Page 234 - A Handbook Genre Studies in Mass Media

MYTHIC APPROACH

Myths tell stories that explain the stages of life that make up the
journey from birth to death. Thus, myths follow the maturation of the
individual, from dependency through adulthood, though maturity, and
then to the exit. Bill Moyers observes, “We all need to understand death
and to cope with death, and we all need help in our passages from birth
to life and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal,
to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are.” 8
In like fashion, many popular genres focus on the different stages of life
common to human beings: birth, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. To
illustrate, the horror genre taps into the infancy stage of development. Films
like The Blair Witch Project put individuals in touch with their “inner” child,
who remains fearful of forces that lurk in the dark. Peter Olafson recalls:

When I was growing up outside Boston, I thought a monster lived in our
attic. Thirty-some years later and 3,000 miles away, that monster has been
brought back to life by Blair Witch Volume 1: Rustin Parr. In so doing, it
raises a useful question about explicit and implicit threats within games.
Namely: How many monsters are too many?
Our attic had room for only one. . . .
My fears reached a summit one night when, with my family out for the
evening, the bulb winked out as I rummaged in the playroom closet.
The darkness was almost total, but I seemed to see a region of denser
darkness at the mouth of the cave. Then the darkness moved. I went down
the attic stairs in two long jumps.
At the bottom, I turned around. There was nothing there—just empty
stairs leading up to an office and a playroom.
My parents, returning, wondered why every light in the house had
been turned on.
Last year’s hit independent thriller The Blair Witch Project thrives on
this same faceless, timeless fear. 9
Genric programs provide a visualization of this universal experience.
Even though few individuals have been possessed by Satan like Regan
in The Exorcist (1973), the audience can relate to the feelings of terror
and uncertainty experienced by her as they sort through the chaos within
their own lives.
The genre of the teen drama focuses on the theme of the adolescent’s
assertion of independence, which is characteristic of the adolescent stage
of development. Thus, in the popular teen drama O.C., the protagonists,
Marissa, Ryan, Seth, and Summer, face the same issues of identity as
appear in the Greek myth of Oedipus. Rollo May notes:

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