the children save the day, proper supernatural order is restored, and our fear of magic is subdued—if only for the moment. Each of these stories reveals different aspects of our fear of magic, though each does so in terms of the witch’s treacherous relationship with places of presumed safety. In the Grimm fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel are caught between the danger of their own home, which to modern readers should signal the primary locus of security, and the old woman’s cottage, supposedly a place of relative safety amid the dangers of the deep, dark forest. Neither, however, is actually a safe place—until both their mother and the witch are dead. Unlike Hansel and Gretel, in The Blair Witch Project, the young people have willingly entered a region of mystery, the Black Hills of Maryland. They’ve gone seeking the legend of Elly Kedward, though their separation from presumed safety is not so much due to their being in the forest as it is their lack of belief. They cannot believe themselves in danger because they do not believe in the reality of the witch. After all, witches aren’t real, are they? Hocus Pocus locates salvation in terms of finding home in the midst of unfamiliarity. Max and his family have just moved to Salem, and he’s miserable, having left everything he knows behind. Removing children from the familiar is a common vehicle by which fantasy narratives are introduced—the Pevensie children finding their way through the wardrobe to Narnia; Dorothy Gale swept away to Oz; Simon, Jared, and Mallory Grace in The Spiderwick Chronicles; Fablehaven’s Kendra and Seth Sorenson; and Harry Potter, who is whisked away from the misery of life at Number Four Privet Drive to the enduring wonder of Hogwarts. In each of these, lack of familiarity triggers a shift in perspective that allows the fantastic to make itself known. In Hocus Pocus, finding his place in the new environment—accepting home, as opposed to going home—is part of what allows Max and his new friends to defeat the Sanderson sisters. Once again, though, if only for the moment. Winnie,

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Sarah, and Mary Sanderson may be gone, but the supernatural threat they represent is still alive. A more permanent control of magic requires a different approach. Domesticating Magic: Bell, Book, and Bewitched The next way in which fantasy culture shapes our relationship with magic also trades on its relationship with the security of home and the so-called nuclear family. Any number of films and television series have tried to integrate the fantastic with the mundane, to domesticate magic, as it were. René Clair’s 1942 romantic comedy I Married a Witch is the age-old story of amor vincit omnia—in this case, though, love conquering magic. In 1958, Richard Quine’s Bell, Book, and Candle, which was based on John Van Druten’s 1950 Broadway play, revisited the theme. In the 1960s, both The Munsters and The Addams Family sought to place the monstrously magical in more family-oriented frames. Harry Keller’s The Brass Bottle (1964) inspired Sidney Sheldon’s I Dream of Jeannie, one of the most famous “magical situation comedies,” which ran for five seasons opposite its principal competitor, Sol Saks’s Bewitched. A generation later, Sabrina the Teenage Witch stepped out of the pages of the Archie storyworld and, to the delight of tweens everywhere, ran for seven seasons. Of all these, and the many more that could be considered, two examples display most clearly the means by which popular culture domesticates magic: renunciation and restraint. In both Bell, Book, and Candle and Bewitched, as David Marc notes, “the discipline and respectability of a nine-to-five, Thank-God-Its-Friday existence are valorized as far more satisfying than the freedom to gratuitously manipulate the world to one’s individual pleasure” (1997, 109). In Bell, Book, and Candle, Kim Novak plays Gillian Holroyd, a sultry young witch who is part of a community of magical folk living just below the mundane radar in New York. Her brother, played by Tony Curtis, is the supernatural trickster cast as the epitome of the 1950s Greenwich Village hepcat: partying until all hours, happily playing the bongos in coffee houses, generally out for a good time—often at the expense of the mortals on whom his magical tricks are played. Rather than a proactive danger, witches are presented here as incapable of human emotion, and they are full-on hedonists, interested only in satisfying their own desires. With her feline familiar, Pyewacket, Gillian runs a shop specializing in exotic art. Though it starts out as a magical prank intended only to embarrass an old school rival, she falls in love with one

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of her customers, Shep Henderson, played by James Stewart. In this, Gillian breaks the one hard-and-fast rule about romantic relationships between magical folk and ordinary people, namely, “Thou shalt not.” If a witch, whether male or female (though the women are clearly dominant in magical society), does decide to commit to a mortal, he or she must renounce all magical powers and accept life as an ordinary human. The title, Bell, Book, and Candle, alludes to ritual implements used in an arcane Catholic rite of excommunication, though, in this case, the concept is inverted in that Gillian is the one who is cast out of her magical community. To follow her love for Shep, she must give up her life as a witch—and she does. She cries “real tears” at the thought of losing him, her emerging emotions a sure sign of her transformation from witch to human. Even Pyewacket abandons her. After all, what’s a familiar to do without a witch to serve? We see the change, however, most clearly in her clothing. Throughout most of the film, wardrobe and make-up take full advantage of Novak’s smoldering beauty: ultra-chic hairstyling and tightfitting clothes that seem drawn straight from the cover of Paris Vogue. She is often barefoot—signaling her defiance of and freedom from accepted social convention. Once she falls in love with a mortal, though, this all changes. Rather than turtlenecks, capri pants, and sheath dresses, she appears at the end of the film in a white, belted dress, the hem falling demurely below the knee—both color and cut heralding the newfound purity of her mortal life. By domesticating the witch’s powers, it appears that the right man can save us from magic—unless, of course, he can’t. Six years after Bell, Book, and Candle, ABC premiered what would become one of the most beloved magical situation comedies of all time: Bewitched. Here, the domestic situation is not dissimilar. A witch, Samantha, has chosen to marry Darrin Stephens, an ordinary human. The fundamental difference, however, is that this does not cost Samantha her powers, though (like I Dream of Jeannie’s eponymous genie) she is under strict instructions from Darrin never to use them. The neighbors wouldn’t understand. It could cost Darrin his job if anyone found out. It just isn’t done in polite suburban society. He loves his wife, but life would be so much simpler if she wasn’t, well, a witch. Of course, as is the thematic through-line in all magical situation comedies, Sam does use her magic—indicated by star Elizabeth Montgomery fetchingly twitching her nose—an act of subversion and defiance that provides the narrative conflict for each week’s episode. Bell, Book, and Candle domesticated witchcraft consequentially: Gillian had no choice when she lost her powers; she knew the rules, but

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she fell in love anyway. In that storyworld, home and husband brook no place for magic. Although many of Bewitched’s b-stories deal with the disapproval of Samantha’s magical relatives and the various ways they interfere in the Stephenses’ family life, Sam retained her powers but restrained them to meet the demands of mortal home and nuclear family. The important point here, which separates both of these storyworlds from later tellings of similar stories, is that magic remains domesticated, either eliminated through embracing the human home or contained within it as a condition of remaining part of the human community. Neither includes, for example, a celebration of magic, such as occurs at the end of Griffin Dunne’s 1998 film, Practical Magic (the free-spirited principal character in which is named, appropriately, Gillian). Both Bell, Book, and Candle and Bewitched, as well as their many imitators over the years, domesticate our fear of magic by bringing the witch in from the cold, as it were. They move her from a position of social isolation—living on the outskirts of the village or in a hovel deep in the forest—to a place of prominence in the home. In this, as folklorist Marion Gibson writes, “women’s domestic magic was saturnalian—an explosion of excitement and disruption into everyday life, that could be easily quelled and that served, in fact, to reaffirm the usual family values pleasantly” (2007, 207). Rather than the singular threat of an isolated witch (think Hansel and Gretel), each of these storyworlds is predicated on what we might call the Grimm hypothesis: that there is another order of reality existing alongside our own, a magical domain that competes with ours, and one over which we have an uncomfortably limited amount of control. Because of this, before we consider other ways in which we imagine magic through popular culture, we must make a short detour and consider magic’s major competitor for the mythic imagination: religion. Magic and Religion: A Brief but Necessary Side-Quest Almost from the moment the father of sociology, Émile Durkheim, pronounced that “there is no Church of magic” ([1912] 1995, 42), attempts to distinguish “real” religion from “mere” magic have proliferated both within the academy and beyond. To defend religion’s place in society, which is to say, the dominance of socially approved supernatural interactions, magic has often been dismissed with barely concealed disdain. Following a common late nineteenth-century intellectual model, anthropologist James Frazer argued that magic precedes religion along a kind of

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evolutionary spiritual continuum. Frazer, though, differentiates the two without offering much of a difference between them. It’s difficult to see, for example, how magical action that “constrains or coerces” supernatural agents, “instead of conciliating or propitiating them as religion would do,” is a useful distinction (Frazer [1922] 1987, 51). Writing at the same time, sociologist Max Weber argued that “those beings that are worshipped and entreated religiously may be termed ‘gods,’ in contrast to the ‘demons,’ which are magically coerced or charmed” ([1922] 1993, 28). Nearly a generation later, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski proposed the difference that has become all but canonical in the academy: magic is little more than a means to an end, simple rites and rituals intended to benefit the end user, but with neither regard nor concern for the larger community or any wider theological context. “We have defined, within the domain of the sacred,” he writes in Magic, Science and Religion, “magic as a practical art consisting of acts which are only means to a definite end expected to follow later on; religion as a body of self-contained acts being themselves the fulfillment of their purpose” (Malinowski 1948, 88). Roman Catholic theologian David Blanchard concurs, putting it even more starkly: “Religion is not a means to an end; it is the end in itself. Religion does not depend on technique but rather on a pre-existing faith and the value of belief. . . . Magical training does not include theology” (2000, 51). Notwithstanding what Blanchard might mean by “the value of belief” and religion as “the end in itself,” his message could not be clearer: religion is “true” and “worthy,” while magic is neither. It’s difficult, however, to imagine a distinction more fraught with problems, more prone to a fallacy of limited alternatives and confounding examples, and more beholden to the kind of theological provincialism that marks so much of our religious imagination. Not only does Blanchard ignore those aspects of his own religion that are both technique-dependent and ends-driven—a Catholic novena, for example, or a Pentecostal prayer for healing—he disregards entirely any notion of a magic system’s theological underpinning. Granted, it may not be Christian theology, but that’s neither here nor there. The complicated magical workings that formed the core of ancient Egyptian funerary rites were underwritten by an elaborate polytheism, a multifaceted conception of the relationship between different orders of reality (Faulkner 1985). More than three millennia later, popular Wiccan authors Janet and Stewart Farrar insist that “witches are neither fools, escapists nor superstitious. If witchcraft did not have a coherent rationale, such people could only keep going by a

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kind of deliberate schizophrenia” (1984, 105). Whether others credence them or not, the magical beliefs of modern Pagans—Wiccans, Witches, and Druids, just to name a few—are informed by complex, often quite elegant supernatural epistemologies, no less sophisticated than many Christian theologies and no less invested in larger questions of meaning and existence. Indeed, by contrast with many of his academic colleagues, and despite his theoretical penchant for binary oppositions, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss saw both magical and religious interaction with the supernatural as all of a piece. “There is no religion without magic,” he wrote in The Savage Mind, “any more than there is magic without at least a trace of religion” (1966, 221). Echoing Lévi-Strauss, historian Ronald Hutton argues that the emergence of modern Paganism, with its explicit focus on magical working and its investment in the concept of a supernatural order, “abolishes the traditional Western distinction between religion and magic” (1999, 394). This does not stop some religious believers from resisting magic at every turn, however, especially when they suspect, once again, that their children may be at risk. Resisting Magic: “Let Me Say Something about Harry Potter” The camera pans across a sea of young faces, all watching, listening, some all but rapturous, others more than a little uncomfortable. “The Devil goes after the young,” intones a woman in voiceover, “those who cannot fend for themselves.” This is Becky Fisher, a Pentecostal children’s minister from the Kansas City suburb of Independence and the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary Jesus Camp (Ewing and Grady 2006). “And while I’m on the subject,” Fisher continues, “let me say something about Harry Potter.” Striding across the room in front of the children, she pauses for effect. becky Fisher warlocks are enemies of god, and I don’t care what kind of hero they are. they’re an enemy of god, and had it been in the old testament, harry Potter would have been put to death! You don’t make heroes out of warlocks.

A solitary “Amen!” and ragged, scattered applause rises from the audience. The children are not sure how to respond. Indeed, as one young person admits later, “my mom won’t let me watch Harry Potter ’cause

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it has, like, witchcraft and stuff in it, [but] I watch them all the time at my dad’s house.” Because of their phenomenal popularity—even that adjective seems pale in the face of Harry Potter’s success worldwide (see Whited 2002)— few other ventures into fantasy culture have been met with such aggressive resistance and consistent condemnation from conservative segments of the Christian community. It is as though the witch’s cottage from “Hansel and Gretel” had suddenly appeared in the children’s section at your local Barnes & Noble. Only these seemingly innocent children’s books are even more treacherous. It’s not that children are in danger of being eaten, but of being consumed utterly, of becoming witches themselves. Like modern heirs of the Malleus Maleficarum, Bible-believing parents fear that their offspring will “abjure the Faith,” and “forsake the holy Christian religion.” Indeed, many Christian commentators have denounced Harry Potter (and its host of imitators) as little more than a candy-cottage invitation to full-blown sorcery. Shortly before the release of the fourth entry in the series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, when it was clear both that J. K. Rowling’s masterwork was a bona fide publishing phenomenon and, therefore, a legitimate and credible threat to Christian children everywhere, professional-astrologer-turned-conservative-Christian Marcia Montenegro posted a series of online articles detailing all things wrong with the Harry Potter storyworld. Montenegro admits that not all fantasy can or will lead to a deadly love affair with the dark side of the supernatural— though she also condemns both Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons—but Rowling’s storyworld “feeds on the occult and is fueled by it. Yes, this is just a story, but stories can teach and influence. Stories can present ideas and endorse worldviews.” She’s not wrong, and for Montenegro this is precisely the problem. “Harry Potter glorifies the occult,” she concludes. “God condemns the occult. Should we take a book lightly that endorses what God has so seriously forbidden?” (Montenegro 2000). From the supernatural reality of sorcery and witchcraft to the spiritual danger of ghosts, astrology, and divination, Montenegro holds up each of the Harry Potter books to what her faith tells her is the clear and unambiguous light of Christian scripture, most notably Deuteronomy 18:9–13 and Exodus 22:18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Christian journalist and fellow culture critic Richard Abanes concurs about the Harry Potter threat, though rather than juxtaposing Rowling’s books with biblical texts, he equates the Potter storyverse with an

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increase in the popularity of Witchcraft, Wicca, and other forms of modern Paganism beyond the page and off the screen. He’s not entirely wrong about this, but the nature of religious resistance to magic demands that any of these correlations represent the same clear and present danger identified by Fisher, Montenegro, and a host of other conservative Christians (e.g., Alexander 2004; Baker 2004; Hawkins 1996). Abanes warns parents about these dangers in books with titles that read like pre-commercial teaser lines from a local news station— The Menace behind the Magick (2001), the cover of which notes “Not Approved by J. K. Rowling”; Fantasy and Your Family (2002), offering A Closer Look at Magick in the Modern World; and What You Need to Know about Fantasy Books and Movies (2005), which promises to evaluate fantasy culture “from a balanced Christian perspective.” Indeed, balancing potted synopses of the different novels with discussions of “the real-world occultism present” in each, Abanes “clearly explains why God is so against occultism and where it is condemned in Scripture” (2001, 7). Although he makes more of an effort to be evenhanded than many of his coreligionists, Abanes’s conclusion is still all but foregone. Instead of banning the Harry Potter books, or, worse, as has happened in numerous places, burning them, he suggests that “during follow-up discussions at home, a Christian parent could demonstrate through Scripture where the Harry Potter series is in error regarding good and evil” (2001, 271). On the other hand, the boy wizard could serve as a very different kind of infection-vector, “a means of introducing a child to godly fantasy such as C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series or J. R. R. Tolkien’s books about Middle-Earth” (Abanes 2001, 271). That is, rather than resist the presence of magic, we can convert it to our own religious purpose. Converting Magic: Preaching the Princess Diaries If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, so the adage goes—or, in the case of many Christians, convert ’em. Throughout its history, when resistance to competing worldviews has proven ineffective, Christianity has baptized a wide variety of gods, goddesses, and local myths into its service. Indeed, the history of Christian assimilation and conversion of other religious traditions and cultural practices extends virtually to the beginnings of the organized church. As missionaries moved out from Palestine in the early centuries of the faith, sites sacred to pre-Christian gods—and crucially important to the people who worshipped them—

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were consecrated in the name of the new religion. Very often, churches were built on pagan sites. Sometimes the gods themselves were retained, though demoted to the rank of the saint. In medieval Britain, the Celtic goddess Brigid was Christianized as St. Brigid, while places sacred to pre-Christian Britons became loci of Christian worship. Many of the West African gods forced across the Atlantic on slave ships became the saints of syncretized Afro-Caribbean traditions such as Vodun, Santería, and Candomblé. Contrary to the resistance and open condemnation of Christians such as Becky Fisher, Marcia Montenegro, and Richard Abanes, numerous aspects of twentieth-century popular culture have been assimilated in the same way. Though relegated mainly to more conservative streams of Christianity, those particularly concerned about the corrupting influence of books, movies, and television, Christians have long sought to map their theology onto potentially contentious pop-culture products. Presbyterian minister Paul Leggett, for example, indulged (and legitimated) his passion for B-movie horror by interpreting the work of Terence Fisher, one of Hammer Studio’s most prolific directors, as “spiritual allegories.” According to Leggett, “Fisher’s work presents a Christian worldview,” and that the oft-terrifying beauty of evil “can only finally be defeated by the cross of Jesus Christ” (2002, 1, 2). Since Star Wars first opened in 1977—and although they are not the only religious believers to do so—Christians have relentlessly sought to bend George Lucas’s uneven vision to the service of their god. Thus, Dick Staub writes of The Christian Wisdom of the Jedi Masters (2005), while David Wilkinson shares The Power of the Force (2000), and Baptist pastor Timothy Jones invites readers on a religious journey in Finding God in a Galaxy Far, Far Away (2005). Craig Detweiler and his co-contributors explore the various ways in which video games can be interpreted through religious lenses (2010). While English professor Greg Garrett points to Holy Superheroes! (2008), B. J. Oropeza and his colleagues propound The Gospel according to Superheroes (2005). Indeed, from The Simpsons (Pinsky 2001) to Star Trek (Neece 2016), and from Lord of the Rings (Wood 2003) to Harry Potter (Neal 2008), The Gospel According to [Insert Pop Culture Product Here] is one of the most common ways that Christians read books, movies, and television through the lens of their own particular theology. Mapping their religious vision onto those products, they attempt to reduce the tension between their beliefs and what they regard as competing spiritual worldviews. It’s no longer that Harry Potter is a threat to young children, luring them into the dark forest of

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magic, but that through J. K. Rowling’s masterpiece, by reading the novels through the explicit lens of their faith, Christian children (and adults, let’s be clear) can more deeply appreciate both the Potter stories and what they consider The Big Story. Although Jesuit film critic Richard Blake insists that popular culture “must not be baptized and then coerced into ecclesial servitude” (1991, 289), this is precisely what has happened with an astonishing range of products. In this regard, let’s briefly reconsider the princess diaries. According to religion reporter Mark Pinskey, Walt Disney “did not want religion in his movies” and “eschewed any film dealing with religion.” Indeed, “there is relatively little explicit Judeo-Christian symbolism or substance in seventy years of Disney animated features” (2004, 1). That said, in The Gospel According to Disney, Pinskey insists that “there is a consistent set of moral and human values in these movies largely based on Western Judeo-Christian faith and principles, which together constitutes a Disney gospel” (2004, xi). Although there are few biblical verses through which to read Cinderella, Pinskey finds a place for this princess in the rather vague notion of “the Disney equivalent of crisis of faith—in faith” (2004, 54). That is, as he puts it, the heart of “Disney’s theology” is that “if you keep on believing, the dreams that you wish will come true” (Pinskey 2004, 55). Other entries in the princess diaries are more explicit. Sleeping Beauty, not surprisingly, Pinskey reads as “an undisguised, if oblique, argument for the eternal promise of the resurrection” (2004, 74). Indeed, in the penultimate scenes, during which Prince Charming is freed from Maleficent’s captivity, armed the Shield of Truth and the Sword of Virtue, and rescues Sleeping Beauty, one of Pinskey’s journalistic colleagues “sees a parallel with Ephesians 6, where the apostle Paul urges Christians to ‘take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day’ against ‘the spiritual forces of evil’ ” (Pinskey 2004, 77). This eisegesis—this religious “reading into”—becomes even more explicit in Snow White. Reaching back to the film’s original release, Pinskey quotes a Methodist minister who wondered in a 1938 issue of The Christian Century, “if readers ‘did not see in the story a reprint of Scripture? And can’t we recognize moral and theological truth unless it is labeled?’ ” (2004, 26). “Did not the happy innocence of Snow White with her animal friends,” he continues, “remind you of the original Eden?” (Pinskey 2004, 26). In terms of the iconic poisoned apple, again not surprisingly, “Where can you find a clearer delineation of sin than in this tale?” (Pinskey 2004, 26). For the Rev. Charles Brashares, Snow

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White “is the retelling of truth as basic as sin and salvation. It might even tempt one to a sermon” (Pinskey 2004, 27). Regardless of the medium, running in the background of all popular culture is a stealth program we might call WYBIWYG. What you bring is what you get. Our biases and prejudices, the various elements of our socialization, the culturally constructed and reinforced filters through which we view the world—all these inevitably lend shape and texture to what we see and how we see it. Whether we’re talking comic books or graphic novels, genre fiction or popular television, video games or highfantasy roleplaying, our experience is always a product of the dialectic between what we encounter and what we bring to it. This may seem a relatively commonplace observation indeed, but it is striking how often critics, commentators, and pop culture interlocutors forget it, operating as though they are not influenced by WYBIWYG’s stealth programming, and neither are other cultural participants. Few, if any, fantasy-culture products are not the subject of intense debate in Christian circles. For every enthusiast insisting that this fairy princess or that can be read as a gospel exemplar, others criticize her as yet more evidence of “everything that’s wrong with kids today.” None, though, imagine magic as a legitimate way of being in the world. For that, we must turn elsewhere, in this case, to a classic Victorian manor in San Francisco. Embracing Magic: Charmed Prior to the advent of binge-ready television that depends on the seasons-long story arc linked by excruciating episodic cliffhangers (a shift in small-screen storytelling that places everything from Breaking Bad to Game of Thrones in the same narrative domain as Saturday matinée chapter plays), relatively few science fiction or fantasy television series develop true, enduring cult followings. And I mean that in the best sense of the term. There is Star Trek, obviously (before which all others bow), though some will argue pride of place for Dr. Who. There is The X-Files (especially the early seasons, before the Vancouver rain drove Fox Mulder to seek the truth elsewhere). There is Buffy the Vampire Slayer (“How could you not love it?” Leonard asks Penny on The Big Bang Theory, and, indeed, how not?). And, then, there is Charmed. Despite its unyielding camp, dated special effects, and the kind of narrative gaps that are inevitable when popularity stretches a natural

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six-season story arc into eight, there is just something relentlessly endearing about the story of the three Halliwell sisters, Prue, Piper, and Phoebe—and, in the wake of Prue’s death, the fourth Halliwell sister, Paige Matthews. While guidebooks, both official (Gallagher and Ruditis 2004) and unofficial (Genge 2000), lead fans through the series, a flood of fan fiction (including amusing, and occasionally disturbing, sexual crossovers with the Potterverse) continues to appear, and even academics remain interested in the magical doings at Halliwell manor (Beeler and Beeler 2007; Crusie 2005). More than anything, this is a show about the magic of embracing who we are, which is, after all, one of the grounding principles of fantasy storytelling and the mythic imagination. Created by Constance Burge, between 1998 and 2006, the nearly two hundred Charmed episodes explore all of the ways in which we imagine magic through fantasy culture. While many of these episodes concern themselves with how the Halliwell sisters can keep their magic contained within “the manor,” that is, domesticated to the demands of daily life in the modern world, season 3’s “All Halliwell’s Eve” returns them via time portal to seventeenth-century Virginia. Caught up in the midst of a witch-craze, their journey into the past forces them to confront the fear of magic that still animates many religious believers today. Similarly, “Morality Bites,” a fairly dark episode from the previous season, imagines a future that looks more like Robert A. Heinlein’s classic short story “If this goes on . . .” (1967) or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Here we enter a world in which Christian totalitarian theocracy has outlawed witchcraft and reinstituted official witch hunts. “This is a reflection of our citizens’ resolve to ferret out the hidden evil,” says Witchfinder-General Nathaniel Pratt, “to turn fear into fight, and to band together as one to cleanse our city of its greatest threat. Tonight, Phoebe Halliwell will burn for her crime, and when she does, let that be a warning to other witches out there: You’re next.” In this episode, the overtly moralistic backstory—that witches may never use their powers for personal gain and never, ever for revenge—is narrative pretext for much more significant issues when it comes to the way societies respond to the presence of magic in their midst. Through far more episodes, though, we follow along as the Halliwell sisters struggle to understand their place in the universe as the Charmed Ones. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the series’ second episode, “I’ve Got You under My Skin.” While Prue and Phoebe are trying to work out how to use their newfound powers without violating the basic rule of “not for personal gain,” middle sister Piper (Holly Marie Combs)

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is wrestling with the more basic, existential question of what it means to be a witch. Watching a documentary one morning, which includes fabricated information about witch burnings in Salem and the death of a suspect witch by lightning, she seeks advice from their family pastor. “Is it true that evil beings can’t go into a church without, y’know [sound of a lightning bolt].” He’s not certain about that but concludes, nonetheless, “I sure wouldn’t want to risk it.” Piper follows him across the street to his classic, neo-Gothic church, but just as she reaches for the wrought-iron door handle, a clap of thunder (which is hardly unusual in San Francisco) scares her away. In something of a story within a story, we watch as Piper is both influenced by the unreliable infotainment of popular culture, just as the larger story of which she is a central part recirculates the fear of witches. When she tries the old “I have this friend . . .” approach, Pastor Williams repeats both his earlier warning and the religious party line. “How well do you remember your Sunday School lessons?” he asks. “Exodus 22:18? ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ ” Although her minister hits a number of appropriate multicultural marks—he’s young, African American, attractive, just a little bit hip, and socially conscious—he still reinforces a retrogressive, centuries-old fear of witchcraft. Later, looking through the Book of Shadows, the repository of knowledge for the hereditary line of Halliwell witches, Piper asks: PIPer we don’t know anything about these powers. why we have them. what they mean. where they even come from. I mean, how do we know it’s not . . . how do we know it’s not from evil? . . . that is what scares me. we don’t know. I just want to be normal again. Phoebe there no way you’ve been given this . . . this gift, if it wasn’t to do good things with it. to protect the innocent, just like the book of Shadows says.

Later, looking again at the church, Piper tries to convince herself that because she is, at heart, a good person, she has “nothing to be afraid of.” Pulling the door open, like a swimmer testing to see how cold the water is, she steps cautiously inside the sanctuary. There is no thunder, no lightning, no . . . nothing. Consecrated ground has not rejected her. If God exists, he has not cast her out. She steps back into the sunlight, a radiant smile on her face. “I’m good!” the young witch shouts, raising

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her arms, and, at one and the same moment, rejecting the narrow provincialism of the church and beginning the work of embracing magic. Throughout the series, Charmed viewers are invited to imagine magic in all the ways we have considered: fear, domestication, resistance, conversion, and, finally, embrasure. In the Charmed storyworld, magic is a reality. There are good witches and bad, demons and Whitelighters, even an enemy claiming to be the very Source of All Evil. Indeed, this episode’s b-story is about a demon who sucks the life out of young women in order to remain young himself. One of the earliest and most compelling ways in which we imagine magic, we turn now to this search for eternal life and everlasting youth.

chapter 4

Between Puer Aeternus and Vitam Aeternam

Traditionally, the story of Peter Pan does not begin in Neverland. The opening lines of J. M. Barrie’s stage play are spoken in the nursery, where Michael, the youngest of the Darling children, announces “obstreperously” (so read the stage directions), “I won’t go to bed. I won’t. I won’t!” Like the dwarfs refusing to wash before supper, this is a scene familiar to most parents. Written a decade after the play, Barrie’s Peter and Wendy also opens in the Darling house, though years before the advent of “the boy who wouldn’t grow up.” Here, new father George Darling feverishly calculates the cost of having children, wondering “can we try it for a year on nine nine seven?” That is, can they afford their new daughter, Wendy, on an annual income of just under three-and-ahalf pounds (Barrie [1937] 2011, 15)? Though, one has to wonder, what if they can’t? Are we back to Hansel and Gretel? A generation later, Walt Disney’s animated version omits both the adult preoccupation with money and the child’s aversion to bedtime. Instead, we find all the Darling children—Wendy, John, and Michael—together in the nursery playing a variety of Peter Pan games. Sometime they fight pirates, other times Indians; sometimes John is Captain Hook, other times the great Pan himself. Occasionally, the brothers are Lost Boys and Wendy their makebelieve mother. In this adaptation, which is amusing, racist, and sexist by turns, the stories of Neverland are already well known to the children, daily shaping their games and fantasies.

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“All this has happened before,” the narrator informs us, in terms of the mythic imagination of childhood, the power of make-believe, and the various tellings of the puer aeternus story. “And it will happen again.” That is, it will happen in our own homes with our own children. Bedrooms become pirate ships, couches and blankets turn into fortresses, and bedtime is a barrier to be conquered at all costs. Even Hook, Steven Spielberg’s 1991 reimagining of the twentieth century’s quintessential puer aeternus tale, does not begin in Neverland, opening instead with a play-within-a-play: children and adults watching wide-eyed as Peter’s first visit to the Darling nursery unfolds on a grammar school stage. Not so The Lost Boys. The establishing shot of Joel Schumacher’s vampire cult classic sweeps low over the ocean, tracking across a gently swelling sea. Moonlight streams from the upper left corner of the screen, while darkness envelops the entire right half. Gradually, lights glow at the top of the frame. Appearing first like stars muddied by cloud, these are the initial reflections of Neverland. The camera pulls up to reveal a beachfront amusement park, a Ferris wheel marking one end, a Tilt-a-Whirl guarding the middle, while an enormous roller coaster frames the shot like the hills and mountains that bound Pan’s magical island. Children laugh as they clutch the wooden horses of a carousel. Others play carnival games on the midway. This is Neverland, a place where the fun never stops, where cotton candy and kettle corn are nutritional staples, where we scream and laugh as the various rides and games of the boardwalk return us to the ostensibly carefree days of our youth. All this as a children’s choir sings hauntingly in the background: “Thou shall not fall; thou shalt not die. Thou shalt not fear; thou shalt not kill.” No nursery rhyme this, though, no bedtime lullaby, for moving through the crowd like bull sharks through low surf are the Lost Boys. Enchanted by the ethereal beauty of a young woman named Star, the Tinker Bell character in Schumacher’s vision, town newcomer Michael follows a group of teenaged vampires to their subterranean hangout, a resort hotel destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Like the Lost Boys’ underground home in Neverland, the cavernous lair is decorated with an assortment of cast-off treasures, some linked to the hotel’s faded past, others washed in by the sea, still others undoubtedly collected as trophies from their victims. Two aspects of this sequence reinvent central elements of the classic Pan story: eating and flying. That is, make-believe and making Michael believe. In the same way the Darling children learn to fly and come to

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understand the make-believe nature of Pan’s island, these actions represent Michael’s initiation into the vampiric domain that underpins Schumacher’s horrific rendering of Neverland. First, we meet the lead vampire, David, played by Kiefer Sutherland in one of the roles for which he was best known prior to 24, and whom the story leads us to believe is the Pan character. As he imperiously orders food for their guest, David rehearses the child-like selfishness that far more accurately marks Peter Pan than the presumed innocence portrayed in any number of saccharine film and stage versions. “That’s what I love about this place,” he tells Michael as food is brought. “You ask, and then you get.” In Barrie’s novel, though, food is never quite what it appears, because “you never exactly knew whether there would be a real meal or just make-believe, it all depended upon Peter’s whim” ([1937] 2011, 90). As they eat, Michael’s Chinese takeout is alternately real and makebelieve. “How are those maggots?” David asks, as the other Lost Boys look on, smirking and giggling like the eternal adolescents they are. “Maggots, Michael, you’re eating maggots. How do they taste?” Michael gags, spitting out a squirming mass of larvae, then seeing only rice spilled on the ground. “Sorry about that,” says David, unconvincingly. “Why don’t you try some noodles?” “They’re worms,” Michael replies, looking in the box and turning away in disgust. When David eats, though, the make-believe vanishes, and he says simply, “They’re only noodles, Michael.” As for Barrie’s Lost Boys, for Schumacher’s vampires, food is not quite what it appears to be—in this case, depending upon David’s whim. The ability to see food where there is none, to make believe and thereby make things believable, is one of the hallmarks of participation in the enduring fantasy world of Neverland. Second, in traditional adaptations of Barrie’s story, two things permit the Darling children to fly. They must, of course, “think lovely wonderful thoughts”—what many consider the sine qua non of flight in Peter Pan. But that’s not all. Happy thoughts are a necessary condition for magical flight, but they are not sufficient. More importantly, there must be magic. “Peter had been trifling with them,” writes Barrie, “for no one can fly unless the fairy dust has been blown on him” ([1937] 2011, 49, 50). In the cavern of the Lost Boys, David has been “trifling” with Michael over the food. Now, he offers their guest an ornately decorated wine bottle. “Drink some of this, Michael,” he says. “Be one of us.” As the others chant his name, Star warns him, “You don’t have to, Michael. It’s blood”—that is, the vampiric inversion of fairy dust, their invitation

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to flight and their passport to an eternal present. “You’ll never grow old, Michael,” David tells him. “And you’ll never die.” Michael drinks as the Lost Boys dance around the cavern, the children’s choir singing again, “Thou shalt not fall.” Rather than cheering them on, though, as Tinker Bell does in film and stage-play, Star watches sadly as another boy is lost.

