I thought
it was rather curious that one of the few Greek kings of the Iliad that returns
home alive, the blond Menelaus, was killed by Eric Bana at the doors of sacred
Troy as a prelude to the war. The version, indubitably unsuitable for the
rapsodos of the Mycenaean courts –which sang the myth to the heirs of the Atreidai-
would have surprised greatly Homer for -as Borges noticed- Paris and Hellene
are but a footnote to the epic. Hollywood’s versions of classical myths have
always produced the condescending smile of theorists of culture and historians.
To Adorno and Horkheimer [Dialectic of
Enlightenment], culture industry was a form of mass deception. However, in
order to have a deception we need to have a real thing which is being supplanted,
and in relation to the Iliad (and myth in general) there is not such a thing.
Besides the fact that on the big screen we are only seeing Brad Pitt and never
Achilles (Hollywood actors are always themselves, in opposition to what
tragedies intended), Achilles is meaningless without the narrative, in fact, he
and the other heroes are nothing but a narrative, whether the one of a
historian or of a poet.
What is
Troy? Is it the place, the stones, the buildings? Obviously, it is not an empty
ruin. And the men and women that experienced the war, what are they? A valuated
narrative, memories, proteins conditioning neural synapses. Social and personal
identity, our precious consciousness, are narrative elaborations. To be
conscious is to be conscious of a myth. We can complain about the psychological
shallowness of the myth elaborated by culture industry, but only from the
purported depth of another myth.
If the
measure of the validity of myth is its capacity for creation of social meaning,
culture industry creates meaning as any other myth machinery, say, traditional Churches and States, enculturating the masses and maintaining the Status Quo.
In this sense, culture industry is just today’s vehicle for the development of
narratives of domination, but not a mass deception.
Meaning is
inevitably created by any social action of communication, for we are
communicating basic emotions (in n-ary developments); our languages are the
result of such homeostatic communication.
