Pop culture and myth
Religious themes appear in disguise, concealed behind the patter of mass media culture
Jan 07, 2025

By Jesuit Father Myron J. Pereira
Our own age isn’t religious in the same way that the medieval centuries were.
Medieval man was passionately and publicly faithful to his beliefs, but was a rabid bigot where the beliefs of others were concerned. This is rarely encountered today, unless a government is totalitarian.
Modern societies are more tolerant, but also more indifferent. So in many ways, religion in the more advanced countries has gone “underground,” its public exhibition not always encouraged.
This is because of the legacy of hatred and violence that religion usually had. As Bertrand Russell put it, “More people have been killed in God’s name, than in anyone else’s.”
Yet religious themes appear in disguise, concealed behind the patter of mass media culture.
The models in our advertisements, the stars in our film and TV shows are today’s “communion of saints,” exemplars for us to imitate, just as a rock concert is a form of “liturgy” come fully alive.
And in their own little way, the comic strips have re-introduced us to the idea of myth.
Pop culture and mythology
Myth — as the anthropologist Mircea Eliade defines it — is whatever is “sacred, exemplary, and significant.” Traditionally religious people see Jesus and Mother Mary as “sacred and exemplary,” as well as some of their favorite saints.
But what of the lives of the celebrities who so dominate the fantasy life of the young today — a Shah Rukh Khan, Marilyn Monroe, Lionel Messi, or a Taylor Swift? Are their lives sacred and exemplary too? Certainly not is the same way!
Nevertheless, for countless millions, these do provide “role models” or exemplars, in their values and behavior, as did the saints of yore. They give focus to an adolescent’s search for identity. They lend energy, elan, and charisma to the dull routine of life.
Cartoons and comics
But when we talk about another form of religious “presence,” not so much in role models, as in artistic depictions, it’s amazing what we find. This essay will therefore study the comic strip and the cartoon.
Cartoons and sketches have always been with us — not in the same form of course — for wherever man has lived and built, he has left behind pictures and sculptures to describe in paint and stone what could not be expressed in words.
Whether it’s the cave paintings of Altamira or Ajanta, or the tapestries of Bayeux or Madhubani, down to cinema and television, all bear witness to the perennial human urge — to tell a story, and to tell it in pictures.
Who reads comics?
It is true that the mandarins among us have never taken the comics seriously. No matter, for seriously or not, comics are read. Or more accurately, looked at and enjoyed.
And in the process of being enjoyed, values, attitudes, and beliefs slip in uncontested along with the story.
For every comic strip must have a story, must have a hero — and a heroine too, preferably “in distress” — and one of epic proportions, so that the ancient myths find modern garb and expression in the pulp fiction of today’s newspapers, and in the darkened halls of a cinema theater.
Take three of the most popular comic book heroes of today: Tarzan, Superman, and the Phantom. Like all the heroes of antiquity, they are avatars (the Sanskrit terms refer to a god descended from above).
Superman comes to earth from outer space, and the Phantom and Tarzan, whose origins are deliberately obscure, are portrayed as “great white warriors” in a jungle with wild beasts, or in a primitive continent inhabited by docile brown “natives.”
Like other heroes their infancy and early life are “hidden,” and only their “public life” is noised abroad.
Hidden versus public
A moment’s reflection on the significance of the ”hidden” versus the “public” in the mythology of the comic, and indeed of all folk heroes.
Every hero, it seems, lives part of his life in disguise. Superman lies concealed behind the bashful Clark Kent, the Phantom is always masked and hooded, and Tarzan (in the original story) is the secret self of the English noble, Lord Greystoke.
What is it that must be hidden and concealed from public view? What is that “obscene” (off-stage) part of ourselves, which must never be probed by others, particularly by prying women?
The disguise — or the mask — is to our fantasy, what the “shadow” (a Jungian term) is to our real lives.
It is that part of ourselves “away from the sun” which represses all that we are, but would rather not be. Or all that we would like to be, but dare not publicly confess. The Edward Hyde to our Dr Jekyll. Whatever lies in uneasy tension within us.
Sex is one such potent force. Any wonder that all comic heroes are virtually sexless males? They may rescue damsels in distress, but they succumb to no feminine wiles and entertain no romantic advances.
They usually find solace in the company of another male friend, or others of an “inferior race” who look up to them as protector.
The mask then is the simplest device to blot all those ambiguities which all of us — heroes included — must grapple with in our striving for integrity.
Sex, race and gender, and the pressures of wealth and power compound these tensions, but in the folksy culture of the comic hero, all tensions and ambiguities are swept aside.
Good and evil, right and wrong are as clear as black and white, and are as easily solved. The comic hero is expected to be good, clean, and sanitized — and usually is.
Why comics continue to fascinate
For if the stories of Superman and Tarzan fascinate us, it is because we still playfully indulge in an infantile world whose “problems” are “solved” with the bang-thud-pow of the Phantom’s fists, or Superman’s zooming across oceans in pursuit of runaway crooks.
All our wishes for problem-solving — which is but “salvation” by another name — have a touch of the miraculous. For the miracles of Jesus will always be more appealing than his teachings.
And herein lie the perennial fascination of the comics: they amuse us with their gentle irony, they tickle us with their humor, they grip us with a story well told in pictures, and they remind us more subconsciously than in any logical way, that in an increasingly complicated world, the personal element still triumphs after all.
That a “personal savior” in the form of a strong and handsome white man will rescue us from the “dragon’s mouth and the snares of the pit.”
Of course, our rational minds scoff at such ideas, but isn’t there some tiny fragment of irrationality in ourselves that sometimes wishes it were true?--ucanews.com
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