Vivian Asimos's Blog: Incidental Mythology, page 12

Lupin: race and mythology

Netflix’s Lupin is utterly fascinating. The show follows professional thief Assane Diop, the son of a Senegalese immigrant in France. Assane’s father was framed for the theft of an expensive diamond necklace by his employer when Assane was a child, causing his father to hang himself in his prison cell. Twenty-five years later, Assane sets out to seek revenge on the wealthy and powerful – and white – Hubert Pellegrini who framed his father in the first place.

Lupin is not only fascinating to me. The first ten-episode part, which launched on Netflix in January 2020, was watched by about 70 million households during just its first month. It’s the most-watched non-English series on Netflix. It’s not hard to see why people fell in such love with it. The leading actor, Omar Sy, is fantastic at showing us subtle changes in his facial expression. He’s a great actor in his portrayal of Assane Diop. The show explores elements of race and classism in Paris society through the eyes of a man who grew up the victim of power dynamics far greater than he is, and this is portrayed in every quiet tick of his eyebrows. But, for me, the fascination is a bit more mythic.

Lupin is the perfect demonstration of mythology in action. As I’ve written before, mythology happens when narratives are used by an individual or a community to better understand themselves or their place in this world. Lupin shows us exactly how mythology works, and how an individual uses a narrative to inform their identity.

In the show, Assane uses the Arséne Lupin books, by Maurice LeBlanc, like a textbook. In one shot, you see how he has the book tabbed and marked with notes in the margins. Its more than just a fun book to Assane – it’s a blueprint for how to live life. At first, it appears to be used as a guide on how to excel in the art of thievery. It clearly informed him of his potential role as thief, and how to pull off a great heist. His rise from quiet immigrant child to professional thief is clearly informed by his experience with the Lupin books. He used the books to draw a blueprint of his career, and even saw his career opportunities through the books themselves.

But the Lupin books were not simply instructions for Assane’s career. Arséne Lupin also was a particular type of character who had a particular way of navigating through the world. Lupin is a Robin Hood type figure, one who is understood as a force for good even though he moves on the other side of the law. He is the “gentleman burglar”, who is suave and protective of women, and targeting the rich elite.

Assane takes notes on this as well. His instance on being a gentleman burglar is focused on his revenge on Pellegrini. Pellegrini not only framed his father but is also the ultimate in privileged wealth. When he successfully steals the necklace, he uses pieces of the diamonds to help others, including the wife of a convicted man. He also stole from violent villainous types to give his ex-wife, working as a single mother, a large roll of cash. In these shots, we see his stealing as ways to help the communities and individuals around him who are in need.

But, what is particularly interesting about Lupin, is that aside from Assane (Omar Sy) and his son, most of the other characters are white. As someone white myself, I don’t feel I have the right eyes or voice to see or speak on much of the issues of Black life and representation – and I’m also not French, and therefore have little understanding of what race relations looks like in France. But I can approach the discussion of these racial elements from the perspective of myth.

In Lupin, and for many capitalist societies like France, there are two primary categories of class: the privileged wealthy elite, and the oppressed working class. These two categories can cross, and when they do they form the middle-class, a strange class of people who carry elements of both categories, often paradoxically. Institutionalised racism, embedded into the systems of capitalism in many European countries, ends up having an inherent connection between classism and racism.

In fact, the connections between classism and racism have manifested in insults we still use even when there are white people discussing other white people. The insult “white trash” for instance, was used to demarcate how the poor whites were on similar levels of society as Blacks – they were the trashed versions of whites.

This connection is not something that was missed by the creators of Lupin. The racial dynamic between the different classes is quite clear. Pellegrini, as well as all the other elites in the show, are all white, while the other working-class members, when Assane moves among them, are all Black. My personal understanding is that this is meant to clearly indicate these racial and economic categories as distinct from one another. This is not to say that there are no Black wealthy members of the elite in Paris, but that there are none in Lupin.

In fact, Assane plays up his race throughout the show, using the backing of Arséne Lupin as his guide. In the books, Lupin is a master of disguise, using wigs and other props to change his appearance at will to fit into new positions and environments seamlessly. While Assane cannot change his skin colour, he changes other elements of himself. More than putting on prosthetic noses, he also plays into his race as if it were a mask of any other. Despite being the only Black man in the room, he holds himself as well as the other members of the wealthy elite. Prior, when he fits into the role of janitor, he moves among the working class with the same known invisibility.

