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Professor Wilcoxen
English 306
Manuel Castro
June 11, 2007


Contemporary Storytelling


“I know for a fact that imagination and hope have kept me alive through the roughest times of me life. Reality is brutal and it will kill you, make no mistake about it, but our tales, our creatures and our heroes have a chance to live longer than any of us” (Guillermo Del Toro). Contemporary storytelling, fantasy and science fiction especially have evolved into not just fantastical stories of instant magic and power but life affirming tales of morality and wisdom, with the power to dispel our fears and doubts while promoting our individual heroic moments. To this effect we must understand why heroes are important, and how there myths and metaphors relate to us. We also will need to illustrate the difference between entertainment and true contemporary storytelling.
“Interestingly, for such fantastical tales, they reject enigma, unpredictability and wonder: the students at Hogwarts have only to learn spells, like lessons, or acquire the right brand of weapon, to become lords of creation” (Warner 284). Warner, suggest that contemporary storytelling gives no realistic examples of power. Power for students of Hogwarts is as simple as learning the right words or getting wand from a local shop. The words for spells aren’t earned through any kind of work, the only have to be memorized. There isn’t any evidence that the students must earn through discipline or deed, other then academic nuances, the power they are granted each year. The other talismans in the series, (wands, flying broom sticks, etc.) are given freely for those who can afford them; you never have to prove you can handle them responsibly. The wand, though more versatile, is a weapon in the same capacity that a gun is in real life, though Harry Potter doesn’t have a 3 day waiting period to buy one, while his background is checked. There isn’t a genuine system of checks to make sure that the intent of the wands or any other powerful tools used. The students are given gifts of power but not with any kind of understanding that it is some thing they earned by proving moral or ethics.
No checks of power in Harry Potter do mirror our own world in some small part. The relying on magic in Harry Potter is never questioned. People use magic to solve nearly every problem, illustrating magic as a crutch rather then a tool. In the real world some have made the same distinction for technology. As technology encroaches on more and more of our daily routine people begin to not only rely on technology but become dependent on it. The cultural response is to redevelop older methods of life, becoming more self reliant. Harry Potter never asks whether the uses of magic should even be done. There is never an alternative suggested, and the culture is never questioned, magic is always good, another spell, trick, or broomstick is always better.
Human’s quest for power has always been a motif in fantasy. In Lord of the rings, the power of each ring has the possibility corrupting each human that gets one. The Ring is a symbol of power not in of it self but a symptom of absolute power or control. Our current trends in technology reflect this cautionary tale as well. The Rings were created to preserve Middle Earth, our own technologies intentions are always to preserve and extend the natural human life. The Elves in Tolkien are like our own Union of Concerned Scientist. The Union has actively suggested absence on certain technologies that could possibly do as much harm as good. “The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge” (Drexler 172). Though enablers in developing the means of creation and destruction, the Elves strive to not only correct there mistakes but prevent them as well. The Ring and its power were creating enemies out of friends and destruction out of more creative enablers. Destroying The Ring would stop current influence but destroying Sauron and with the Elvin rings leaving, made sure that no new rings could ever create the influence of power again. A sharp contrast to the Wizard world of Harry Potter.
“In the Harry Potter books, Lord Voldemort comes back to life again and again. These Myths ultimately grant more power to their villains than they can ever take away” (Warner 284). Because of the conceptual truths about Lord Voldemort, his soul’s rebirth in attempt to regain power, we can consider him to be a zombie. “That class of beings who at some point were living creatures, have died, and have come back such that they are not presently at rest” (Vargas 39). Our most basic fear is exploited, that of death and dying. Death is an easy to understand fear, when our relationship with death and the dead is challenged though it is a more primal fear. Here our villain travels between life and death in the familiar form of the undead but with different consequences. Never the less our villain is still a representation of death and the undead. Most often these travel arrangements deal in abjection, and double abjection as the powers of Harry himself are parallels of Voldemort’s. Abjection is both inside and outside our bodies, as much of the decay we try to dispose of from our own body’s abjection presets within us (Cole 189).
The superhero and villains and have changed vastly in the last century. In a recent story arc one the comic book’s most powerful hero was brain washed. Superman had been compromised. This rogue hero could hold the world ransom at will. His cotemporary, Wonder Woman found out who was behind this control and killed him. She made sure that the threat couldn’t reoccur. She exemplified one of the new motifs in storytelling. Win once or else fight it again. The origins of this motif are in Orson Scott Card’s Enders Game. “I have to win this fight now, for all time or else I’ll fight it everyday and it will get worse and worse” (Card 7). Superheroes today have learned hard lessons in stopping villains. The Punisher, a popular superhero in the Marvel Comics universe is based on the motif entirely. The Punisher kills his villains, and the villains don’t come back to life.