Excerpt from the Conduit Interview
Marina Warner
Unmasks the Myths
Marina Warner is a British novelist, mythologist, historian, and culture critic. Her studies of myths and symbols include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary and From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. Her novel, The Leto Bundle, will be released in the U.S. in May. Helen Antrobus spoke with Ms. Warner by phone.
conduit: Do you
think that the Disney effect on myth limits our ability to deal with something like
terrorism in a complex way, because our stories are so denatured that they only bring
us to this point of good vs. evil?
warner: Yes, I think that’s the dominant problem of global marketing
strategies in the entertainment industry. Stories always have responded to local
problems. As I’ve argued, you know, it’s not as though there are archetypal
scripts in the psyche. It’s a practical thing. People tell stories to get to
grips with what is assailing them, what is troubling them. The stories may or may
not be effective, but in the act of representing what you fear, then you have some
kind of curiously better way of handling it. You can confront it better. Usually
the way that’s happened is that transactions and exchanges have kept very close
to the ground of what is the problem. So the Cinderella story is different in Italy
because of the dowry problem than it is in another country where you don’t have
a similar insistence on dowries.
What’s happened now, of course, is they do go for the broad brush conflicts,
because they’re selling everywhere, all over the world. And they’re losing
some of the complexity and the nuances and the sensitivity. You see, the new Lord
of the Rings and Harry Potter, are films I could put in the lineage of Star Wars,
which also has a very Manichaen plot, a very “good and evil” plot.