between vitam aeternam and puer aeternus Because death is the constant darkness hovering just beyond the light, tales of eternal life are ubiquitous in the mythic imagination. Vampire films such as The Lost Boys are cinematic waypoints in a narrative journey stretching back millennia. From rudimentary grave goods left with the bodies of early hominins to elaborate religious rituals marking the passage from one world to the next, according to Joseph Campbell, “the recognition of mortality and the requirement to transcend it is the first great impulse to mythology” (1972, 22; see also Cowan 2008, 123–65; 2018, 63–87; Eliade 1958, 287–96). The Epic of Gilgamesh, history’s first literary masterpiece and the extant source material for many biblical myths, notably the story of Noah’s Ark, ends with a search for eternal life—one that, in the end, is foiled and fails. Despondent over the death of his friend Enkidu, the hero Gilgamesh seeks the counsel of Utnapishtim, one of a handful of humans to survive the Great Flood and who has been granted immortality as a reward. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh of a wondrous plant that grows in the depths of the sea, one that has the power to grant eternal life. But, since death is the great and unwavering constant in our lives, the epic hero loses immortality just as it comes within his grasp. From the Tree of Life standing in the Garden of Eden, lost to humankind through the Fall, to the River of the Water of Life that “flows from the throne of God and of the Lamb” but is available only to those who conform to proper doctrine and practice, Christian mythology has focused for nearly two thousand years on life after death. In the Norse Eddas, the golden apples of the goddess Iđunn were said to grant eternal life. The Taoist search for immortality is less about ensuring postmortem survival than achieving antemortem longevity through both natural (external) and magical (internal) means. Legend has it that sixteenth-century conquistador Juan Ponce de León searched for the fabled Fountain of Youth in the swamps and everglades of postconquest Florida (one can only hope it was near Orlando, but alas). Whatever their magical contrivance, however, eternal-life stories often reveal that immortality is rarely a bargain. Indiana Jones and the Last

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Crusade, for instance, interprets the Holy Grail as “the search for the Divine in all of us.” Although drinking from the cup of Christ does grant eternal life, it does so only within the confines of the Grail cave. Rob Marshall’s On Stranger Tides, the fourth entry into Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, is loosely based on the legend of Ponce de León (by way of Tim Powers’s 1987 novel). Here, when mixed with a mermaid’s single tear, water from the Fountain of Youth will grant extended life, but not necessarily immortality. Again, though, even this life comes at the cost of death. The years granted one participant in the Fountain ritual are gained only at the expense of another. In Terry Pratchett’s Faustian comedy, Eric, Ponce da Quirm has spent his life searching for the Fountain of Youth, though things don’t work out exactly as planned. Now in Hell, where he is condemned to plod an eternal treadmill, da Quirm muses wistfully, “I’d read so much about the Fountain, and you’d have thought someone in all those books would have mentioned the really vital thing about the water, wouldn’t you? Boil it first. Says it all, doesn’t it?” (Pratchett 2012, 148). Indeed. Although occasionally mistaken, one for the other, a significant difference exists between a fear of growing old, which is ultimately rooted in awareness of our own mortality, and a resistance to growing up, which could be little more than a desire to avoid the unpleasant responsibilities of adulthood. That is, fantasy culture often presents us with the difference between the vitam aeternam and the puer aeternus, between eternal life and eternal youth. Confusing the search for the former with a longing for the latter can have dire magical consequences. While Grimm portrays Nick Burkhardt’s bloodline as soldiers on the front line between our world and that of the Wesen, Terry Gilliam’s 2005 film, The Brothers Grimm, casts the famous fairy-tale collectors as eighteenth-century con artists. Here, while the Mirror Queen does succeed in her quest for eternal life, she neglects the spell’s important “middle bit” about youth and beauty. Thus, instead of admiring herself throughout eternity as “the fairest in the land,” for five centuries she has remained bedridden in her tower, each day growing older and older, but never able to slip into the comfort of endless night. Condemned to live forever, she is not forever young. Even this is based on classical texts, though the original source of the story is lost to us. In the “Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite,” the titular goddess explains to her mortal beloved, Anchises, why she will not beg eternal life for him from her father, Zeus. She tells him the story of Eos and Tithonos, who

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was granted the boon of immortality, though Eos, in her haste, “thought not in her heart to ask youth for him and to strip him of the slough of deadly age.” As the years pass, “when loathsome old age pressed full upon him,” Eos tenderly laid Tithonos on a bed in a sealed room. “There,” the unknown author tells us, “he babbles endlessly, and has no more strength at all” (ll. 220–39). Nearly seven hundred years later, Ovid’s Metamorphoses tells a similar tale, this one of the Cumaean Sybil, who was offered “life without end,” though, as she points out drily, “it slipped my mind to ask those years should be forever young” (14.136, 14.144–45). On the other hand, there are those whose greatest fear is that they will never age, never mature. In Bill Willingham’s Fables, instead of the small wooden puppet who only wished he “was a real boy,” Pinocchio is a depressed and angry preadolescent, furious that he can never actually grow up. “Who knew I’d have to stay a boy forever?” he demands, constantly on the lookout for the elusive, bungling Blue Fairy. “The ditzy bitch interpreted my wish too literally,” he complains. “I’m over three centuries old and I still haven’t gone through puberty. I want to grow up, I want my balls to drop, and I want to get laid!” (Willingham 2009, 95). A considerably darker version of this problem is the child-vampire Claudia in Neil Jordan’s uneven film adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. “You want me to be a doll forever!” she screams at Lestat and Louis, her vampiric surrogate parents, flying into a near-psychotic rage when the truth finally dawns on her, and she realizes that she is doomed to spend eternity as a small child who will never grow into a woman. How we tell the puer aeternus tale, especially when we do so in the context of well-known, even beloved stories, and particularly when we ask what changes in the telling of these stories, reveals a considerable amount about the social and psychological anxieties underpinning the adaptations. Consider, in this regard, Peter and George. Adapting Peter and George Numerous filmmakers and playwrights have adapted J. M. Barrie’s classic puer aeternus tale. In many of these different versions, the characters most often altered are George, the patriarch of the Darling clan, and Peter Pan himself. In Barrie’s original story, the latter is the quintessence of selfishness, unconcerned with any interests other than his own, while the former is so concerned with what everyone else thinks that he appears, as one critic puts it, to have “the soul of a Dickensian bookkeeper” (Barrie [1937] 2011, 15n10). However central to Barrie’s story,

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though, these aspects are all but lost in both the stage and the Disney versions. There, Pan is elevated to little more than a playful, if easily distracted innocent, while George is played as the bumbling fool obsessed with cuff links and bow ties. Identifying with the wonders of childhood and the promise of a magical flight to Neverland, we are encouraged to laugh at George for his inability to fix his tie or find his cuff links, actions that, for him, represent his ability to participate in the adult world—that is, to continue providing for his family. Once again, though, the issue is not so much that the stories are changed, but how, and how these changes affect the telling and reflect the society in which and for which the changes are made. Scenes of domestic propriety and financial concern rarely if ever make it into Peter Pan’s film or stage versions, if for no other reason than they are not nearly as entertaining as sword fights with pirate captains, adventures with ticking crocodiles, and, of course, fairy dust and flying. Yet without them, the story of Peter and Wendy loses much of its critical edge. Its refraction of growing up is blunted into a more superficial desire simply not to grow up. While the Lost Boys are clearly the children in Neverland, they are also adults who lost their way while being boys and girls, who chose the ability to play as the cost of growing up. If The Lost Boys considers the dark side of the puer aeternus, two other popular versions of the Pan story—Peter Pan and Hook— explore different perspectives on the desire for youth and the resistance to aging, as well as the inevitability of one and the recovery of the other (see also Nikolajeva 2000; Rose 1984; von Franz 2000; Yeoman 1998). Most of us are familiar with children pretending to be older than they are, whether through dress-up games or, later, dressing in clothes well beyond their years; whether adopting behaviors they associate with adults—smoking because they think it makes them look older—or refusing the strictures of childhood they consider unreasonably imposed by adults, such as a set bedtime. Perhaps we remember these from our own childhoods, or with our own children. Paradoxically, though, parents often seem impatient for their children to grow up, chiding them to “act their age,” when, in fact, that’s precisely what they’re doing. In many cases, what parents really want is something closer to simple obedience. This paradox lies at the heart of the conflict in the Darling nursery on the night at the beginning of Walt Disney’s classic animated film, Peter Pan. George Darling is a man consumed with two things: the worry that he will not be able to provide adequately for his family (hence his ambivalence about having children) and the need to keep up appearances for the neighbors (upon which he believes rests his ability to

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support those children). Faced with the incessant fantasy games that Wendy, John, and Michael play, and his almost crippling concern with propriety—in this case, a recalcitrant bow tie and a chalk treasure map drawn on his best shirtfront—George decides that his daughter must finally have a room of her own, that she must move out of the nursery, that she must grow up. After all, she is growing up. At this point in the story, Wendy Darling is entering adolescence, and her father is undoubtedly worried that if she persists in her fantasy life with Peter Pan and her brothers, a suitable “arrangement” will be difficult to come by. The thought of being separated, however, strikes terror into the children’s hearts. “But, Mother,” Wendy pleads as she’s tucked in for the night, “I don’t want to grow up.” When Peter arrives just moments later, she tells him sadly, “I have to grow up tomorrow. Tonight’s my last night in the nursery.” Peter but that means . . . no more stories.

Peter’s concern here is significant, if for no other reason than that it is so often overlooked in order to get on with the fairy dust, the flying, and the magical trip to Neverland. True, he wants to take Wendy there so that she will never have to grow up. But, more importantly, he wants her with him so that her stories will go on, so that he and the other Lost Boys can be entertained, so that they will continue to find meaning and identity in the storyworlds she creates for them. Rather than any real concern for her feelings, he embodies childish self-interest. As folklorist Maria Tatar notes, “Peter is drawn to the Darling nursery window because of the stories told in it, not because of a genuine desire to take Wendy to Neverland. In Neverland, there are plenty of adventures, but no memory and therefore also no stories” (in Barrie [1937] 2011, 45n19; emphasis added). And, if no stories, then no identity. Without the stories to tell them continually who they are, they are truly “lost boys.” A central paradox of both Neverland and, as we will see, Wonderland is the problem of memory: the memory of being a child, and the willingness to hold it as a memory rather than as a necessary moment in an eternal, ongoing present. In Barrie’s novel, for example, as soon as Wendy finishes reading him the story of Cinderella, telling Peter simply that “they lived happily ever after,” he forgets her and is set to fly straight back to Neverland “to tell the other boys” ([1937] 2011, 45). He has what he wants, and he’s

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ready to leave. Barrie continues, in what Tatar considers clear allusion to the Edenic temptation: “Don’t go, Peter,” she entreated, “I know such lots of stories.” Those were her precise words, so that there can be no denying that it was she who first tempted him. He came back, and there was a greedy look in his eyes now that ought to have alarmed her, but did not. “Oh, the stories I could tell to the boys!” she cried, and then Peter gripped her and drew her toward the window. (Barrie [1937] 2011, 45, 47)

Thus, in the ur-text, Peter is not simply the innocence of childhood, mischievous perhaps, but entertaining and basically good at heart. As soon as he learns that Wendy could tell “such lots of stories,” instead of flying off, he simply presumes to take her with him. In theatrical and musical versions, this underlying sense of menace is lost entirely, replaced with Pan’s greedy enthusiasm for more stories and the fairy magic of flying about the nursery. Schumacher’s version of the story, however, recovers the malevolence and selfishness underpinning this scene, presenting the Lost Boys as perpetually unsatisfied adolescents  whose eternal existence orbits around what they can take from others. Many productions cast the same actor as both George Darling and Captain Hook, the latter seen as the Neverland mirror of the former. In both Barrie’s novel and Schumacher’s adaptation, though, it is the eternal child who is in search of an eternal adult. Wendy doesn’t want to leave the nursery, yet both her father and Peter push her to assume what amount to adult responsibilities. For her father, she must grow up, marry according to her station (if not, possibly, above it), and have children of her own. For the Pan, she must never grow up, but she must playact at marriage and become a surrogate mother to the eternal children already trapped in Neverland. Like the Fountain of Youth, puer aeternus rarely comes without cost. Indeed, as children’s author John Goldthwaite notes, “every decade or so, someone mounts a major stage production of this coy business, or some film version is released, and parents dutifully bring their children into theatres to puzzle out a fable that confounds their every instinct about growing up” (1996, 210). If Disney’s version presents us with the problem of Peter and George, as each tries to control Wendy in his own way, Steven Spielberg’s Hook explores the question of Peter as George, as the adult now obsessed with propriety, success, and security.

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En route to London for a Christmas visit with “Granny Wendy” (Dame Maggie Smith), the woman about whom Barrie allegedly wrote his original stories, we learn that Peter Banning (Robin Williams) has so forgotten the “boy who wouldn’t grow up”—he has been so successful in “banning” Peter, as it were—that he is now actually terrified of flying. In fact, he’s grown into something of a control freak and seems to be afraid of everything—currently, of losing the biggest business deal of his life. graNNY weNDY and what is so terribly important about your terribly important business? JaCK (interrupting) well, y’see, when a big company’s in trouble Dad sails in, and if there’s any resistance . . . baNNINg he’s exaggerating. I’m still in mergers and acquisitions, and I’m dabbling in some land development . . . JaCK (interrupting again) Any resistance, and he blows them out of the water. boom! graNNY weNDY So, Peter, . . . you’ve become a pirate.

If the tug-of-war in Peter Pan is between Peter and George over who will decide whether and how Wendy will grow up, in Hook, Peter has become George, and his struggle is to rediscover who he really is. He has grown into what other variants of the Pan story actively encourage us to mock. After she takes Banning to Neverland, Tinkerbell (Julia Roberts) wakes the Lost Boys to tell them “Pan’s back.” They look at him suspiciously, much the way children regularly regard adults. “That ain’t Peter Pan,” says one. “He’s old,” says another, while a third adds, “He’s fat.” “He’s an old, fat grandpa man,” sums up one of the smaller Lost Boys, not insignificantly. When Hook was released in 1991, Williams was barely forty years old—hardly a respectable age for grandparenthood. Neither Jack nor Maggie, Banning’s children, had reached puberty. Yet, to the Lost Boys, to the puer aeternus, all adults are old, very old, “grandpa man” old. In Neverland, youth and age do not exist as developmental continua, but as mythic opposites, conceptual and

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experiential binaries worthy of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966). When Ruffio, the de facto leader of the Lost Boys in Peter’s absence, appears carrying the Pan sword, Banning immediately asserts the authority of the adult and reinforces this opposition. baNNINg Now that’s enough! Show’s over. Now you put that thing away. Now you put it down before you poke somebody’s eye out. . . . this is an insurance nightmare. what is this, some sort of Lord of the Flies preschool? . . . I want to speak to a grownup.

“All grownups are pirates,” Ruffio replies, menacingly. “We kill pirates.” baNNINg I am not a pirate. It so happens—I am a lawyer. loSt boYS Kill the lawyer! Kill the lawyer! Kill the lawyer!

Which, in a way, is exactly what must happen if Peter Banning is to become Peter Pan once again. In Spielberg’s version, he must undertake the classic hero’s journey to recover the boy whom the story demands still lives inside the man.

Remembering the Hero’s Journey Ordinarily, neither Peter Pan nor Alice in Wonderland, which, with L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, are among the most popular children’s fantasies, are viewed as examples of the “hero’s journey,” the archetypal narrative cycle that Joseph Campbell contends has shaped the mythic imagination from the time hominins first began telling complex stories. Also known as the “monomyth,” it was popularized through the 1988 PBS series Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth but is most thoroughly explored in Campbell’s best-known work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1968). There, Campbell argues that the hero’s journey, and by “hero” he means both male and female participants in the mythic quest, represents “in the form of one composite adventure the tales of a number of the world’s symbolic carriers of the destiny of Everyman” (1968, 36). Although some scholars have criticized Campbell for his overzealous generalization of the hero’s journey, universalizing the myth with little or no regard for local variation (a critique Campbell himself

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disputes in his preface), the monomyth has arguably become the principal template into which Hollywood filmmakers now either place or force much of their source material (see Vogler 2007). Put briefly, the hero’s journey takes place in three phases: departure, initiation, and return. As Campbell puts it: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man” (1968, 30; for a version of this as the ritual journey, see Cowan 2018, 125–38). Once again, we are in the domain of magic, monsters, and make-believe heroes—the natural home of the unnatural narrative. Each phase contains stages through which the hero must pass on her quest. For example, at departure (Campbell 1968, 49–94), the hero often initially refuses the call to adventure. Once it is reluctantly accepted, however, some form of magical or supernatural aid is needed to begin the journey. This can come in the form of a mentor or guide; it can appear as a weapon or some other magical symbol of power. Once underway, during initiation (Campbell 1968, 97–192), the hero undergoes a series of trials as he pursues the object of his quest or the purpose of his journey. Here, he will be supported and tempted by a variety of beings, forces, and circumstances, both natural and supernatural. Some will reinforce his sense of mission, while others try to force him from the fated path. This stage closes with “the ultimate boon”—achieving the goal of the quest. Finally, in the return (Campbell 1968, 193–243), the hero completes the quest, though she is often as reluctant to rejoin the “normal” world as she was to begin the journey in the first place. At the conclusion of the mythic quest, the hero conquers both worlds, walking between them, as it were, and gaining the freedom to live as she determines, not as has been determined for her by others. By refashioning the stories of Peter Pan and Alice Kingsleigh as heroes’ journeys, Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton not only standardize them to current Hollywood fashion—making them, in effect, tellings of a story already told in a thousand different ways—but they significantly disembed them from their ur-texts. In both Hook and Alice in Wonderland, the hero’s journey is intimately associated with recovering lost memory. How we remember things affects what those things are for us. Indeed, “how much of who we are is a function of what we remember? If being human is not merely a function of biology and biogenesis, in what else, then, does it consist?” As so many of the stories we tell pro-

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pose: who we are is explicitly a function of who we remember ourselves to be. “Contrary to popular belief, however, memory is not about the past; it is constitutive of the present and generative of the future” (Cowan 2010, 66). Both Peter Banning and Alice Kingsleigh have lost their memories: he of Neverland, which he does not remember at all; she of Wonderland, which she misremembers as “Underland” but dismisses as a half-forgotten dream. Both characters find themselves reluctant heroes on monomythic journeys requiring, above all, that they remember who they were and, thus, who they are and who they will become. “His Mind’s Been ‘Junk-tified’ ” Peter Banning has no memory of anything prior to adolescence, when he was adopted by an American couple and taken from London to live in the United States. In the wake of Captain Hook (played marvelously by Dustin Hoffman) kidnapping Jack and Maggie, though, Granny Wendy knows that it’s time for Peter to remember, to learn again who he was. graNNY weNDY Peter, the stories are true. I swear to you. I swear on everything I adore. and now he’s come back to seek his revenge. The fight isn’t over for Captain James hook. . . . only you can save your children. Somehow you must go back. You must make yourself remember. baNNINg remember what? graNNY weNDY Peter, don’t you know who you are?

As he stands there, arms akimbo, she opens her copy of Peter and Wendy, showing him the iconic illustration of Pan in the same pose. “Yes, boy,” she tells him. “Yes.” Banning’s answer to this, not surprisingly—and his initial refusal of the quest—is a stiff double Scotch, drunk neat, quickly, and with another hard on its heels. While this approach may not help his memory, it at least takes the edge off the implication of what Granny Wendy has just urged him to remember. Enter Tinkerbell, the very sine qua non of supernatural aid, but whom he calls at first “a firefly from hell,” then “a complex Freudian

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hallucination having something to do with my mother”—which is closer to the mark than he realizes. When Banning still refuses to believe, Tinkerbell bundles him in a blanket and, trailing clouds of fairy dust, takes him to Neverland by force—the magical inversion both of Hook taking his own children and Pan taking the Darlings. Even there, he refuses to accept his central role in the quest, something that confuses everyone in Neverland just as much as Banning is confused by everything. Indeed, in the same way adults occasionally demand that their children stop pretending and grow up, Hook insists that Banning stop pretending he can’t fly, stop claiming that he isn’t Peter Pan, in fact, stop playacting that he’s an adult. To save his children, Hook says, all he has to do is fly to them, touch their hands, and they’re free. “Be the Pan you are,” urges Tinkerbell. “Fly, fly. Think a happy thought.” But he can’t. Faced with the loss of his children, there are no happy thoughts. The “boy who wouldn’t grow up” remains as trapped by the man who can’t remember his childhood as surely as if he hadn’t existed at all. It is Smee (Bob Hoskins), Hook’s first mate, who finally sees the problem. SMee he’s Peter Pan, alright, Captain. he’s just been away from Neverland so long his mind’s been “junk-tified.” he’s forgotten everything.

In the novel, as Pan, Peter lives in an eternal present, substituting stories for memory. In Hook, he has been gone so long from Neverland’s perpetual now that he no longer remembers it at all. Caught up in the “junktifying” obsessions of adulthood, Banning’s rational mind screams that there has to be some other explanation. Any other explanation. None of this can possibly be true. Of all the trials Banning faces in Neverland, none is more devastating than watching Hook gradually take over as Jack’s surrogate father. This would be the ultimate defeat of both Peter Banning and Peter Pan. Convinced he’s losing his son, Banning knows he’s “gotta fly!” but he can’t. Adults simply don’t fly. It’s not “good form,” as Hook would say. Reeling from a sudden blow to the head, however, Banning glimpses his reflection in a pool of water—and sees, for a moment, the face of the boy he once was. Like Pan regaining his shadow, like an amnesiac to whom everything comes flooding back—the underground home where he and Lost Boys lived, the thimble he gave Wendy (thinking it a

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“kiss”)—Banning, with his memory restored, transforms into Peter once again. baNNINg/Peter I . . . remember.

What he remembers, though, is lying in an Edwardian pram beneath a lowering London sky, listening as his mother makes plans for his entire life. “I was afraid,” he tells Tinkerbell, “because I didn’t want to grow up, because everybody who grows up has to die someday. So, I ran away.” This is the tipping point in the quest, the moment in Hook when the goal is in sight. The climactic battle between the pirates and the Lost Boys, Peter rescuing Jack and Maggie, Captain Hook’s final defeat—all are foregone conclusions now that the hero has at last assumed the role meant for him from the beginning. When Peter returns from Neverland, after vowing never to forget the Lost Boys again, he is fundamentally changed, and that change will have ripple effects throughout the family. Just as the hero brings a gift back for the world he left, Banning brings Pan’s sense of mischievous joy and endless fun. When his cell phone rings, which is the envelope structure that frames the action in the film, Peter tells his family: Peter I have to take this. . . . brad? ever wonder what it’s like to feel the total exhilaration of really flying? Feel this.

Throwing his phone out the window, Banning is banished at last. The Pan has returned. “I Told You She’s the Right Alice” Like Peter Pan, the story of Alice’s nonsense adventures in Wonderland has been told innumerable times. Among many others, it has been: a silent film that followed the mirror-world plot of Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1915); a studio vehicle that flopped at the height of the Great Depression, as much as anything because the stars whom audiences went to see were all but unrecognizable in costume (1933); and a Disney animated “classic” (1953), which did no better than its predecessors, but which, for the tens of millions of viewers, serves as something akin to an “authorized version.” While many versions since are remakes, in one way or another, of the Disney film, others are pallid and

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obvious allegories, often insinuating what many commentators consider Carroll’s latent sexual attraction to Alice Liddell (Dreamchild). It has been remade as cinema horror (Alice in Murderland), as a science fiction miniseries (Alice), and as the central metaphor in the Wachowski Brothers’ iconic The Matrix. Some treat what we might call the “Alice problem” as mental illness (Once Upon a Time in Wonderland), while others attempt to reconcile it as traumatic amnesia (Malice in Wonderland). Alice has been portrayed as insane and homicidal, trapped forever inside Lewis Carroll’s mirror in two episodes of Syfy’s steampunkinspired paranormal series Warehouse 13. Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland writes Alice into the mythic quest and casts her as the mythic hero. Like Peter Banning, nineteen-year-old Alice Kingsleigh (Mia Wasikowska) has forgotten who she is. She is nearly a woman now, and, in proper Edwardian fashion, an “arrangement” has been made for her with Lord Hamish Ascot. At the garden party intended to announce their engagement, however, the various people Alice encounters reinforce the confusing absurdity and almost dreamlike quality of the life that’s been laid out for her. Hamish, for example, is a mock-lobster of a man who finds the quadrille “exhilarating”—even though it’s a dance that’s the next best thing to not moving at all. She watches her sister put on a brave front about the importance of hearth and home, even as her brother-in-law cheats on his wife behind the hedgerow. Her spinster aunt is quite mad, waiting for a Prince Charming who will never come, while her soon-to-be mother-in-law fairly defines the wicked stepmother. Indeed, in the manner of Through the LookingGlass, events in Underland, as it is known for most of the film, mirror her real-life experience in what we might call the Overworld. Much of the film reproduces set-piece scenes that identify it as the traditional Alice story: she meets the White Rabbit, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the Cheshire Cat, the Blue Caterpillar, all of whom serve as secondary supernatural aids in her heroic journey. Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton, however, adapt their variant from wellknown, though less significant, aspects of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. In the ur-texts, the Mad Hatter and his famous tea party are but a single waypoint in Alice’s wanderings through Wonderland. Similarly, Carroll’s famous nonsense poem, “Jabberwocky,” is limited to one small part of the larger, episodic Alice storyworld. In Burton’s hands, though, the Jabberwocky becomes the central conflict animating the narrative, the linchpin in

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Alice Kingsleigh’s heroic journey. Using the gigantic creature as her principal weapon, the Red Queen’s rule has devastated Underland, and all the realm lives in fear of her dread words, “Off with their heads!” Since Alice remembers nothing of her time there as a young girl, she has forgotten that the stories are true and that she isn’t mad (even though, as the Hatter reminds her, “all the best people are”). The White Rabbit has been sent to the Overworld to bring Alice back, to return with a hero who will lead the insurrection against “the bloody Red Queen” (Helena Bonham Carter), champion the White Queen on the Frabjous Day, and ultimately restore balance to “Underland.” As in Banning’s initial confrontation with Hook and the Lost Boys, throughout the film, there is considerable debate about Alice’s identity. Who is she? Is she the “right Alice”? What if she isn’t, or, perhaps worse, what if she is, but can’t remember that in time? We know that she must be the right Alice—just as we know that Banning must be the Pan—and this central conceit underpins the larger narrative and structures significant aspects of Alice’s heroic journey. It’s not about whether she will remember, but under what circumstances and to what end? Although a number of requisite action sequences move the narrative along— her narrow escape from the “frumious Bandersnatch”; her narrow escape from the Knave of Hearts; her narrow escape from the Red Queen’s castle (astride the Bandersnatch, as it happens)—all are subsumed to the film’s central question, posed by the Blue Caterpillar: “Who are you?” whIte rabbIt I told you she’s the right alice. DorMouSe I am not convinced. whIte rabbIt how is that for gratitude? I’ve been up there for weeks, trailing one alice after the next, and I was almost eaten by other animals. Flower She doesn’t look anything like herself. DorMouSe that’s because she’s the wrong alice.

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In the fantastic world of Underland, the Blue Caterpillar, Absalom (played by Alan Rickman), is considered the definitive authority in the matter of all things Alice. “Is she the right Alice?” the others ask him. “Not hardly,” he replies. “I told you,” piles on the Dormouse. When the Cheshire Cat asks the young woman if she’s “the Alice,” she replies, “There’s been some debate about that.” Indeed, just as Banning rejects being Peter Pan, for most of the film, Alice resists being “the Alice.” A subtle shift in Campbell’s heroic journey motif, though one that serves to maintain narrative tension in both films, Alice and Banning carry their initial refusal of the quest even as they are caught up in its trials and tribulations. Neither chose to be in Neverland or Wonderland, and both defy the logic of their presence there. For each, the heroic journey is only partially about defeating the principal enemy. The true goal of the quest is the recovery of memory that will lead them to their true selves. Of all the Underlanders, the one driven most clearly mad by the Red Queen’s predations, and whose ability to distinguish reality from fantasy is the most obviously impaired, is the Hatter, played by Johnny Depp. Yet, unlike all the others, he recognizes Alice the moment she arrives at his tea party, and he becomes her principal guide to the problems of Underland and to her role in its salvation. hatter It’s you. DorMouSe No, it’s not. look, twisp brought us the wrong alice. hatter It’s absolutely alice. You’re absolutely alice. I’d know you anywhere.

Though the Hatter is quite as mad as Alice’s Aunt Imogen, he’s not wrong. In the manner of the Shakespearean fool, from the depths of madness and pain, he serves as the font of wisdom, the one character who sees when others don’t or prove unwilling. Absalom may pose the question in the manner of a hookah-smoking Zen roshi, but the Hatter is the one who knows. She is the right Alice, only she doesn’t know it yet and, more than that, doesn’t know what being the “right Alice” means. Others may be certain, but until she remembers, their certainty counts for naught.

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As Alice rides on the Hatter’s shoulder, her tiny size the result of yet another Underland potion, he recites part of “Jabberwocky,” his voice dropping to a low, menacing brogue (that’s worth the price of admission). “It’s all about you, you know,” he tells her, now fully the supernatural guide to the hero’s journey. Adapted slightly from Carroll’s venerable urtext, in Burton’s hands, “Jabberwocky” shifts from what critic Martin Gardner considers “the greatest of all nonsense poems” (Carroll 2000, 149n16) to an apocalyptic prophecy of the final battle between good and evil. Eventually, as we know she must, the hero in the monomyth accepts both the premise of the journey and her central place in its resolution. For Alice, this means two things, and it happens in two stages: asserting her independence in the face of expectation and claiming her identity in a way that reconciles the parallel realities of Underland and the Overworld. When the bloodhound Bayard asks, “Would your name be ‘Alice,’ by any chance?” she replies, “Yes, but I’m not the one everyone’s talking about.” Even in the very midst of the quest, Alice still refuses to accept who they insist she is. When Bayard reiterates her importance to the Frabjous Day prophecy, Alice finally loses her temper. alICe From the moment I fell down that rabbit-hole, I’ve been told what I must do and who I must be. I’ve been shrunk, stretched, scratched, and stuffed into a teapot. I’ve been accused of being alice, and of not being alice, but this is my dream. I’ll decide where it goes from here. baYarD If you diverge from the path— alICe I make the path.

“I make the path.” That is, “the future’s not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves”—John Connor’s well-known line from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, arguably the most significant statement in the franchise. For Alice, there is no future but the one she makes. She chooses who she will be. If she is not the Alice Underland expects, she will become the Alice Wonderland needs. Confiding in Absalom on the eve of Frabjous Day, the final resistance to her hero’s journey vanishes.

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abSaloM I can’t help you if you don’t even know who you are, stupid girl. alICe I’m not stupid! My name is alice. I live in london. I have a mother named helen and a sister named Margaret. My father was Charles Kingsleigh. he had a vision that stretched halfway around the world, and nothing ever stopped him. I’m his daughter. I’m alice Kingsleigh. abSaloM Alice, at last. You were just as dim-witted the first time you were here. You called it “wonderland,” as I recall. alICe (flashing back) wonderland? It wasn’t a dream at all. It’s a memory. this place is real, and so are you, and so is the hatter.

Once she remembers, it doesn’t matter whether it’s “real” in any conventional sense. It has become mythically real. It has become real in terms of the hero’s journey, which is always, at some level, a journey into and toward one’s true self. As when Banning remembers the Pan, the conclusion of the quest is foregone, and all that remains is, as the Hatter puts it, “the slaying and so forth.” Donning the armor of the White Queen and taking up the Vorpal Sword, she steps into her identity as the Alice.

telling and retelling the same stories Both Hook and Alice in Wonderland rewrite their respective ur-texts as heroic journeys, as monomythic mirrors whose central characters are frustrated by social convention, and who must, in turn, frustrate expectations in order to succeed in their quests. This is the return to the world of ordinary reality, which, if the journey is successful, can never be perceived or experienced the same way again. Peter is locked in the adult world, chained there by prospect and propriety, kept from the joys of childhood he should be realizing through his own children. As the legal pirate Banning, he is forever kept from playing the Pan, and his mythic journey is from the adult to the child. Alice, on the other hand, even though she is technically on the verge of adulthood, faces the sexism of Edwardian social convention, which demands

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that she pass from one form of guardianship to another. As the child who is soon to be a wife (and, presumably, a mother), Alice is actually kept from growing up, and her journey is from the child to the adult. To succeed in their quests, both heroes must transcend the expectations by which they are, in fact, confined. Both journey from a closed to an open life, from circumscription and limitation to expansion and exploration. Two sets of paired symbolic acts mark the attainment of the quest. The symbol of Banning’s adult enslavement is his cell phone, the “grandpa man” surrogate for the Pan sword. Always close at hand, he even wears it on his belt like a weapon, drawing it whenever he feels the situation demands and engaging in mock keyboard battles with other corporate drones. Alice is bound by the rigid codes of Edwardian propriety. Her hair must be prim and correct. She must dance as and when instructed. Yet she arrives at her engagement party wearing neither corset nor stockings. alICe I’m against them. Mother but you’re not properly dressed. alICe who’s to say what is proper? what if it was agreed that “proper” was wearing a codfish on your head? Would you wear it? To me, a corset is like a codfish.

It’s unlikely that Banning ceases to be a lawyer when he returns from Neverland, but throwing his cell phone out the window asserts a new form of adulthood for him, more of a “liquid identity,” in which (and through his own children) he moves between the child and the adult, choosing in each moment which to be and how. Returning from Wonderland, Alice refuses her arranged marriage to Hamish Ascot, choosing instead her own path in life. Her rejection of family expectation is marked by her bold choice of Hamish’s father as a business associate, rather than her meek acceptance of his son as a marriage partner. In a final act of defiance, similar to Peter’s destruction of the cell phone, as she leaves her engagement party, she raises her skirts and petticoats, reveals her shockingly unstockinged legs . . . and futterwackens. That is, she dances a nonsense step created for the film and performed first by the Mad Hatter in celebration of the Red Queen’s downfall. Wonderland’s freedom is reflected in her own choice for independence.

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The Disney version of Peter Pan closes with George looking through the open window of the Darling nursery as a pirate ship ghosts across the large, full moon. “You know,” he says, “I have the strangest feeling that I’ve seen that ship before, a long time ago, when I was very young.” Hook ends similarly, with Peter and his family looking out the same open window. “So,” says Granny Wendy, “your adventures are over.” “Oh no,” he replies, in classic Pan pose, “to live, to live would be an awfully big adventure.” Alice’s journey frees her to a liquid identity as an adult woman, both able to and capable of making her own choices, her own way in the world. The closing shot finds her on the foredeck of the barque Wonder, as she sets off to launch her company’s trade route to China. This is her open window on the world of adventure, the magic of finding her place in the world. They have become the heroes in their own adventure, part of the larger mythic continuum to which we now turn.