When playing the role of the wealthy elite, he also wields his race like a weapon against the white crowd, in a nice shifting of the typical power dynamic of race being used as a weapon against Blacks when class is introduced to the equation. We see this from the opening episode. When portraying himself as the wealthy man who successfully bid on a diamond necklace, the auctioneer makes a comment to Assane that he “wasn’t what he expected”. Assane does his very charming smile, leans his head in slightly with a tilt to show confusion, and asks “what do you mean?”. There is a hesitation and some backpedalling. Race was never brought up in this conversation, but it’s the suggested reason the white auctioneer did not expect to see a Black man in an arena where there is typically the white social elite.

This scene in the opening episode is actually the best demonstration of the way race is used in Lupin more generally – it is the implicit reminder, rather than anything explicitly discussed in your face. The show uses race the way society does – quietly manipulating thought based on audience expectation. It is the silent factor dangling between conversations, the unspoken marker of difference in the power dynamic.

Another early scene to set this silent power dynamic is in a flashback to Assane’s youth. Assane walks into an indoor pool, where Juliette Pelegrini, the daughter of Assane’s father’s employer, is also lounging. The difference in their social standing is marked at the very beginning, when Assane has to immediately explain his presence in the same room.

Juliette is smoking a cigarette on the other side of the pool and asks him if its “true what they say” about Black people, that they cannot swim. She then makes Assane swim to the other side of the pool in return for a kiss. An uncomfortable bit of a scene follows where Assane struggles to swim to Juliette.

This scene is frankly uncomfortable to watch – but it’s supposed to be. It shows the difference between the young Assane who struggled in the power dynamics, to the adult Assane who uses these dynamics to his benefit. It clearly paints the struggle of implicit racism, micro-aggressions, and the clear understanding of where the rich white elite of the Pellegrini family saw the Black immigrant family who worked under them. Juliette could not care any less for Assane – she enjoyed the process of seeing him struggle. And Assane acquiesces to the request not because he desperately wants to kiss a white woman, but because the power dynamics of their class and their race deem it necessary that he does.

These dynamics are all important because these are the elements that are frankly not present in the Lupin books by Leblanc. They are missing, not because they did not exist at the time, but because the wealthy white elite of the books did not need to confront their own biases. Assane forces them to by his shear presence. He flows in the system where it suits him – blending into the world of the caretakers to gain access – but fights the system when it does not suit him.

The scene of young Assane in the pool, and adult Assane after an auction, is a demonstration of the way Assane learned to see himself and his role through the Lupin books. He uses the character of Lupin as a kind of mask, a white mask to use the phrasings of Frantz Fanon whose book Black Skin, White Masks may be well suited to compare to Netflix’s Lupin.

Like most myths, Maurice Leblanc’s Lupin books are complicated, especially in how they are internalised and used by Assane in the Netflix show. It is more than just a demonstration of the ability of a thief to hide and move through the world – in many ways, the disguises and shifting nature of Lupin the thief is a metaphor for the way Assane felt the need to disguise and shift his own self and nature to fit into a world that saw him as the colonialised Other. He wears the aspect of white elite as comfortably as he does Black working class – he flows between these worlds as easily as the removal of a fake moustache.

The character Lupin, and the stories spun far before Assane was born, became the blueprint for how to move in the world – not as a thief but as a man facing social oppression. Netflix’s Lupin shows us exactly what mythology looks like in action for Assane.

Disclosure: Please be aware that some of the links in this post are affiliate links. If you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission. The commission does not affect your purchase price, nor my willingness to include them. I include them because I believe they are worth supporting.

Research Roundup: The Meaning of Mythology

Disclosure: Please be aware that some of the links in this post are affiliate links. If you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission. The commission does not affect your purchase price, nor my willingness to include them. I include them because I believe they are worth supporting.

Being as this is a blog and website devoted to mythology, incidentally or not, I feel it a bit lacking that I haven’t yet put together something which helps people who are first embarking on the glorious journey that is mythology. Many beginning their interest in mythology start with reading the glorious tales, from Welsh to Greek to Indian. But after getting a lot of these in your head, you start to wonder about what it all means – how to explain all these wonderful myths, both their similarities and their differences.

This list is for that secondary thought, that curious wondering as to what it all means and why so many people from all around the world have cared enough in words to tell stories in the first place. This list is for those who wonder about the meaning of mythology and want to dig into all the reasons why it’s so unique but also so everywhere.

