the stories we tell
Last week, we got a chance to see Hadestown, which is basically the Orpheus & Euridice story but with jazz and a Depression Era- NOLA feel. It worked beautifully, especially some of the staging during Orpheus' journey to the underground to an industrial hellscape overseen by Hades (and by extention Persephone, who, many millennia into marriage, spends much of the musical drunk and unhappy with her underground husband) One year, in her absence, he decided to start mining the Underworld. When he entices Euridice into the world below, he does so out of desire alone, but also out of her longing for warm beds and full bellies, only to be met with back breaking labor and totalitarianism. When Orpheus tries to rescue her, he falls prey to insecurities that cost him his wife forever.
As we watched, my poems about the Greeks and the Iphigenia story were fresh in my head from an afternoon spending some time with it, as well as a discussion the previous night about how Ari Aster's Heredity is, for all intensive purposes, a very Greek story about destiny and family trauma. How so many stories that aren't Greek in origin in the least are basically, down at the bones, part of the same story structures we've been working with from the beginning in Western culture (and maybe just a little why we tend to fuck it all up on occasion.) It's easy for me, when watching something, to say that it's Shakespearean in nature (and it may just be testament to the playwright how he managed to encapsulate so many dynamics in his plots.) The Greeks are more difficult to suss out. You can take things like hubris and pride, meddling gods, duty and honor, and so many stories could be compared, and correctly, aligned with Greek themes.
I also think of this when I think of stories, and how whatever their form--be it books, tv., movies, games--how we line up for them. How we spend our hours up to our knees in them , even if you're tastes are less than erudite and you're only watching reality shows (which are surely a mix of happenstance and scripted story/characters even if that's not the intention.) When we hit up a double feature at the drive-in or lately in the theater, we are packing in for a night of stories, even if they are just trashy horror amusements. When we pick up a book or watch the same comfort television series for the fifth time. All stories.
It also got me thinking about the Greeks and horror, which seems like it never quite needed to be a separate genre surely, when so much violence and death rattled inside those stories. Women being raped by swans, pursued by violent or vengeful gods, dismemberment, torture. Only the Grimm versions of fairytales may be darker. Even more modern interpretations, like Frankenstein being, at its heart, a Prometheus story and setting the stage for all gothic literature henceforth. I, for one, return to these stories again for their violence and horror but also as a way of understanding.
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