*Modern Myths*

The Greek myths are not saying one thing: if the Greeks had wanted a simple lesson, they would have told a few simple stories. The complexity is part of the point, and so is the intertwining—it is not that it keeps saying the same things, it is that those things, when multiplied, begin to say other things. The grieving mother who can only manipulate, mirrored in her daughter, who can only be acted on; the father and son in competition with each other for power; the princess who chooses something new over what she already knows; the curse of being beloved by the gods; the iconoclast who makes their own rules, whether or not they know the costs; and the hero who always suffers for their victories. These are all the prices we pay—or charge—for order, and the alternative is not Chaos but a world in which we are no longer forever dominant—in other words, Change.

This is part of our cultural legacy (even I understand that the Abrahamic myths tell a different story), and they inform how we see the world we live in now—and that world has its own myths and its own glamorous pantheon.

While, clearly, I loved Calasso’s take on the Greek myths, Philip Ball in Modern Myths does a better job at getting to the core of what mythology is really doing, and that is responding to our anxieties—and those transform as we go. It is the genius of the Greeks that they wove anxieties both enduring and evolving into something that looks like a history; for better or worse, our modern civilization doesn’t have such an overarching “umbrella story”, unless you count mashups like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or the Justice League. Without that umbrella story or organizing principle, myths can be even messier. They are responses to threats—or Changes—that we viscerally understand but can’t easily articulate in, say, a paragraph. We need a story to fully get across what it’s about, and that story frequently doesn’t qualify as high art or even good literature, but it endures nonetheless because the reader understands—at that same visceral level—what the story is really about.

I first encountered Philip Ball as a science writer, who are among my favorite writers. Ball writes about science in ways that are easy for lay people to understand—this one, anyway—and therefore I wasn’t surprised to find that he’d take on a topic like mythology. However, maybe he’s not stepped entirely out of his wheelhouse, as five of the seven mythological characters he cites lean on modern science and technology.

The myths are Robinson Crusoe, Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The War of the Worlds, Sherlock Holmes, and Batman. Even if you’ve never read the originals, you know the outlines of all of the stories—in no small part because you’ve seen modern iterations of them and some of them have become a shorthand for every day phenomena. While the entertainment industry’s fear of new stories—you know, Change—plays some role in the repetition, these are also stories we continue to read and watch because they continue to resonate.

While we can draw lessons from any of them, it’s more interesting to consider the story each myth is grappling with. Robinson Crusoe brings English culture and, more importantly, civilization to an empty island; Frankenstein brings forth a new creation and then deals with the consequences the creator hadn’t thought through; Dracula describes the fear of the foreign and its seductive, dangerous power to transform; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde describes someone who can’t reconcile the different sides of their personality, and thus those aspects become more extreme; The War of the Worlds is about a vicious invasion and the fight to survive in its aftermath; Sherlock Holmes uses reason and cold logic to cut through the noise—and anxiety—surrounding the mysteries of modern life; and Batman is a hero who takes it upon himself to become the law after living through a tragedy when he was a powerless child.

If you’re of a certain age or younger, you might be more familiar with Dracula than anything else, in no small part because he showed up as a Sesame Street character, to say nothing of the hundreds if not thousands of iterations of him in movies, television programs, and books. Sometimes he is vicious and bloodthirsty, sometimes he is the ideal lover—no, really—and frequently both. It’s not an accident that the successful YA series Twilight was reimagined as the extremely successful NA series Fifty Shades of Grey: one features a benevolent, eternally teenaged vampire emo, and the other features a billionaire into kink because of an abusive early childhood. I don’t think we can say there are popular billionaire romance novels as much as we can say that billionaires are the most popular heroes, which is worth examining as we live in a world of increasing wealth inequality. Billionaires in these novels are always sexy and powerful, but they are also dangerous, and the protagonist is warned off of them for a reason. Unlike the original, the protagonist can save him, but it might require a sacrifice of themselves first.