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Two warriors face each other across the dull grey flagstones of a traditional martial arts training yard. One, Yu Shu Lieu, has been forged in the fire of long practice and tempered through a lifetime bent to the demands of the sword. The other, Yu Jen, is barely out of childhood. Though considerably less experienced, she has been trained in techniques far more advanced than her years should permit—and she has stolen a weapon never meant for her hands. “Give me the sword,” Shu Lieu says, calmly. “Take it if you can,” Jen replies. Anxious to demonstrate her prowess, she wants to take her place among what she imagines are the martial heroes of her culture. They come together in a rush, fierce and determined. Weapons clash in a percussive symphony of strikes and parries, at times moving almost too fast for our eyes to follow. Woven into their swordplay is an acrobatic spectacle of balance, flexibility, speed, and strength—hallmarks of the Chinese martial arts, or wushu. Throughout the battle, Yu Jen (Zhang Ziyi) wields only the one weapon, a Chinese straight sword, or jian, its slender blade tinted the color of pale jade and carved with a procession of dragons. This is the legendary Green Destiny, carried for decades by the Wudang sword master Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat). Intent on reclaiming the sword, the warrior-hero Yu Shu Lieu, played by the incomparable Michelle Yeoh, uses an astonishing array of traditional weapons: double sabers (dao), long spear (qiang), twin hook swords (shuang gou), Monk’s spade (which proves too heavy to wield), a short bronze staff, and, finally, a massive two-handed broadsword. Breath 97

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hisses in and out, and grunts explode as their weapons ring again and again. The only other sounds are the Chinese drums beating time in the background. The bronze staff shatters the flagstones of the training floor but is itself gradually cut to pieces by the Green Destiny. Indeed, each of Shu Lieu’s weapons, even when wielded with the supreme skill of a martial arts master, proves useless against the blade’s mystical power. In the end, running with sweat and nearing exhaustion, they battle to a draw. Shu Lieu again demands the sword. “Here, take it,” says Jen, the delicate blade flicking out like a snake’s tongue. Shu Lieu grasps her bleeding arm, and Jen, sensing advantage, prepares for the killing blow. Suddenly, Li Mu Bai himself appears. “You don’t deserve the Green Destiny,” he says evenly. “Let’s end this here.” Unwilling to fight another renowned hero, especially after her grueling battle with Shu Lieu, Jen retreats across the training floor. Spreading her arms wide, she suddenly defies gravity, floating gracefully up to the tiled roof, then drifting down to the pond on the other side of the palisade wall. At this moment in Ang Lee’s award-winning Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, we transition from the acrobatic, intensely physical style of wushu that is characterized by Shaolin kung fu to the arena of magical combat that has for decades signified Hong Kong martial arts cinema and is more closely associated with the inner martial art traditions of Wudang. Trading the dull grey solidity of the stone courtyard for the deep emerald green of a bamboo forest, we move from the world of highly specialized (though not technically impossible) martial arts to the realm of the fantastic, where warriors use legendary Taoist “light body” techniques to do battle in midair. Instead of drums echoing off the walls of the training hall, the breathy voice of a bamboo flute floats on the breeze high in the forest. Moving gracefully among the bamboo stalks a hundred feet above the ground, Li Mu Bai and Yu Jen continue their battle for the Green Destiny. Rather than the quick edits and sharp angles of the earlier fight, though, this sequence moves through a series of slow, almost languorous lapdissolves that turn the fighters’ movements into more of an aerial ballet than brute combat, more Cirque de Soleil than mixed martial arts octagon. Even when Jen loses her grip, she falls only a few feet before literally swimming up through the air to reengage her opponent. At one point, they face each other balanced on a single bamboo stalk, only a few inches in diameter and bent over almost double. Leaping down against the lush backdrop of the bamboo forest, Jen makes a final effort to escape, running delicately across the glass-smooth

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fig.3 Li Mu Bai and Yu Jen battle for the Green Destiny in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000).

surface of a small lake—where the cast and crew could film for only a brief time each morning, before the breeze picked up and rippled the surface of the water. But even here she cannot evade Mu Bai, and he finally reveals his purpose: to take Yu Jen as his disciple, to teach her the true ways of Wudang martial arts, not the adulterated techniques passed on by her mentor, the villainous Jade Fox. That is, he wants to train her to be worthy of the sword she has stolen, so that she can take her place as part of the heroic community it represents. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won four Oscars, including best cinematography and best foreign language film, and it was nominated for (among others) best picture, director, costume design, and film editing. Both a critical and a box office success worldwide, it is as much an homage to Hong Kong kung fu cinema and an insistence on that cinema’s place in mainstream popular culture, as it was a showcase for the mythic values of the warrior-hero.

the fantastic world of asian martial arts Back in the 1970s and 1980s, we all wanted to be kung fu fighting. Although kung fu simply means “skillful ability” and can apply to a wide range of activities, it has become synonymous with Asian martial

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arts of all types. From the first moment Bruce Lee punched, kicked, and kiaied his way across the big screen to the iconic television program Kung Fu, these fighting styles have held an important place in the latemodern mythic imagination (Donohue 1994; Hunt 2003). And, for tens of millions of fans around the world, the 1970s was the coming-of-age of martial arts movies, especially those produced in Hong Kong. Studiobased directors such as Lo Wei, Yuen Woo-ping, and Lau Kar-leung delivered scores of films for eager audiences, both at home and abroad. In North America, distributors rushed to bring low-budget, high-action movies like Five Deadly Venoms and Master of the Flying Guillotine (a personal favorite) to drive-in theaters and midnight movie marathons. We thrilled as samurai warriors battled secretive ninja, and rigorous Shaolin training inevitably gave way to martial arts mastery. Often hilariously dubbed (a lengthy section of Cantonese dialogue regularly reduced, for example, to “Let’s beat ’em up!”), the actual storylines were superficial, often difficult to follow, and intended only to bridge the gaps between one wildly improbable but endlessly entertaining fight sequence after another. While American film studios hustled to produce their own martial arts imitations, children sat down on Saturday mornings to the short-lived adventures of Hanna-Barbera’s Hong Kong Phooey, a crimefighting martial arts wonderdog, and, later, the massively popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Suddenly, as Carl Douglas reminds us, “everybody was kung fu fighting,” and audiences everywhere were caught up in what became known as “the chop-socky craze.” By the time The Karate Kid premiered in 1984, Asian martial arts were a bona fide cultural phenomenon in the West. And, as it does so often, onscreen fantasy inspired its own version of off-screen reality. Strip malls, rec centers, and church basements across America sprouted martial arts studios as if overnight and by magic. Hitherto unknown practitioners suddenly marketed themselves as “Master This” or “Sifu That,” and claimed membership in any number of secretive Asian fighting traditions. Trade magazines such as Black Belt, which to that point had covered mainly judo, karate, and aikido, began to publish more frequently on the complex and confusing diversity of fighting styles that had developed over thousands of years in China. Although, for many people in the West, the early Hong Kong chopsockies defined (and continue to define) the totality of martial arts cinema, the genre actually covers a broad international spectrum and draws on a wide range of classical and pop cultural traditions. In China, supernatural epics such as Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain and Jour-

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ney to the West compete with everything from slapstick kung fu horror like Mr. Vampire and Spooky Encounters to period melodramas such as the gorgeous House of Flying Daggers. From broad comedy (Drunken Master) to drama (Tai Chi Master and Shaolin) and action (Iron Monkey); from magical retellings of popular legends (The Monkey King) to historical epics (Hero), and from bio-pics (Ip Man) and supernatural romance (The White-Haired Witch) to children’s anime (Legend of Kung Fu Rabbit), few entertainment genres go unexplored through the medium of Chinese martial arts (see Teo 2016). Japan, as well, has a long tradition of martial arts tales, ranging from cinematic masterpieces such as Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai to more forgettable (but no less popular) television series like Shadow Warriors. Japanese anime would be inconceivable without its own highly stylized martial arts. More recently, especially with the advent of online streaming services, countries such as Thailand (Ong Bak; Chocolate), Indonesia (The Raid: Redemption), and Korea (Memories of the Sword; Shadowless Sword) have begun to see successful martial arts releases in the West. Indeed, the sea of Asian martial arts popular culture is so broad and the waters so deep that drawing unambiguous conceptual lines within the world of chop-socky films is impossible, in that there are always other ways to box their cinematic compass. Rather than search vainly for a coherent kung fu movie catalogue, then, this chapter pulls at three different strands of story with which tales of the mythic hero—the warrior in the East—are regularly woven. They are (a) the importance of tradition and lineage in the cultivation of the martial hero; (b) the central relationship between the master and the student; and (c) the hero’s responsibility to the larger community. The nature of each of these connections structure the formation of the hero and mimic, in many ways, the hero’s journey: there is a call to some form of training, which often occurs in the context of social stigma or eccentricity; there is the appearance of a guide or mentor whose task is to further the heroic journey; there is the training regime itself, which is often a microcosm of the heroic quest; and, finally, there is the return to the real world, in which things are set right, justice is restored, and community established and reinforced.

training the hero: the importance of lineage Thanks in large measure to programs such as Mythbusters, current cultural fashion tends to regard a myth as something we can test to see if it’s

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true or not. If “confirmed” or declared “plausible,” it’s no longer technically a “myth,” but if “busted,” it is dismissed as false. Unfortunately, this has diminished our appreciation for the cultural importance of myth and the products of the mythic imagination, often rendering them simplistically as “things that are not true.” Myth, however, “as scholars have pointed out for decades, is not a synonym for fiction. Rather, it is a vehicle for explanation, a cache of symbols lodged in narrative that established a framework of cosmological significance for a particular group of people. They are stories that encode, and, just as importantly, transmit cultural meaning and significance” (Cowan 2010, 182). Put differently, the mythic imagination generates ways in which we explore and shape meaning in the world, and, more importantly, the ways in which those culturally transmitted meanings continue to shape us. In few places is this more evident than in creation stories, and myths of origin figure as prominently in the fantastic world of martial arts as they do anywhere else. The South Indian art of Kalaripayattu is believed by many to have been the divine gift of Vishnu (Denaud 2008). In Japan, humans are said to have learned martial arts from a race of mountain goblins known as tengu. Immortalized in the eighteenth-century samurai classic The Demon’s Sermon on the Martial Arts (Issai 2006), supernatural aspects of this myth were brought to the screen in Carl Rinsch’s 2013 telling of the 47 Ronin (see Allyn 2012). Practitioners of the Russian martial art Systema insist that the roots of their style date back to thirteenth-century Russian Orthodoxy, while the Filipino art of escrima (stick fighting) developed during three centuries of Spanish domination when edged weapons were forbidden to the populace at large (Wiley 1996). Tradition says that a similar ban by the Japanese led to the development of empty-hand fighting techniques in Okinawa and, ultimately, to the birth of the world’s most popular martial art: karate. Of all the martial arts myths of origin, however, none is more widespread and more enduring than the legend of kung fu’s creation at the Shaolin Temple. Books, magazines, websites, and television documentaries without number repeat the tale of the Indian monk Bodhidharma, also known as Da Mo, and insist on the historical truth of his relationship to Chinese martial arts. Traveling to China sometime in the sixth century, so the story goes, Bodhidharma arrived at a nondescript Buddhist monastery at the base of Song Mountain, but he was so appalled at the physical condition of the monks there that he taught them a series of exercises to improve their fitness. Thus, they could meditate longer and with greater mindfulness, and, because these techniques were allegedly based on his

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own martial training—the legend holds that he was an elite warrior in the Kshatriya caste, perhaps even a master of Kalaripayattu—the monks became skilled fighters capable of defending the temple. Regardless of whether Bodhidharma actually existed as a real person or is another example of mythical hagiography common to the religious imagination, evidence of Chinese boxing forms long predates his purported arrival at the monastery. Conversely, the traditional story that he invented Shaolin kung fu is the product of retroactive invention more than a thousand years later (see Green 2003; Holcombe 2002; Lorge 2012; Shahar 2008). The purpose of myths of origin, however, depends less on their historical truth than on their ability to establish frameworks of meaning within which legitimate (and, by implication, illegitimate) social and cultural practices reside. That is, they structure credibility. In the context of the Shaolin myths of origin, the formation of the mythic hero entails acquiring knowledge and expertise within the bounds of tradition and lineage. Those who obtain these skills by other means might become fighters, but they cannot, almost by definition, become heroes. That status is reserved for those who return to and embrace traditional responsibility and social propriety. Kung fu films produced during the heyday of such studios as Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest regularly present questions of lineage and validity through the legitimizing device of the Shaolin Temple. Looking at two early Jackie Chan films, we will consider three particular ways in which this happens: the problem of those who exist outside of the tradition, but who nevertheless acquire its secrets; the threat represented by those who betray the lineage from within; and the danger posed by those who challenge the tradition from without. Shaolin Wooden Men (1976) Little Mute (Chan) came to the Shaolin monastery as a child, after his father was killed by a mysterious martial artist. As the film opens, we see him as a young man trying desperately to keep up with the other novices as they endure harsh physical training under the watchful eyes (and often wild eyebrows) of Shaolin monks—a standard motif in numberless kung fu films. As they struggle with heavy iron shoes, steep flights of stone stairs, and seemingly endless buckets of water, all the students look forward one day to the final test of their martial arts prowess: passing through the long hall of articulated training dummies, the Shaolin wooden men.

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Little Mute, however, longs only to avenge his father—a motive that already places him at odds with temple tradition and the propriety associated with Shaolin martial arts. Confused and dejected by his apparent lack of progress, he encounters a pair of enigmatic teachers, Fa Yu and Wu Mei, who pass on aspects of kung fu wisdom outside the normal course of Shaolin training. Chained for years in a cave on the outskirts of the monastery, the mad monk Fa Yu has been trying to develop the “Lion’s Roar,” a technique that will allow him to escape his prison and destroy the wooden men—and, by implication, the temple itself. The nun Wu Mei, on the other hand, emerges from the forest and advises Little Mute, “Kung fu is for the good of body and soul. It should manifest noble intentions. Clear your heart, and you’ll find peace of mind.” Although vengeance is often a motivator in Shaolin films of this type, they implicitly (and often explicitly) reinforce the Confucian adage that “those who embark on a journey of revenge should dig two graves.” As in so many other tellings of the heroic quest, the central message for the mythic hero is to overcome the self. Through the training montages that are a staple of Hong Kong kung fu films, we watch as Fa Yu and Wu Mei instruct Little Mute according to the two basic approaches of Chinese martial arts: the hard, external style exemplified in Chinese boxing and the soft, internal style most often associated with t’ai chi chu’an. From the mad monk, he learns the “Eight Deadly Moves,” a series of devastating offensive techniques, while the gentle nun teaches him “Ten Shadows, Eight Steps” and insists that “kung fu is for self-defense. If you use it in the right way, it will allow you to ward off attack, yet prevent you from killing others.” Where Fa Yu subjects Little Mute to rigorous conditioning intended to harden his body into a living weapon, Wu Mei maintains, “your aim must never be to harm your opponent.” When Little Mute surprises everyone by successfully negotiating the Shaolin wooden men, the abbot senses trouble. The young man has learned his kung fu outside of the accepted norms of the temple—the first way in which the importance of lineage is both threatened and underscored. Fa Yu himself represents the second denial of tradition. He is actually a renegade monk who betrayed his Shaolin vows and left the temple years before, using his training to become the leader of two local criminal gangs. Little Mute, however, knows him only as the monk who taught him kung fu, and, bowing before him and accepting him as master, helps Fa Yu escape. Outside the temple—that is, both physically and metaphorically beyond the boundaries of Shaolin tradition—Little Mute witnesses a

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fight and recognizes the moves used to kill his father many years before. He confronts the winner. Even with his (albeit clandestine) training, though, he cannot defeat the man he now believes is his father’s killer, who suggests derisively that he spend a couple more years at the monastery. This is the bridge moment in the film that provides the opportunity for redemption within the tradition and reintegration into the conventions of Shaolin kung fu. Little Mute must undergo the training that will bring him back into the lineage and allow him to develop into a hero. Returning to the forest, Little Mute finds a blind, white-haired, and wild-eyebrowed monk meditating in seclusion. Another staple figure in Shaolin films from this era (brilliantly reprised by Gordon Liu as the monk Pai Mei in Kill Bill: Vol. 2), this is the temple’s former abbot. Years before, Fa Yu had been his favored student—a trope made famous in Star Wars through the relationship between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker. “Shamed before his ancestors” because he could not see the darkness in his pupil’s heart, the abbot resigned his position, blinded himself in penance, and left to live out his life as a hermit. His failure to protect the lineage of Shaolin has also placed him outside of it. In Little Mute, however, he too has the chance for redemption, the opportunity to restore balance to the fractured relationships explored throughout the film. Like Fa Yu and Wu Mei, the old man will serve as one of the mythic guides on the young man’s journey. This is the new disciple the master must train, which is to say, the fighter he must bring into the Shaolin lineage as a martial hero. “Are you willing to go back to the temple?” the current abbot asks Little Mute, despite having kicked him out for improperly learning kung fu. Shaolin, we are reminded, is the “leader of the kung fu world” and, therefore, bears the responsibility to protect the tradition. “We represent justice”—one of the principal values of the martial hero and a central characteristic of the wuxia (martial chivalry) novels, comics, and films on which stories such as this are based. Little Mute kneels and pledges his allegiance to Shaolin, ritually embracing the place for which his traditional training has now prepared him. Not surprisingly, rather than the unknown streetfighter, Fa Yu is revealed as the one who killed Little Mute’s father. Confronting him, the young man finally speaks, and the ultimate battle is joined. Even here, though, is a conflict of lineage. Since Fa Yu is also his teacher, Little Mute shows him respect even in defeat, refusing to kill him, and asking only that he return to Shaolin and never leave. Which is to say, return to the path, and all will be forgiven. Always the renegade, though, Fa

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Yu is too proud, and, in the end, Little Mute is forced to kill him. “Shameful,” says the abbot, shaking his head sadly. Back in the temple, lineage and tradition are restored as Little Mute takes the tonsure and assumes his place as a Shaolin monk. The music swells, and the final shot frames the serene face of a large golden Buddha. Roll credits. Spiritual Kung Fu (1978) Rather than the threat of local criminal gangs, Spiritual Kung Fu is set against the familiar backdrop of competing martial art clans, schools, and styles. Directed by Lo Wei and released in some markets as Karate Ghostbuster, this film is a classic in the “spooky encounters” subgenre of kung fu fantasy (see O’Brien 2003). Blending broad comedy, martial arts action, and supernatural thrills, Jackie Chan stars once again as a Shaolin student who learns forbidden kung fu techniques—this time from five mischievous spirits, who function as explicitly supernatural guides on his journey toward becoming a hero. As the story opens, the Seven Fists Manual, a book of forbidden kung fu so deadly that for generations no one has been permitted to learn it, has been stolen by a local martial arts clan bent on using its techniques to eliminate potential rivals. That is, once again, proprietary Shaolin kung fu has been appropriated outside the lineage and is being used to ignoble purpose. In something of a panic, everyone at the monastery agrees that the famed Five Animal Fist could defeat the Seven Fists kung fu, but, sadly, that style has been lost for hundreds of years. Enter the spirits. Appearing in the library as five white-faced, red-haired ghosts, they are playful, ill behaved, and vaguely sexual in their poltergeist activity. It’s the haunted library meets slapstick kung fu—all set to the music of theremin and penny whistle. When Yi-lang (Chan) successfully traps the spirits, however, the eight trigrams of the I Ching (a common Taoist import into “spooky encounter” films) appear on his chest, and the spirits all bow in obeisance. He learns that these are the spirits of the long-lost Five Animal Fist— dragon, snake, crane, tiger, jaguar—fighting forms that Yi-lang forces them to teach him. This reveals the mirror structure of the film, as we move back and forth between the forbidden training within the temple and the treacherous use of purloined Shaolin techniques without. As Yilang trains in each of the Five Animal Fist styles, showing off the differ-

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ent aspects of Jackie Chan’s wushu prowess that Hong Kong audiences have paid to see, he becomes “as agile as a dragon, as cunning as a snake, as fierce as a tiger, as vicious as a crane, and as powerful as a jaguar.” Eventually Yi-lang fights all five ghosts, using their styles against them in combination. Each spirit represents only one animal, but he has come to embody them all. Outside the monastery, in a series of battles and betrayals, the champion Seven Fists fighter gradually eliminates the rival clans who would compete for local leadership of all martial arts styles. With his newfound abilities, Yi-lang wants to leave the temple and confront this threat to the tradition of martial arts leadership in the area. Before he can do so, however, he must prove himself worthy, a task that sets up another extended fight sequence and another important mirroring of lineage. Although he has learned the Five Animal Fist outside the boundaries of traditional training, his ritualized battle with the Lohan guards—named for the eighteen traditional guardians of Buddhist temples, and Spiritual Kung Fu’s version of the Shaolin wooden men— relocates him within the temple lineage. Once again, what the Seven Fists stylist does outside the constraints of tradition and propriety, Yi-lang eventually reinforces through the proper acceptance of lineage and respectability. With the tradition’s acceptance of him through trial by combat, he becomes the martial hero, while the other remains merely a brawler. In the end, of course, the treacherous are defeated, the virtuous conquer, and the Five Animal spirits are freed from Yi-lang’s thrall to wreak poltergeist havoc once again. Whatever a film’s particular generic frame— comedy, revenge fantasy, drama, melodrama, straight-up action, or spooky encounter—the mythic import of the Shaolin Temple is consistent: this is the place of lineage and tradition, where the foundation of the martial hero is laid. That foundation, however, often requires reinforcement and moderation, which brings us to the relationship between the master and the student.

tempering the hero: the master and student relationship It is common in the West to regard the black belt as a coveted achievement, in itself a symbol of mastery. Nothing could be further from the truth. In karate, shodan, the first-degree black belt, literally means “beginning level,” and signifies that a student has worked long enough and with sufficient diligence for the senior teachers in the lineage to take him or her

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seriously. Thus, a black belt is not the culmination of martial arts training, but the point from which real training begins. Indeed, for those who truly understand the nature of Asian martial arts, the most important question is not “How many techniques do you know?” or “What black belt do you hold?” but “Who is your teacher?” As writer and martial artist Dave Lowry puts it, “the master is the sole source of teaching. Without him, the student blunders about blindly. A dead-end, convoluted side trail is mistaken for the Way. Worse still, a precipice beckons and the student, without instruction, is lost. Only with the guidance of the master is there hope for following the Way correctly” (1995, 33). In martial arts throughout the world, no relationship is more important than the one between teacher and student. They might be called sensei (which simply connotes “teacher,” with no necessary connection to karate or judo) or sifu (the Chinese term for a person who is skilled in a particular thing) or sa bum (Korean for “instructor”). Within the chop-socky frame, however, and whether a man or a woman, this character is most often styled “the master.” In Shaolin Wooden Men, even when Little Mute realizes that it was Fa Yu who murdered his father, he cannot bring himself to abandon their respective roles as student and master. In fact, he recommits to it in a futile effort to save the other man. Countless entries into martial arts popular culture are based on this central bond, whether it is a favorite student returning to avenge a beloved teacher’s death (The Chinese Connection; Fist of Legend) or the relationship between an unlikely student and an even less likely master (The Karate Kid). Though marketed as thrillers, martial artist and writer John Donohue’s Connor Burke novels are, in fact, an extended meditation on the relationship between master and student (2003, 2005, 2008, 2011, 2014). Novelist Kylie Chan’s Dark Heavens (2006, 2007a, 2007b), Journey to Wudang (2009, 2010, 2011), and Celestial Battle (2013, 2014, 2016) trilogies, on the other hand, update the grand tradition of Chinese wuxia fantasy through the evolving story of a young Australian woman who joins the household of an enigmatic Hong Kong businessman—who, in reality, happens to be Xuanwu, the Taoist god of martial arts. If the preparation for the heroic journey takes place within the context of lineage and tradition, the transition from mere fighter to martial hero often requires temporarily stepping outside those boundaries— though careful always to keep them in sight. Within the larger community of the training hall or temple, the macrocosm of tradition is paramount; in the more intimate (and intimidating) relationship between

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master and student, we see the microcosm of tempering. Once again, using two Jackie Chan movies from the same period of early kung fu films—Drunken Master and Snake in Eagle’s Shadow, both directed by Yuen Woo-ping, and both of which inspired a host of imitators—we experience a story told again and again throughout fantasy culture and Asian martial arts cinema. Drunken Master (1978) One of the most often filmed characters in motion picture and television history is a nineteenth-century scholar, physician, and martial artist named Wong Fei-hung. Born near the end of the Qing dynasty, just before the Taiping Rebellion, Wong lived through some of the most turbulent times in early modern Chinese history. The subject of more than a hundred television programs and films (sometimes several were produced in a single year), his story has been told and retold for more than two generations. It has been mythologized as drama and melodrama; it has been rendered as comedy, heroic action, and national epic. While they may not know its precise origin, few fans of kung fu pop culture would be unfamiliar with the famous Wong Fei-hung theme, “A Man Should Better Himself.” The melody is based on a traditional Chinese folk song, and its title epitomizes the central message these multiple tellings are meant to convey. In Drunken Master, one of the most popular Hong Kong kung fu movies of all time, we meet Wong Fei-hung (Chan) as a likeable but mischievous student in his father’s martial arts school. Indeed, the film’s entire first act is dedicated to one theme: reinforcing in as many ways as possible just how much of a handful young Fei-hung is, all in order to highlight the change he undergoes once he meets his master. Although he is being trained within the context of a traditional lineage—that of his father, Wong Kai-ying, who in real life was among the most respected kung fu teachers in southern China and known as one of the Ten Tigers of Canton—Fei-hung’s boisterous nature gets him into trouble at every turn. When a pretentious but not particularly skilled senior student, played by veteran character actor Dean Shek, is left in charge of the class, Fei-hung uses his own superior abilities to mock him mercilessly in front of the other students. Later, hanging around the market with his friends, Fei-hung bets that he can trick a pretty girl into kissing him. When her mother intervenes, he challenges the older woman, but this time is soundly thrashed for his impertinence. Seeking to regain face—

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fig.4 Wong Fei-hung practices Horse Stance while Teacher Ko taunts him in Drunken Master (1978).

and in order to demonstrate to the audience that he is not beyond redemption—Fei-hung beats up a local rich kid whose gang has just bullied and cheated a poverty-stricken farmer. All of this within the first twenty minutes of the film. Back at his father’s school, we learn that the woman and young girl from the marketplace are, in fact, Fei-hung’s aunt and cousin. Seeing him trying to hide in the background, Auntie tells Wong Kai-ying how well regarded his son is in the neighborhood and what a credit he must be to the family—exactly the opposite of the young man’s troublemaking ways. When she relates the incident in the marketplace, the elder Wong is so outraged that he is ready to seek vengeance then and there. But, before he can leave, the cousin reveals Fei-hung as the troublemaker. Clearly, though, this is not the first time Kai-ying has been embarrassed by his son, both as a father and as a martial arts teacher. The situation only gets worse when the father of the bully Fei-hung beat up earlier comes to the school demanding satisfaction, claiming that his son was attacked without provocation. Frustrated beyond measure, Wong Kai-ying thinks he has no alternative but to kill Fei-hung. “He’s a disgrace to the name of Wong,” he explodes, thrashing the boy around the room. “It sounds bad for a teacher of your standing to flog his own son,” Kai-ying’s sister advises coolly. “Don’t kill him. Break his wicked

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ways through practice.” Which is to say, return him to the confines of tradition, lineage, and propriety through further instruction. His punishment begins with five hours of Horse Stance, a sequence that sets up another comedic training montage and more opportunity for rebellion on Fei-hung’s part. Entirely out of patience, Wong Kai-ying arranges for his son to leave the school and train with the legendary kung fu master Su Hua-chi, a brutal teacher notorious for crippling his students. Quite naturally horrified at the prospect, Fei-hung runs away from home, setting up the film’s second act. Not surprisingly, while grifting a free meal at a restaurant, Fei-hung winds up in a fight with the wait staff, but he is saved by an old beggar sleeping one off at a nearby table. This, of course, is Su Hua-chi, the dreaded drunken master (played by director Yuen Woo-ping’s father, Yuen Siu-tien). With a dazzling display of kung fu, Hua-chi, known in dubbed versions as “Beggar So,” demonstrates how little Fei-hung, for all his boasting, actually knows about martial arts and how much he has to learn. Leaving the city, they move into an abandoned farmhouse in the countryside, a physical as well as metaphorical indication that the master-student relationship cannot flourish in the context of the familiar. There are too many distractions, too many other responsibilities for the dedication such intensive training requires. Like a ritual journey, becoming the hero means abandoning the safety of society for a time and practicing in the liminal space of seclusion and solitude before returning to the community. During the first of the long training sequences that dominate the film’s second act, the headstrong Fei-hung seems no more inclined to learn under Hua-chi than he was under his father. The key scene occurs when Fei-hung escapes again, but encounters a mysterious assassin named Thunderleg, who not only beats him easily but also insults his family’s martial arts heritage. Humiliating Fei-hung rather than killing him, Thunderleg sends the boy away bruised, ashamed, and all but naked. This is the moment in so many of these stories when the fighter must dig deeper than she ever imagined possible in order to emerge as the hero. Fei-hung returns to Hua-chi and, rather than taunt or mock the old man, serves him as a student is expected to serve a teacher, as a show of respect. Another long comedic training montage ensues, punctuated by de rigueur fight scenes. When Fei-hung complains, he is disciplined; when he tries to cheat, he is made to train even harder. As this part of the

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film unreels, the feel of the story shifts as Fei-hung’s abilities improve and his resistance to the harsh training lessens. Audiences now know that the outcome is no longer in doubt. The moral of these relatively straightforward stories is that harmony must be restored: the relationship between father and son must be repaired; natural justice demands that the evil Thunderleg be defeated; and the centrality of the master-student relationship requires that Fei-hung grow from a fighter into a hero. When Hua-chi believes he is ready—the bridge moment between the film’s second and third acts—he confides to Fei-hung that his father is actually one of the best kung fu teachers in the region and his style one of the strongest. Wong Kai-ying wanted his son to train with Hua-chi, however, because he possesses a “secret style”—“the secret of my Eight Drunken Gods.” Known as “drunken boxing” (zui quan), this martial arts form is based in Taoist legends of the Eight Immortals and imitates in combat the unpredictable movements of a drunkard. Onscreen, of course, in this comic telling of the Wong Fei-hung story, Hua-chi (and his young protégé) must actually be drunk for the style to be most effective. Having trained him for a year (and likely introduced him to incipient alcoholism), Hua-chi tells Fei-hung that he has taught him all he can. Practice diligently, he says, remember that the Eight Drunken Gods is the ultimate kung fu, and, most importantly, return home to Wong Kai-ying and be a good son. That is, take what I have taught you, return to the community, and use what you have learned to honor both the teachings and the teacher. A man should better himself, says the song, so stop being a fighter and become a hero. Snake in Eagle’s Shadow (1978) More than any others, Drunken Master and Snake in Eagle’s Shadow helped launch Jackie Chan’s career. Principal entries in a large suite of Hong Kong kung fu films that tell essentially the same story, they often used the same cadre of studio actors cast in roughly similar roles. Yuen Siu-tien plays the same carefree beggar who just happens to be a kung fu master. Dean Shek is the same arrogant but unskilled assistant kung fu teacher, while Chiang Wang is the same rich local bully. Huang Cheng Li is a dastardly martial arts master in one telling and the sinister assassin Thunderleg in the other, but it’s essentially the same role, and both films take full advantage of Huang’s real-life martial arts skill. Snake in Eagle’s Shadow, however, flips the script for Jackie Chan’s character, turning it into something of a Cinderella story. Chien Fu (Chan) is not the skilled

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but troublesome son of a kung fu master, but an orphan working as a cleaning boy in a local martial arts school. Sweet, kind, and “not too bright,” the other students, especially Teacher Li (Shek), regularly use him as the school’s resident training dummy. Instructing the students in Dragon Fist, for example, Li tells them “with this, you can beat ten men by yourself,” then proceeds to brutalize Chien Fu to the point where the young man runs away in pain and shame. If Drunken Master highlights the student’s journey from the community to his solitary training with the master and then back again to society, Snake in Eagle’s Shadow uses the same repertoire of training montages and fight sequences to illustrate the character of the master, in this instance, his humility. Showcasing the qualities of the true master, which are grounded in the ideal of the Taoist sage, this film juxtaposes different styles of teaching and serves as something of a cinematic PSA for the kind of martial arts school to avoid. We meet the master, Pai Chieng-tien (Yuen Siu-tien), as he goes from house to house begging for a bowl of soup or a few dumplings. Rather than show respect for his age and offer him some food, though, students from another martial arts school attack him as a vagrant. Although he has no fighting skills, Chien Fu can’t stand to see the old man beaten and steps in. When the students realize that he’s from a rival school, they all shout: “Let’s beat him up!” Standing behind Chien Fu and manipulating him like a puppet, though, Master Pai soon sends the other students packing. Not entirely clear what’s just happened, Chien Fu invites him to his school for tea, consistently showing him the respect tradition demands for our elders. Throughout the film, Pai Chieng-tien’s humility and martial arts mastery are contrasted with far less skilled teachers who are only interested in attracting wealthy students by showing how many bricks they can break or why their style is “the real thing, the real kung fu.” Likewise, Chien Fu’s modesty and loyalty are highlighted by fickle students who constantly switch schools based who can beat up whom on any given day. When Master Pai finally agrees to teach him kung fu, he enjoins Chien Fu to follow three rules. First, “never call me ‘teacher.’ After all, we’re good friends, right?” That is, the true master never places himself above another. Second, “never show you know kung fu unless it’s essential.” That is, the true master never advertises her skill. Indeed, the martial arts should never be used “unless absolutely necessary.” Finally, “If you see me fighting with someone, you mustn’t try and help me.” That is, the true master never puts others at risk ahead of himself.

