Cultural Review Film and Culture the Grimm

Cultural Review

Film and Culture

The Grimm brothers began collecting folktales around 1807 and began a legacy that has been ingrained in popular culture. Although the tales that they collected were representative of the culture at the time, the brothers worked to canonize some of the archetypes that were present in their day. Instead of seeing them as just random works of literature, the brothers were able to identify various themes which served as the main focuses on their fairy and folk tale. These themes seemed to be generally available in the stories that the two individuals documented just as they are also present today. These archetypical characters which formed can make one wonder whether it is the culture that shapes the story or whether it is the stories that shape the culture.

Very few Grimm's Fairy Tales deviate from the stereotypes of the hero, villain, and damsel in distress that were present in the folklore of their time. The hero goes through a fairly narrow and somewhat predefined journey in which they must face their own mortality yet find the courage to excel in the face of danger. While the villain on the other hand, once human, slowly descends into something other than human. This character generally morphs into some kind of machine, monster, or some other figure that barely is representative of its previous human form. This paper will apply Grimm's archetypes to three popular films and modern culture; Darth Vader, Frankenstein, and Tyler Durden from the movie Fight Club. It was found that each of these characters fits the cultural archetypes transcribed by the Grimm brothers exceptionally well.

Discussion

The novel Fight Club was published in 1996 which later became a motion picture. Fight Club is perpetually cited to be one of the most cult related stories of its time. It shares many similarities with Frankenstein as well as Star Wars. In the three stories the authors tend to dwell in the same focused villain archetypes with use dark settings and grotesque styles of presentation to illustrate the characters. In Fight Club, for example, the story follows an individual, whose name is never revealed throughout the duration of the novel which is intended to portray the characters inhumanity (similar to Frankenstein and Vader). The story also deals with his obsession obtaining power, along with the struggle involved with the process of trying to obtain power.

In fight club, the character realizes that his existence means nothing and that whatever meaning that he used to define his life by, was truly meaningless in the end. He began to take a rather reductionist approach to the problem of the meaning of life. Furthermore, despite his hard work and determination, there is little chance of avoiding death and the world will go on as if he never existed. This existentialist dilemma is also present in the archetype as well as in all three villains. While in Fight Club the main character goes through a psychological transformation, in Star Wars and Frankenstein the character actually goes through a physical transformation as well. The only physical transformation in the Fight Club story occurs within the character's own mind as they have a mental projection of their self as another character; who in the movie is played by Brad Pitt.

The inner struggle of the villain archetype can also be illustrated by Darth Vader who is said to be destined to be that strongest Sith of all times. In "Star Wars: A New Hope" they say that "Darth Vader is mostly machine now, more than human." The character begins to take a megalomaniacal path, in which he becomes power-hungry in his character, which also corresponds to his evolution from human to machine and descent into the quintessence of evil. Many parallels can definitely be drawn to the story of Frankenstein in this descent.