Introduction to the Study of Myth - Downloadable Course

All personal biases aside, I do think something like this would be best served for those only just now embarking on the more analytical side of mythology. More analytical approaches to mythology are quite varied, in more ways than those more used to reading the wonderful volumes of anthologies of myths may realise. A course which introduces you to each of the ways myth can be analysed can help you navigate this world and find the way that makes the most sense to you in as easy digestible a format as possible.

Getting downloadable courses, like the ones I have on offer, allows the course to fit into your busy life without clogging anything up. It’s entirely self-directed, so you can even jump around in the course to fit your own interests.

My own course not only introduces many approaches and theorists to you, but also provides you with several readings by these scholars, as well as lists of references for you to keep going where you find your bliss. To help get anyone started in this endeavour, I’ve put a sale on my courses – if you use discount code MYTH2021 at checkout, you can get any of my courses, including Introduction to the Study of Myth, for 25% off.

Claude Lévi-Strauss – Myth and Meaning

Myth and Meaning by Claude Lévi-Strauss is a wonderful starting point to hearing about interesting aspects of how to study mythology and get at the heart of its meaning. Lévi-Strauss’s brand of anthropological Structuralism can sometimes be a bit of a confusing and complicated world, but Myth and Meaning truly helps to break down the complicated bit of analysis and leaves you with the wonderful sense of myth’s majesty – you get all the senses of the importance of myth and how Levi-Strauss views myth with none of the boring.

Obviously, the positive aspect of removing the complication is also a potential drawback. If you’re wanting to get hard and fast into structural analysis of myth, this wouldn’t really do the trick for you (if this is you, grab the Raw and the Cooked by Lévi-Strauss). But if you’re only just starting out and unsure where exactly you want to plant your analysis flag, this will really help to give you the overview with none of the annoying.

Alan Dundes – Sacred Narratives

Sacred Narratives is an anthology of different ideas and approaches, edited together by folklorist Alan Dundes. That’s right – a folklorist! This anthology isn’t limited to conversations about myth, but extends it to the other special narratives in the world like folklore and legends.

This particular text is a staple for any academic and academically-minded person pursuing the study of these types of narratives, whether it be myth or otherwise. However, it is a bit of an older text. There haven’t been any newer editions in the last several decades, so most of these readings provide the fundamentals for more contemporary writers rather than being written by them. That being said, it’s still a valuable piece of information if you wanting to know more about these fundamentals.

Jonathan Miles-Watson and Vivian Asimos – The Bloomsbury Reader in the Study of Myth

Another anthology, but a slightly different one this time round. This is one I edited together with my friend and colleague Jonathan Miles-Watson. The purpose behind the text was to aid courses geared toward undergraduates on the subject of the analysis of mythology. So in that sense, it’s right for anyone who wants that level of introduction to the topic.

The way this anthology works is that it provides readers with small sample-sizes of a variety of other readings, along with introductions to each one. This means that you’re not getting someone else’s interpretation, but you’re also not needing to invest in dozens of books and articles to get your hands on them.

Joseph Campbell – The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces is perhaps the most well-known piece of writing on the analysis of mythology. Campbell’s book is focused on the idea that all myths, and all successful books and movies outside of myths, is based on the same steps of the hero’s journey. His book breaks down this journey, and also spends some time on each step.

Campbell is a universalist theory – he believes that every myth in the world can be analysed the same way using the same steps. Not every approach to myth follows this, though. Campbell’s approach, while the most popular, is not the only accepted one. However, it’s hard to go through most discussions of mythology, especially mythology and popular culture, without stumbling into this and dealing with it. Whether you approach it because you agree and love it, or because you simply need the background before moving on, it’s still worth a read.

[image error] Keith H. Basso – Wisdom Sits in Places

Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places has been a recent favourite of mine – not because it’s a recent publication but because it’s recent to me. There is an inherent connection between mythology and the landscape, but that’s not always something that people spend a lot of time talking about. Basso’s book does spend that time. This book is all about how myth is within our landscape, and how landscape is inherently within our myths.

For those newly embarking into the world of academic texts, this may read – at times – a bit dense. But these bits are only occasional, and overall I found the book incredibly pleasing to read. It was an easy flow most of the time, and even had some really beautiful moments as well. It’s a strong suggestion for anyone whose interested in learning more about how mythology impacts our understanding of place names, and even of the landscape itself.

Jack Goody – Myth, Ritual and the Oral

Goody’s Myth, Ritual and the Oral spends time connecting myth to the other core aspects of mythology people think about: oral recitation and ritual. Goody spends the first part of the book really breaking down some definitions of mythology, definitions of ritual, and how myth and ritual all connect to one another. It’s a great entry point to this particular perspective on myth for anyone whose interested in getting into these aspects.