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Sometimes, though, as one of the film’s central villains tells Chien Fu, “fighting isn’t a choice.” In those cases, how do we know when to fight? And for what cause? How do those choices signal the final transition from skilled warrior to martial hero? For this, we return to the legend of Wong Fei-hung, this time, though, through stories that begin “Once upon a time, in China . . .”

becoming the hero: the responsibility of community None of what we have seen is to say that Asian martial arts films and television series don’t feature lone warriors trying to find their way in the world. They do, and some are among the finest examples of the genre. After the Rain—which is often considered Akira Kurosawa’s last film and which costarred Shirô Mifune, son of long-time Kurosawa leading man Toshirô Mifune—explores the complex but not unsatisfying life of a wandering ronin, a masterless samurai. The various adventurers of Zatoichi, a blind masseur and swordmaster wandering the storyworld of the late Edo Period, are among the longest-running film and television series in Japan. Derek Yee’s Sword Master tells the story of two men—one an assassin, the other a classically trained swordsman—who are both haunted by the violence of their past and seek only peace in their final days. The surrealistically violent anime Afro Samurai is a straight-up lone-wolf revenge story. And then there is one of the most popular manga of all time, Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s Lone Wolf and Cub. In so many examples of Asian martial arts popular culture, however, the warrior-hero is defined by the willingness not to act alone, but to step out on behalf and in defense of the community. Hong Kong auteur Tsui Hark wrote, produced, and directed four installments of the six-film Once Upon a Time in China franchise, most of which featured rising action star Jet Li as Wong Fei-hung. Indeed, for many of Li’s fans around the world, this is the role for which he is most fondly remembered. Rather than the slapstick comedy of Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master or Sammo Hung’s Magnificent Butcher (which tells the story of Wong’s closest student, Lam Sai-wing), the Wong Fei-hung of Once Upon a Time in China is the epitome of the reserved teacher and sage, the martial hero who fights only in defense of the highest cause. In this series, of which we will consider only the first entry, the highest cause exists in both macrocosmic and microcosmic dimensions, the former reflecting the importance of tradition and lineage, the latter

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embodying the special relationship between master and student. Threats to either of these—whether from without or within—will inevitably invoke the hero in the warrior. In the larger social sphere, Wong Fei-hung’s story takes place during a time when China was beset on all sides with challenges to its national identity, its traditional culture, and even its sovereignty. Internally, the Qing Dynasty was staggering under the weight of resistance to imperial rule and the emergence of hyper-nationalist movements such as the Boxers. Externally, as one of the establishing sequences of Once Upon a Time in China’s Chinese theatrical release showcases, numerous foreign governments were making incursions into Chinese society and demanding entry. British, French, Portuguese, Russian, and American ships crowd the narrow channels of the Pearl River delta, while U.S. Marines swagger down the streets, unable to read the signs or understand the language—yet laughing at the Chinese nonetheless. A Chinese general’s ceremonial fan reminds the audience of the multitude of unjust treaties the government felt forced to negotiate with various Western powers. Westerners themselves saunter along the avenues, often accompanied by Chinese men and women dressed in Western clothing—a particular point of cultural insult for the traditionalist Wong Fei-hung. In this scene, the camera pans down past a group of Chinese musicians playing on the balcony of a crowded restaurant and focuses on a procession of Roman Catholic priests (with their young Chinese acolytes) singing a tremendously off-key version of the “Hallelujah.” Seeing this, the Chinese musicians begin playing louder and faster, doing their best to drown out the foreign competition—both literally and metaphorically. The Christian priests respond in kind, shouting now rather than singing, and the sonic battle escalates until the patrons cover their ears at the unholy din. As we have seen in works such as The Hobbit, though, different tellings (often intended for different audiences) produce different readings of the same story. The Chinese theatrical release of the film ran for more than two hours and was edited to focus on Wong Fei-hung in the context of these various threats to Chinese culture and national identity. Two of these dangers are symbolized through “Aunt 13” (Rosamund Kwan), Fei-hung’s cousin by marriage and the young woman who will grow through the franchise into his love interest. Educated in the West, she both affects Western clothing and has brought one of the first box cameras with her to China. She wants to give Fei-hung a Western suit as a gift, but he refuses, seeing in it the dilution and eventual disappearance of Chinese traditional culture. Things are changing, he knows, but,

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on both the macrocosm and the microcosm, the Once Upon a Time in China films ask how we retain what is culturally vital, yet adapt in ways that allow for integration into the modern world. The version of the film dubbed in English for DVD release, on the other hand, is shorter than the Chinese version by more than half an hour. Edited to minimize the Chinese version’s more negative presentation of Western incursion, the English version focuses more on relationships within Wong Fei-hung’s inner circle of students. The international connections and intrigue are muted in favor of more internecine Chinese conflict, especially street gangs, rival kung fu schools, and Chinese recruiters working with American companies to trick their fellow Chinese into working on railroad gangs in the United States. While the street gangs (dubbed “Tongs”) take advantage of the heightened social tension to run a widespread extortion racket, they have also allied themselves with an American company to kidnap Chinese women and ship them overseas as prostitutes. Unlike his persona in Drunken Master, the Wong Fei-hung of Once Upon a Time in China does everything he can to avoid fighting. When he intervenes, it is always to forestall or foreshorten trouble, rather than instigate or exploit it. Using every opportunity available, Fei-hung teaches his students to defend the Chinese way of life, not to fight among themselves when a far more dangerous enemy gathers on the horizon. These are, however, martial arts films, and audiences have paid to watch Jet Li’s extraordinary wushu talent and Yuen Cheung-yan’s award-winning “wire fu” fight choreography. The film’s final battle, which is worth watching just for its sheer acrobatic intensity, takes place in the American shipping warehouse—on a series of ladders spanning the cavernous room. Here we see the microcosm and macrocosm brought together. Aunt 13 has been kidnapped by the gang, and Fei-hung comes to her rescue, but the scene is more complex than that. The human trafficking ring run by Chinese on behalf of the Americans represents everything that Wong Fei-hung is fighting against: the destruction of Chinese society in the face of foreign invasion. More than that, another local martial artist, Iron Shirt Yim, has made the disastrous decision to ally himself with the gang in order to raise money to start his own school. Yim is a practitioner of a form of kung fu that involves extraordinary upper-body strengthening and conditioning. Ordinary punches and kicks have no effect on him, while throughout the film, his own blows have been devastating. Because he is simply a fighter, though, and little more than a local bully, when

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Fei-hung’s superior skill begins to turn the tide of the battle, he cheats: a knife blade has been woven into the bottom of his queue. Fei-hung catches the blade and severs Yim’s long braid, literally and metaphorically cutting off his very identity as Chinese. “Fists cannot fight guns” has been one of the refrains throughout the film, which Yim discovers as he runs out of the warehouse. His “iron shirt” cannot save him as he goes down in a hail of gunfire. “We can’t fight guns with kung fu,” he says, knowing in that tragic moment the depth of his mistake. Wong Fei-hung is not the lone warrior, but the martial hero who always exists in relationship, both with his students and with the larger community he is called to serve. For him, kung fu is less about combat efficiency, which suits the day-to-day skills of the fighter, than it is a hallmark of cultural identity in the face of foreign imperialism, which Once Upon a Time in China insists is something worth fighting for. The years between 1993 and 1997 each saw the release of a new chapter in the Once Upon a Time in China story of Wong Fei-hung. The last installment, directed by Sammo Hung and once again starring Jet Li and Rosamund Kwan, took the Chinese folk hero across the Pacific to visit one of his students who had moved to America in order to perpetuate Fei-Hung’s work there. Once Upon a Time in China and America, however, is almost universally regarded as the weakest in the franchise. The plot is more contrived and convoluted than fans of the series had come to expect—or were willing to tolerate—and even Jet Li’s spectacular wushu skills could not rescue the screen-time investment. Fortunately, though, to bridge the concept of the mythic hero in the East with its counterpart in Western popular culture, we can turn to the most iconic of martial arts television programs, Kung Fu, and the wandering Shaolin monk Kwai Chang Caine, the quintessential warrior caught between two worlds.

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A man trudges across the endless desert, head bowed, eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. A world away and decades before, a young boy stands in a summer rainstorm, soaked to the skin, but unwilling to move. The man knows that if he does not keep walking, he will die. The boy fears that if he walks away, there will be no future worth living for. Many times, the boy has stood at the gates of this fabled place only to be told by a gentle, orange-robed priest, “You have waited a long time; please wait a little longer.” When the boy and three others are finally ushered in, the abbot offers them tea. Three small heads bow over delicate porcelain cups. Three hopeful children are told, once again, “Please, go home.” Only Kwai Chang Caine remains. Orphaned son of a Chinese mother and an American father, he has no home to go to. Raised by his grandfather, he knows that proper etiquette demands that he wait until the older man has tasted his own tea. The invitation to stay at the Shaolin Temple, perhaps to find there a new family, is marked by one of the most famous moments in American television history. The abbot (Philip Ahn) holds out his hand, palm up. He looks at the boy, his face relaxed, his gentle eyes giving nothing away. “When you can take the pebble from my hand,” he tells young Kwai Chang (Radames Pera), “it will be time for you to leave.” The scene lap-dissolves to the desert and the camera pulls back to reveal Kwai Chang, now grown into the man Caine, becoming smaller and smaller, making his way up one more sand dune in the wide, trackless waste. Where once he knew 118

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only peace, the years “quiet and measured, flowing slowly, like water,” here he could not be more alone—in this place where water and peace are little more than bitter memories. In the history of American cult television, few series have proven as durable in terms of fan support as Kung Fu, which aired for only three seasons (1972–1975), but made star David Carradine a household name. Originally proposed by Bruce Lee, the hottest kung fu property in Asia at the time, the role of the enigmatic Shaolin priest was intended to help him transition from Hong Kong to Hollywood stardom. Producers chose not to cast Lee, however, because they thought he looked “too Chinese.” As Jack Moore noted in a profile published shortly after the pilot aired, Kung Fu “was to have been called ‘The Warrior,’ and feature Lee as a Chinese knight who somehow wandered into the American West and hassled with cowboys, Indians, and so on” (1972, 152). The same racism that had marked Chinese immigration for more than a century, however, and which is a central element in Kung Fu’s narrative arc, kept Lee from the role that launched Carradine’s career. Some of the producers “were a little worried that a Chinese hero might not go over well in parts of the United States. ‘They didn’t know if people were ready for Hopalong Wong,’ says Lee wryly” (Moore 1972, 152). Less than a year later, Bruce Lee was dead, at the age of thirty-two. His legacy, though, including Kung Fu, lives on. The pilot episode continually shifts between fantasy and reality, between the soft-focus serenity of the Shaolin Temple and the harsh life of Chinese railroad laborers. These are the same kind of men we meet in Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China, being lured to the American West by promises of wealth beyond measure. Potential immigrants are told that gold is so common in America that people trip over it in the streets, that they have to wear sunglasses at night to cut the glare. The truth, of course, is appallingly different. Through the lens of fantasy, Kung Fu explores some of the most brutal realities of American history. Caught between the sheltered community within which the priest Kwai Chang was raised and the labor camp where the wanderer Caine struggles to survive amid white racism and internecine Chinese conflict, we watch this horrific experience play out week after week. Caine’s grudging acceptance onto the work crew, for example, is contrasted with Kwai Chang’s first meeting with Master Po (Keye Luke), the elderly priest who became his beloved teacher, to whom he was always known as Grasshopper. Underscoring the temple scenes is the kind of breathy, paradoxical (indeed, orientalist) wisdom the West has come to associate

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with the East—American television’s watered-down version of the Zen koān. The railroad camp, on the other hand, knows only disappointment, misery, and the violence of the Chinese immigrant experience. Fans of the series know that, despite his calm, detached demeanor, Kwai Chang grew to be one of the Shaolin sect’s most formidable fighters. When Master Po is murdered by a callous aristocrat, Kwai Chang’s emotions take over, and he kills the man in retribution. Escaping China two steps ahead of the Imperial Guard, he becomes Caine—both literally and metaphorically—and travels to California, now bereft of everything that has sustained him throughout his life. His teacher is gone; he has been forced to leave his home; the only country he knows is a world away. Kwai Chang must abandon the warrior archetype of the East, the one who exists in the context of community, and evolve into Caine, the warrior archetype of the West, the mythic hero who finds community in the midst of a wasteland of solitude and pain. As much as anything, fantasy culture continually reminds us that mythic heroes come in all shapes and sizes. In terms of the warrior-asmythic-hero motif in the West, we find a different relationship to the notion of community than we have discussed so far. This is not to say that the solitary hero doesn’t exist in the East. In the manga and anime traditions, Nobuhiro Watsuki’s wildly popular Rurouni Kenshin, literally the “Wandering Swordsman,” is another, albeit eponymous example, as is Akira Kurosawa’s magnificent Yojimbo (1961). In the West, this iteration of the mythic hero wanders across the screen in three principal guises. In Kwai Chang Caine, we encounter first, the warrior in the wasteland, the one who finds community, but only temporarily; he cannot live permanently even with that community’s wholehearted acceptance. His mythic resonance is linked explicitly to the transitory nature of his heroic action. Here, one of the iconic figures of postapocalyptic fantasy is Max Rockatansky—Mad Max— the character that made Mel Gibson a star. As the camera pulls back in the closing shot of The Road Warrior (an envelope structure that mirrors the film’s opening scene), we see Max standing alone on the highway, even as the people he has saved escape toward a more hopeful future. Growing smaller and smaller as time and distance separate them, the warrior who became a hero knows that he cannot join them. He remains forever a part of, and defined by, the wasteland. Next, we have the mythic hero as world-builder, the one whose task is to forge a lasting community of which she may be a part, often as leader. Here, for nearly a millennium, the prime example has been King

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Arthur, with his knights of the Round Table and his mythical court at Camelot. In terms of fantasy culture and its reciprocal effect on our mythic imagination, like Bodhidharma, whether Arthur existed as a historical person or not is far less germane than the once and future importance of the story—that is, how we shape that story through different tellings and how we let ourselves be shaped by them. Finally, we meet the mythic hero as world-savior, the “chosen one” whose often-terrifying heroic journey does not so much create the world as ensure its continuation. More than the preceding types, perhaps, this is the story of sacrifice, the tale of the dying-and-rising hero, a character critics and commentators often glibly label a “Christ-figure” (see Cowan 2009; Deacy 2006; Kozlovic 2004). We forget, however, that the motif of death and resurrection as the mark of the hero long predates the appearance of Jesus, who stands less as a unique and exclusive exemplar than as one that has been elevated to social and cultural dominance through particular historical processes. Less the singularly ontological fulfillment of this sacrificial principle, the Christ is one markedly wellknown player among a much larger mythic cast (Campbell 1968; Frazer [1922] 1987). In this iteration, we will consider one of pop culture’s most famous television icons, Buffy Summers—the Vampire Slayer. Before we visit the Hellmouth, however, we must spend a bit more time in the wasteland.

max: the warrior in the wasteland Scene 1: An isolated Wyoming valley. Homesteaders there are under constant threat of attack by a ruthless cattle baron. In rides a lone gunman, offering his help to the beleaguered farmers and ranchers. Together they prevail against seemingly impossible odds, and the gunman rides away, despite a small boy’s plea to come back. Scene 2: A remote mining town somewhere deep in the western territories. A small community set upon by marauding bandits watches as a nameless stranger appears out of the desert. His preternatural skills with a revolver gain him the wary trust of the townsfolk, and he helps them organize a defense against the outlaws. Once the town is safe, he drifts back onto the high plains, never to be seen again. Scene 3: Carbon Canyon, California. At the height of the gold rush, prospectors and panners wonder how they will survive the harsh winter after a wealthy miner destroys their camp and jumps their claim. A pale rider comes to town in response to a young girl’s prayer, and . . . well, you’ve heard this story before. Indeed,

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according to a variety of sources (though most often attributed to novelist John Gardner), this is one of the two basic types of storytelling: a stranger comes to town. The other we’ve already met: someone goes on a quest. Though separated in theaters by a generation, each of these scenes replays this same archetypal fantasy. An enigmatic outsider appears during times of great crisis, uses almost superhuman abilities to save the community, then leaves as mysteriously as he (or she) arrived. As film critic Leonard Maltin told his viewers in 1982, this “timeless kind of character” has extraordinary audience appeal. “He has universal qualities, as a warrior, a survivor, and, ultimately, as a champion of the oppressed.” In this case, however, Maltin wasn’t talking about Shane (1953), High Plains Drifter (1973), or Pale Rider (1985), but about a surprise blockbuster from little-known Australian filmmaker George Miller, a high-octane dystopian fantasy called The Road Warrior. Scene 4: Broken Hill, deep in the Australian outback, nearly eight hundred miles west of Sydney. Over clips and images from Mad Max (1979), the first chapter in Miller’s postapocalyptic franchise, a gravelly voiceover recounts the essential history of the highway-cop-turnedroad-warrior. Narrator My life fades, my vision dims. all that remains are memories. I remember a time of chaos, ruined dreams, this wasted land. but most of all I remember the road warrior, the man we called Max . . . a shell of a man, a burnt-out desolate man, a man haunted by the demons in his past, a man who wandered out into the wasteland. and it was here, in this blighted place, that he learned to live again.

The Road Warrior’s main action begins as the camera pulls out from the dark maw of a massive Weiand supercharger. Roaring across the endless desert in “the last of the V8 Interceptors,” Max lives each moment in the pain of loss and self-loathing—specifically, the memory of his wife and infant son cut down as society collapsed and he was unable to protect them. Now, he wanders the wasteland, moving restlessly from one potential fuel source to another, avoiding trouble where he can, often only barely surviving it when he can’t. In both The Road Warrior (1981), however, and its sequel, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), the more important shifts take us from the wasteland to

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fig.5 Mad Max staring into the wasteland from the last of the V8 Interceptors in The Road Warrior (1981).

the community, from the margin to some approximation of a center, and then back out to the margin. Through this movement, both films juxtapose the temptation of false kinship with the potential for real belonging, and Max must inevitably pass through one if he is to have any chance at the other. Max’s skill as a fighter and his indomitable will to survive could easily earn him an ersatz home among the mechanized hordes of The Humungus, the film’s principal villain and leader of a ravening pack of desert looters. For a man who has lost everything, it might even have been the logical choice in a world turned on its head. But there are no heroes in the horde. There never can be. Heroes, by definition, don’t prey on the weak or ravage the helpless. Better to scavenge the fuel he needs, or trade for it, when he can, than take even one step closer to being what he hates. Max may not yet be the hero, but he’ll be damned if he’s going to become a monster. The potential for real belonging he finds in a small desert refinery, crudely garrisoned against The Humungus. Desperate survivors of the time when “two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze that engulfed them all,” they huddle around a single horsehead pump, carefully coaxing up the “black fuel” and turning it into “precious juice” for their own journey out of the wasteland. Rescuing a refinery worker and trading him for enough gas to put the outland marauders behind him, Max glimpses the opportunity for a home, but

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resists, unable to see beyond a horizon limned by fire and smoke. The demons of his past and his own high-speed solitude have convinced him there can be no salvation. Not for him. His pain has become his identity, and his motivations remain as nakedly open as the desert through which he wanders. “Do you think you’re the only one that’s suffered?” demands Pappagallo, the refinery group leader and the one who steps into the hard role of the hero’s guide. Challenging Max to become more than he thinks he is, he continues, “We’ve all been through it in here. But we haven’t given up. We’re still human beings, with dignity. But you? You’re out there with the garbage.” When the road warrior points to his car—the paradoxical symbol of both his imagined freedom and his wasteland solitude—and says, “I’ve got all I need here,” the older man replies, “You don’t have a future. I could offer you that.” Four years later, Max wanders out of the wilderness once again, this time in Beyond Thunderdome. Here, again, the most obvious community is also the most dangerous: Bartertown, ruled as a fiefdom by Aunty Entity (Tina Turner) and controlled by the violent ritual of the Thunderdome, a place where “two men enter, one man leaves.” Rather than the renewal of civilization it purports to be, Bartertown is just another form of wasteland, perhaps more concentrated than the vast expanse of Australian desert, but no less hostile and unpredictable. “I got skills,” Max tells The Collector, as he tries initially to find a place for himself in this postapocalyptic version of a Wild West border town. “I could trade those.” “Sorry,” he’s told dismissively, “the brothel’s full.” When he does finally encounter a community, it is not as the hired gun employed to eliminate Aunty Entity’s political rival in the Thunderdome, but as the one called to ensure the safety of those who cannot protect themselves. He becomes the same mythic hero as Shane, the Stranger, or the Preacher. Betrayed by Aunty and exiled from Bartertown, Max literally wanders in the wasteland until he is found, near death, by a tribe of children. These “Waiting Ones” are survivors of a plane crash, and in Max they see their promised savior. In an astonishing play-within-a-play, a young woman named Savannah Nix “takes the Tell,” a nightly ceremony that recounts the story of their survival in the wilderness. Other members of tribe provide sound effects and antiphons in what is nothing less than a ritual retelling of the small group’s creation narrative about the “Pox-eclipse, full of pain,” “cracklin’ dust and fearsome time,” and “Mr. Dead chasin’ ’em all.” Assured, however many months or years ago, that one day someone would come for them,

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as Savannah finishes the Tell, a reed screen is drawn aside, revealing a crude painting of a man who looks just like Mad Max. “We’re ready now,” says one of the children. “Take us home.” In addition to the plot, each film’s cinematography and editing consistently reinforce the contrast between the temptation to false community and the promise of a real home. Seeing The Road Warrior for the first time, Leonard Maltin was barely able to sit back in his seat, he later recalled. He dubbed the movie “a non-stop chase.” And throughout the franchise, that’s the overarching aesthetic: a frantic, hyperkinetic, seemingly endless road war. But though it may appear that such dialogue as there is exists only to stitch one frenzied chase sequence to another, each story is layered in more subtle ways. Whether battling The Humungus in the wasteland or betrayed by Aunty Entity in Bartertown, false community is marked by chaotic motion and high-intensity turmoil, while the promise of real community— whether with the refinery group or the Waiting Ones—is signaled by the chance to rest, to shut down the supercharger and turn the engine off for a while. This happens, though, only when Max is injured and in need of help himself: after the wreck of his car in The Road Warrior or at the end of his death-march in Beyond Thunderdome. This unwillingness to stop, and his ultimate inability to accept the offer of real community, essentially limits his heroic role. He remains the one who cannot move beyond the wounds that drive him. In this iteration, the very nature of Max’s role as the mythic hero is connected to his ongoing existence in the liminal stages of the heroic journey. He never heals and returns to the world. Even when we meet him again in Fury Road, a generation after Beyond Thunderdome, for all the numberless tanks of fuel he’s burned, he hasn’t moved at all. He’s still alone in the wasteland, running from the bad guys. By this time, though, in Miller’s 2015 return to the Mad Max franchise, the title character is almost incidental to the plot. As we will see in chapter 7, the real hero is someone else entirely, someone who looks beyond the ruins in the wasteland and gestures toward a new world waiting to be built.

arthur: the mythic hero as world-builder The notion of the self-sacrificing hero, the one who rises to the challenge, faces impossible odds, and forges community from the turmoil of social strife and civil conflict, is central to the mythic imagination in the West. While any number of examples crowd our fantasies, for nearly a

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thousand years the legend of King Arthur has been our most enduring model of this archetypal vision (Ashe 1985; Hutton 2003). The wondrous Lady of the Lake and the enchanted sword, Excalibur; the excruciating love triangle between Arthur, his beloved Guinevere, and his most trusted friend, Lancelot; the grim battle between Merlin and Morgan le Fay, a contest that is both magical and political; and the tragedy of Mordred, a son’s betrayal of his father as the sign and seal that building worlds is always and ever a hero’s journey fraught with danger and heartbreak—the Arthur legend has been told in virtually every genre and pop-culture form imaginable. From medieval romance to epic poem and broad comedy, from high drama to magical fantasy and feminist revision, it is a story with which the Western mythic imagination reverberates again and again. Three of the most famous tellings, of course, are Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, first published by William Caxton in 1485 (I recommend any edition featuring Aubrey Beardsley’s gorgeous ink drawings); Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s episodic narrative poem, Idylls of the King, which appeared exactly four hundred years after Malory’s work; and T. H. White’s justly celebrated The Once and Future King ([1939] 1958), the principal source for countless other retellings. The Arthuriad has been the target of satire and social commentary, from Mark Twain’s 1889 novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, to Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), in which the somewhat confused king is told, “You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!” Back across the pond, the legend of King Arthur inspired Gary Gygax’s first role-playing game, Chainmail, the precursor to Dungeons & Dragons. In the United States, caught in the depths of the Cold War, Arthur’s court became the cultural metaphor for the bright new day millions of Americans hoped for in the Kennedy White House. And perhaps this should come as no surprise. Less than a month after John F. Kennedy was elected, Lerner and Loewe’s award-winning Camelot opened on Broadway and retold the story once again. Running for nearly nine hundred performances, it was one of the Great White Way’s most popular musicals. Indeed, among my fondest childhood memories is watching my mother, a lyric soprano, sing the role of Guinevere in a local production. That performance, though, was not my first experience with the Arthur legend. Like millions of other children, I was introduced to the West’s enduring mythic hero through Walt Disney’s 1963 animated classic, The Sword in the Stone.

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Between Orphan and King Setting aside the storybook graphics and the upbeat tone of the voiceover, The Sword in the Stone’s opening is not dissimilar to that of The Road Warrior. “This was a dark age,” we are told, as a slavering wolf prowls the tenebrous forest. This was a land “without law, without order. Men lived in fear of one another, for the strong preyed upon the weak.” Because this is Walt Disney, however, and not George Miller, we also know that mundane lessons come cloaked in legendary storytelling. Indeed, if Snow White’s domestic message is “Wash your hands before you eat,” The Sword in the Stone’s moral, which is even more obvious than the earlier film’s emphasis on personal hygiene, declares: “Stay in school and do your homework.” Wart, as Arthur is known throughout most of the film, is an orphan, the charity ward of Sir Ector. Knowing that he lacks the “proper birth” to aspire to knighthood, the young boy is content to act as page for his idol, Ector’s oafish son, Kay. Taken under the wing of the mysterious magician, Merlin, however, Wart is relentlessly schooled in the film’s controlling idea: brains will triumph over brawn every time. “You can’t grow up without a proper education,” the wizard lectures the orphan. “Higher learning, that’s the thing!” Indeed, Merlin suggests that the boy allot “six hours for the schoolroom, two for studying,” because “how can you expect to amount to anything without a proper education?” Put differently, you might be able to hack-and-slash your way to the throne, but that’s no way to rule a kingdom. Much of Wart’s training, which occupies the vast majority of the film’s run time, is devoted to teacher and student magically transforming into different animals—a fish (a form that teaches Wart about physics), a squirrel (in which he learns both that gravity is not necessarily his friend and that love comes with its own particular set of challenges), and a bird (which sets up the magical duel between Merlin and the sorceress Madame Mim). In each of these episodes, the boy faces a specific trial or danger that he must overcome with his wits rather than his allbut-nonexistent strength. Despite the title—and the central magical element of the Arthur story—the key scene has nothing to do with the sword in the stone, which remains little more than a prop for the film’s more important message. Instead, we find Merlin midwinter, sequestered in his ramshackle tower library, enjoying a pipe and surrounded by his beloved books. With stockinged feet extended, he warms his ancient bones beside a potbellied

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stove—a stove made from an old suit of armor. Metaphorically, humankind advances only when knowledge beats our swords into plowshares, when the trappings of war are put to more useful purposes—a notinsignificant hope when the film first appeared in the immediate aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Suddenly, Wart bursts in, excited to show Merlin his new squire’s tunic. He’s been chosen to accompany Kay to the great tournament in London. Rather than pleased, however, the magician is outraged. “And I thought you were going to amount to something,” he fumes. “I thought you had a few brains!” He knows from long experience that warriors cannot build community. Only heroes can do that. When Wart does finally pull the sword from the stone, the film is all but over. And, although he is neither big enough to wield the weapon nor old enough to lead armies into battle, Disney’s divine right of kings is certified by heavenly light and angelic choir, as the narrator announces that “the glorious reign of King Arthur was begun.” “You’ll become a great legend,” Merlin tells the boy in an implicit fourth-wall break. “They’ll be writing books about you for centuries to come. Why, they might even make a motion picture about you. . . .” Between Warrior and Hero From light-hearted animation, which never hints at the tragedies that would eventually topple Camelot, we move to more recent tellings of the Arthur legend: John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981), which is widely regarded as among the darkest and most disturbing entries into the Arthuriad, and Antoine Fuqua’s anachronistic King Arthur (2004), which retrojects medieval chivalric conventions and vocabulary into fifth-century Roman Britain. If The Sword in the Stone is a child’s breezy introduction to the story, these two films showcase the different aspects of peril and promise the Arthur legend is meant to convey—the distinction between the simple warrior and the mythic hero might be thin, but it turns ever and always on the choices we make. Taken together, Fuqua and Boorman highlight both the narrow margin by which heroic journeys succeed and the myriad ways in which would-be heroes miss the mark. Based on Le Morte d’Arthur rather than The Once and Future King, two key sequences in Excalibur tell us all we need to know, and everything that follows derives almost inevitably from them. As usual, it is a time of war, and the land is consumed, as the Bard put it so well, with “the intestine shock, and furious close of civil butchery” (Henry IV, part

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1, 1.1). Into the midst of this chaos comes Arthur. If all we learn of Disney’s Wart is that he’s an orphan, Boorman leaves no doubt that the man destined to be king is a bastard, conceived in the overpowering heat of lust and born at the confluence of sorcery and betrayal. Following a skirmish meant to unite warring Briton factions, Merlin uses the “Charm of Making” to transform the putative victor, Uther Pendragon, into the likeness of his erstwhile enemy, Gorlois, the Duke of Cornwall. Despite a tentative peace barely hours old, Uther would throw it all away in order to lie with Gorlois’s wife, the beautiful Igrayne. Conjuring a magical fog, Merlin assures Uther, “Your lust will hold you up. You will float on the dragon’s breath.” In a scene that slips back and forth between battlefield and bedchamber, as the duke dies in the renewed fighting, Uther, still fully armored, strips the duchess naked and rapes her. In this telling, Arthur’s illicit pedigree dooms him from the start. Decades pass, and with Excalibur at his side and a newly minted kingdom to unite, Arthur encounters Lancelot for the first time. Seeking only a sovereign worthy of his sword, this strange, beautiful knight has barred passage across a small bridge. Should anyone best him in single combat, all may pass. After the king’s men fall before a warrior who has never known defeat, Arthur himself rides out. “Your rage has unbalanced you,” Lancelot warns the young monarch as they hack and slash at each other. “You, sir, would fight to the death against a knight who is not your enemy, for a stretch of road you could easily ride around.” “So be it,” Arthur growls, panting in the grip of his anger. “To the death!” Although clearly overmatched, rather than yield, as knightly honor demands, Arthur calls on Excalibur’s magical power to snatch victory from defeat. That is, he follows in his father’s footsteps, securing by sorcery what he could not win through skill or valor. But as he strikes, and Lancelot falls, Excalibur shatters in a moment that weds hollow victory to eventual defeat. For the first time in his life, Lancelot is beaten, and Arthur, having “broken what could not be broken,” knows almost instantaneous regret. Throwing the remnants of the now-useless sword into the river, the king cries out. arthur My rage broke it. and this excellent knight, who fought with fairness and grace, was meant to win. I used excalibur to change that verdict. I’ve lost for all time the ancient sword of my fathers, whose power was meant to unite all men, not to serve the vanity of a single man. I am nothing.