The myth that resonates for me the most, however, is Sherlock Holmes. Confession: before I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be a private detective, inspired in no small part by the 1970s television shows I watched when I was little. Holmes, however, was less hapless than, say, Jim Rockford, and I loved the confidence his character exuded when in the midst of what looked like...Chaos. His smooth deductions brought order even more than justice, and gave me hope that I could do the same. [Also probably worth mentioning how much he resembles Star Trek’s famously logical (and emotionally repressed) Mister Spock, the true romantic hero of my childhood, and I don’t think I’m the first person to make that comparison.]

But let’s get to the one we all recognized immediately: Batman.

Of all of the modern myths, the anxiety of Batman is the most familiar. A city—Gotham—so big that it’s easy for someone to be lost to anonymity, and you could as easily be a victim as a perpetrator, and no one would know or care. Meanwhile, vast amounts of wealth, inequality, greed, and vulnerability are the backdrop for the corruption and the real crimes. Both combine for an ethos of looking away lest you have to intervene or, worse, see someone you know.

Bruce Wayne is the adult survivor who witnessed his parents murdered as a child. In some versions, the police were sympathetic, but in all versions, the murderers were never brought to justice. He is, in many ways, like so many other victims of crime in Gotham, but unlike most of them, he is wealthy. Arguably, that makes it worse: the impotent frustration many feel in the face of injustice and indifference persists with Bruce Wayne, even after he eventually does something about it. He secretly studies martial arts techniques and either creates or has access to a level of technology most can’t even imagine. Combined with mask and cape, he becomes Batman, the Caped Crusader, fighting crime outside of the bounds of the law.

As a child watching the classic television show and cartoon, I found all of that as exciting as anyone else (especially the illustrated sound effects); as an adult, I’m horrified by what I see as a model for someone who clearly has PTSD and needs serious professional help.

It is the split in identity—in some ways even more pronounced than Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde—that is so disturbing. Fierce and occasionally vicious Batman isn’t Bruce Wayne’s disguise; shallow playboy Bruce Wayne is Batman’s. In other words, the traumatized child grew up to become a dangerous sociopath who used the man he should have become as his face to the world. It is fair to say, perhaps, that Bruce Wayne never actually grew up.

Should we excuse that if Batman is a hero? But what is a hero? Is that someone who, as in the Greek myths, earns glory by standing up to an inhuman challenge? Or is it someone who stands up who not only temporarily protects but tries to improve the lives of others? Batman may be a hero by the first definition, because he comes alive when he is in violent conflict with a “villain”, but he can’t wait to leave the scene when he’s with someone he’s allegedly protecting.

That Batman/Bruce Wayne is so wealthy and chooses this path to ostensibly fight crime speaks to what he’s really interested in, and that is literally fighting his demons. The 2022 version, The Batman, was a very good film, and in part because it caught out our hero in a way that most versions hadn’t. Bruce Wayne shrugs off his butler/guardian Alfred’s reminders to meet with the accountant to discuss the Wayne Foundation. Later in the film, Batman meets with the Riddler in Arkham Asylum. The Riddler is really Edward Nashton, someone equally damaged by their traumatic childhood. He isn’t born with Bruce Wayne’s means, but he, after a fashion, develops them by becoming a forensic accountant. He reveals that the recent spasm of criminal activity that Batman has been fighting has been financed by embezzlement—of the unmonitored Wayne Foundation.

Oh, Bruce, maybe you should have taken that meeting after all.

The costumes, gadgets, and villains of Batman may be insane, but we recognize the world that made him, both literally and figuratively. It’s a big city filled with billionaires, crumbling infrastructure, and corruption. But while we may recognize and possibly identify with that one the most readily, it might just be Frankenstein that makes us shudder the most because we see ourselves in both the doctor and the monster he makes.

To be clear, no one has reanimated a long-dead corpse with an assist from other people’s body parts. Yes, there are organ transplants, and what we can do to help a body recover from injuries might have struck Frankenstein’s author Mary Shelley and her contemporaries as bringing the dead back to life, but we understand enough about the body that while those revivals may be miraculous on some level, they are not the stuff of science fiction. Frankenstein is not possible (that should make the sane among us feel better).

Frankenstein speaks to the impulse to create life as a response to grief, but it also warns what that life might look like. The movies would have us believe that the monster is lacking in higher faculties, but in the book, apparently, it—he—is filled with cunning, and can turn on its creator if, basically, his feelings are hurt or if he feels threatened. The creature is a monster not because of its origins, but because of its nature.