Like Basso, there are definitely paragraphs here and there which can be a slog, but overall it’s actually a surprisingly easy read that is still full of references, citations and guidance on where to go. Personally, I don’t always agree with everything he has to say, but it is a wonderful exploration through the worlds of religion, mythology and ritual.

I hope this list provides a solid starting place to someone who really wanted to have their interests satisfied but wasn’t sure where to start. I’m obviously a little biased, but getting into the nitty-gritty of myth’s meanings is one of the most fascinating endeavours. There’s so much diversity, so much thought, and so much nuance. Our worlds are really filled with narratives and storytelling and the performance of these myths, and getting into what they really say about us is definitely worth the time.

Disclosure: Please be aware that some of the links in this post are affiliate links. If you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission. The commission does not affect your purchase price, nor my willingness to include them. I include them because I believe they are worth supporting.

Reddit’s Sympathetic Monsters

While we have gone some time since looking at monsters, I thought I’d take a moment to talk about one of the aspects of monsters I never got around to. This is the fact that not all monsters are monstrous, but they sometimes are bearers of sympathy, empathy and compassion. One of my favourite places to go for compassionate monsters is the subreddit Sympathetic Monsters.

What makes reddit’s sympathetic monsters so interesting is how it treats what is considered monstrous. The images presented are what we typically think of as “monsters” – creatures who echo demonic bodies, or hybridized forms which cross boundaries of our categories of specific animals or animal types. These monsters are not presented in situations which capitalize on their horrid forms, however. They, instead, are portrayed in caring and – well – sympathetic ways.

One of the better examples from more recent days is the comic on summoning a demon. In it, we see a young person summoning a demonic form. When the demon arises and demands repayment, it pulls out a small demonic puppy and says the person must dog-sit.

This comic puts an unexpected perspective on the monster. It shows the demon not as a shambling beast of a creature, but one with a caring heart and a cute little demonic dog. The comics and images on the subreddit are meant to shift perspectives – alter the perceptions of what a monster is and what it means to be monstrous.

Sympathetic monsters on reddit works to shift the focus of the monster – not the monster itself but the examples and understandings the word provide for us. This shift also makes us reconsider a monster’s personhood. We’ve been looking into personhood as a concept a lot in our previous monster series, for example how Oogie-Boogie’s monstrosity was because it made us reconsider what it meant to be a person. Unlike Oogie-Boogie whose shift in the identity of personhood was meant to cause fear, reddit’s sympathetic monsters are meant to carve out a place of sympathy and connection. It shifts our understanding of what kind of person is worthy of our respect and admiration, and even who we consider on par with humans when it comes to personhood.

In our example of the demon summoning, we have our expectations shifted from seeing a demon to seeing a demon who wants to have their dog cared for. We can understand and connect to a demon who wants to have their dog cared for because we want to have our dogs cared for as well.

During our Anatomy of a Monster series, I talked about how monsters break the boundaries between categories. In many ways, sympathetic monsters more complicates boundaries than breaks them. The sympathetic monsters begin the process of humanising or personifying them, and thereby are making them gradually more and more un-monstrous. Unlike the conversation of personhood we had for Oogie-Boogie, the personhood given to the sympathetic monsters is not meant to cause fear, but rather to cause sympathy and personal connection.

The appeal of reddit’s sympathetic monsters is how these un-monsters flip the nature of the depiction of the monstrous. The typical categorical breaking of the monster is actually supporting the cultural and social boundaries and categories that have been built. Monsters have typically demonstrated differences between the Us and the Them for social and cultural groups, often used to further aspects of xenophobia, as philosopher Noël Carroll has pointed out. While some monsters do this kind of shifting, the shift back – which sympathetic monsters can do – can illicit new perspectives on old sentiments of fear and othering.

In one comic in which the sympathetic monster does not harm someone due to them having “other monsters” to fight, the monster shows empathy towards those battling problems such as depression. In this particular comic, depression becomes the monster, a more monstrous monster to wrestle with than the physical one. Its positioning of empathy shifts our societal definitions of monsters away from the physical breaking of boundaries to more complicated concepts of what is the Other.

The point is to get society to focus on both monsters and monstrosity in metaphorical or even human forms, rather than the physical demonic monsters we come to expect from the word. Because there are more monsters in the world than vampires and demons.