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Once he experiences this glimmering of humility, though, Arthur can at least see the hero’s path in the distance. The Lady of the Lake restores Excalibur to him, and again the promise (if not the certainty) of his kingship is blessed. For all that, Boorman’s tale ends as it began: with pain and death and sorrow. Caught in adultery, Guinevere has taken the veil and spends her life in prayer; Lancelot wanders the countryside as a mad prophet, preaching the end of days. Sick in both body and spirit, Arthur lies near death, as his knights search the world for the Holy Grail, the one thing they believe can restore both king and country. At one point, sinking to the bottom of a pond, Perceval, the lone survivor of the Grail quest, learns that only by shedding his armor can he live. That is, not unlike Merlin and his potbellied stove, only by abandoning the way of the warrior can peace finally reign in “England’s green and pleasant land.” Indeed, in this telling, the warrior becomes the hero not by taking up the sword, but by laying it down. As historian Eric Hobsbawm writes, “objects or practices are liberated for full symbolic and ritual use when no longer fettered by practical use” or necessity (1983, 4). All those years ago, Merlin told Arthur’s father that he would take up Excalibur, “but to heal, not to hack.” That is, the Lady of the Lake’s gift was always meant as the symbol of a united kingdom, not as a weapon to keep warring fiefdoms suppressed or in check. “Talk?” Uther retorts, forever foregoing the heroic path. “Talk is for lovers, Merlin. I need the sword to be king!” Uther never understood, and Arthur only dimly realized, that as the one called to forge community, a king is meant to serve the land and its people—never the other way around. In the Arthur legend, service to others is always the path of the mythic hero. Whenever that guiding principle is abandoned, whether through lust and pride (Uther) or rage and jealousy (Arthur), the anguish of the king is but a trifle compared to the suffering of the land. If you believe the Rochester City News, Antoine Fuqua’s 2004 King Arthur tests the limits of film critic Ado Kyrou’s sage advice that we “learn to look at ‘bad’ films,” because “they are sometimes sublime” (1963, 276). Burdened by an “absurd script,” it turns “probably the most important single myth for literature in Western Europe” into “a ridiculously inflated, nervously self-conscious, and abysmally dull version of a story that should be almost impossible to tell badly” (Grella 2004). Indeed, in many ways, King Arthur simply retells Fuqua’s 2003 modern military rescue story Tears of the Sun against the legendary backdrop of the Arthuriad. In this case, Arthur (Clive Owen) is Arto-

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rius, the half-Briton, half-Roman commander of a group of conscript soldiers who had been taken years earlier from their homes in central Europe and posted to the western outlands of the empire. On the day their freedom was to be granted, however, they are tasked with one final mission: reach a Roman family living far north of Hadrian’s Wall and escort them to safety ahead of the invading Saxon army. To get there, however, Arthur and his “knights” must traverse the country of the Woads—small tribal groups of ethnic Britons who are marked in battle by the blue dye (woad) on their skin and who have been waging an insurgency against the Romans since their arrival on Albion’s shore. Unlike Excalibur, which is replete with sorcery (however much of it serves as a cautionary tale against its use), there is no magic in King Arthur. Merlin is a generic Briton, a Woad spiritual leader who appears mysteriously from the forest but does little else. Kiera Knightley is the fierce Woad princess, Guinevere, whose principal task, it seems, is to evoke the aesthetic of the fantasy woman warrior. During a pitched battle on a frozen lake, for example, Romans, Britons, and Saxons alike are bundled in leather armor and heavy fur, while Guinevere seems content to loose her arrows dressed in a thin, essentially sleeveless gown. This “less is more” costume trope, which is common in the sexualized portrayal of action-heroines (Thomas 2003)—as anyone familiar with the fantasy art of Frank Frazetta, Rowena Morrill, or Boris Vallejo knows— continues in the film’s dénouement, the legendary Battle of Badon Hill. Once again, the Romans appear in full regalia, while the Saxons are clad in padded armor and chainmail. Guinevere, on the other hand, is all but naked. Painted blue (of course), she fights dressed in a short leather skirt and a strategically arranged set of thin straps. The only magic, it seems, is how they stayed on during the melee. For all its problems—and they are legion—King Arthur does conjure the sublimity of the Western mythic hero far more than Boorman’s film, where he or she exists only as an ideal glimpsed, but never realized. If Excalibur shows us the myriad ways in which heroes can stray from the path, Fuqua’s telling keeps Arthur on the mythic straight and narrow from the first frame until the credits roll. More than anything, Arthur must learn who his people really are, he must place others before himself at all times, and he must accept that the ultimate sacrifice is not to die in their service, but to live. After the Saxons are routed and the imperial eagle of Rome withdraws east across the empire, the marriage of Arthur and Guinevere secures this central message of the story. That is, Roman Britons,

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European conscripts, and Woads alike must realize that they “are one, as you are.” As their union is blessed, and they lift Excalibur aloft, Arthur and Guinevere are told that from that moment “all Britons will be united in one common cause.” Together, they will build a new world from the ashes of the old. In addition to the personal and political conflicts they raise, both Excalibur and King Arthur present the Arthuriad in the context of competing religious claims. On the one hand, throughout Fuqua’s film, Christians are portrayed as the worst kind of delusional zealots, torturing and murdering “pagans” for the good of their souls, then calling on the power of the church when held responsible for their atrocities. On the other, rather than the pagan stone henge that frames the wedding in King Arthur, Boorman’s royal couple marries in an explicitly Christian ceremony, presided over by a priest as the kyrie eleison is chanted in the background. Watching from the sidelines, Merlin laments wistfully, “The one God comes to drive out the many gods. The spirits of wood and stream grow silent. It’s the way of things. It’s a time for men and their ways.” Soon, it seems, no one will call on the old gods and goddesses. There will be no one left to part the mists of Avalon. Between Pagan and Christian In 1982, science fiction and fantasy writer Marion Zimmer Bradley published a sprawling masterpiece that reenvisions the legend of Arthur from the point of view of the women most important in his life: his mother, Igraine; her sisters, Morgause and Vivianne, who is also the Lady of the Lake, high priestess of the storied isle of Avalon; Arthur’s half sister, Morgaine; and his beloved, tragic Guinevere. Setting The Mists of Avalon in roughly the same historical context as Fuqua’s King Arthur, Bradley passionately refracts the story of the mythic hero who arises to unite the warring tribes of Britain in the face of early sixthcentury Saxon invasions. In this case, though, the contending factions are at least as divided religiously as they are politically or ethnically. Since its appearance more than a generation ago, The Mists of Avalon has been an overwhelming favorite among modern Pagans, many of whom see in it an important counter-narrative to more dominant tellings of the Arthur legend. In its pages, they discover the same sense of inspiration and mythic resonance that Christians find in stories from the Bible or Muslims, the Qur’an. That is, these modern Wiccans, Witches, and Druids imagine themselves into Bradley’s spiritually reimagined

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Arthuriad, finding there a different set of mythic heroes—the women this time, rather than the men—with whom they can identify. “Fiction can change readers’ beliefs,” philologist Vera Nünning reminds us, and “it can influence what readers think about alleged facts and causes of events. Reading stories can work as a powerful means of modifying readers’ mental encyclopaedia and changing their attitudes; it can even influence their personality traits” (2015, 43; see also Schultz 1979; Sirridge 1975). In 1999, director Uli Edel adapted The Mists of Avalon into a twopart television miniseries. Once again, the establishing sequences—one contemporary, one retrospective—leave little doubt about the story to come. As the ethereal voice of Canadian singer Loreena McKennitt floats in the background, a small boat appears out of the mist. Morgaine le Fay (Julianna Margulies), daughter of Gorlois, the Christian Duke of Cornwall, and Igraine, a priestess of Avalon, stands in the bow as she is conducted from the sacred isle, a place of magic, mystery, and, most of all, peace, to a land ravaged by war. MorgaINe (Voiceover) No one knows the real story of the great King arthur of Camelot. Most of what you think you know about Camelot, guinevere, and lancelot, and the evil sorceress known as Morgaine le Fay are nothing but lies. I should know, for I am Morgaine le Fay, priestess of the isle of avalon, where the ancient religion of the mother goddess was born.

As Morgaine’s boat slips from view, the mists part to reveal fire and blood and screams: the narrative opening we have come to expect in the story of Arthur and a world struggling to become. These “Saxon barbarians,” Morgaine tells us bitterly, “swept into my country, killing Christians and followers of Avalon’s goddess alike.” Indeed, “unless one great leader could unite Christians and followers of the old religion, Britain was doomed to barbarism, and Avalon would vanish.” Many years earlier, when Morgaine was a child, the aging high king, Ambrosius, invited his most powerful nobles to meet him at Cornwall, where he would name a successor. “I must tell you, Igraine,” he says at table one evening, his eyes crinkling in amusement, “my [Christian] priests don’t like it that your priestesses of Avalon have been placed on an equal footing with them. But I say that you both serve the great one above us, by whatever the name, and women are, after all, the carriers

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of original sin.” Igraine lowers her eyes demurely, chuckling at the king’s teasing reference to what she considers the utter foolishness of one of Christian theology’s central tenets. bIShoP PatrICIuS that’s not quite how we advance it, sir. IgraINe Do you not say that women are the means by which evil came into the world? there is in your bible a fantastic tale about an apple and a snake. bIShoP PatrICIuS the bible merely recounts the truth, good lady. IgraINe the old religion embraces yours, bishop, but your priests deny the power of avalon. bIShoP PatrICIuS Perhaps people no longer believe in it. IgraINe Perhaps it’s because you tell them not to.

The blocking of this scene reinforces the layers of tension in the brief bit of dialogue. The high king, of course, commands the head of the table. Rather than place his nobles beside him, though, Igraine sits at his right hand, Patricius at his left. Neither is closer to Ambrosius than the other, although it could be argued that the Christian sits in the “sinister,” less-honorable position. Both, however, are encouraged to speak their minds and, until Uther Pendragon blunders his way in to the hall (and shoulders Patricius aside, a move that places him directly across from Igraine), the Catholic bishop and the pagan priestess share the king’s confidence. For the moment, at least, the new religion and the old are on level ground, and any chance the mythic hero has to forge a new world from the ruins of the old rests entirely on the willingness to recognize, as Artorius is warned in King Arthur, that “all Britons will be united in one common cause.” Which is to say, the Saxons will spare Christians no more readily than they will the followers of the old religion, and it is in the best interest of all Britons for the two competing faiths to find a way to live together.

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Edel’s adaptation of The Mists of Avalon was not entirely panned by critics, but it did highlight that the question raised at the high king’s table is still very much alive today. Many Christians were as deeply offended by the portrayal of their faith as they were by the positive representation of pre-Christian paganism. Indeed, Christianity Today, one of the most widely read evangelical magazines in the world, dismissed the miniseries as a “Christian bashing,” “Neopagan pity party” (LeBlanc 2001, 55). Complaining that both versions of Bradley’s telling “treat the Arthurian legend as a canvas for goddess worshippers” (LeBlanc 2001, 55)—though one wonders why that should be a de facto problem—the review laments that “most of the heroes are goddess-worshipping feminists.” The producers make “feverish assumptions about religious suppression” as they spin this “PC fairy tale” fraught with “muddle-headed theology” (LeBlanc 2001, 55, 56). Indeed, the review concludes, “Christians and neopagans who take their respective faiths seriously will know that our beliefs cannot be reconciled so tidily by such fundamentally dishonest storytelling” (LeBlanc 2001, 56). In this, though, it’s difficult not to hear echoes of Patricius’s self-serving remark to Igraine: “The Bible merely recounts the truth.” Reviewers are entitled to their opinions, of course; they paid their admission and can think what they like of the show. But two points are worth noting. First, the assumption that there is one objective version of history—a “correct” version, if you will—is a notion that flies in the face of historical reality. Whether based on legend or not, this is especially true of religious history, where the interpretation of events often balances on the razor’s edge of competing beliefs and contested interests. Put differently, one person’s successful evangelical mission is another’s horrific experience of religious persecution. One believer’s crusade is another’s holocaust. Second, the idea that The Mists of Avalon constitutes “fundamentally dishonest storytelling” because it does not present events in the way evangelical Christians would prefer implies that novelists and filmmakers have an obligation to a particular “truth” of history. Exploring alternative visions of religious history becomes tantamount to sacrilege. The truth of a story, however—its ability to reach deep into the core of our imagination and grasp something there—is inevitably related to who’s telling it. And who’s listening. For many evangelical Christians, it is simply outside the realm of imagination that a worshipper of the goddess could be the Arthuriad’s mythic hero. For thousands of modern Pagans enchanted by Bradley’s telling, it could not be otherwise. That one telling has risen to social dominance

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does not mean that it must (or will) remain the canonical version against which all others must be judged. To think this forecloses other quests to which the mythic imagination continually invites us. All that said, whether Christians or followers of the old religion win the day, whether the diversity of Britons come together in the grand idea of “Britain” or fall before the Saxon hordes and disappear, the reality is that the world still turns. The world continues. The waves still crash on the Cornish coast, just as the sun sinks into the Celtic Sea— whether or not Camelot is there to see it. What, though, if the world itself is at stake?

buffy: the mythic hero as world-savior In The Lord of the Rings, Sauron orders his armies to ravage Middleearth, sweeping all before them and establishing the Dark Lord as supreme ruler in a new age of terror. For Hellboy’s Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, it’s not simply “things that go bump in the night” that threaten our sleep, but misguided attempts to release the Ogdru Jahad, primal gods (based on H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos) who wait with terrible patience to escape their prison and destroy the world. Although most San Franciscans remain oblivious to the danger, they are no less at risk in the early seasons of Charmed than the Halliwell sisters themselves. There, the overarching threat is the Source of All Evil, the most powerful demon in existence, an ancient malevolence that the sisters’ magical lineage has vowed to oppose. In the Potterverse, Voldemort plans to eliminate all those either lacking in magical heritage or whose pedigree is tainted with Muggle blood. Once this dark eugenics has purged the world, “You-know-who” can take his place as ruler. However caught up we get in the day-to-day drama of these storyworlds, it’s important to remember that in each case it’s not simply that the Shire is at risk or the monster-of-the-week needs to be destroyed or the disposition of one character or another in the crenellated towers of Hogwarts must be decided. At the heart of these stories, the world itself hangs in the balance, and a different kind of mythic hero must arise. Rather than a temporary connection with community or the establishment of community out of chaos, this iteration of the hero takes the stage as world-savior, one willing to sacrifice everything because everything is at stake. Ubersuck. Somewhere deep beneath the Sunnydale High School library lies what Rupert Giles, the “Watcher” in Joss Whedon’s wildly popular Buffy the

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Vampire Slayer, describes as “a mystical convergence,” a thin spot in the barrier separating our world from a supernatural domain haunted by vampires, zombies, “werewolves, incubi, [and] succubi.” Indeed, this is “everything you’ve ever dreaded was under your bed, but told yourself couldn’t be by the light of day.” Welcome to the Hellmouth, the place where Buffy Summers and her friends, known affectionately as the “Scooby gang,” “stand between Earth and its total destruction” (“The Harvest”). For much of Buffy’s early episodes, Giles is also our Greek chorus, catching us up on malevolent doings, planning strategy for the Scoobies, and fretting when the Slayer inevitably goes off book. He is also the one who continually reminds her—and us—that she is a child of prophecy, part of a grand design to keep the universe in balance. gIleS You are the Slayer. to each generation a Slayer is born, one girl in all the world, a Chosen one, one born with the strength . . . buFFY . . . strength and skill to hunt the vampires, to stop the spread of their evil. blah, blah, blah.

Like many pop-cultural products that provide a wide palette of emotional choices, intellectual challenges, and potential sites of identification or aversion, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been interpreted in a variety of ways. Some, like the Parents Television Council (PTC), bring Marion Zimmer Bradley’s dour Bishop Patricius to mind. A conservative censorship advocacy group, at the start of Buffy’s final season, the PTC labeled it “the least family-friendly show on TV.” A year after the series finale, Brooks Alexander, founder of the evangelical Spiritual Counterfeits Project, declared it “second only to The Craft as a milestone in the spiritual devolution of American culture” (2004, 107). Not everyone, however, was so “blame-y.” Frances Early, one of the first scholars to recognize the series’ importance, argues that Buffy’s story “is preeminently a narrative of the disorderly rebellious female” (2001, 11), while Lorna Jowett uses feminist cultural studies to explore the series as an important site for gender criticism (2005). Now subtitled The Journal of Whedon Studies, and devoted to all things Joss, Slayage began life as The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies and continues to publish articles on the series long after it first went off the air. Sarah Wirth, for example,

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considers the horrific fairy tale elements in the season 4 episode “Hush” (2017), and literature scholar Wayne Chandler discusses the validation of geekdom as an essential part of the Slayer’s “equipment for living” (2016). Buffy has been a pop-cultural lens through which critics have explored morality, ethics, and the gendering of violence (e.g., South 2003; Wilcox and Lavery 2002), while in What Would Buffy Do? Jana Riess takes the Slayer’s story as a source of spiritual inspiration (2004). From the first season to the last, though, Buffy also embodies the mythic hero as world-savior, the one who steps into the breach against existential crises. The one who, both literally and metaphorically, becomes the dying-and-rising hero, because if she does not rise, we all die. This is beautifully captured in the first season’s narrative arc, where the end of the world looms in the terrifying form of the Master. An urvampire of immense power, the Master and his kind are thought to predate the emergence of human beings (he never appears other than as a vampire). Imprisoned for decades after failing to open the Hellmouth in the 1930s, he is preparing to attempt the portal once again. In the series pilot, his principal acolyte, Luke, explains the prophecy of the Master’s return (“Welcome to the Hellmouth”). luKe and like a plague of boils, the race of man covered the earth. but on the third day of the newest light will come the Harvest, and the blood of men will flow as wine. and the Master will walk among them once more. the earth will belong to the old ones, and hell itself will come to town.

More than that, though, as the Master’s power grows and signs of the impending apocalypse increase, Giles discovers an additional prophecy, one that leaves him filled with dread. “It’s very plain,” Giles tells the ensouled vampire Angel. “Tomorrow night, Buffy will face the Master, and she will die.” Overhearing this, Buffy confronts them. With tears in her eyes, her voice breaking, she asks, “Does it say how he’s gonna kill me? Do you think it will hurt?” Not surprisingly, she threatens to quit, to resign her place as the Chosen One. “You can find someone else to keep the Master from taking over,” she tells them, even though they all know that as the Slayer, she alone has the power. “Giles, I’m sixteen years old. I don’t wanna die.” Mythic heroes may doubt themselves, indeed, that seems a core part of the job description, they may want more than anything to let the cup

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of suffering pass from them, but that is not the way of the Chosen One. In the end, Buffy does face the Master—it’s what Slayers do—and she does die. Indeed, she is the one foretold to set the Master free through the power of a Slayer’s blood. Brought back from death by her friend Xander (who harbors an unrequited love for her) and Angel (her starcrossed undead lover), Buffy challenges the Master once again. As Elisabeth Krimmer and Shilpa Raval explain, this scene exemplifies how the “paradigm of Death and the Maiden is replaced by that of the hero who faces death and emerges stronger” (2005, 156). The Buffy main theme plays, and the Slayer takes her place as worldsavior—after her own fashion. the MaSter You’re dead! buFFY I may be dead, but I’m still pretty. which is more than I can say for you. the MaSter You were destined to die! It was written! buFFY (shrugs) What can I say? I flunked the written.

With the Master gone and the Hellmouth closed once more, Buffy sums up the day: “We saved the world. I say we party!” One of the real pleasures of popular culture is its relentless intertextuality, its ability to make narratively coherent references between movies, television, music, comics, games, and other forms of art. This process reinforces storylines, cements fan loyalty and appreciation, and encourages participants to explore connections between different storyworlds. And, in this respect, Buffy never disappoints, calling out to everything from The Matrix (“The Initiative”) to A Nightmare on Elm Street (“Killed by Death”) and from DC’s “Legion of Super-Heroes” (“Real Me”) to the supernatural soap opera Passions (“Something Blue”), the classic Hollywood musical (“Once More, with Feeling”), and even a violent, dystopic fantasy filmed half-a-world away. In the seventh-season episode “Showtime,” Buffy stages a final battle with the Turok-Han, another powerful primeval vampire, part of the precursor to another supernatural extinction event. Once again, the world is at stake, and, once more, the world-savior must step into the breach.

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Luring the creature to an empty construction site, the Slayer both brings us full circle in our own journey and looks ahead to the next chapter. While other people “are having nightmares about monsters that can’t be killed,” Buffy says, and are paralyzed by the fear that the world cannot be saved, she reiterates the role of the mythic hero. “I don’t believe in that,” she tells the Turok-Han, who circles her warily, eager for the kill. “I always find a way. I am the thing that monsters have nightmares about. And right now, you and me are gonna show ’em why. It’s time. Welcome to Thunderdome.” From the catwalk high above the makeshift arena, another character supplies the ritual antiphon from the third Mad Max film, which was released years before many of Buffy’s most ardent fans were even born: “Two men enter. One man leaves.” In this heroic tale, though, one combatant is not human; the other is not a man.

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Home. Let the word linger in your mind. Roll it around on your tongue, feel how it tastes. Hear how it sounds. Now, imagine being taken from your home as a young girl, held captive for “seven thousand days” at the hands of a brutal warlord, your life bent only in the service of his. Sit with that for a few moments, because for countless women throughout history it isn’t fantasy, but horrifying reality. Now imagine watching for nearly twenty years as girls just like you come and go. Some survive, though many undoubtedly wish they hadn’t, while others disappear into the wasteland, never to be seen again, their lives less than a footnote in the pitiless history of this place. What would you do? What role would you play? What cry would you raise? Finally, imagine escape, imagine what it would be like . . . to go home. “I am one of the Vuvalini, of the Many Mothers!” the one-armed woman shouts, stepping down from her eighteen-wheeled war rig and striding across the burning sand. “My Initiate Mother was K. T. Concannon! I am the daughter of Mary Jo Bassa. My clan was Swaddle Dog.” As others watch suspiciously from the dunes, she tells them simply, “It’s me.” Furiosa. In George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, we return once again to the desolate fantasy of life beyond the “pox-eclipse.” As harsh the terrain and brutal the conflict, however, both pale before the cruelty of the human 141

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heart that has brought us to the moment of Furiosa’s homecoming. Like The Humungus and Aunty Entity after him, another tyrant has proclaimed himself lord of the wasteland: Immortan Joe. Controlling his people—“the wretched”—not through gasoline, but the callous rationing of water from his impregnable Citadel, he adds to his high-octane cavalry with the offspring of his “wives,” women kept only as playthings and breeders. After endless years watching in silence, abetting Immortan Joe when she has to, protecting these women when she can, one of his most trusted lieutenants, the Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), has spirited five of them away in her supercharged war rig. “Our babies will not be warlords” is the stark message left behind on the walls of the harem chamber. Nor will they grow up to be Warboys, zealous road fodder for the orgy of violence into which so much of the world has descended. Instead, Furiosa will take them to the “green place,” the home she remembers from her own Before Time, before the Citadel, before Immortan Joe, before the wives. Fighting her way free of the Warboys and the combined armies of the Bullet Farmer and Gas Town, plunging through a massive sandstorm, she finally locates what remain of the Vuvalini, the last surviving Many Mothers. But, just when she thinks she’s made it home, she finds that home is gone. The green place is no more, replaced by a fetid, oily swamp. The Many Mothers too have dwindled, until only a handful remain. Where once there was life, abundance, and hope, there is only hardship, death, and the wasteland. Stumbling out into the dunes, Furiosa falls to her knees and screams in rage and anguish. Home lives now only in her memory. And what of Mad Max, the titular character, the one for whom the franchise is named? Really, who cares? In this installment, he’s all but incidental to the plot, as philosopher Jack Weinstein notes, “unimportant, unlikeable, and bizarrely inarticulate” (2015). What’s important to note, though, is that this is not his story. This is the Fury Road, the path of Furiosa, daughter of Mary Jo Bassa, of the clan Swaddle Dog. And there on the endless dunes, shrieking into the empty desert, she must decide whether that road ends here, or she will become the one who forges a new home, a new life, a new way. She faces the choice to remain simply a soldier kneeling in defeat or to rise and take the path of a warrior and a heroine. According to Weinstein, however, “Mad Max: Fury Road is a very, very bad movie” (2015), though his principal criticism seems to be that it isn’t realistic enough. That is, Miller’s “non-stop adrenaline thrill-

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fig.6 Furiosa vents her rage at the disappearance of the “green place” in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).

ride” does not ring sufficiently true to real life. No one seems to need to eat or sleep; the women Furiosa rescues are diverse only after an Ellemagazine fashion; gasoline appears curiously abundant; and the Warboy rigs are so death’s head–bedecked that they “must have a secret metal skull factory hidden under their butte.” Put simply, for him this is just “a terrible, terrible movie that doesn’t meet the minimal standards of science fiction” (Weinstein 2015). But that’s the problem. He thinks this is science fiction, and it isn’t—at least not hard science fiction and not in its most important mythic valence. However dark in outlook, violent in execution, and seemingly devoid of hope, Fury Road is fantasy, a tale set in a storyworld filled with things we believe couldn’t possibly happen. While Weinstein does recognize that Furiosa is actually the film’s central character, he complains that she “never grows. She doesn’t change or learn, other than to accept the leadership of a man she neither knows nor really trusts” (Weinstein 2015). It’s as though for Weinstein, and for critics who seem to think this film was about Max Rockatansky, the story ended there in the desert, on the dunes beyond what had once been the green place. Once again, they bought their tickets and are entitled to their opinions, but in terms of the warrior-heroine, there is a lot more to Fury Road than cinematic wasteland. Two points in particular are worth noting. First, a man in the frame or man’s name on the marquee should never be mistaken for the centrality of that man in the narrative. What critics

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like Weinstein miss is how much Furiosa has already grown, already learned, and already placed at risk just to get to the point where the film’s main action begins. Imagine, once again, the very concept of “home” and what it must have taken for her simply to remember the green place. Essentially a janissary, a slave-soldier, she has chosen not only to betray the only life she has known for those seven thousand days but also, through her duplicity, save the lives of those she can. And she knows exactly how Immortan Joe will respond. Weinstein can criticize Miller’s casting decisions about the wives, but Furiosa’s choice to leave the Citadel is hardly the mark of one content to remain a servant. Second, in the hyperkinetic run-and-gun through the desert, Furiosa may take Max’s help when she needs it, but nothing in the film suggests that she ever accepts his leadership. This is her mission, her road, and never does the journey become about him, his choices, or his destiny. Indeed, throughout, it’s clear that the moment she feels he’s a threat, she will put a 9mm bullet right through his head. In her world, he is simply of no consequence. Although for many in the audience it may not fully arrive, Fury Road leads to a place that filmmakers and fantasy storyworlds have hinted at for decades, but have achieved with only limited success: the fierce warriorheroine, one who is neither the sum of her relationship with a man, nor whose ability to walk the path of the heroine turns on that relationship. This, for example, was, for many fans, one of the principal disappointments of the much-anticipated 2017 film Wonder Woman. While the Amazon princess Diana may have set out on an admittedly naïve quest to kill Ares, the god of war, she steps into the fierceness of her power as a warrior only after witnessing the death of the man she loves—who, not insignificantly, is the first man she ever met. Without this defining moment, the narrative does not allow for her to do anything other than remain who she is—powerful but impotent, formidable but confused, a skilled fighter but never a warrior-heroine. (Note: in this chapter, heroine is used simply to distinguish a principal female character and is not intended to diminish the character or suggest that she is a “hero-lite.”) Also, here more than anywhere (and in fairness to critics like Weinstein), of necessity we blur the distinction between strict fantasy and other genres, such as science fiction and horror, if only because the characters we are interested in exist far more in these hybrid storyworlds than they do in the worlds of straight-up fantasy. Even here, though, we find elements of the stories we have discussed. Witchblade, for example, is an intrusion fantasy, the magical element of which is the enchanted

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gauntlet, the storied Witchblade that chooses Sara Pezzini as its latest bearer. Likewise, despite its obvious science fiction conventions, Sarah Connor’s experiences in the Terminator films and the television series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles are also intrusion fantasies: something that she believes absolutely cannot be has come into her life and forever changed everything she thinks she knows about the world. Despite what some critics may think, from the legendary Amazons to characters such as Foxy Brown and Emma Peel, film, television, and fantasy culture is replete with both antecedents to the warrior-heroine as well as successors and descendants—The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen, Kill Bill’s Beatrix Kiddo, and Ghost in the Shell’s Motoko Kusanagi, just to name a few (see Early and Kennedy 2003; Heinecken 2003; Inness 2004a; Mainon and Ursini 2006; McCaughey and King 2001; Neroni 2005; Schubart 2007; Stuller 2010). There have been less-successful attempts at the warrior-heroine, to be sure, though in the sexist political economy of popular entertainment this just as often means “didn’t do well at the box office,” as “was simply a bad film.” Sometimes it’s both. Intended as a spinoff from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s two Conan films (1982, 1984), for example, Red Sonja (1985) was intended to showcase stars Brigitte Nielsen and Sandahl Bergman, jump-starting a new fantasy franchise featuring the warrior-heroines of sword-andsorcery. Schwarzenegger himself considers it the worst film he has ever made, while on this Nielsen remains largely silent. To others, however, clichéd dialogue, wooden acting, and an almost incomprehensible plotline weren’t as important as the film’s more basic message—the power of the mythic heroine. “I didn’t care about acting technique,” writes Ginnis Tonik, recalling the first of many times she has seen the film. “I cared about watching two women play powerful warriors. . . . There was no doubt in my young mind that Red Sonja was the best movie ever!” (2015; see also Stuller 2010, 57–60). Based on a few such examples, though, Wikileaked Sony emails indicate how little confidence that corporation, at least, has in female superhero (or action hero) films. Rob Bowman’s Elektra (2005), which starred the usually bankable Jennifer Garner, best known for her role as Sydney Bristow in Alias, was generally panned by critics, while Marvel Entertainment CEO Ike Perlmutter (though misspelling the title in his email) called it “a very bad idea and the result was very, very bad” (Silman 2015). Similarly, despite being about “one of the most important female characters in the Batman franchise,” Perlmutter characterized

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the 2004 Catwoman simply as “a disaster” (Silman 2015). While “there have been tons of male superhero movie duds,” culture critic Anna Silman points out trenchantly, “it’s only when a female-led film flops that the protagonist’s gender is held to blame” (2015). Where, though, has the warrior-heroine succeeded? Where has she stepped out from the male crowd and staked her claim to mythic importance? More than anything, the warrior-heroine emerges reluctantly and always in the service of others. For the first three seasons, every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer reiterated the prophecy of the Slayer, one girl chosen in all the world to stand against the evil that would consume us all—and much of the series’ dramatic tension turned on Buffy’s ambivalence about that role. The opening credits of Charmed featured a montage of images designed to convey the central importance of the Halliwell sisters as magical warrior-heroines—and the often dire consequences of their calling. While all of these women appear in the role of mythic world-savior, each attacks her role reluctantly. Like little Furiosa playing with her childhood friends in the green place those seven thousand days ago, none sets out to be who she becomes. Despite the “many mothers” of the warrior-heroine tradition—those remembered and those forgotten—our discussion opens with Aliens and the second appearance of Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). Beginning there, we consider warrior-heroines who have taken the stage since Ripley’s climactic battle with the xenomorph Queen in the cavernous space of the Sulaco’s dropship bay. Throughout fantasy culture, and in all its hybrids, these women appear in a number of valences, all marked by variations in their relationship to the group of which they (at least nominally) play a part. These include (a) emergence, women who step out from the pack and take center stage as warrior-heroines; (b) election, chosen women who by whatever means become the warrior-heroine; and (c) redemption, a woman who seeks salvation for herself, but in so doing balances the larger scales of justice in her mythic storyworld. As always, though, these are neither discrete nor exhaustive categories, and some characters may easily blur the boundaries between one and another.

ellen and alice: emergence Both Aliens (1986) and Resident Evil (2002) are part of complex, multivalent science fiction franchises that include feature films and television adaptations, games and action figures, elaborate cosplay, fan

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fiction, comic books, and graphic novels, as well as a range of novelizations and shared world literature—all of which expand and extend each original story’s mythology and principal character arcs. More than any others in their respective franchise, however, these two films offer us similar mythic narratives played out in different storyworlds. That is, they tell the same story, highlighting the warrior-heroine as the one who assumes her role in the face of initial reluctance, who emerges from within the group to take command, and who, like Furiosa, ensures the survival of innocents under her protection. Return to LV-426: “Get Away from Her, You Bitch!” While some critics are comfortable consigning Alien’s Ellen Ripley to the “last girl standing” genre of 1980s teen horror films (Dole 2001, 91), others insist that her lone-survivor status marks her as the mythic heroine. Although in Ridley Scott’s first installment of the franchise we do see glimpses of the toughness and sheer will to survive that characterize Ripley throughout the series, aboard the Nostromo, she remains the one who escapes, who gets away, whose identity is linked to her survival. She has not yet stepped out from the crowd as the warriorheroine. That evolution occurs only when she returns to LV-426 in Aliens and, in the end, confronts the terrifying xenomorph hive-mother. Critics and fans alike cheer the emergence of Ellen Ripley in Aliens as “one of the toughest females to appear in the mainstream media” (Inness 2004b, 3) and “one of the first recognizable female action heroes of American mainstream cinema” (Stuller 2010, 62). Consider the sequence of moves, almost like a cinematic chess game, that takes one queen across the board to confront the other. First, Ripley must be convinced to return to the small planetoid where her nightmare began nearly six decades before. But she knows what’s there, she knows what’s waiting, and she tells the company man Burke, “I’m not going back.” That is, not until Burke threatens her employment, questions her mental strength and emotional stability—all of which she might have resisted—and ultimately tells her that they’ve lost contact with the terraforming colony that was established during those long years she “drifted right through the core systems.” Suddenly, more lives are at stake than simply her own and, despite the almost paralyzing fear the memory of her experience on the Nostromo invokes, she agrees to return. She would be going only as a consultant, Burke assures her. She likely wouldn’t even have to go down to the planet.

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When they arrive, of course, her role as the putative xenomorph expert demands her presence on the surface. But, once again, she stays in the background, screened from danger by a squad of heavily armed marines, led by the two power-gunners, Drake and Vasquez. Played by veteran character actor Jenette Goldstein, the diminutive Private Vasquez is the film’s “pseudo-male” warrior, the female soldier whose actions throughout demonstrate that she is at least as tough as most of her squad-mates (and significantly tougher than some). “Hey, Vasquez,” asks the unit’s joker, Corporal Hudson, as the young woman does a series of pull-ups following their emergence from hypersleep, “have you ever been mistaken for a man?” “No,” she replies, lowering herself easily to the deck, “have you?” As the marines search for the missing colonists, Ripley remains behind in the colony’s control center. She is one step closer to danger, perhaps, but still presumably secure against the xenomorphs. There, she assumes charge of Newt, the little girl who is the colony’s lone survivor, saving her from the alien “face-hugger” when Burke betrays them both in the colony med-bay, searching for her when she is captured and taken to the alien hive, protecting her on the Sulaco with a terse “Get away from her, you bitch!” Much has been made of Ripley taking the role of Newt’s surrogate mother. Perhaps, some suggest, this relates to the guilt she feels over the daughter she left on Earth when she signed on to the Nostromo—though this only becomes apparent in the director’s cut, rather than the film’s theatrical release (e.g., Schubart 2007, 169–94). Roz Kaveny, however, argues that “critics have overstated” this point and that rather than a replacement for her daughter, she sees in the child an image of herself, someone “who has experiences more like Ripley’s than anyone else’s”—that is, someone who has survived the nightmare—“and has to be protected for that reason” (2005, 151). Ripley begins to emerge from the background when the gravity of their situation finally becomes clear, and she confronts the devious corporate fixer. “You know, Burke,” she grates, slamming him against a bulkhead, “I don’t know which species is worse. You don’t see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage!” When the marines “get their asses kicked” in the labyrinthine hive of the alien Queen, and Hudson’s bravado slips to reveal his basic cowardice, another squad member assumes putative command. It is Ripley, however, who takes control, literally and metaphorically stepping out in front of those who were initially tasked with protecting her. Even at this point, though, she is still the Ripley from the Nostromo, operating in survival mode.

