Page 213 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Conclusion

Myths and the media: Medusa

We have learned in school the story of the Gorgon Medusa
whose face, with its huge teeth and protruding tongue, was so
horrible that the sheer sight of it turned men and beasts into
stone. When Athena instigated Perseus to slay the monster, she
therefore warned him never to look at the face itself but only at
its mirror reflection in the polished shield she had given him.
Following her advice, Perseus cut off Medusa’s head with the
sickle which Hermes had contributed to his equipment. The
moral of the myth is, of course, that we do not, and cannot, see
actual horrors because they paralyze us with blinding fear; and
that we shall know what they look like only by watching images
of them which reproduce their true appearance. These images
have nothing in common with the artist’s imaginative rendering
of an unseen dread but are in the nature of mirror reflections.
Now of all the existing media the cinema alone holds up a mirror to
nature. Hence our dependence upon it for the reflection of happenings
which would petrify us were we to encounter them in real life. The film
screen is Athena’s polished shield.
(Kracauer 1965: 305; emphasis added)
Kracauer uses the Medusa myth to make a clear distinction between
‘the artist’s imaginative rendering of an unseen dread’ and ‘mirror
reflections’. The traditional role of the artist of then (Benjamin’s
notion of art’s contemplation-inducing qualities and Kracauer’s
characterization of an art ‘permeated by cognition’) is now sup-
planted by the mirror reflections of sophisticated modern media
technologies. Kracauer sees film’s empowering potential in the way it
produces images that: ‘beckon the spectator to take them in and
thus incorporate into his memory the real face of things too
dreadful to be beheld in reality’ (1960: 306). Like Benjamin’s hope
that the masses would absorb media images, rather than being
absorbed by traditional art forms, for Kracauer too, there is the
hope that the spectator is in control of the process. The ability to
view such images as those that came out of the liberation of the Nazi
death camps means that: ‘we redeem horror from its invisibility
behind the veils of panic and imagination. And this experience is
liberating in as much as it removes a most powerful taboo’ (1960:
306). The taboo that Kracauer refers to is the threat of inhibition in

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