Disclosure: Please be aware that some of the links in this post are affiliate links. If you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission. The commission does not affect your purchase price, nor my willingness to include them. I include them because I believe they are worth supporting.

Cake and Food as Mythology

In the past, I’ve described myth as a narrative, or something similar to a narrative. So far, I’ve focused on the first part of this: the narrative. We’ve looked at stories woven into books or video games, but still ones which can be spoken just as easily as understood. But mythology does not necessarily always have to be written or spoken. Implicit Mythology, or mythology which exists in other forms, is also present in our world. And yes, I’ve dwelled on implicit mythology a couple of times, but each time focused on performance in one way or another. So let’s remedy that – let’s look at the storytelling and mythological power of cake.

There’s always been something tremendously amazing about cake.

For one, it’s a scientific marvel. Whoever was the first to mix crushed up wheat with eggs and milk is my hero. It’s one of those food stuffs, like bread, which makes you wonder who on earth first thought doing something like that was a good idea. Who put a bunch of living bacteria in flour and water and thought “it might look a bit iffy now, but I bet if I wait about three hours for it to get big, and then I bake it, it’ll be pretty good”. Cake is the culmination of centuries of human invention and thought, all poured into a soft batter and baked to perfection.

Cake is one of those things that carries so many things with it. It’s a requirement for celebrations, like weddings and birthdays and funerals. It makes people happy – it signals a joyous round of happy eatings. It’s as joyous on a fork as the laughter around us in the room. In fact, it brings the atmosphere of the celebration and the love around us into us, and damn is it light and fluffy and delicious. And because of its ability to feed love, it’s also just as suitable when times are not so good – when we’d rather curl up into a ball and cry through the night than face anyone around us. It brings us comfort, and eating it makes us realise that the world can’t be all that bad when it has something as amazing and delicious as cake in it.

Baked goods take time and effort to make – they cannot be dashed together with a fried egg on top. They take caring for and looking after. When we eat these baked goods, it’s impossible to not taste that care, to not feel it in the way it feels on the tongue. In this way, cake tells stories. It fills us with the emotional impact stories carry, and can even tell a narrative about the way we feel, how we feel, and why we feel – all in a bite of fluffy cake and creamy icing.

Cake can tell stories through how it tells the timing of its presence. Birthday cakes are present to mark the passing of a year. The sprinkles and sweetness to end the day fills us with the hopes of new years to come. Certain flavours also echo the necessary markers of time throughout the year: a lemon drizzle feels markedly more summer than winter, but a nice spiced ginger cake warms us on a winter’s evening. And yes, of course we can have ginger in summer and lemon in winter, but when we do, it brings something of that time to the one we’re in.

It can also mark locations. Sometimes, these locations can be broad and cultural. Black Forest Cake feels German in the way a Victoria Sponge will always be British. Whether we realise it or not, we’re tasting each part of the cake’s history in these places with every bite we have. We can taste how one culture interacted with another; feel the clashing of their spices and cooking techniques. Sometimes, one of these is lost in the memories of time, but we can always taste them, lingering on our tastebuds like a name we’ve forgotten.

To really see how cake can tell stories, we can look to other non-narrative forms of storytelling. The best to compare cake to is architecture. When we look at the buildings around us, we can learn something about their history. They tell the stories of who lived there during what times. They can tell us about past floods, or fires – markings on their bodies the lingering reminders of past traumas in not a dissimilar way to the human body. Cake, and other forms of food, hold onto their pasts, too. The techniques, the spices, the ingredients all combine to tell the stories of their past – from times of famine to times of war.

Food also tells the story of the now. I can live a life in the mouthful of a cheesecake, but I also impart the emotion and stories I spin into the food I create. The trials of new ways of doing it, the thoughts of the moment as I knead bread or mixed batter all become an ingredient I add to the mixture. Food tells the story of the person making, and the person eating. Its through these untold narratives that connections to others can be formed in similar ways to sitting round a campfire and telling stories. Our myths, both implicit and explicit, tell the stories of ourselves, whether that be in the gossip we share, or in the coffee we share while gossiping.

Cake fills the same role as narrative and myth. Like our myths focused on performance, cake is not something which can be written down. This post itself is a struggle to include all the intricate aspects of the crumb and what makes them not only delicious but remarkable. And in many ways, cake comes to life the same way mythology does. Myth exists in the performance, and is lived through the experiences of both the storyteller and the audience. Cake cannot live without the baker and the eater, and its in their interaction that cake takes on its true life.