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Stay alive. Get to the ship. Escape. She emerges fully as the warrior-heroine only when most of the pawns and other major pieces have been cleared from the board, and she must cross the centerline into the alien Queen’s territory to rescue Newt. Taking the child and destroying the xenomorph egg cache, she fights her way upward, toward safety aboard the Sulaco, still waiting patiently in orbit. There, all but alone, she defeats the alien Queen in a final conflict that can only be described as an epic battle of the spacebitches. Though she doesn’t know it, Ripley’s journey through the Alien storyworld is far from over, but at least for the moment she believes she can rest. “Can I dream?” Newt asks, as Ripley checks her hypersleep chamber, tucking her in, as it were. “Yes, honey,” she replies, “I think we both can.” Return to Wonderland: “My Name Is Alice.” As much as anything, Resident Evil’s Alice Marcus is the product of Milla Jovovich’s love of playing this kind of warrior-heroine. The Ukrainian-born actor got her start in action films as the semidivine being Leeloo in The Fifth Element (1997) and Joan of Arc in The Messenger (1999), then went on to play similarly kinetic characters in Ultraviolet (2006) and the Resident Evil franchise. Based originally on the PlayStation video game, the numerous Resident Evil films, graphic novels, other media products, and participatory fan culture have significantly extended both Alice’s backstory and the franchise mythology, demonstrating once again the relentlessly intervalent and referential nature of popular culture. The first two films, Resident Evil and Resident Evil: Apocalypse, very much mirror the structure of Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens, while the third, Resident Evil: Extinction, pays an unspoken homage to George Miller and the Mad Max franchise. More than that, Resident Evil is a horrific inversion of the Alice in Wonderland story. In this case, the action takes place in the Hive, the sprawling, madhouse world of the Umbrella Corporation’s laboratory complex hidden deep beneath Raccoon City. There, among other things, the world’s largest corporation has been experimenting with humantissue regeneration via the T-Virus, the film’s version of the different substances Alice eats and drinks in Wonderland. Not surprisingly, this all goes horribly wrong and leads to a zombie apocalypse. The Hive itself is controlled by a murderous artificial intelligence known as the Red Queen, which slices, dices, and beheads its opponents with laser

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beams, and Resident Evil follows the room clearing, escalating run-andgun format of the video game. The mythology of Alice, however, turns on the emergence of the warrior-heroine, and the rabbit-hole down which she falls is the loss of her own memory. Indeed, both Ripley and Alice must step out from behind the screen of memory. For her part, no matter what she does, Ripley cannot escape the sights and sounds and smells of her experience on the Nostromo, the visceral fear engendered by her initial encounter with the xenomorph. “I know you haven’t been sleeping,” Burke tells her, when he first broaches the idea of her return to LV-426, known by that point as Hadley’s Hope. And this should come as no surprise. Her memory of the horror that began there is as bright and alive as if it happened just yesterday—and as far as she is concerned, in hypersleep for fifty-seven years, it did. Alice, on the other hand, awakens with no memory of who or where she is or what’s brought her to this pass. A side effect of the Hive’s primary defense system in the wake of the T-Virus, she is experiencing amnesia. For her, emerging as the warrior-heroine means confronting what she cannot remember, recovering some sense of her own identity, and facing whatever that might mean. Is she a victim? A perpetrator? Collateral damage caught in the wrong place at the wrong time? As we have seen, in many variants of the Wonderland stories, “Who is Alice?” is the central question. Each woman must descend into her version of fantasy’s memory-hole: Ripley to the surface of LV-426, Alice to the tortuous depths of the Hive. “I’m not sure I want to remember what went on down here,” Alice says, as she and a security team (Resident Evil’s version of the marines from Aliens) move down through the levels of the Hive in an attempt to shut down the Red Queen and contain the outbreak. Rain (Michelle Rodriguez, who is best known for her role as Letty in the Fast and Furious franchise) is this film’s Vasquez character, the strong, fearless pseudo-male in the Umbrella Corporation’s paramilitary unit, the one who outshines the rest of her cohort and, like Vasquez, will eventually sacrifice herself for them. In Aliens, confronting the xenomorphs for the first time in the steam tunnels below the atmosphere-processing plant and recognizing the danger immediately, Vasquez unleashes her powergun with the exultant battle cry, “Let’s rock!” With its snaking pipes, metal tanks, and green-grey color palette, Resident Evil’s terrifying hybrid room explicitly calls to mind the egg chambers in both Alien and Aliens. There, when Rain and a male team member encounter the first of the T-Virus zombies, which they initially mistake for a survivor, he hesitates and tries simply to disable the creature. Despite the bullet

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wound in its leg, the reanimated corpse continues its attack. From behind her partner, Rain empties her weapon and eliminates the threat. “Bitch isn’t standing now,” she says, grimly. Proceeding deeper and deeper into the Hive, the team and the survivors are gradually eliminated by the Red Queen and the growing zombie population. As the remaining men start to panic, Alice emerges as the one who will take control of the situation. As in Aliens, their mission is in disarray, their numbers depleted, and the Umbrella security team want nothing more than to flee the Hive, just like Ripley, Newt, and the remaining marines want to escape LV-426. How each character—Ripley and Alice—is coded as the emergent warrior-heroine, however, turns on the difference between technology and training. Throughout Aliens Ripley wears a grey, rather shapeless flight suit and, occasionally, a leather flight jacket. With her short, bobbed hair, this lends her an almost androgynous appearance. When she emerges as the warrior-heroine in the film’s final act, like so many women in swordand-sorcery fantasy, she sheds part of her clothing, in this case stripping down to a T-shirt. More importantly, though, she deliberately accumulates the lethal technology required for the task ahead. That is, while her choices make her the heroine, the weapons she assembles—the M41A pulse rifle, M240 incinerator unit, and grenade bandolier—signify her as the new alpha warrior. Alice, on the other hand, is coded in a similar but more-than-slightly-different fashion. Following the film’s establishing sequences, she awakens wearing a red spaghetti-strap party dress (which makes her the subtle mirror of the Red Queen), and during the descent into the Hive she acquires a man’s leather jacket. This places her in stark contrast to the members of the security team, who are heavily armed and outfitted with Molle tactical gear and body armor. Midway through Resident Evil, Alice’s true nature begins to reveal itself. Rather than the weapons with which Ripley assumes the role of the warrior, when Alice is attacked by a zombie, some manner of past training takes over—something that surprises no one so much as Alice herself—and she dispatches the threat in hand-to-hand combat. At this point, she still can’t remember even her name. The shock of the encounter, however, and the instinctual, haptic familiarity of the martial arts begin to force the return of her memory. Confronted next by a pack of zombie Dobermans, Alice demonstrates conclusively that she is far more dangerous than any of the others who entered the Hive to shut down the Red Queen. Once again, though, she is surprised by her own combat skills. Like that of The Matrix’s Trinity, Alice’s lethal aesthetic

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is presented in slow motion, particularly the balletic violence and spinning movement that owes much of its inspiration to Hong Kong director John Woo. When her lethality takes over, Alice’s face changes dramatically, going from surprised and scared to purposeful and deliberate. She becomes who she is. As they discover that they have been trapped in the Hive by design rather than by accident, Rain resigns herself to her orders: contain the T-Virus outbreak at all costs. She and her team are just as expendable as the doomed crews aboard the freighter Nostromo and the troop-transport Sulaco. Alice, on the other hand, fully emerges as the warrior-heroine committed to escape with as many survivors as possible. When she and the lone other survivor make it to the surface, they are captured by Umbrella employees in biohazard suits. “He’s infected,” one says. “I want him in the Nemesis Program”—an explicit nod to the continuation of the franchise and its expanding mythology. When Alice once again opens her eyes—the envelope structure to her awakening at the film’s beginning—we are returned to the fantasy realm of memory and becoming. Held in a brightly lit, sterile white room, she is connected to a variety of machines—another part of this terrifying Wonderland in which she is changed and modified, and through which she must fight. Once again, she is unsure where she is or what has happened. Ripping herself free, the film’s dénouement comes as the camera pulls back through an observation room crowded with monitors but unoccupied (except for a zombie shambling past), as Alice pounds on the glass. We see her scream, but hear nothing. Eventually picking the lock, she emerges dressed in a paper hospital gown—the envelope-structure analogue to her red dress. She makes her way through the empty facility and steps into the street, where she recoils in horror. However many days have passed since her capture mark the boundary between pre- and postapocalypse in the original Resident Evil storyworld. We watch as she takes a shotgun from a wrecked police cruiser, her eyes once again set and intense. She racks the weapon’s slide, and the camera pulls up and away, leaving her standing alone in the midst of wholesale destruction. Her journey as the warrior-heroine has just begun. Roll credits. Like all other warrior-heroines, both Ellen Ripley and Alice Marcus are thrust into situations they did not want and would gladly escape if they could. Their status as mythic heroines rides on two concerns: (a) their reluctant willingness to act as saviors for those who cannot save themselves, and (b) their “special nature” relative to the evolving

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franchise mythologies. In Ripley’s case, it will be her eventual hybrid relationship with the xenomorphs (Alien: Resurrection); for Alice, it is her resistance to the zombie infection and the revelation of her true nature, both anomalies that make her the literal vessel of humankind’s salvation. This leads us to the second iteration of the warrior-heroine: the one who is chosen.

sara and sarah: election From the legend of Queen Maya and her dream of a wondrous white elephant, a tale recounting the miraculous conception of the Buddha, to the Christian myth of the Virgin Mary, told by the angel Gabriel that she would bear the son of God through the power of the Holy Spirit; from warrior-heroines such as Hua Mulan in China to Boudicca in northeast England and Jeanne d’Arc, who answered what she believed was the call of God during the Hundred Years War; and from Buffy Summers and the Halliwell sisters to Sara Pezzini and Sarah Connor— mythic history, folklore, and popular culture fairly teem with women elected in some way to play the role of world-savior (see Davis-Kimball and Behan 2002; Lane and Wurts 1998). Often, these are women chosen by circumstance rather than supernatural visitation. They are selected in spite of themselves and would not choose to play the role that fate has assigned them. But they take the mythic stage nonetheless. Unlike Ellen Ripley, when we first meet Witchblade’s Sara Pezzini, she is already an accomplished fighter—a tough, though troubled New York cop who has chosen to put her life on the line for others. Destined by virtue of a bloodline extending back millennia, however, she is also a daughter of prophecy, the next woman destined to bear the Witchblade, a magical artifact that turns her into an all but invincible warrior. Originally a comic book series (which ran for two decades, from 1995 to 2015), Witchblade has been developed as a television series and has seen both manga and anime versions. Various interpretations of Pezzini’s elaborate Witchblade outfit are regular staples of Comic-Con cosplay. Indeed, in much the same way as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed, “Witchblade rewrites women’s history as a secret narrative of ongoing female heroism,” in this case another “gender-pure warrior line” that selects its latest bearer and links them to all those “many mothers” who have borne the Witchblade in the past (Greven 2004, 127, 128). But, as much as it is a moment of fantastic intrusion into one’s life, election is also a process of acknowledgment and acceptance. In the

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short-lived television series, once the mysterious force behind the Witchblade has chosen her, Sara (Yancy Butler) begins to have unsettling dreams and visions, confusing fragments of insight into her new calling. “Pez, here’s the deal,” the spirit of her dead partner tells her in the series pilot, “Parallax.” “You don’t even know who you are. All I can say is you’re from a line going back through time and forward into the future, part of a wave, a force. A warrior-bloodline. You’re the inheritor of something unique and powerful.” Not surprisingly, Sara thinks she’s losing her mind, that she’s suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. “You are special,” the apparition insists, waving away her concerns. “You were chosen.” However mystified she may be, Sara Pezzini is never presented as anything other than a force of nature, someone who will stop at nothing to understand what her election means and to follow the dictates of her destiny. Once again, the hero’s journey is always toward who we are—or are becoming. To comprehend the nature of choice from a different perspective, though, to explore election and the movement from unwilling participant in a cosmic game to warrior-heroine on the front lines of the battle, we must travel coast-to-coast and look to another Sarah. We first meet The Terminator’s Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) as a twenty-something waitress trying to make ends meet in Los Angeles, balancing the demands of friends and lovers, enjoying her life when she can, and generally trying to find her place in the world. She is a young girl growing into a woman, and she certainly doesn’t expect that place to be as the mother of humankind’s savior in the face of an artificially intelligent apocalypse. “Do I look like the mother of the future?” she asks Kyle Reese, the soldier sent back in time to protect her from Skynet’s cyborg assassin. “I mean, am I tough? Organized? I can’t even balance my checkbook!” More to the point, she insists, “I didn’t ask for this ‘honor,’ and I don’t want it, any of it!” Whether she wants it or not, the reality of the Terminator in her life forces her to accept the role fate has thrust upon her. She has been chosen whether she likes it or not, and she cannot escape the demands of this terrifying intrusion fantasy by simply clicking her heels. The film draws to a close with Sarah driving deep into the Mexican desert, a German shepherd beside her, a Colt Python in her lap, salvation growing slowly in her womb. When she stops for gas, an old man warns her, “There’s a storm coming.” “I know,” she replies, gazing off into the middle distance. Thunder booms as she and our uncertain future roll toward the mountains. As some do with Ellen Ripley, there are those who argue that Sarah Connor’s journey toward the warrior woman as mythic heroine begins

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with her first appearance on film, and they’re not wrong. In both cases, however, it’s vital to consider the development of the character between the first film in the franchise and its sequel. When Sarah destroys the original Terminator, it is a last desperate act of survival, not the opening salvo in a war that will consume the rest of her life. Only in this final scene, with her Jeep and her dog and her gun, do we catch a fleeting glimpse of the Sarah Connor we will meet seven years later in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Audiences gasped when they saw the transformation in Linda Hamilton, who between the two films was best known for her role in the television series Beauty and the Beast. When we first see her in Terminator 2, she is doing pull-ups on an upended bedframe in a mental hospital, where she has been confined for her delusional fantasies about killer robots from the future. Now little more than muscle, bone, and sinew, when she turns to the camera, her face is haggard, her hair wild, her eyes almost feral in their intensity. Gone entirely is the soft, innocent young woman of the first film. She has been replaced by a soldier who has stripped her body and her life of everything not required to serve the mission. As with Mad Max: Fury Road, only those least interested in the depths of the story would mistake this for a film about a cyborg assassin (the T-800 or the T-1000, take your pick) or even about Sarah’s son, John Connor. There is no doubt that this is Sarah’s story, and the power with which Hamilton delivers her performance all but excludes everyone else when she is in the frame. Indeed, as though in answer to her younger self’s question, she has accepted her election and forged herself into the weaponized epitome of toughness and organization. She probably doesn’t even have a checkbook anymore. Through most of Terminator 2, we follow her as a woman still desperate to protect her son and, in doing so, protect us all. Indeed, by defending John, she has been defending humankind since the day the first Terminator entered her life and changed it forever. Battered but never broken, she has grown into a supremely confident soldier. She assumes her role as the warrior-heroine, however, only when she fails to kill Skynet’s inventor, Miles Dyson, and is forced to accept that there must be another way. That is, her path to heroism emerges from the fatalism that has marked her life to that point, and she steps into the truth of the message sent back from beyond the rise of the machines: “The future’s not set. There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.” That is, Sarah “must transcend the boundaries that have governed her

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fig.7 Sarah Connor doing what she has learned to do best in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).

since she first encountered the Terminator many years before” (Cowan 2010, 50). She must evolve; she must find a way to look past what she has become convinced is the certainty of Judgment Day. In this film, “crisis has forced evolution, forging new boundaries of relationship between human and machine” (Cowan 2010, 50–51), and demanding new choices from the warrior-heroine. Terminator 2 concludes in ways that both reflect and refract Sarah’s experience in the first film, and which highlight this development from the chosen innocent to the desperate soldier to the warrior-heroine. Just before the closing credits, we don’t see her as we did in the first film, but we hear her voice, as a flare of headlights picks out the centerline of a darkened highway. Sarah (voice-over) the unknown future rolls toward us. I face it for the first time with a sense of hope. Because if a machine, a terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.

Although Sarah Connor is hardly the Virgin Mary type, there is enough resonance with Christian mythology that it’s not surprising some believers read both films as a gospel allegory. Christianity Today’s Peter Chattaway notes that the original “is in many ways a sci-fi Nativity story,” and that the first Terminator’s destructive rampage “evokes

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parallels to the slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem” (2009). Jeff Saporito calls The Terminator “a retelling of the Annunciation story from the New Testament,” while the sequel “mirrors the biblical family’s flight into Egypt” (2016). “And if you’re still not convinced,” writes Madison Podolnick, “the initials ‘J.C.’ should do the trick” (n.d.). Whether they do or not (or whether they are simply writer-director James Cameron’s inside joke), a superficial reading of these films as biblical allegory is complicated, not least, by three concerns. First, there is the character of John Connor himself, who in Terminator 2 is little more than a juvenile delinquent; only the most tortured reading could cast him as a Christ-figure. Second, there is the plain sense of the narrative, which is at cross-purposes with the Christian apocalyptic message. Specifically, both films “(perhaps unknowingly) invert the morality of apocalyptic literature, proposing that the established order must be upheld in the face of its destruction.” That is, “the ‘end of the world’ as depicted in these films is a crisis that the heroes must rush to stop” (McKee 2007, 237). Put differently, they explicitly turn away from the expected (and longed for) conclusion of Christian apocalypticism. These are not heroes who look for the end of world in hopes of some life beyond, but who seek salvation for humankind as we can become here and so redeem the times in which we live now. Finally, and most important for our consideration, John may be the savior at some time in the future—if that future even happens—but the path to humankind’s redemption in Terminator 2: Judgment Day is clearly and relentlessly through his mother. This points us to the last category: the warrior-heroine as the agent of redemption.

xena: redemption No consideration of the warrior-heroines of fantasy culture would be complete without Xena: Warrior Princess, to which far more than a brief section could easily be devoted. Here, we return to the world of high fantasy, of gods and monsters, of mythological beasts, magical quests, and, as each episode’s opening narration tells us, “a land in turmoil [that] cried out for a hero.” Or, in this case, a “mighty princess forged in the heat of battle” who seeks redemption as the mythic warrior-heroine. As with other warrior-heroines we have discussed, Xena emerges from behind a particular screen, in this case, the stigma of her past as a savage and merciless warlord. Throughout the series, her struggle to understand the path of redemption becomes more important than the putative end of the journey.

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Almost from its pilot broadcast, Xena: Warrior Princess proved immensely popular, especially among women, and the series quickly accumulated a large fan base. Fans loved it for its never-ending camp, its scenery-chewing villains, its over-the-top acrobatics, and, as Dominique Mainon and James Ursini point out, the undeniable “charisma and physical presence of its star Lucy Lawless” (2006, 51). Little about the series, though, is as simple as it seems, and it has engendered significant discussion among critics of popular culture. Rather than a purely feminist hero, for example, some consider Xena’s story important precisely because “it retains moments of hybridity, a quality that resists purity in favor of continuous fusing, intermingling, and mixing of differences” (Kennedy 2003, 40). That is, however and wherever we focus the interpretive lens, Xena refuses to conform to easy or superficial categories. For others, the redemptive question is much more clearly cut, and many critics feel that Xena and the legions of fans she inspired were betrayed, in the end, by her creators. “After years spent prioritizing a feminist community over patriarchy,” writes Sara Crosby, “she abandoned this devotion in order to sacrifice herself to violent misogyny. She accepted guilt for her heroism and bowed to the justice of her punishment, endorsing sexist brutality and the society created by it” (2004, 166). Put differently, after six seasons, Xena’s quest for redemption goes essentially unfulfilled, as though, in the end, the warrior-heroine was stripped of her agency, just as surely as the rain of arrows took her life. Jennifer Stuller, on the other hand, insists that readings of such a complicated and multivalent series are rarely so straightforward. Indeed, we “don’t need to take an either/or approach to superwomen,” she argues. “We can look critically at the social implications of the over-emphasis on sexuality”—or, per Crosby, on gender roles and stereotypes—“as well as thrill at watching displays of confidence and power. Because an audience can engage with a representation as entertainment or as message, the relationship will never be static” (2010, 73). It is difficult to overstate the importance of Stuller’s last point: what we take from any pop-culture product is inevitably a function of what we bring to it. Xena, the role for which Lawless will be forever remembered, entered the canon of fantasy culture principally through a three-episode story arc in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, an internal storyline that was intended to end with the death of the warrior princess. Instead, the mythic resonance and telegenic appeal of her character recast these episodes as a prequel narrative that both sets the stage for and reflects Xena’s longer, more detailed redemptive journey.

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In the Hercules origin story, Xena is the antithesis of the warriorheroine. A ruthless warlord bent on little more than wholesale slaughter and wanton destruction, she lives only for the thrill of leading her army in battle, the feel of a sword in her hand, the smell of blood, and the screams of the dying. During her brief, tumultuous encounter with Hercules, however, she becomes convinced that “killing isn’t the only way of proving you’re a warrior.” When we first meet her in Xena: Warrior Princess, she rides alone, no army following, no war banners snapping and fluttering in the breeze. She is the marauder in search of a redemption she dares not hope to earn and, more than that, is not certain she deserves. And the pilot’s opening scene demonstrates just how hard that road to redemption will be. Without knowing who she is, a young boy in a burned-out village tells how his parents were killed by “Xena, the warrior princess, who came down out of the sky in a chariot, throwing thunderbolts and breathing fire.” What, then, in the face of this, is the cost of redemption? Far more, clearly, than the crust of bread she tosses the starving orphan. At the very least, it is everywhere and always looking into the faces of those she has wronged. Taking the journey without knowing the outcome, however, are the nascent hallmarks of the warrior-heroine. Her “unknown future” rolls toward her, and Xena’s first thought is simply to renounce her past, both actually and symbolically. Stripping off her armor and burying it with her weapons, she naively thinks that it will be sufficient to give up the life of the sword. What she learns immediately, though, is that the past will not so easily surrender her. Who she is is not tied to what she wears. Stepping into the same mythic stream as the Imperator Furiosa, she must find redemption through action, through willing sacrifice on behalf of others. A small band of soldiers have captured a group of frightened villagers. The leader, who could, in a different time and a different telling, be one of Immortan Joe’s Warboys, tells them, “We can do this one of two ways. You can let us have the girls and go back to those hovels you call homes, or we can hack you all into little pieces and take the girls anyway.” Dressed only in her undergarment—an equivalent to Alice’s red dress—Xena intervenes, easily defeating the soldiers and, more than that, inspiring the villagers to take up arms in their own defense. Grateful though they may be, they recognize her for who—and what—she is, and beg her to leave them in peace. When Xena returns to her home village, however, her reception is anything but what Furiosa found among the remnants of the Vuvalini.

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People point and whisper among themselves. Others scowl and turn aside. She is not welcome, not even in her mother’s house. “Go away, Xena,” Cyrene says, “this is not your town anymore. We are not your people. I am not your mother.” xeNa I wanted to come home. I thought maybe I could get it right. CYreNe I don’t think anything will take away the shame and sorrow you’ve brought on your kinsmen. xeNa Probably not, but I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying. CYreNe oh, xena, I wish I could believe you.

From the series’ earliest moments, we learn that the road to redemption is less Herculean than Sisyphean. However much she does, whatever amends she makes, around every bend is another face that sees only the rampaging warrior princess, and not the redemptive warrior-heroine. Overcoming the sins of one’s past is as much a function of whether people see and recognize the change as the fact of the change itself. When she fights on behalf of the village against her former warlord partner and secures their safety at the risk of her own life, we see the first glimmer of her potential salvation: a mother’s hug as Xena prepares to be on her way. xeNa Mother, forgive me, please. CYreNe I forgive you, my little one. I’m so happy to have you back again. xeNa I can’t stay long.

That is, the road to redemption has a beginning, but rarely an end. The first-season episode “Dreamworker” reinforces these significant aspects of Xena’s journey. Her new companion, Gabrielle (Renée

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O’Connor) has been taken by a cult dedicated to Morpheus, the god of dreams, and Xena enters “the dreamscape passage” in a desperate attempt to save her. As she falls into a magical dream-state, in almost textbook Jungian fashion, she is told that she must not fear, that whatever she sees is coming from her own mind. This is a metonym for her entire journey. She must act on behalf of others, resisting the temptation to take up the sword for herself. She must face the accusations of those she has killed, the shades of those she destroyed, who insist that she see their faces, learn their names, remember them as something more than just a dream. When they tempt her to pick up her the sword again, to kill them anew, she breaks the weapon, shouting, “I’m not her anymore!” Like an alcoholic refusing in every moment not to take that one next drink, for Xena, every step along the road makes a claim on the agency of the present. If she lets herself be defined by the past, by the expectations of others, there can be no redemption. There can be no future. Finally, deep in the dreamscape passage, she encounters the most dangerous adversary of all: herself. “You think this goody-goody act of yours is going to last?” her haughty, armored, darker self demands. “There’s no glory in being a hero. Ask around.” xeNa All through this dreamscape passage I’ve had to fight people I’ve killed before. and I couldn’t bring myself to kill them again. but as I face you, I realize it can mean only one thing. . . . It means I finally get to kill you.

In the end, though, it is not destruction that opens the path to redemption, but integration. She cannot obliterate her shadow side any more than she could stop being the warrior princess simply by covering her sword with dirt and stones. She must accept that the dark self, the urge to kill, will always be there. Indeed, she says, “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t exist. Whether I like it or not, you’re the key. You’re the key. . . . I control you.”

the road ahead Part of the problem with comparing feature films and television series, obviously, is that the former have far less time and opportunity to explore character motivation and development, leaving viewers to piece together aspects of backstory and significance from much smaller, more

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disparate fragments. On the other hand, while multi-season series allow writers, directors, and actors to delve much more deeply into the characters, the original motivations, conflicts, confusions, and resistances can become lost. Indeed, the popularity of some television series can lead producers to extend narrative arcs far beyond what the storyworld and storylines themselves will reasonably bear. Story arcs are not so much extended as attenuated, growing thinner and thinner until they can barely support the weight of the story at all. This is especially the case when there is significant merchandising attached to the continuation of the series. Thus, while we must consider characters in the context of the entire series, the initial episodes, the establishing sequences behind the principal motivations and narrative mythology are of particular importance. What does allow the story to continue once the series has been cancelled, once one blockbuster release has replaced another? How do we continue the quest on which these various characters have invited us? Sometimes, by playing the heroes ourselves.

chapter 8

The Stuff of Legends

It’s a story as old as time. Boy loves girl. Girl dumps boy. Boy recovers from heartbreak by slaying succubus demon and winning the love of another, more attractive girl. It’s the stuff of legends. Almost literally. Mechanic and would-be doom metal singer Joe has just learned that the love of his life doesn’t see him as commitment material and has abruptly ended their relationship. Depressed, angry, and more than a little stoned, Joe is shanghaied by his friends Eric and Hung to a weekend of live action role-playing (LARP) that will culminate with a glorious battle on the “Fields of Evermore.” Not surprisingly, though, he doesn’t fully embrace the idea. How could foam swords, beanbag spell balls, and archaic dialogue possibly mend his broken heart? More than that, he tells them, he gave “all this up” years ago. That is, he’s a man now; he has put away childish things. LARPing is for kids and losers— a standard trope when portraying any form of immersive or participative fantasy culture. His friends, now cast as Eric the Enchanter (a twenty-sixth level wizard who hopes to become Grand Sorcerer) and Sir Hung the Magnificent (played by Peter Dinklage, best known for his role as Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones), try to convince him to stay. “Come on, Joe,” Eric pleads, “you played D&D. Live action roleplay is the next level.” Joe D&D was a long time ago.

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eric Yeah, and you were a legend. these people here, they sing songs about the time you gave ronnie Kwok’s paladin demonic syphilis. Do you remember when we caught ronnie spanking it to the succubus picture in the old Monster Manual? Joe (wistfully) good times, man. eric Yeah, and some of us are still having them. You have a choice: join us in tasting the sweet nectar of victory or mope around an empty house all weekend like a bitch.

Looking at his friends, Joe smiles, resigned, and replies, “You guys actually do look slightly badass.” And with that, Joe the Mechanic steps onto the live-action stage as Jonan the would-be Warrior. Using what he thinks is an old movie prop, but which is, in reality, a diabolical grimoire—which he found on eBay—Eric the Enchanter inadvertently summons a succubus, a lascivious fiend whose victims “are tempted to give in to their darkest desires” before being devoured (Mearls, Schubert, and Wyatt 2008, 284). Against a background of B-movie screams and practical special effects (as opposed to CGI), the demon turns the LARP campsite into its own hellish playground-cumsmorgasbord. Rather than escape, Joe insists that they help the other LARPers. “I think I’ve done enough damage already!” Eric cries, his eyes bugging with terror. “That thing? That’s real!” Where, only hours before, his friends had challenged him to play the hero, Joe now dares them to become heroes. Joe that thing slaughtered our best friend. are you going to let that stand? You’ve been out here practicing this shit every weekend for years. Face it, man, you’ve got everything, but you earned nothing. are you going to hide from that thing, the way you hide from real life? or are you going to man up and avenge the death of our friend?

For film critic Todd Gilchrist, Knights of Badassdom was “a complete failure,” a “sophomoric distraction” at best. He sums the film up as “a one-note joke and a whiff of a story that fails to offer a single reason—

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literal or metaphorical—why dressing up as a fictional character is enjoyable or rewarding” (2014). Others agreed. “Verily dost this movie suck,” writes one blogger (DeLucci 2014), while another complains that director Joe Lynch’s loving homage to fantasy culture “is everything that bothers me about LARP films” (Kessock 2014). Not everyone despised Knights of Badassdom, however, and even those who did recognized that most of its problems were the result of postproduction interference by the studio. Few doubted Lynch’s original vision of the film as something of a love letter to the fantasy role-playing community. During principal photography, for example, LARPers from around the country answered the casting call, many using their annual vacation time just to participate in the film’s “medieval summer camp” atmosphere and perhaps be cast as extras. “Thanks to one gloriously insane man in the film’s art department,” Eric the Enchanter’s demonic “spell book is filled with 1,700 pages of ‘John Dee’s authentic handwriting,’ despite the fact that only a page or two of it is actually ever glimpsed in the movie” (Wilkins 2011). Indeed, fans were so enchanted by the Knights of Badassdom trailer at the 2011 Comic-Con that they avidly followed the film’s production and eagerly awaited its release. As Lynch pointed out during his Comic-Con panel, the film is about “how real life dulls us, and the magic of being twelve years old goes away. LARPing is one way to get that feeling back . . . and fighting demons is another” (Wilkins 2011). However the history of fantasy culture ultimately judges the film’s final cut, it’s clear that most reviewers wanted to like Knights of Badassdom. They weren’t disappointed so much because it was a bad movie— and it’s really not that bad—but because they so wanted it to be a good movie, even a great one. And they wanted that because they recognize the importance of fantasy culture in all its disguises and dimensions. What confused and frustrated them was the disjunction between the cast and crew’s evident love for fantasy role-playing and the final product’s reliance on the worst cultural stereotypes of fantasy role-players. And they aren’t alone. Even Netflix’s phenomenally successful paranormal series Stranger Things begins with this same trope: four young boys, social outcasts who have bonded in the face of bullying and peer humiliation, are playing Dungeons & Dragons in the basement. And, despite the first season’s brilliant use of D&D as a metaphor for the terrifying events overtaking the small town, in the end, the four boys return to their game. Having defeated the Demagorgon, both in-game and out, they are heroes, to be sure—but they’re still in the basement.

