One of my favorite TV shows ever was Northern Exposure, an hour of humor, quirkiness and cosmic insight that has never been matched or copied as far as I know. I have read that it is to be revived soon with some of the old characters, and I await with hope and trepidation. Hope, that it is as good as before, and trepidation, in that it doesn’t fall into the Politically Correct trap that it already skirted at times back in the early 90’s, when PC was still not in full bloom. Towards the end of the series (which is typical of endings – recall Ellen, MASH and Rosanne, among others), there were some PC “teaching moments,” but those are not the shows that hang in my mind as being especially unsatisfactory. PC is more boring than bothersome, in my opinion. Rather, the most disappointing was one that had Ed as the central character, the half-Indian man-child whose greatest ambition was to become a film director despite his humble and extremely rural background. Here’s how it went down:
We find Ed walking the streets of small-town Cicely, Alaska with his camera, acting as a reverse anthropologist by asking whites (Euro-Americans) what their greatest myths, as in creation myths and such, are. Everyone scratches his or her head – Jeez, I don’t know, they say, or, hey, what about the Big Bang? There’s evolution, too, and … no one really knows of any. White Man has outgrown or destroyed his myths, and Ed concludes that he is now left with only one thing: the movies. His myths of his origins and place in the world are now made primarily in Hollywood.
There was no moralizing or shaking of heads about this in the episode. Rather, it was simply taken as fact. It is now our movies that give us our role models and our sense of self. Science has taken care of the rest – creation, development, and even, for many, the end game (that is, the meaning of death – which turns out to be nothing). There is, then, no need for a god or spiritual insight beyond what the movies tell us: which might be, say, to be tough and manly like John Wayne or Rick in Casa Blanca, or feminine and assertive, even unto death, like Thelma and Louise. The greater meaning of life, they tell us, is to be found in a brave pessimism, a Beau Gest, a noble existentialism, a great sigh unto fate like that once found in the drinking halls of the Vikings, but without the magic – except for the kind of celluloid juggling that allows for the actions of superheroes and blood-drooling demons.
Hollywood magic and Hollywood mystery. They are both so unsatisfying, as we adults know, for they are indeed manmade – and not only manmade, but made for profit, or at the very least, made to impress some other mere mortals in the film industry. They are not divinely inspired, as are the great myths of cultures, and it is obvious. We can guess at most turns of events, and more, we can understand almost without thought exactly what “deep meaning” is meant by the script writers (although I am still trying to find the point to “Looking for Mister Goodbar”). With real myths, we are stretched beyond our limits, for that is their purpose – to point us beyond ourselves. Movies, on the other hand, are only ourselves looking back in the mirror, examples of extreme cultural narcissism that are hardly the stuff of godly visions.
It is upsetting to find, through this episode with Ed, that Hollywood writers and directors and even some actors see themselves as our Moses and Apostles. Fortunately, most of us who live beyond the shadows of the Hollywood hills do not believe this. Most people are not satisfied with science’s answer to the meaning of life – which is nothing – nor with its explanations of our origins – which also amounts to nothing. Most people do not think that existence is only our persona’s brief appearance on the stage of life. But Ed is inadvertently right about one thing: if we see our traditional myths at all - those would be spelled out in the Bible for the majority – they are often seen as allegory. This form of understanding is a part of our historical maturation process, but with it comes a lot of growing pains.
And here is where the writers of Northern Exposure show a certain genius that they perhaps were not even aware of.
Through Ed, we learn that perhaps we have taken our modern wisdom too far. Science tells us, and correctly, that the universe was not made literally in 6 days (in the beginning, what are even days?) Eve was probably not first produced from the rib of man; and Noah - what of his Ark and the animals, and what of Jonah in the whale? We turn, then, to allegory. Creation in the Bible, after all, roughly followed the trajectory of evolution, and the Ark, well, there was a big flood at the end of the last ice age. And Jonah – we are often swallowed up by our worries, and it is a pretty good story for the pre-Disney era.
Our troubles begin when we turn ALL of our “myths” into allegory. If creation can be interpreted as allegory, so could the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, or even the resurrection of Jesus, which the original Peter admitted would make of him and the Apostles the worst liars of all time. This is what many of us have done – reasoned our myths out of existence by allowing the nose of common reason into the tent of uncommon revelation. We do grow by turning the fanciful into allegory, but we miss the very point of our existence by doing so to that which allegory was not intended. The slavery of the Jews under Egypt was no simple allegory; nor was the crucifixion of Christ. And neither was the resurrection, as impossible as that is…but that is the point. Simply put, we must leave that which is at the core of truth as it is, even if and especially if it is beyond our common reason. The trouble is in finding where we should draw the line.
The line is to be drawn, I believe, where the allegory steals from the mystery. It is no less a mystery to me that the earth was created and populated over millions of years rather than in six days, but it deflates everything to nothing if Christ were just a philosopher who was killed, and whose followers then lied about his resurrection, reappearance, the descent of the Holy Spirit, and so on for effect. It is at this point that, instead of getting closer to the truth, we have pushed it away - creating, as I found it, the flat ending to that particular episode of Northern Exposure. Are we really that dumb, that numbed, that we have moved beyond primitive superstition to embrace something without any real mystery or truth in it at all – something far more harmful than mere superstition?
Maybe I am wrong about that episode after all. Maybe it was the writers’ most profound effort, buried like myth in its subtleties. For as Ed walked off with his conclusion – that movies are our myths, our new cultural truths – it might have been that the thud I felt in my stomach was intended by some very wise people, people far wiser than the average Hollywood writer. Maybe they had meant to show us truth as the great artists and prophets did: not by narrow logic, but by poetic example, by an act or story that goes beyond the brain to the soul, bringing us closer to reality than (common) reality itself. Maybe they meant to show us the danger of falling off the wagon of wisdom by drinking too deeply from the jug of contemporary intelligence. Maybe they meant to show us that, just as we have diminished primitive myth in our cultural arrogance, so are we in danger of doing the same to our own, destroying our traditional path to truth, leaving us with nothing but vapid entertainment offered more for profit than for anything else.
Could be. My apologies, then, to Northern Exposure. May you soon enlighten us all again.