The aspect of a creation that turns on its creator has been done many times, and arguably predates Frankenstein, but because of the technological aspect of the story, I see it in every contemporary fear of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as Skynet, the network of malevolent artificial human life from The Terminator. While admittedly the relatively recent large language models (LLMs) can read eerily as if as an actual human wrote it, they are, as Adam Becker wrote in More Everything Forever, “blurry pictures of the internet” that get blurrier as the internet is fed with that much more AI. Once you know that—or even read the “content” it generates—the idea that AI could do anything to us along the lines of Frankenstein’s monster doesn’t hold for long. That doesn’t, however, mean that there aren’t those among us with Doctor Frankenstein’s impulses.

One of the most valuable insights off Modern Myths is that in addition to worrying that we are going to have to fight our own monsters, we are also worried that we are going to *become* those monsters ourselves. The robotic workforce or, as Cory Doctorow has highlighted, the reverse centaur—a human being whose primary job is to assist a machine, as opposed to a person who uses a machine for assistance—is yet another specter that can trace its lineage to Frankenstein.

Finally, it’s hard not to see zombies as another modern descendant of the story. Zombies, at least in part, are almost always the result of a technological or scientific innovation or experiment gotten out of hand or, worse, that has somehow escaped the lab (which reminds me of one of the “theories” about COVID-19’s origins). They are also a symbol for the mindlessness of modern masses, particularly consumers, which is a creation of media, propaganda, and marketing, a very different kind of technology.

I have less to say about Jekyll and Hyde, perhaps because the story is so deeply knitted into culture that I can’t tease it out. Everyone immediately knows if you reference the characters that you’re talking about someone who’s divided, sometimes with a violent personality shift. In some ways, it’s a story about the costs—and compromises—of projecting an acceptable social existence. In the 2020s, the cost benefit analysis favors those compromises less and less; that doesn’t, however, make the story ring any less true.

It is not so much that I have less to say about Robinson Crusoe and The War of The Worlds as it is that they speak less to me. I understand the anxiety of having to bring your civilization and culture to a “new world” and the fear of an alien invasion, but both of them leave me cold. That is in no small part due to my mixed origins as Other and, er, “Native” in that sense earlier white settlers used in the nineteenth century. My ancestors who came to this country after the middle of the nineteenth century didn’t get to bring most of their culture with them, particularly my Korean father. The aspects that they could keep—language, food, and in the case of my Ashkenazi great-grandparents, religion—marked them as Other, and in some cases could make them a target. I will never have the privilege of Robinson Crusoe, and I am one of the aliens the heroes do battle with. So be it.

Ball was aware that his list might not be all-inclusive. He makes an argument for the inclusion of at least one of the Bronte sisters, and I’d say Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre both get at persistent anxieties. I would also argue that Superman as well should be included; ironically, what that story gets at is the Other as Hero, and the constant alienation the Other experiences.

Mythology is not the place we go for an answer to our anxieties, but for an understanding of them—a description, not a prescription. In some ways, that can be just as instructive, as you can’t solve a problem until you understand what it is and possibly why it exists. It was psychological theory before the science of the mind was developed, and it continues to serve as an outlet for our concerns. I see continued relevance in the Greek myths, but their modern descendants obviously speak to our more immediate concerns. The Foreigner, for example, shows up in the Greek myths as well, but they are frequently heroes. That lineage of mythology might be worth pursuing, if only because they are more concerned with the long game.

Myths are fungible things, as are dreams, the other outlet for our subconscious. Things change, and so does our response to them. And while a good myth will frequently not qualify as great literature, it almost always contains multiple characters and aspects that become more important as our cultural story shifts. The layering and the complexity are what gives a myth durability, while also giving us a window into the anxiety it is a response to.

The cultural anxiety that shows up in all myths, I would argue, is a response to the compromises we make to continue, and it goes beyond fear of separation from our parents or being eaten by wild things with teeth. At some level, our anxieties as expressed in myths and dreams are telling us that *this* is not sustainable. We are forgetting about something or someone that was important, and we need to remember and find our way back to whatever or whomever it was. It is that quest or journey that changes us as a person, but to what extent does it change us as a civilization?