And like mythology which shifts over time, or has multiple versions of just one story, cake, too, changes through its history. Many recipes can exist for the same cake, with minor alterations which reflect the context of the world the recipe maker lived in. Each of these variants tell a story in the same way as the written variants do. Each context is tasted as it may be heard.

Humans are all just storytelling machines – we are but narratives wrapped in flesh. These narratives can have many forms, from architecture, to performance, to the fluffiest piece of cake. Next time you find yourself gravitating to cake, think about what it is that drew you to it. What stories are being imprinted on your tongue with every bite, and what stories of yourself you also re-live as you eat.

The Anthropology of Love Island

I have said it once, and I will say it again, and I will shout it from every rooftop if I have to: reality television is fantastic. I don’t personally believe in the phrase “guilty pleasure” because I don’t think any pleasure should make you feel guilty about unless it hurts someone. Reality television is a plain old pleasure. But it can also be useful to budding anthropologists. I used to encourage students to go to public places and people-watch as a test run of their anthropological skills. Reality television is like this, but on a massive scale. I’ve mentioned it on podcasts before, that reality television is a great way to explore sociology and anthropology, so today I’m going to demonstrate what can be gleaned from an anthropological lens through what is arguably the biggest reality television show on right now: Love Island.

This is the first article I am posting on Medium. It’s free to read for a certain amount of reads, but will require a paid account after that. Blog posts here will be also posted on Medium for free, with an occasional post that is unique to Medium. You can read the rest of The Anthropology of Love Island on Medium, or by clicking here.

Simple Myths

A couple months ago, I discovered the subreddit Life of Norman. This is a storytelling subreddit, where different writers create posts which explore the life of a man called Norman – a regular man who lives an ordinary life. In fact, the subreddit describes Norman as a “remarkably unimportant individual”. Each story is a different aspect of normal life for Norman: “Norman Writes a Hate Note” was about when Norman grew furious at seeing a car taking up two parking spots; “Norman Buys Some Coke” details Norman’s trip to the grocery store and his choices of different forms of Coca-Cola; and “Norman Has a Headache” is exactly what you would expect.

So, what do simple narratives about an “unimportant individual” teach us about mythology?

Throughout my time with myths and studying myths, I have considered mythology to be narratives, or things similar to narratives, that individuals or a community uses to understand themselves or their world. Typically, the word “myth”, when not used to designate an untruth, calls to mind extravagant stories of extraordinary people.

But to define a myth by what it contains (extravagant adventures, superhuman beings, etc.) is to have a substantialist definition. I prefer, however, to view myth as something more functional. A narrative is far more than the elements it contains – a narrative is also doing something every time it is read, discussed or performed. Narratives affect people – they engage with the world around them. And with that view, myths do not necessarily have to hold extraordinary narratives to have an impact on the people who read them. Myths can also be simple, and these Myths of Simplicity can tell us a lot about what we find comfort in.

Today, we’re going to explore three different types of simple myths, and explain what it is that these myths tell us about ourselves and our world. To illustrate these, I’m choosing an example for each category which falls into the remit of a capitalistic worldview, but each type of simple myth approaches the concept in different ways.

The Myth of the Idealised Life

One type of simple myth is the presentation of the idealised life. This type of narrative may not be the best for telling around the fire, but is perfect for calming video games. In fact, the perfect example of this is Animal Crossing.

The newest instalment of Animal Crossing, New Horizons, launched in March just as much of the world was falling into lockdowns in their attempt to stop the spread of COVID-19. The result was an unprecedented rise in sales of Animal Crossing games, not because it was the only game on the market, but because of the calm relaxing nature of the game to help relieve the anxiety of the global pandemic.

Animal Crossing allows for an escape to an idealised life, where the problem of money is present but not damaging, and achievements and successes are not dependent on skill or expertise. A 5-star island, the highest ranking you can achieve in the game, is not dependent on the island being necessarily aesthetically pleasing, but only in having certain numbers of items, flowers or trees on the island. The aesthetics themselves are entirely up to the player.

The capitalist worldview still underlies Animal Crossing. In fact, the entire game is spent in a debt entirely forced upon the player by the banker racoon Tom Nook. But the debt never feels entirely crushing. There’s no interest built up over time, as there is outside the game, and the player can pay off the debt whenever they want (and if they want). The money earned in the game is also quite easy to find – it’s earned through catching bugs and fish. It also sometimes grows on trees (ah, if only I could find a real-life money tree).