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“In real life,” writes journalist Lizzie Stark in Leaving Mundania, her exploration of LARPing in North America, lovers of fantasy culture are not just children—and certainly not just social pariahs. “They drive your trucks and make your copies. They teach your children and repair your computers, and when you have a heart attack, they’re first on the scene. They fight your wars and stock your stores and build your roads. They research new vaccines and obscure old deities. They care for your mentally ill. They train your FBI agents and catch child molesters” (2012, ix). Indeed, in the nine-to-five world that so often mocks the mythic imagination, they may be bookstore clerks, neurosurgeons, archeologists, philosophers, physicists, stay-at-home dads (or moms), celebrities, gold miners, baristas, or religion scholars. They range in age from the very young to the very old and count among their serried ranks all manner of gender description. You name it, you’ll find them. At Baltimore’s Darkon Wargaming, for example, one the country’s largest LARPing communities, two transgender women not only fight together but also chose to have a LARP wedding surrounded by their role-play friends. “It’s actually really nice,” says one, and she admits “very unusual,” that Darkon has “no transgender community. There is no difference. In the group I’m one of the people, just one of the girls.” That is, they are not set apart, even by gender definition. Another Darkon LARPer who spent her youth as “one of those closeted nerd kids,” says she came out one weekend on a whim and discovered, “I can be Xena? Fuck, yeah, I want to be Xena!” (Lee 2015). Indeed, Stark continues, on those weekends, and in whatever form their fantasy takes, LARPers can be “elves, magicians, cowgirls, vampires, zombies, arcane priests, samurai, druids, Jedis, zeppelin pilots, and chain-mailed warriors of unreasonable strength.” More than that, she writes, “They save the world. A lot. They are larpers, and they are misunderstood” (Stark 2012, ix; see also Byers and Crocco 2016; Ewalt 2013; Fine 1983; Gilsdorf 2009; Mazzanoble 2007; Williams, Hendricks, and Winkler 2006). From movies like Knights of Badassdom and Of Dice and Men (in which a group of gamer friends deal with the fact that one of them is deploying to Iraq—the tagline reads, “a geek movie without the selfloathing”) to documentaries such as Enter the Battlefield (about the lives of professional Magic: The Gathering players) and The Dwarvenaut (about a New York artist whose life revolves around creating extraordinarily detailed tabletop fantasy terrain); from the social distribution of fantasy culture ranging from shared universe fiction, both

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canonical and fan-generated, to live-action D&D, whether streamed on the internet (CelebriD&D; Critical Role; Dice, Camera, Action), played on the main stage at major gaming conventions (Acquisitions Incorporated), or performed as audience-participation theater improv (Zombie Orpheus); and from meticulously crafted cosplay to a pair of coathanger-and-tissue-paper fairy wings worn by a small child at a local comic-con—fantasy culture invites and celebrates all those who are unwilling to give up “the magic of being twelve years old,” and who are emerging from the basement to take their place as a pop-culture phenomenon. All these aspects of fantasy culture both recognize the primacy of story in the human experience and reinforce the need to resist those aspects of “Mundania” that threaten to strip us of our mythic imagination. According to anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, writes Stephen Asma, “myths, whether ancient or cinematic”—or, we hasten to add, immersive or participatory—“have very similar sociological functions. The purpose of the mythic narrative is to make the world intelligible, to use magical means to resolve the contradictions of life” (2009, 197). “Fantasy gamers,” notes sociologist Gary Fine, one of the first scholars to take the phenomenon of fantasy role-playing seriously, “construct a world imbued with meaning. Theirs is a social world that is not inherently meaningful but is made meaningful by the significance given to it by the participant” (1983, 231). In this chapter, we travel between the page and the stage, between the printed word or streamed video and the various levels of immersion and participation in fantasy storytelling and role-playing. Reading The Hobbit is one thing; watching this or that reimagining of Tolkien’s classic story is another. Becoming part of the adventure, though—if only for a weekend becoming a hobbit, a dwarf, or a wizard, or even an orc— reminds us that fantasy is more just than a spectator sport. If, as Jonathan Gottschall writes, the stories we tell and retell are part of “a powerful and ancient virtual reality technology that simulates the big dilemmas of human life” (2012, 67), then moving these stories from the page or the screen to the tabletop and the forest clearing lets us see the mythic imagination at work in real time. Indeed, participative, immersive fantasy culture actively addresses Tolkien’s fundamental complaint about fairy tales: the misconception that if they are read by children they must have been written for children. “It is parents and guardians who have classified fairy-stories as Juvenilia,” he wrote (1966, 66). That is, it is the George Darlings of the world who insist

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that fantasy culture remain in the nursery (or the basement), that children stop playing make-believe (or D&D), that they grow up and get on with the proper business of being miserable for the rest of their lives. “Let us not divide the human race into Eloi and Morlocks,” Tolkien counters, invoking another master of the imaginative tale, H. G. Wells. “If fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read by adults” (Tolkien 1966, 67). Tolkien lamented how the best of folk tales and fairy stories have been “mollified or bowdlerized” to accommodate only younger readers, and in the process become the saccharine “authorized versions” of these tellings. Fantasy role-playing in all its forms—whether rolling the dice, playing the hero, or dressing the part—reclaims and recovers for all of us the magic of make-believe heroes. Moreover, as Sir Hung the Magnificent reminds Jonan the would-be Warrior, “There be monsters in need of pummelin’!”

rolling the dice Back in the day, when fantasy gamers played Dungeons & Dragons or one of its early imitators, they did so using little more than a handful of dice, some cheap graph paper, and endless HB pencils. Responding to the dungeon master’s prompts, players explored dungeons, followed quests, and pummeled monsters, painstakingly inscribing their adventures one quarter-inch square at a time. As fantasy role-playing grew in popularity, in addition to the use of character miniatures, or “minis,” different visual aids were introduced to help players realize their storyworld. Reusable battle mats made of dry-erase plastic and pre-printed with a standard grid allowed gamers to draw out the game space in more detail. Rudimentary terrain and background props, much of it taken from the worlds of model railroading and tabletop wargaming, added a sense of realism. Before too long, players began crafting their own terrain, expanding the descriptions and artwork contained in the various D&D modules and popular magazines such as Adventurer, Dungeon, and The Dragon. Inevitably, this gave way to commercial sets of richly detailed, three-dimensional fantasy terrain that let the players see and touch the storyworlds spread out before them. Exquisitely painted minis, such as those produced by a former geologist who turned his passion for tabletop gaming into a full-time artistic career, bring their quest for adventure to life. All these developments, from dime-store graph paper to 3D-printed dungeons and castles, reflect

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different expressions of fantasy culture’s expansive theater of the mind. To explore this further, consider two role-play storyworlds: Titansgrave and Heroes of Awesome. Titansgrave: “Battle of the Boasts” Designed and run by actor and avid gamer Wil Wheaton, Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana is a science fantasy role-playing game streamed originally on Felicia Day’s Geek & Sundry channel. The adventure takes place on the world of Valkana in the centuries following a devastating, thousand-year conflict known as the Chaos Wars. In the aftermath, as each episode’s opening narration explains, “a new civilization was built on the ruins of the old, a peaceful world of magic and science. But the forces of Chaos are patient and not easily contained. Left to fester, ancient evils threaten to emerge and unleash mayhem upon the world. And so, to face them, new heroes must arise from . . . the ashes of Valkana” (Wheaton et al. 2015). Introducing Titansgrave and its particular role-playing system, Green Ronin’s Fantasy AGE (adventure game engine), Wheaton tells viewers that “the bulk of the world [of Valkana] is going to exist in your mind, because this is one of the things that I really love about role-playing games. When we play a game, everyone involved has a different version of the world in their imagination. That includes us, on the set, and you, at home—or wherever you’re watching this” (2015a). The Titansgrave set is dressed as though we are sitting in Wheaton’s living room—or, it needs be said, his basement—a group of friends gathered around an old coffee table for an evening of gaming and adventure. As game master, Wheaton uses no battle mat, no dedicated game space, no role-playing terrain of any kind. There are no gridlines to mark player speed or movement, no protractors to determine line-of-sight for combat. Instead of the multiple, polyhedral dice cherished by Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts, each player uses three common, six-sided dice—3d6 (Pramas 2015). Every action will be determined, every encounter resolved, and every battle decided by the convergence of those dice, the character’s abilities, and the player’s flair for entering into the Titansgrave storyworld. Although Wheaton has the outline of the campaign plotted, like any good role-playing encounter, much of what happens in the game depends on the choices his player-characters make. In postproduction,

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the Geek & Sundry art department supplied fantasy artwork designed to engage the audience and help them follow the story, but not so overwhelming that it foreclosed on the viewer’s own imagination. Placing themselves in the hands of Wheaton’s considerable skill as a storyteller, the players came to the table with nothing but character sheets, pencils, and their 3d6. This is the true theater of the mind, the principal domain of fantasy, and the heart of the mythic imagination. To begin the game, Wheaton gives his players a brief bit of background, sketching their recent history and setting the scene. “So, you arrive at the Pegasus Roadhouse, and it’s an exciting night.” Then, looking at his players, he says simply, “Tell me what you would like to do as you arrive at the doorway” (Wheaton 2015b). How the game proceeds, how the story unfolds, is immediately left with those who will participate in its telling. As Kurt Lancaster and Tom Miktowicz point out in the introduction to Performing the Force, however, “players do not just improvisationally describe what their characters will do in a given scene: what they say is the action itself, and that very act induces the players and audience into a new context—activating an imaginary fantasy environment” (2001, 5). As it happens, the Titansgrave players have arrived at the Pegasus on a night when the entire town celebrates the end of the Chaos Wars, most importantly through something called “The Battle of the Boasts”—a fascinating play-within-a-play metaphor for the entire role-play experience. “What happens,” Wheaton says, “is they retell the legends, and they put themselves into the legends. The goal of this is to tell the most bombastic, outrageous, and inspiring story about how you were involved in this particular battle” (2015b). Slipping into the character of the elven mistress of the evening’s revels, he continues, “I am but one of many companions whose legends speak as boldly as mine. My first companion, come forward, tell the Warlord of your brightest deeds.” Game master once again, Wheaton holds out his hand to cast member Laura Bailey, who plays a cybernetically enhanced teenager named Lemley, and says, “She reaches out to you, and she pulls you out forward.” “Ah, man!” Bailey replies. “So, please,” Wheaton continues, smiling broadly, “tell us what Lemley tells the crowd.” As with all fantasy role-play gaming, it’s important to remember that Wheaton is the only one with even a minimal script—and even what he has could change dramatically depending on how his players respond to the story as it evolves. Together, tale by tale, they cocreate the unnatural narrative that arises from the ashes of Valkana.

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Less than ten minutes into the game, and unprepared for anything like the Battle of the Boasts, Bailey is the first to contribute to their story. She is the first to shape the storyline and set the tone for whatever will follow. As the others cheer her on, young Lemley writes herself into the legend of the Chaos Wars. lemley “You do not know me? I am lady lemley. why, I . . . I put out the fires in the Glass Forest. I did it with one magic device. It was a box, a box that contained a single crystal.” wheaton the warlord gasps, and he space-works a box. “was it this box, my lady?” lemley “It was! It was this box. and inside of it . . .” [lemley looks at S’lethkk] what did I say it was? S’lethkk a crystal. lemley “. . . a crystal! but the crystal only works for the one person who knows how to use it, and, of course, that’s me. You want me to use it? You want me to use it?”

As the other player-characters contribute to Lemley’s story, the world of Valkana begins to take shape in our minds, just as it does in theirs. Soon hailed as heroes by the Pegasus crowd, they are quickly recruited for a dangerous mission—the central part of their Titansgrave quest, and which, in the spirit of the moment, they agree to take on for their standard price of “five gold and a party.” To the uninitiated, fantasy role-playing can be more than a little daunting, especially when one first opens a player’s manual, with its impossibly tiny print and seemingly endless lists, charts, and rules. What any good game master will tell you, though, is that these should always be secondary to the story. The framework of the game serves the adventure the players create among themselves, not the other way around (Fine 1983,

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115–17; Mazzanoble 2007). Because he intended Titansgrave both as an opportunity to have fun with his friends and as a means to entertain his audience, Wheaton cast accomplished voice actors such as Laura Bailey and Yuri Lowenthal (S’Lethkk) to play his characters. More than that, everyone brought considerable role-playing experience to the table and had the benefit of postproduction to edit out any truly egregious lapses. What happens, though, when players are new to the game and step onto the role-play battlefield for the first time? What happens when they don’t know whether to draw their sword, make a ranged attack, or cast “Magic Missile”? What happens if they can’t be certain their friends will have their back? Meet the Heroes of Awesome. A War in Scarlet: “Night of the Owlbear” Outlaw Moon is a popular game, comic book, and toy shop in Austin, Texas. A regular haunt for fan communities devoted to all manner of geek culture, it’s also one of the city’s premier tabletop gaming venues. Beginning in 2014, it became the site for a long-running D&D campaign called A War in Scarlet, biweekly episodes of which were streamed on Twitch and later uploaded to YouTube. More importantly, though, unlike Titansgrave, A War in Scarlet was the doorway through which four neophyte role-players entered the world of the mythic imagination. “I love to play board games,” says Mark Gardner in his introduction to the series, “but I’ve never actually played a role-playing game, and that drives me crazy!” Gathering a few hardy though similarly inexperienced compatriots, he set out “to learn how to play Dungeons & Dragons, because we are . . . the Heroes of Awesome” (“Character Creation” 2014). As their Dungeon Master, Outlaw Moon manager Brandon Zuern would teach “these rapscallions” the fundamentals of role-playing, help them create their characters, guide them on their adventures, and then, as he puts it, “try to kill them immediately” (“Character Creation” 2014). Sancita, a University of Texas (UT) sophomore who had never heard of Dungeons & Dragons, chose to play Arya, a rogue-thief who “just does enough to get by,” but who sees herself paradoxically as “like Robin Hood, but more for myself.” Amanda, a UT graduate student, will play Claire de Lune, an elven ranger whose past conceals a dark and terrible secret. “I love The Hunger Games,” she tells the audience during one of the interview segments in which players comment on the

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state of the game, “so I’m not going to pretend like I don’t want to be like Katniss [Everdeen] and wield an awesome bow” (see Collins 2008, 2009, 2010). Mark, a writer and director who has turned to producing online content, will be Taruil, a Bladesinger wizard who can use his sword as a wand. “Wizards are cool,” he says, to which Abby, a startlingly articulate and precocious twelve-year-old, replies, “You could never be cool.” For her part, she has chosen to play Cendia, the tank of the group, a heavily armored paladin, a “warrior of justice” who, Zuern explains, “is the sworn avatar of a deity.” In Abby’s case, this is Heironeous, the god of valor and chivalry, to whom she will pray before nearly every combat, trap, and tricky encounter. “They’re really intense,” Zuern says of paladins in general, glancing at his young player (“Character Creation” 2014). Indeed, as he comments on the game’s emerging character dynamics: “That’s a buddy cop movie right there. So I think the really rewarding role-playing situations are being able to overcome your differences and find a common ground” (“Character Creation” 2014). Though often at odds with each other, the Heroes of Awesome staked their claim to common ground only a couple of months later, in the fifth episode of gameplay, “Night of the Owlbear” (2014). Having avoided a “total party kill” at the hands of a horde of goblins—a popular initial encounter for first-level players—the Heroes find themselves in a forest, facing a far bigger, far more dangerous foe. Unlike Wil Wheaton, here Brandon Zuern uses a terrain map, which gives his players an increased sense of situational awareness and frees them to enter more fully into the imaginative space of the game. Because they know where the trees and rocks are, which way the stream runs, how far and in what direction they can move, they are better able to concentrate on role-playing their characters. As it happens, something huge is moving in the forest not far from their camp, carrying with it the overwhelming stench of death. Arya, the stealthy rogue-thief, volunteers to sneak through the trees and check out the potential danger. Cendia, the paladin sworn to protect her comrades, vehemently objects, fearing they might actually be facing her own personal nemesis, a dragon. “You’re just going to send her off alone with whatever this happens to be?” she gasps, suddenly sounding far more than twelve years old. “I’m not letting her go off alone!” Later, as Abby explains to the audience, “I’m not going to let someone else go off where I can’t help them.”

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abby If she goes off, there’s nothing I can do. If the dragon swoops down and torches her into a flame ball, there’s nothing I can do. She’s just out on her own. and I’m not going to let that happen . . . again.

When the other characters question whether Cendia has the right to make that call for someone else, essentially to abrogate Arya’s free will, she responds, simply, “Yes. I’m going to say she can’t go off into a deathtrap.” Zuern leans back, barely able to contain himself. “They were bordering on role-playing gold,” he tells the audience. “I don’t know if anyone looked at me at that time, but I had a big old grin on my face, because they were acting their characters out. And that’s exactly what I love to see.” While Sancita (Arya) might have felt Abby’s character abridged her freedom of action, she recognized that Cendia “has that group leader’s sense of ‘I’m the armor, not you, so I don’t want you to die’ ” (“Night of the Owlbear” 2014). But wait, it gets better. It’s not a dragon, but a dreaded owlbear, a D&D classic whose “reputation for ferocity, aggression, stubbornness, and sheer ill temper makes it one of the most feared predators of the wild.” Indeed, as “Xarshel Ravenshadow, Gnome Professor of Transmutative Science” notes, “The only good thing about owlbears is that the wizard who created them is probably dead” (Mearls, Schubert, and Wyatt 2008, 249). Discovered by the massive creature, the lightly armored Arya suffers twenty points of damage, very nearly her entire life total. Without hesitation, the more heavily armored Cendia offers to cast “Righteous Shield,” a specialized paladin spell that surrounds an ally with divine energy, “absorbing an attack against your friend and transferring the damage to yourself.” “Why?” asks Sancita, astounded, given the conflict she and the other player-character have just experienced. “Because she wants to protect you,” Mark replies quietly. “This is a really sweet moment that’s happening,” adds Amanda. It is the Dungeon Master, however, who captures the real essence of Cendia’s sacrifice, the role-playing ramifications of which none of the players could foresee. “It totally worked out so great,” he says, “when Cendia saves her life. That’s the stuff of Hollywood right there” (“Night of the Owlbear” 2014). Which is to say, it’s the stuff of heroes, the soul of the mythic imagination. Less than a minute later, Arya’s turn comes around again. To this point in the story, her reaction to every challenge or potential danger

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has been to retreat, to fade into the shadows until the threat has passed—that is, true to her nature, doing just enough to get by. Jaws drop around the table at Outlaw Moon, however, when, having narrowly escaped death at the claws of the owlbear, Sancita asks, “Can I somehow climb on the back of it and attack its eyes?” Talking to the audience, Mark is dumbfounded. “I would have never expected her to say, ‘I’m going to jump on the owlbear’s back and gouge its eyes out.’ What? Where did that come from?” (“Night of the Owlbear” 2014). Where, indeed? Zuern tells her that before she can even attempt her attack, she must succeed at both an acrobatics roll of the d20—the beloved twenty-sided D&D die—and a strength roll. Whether she has the agility to jump on the creature’s back, and then the strength to hold on, the d20 will decide. “I love that she did that,” Amanda says to the camera. “I don’t know what you’re about to do, but it’s going to be awesome.” Succeeding on the first two rolls, Sancita and her friends hang on Zuern’s words as he describes the action. brandon You swing up onto the creature’s back. You manage to grasp onto its haunches and hold on for dear life, while it flails around. You’re going to get one attack. this is like being on a bull at full, mad charge. You’re not riding the family sheepdog. It’s an owlbear!

A moment later, the wounded owlbear turns its fury on Cendia, who has already taken significant damage on behalf of her friend. Rolling the damage behind his DM’s screen, Zuern tells the youngest player at the table, “You took twenty-eight points of damage, and you are at death’s door.” He tips Cendia’s character mini over on the battle mat. “Ah, man,” Abby says to the audience, “I liked that character.” And, with their paladin’s life hanging be a thread, Amanda articulates the sine qua non of fantasy role-playing: “This is getting real.” From that point, each time her turn comes up in the initiative order, Cendia must roll a d20 and make a Death Saving Throw. According to the Player’s Handbook, “If the roll is 10 or higher, you succeed. Otherwise, you fail. A success or failure has no effect by itself. On your third success, you become stable. On your third failure, you die” (Mearls and Crawford 2014b, 197). Suddenly the paladin must rely on the strength, cunning, and courage of those she has sworn to protect. At the end of the Night of the Owlbear, Abby turns to the audience once more. “I’m

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fig.8 Arya, Taruil, Claire de Lune, and Cendia listen as Dungeon Master Brandon Zuern describes the action in “Night of the Owlbear” (2014). Courtesy of the Heroes of Awesome.

super relieved,” she says. “I really liked that character. I felt even better about that character after the battle, like I knew more about her. I really wanted to continue playing her.” And she did. Though Laura Bailey addresses the crowd at the Pegasus Roadhouse as Lemley, on the Titansgrave set she appears as she is—an attractive, thirty-something woman, wearing a baggy T-shirt and sitting on an old couch in what could be Wil Wheaton’s basement. For his part, Mark Gardner may imagine Taruil as an Eladrin, a member of the subrace of “elves native to the Feywild, a realm of unpredictability and boundless magic” (Wizards of the Coast 2017), but for everyone following the Heroes of Awesome he’s a tall, forty-something Texan sitting at a table—in a T-shirt. What happens to our characters, though, when we up the ante, trading imagined elf ears for the “real” thing, strapping on leather armor, and playing the hero away from the table?

playing the hero In The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall points out that from the rudimentary stories we recite and repeat as children to the most elaborate and convoluted of unnatural narratives, the fantasy worlds we inhabit “are bound together by a fat rope of trouble” (2012, 34).

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Any number of books and articles on “how to write great stories” are tied with the same twine, and aspiring writers are encouraged to stock spools of it alongside pen and paper. The basic rule is simple: Create your characters, then throw them in the soup. Let the cauldron of story boil for a while. If they manage to escape the soup pot, make sure they land in the frying pan. Should they get out of frying pan, be sure there’s something even worse waiting. The point is that whether characters are drawn with the Spartan dialogue of Elmore Leonard or more amply rendered à la Marion Zimmer Bradley or Margaret Atwood, it’s crucial that they get into trouble quickly and often. After all, imagine the Odyssey with fair winds, placid seas, and a dearth of sirens, witches, and sea monsters. Imagine Lord of the Rings if Frodo had simply walked down to the Bag End post office with a small, neatly wrapped package marked, “Mount Doom, Black Land of Mordor. (Please throw in.)” Or imagine poor cubicle-bound Arthur, who describes himself as “just some programmer drone,” as opposed to his favorite LARP character, the rogue-thief Noctus, “a hero” who “shaped history with every action” and who in all things was “a force to be reckoned with” (“Post-Mortem” 2015). In a post-credits scene in the first episode of LARPS: The Series, Arthur stares blankly at his computer screen. With a weighty thud, a stack of papers drops from the top of the frame onto his desk, obscuring everything from his eyes down. Arthur lifts his head briefly to peer over the newly deposited mountain of paperwork, a phone trills in the background, and he sinks slowly back below the file-bound horizon. Less than ten seconds long, this scene is a metonym for corporate life, an existence relentlessly lampooned by Scott Adams in Dilbert, a world that actively discourages workers from playing any part but cog in the machine. There is no story here, the cubicle says. There will never be a story here. Produced in Montreal and housed on Geek & Sundry, LARPs: The Series is what so many fantasy enthusiasts hoped Knights of Badassdom might be, a reflection of live action role-playing that takes the lives of its players seriously. The premise is simple. A small group of friends have been running a weekly fantasy LARP for three years, turning their game master’s basement into a temple one week, a tavern or a trap-room the next. Occasionally, they venture to the scenic Laurentian Mountains as guardians of the mystical “Eleventh Eye.” As they move between being players, characters, and friends, however, they navigate not only their personal relationships out-of-game but also the often complex relationships

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they have with their characters in-game. Throughout, LARPs: The Series highlights three fundamental aspects of fantasy storyworld creation and participation: its playful, or ludic, orientation; its affective character and its effect on character; and its recognition of the importance of story for the continuation of human be-ing. Consider: Is there a game we seek not to win, one that holds over our heads the chance of not losing? In many games, perhaps even most, these are the opposed essentials of gameplay. Otherwise, why bother? Isn’t that the fun? From checkers to chess, backgammon to Risk, and Monopoly to Magic: The Gathering the board becomes the battlefield between competing armies. However, what about games in which the victory conditions don’t turn on one player or group beating another, but on all players succeeding, games in which the most important metric of success is how much fun players have? That is, we need to consider enjoyment as value. Often forgotten in the interpretive quest, the scholarly search for Something Important To Say, is precisely the reason Tolkien said that he wrote The Lord of the Rings. Staunchly rejecting any contention that his magnum opus was meant to be taken either allegorically or topically, he wrote that he wanted a long story that would “hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them” (Tolkien [1966] 2011, xxi). He knew that one of the principal reasons we tell stories, one of the driving forces behind the need to read, watch, hear, and participate endlessly in storytelling and storyworld creation is that it gives us pleasure. Stories do amuse and delight us. We are excited by them. They have the capacity to move us—often profoundly and permanently. Yet, as Johan Huizinga pointed out in his classic Homo Ludens, “the fun of playing, resists all analysis, all logical interpretation. As a concept, it cannot be reduced to any other mental category” (1950, 3). That is, we are confounded by the possibility of enjoyment as a value in and of itself. “It’s about having fun,” says game master Evan as he explains the appeal of LARPing to Kat, a new player who has just joined their group. “Different people have fun in different ways. Some people like beating up the bad guys, sure. Others like exploring their characters. Some people enjoy outwitting the game master. And some people play because their friends do.” Moreover, he tells her, “whatever your character does adds to the story. Some of the best moments in gaming come from failure” (“Backstory” 2015). That is, we learn far more from the times we

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don’t succeed than when we do, or, in the face of adversity, we often succeed in ways we never imagined possible. In what we might call the “Eleventh Eye” metagame—that is, the inevitable interaction between the real life and role-play—two perceived failures mark the moments of most profound growth for members of the LARPs group. On the one hand, when it becomes clear that Arthur’s beloved character Noctus will die in the game, Evan simply asks him, “Who do you want to be next?” (“Broken” 2015). That is, how does he want to write himself into the continuing narrative? Arthur is so attached to Noctus, however, that he has trouble committing to another character. One by one, from Nel’Zuul the necromancer to Vanya the druid and Melland the elf, Arthur has been “committing suicide by Evan”—letting the game master kill him, just to allow for the creation of a new character. Like a broken-hearted lover in the throes of a series of rebound relationships, Arthur struggles to find out who he is without that other essential part of himself. On the other hand, in-game, Corillia the elven mage has fallen in love with Biff the human ranger, and, as we are repeatedly reminded, “the love of an elf lasts forever.” Out-of-game, though, a brief romance between Brittany (Corillia), who is Evan’s sister, and Will (Biff), Arthur’s brother, has waxed and waned, leaving both of them hurting and confused. Complicating matters further, another member of their group, Shane, has been outed as a journalist who initially joined looking for an easy story, but stayed because she found new friends, as well as a passion for role-playing. Throughout the series, Will is the class clown, the one who LARPs while mocking his own participation in the game. Yet, near the end of the second season, the party is on the verge of splitting—and as role-playing veterans know, you never split the party. As they do so often in fantasy culture, in times of chaos, the outsider and the fool become the voices of wisdom. “Our characters don’t come out of nowhere,” Shane tells Will. “They’re part of who we are. You can find out a lot about yourself through role-playing” (“Post-Mortem” 2015). “How Zen,” he replies. Will’s deadpan rejoinder notwithstanding, Shane’s not wrong. None of the characters we create, none of the monsters and villains that populate our storyworlds, none of the heroes who face the challenges of the quest come out of nowhere. They are part and parcel of the mythic imagination, which is nothing more or less than our ongoing need for story and, through story, for meaning. In a sequence that cuts back and

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fig.9 Corillia, Astra, Biff, and Nel’Zuul greet a new player in LARPS: The Series (2015).

forth between two pairs of characters, and which is worth quoting at length, Arthur and Brittany confront this most basic realization, one guided by the outsider, the other by the fool. “I’m the one who let Corillia bleed into my real life,” Brittany tells Will. “No wonder you got confused.” When he presses her, she retorts, “Corillia’s a character. She uses magic, and she isn’t even human. She’s not real, and it was stupid to try to be like her. She’s a cloak and a pair of fake ears. She’s nothing special.” Across town, Shane tells Arthur, “Noctus isn’t greater than you,” but Arthur still longs for the hero he thought he was. “I’m just trying to live up to him, you know? His legend” (“Post-Mortem” 2015). wIll (to brIttaNY) You’re not your character, that’s true. but Corillia is you. ShaNe (to arthur) everything that Noctus was came from you. everything that made him amazing, everything that made him legendary came from you. You created him. You gave him everything he had. wIll (to brIttaNY) Her confidence, her leadership, her cunning, you know? the way she gets things done. the way she kicks ass.

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ShaNe (to arthur) all that had to come from somewhere. Sure, you may not be deadly with twin blades. wIll (to brIttaNY) So you can’t cast spells. ShaNe (to arthur) You may not be the greatest thief. wIll (to brIttaNY) You might not actually be an elf. ShaNe (to arthur) but a character is more than what’s on their sheet. wIll (to brIttaNY) a character’s spark comes from you. ShaNe (to arthur) Your character might be fictional . . . wIll (to brIttaNY) . . . but that doesn’t mean they’re not real. ShaNe (to arthur) No character truly dies. wIll (to brIttaNY) their essence lives in you. ShaNe (to arthur) and that’s what makes you . . . wIll (to brIttaNY) . . . so awesome.

“What about you?” newcomer Kat asks Evan, as he schools her in the basics of LARPing and swats away another clumsy attempt to strike him with her foam mace. “Why do you play, smart guy?” “I play for the story,” he replies. “I like the idea of not knowing what happens next. I want to find out how the story ends” (“Backstory” 2015). And the story does end, with a total party kill in the series finale. Corillia, Astra, Biff, Porrik the bard (Arthur’s new character), and Ellowyn (Kat’s character) are gone. As the players gather in Evan’s basement, reliving

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their three-year adventure, taking part in their own Battle of the Boasts, and arguing good-naturedly about which character each will play next time, Evan interrupts. “Guys,” he says, “the story’s done. The Guardians of the Eleventh Eye destroyed what they swore to protect in their last stand. The game’s over.” Slightly shocked, they wonder what they will do now. Taking fresh character sheets from his binder, the game master tells them, “Sure, that game’s over. But there are tons more” (“Chronicle” 2015). And that’s the point, isn’t it? One story ends, but another always begins. A harsh electronic hum fills the room, and the scene fades to black. We open again on a cityscape at night, and hear a familiar voice. arthur I once paid a terrible price for the noblest of causes. I saved my friends. I thwarted evil. but in doing so I was left for dead. but instead of dying, I was taken away from the only world I’d ever known and thrown into this one. alien. unforgiving. a planet crying out for a hero, crying out for someone raised . . . by the night. I found new friends to help me learn about this place. they taught me to run the Nets, to jack creds where I could, to become more than who I was. With their help, we can fight back against the Conglomerate. I am . . . Cyber-Noctus.

Not everyone enters into storyworlds the same way. As Will tells Shane, “I may not buy into it as much as you nerds, I play because it gives me a chance to hang out with my friends” (“Post-Mortem” 2015). Not everyone wants to roll their damage or win the Battle of the Boasts. For thousands of others, the thrill of fantasy culture comes through dressing the part.

dressing the part Like those who looked forward to Knights of Badassdom, superhero fans eagerly awaited the release of David Ayer’s bad-guy buddy movie Suicide Squad (2016), a comic villain homage to the classic war film The Dirty Dozen (1967). Reviews were mixed, however, to say the least. While USA Today called it “excellently quirky,” the Wall Street Journal dismissed it as “ugly trash,” and even those reviewers who wanted to like it felt compelled to damn it with faint praise. The nadir came from

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fig.10 Margot Robbie as Suicide Squad’s Harley Quinn (2016).

Slate’s Jacob Brogan, who concluded that the film’s “only triumph” was that “it manages to make Batman v. Superman look better by comparison” (2016). What Suicide Squad gave us, though, was the cosplay antihero of that summer: Harley Quinn. The Joker’s on again–off again (I mean, really off) girlfriend made her first appearance in 1992 in Batman: The Animated Series, dressed eponymously as a harlequin. She maintained this style, more or less (Batman: Arkham Asylum notwithstanding), until Suicide Squad costume designer Kate Hawley and actor Margot Robbie tacitly proclaimed the new “authorized look.” Whether audiences liked the film or not, during that year’s fan convention season, Harley Quinn was everywhere, becoming, as Cosplay Culture magazine put it, “one of the most popular cosplays of all time” (Hughey 2016, 46). This should not surprise us. According to Ashley Lotecki, who carried out some of the first in-depth ethnographic research among cosplayers, cosplay culture actually reverses the gender imbalance one normally associates with fantasy role-playing. More than three times as many women responded to her initial survey as men, a finding she considers consistent with cosplay culture overall (Lotecki 2012). Asked what attracted her to Harley Quinn, cosplayer Kristen Hughey replies, “She has such an extreme personality . . . or maybe personalities. I’m shy and pretty laid back, so becoming Harley breaks me out of my shell a bit” (2016, 49). Her choice of words here is important. Not

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“playing Harley,” but “becoming Harley”—as though cosplay allows participants to explore aspects of themselves that are either embargoed by wider society or kept under lock and key by their own personal backstory. Other cosplayers agree. Known in the cosplay community as Blerd (i.e., “Black Nerd”) Vision, one of Jourdan Barnett’s favorite characters is Suicide Squad’s Deadshot (played in the film by Will Smith). “It’s a powerful thing,” he relates, “when you can look at a character and go, ‘That’s me.’ It gives you the idea that you can actually do anything” (2016). Like Kristen Hughey, April Gloria says, “I’m an introvert and also naturally shy with people I don’t know very well” (2016, 18). Rather than superhero films, her interest in cosplay developed out of a love of such video games as Skyrim, BioShock Infinite, and The Witcher 3. “Being in the cosplay community has helped me become more comfortable with myself,” she adds, “which in turn has helped me feel more at ease when around other people.” Indeed, Gloria says, “I’ve learned how to be a better friend, as well” (2016, 18). “Cosplay can be both mentally and physically therapeutic,” declares Cincinnati deputy sheriff Michael Wilson, “because of the complete unlimited expression of yourself; you can push yourself in so many ways” (2017, 74). Cosplaying under the name Knightmage, something he does for both conventions and charity events, Wilson wants people to know that “as a cosplayer, you can be whomever you want regardless of size, gender or race. It doesn’t matter if you made [your costume] or bought it, what your skill level is, or how much you spent. None of that matters as long as you’re having fun” (2017, 74). Indeed, first-time cosplayer Laura Beauchemin bought her elaborate Black Canary costume. One of DC’s earliest female superheroes, Black Canary has gone through a number of iterations since her first appearance in 1947. Beauchemin chose to cosplay a recent version because she resonates with this character’s “many emotional transformations” and with the fact that she “embodies many qualities I admire” (2017, 91). “Despite the danger she faces every time she dons the mask,” Beauchemin continues, Black Canary “still goes out to save the city with her friends and watch their backs” (2017, 91). Because that’s what heroes—and occasionally antiheroes—do. Over the last two decades, cosplay has emerged as an integral part of fantasy culture that essentially turns the annual extravaganza of Halloween into something of an alternate lifestyle. No longer do we don a

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hat and cape in search of once-a-year treats, but we become an astonishing variety of characters in search of ourselves. Despite recent concerns about the political correctness of this costume or that, as Jack Santino argues, Halloween is about “the exhilaration of being out after dark, safely exploring new territories, staying out late, and overstepping the bounds of good taste” (1998, 10–11). We make central and meaningful things that those who drop mountains of paper on our desks would have us push to the margins. We insist to the cubicle that there are still stories to be experienced. However popular are Harley Quinn, Deadshot, or Black Canary—and Anna Shepherd’s Maleficent costume had a similar effect on the fan convention circuit—cosplay culture embraces a multitude of styles, is inspired by all manner of popular entertainment, and is limited only by the imagination of its participants (see Rauch and Bolton 2010; Winge 2006). From anime characters such as Sailor Moon—who are frequently “crossplayed” (i.e., gender-bent in cosplay)—to steampunk, which also exists as a selfcontained counterculture (VanderMeer and Bosckovich 2014; VanderMeer and Chambers 2011); from the soft and fuzzy, such as Hayao Miyazaki’s famous Totoro, to the hard and machine-like, such as incredibly detailed mechas from Mobile Suit Gundam; and from the latest superhero blockbuster (or not) to the products of one’s own fantasy, as April Gloria says, “Cosplay can be whatever you want it to be” (2016, 12). At a time when any number of self-help books and pop-psychology regimes insist that we drop the masks we wear in order to face the world (e.g., Sparks 2015), fantasy role-playing, whether tabletop, live action, or cosplay, encourages us to roll the dice, play the hero, and dress the part—to reclaim the mask and the mummer as means of understanding ourselves in greater depth.

chapter 9

. . . Happily Ever After?

Beginnings are easy, endings not so much. “Once upon a time” may begin the tale, because at that moment almost anything can happen. Once upon a time . . . an astronaut returned to Earth and found a beautiful genie in a bottle. Once upon a time . . . two different families of monsters lived relatively quietly just down the block from we so-called normal folk. Once upon a time . . . an alien came to live with us. Once upon a time . . . I married a witch. Once upon a time . . . a small boat set out for a three-hour cruise. Beginnings are easy. “Happily ever after,” though, that’s another story. Because what happens if “happily ever after” isn’t the right ending? What happens if we want the tale to end, but it refuses? Consider, in this regard, then, one last story: John Boorman’s dystopian fantasy Zardoz (1974). arthur (voice-over) I am arthur Frayne, and I am Zardoz. I have lived three hundred years, and I long to die. but death is no longer possible; I am immortal. I present now my story, full of mystery and intrigue, rich in irony and most satirical. It is set deep in a possible future, so none of these events have yet occurred. but they may. be warned, lest you end as I. In this tale, I am a fake god by occupation and a magician by inclination. Merlin is my hero. I am the puppet-master. I manipulate many of the characters and events you will see. but I am invented too, for your entertainment and 186

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amusement. and you, poor creatures—who conjured you out of the clay? Is god in show business too?

