Joseph Campbell
“Mythology and the Individual”
What is television, but a meditation on a theme, to which you return every week? Community is gone for now, but hopefully it will be back, and if I may serve as a Community apologist for a moment, I would like to talk about the meditation of Community.
I have talked to and read from many people that dislike Community and describe it as a live action Family Guy, stringing together pop culture references ad nauseum in lieu of a plot. I disagree with this viewpoint, but I understand that it may come from a place of differing mythologies. I posted a screenshot from episode 3x01 because it is exemplary of my point. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a film which I have meditated over many times and have attempted to tease apart the layers of meaning in its final scenes. Having personally worked over the narrative on my own, I have come to various conclusions about the transcendent journey that the character must take to arrive outside of himself and watch himself die, so that he may see his part in the larger whole of humanity and all existence, to be reborn as an enlightened being. By tying Jeff into this story with a few quick scenes, the writers of Community have immediately started speaking to me regarding what their goal for Jeff is in this story and what his journey should be, but I do not know yet if Jeff will follow the same path of the film, they still have something more to say about what the film meant and how it applies in this situation. This economy of language through pop culture mythology allows so much more to be put into a 22 minute show, if I speak the language. Some references, I admit, I do not get on first viewing. I understood that they were referencing Dead Poets Society in episode 1x03, but I had not meditated on that film, and I did not know what the writers wanted me to understand when everyone stands up on their desks and one person falls down. So, I watched Dead Poets Society, and suddenly, after investing an hour and a half, that 3 minute scene in the show reveals several more layers of meaning than the one sight gag I had gotten from it on first viewing. They are not using new archetypes, but then neither are the pieces they are referencing, the point of these metaphors is to talk about larger concepts and to provide a point of entry for your personal exploration of the concept. What Community does so well is say “ok, you know about the death and rebirth and seeing the planet as a whole that the space fetus goes through in 2001, but now look at how that concept also applies to interpersonal relationships and group dynamics here.” Once it evokes the memory of the mythology that you have meditated on and you are in the realm of the indescribable idea that you have worked through personally, then it anchors that to the character and combines it or contrasts it with another idea. If you remember the end of episode 3x01, Jeff emerges from the 2001 reference as the lead character of The Shining. So not only are we taking Jeff who should be an enlightened space fetus now, and having to immediately recast him in the role of a violent Jack Torrance and figure out the implications of that, but we are also reminded that both of these are films of Stanley Kubrick, and so, we are asked to examine the themes of his characters from an auteur standpoint. There is no mention of Eyes Wide Shut, Full Metal Jacket, The Killing, or A Clockwork Orange, but the mention of Kubrick by contrasting two of his films embodied in the same character, brings to mind the ideas of group dynamics in relation to the individual within the group in those 4 films, and that was what we were exploring in this episode to start with, so many more layers were added by that one change, depending on your previous meditation on Kubrick’s work.
When Community combines these mythologies well, it really is a masterful show. The point of meditation to which we are returning every week with Community then is that pop culture is our current mythology and what these meditations on the mythology mean to us.
“The ritual was very technological, as in these beings descending from the sky in a circle, signifying arrival of the gods. Where does that flying or descending gods motif originate? Our ancestors saw something, because why would you hurl yourself from a hundred foot pole out of nothing? To imitate a bird? Birds are not that important. Something very significant happened.”
There are a couple of episodes of Community that I want to go back and look at more in depth. The first is episode 2x05 titled “Messianic Myths and Ancient Peoples”
“The ego can’t reflect upon itself unless it has a mirror against which to read itself, and that mirror would be the mythological schedule that let’s it know where it is. It’s a mirror with a schedule on it —a patterned mirror— and the ego sees itself in that reflex and knows where it is on the scoreboard.”
- Joseph Campbell
Abed decides to compare himself against the Jesus mythology to find his current place in life as a filmmaker, just as he has seen so many other filmmaker’s do (the life of Jesus is compared to E.T., Edward Scissorhands, Back to the Future, The Matrix, Robocop, Superman Returns, and Star Trek II within the episode). Of his film he says:
“In the filmmaker’s film, Jesus is a filmmaker trying to find God with his camera. But then the filmmaker realizes that he’s actually Jesus and he’s being filmed by God’s camera and it goes like that forever in both directions like a mirror within a mirror because all of the filmmakers are Jesus and all of their cameras are God, and the movie is called ABED, all caps.”
The film is Abed’s examination of ABED. It is a mirror of Jesus and God to which he will compare his life. Ultimately, he finds it lacking, but he does resign himself to his fate after praying to God in the garden of Gesthsemane. To simplify Joseph Campbell’s theory of the monomyth, all religions and mythologies share the same metaphorical waypoints to which people are to compare their lives. Abed has been hitting the waypoints in order of the myth he has chosen so far. In Abed’s prayer to God in the garden, he describes his film as “a self-indulgent adolescent mess” and says that the “critics are gonna crucify me.” He returns inside anyway, having heard nothing from God. As Campbell says when he explores similar rites of passage in other cultures, “the burial isn’t as important as the kid thinking he’s dead” and “what has died has been infantile ego.” Though Abed is not necessarily crucified, he has believed himself to be dead and therefore killed his childish ego. At the end of the episode we see the piece he ends up making is a rap song about Heaven. No one cares. The reason no one cares is because in Campbell’s interpretation, Heaven was never meant to be an actual place. A better word for the same idea would be Nirvana or Enlightenment. It is a place of personal growth, to which Abed has arrived, and no amount of prosthelytizing can force it on anyone else.
Pierce’s parallel story is one without mythologies. He is comparing himself to his peers and finding his life empty.