Animal Crossing: New Horizons depicts for the player the idealised capitalist society. Everyone around you are cute animals who love you and give gifts freely, money is easily found, but people still endeavour to earn more money and increase their housing, clothing items, and decorations. It’s a nice escape from the real crushing debt, failing housing crises and, and global pandemics we have grown to know from our late capitalist reality.

The Myth of the Hard-Working Life

Striving to work hard is the narrative often repeated in capitalist countries: anyone can succeed if they simply work hard enough. If you’re struggling, it’s because you need to work harder, not because of the failing system around you. The “pulling yourself from your bootstraps” myth is a common one in this category.

The conception of the “American Dream” is also in this category: the story of the individual (often the white, heterosexual, cis-male) who fought from poverty to billionaire status. They succeeded not due to the inherent privilege of the systems, but because they worked hard.

Unsurprisingly, there are also video games, books, memoirs and many other elements of popular culture that fit this category of the Simple Myth. Because of the western obsession with this narrative – intensely so in the United States – popular culture is full of the wonderful narrative of how a work ethic can build a happy life.

Stardew Valley is perhaps the best example of this in contemporary video games, and an interesting one to look at due to its skewed way of using capitalism to beat capitalism. Stardew Valley is the story of a person who has become unhappy in their life working for a large, soulless corporation, and leaves everything behind to inherit an overgrown and run-down farm. Through hard work and perseverance, the player can transform the farm into a working, profit-making farm that can, in turn, save the small town its in from the evil corporation the player initially escaped from. Even though the true ending of the game is the defeat of Joja Corp, the player does so by same “hard work gets you everywhere” mentality that caused a corporation like Joja to arise in the first place.

Simple Myths of the Everyday

The simple myths that capture the every-day lived experience is captured in the Life of Norman. Like the Hard Work Myths, these typically do follow the lives of the cis-male, white heterosexual, because anything outside this purview is no longer considered the “typical” experience. These narratives glorify the lived experience of the typical day in capitalist society. The simplistic nature of the rise early, go to work, and go home to sleep mentality is a calming one due to the ritualistically routine nature. The surprises are the small ones like a slight headache, and the decisions are as basic as which type of Coke to buy at the shop. These narratives demonstrate to us that everything is fine, that the every day experience lived in the privileged corners of the middle-class are something to celebrate, and not something to feel soulfully crushed by.

Each of these types of the simple myths solidify the capitalist worldview they originate in through a variety of forms. The Myths of Simplicity re-establish the foundational culture – it glorifies the every-day lived experience of the world they come from. Simple myths are powerful because of their simplicity. They force us to focus on the experiences most basic to us in our society or culture, and to home in on the experience most shared. In societies like the United States or in Britain, these experiences are typically the middle-class, white experience. These myths help to demonstrate how engrained some institutions and systems are (such as capitalism) as well as which narratives proliferate to explain what it means to be a person in this time (white, male, financially well-off).

Myths of Simplicity can be fun to play, but they are also incredibly interesting to step back and really see what it is that is being celebrated, and which narratives are being silenced for the good of the simple, comfortable experience.

Thinking About Clothes

I’ve been thinking a lot about clothes recently. Not just because my financial position leaves me simply online-window shopping instead of doing actual retail therapy, but mostly because my work into cosplay has made me really stop and think about clothes in a way I hadn’t really done much of before. So today, I’m going to talk a bit about clothes, and the thoughts playing around in my head on the subject matter.

One of the most obvious sentences I’ve read in quite some time was one that went essentially like this: you can tell a lot about a person by their clothes. On first account, it seemed remarkably obvious. I spent most of my life worrying and stressing about this exact consideration. Teenage me agonized over clothes because of how much they were supposed to embody what made me me, and no teenager really knows who they are because at that point in life we’re changing so much. Our brains are suddenly beginning to find ways to think for themselves, and so we’re constantly considering what it is that makes us unique and special and not just echoing things we’re told to be thinking about from parents, family or even friends. And yet, we also want to fit in. We want to wear the clothes that others will recognise, and never want anyone to look at us and ask that dreaded question: “what on earth are you wearing?”

I went through a do-rag phase at one point. There are still lingering photos of me with a bandana wrapped around my head. This was around the point I blue-tinted glasses and dyed one small stripe of blue in my hair. I constantly vacillated between some jazzy perspective, with my blue hair and blue glasses – my hair straightened flat– to some over-the-top tom-boy who thought that a bandana round the head communicated my inability to be like “other girls”.