“Where is the grave-yard of dead gods?” asks H. L. Mencken at the beginning of “Memorial Service,” his litany of long-forgotten deities (2010, 434). Dumuzi-abzu, Sumerian goddess of new life in the marshlands; Ptah, the Egyptian demiurge; Dagon, the Semitic god of the crops and the father of Baal—Mencken lists these and dozens of others who, for millennia, humankind vested with life and in whom whole nations were invested. Some are vaguely familiar, but most are so far over the historical horizon that even their names sound alien. Yet, Mencken writes, “they were gods of the highest standing and dignity, gods of civilized people—worshiped and believed in by millions. All were theoretically omnipotent, omniscient, and immortal. And all are dead” (2010, 437). More than half a century after his essay appeared in the literary magazine Smart Set, Mencken’s shade is with us still, playing the role of a silent docent in Boorman’s museum of elapsed divinity. “This is where you’ll be working,” says Friend (John Alderton) amiably, as he leads Zed (Sean Connery) into a musty, low-ceilinged basement, cluttered with statues. A few are intact, but most are damaged, some clearly beyond repair. As the camera follows the two men, we glimpse the central figure of the famous Laocoön group, though his sons are absent, as is the serpent they battled so valiantly. The Venus de Milo stands in the corner, staring sightlessly into the middle distance over a bust of Julius Caesar. Tucked off to one side, Valerio Cioli’s Narcissus still reaches for the fantasy of his own reflection. Stretching off into the gloom and shadows, many others wait in vain for our attention. “Is this your god’s house?” Zed asks, looking around in awe. “Ah, it’s God you’re seeking, is it?” Friend replies, indicating the ruined pantheon with a flourish. “Well, here we are. Gods, goddesses, kings, and queens. Take your pick.” He stops beneath a statue of Apollo and turns, the god’s hand seeming to rest on his shoulder. “They’re all dead,” he warns, tacitly echoing Mencken. “Died of boredom.” Museum has become mausoleum.

the never-ending story Zardoz takes place “deep in a possible future,” a time when Earth is ruthlessly divided. The Eternals live in a force field–protected Vortex,

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their endless days filled with petty disputes, menial tasks, useless hobbies, and the illusion of complete, participative democracy. Violence is unknown, but when one of their number strays from the path of “total consciousness,” particularly through such thought-crimes as “transmitting a negative aura,” the collective judges the transgressor and pronounces sentence: aging, but never death. Punished with aging six months for this offence, a year for that, five years for something really serious, the catch is that death is never a release. Not unlike the Cylon Resurrection Ships in Ronald Moore’s Battlestar Galactica, if an Eternal succeeds in dying, either accidentally or by her own hand, she is reborn through the power of the Tabernacle. At this point, it is as if Christopher Hitchens has joined Mencken in the shadows, commenting wryly that worse than the prospect of death “would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave” (2010, 331). Fated to live again and again, in the Vortex the dread price of immortality is eternal life. In the Outlands beyond the Vortex live the Brutals, humans who have not made the evolutionary and technological leap to immortality and whose continued existence so terrifies the Eternals that Exterminators like Zed are used to control them. Wearing clay masks of their god, Zardoz, Exterminators ride the land, killing wantonly, raping when divinely commanded, assured by their faith that “it is enough.” If Mencken and Hitchens preside in the dusty museum of the Eternals, Thomas Hobbes rules in the anarchic Outlands. In both worlds, death is the enemy: for Brutals, it comes all too often and far too easily; in the Eternal realm, it does not come at all. Zardoz himself appears as a great stone head, floating majestically over the countryside, touching down to dispense weapons for the Exterminators and receive crops raised as tribute by surviving Brutals. Determined to learn the truth of their world, Zed stows away in the stone head and travels to the Vortex. There, as the Eternals probe his memories, we follow the flashback trajectory of his disillusionment and watch the collapse of faith in his god. “One day,” Zed recalls, “something happened that changed everything. I lost my innocence.” Chasing what he believes is a Brutal into an abandoned library, the Exterminator follows a ghostly, almost carnivalesque figure—Arthur Frayne, the man behind the god. Led first to a child’s picture book, over time Zed learns to read and begins to sense the truth underpinning the fiction. “I read everything,” he says. “I learned all that had been hidden from me. I learned what the world had been before the darkness fell.”

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Suddenly, killing and breeding in the name of his god were no longer enough. Then, he finds the Book. He finds the story, the one story among so many that have shaped our quest for meaning. Under psychic interrogation, Zed struggles both to remember and to forget. He knows, but he wishes he didn’t. He fights to maintain belief in his god when suddenly he finds that god is no longer worthy of devotion. A classic example of cognitive dissonance, of mythic dissolution, Zed learns that the gods did not create, but are themselves created— over and over again. The truth of the Vortex is not that God is in show business, but that God is show business. “You knew that Arthur was Zardoz, didn’t you?” demands the Eternal pushing him toward total recall. “You killed him, didn’t you? You murdered your own god.” True enough, because eventually the Book is revealed. The one volume Arthur Frayne intended Zed to find was not written by his god but was used instead as a conjuror’s trick to create the fiction of God’s existence. ZeD The Wizard of Oz is a fairy story about an old man who frightened people with a loud voice and a big mask. eterNal It was arthur Frayne’s idea, a simple way of controlling the outlands. ZeD but remember the end of the story. they looked behind the mask and found the truth. I looked behind the mask, and I saw the truth. Zardoz.

Released in 1974, Zardoz followed the blockbuster success of Boorman’s Deliverance, which is widely regarded as one of the most important American films of the late twentieth century. His shift from brutal realism to ethereal fantasy, however, from the rivers of northern Georgia to the vortices and outlands of postapocalyptic Ireland, clearly confused many viewers. Variety thought the script good, the premise brilliant, but the end result “unfortunately [washed] out in climactic sound and fury.” Roger Ebert called it “an exercise in self-indulgence” which, he noted wryly, “will certainly age you by two hours.” Notwithstanding the film’s numerous flaws, the New York Times’ Nora Sayre concedes that “Boorman’s intentions are obviously noble,” though she

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neglects to say why or what this means. For her, the film fails principally because Zardoz “raises questions about man’s fate but doesn’t offer satisfying answers.” For the most part, these reviewers aren’t wrong. Unless you’re fond of watching a ponytailed Sean Connery riding the Irish countryside in a red loincloth and thighboots, Zardoz is not a very good movie. That said, in terms of the mythic imagination, Zardoz offers an important window into the ways in which storyworlds are created and worldviews maintained. As much as anything, Zardoz highlights the uncomfortable reality that all our relationships with our “gods, goddesses, kings, and queens,” with our heroes and antiheroes, are subjective, erratic, and precarious. As the stories of old gods pass into memory, and the gods themselves take their place in Friend’s museum, we invariably tell new stories and breathe life into new gods. Indeed, anything human beings consider sacred is always and only the product of social agreement, our willingness to grant that stories about this god or that answer our questions, if only for the moment and however our agreement is obtained. Threaten the arrangement, tell a different story, and the entire worldview is jeopardized. Eternals who threaten the fantasy of life within the Vortex are considered mad; Brutals, whose very existence calls the meaning of the fantasy into question, are regarded as evil. Because he is neither insane nor malevolent, though, Zed is considerably more dangerous than either, even more so than the miserable Apathetics—Eternals aged to the point of senility, who spend their days in Hitchens’s hell of a neverending garden party. Boorman doesn’t have any answers, but he doesn’t pretend to. And that’s the point Nora Sayre misses entirely. Certainly, if one chooses, Zardoz can be read as a biblical allegory, a pale retelling of a familiar story—all the cues and clues are there. Zed’s journey to the Vortex neatly inverts the classic Fall narrative told in the first few chapters of Genesis. Through the book he finds in the library, he picks the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But in doing so, he discovers not his own nudity, but the nakedness of the one who led him to eat in the first place. In this reading, Arthur Frayne is both Yahweh and the serpent, the self-admitted “puppet-master,” a “fake god by occupation” and “magician by inclination.” Instead of hiding from his god when he senses the truth, Zed hides within the god to discover the reality behind Arthur’s elaborate fiction. Rather than being banished from paradise to the harsh world beyond the gates of Eden, Zed travels from the brutal Outlands to a supposed utopia where he discovers not the heaven of life

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eternal, but the hell of immortality. In both ways, he becomes a Promethean hero: to the Outlanders, both Brutal and Exterminator, by exposing Zardoz, he steals fire from the gods in order to enlighten humankind; to the Eternals, he subverts their own ersatz divinity and eventually brings the welcome gift of death. On the one hand, we could interpret the film this way. On the other hand, though, as we’ve already discussed, such an interpretation doesn’t really tell us very much. Rather, the secret of Zardoz is hidden away in Friend’s museum, crowded now with expired gods, retired deities, defeated monsters, and long-forgotten heroes. That is, in the history of the mythic imagination, the myriad storyworlds we have created have no happy ending—and that’s a good thing. There is always another story to be told, another god to rise in the pantheon of the fantastic, another dragon gliding in from the Feywild, another hero summoned to the quest. Far more important than the answers offered by the gods and heroes of our elder tales are the questions we continue to pose and which have been fundamental to the fantasy storyworlds we have created for millennia. Who are we? Where do we come from and where are we going? How should we live? What is my place in the world? One of the reasons we tell the same stories over and over is that there are rarely hard-and-fast answers to any of these most significant inquiries. Our understandings change over time, and the more rigidly we hold to our supposed solutions, the harder those changes will come. “The former gods are growing old or dying,” Émile Durkheim reminds us, and “there are no immortal gospels.” He concludes that “a day will come when our societies once again will know hours of creative effervescence during which new ideals will again spring forth and new formulas emerge to guide humanity for a time” (Durkheim [1912] 1995, 429). If we find any of Ado Kyrou’s sublimity in Zardoz, or in fantasy culture writ large, it is in continuing to explore the questions it raises, not demanding the answers it cannot provide.

no happy ending Zed’s discovery in the abandoned library tells us less about our sacred stories than about how we tell stories and occasionally make them sacred. That is, the religious stories we tell and by which our lives are framed are not so very different from the fantasy narratives of Tolkien or Rowling. They are as infused with the myth, magic, and mystery of the unnatural narrative as The Hobbit or Harry Potter. Many readers

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may respond that I am calling religious narratives “fantasy”—to which one can only reply, “But, of course. How could they be otherwise?” Myths and legends, some surviving only skeletally in our culture, others developing into fully robed religious beliefs on the basis of which devotees are willing to offer themselves in the most selfless ways imaginable and to commit the most unthinkable atrocities; folk tales that morph into fairy tales, occasionally become animated cartoons and musical extravaganzas; single lines, such as “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” that grow in the telling into epic fantasy—all are products of the mythic imagination. It doesn’t mean they are not true, though it may mean they are not factual. Consider for a moment: what if it’s not that the mythic and the fantastic are discrete elements of the religious imagination, aspects of the way we model imaginary worlds that have been corrupted by our sinful nature (a position taken by millions of Christians, for example), but precisely the other way around? The religious imagination—our propensity to imagine gods in our own image and to amend those gods as our self-image changes—is of a piece with our development as Homo narrans, the ones who tell fantastic stories. That is, our tales of magic and mystery, our myriad unnatural narratives, are not corruptions or refractions of our religious imagination. Rather, what become religious stories arise from the same psychological and imaginative strata as do epic fantasy, fairy tales, myth, and legend, stories through which we locate ourselves in the world and structure meanings—just as surely as a Magic: The Gathering player gains new life when he plays “Abzan Guide,” a 4/4 human warrior with Lifelink, or a rogue-thief rolls a critical hit on her third and last death save. As far back as we have records, humans have told stories of their gods and created vast, unseen orders in which mighty powers contend. On the grand stage of human life, a stage made grand, paradoxically, by the very stories we tell, the gods are often like actors hidden behind a scrim, sometimes backlit and thrown into high relief, other times opaque, concealed from view, their devotees left wondering if they have been abandoned. In the foreground are the storytellers, though we have little record of who they were and only fragments of what they said. We have no idea, for example, who first framed the story of Gilgamesh, who first spoke the full epic narrative of his journey, or who first pressed the cuneiform characters of the story into slabs of wet clay. But we have the stories themselves, and they tell a wondrous tale of the unseen order. Stories of gods and heroes, mighty clashes between titanic forces. In

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time—again, we have no idea exactly how or when—the storytellers gave way to shamans and priests, those versed in the tales of the gods and skilled in the ways of the unseen order. Those who could tell the stories and, in doing so, walk between the planes of the seen and the unseen often arrogated to themselves the power to mediate between those planes. Stories locate us. The mythic imagination plays a central role in telling us who we are (identity), how we should be as that person (socialization), and who we might become (transcendence). As far back as we have information, we have framed these most important aspects of our lives in terms of the relationship between orders of reality in terms of the seen and the unseen, the natural and the unnatural, the mundane and the fantastic. For us, there has always been and there must always be “something else.” The will to narrate, it seems, is as strong in hominins as the will to believe. When we presume to ask the difference between, say, the unseen order as explicated in Roman Catholic dogmatic theology and in Deities and Demigods, the player’s manual of all things divine in Dungeons & Dragons (Ward and Kuntz 1980), the obvious answer for many people is that one is true and the other fictional. But let’s stop there for just a moment and cast our minds back to Friend’s museum of dead and forgotten gods. Do you mean fictional like the Buraq, the winged horse said to have carried Mohammed on his “night journey”? Do you mean fictional like the story of Jonah, swallowed alive and living inside a “great fish” for three days, before being vomited out on the beach near Nineveh? Fictional, like those? Or fictional like the evil alien dictator, Xenu, who, according to the Church of Scientology’s creation story, solved galactic overpopulation by dropping people in volcanoes and then detonating nuclear weapons on them? No, of course not, you might answer, that would be silly. But why? I mean, you can’t build a religion on fiction, can you, on a story? Imagine for a moment, though, if Arthur Frayne had found the deity guide for Dungeons & Dragons— or, heaven forbid, the Monster Manual or the player’s module for The Temple of Elemental Evil (Gygax and Mentzer 1985)—rather than The Wizard of Oz? How different would have been the tellings, the stories, the answers to the great questions of existence? In the end, there is no “happily ever after.” That’s one of the reasons we return to the same stories over and over. As a species, our heritage as Homo narrans rarely allows us to be satisfied with happy endings, with conclusions wrapped in a bow, or resolutions presented like dessert after the main course of action, adventure, and intrigue. For us, there is

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always another voyage to take, always another way to ask the question, “What if . . . ?” Fantasy is one more expression of our desire to believe in another world, a world that exists around, behind, and beside our own, a world of wonders, of Faërie. “When I was little, or your age,” says Canadian filmmaker John Walker to his daughter’s first-grade class, “I could see [fairies], but now I’m having a real hard time. Do you have any advice that you could give me?” (2000). He has grown into the adult trap about which Tolkien warned us, and which so many contributors to and participants in fantasy culture resist. A few children speak up hesitantly, until a little girl with a riot of blonde curls says boldly, “I think, maybe, kids just have better eyesight.” Just so, fantasy culture encourages us to look with better eyes. Our “happily ever after” is always just beyond the horizon, just around the next bend, or just there, by “the second star to the right.” “It was a dark and stormy night” gives us no assurance we will survive to greet the dawn, so we must tell the story to find out. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” may comfort us in the moment, but it hardly guarantees that the darkness spreading from the land of Mordor will not overwhelm the Shire, so we must join the Fellowship of the Ring once again. And that’s the point. Because the mythic imagination always presents the possibility of seeing something different—or seeing the same thing in a different way—we are prevented from ever deciding (or foreclosing) on the “truth” of the story. “A myth may be told and retold,” writes Northrop Frye. “It may be moderated or elaborated, or different patterns may be discovered in it; and its life is always the poetic life of a story, not the homiletic life of some illustrated truism” (1963, 32). Not because stories don’t end well, not because the dragons aren’t slain or the world saved, not because the heroes do not triumph in the end, but because there are always more stories. “Tons more,” as Evan the game master puts it. If this seems anticlimactic, ask yourself: Who would I be without the stories that have given my life meaning? What are the stories I will pass on to shape the lives of those who come after me? Put simply, stories tell us who we are, and, more importantly, they remind us who we can be. So, let me tell you a story . . .

Mediography

cinema Title

Year

Director

47 Ronin 7th Voyage of Sinbad, The After the Ball After the Rain Alice in Murderland Alice in Wonderland Alice Through the Looking-Glass Alien Aliens Avengers, The Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice Bell, Book, and Candle Beowulf Blade Runner Blair Witch Project, The

2013 1958 2015 1999 2010 2010 1915 1979 1986 2012 2016 1958 2007 1982 1999

Brass Bottle, The Brothers Grimm, The Catwoman Chinese Connection, The Chocolate Cinderella

1964 2005 2004 1972 2008 1950

Carl Rinsch Nathan Juran Sean Garrity Takashi Koizumi Dennis Devine Tim Burton W. W. Young Ridley Scott James Cameron Joss Whedon Zack Snyder Richard Quine Robert Zemeckis Ridley Scott Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez Harry Keller Terry Gilliam Pitof Lo Wei Prachya Pinkaew Clyde Geronimi (continued)

195

196 |

Mediography

Title

Year

Director

Cinderella Cinderfella City of the Dead, The Clash of the Titans Conan the Barbarian Conan the Destroyer Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Dark Crystal, The Deliverance Dirty Dozen, The Dreamchild Drunken Master Dungeons & Dragons Dwarvenaut, The Elektra Elle: A Modern Cinderella Tale Enter the Battlefield: Life on the Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour Ever After: A Cinderella Story Excalibur Exorcist, The Fantasia Fast and the Furious, The (franchise) Fifth Element, The Fist of Legend Five Deadly Venoms Ghost in the Shell Ghostbusters Gladiator Golden Voyage of Sinbad, The Hellboy Hero High Plains Drifter Hobbit, The Hocus Pocus Hook House of Flying Daggers Hunger Games, The Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Interview with the Vampire Ip Man Iron Monkey Jesus Camp

2015 1960 1960 1981 1982 1984 2000 1982 1972 1967 1985 1978 2000 2016 2005 2010 2016

Kenneth Branagh Frank Tashlin John Llewellyn Moxey Desmond Davis John Milius Richard Fleischer Ang Lee Jim Henson John Boorman Robert Aldrich Gavin Millar Yuen Woo-ping Courtney Solomon Josh Bishop Rob Bowman John Dunson Nathan Holt

1998 1981 1973 1940 2001–2017 1997 1994 1978 1995 1984 2000 1973 2004 2002 1973 2012–2014 1993 1991 2004 2012 1989 1994 2008 1993 2006

Journey to the West

2013

Andy Tennant John Boorman William Friedkin Samuel Armstrong et al. Rob Cohen et al. Luc Besson Gordon Chan Chang Cheh Mamoru Oshii Ivan Reitman Ridley Scott Gordon Hessler Guillermo del Toro Zhang Yimou Clint Eastwood Peter Jackson Kenny Ortega Steven Spielberg Zhang Yimou Gary Ross Steven Spielberg Neil Jordan Wilson Yip Yuen Woo-ping Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady Stephen Chow

Mediography | Karate Kid, The Kill Bill: Vol. 1 Kill Bill: Vol. 2 King Arthur Knights of Badassdom Labyrinth Lawnmower Man, The Legend Legend of Kung Fu Rabbit Lord of the Rings, The Lost Boys, The Mad Max Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome Mad Max: Fury Road Magnificent Butcher Maleficent Malice in Wonderland Man of Steel Master of the Flying Guillotine Matrix, The Memories of the Sword Messenger, The: The Story of Joan of Arc Monkey King, The Monty Python and the Holy Grail

1984 2003 2004 2004 2013 1986 1992 1985 2011 2001–2003 1987 1979 1985 2015 1979 2014 2009 2013 1976 1999 2014 1999 2014 1975

Mr. Vampire Pale Rider Peter Pan Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides Of Dice and Men Once Upon a Time in China Once Upon a Time in China and America Ong Bak Practical Magic Pretty Woman Raid: Redemption, The Red Sonja Resident Evil Resident Evil: Apocalypse Resident Evil: Extinction Road Warrior, The Rosemary’s Baby Seven Samurai Shadowless Sword Shane Shaolin

1985 1985 1953 2011 2014 1991 1997 2003 1998 1990 2011 1985 2002 2004 2007 1981 1968 1954 2005 1953 2011

197

John G. Avildsen Quentin Tarantino Quentin Tarantino Antoine Fuqua Joe Lynch Jim Henson Brett Leonard Ridley Scott Lijun Sun Peter Jackson Joel Schumacher George Miller George Miller George Miller Yuen Woo-ping Robert Stromberg Simon Fellows Zack Snyder Wang Yu The Wachowski Brothers Park Heung-sik Luc Besson Cheang Pou-soi Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones Ricky Lau Clint Eastwood Clyde Geronimi Rob Marshall Kelly Slagle Tsui Hark Sammo Hung Prachya Pinkaew Griffin Dunne Garry Marshall Gareth Evans Richard Fleischer Paul W. S. Anderson Alexander Witt Russell Mulcahy George Miller Roman Polanski Akira Kurosawa Kim Young-jun George Stevens Benny Chan (continued)

198 |

Mediography

Title

Year

Director

Shaolin Wooden Men Snake in Eagle’s Shadow Sleeping Beauty Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Spiritual Kung Fu Spooky Encounters Star Wars Suicide Squad Superman: The Movie Superman IV: The Quest for Peace Sword in the Stone Sword Master Tai Chi Master Tears of the Sun Terminator, The Terminator 2: Judgment Day Thor Tron Ultraviolet White-Haired Witch, The Witches, The Wizard of Oz, The Wizards Wonder Woman Yojimbo Zardoz Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain

1976 1978 1959 1937 1978 1980 1977 2016 1978 1987 1963 2016 1993 2003 1984 1991 2011 1982 2006 2014 1966 1939 1977 2017 1961 1974 1983

Chi-hwa Chen Yuen Woo-ping Clyde Geronimi William Cottrell Lo Wei Sammo Hung George Lucas David Ayer Richard Donner Sidney J. Furie Wolfgang Reitherman Derek Yee Yuen Woo-ping Antoine Fuqua James Cameron James Cameron Kenneth Branagh Steven Lisberger Kurt Wimmer Jacob Cheung Cyril Frankel Victor Fleming Ralph Bakshi Patty Jenkins Akira Kurosawa John Boorman Tsui Hark

television and online content Title

Dates

Episode

Director

24 Addams Family, The Afro Samurai Alias Alice Batman: The Animated Series Battlestar Galactica Beauty and the Beast Bewitched Big Bang Theory, The “The Big Bran Hypothesis”

2001–2010 1964–1966 2007 2001–2006 2009 1992–1995 2004–2009 1987–1990 1964–1972 20072007

S. 1, Ep. 2

Mark Cendrowski

Mediography | Breaking Bad Buffy the Vampire Slayer “The Harvest” “Hush” “The Initiative” “Killed by Death” “Once More, with Feeling” “Real Me” “Showtime” “Something Blue” “Welcome to the Hellmouth”

2008–2013 1997–2003 1997 1999 1999 1998 2001 2000 2003 1999 1997

Charmed “All Halliwell’s Eve” “Morality Bites” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” Dragon Age: Redemption “Tallis” “Saarebas” Fairy Faith, The Game of Thrones Gilligan’s Island Grimm “Happily Ever Aftermath” “Organ Grinder” Hercules: The Legendary Journeys Heroes of Awesome Hong Kong Phooey I Dream of Jeannie Kung Fu LARPS: The Series Lost Lost in Space Mists of Avalon, The Munsters, The Mythbusters Once Upon a Time “Price of Gold, The” Once Upon a Time in Wonderland Sabrina the Teenage Witch Sanctuary Shadow Warriors Snow White: A Tale of Terror Spellslingers Star Trek Stargate SG-1 Stargate: Universe

1998–2006 2000 1999 1998 2011 2011 2011 2000 2011– 1964–1967 2011–2017 2012 2012 1995–1999 20141974 1965–1970 1972–1975 2014–2015 2004–2010 1965–1968 2001 1964–1966 2003–2016 20112011 2013 1996–2003 2008–2011 1980–1985 1997 2013–2015 1966–1969 1997–2007 2009–2011

199

S. 1, Ep. 2 S. 4, Ep. 10 S. 4, Ep. 7 S. 2, Ep. 18 S. 6, Ep. 7 S. 5, Ep. 2 S. 7, Ep. 11 S. 4, Ep. 9 S. 1, Ep. 1

John T. Kretchmer Joss Whedon James A. Contner Deran Serafian Joss Whedon David Grossman Michael Grossman Nick Marck Charles Martin Smith

S. 3, Ep. 4 S. 2, Ep. 2 S. 1, Ep. 2

Anson Williams John Behring John T. Kretchmer

Ep. 1 Ep. 6 John Walker

Peter Winther Peter Winther

S. 1, Ep. 20 S. 1, Ep. 10

Terrence O’Hara Clark Mathis

Uli Edel

S. 1, Ep. 4

David Solomon

Michael Cohn

(continued)

200 |

Mediography

Title

Dates

Stranger Things Supernatural Surviving Gilligan’s Island

201620052001

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana “Journey Begins, The” “Wil Wheaton Introduces Valkana!” Walking Dead, The Warehouse 13 Witchblade X-Files, The Xena: Warrior Princess “Sins of the Past” “Dreamworker”

1987–1996 2008–2009

Episode

Director

Paul A. Kaufman

2015 2015 2015

Ep. 1 Ep. 0

Adam Lawson Adam Lawson

20102009–2014 2001–2002 1993–2002 1995–2001 1995 1995

S. 1, Ep. 1 S. 1, Ep. 3

Doug Lefler Bruce Seth Green

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Index

action hero, 28, 131, 145, 147. See also superhero Alber, Jan, 17–22 Alice in Wonderland: 16–17, 19, 89–90; and Dungeons & Dragons, 55–56; and Resident Evil, 149–152; as hero’s journey, 85–87, 89–96 Aliens, 146, 147–149 Arneson, Dave, 10, 53. See also Gygax, Gary Arthur, King: 125–126; and Excalibur, 128–130, 131; and King Arthur, 130–132; and The Mists of Avalon, 132–136; and The Sword in the Stone, 127–128 Bell, Book, and Candle, 62–64 Beowulf, 33–34, 39 Bewitched, 62–64 Big Bang Theory, The, 21–22, 71 Blanchard, David, 65 Bodhidharma, 102–103 Booker, Christopher, xii Boorman, John: xv; and Excalibur, 128–130, 131, 132; and Zardoz, 15, 186–191 Bradley, Marion Zimmer: 20; and The Mists of Avalon, 132–136; criticism of, 135–136 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 71, 136–140, 146, 153

Cameron, James, xiv; Aliens, 146, 147–149, 151; Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 155–157 Campbell, Joseph, 36–37, 78, 85–86. See also hero’s journey. Chan, Jackie, 103–114 Charmed, 71–74, 136, 146, 153 Cinderella: 27, 37–38, 41, 42, 112; and Fables, 29; and Grimm, 40–41; and Once Upon a Time, 38; and religion, 70; Disney tellings, 38–40, 45 Clarke, Arthur C., 17–18 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 28 Comic-Con, 3, 153, 165, 167 Connor, Sarah, 9, 145, 153, 154–157 cosplay, 3, 11–12, 16, 37–38, 146, 153, 167, 182–185 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 97–99 Day, Felicia, 7–9, 10, 51, 169, 177 Dragon Age, 4, 7, 8 Dragon Age: Redemption, 6–9 Drunken Master, 109–112 Dungeons & Dragons: and character, 10–11; and popular culture, 163, 165, 166–167; and religion, 193; film, 4–6, 7, 9, 10; game, xiv, 10–11, 12, 53, 54, 126, 168, 172–176 Durkheim, Èmile, 36, 64, 191

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Ebersole, Gary L., 18 Epic of Gilgamesh, The, 1, 78, 192 eternal life, 78–80, 187–191 Excalibur. See Boorman, John

intrusion fantasy, 15, 26–30, 42, 144–145, 154

fairy tales: 1, 14, 25, ; and adaptation, 43–49, 58–62, 138, 167–168, 192; and unnatural narratives, 19, 24; function of, 9–10, 18, 27–30, 33, 37 fan fiction, 3, 50–51, 53, 72, 146–147 fantasy: and children, 61, 79–80, 81–83, 194; and dystopia, 121–125, 139, 141–146, 149–153; and gender, 137–138, 146, 158, 166, 183, 185; and memory, 27, 82, 86–89, 92–94, 150–152, 190; and religion, 22–24, 67–68, 71, 187–192, 193; and unnatural narratives, 17–22; and enjoyment, 178–179; definitions of, 4, 13–15, 17; elements of, 7; function of, 3, 37, 120–121, 166–168, 175, 178, 194; types of, 15–17, 26–30, 34, 42, 163. See also magic Fine, Gary, 167 Forster, E. M., 14, 28 Frazer, James, 64–64, 121 Frye, Northrop, 10, 194

King, Stephen, xii, xiii, 20–21, 26, 31, 38 Knights of Badassdom, 163–165, 166, 177, 182 Kung Fu, 118–120 Kyrou, Ado, xv, 130, 191

Gaiman, Neil, 18 Gardner, John, xii, 122 Gardner, Mark, 172–176 Gilgamesh, Epic of, 1, 78, 192 Gottschall, Jonathan, 30–31, 167, 176 Grimm: 25–27, 29, 64, 79; and Cinderella, 40–41 Gygax, Gary, 10, 53, 126. See also Dungeons & Dragons Hansel and Gretel: and Hocus Pocus, 60–62; and The Blair Witch Project, 59–60; as fairy tale, 58–59 Harry Potter, xiv, 16, 27, 34, 61, 66–68, 69–70, 136, 191 Harryhausen, Ray, 14 Hercules, xiv, 14, 158–159 hero/heroine. See mythic hero Heroes of Awesome, The, 172–176 hero’s journey: 85–87, 95–96, 101, 104; and Alice in Wonderland, 89–94 and Hook, 87–89 Hitchens, Christopher, 188, 190 Hobbit, The, 3, 34–35, 115, 167, 191 Huizinga, Johan, 178 Hutton, Ronald, 66

James, William, 3–4

LARPs: The Series, 177–182 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 66, 85 Lewis, C. S., 16, 19–20, 28, 34, 61, 68 Lord of the Rings, 3, 5, 12, 33, 136, 177–178 Lowry, Dave, 108 Mad Max: and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, 124–125, 140; and Mad Max: Fury Road, 125, 141–144, 155; and The Road Warrior, 122–124, 125; franchise, 149 magic: 54–56; acceptance of, 71–74; and Fantasia, 57–58; and religion, 4, 6–9, 23–24, 64–68, 192; and situation comedies, 13, 63–64; and the unseen order, 3–4; and witchcraft, 56–57, 58–64, 71–74; definition of, 14, 18; domestication of, 62–64; fear of, 58–62 Magic: The Gathering: 50–55, 56, 166, 192 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 65 martial arts: 99–101; and community, 114–117; and kung fu craze, 99–101; and lineage, 103–107; and master/ student relationship, 107–114; and myths of origin, 101–103; and nationalism, 114–117; and Shaolin, 98, 100, 102–107, 118–120; and Wudang, 97–99, 108 McConnell, Frank, 1–2 Mendlesohn, Farah, 15, 26–27 monomyth, 85–87. See also Campbell, Joseph monsters, 4, 10, 26, 29–30, 33–34, 39, 42, 168, 179 myth, 102 mythic hero: and the hero’s journey, 85–86; as world-builder, 125–136; as world-savior, 136–140; female, 136–140, 143–146, 151–153; in the wasteland, 121–125 mythic imagination: xiv, 53–54, 126, 166–167; death and, 78; function of, 7,

Index | 9–10, 72, 85, 102, 121, 170, 179, 190–192, 193, 194; games and, 172, 174; hero and, 90–94; quest and, 85–86, 90, 136; martial arts and, 100–101; religion and, 23–24, 64–66, 68–71; resistance to, 66–68 unnatural narrative and, 18, 22. See also religion narrative, unnatural, 17–24, 28, 31, 36, 54, 60, 86, 170, 176, 191–192 Narnia. See Lewis, C. S. Once Upon a Time: 27; and Cinderella; and Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, 19, 90 Once Upon a Time in China, 114–117, 119 Peter Pan: 27, 75, 80, 96; and Hook, 83–85, 87–89, 92, 94; and The Lost Boys, 76–78; Disney telling, 81–83 Pinskey, Mark, 70–71 plot, xii-xiii, 15, 38–39 Plott, Sean, 50–51 Pratchett, Terry, 2, 24, 54, 79 quest: and redemption, 157–161; and the hero’s journey, 85–87; portal-quest, 15–16, 26–27 Quinn, Harley, 183–185 Red Sonja, 145 religion: 22–24; and magic, 64–71. See also mythic imagination Resident Evil, 146, 149–152 Ripley, Ellen, 146, 147–149, 150–153 role-playing: 3, 10–11, 167–168; and cosplay, 12, 182–185; and gender, 166, 183, 185; live action (LARP), 16, 163–166, 176–182; tabletop (RPG), 5–6, 12, 126, 168–176; video game, 11 Scott, Ridley, xiv, 15, 35, 147, 149 Shaolin Wooden Men, 103–106 Smith, J. Z., 36–37 Snake in Eagle’s Shadow, 112–114 Snow White: and Fables, 29; and religion, 70–71; as tale of terror, 10, 44–49; as

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telling, 20, 27, 32; Disney film, 39, 43–44, 51, 127 Sleeping Beauty: 39; and Maleficent, 42–43, 185; and religion, 70; animated telling, 41, 44, 70 Spiritual Kung Fu, 106–107 Star Trek, 3, 69, 71; and cosplay, 12 Star Wars, xii, 35, 69, 105 Stark, Lizzie, 165–166 storytelling: and morality, 31; basic types of, xii, 122; effects of, 1–2, 18, 178; functions of, 8–9, 11, 30–31, 72, 167–168; participative, 2, 10 superhero, xi, 14, 22, 28, 145, 146, 182, 184, 185. See also action hero. Superman: xi-xii, 21–22, 26; films, 14, 21–22, 24, 26, 183 Tapping, Amanda, 29–30 tellings, 19, 32, 35–37. See also variants Terminator, The, 145, 154–155; and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 9, 93, 155–157 Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana, 169–172, 176. See also Wheaton, Wil Tolkien, J. R. R.: and fandom, 3, 16, 68, 167; and world creation, 3, 28, 30, 178; on fairy tales, 29, 37, 167–168, 194. See also Hobbit, The variants, 19, 32–35. See also tellings Weaver, Sigourney, 45–46, 48, 146 Weber, Max, 65 Weinstein, Jack, 143–144 Wheaton, Wil, 12, 169–172, 173, 176 Willingham, Bill, 16, 29, 80 Witchblade, 144–145, 153–154 Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The, 16, 58, 61, 85, 189, 193 Wonder Woman, 144 Wong Fei-hung. See Once Upon a Time in China Xena: Warrior Princess, 157–161, 166 Zardoz. See Boorman, John