In these two perspectives of myself, you can see the influences which fought to be shown on every aspect of my body. I was embarking on a discovery of jazz music, a genre of music which spoke to my inner turmoil, especially as I was in an abusive relationship at the time. I loved this new thing of mine so much I wanted to embody it – wanted to wear leather jackets and blue glasses and talk about nothing but Billie Holiday. But I was also intensely aware of my inability to fit in. Other girls were talking about makeup, which I wouldn’t start wearing for another two or three years (the first day of which I still distinctly remember a friend making fun of my poorly applied eyeliner), or about their new-found crushes. Not that all girls were like that – it wasn’t until I was much older that I realised we were all perhaps pretending to be interested in things we weren’t simply for the art of “fitting in”. But these social perspectives of people-watching, and realising the complicated nature of what fitting in really means, didn’t come until after my first few anthropology classes in university.

Young Vivian rocking some blue-tinted glasses.

I have since learned every interest of mine doesn’t have to be represented in my fashion choices. I don’t have to wear every genre of music I enjoy, or have my glasses reflect my hobbies. But, in a way, they still do. I still enjoy wearing flares or boot-cut jeans for more reasons than I think they are most flattering; they also remind me subtly of the fashion choices of the flower-child scene I saw reflected in old pictures of my mother, a style I once tried to reflect when I first picked up Buddhism in high-school. I still sport a large collection of shoes and purses, only less than half of which I actually use on a regular occasion. This collection, like the makeup bag full of lipsticks and eyeshadow colours I seldom use, is important to me. It gives me the choice to be the person I feel on any particular day.

Just a few years ago, I got my first tattoo – the words from the One Ring wrapped around my upper left arm. This is perhaps the biggest display of my personal interests being inscribed on my body. But it goes to show just how intensely my own interests can be reflected in what I choose to wear.

Ernest Goffman wrote about what he described as “identity kits” – items or aspects of your identity you always keep on you. This can be the fact you always carry a book on you, or the necklace you never leave the house without, or your choice of jeans or shoes. They’re the aspects that make someone think of you, and that if someone else was to ever cosplay as you, what they’d inevitably put on. Reflecting back, I can remember my past identity kits, like my bandana or my blue glasses. But it made me reflect on what my identity kit is now, and what that says about me.

Shifting to cosplay (as that’s where my brain was at in this research), I considered how interesting it is that these characters do not have a say in what their identity kit is. This is decided by us – the audience – who has considered what makes a character quintessentially them. But, on second thought, that’s always how it works. I’m sure back when I was teaching, my students would have certain considerations of what was quintessentially me. Maybe they would recognize my backpack, or the colourful pens I used for notetaking. But maybe they would pick up on something I don’t think as much about – not because its not important to me, but because it is so much me that I don’t have to dwell on the thought of its existence. I think of how my husband always considers Zelda earrings and my hair braided to one side as a quintessential Vivian-look, but for me it was simply what was easiest for my hair that was too thick and long to wear in a bun without hurting my head.

From a mythic perspective, clothes tell stories. I’ve mentioned before about the role of implicit mythology (in a few different forms, actually). Clothes are a form of implicit mythology. Clothing is a tool we use to communicate ourselves to others without ever having to open our mouths. My hair, my makeup, my jewellery, my clothes, are all part of the communication of self to others, and each aspect communicates aspects of myself and my story. Dressing as someone else is an important signature of the art of dress-play (cosplay, drag, etc.) because the clothing signals who we are.

Definitions and word choices associated with clothing can be complicated and can shift depending on what we’re talking about. What’s the difference between clothing and costume, for example? There’s two aspects or definitions of costume, but one always stands out: a costume hides aspects of your identity. If a costume hides your identity, at what point are our clothing choices simply a costume? The way I dress when simply at home with my husband is different than when I leave the house, and both of these are different than if I were to, say, go to a job interview. If I wear certain clothes to hide my tattoo when I go to a job interview – with the explicit purpose of hiding it – is my outfit a costume? The art of dressing, in any circumstance, is the art of emphasizing or de-emphasizing aspects of your own identity through your clothing. Its an act of play – we are all just cosplaying the character we want to portray ourselves as in that moment.

So the singular phrase that you can tell a lot about someone from their clothes is both more direct, as well as far more complicated, than it initially seems. Clothes are complicated, and the humans wearing them are more so. Where I am at the moment is considering clothes as an intricate form of mythology and storytelling which individuals play with every time they change outfits.