NORTHERN EXPOSURE AND MYTHOLOGY OF THE GLOBAL COMMUNITY
Joseph Campbell in the Public Broadcasting System series
The Power of
Myth intimated that modern industrial societies face so
many social
problems because they fail to embrace a powerful mythology
or ethos
that informs individuals how to find a place in that
society. Guides
for understanding and behavior that people evoke today are
based on
hunting and pastoral myths, "the old time religion"
designed for
discrete communities in another time for another people
with another
set of values. With little relevance to current
circumstances,
lifestyles and knowledge, Campbell said, these old myths
fail to
perform their intended function: that is to allow us to
make sense of
the world and our experiences in it and, more importantly,
to find a
way to "the spiritual potentialities of the human
life"(5). Myths must
be appropriate to their times, he said, if they are to
relate
individuals to their natures and to the natural world, as
well as to a
community. "The moral order has to catch up with the moral
necessities
of actual life in time, here and now," Campbell said (13).
While an
effective modern myth would deal with what all myths of
all times have
dealt with--the maturation of the individual from birth to
death--it
must expand the traditional sociological base and
function. "The only
mythology that is valid today is the mythology of the
planet,"
Campbell said. "We need myths that will identify the
individual not
with his local group but with the planet"(22-3).
Although Campbell does not deal with how to transmit the
new myth or
where it will come from, television seems an obvious tool
for both.
Daily it tells us about ourselves. Daily it shapes what we
will think
and become, as evident in the effects of commercial
advertising, news,
public service messages, and the stories told through
comedy and
drama. As more and more of us around the globe hook up to
television,
from the smallest rustic place to the largest urban city,
we become
linked to and affected by each other through this medium
and its
stories. The community's elders, the principal
storytellers of old who
relay the myths that teach us how to find a place in
society, give way
to popular mass media.
The CBS television series, Northern Exposure, takes on the
challenge
of developing a modern global mythology in a fictional
setting that
is, ironically, geographically isolated. Its mythmaking
process takes
ideas from old myths, juxtaposes them with each other, and
then
synthesizes the point of the myths in its own plot: the
Hegelian
dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Thus, the
old myths
are redesigned to become more suitable for the twentieth
century. In
Northern Exposure's mythic village of Cicely, Alaska, we
see elements
of the mythic early America, cooperatives in the
church-centered
villages of New England, the independence of the prairies,
and the
ragged individualism of the mythic west. We glimpse at the
old Myth of
the Garden that spurred many forebearers across the
continent in
search of Eden, the quest in many religions where we might
realize, as
Campbell says, that we are one with all and one with the
spirit (107).
Northern Exposure's episodes demonstrate how Cicelians
reach beyond
family, nationality, religious community, and linguistic
community to
the whole of earth and humankind. In Cicely, the new
mythology takes
into account Native Americans, African-Americans,
non-Christians,
women, and everyone left out of the old American myths.
Northern
Exposure experiments with an ideal place where we can find
unity in
cultural diversity, individual freedom in community
cooperation, and
individual growth through social participation.
We use myth here in the Aristotlean sense of "mythos,"
which roughly
translates to our idea of plot, or story. Underlying the
plot, its
raison d'etre, is the theme. The themes are what Campbell
means when
he discusses similarities in world myth. For example,
creation/destruction is a common theme. Shiva in Hindu
myth is both
destroyer and creator, as is YHWH in Judaism. In
Christianity, a
convert dies to sin to be resurrected to a better life.
The message is
the same; the vessel for conveying the message is
different.
Northern Exposure plays with the same themes, sometimes
using various
mythic tales with similar plots but ultimately for a
different end. In
one episode, for example, the leading female character,
Maggie
O'Connell, meets a tall, handsome, young man with long
blond hair who
lives in a cave and can shift his shape between bear and
man. The
episode's relationship to the Alaska Tlingit myth of "The
Girl Who
Married the Bear" comes instantly to mind. In the Tlingit
tale, a
maiden comes upon a good-looking man, who is really a
bear, whom she
eventually marries. This is not the end of the myth, but
it is the
relevant part to the Northern Exposure episode.
The episode--with its blond young man who lives in a cave
and brews
mead, and its setting in Cicely, a garden of sorts in the
last
frontier--also suggests Celtic myth and the Arthurian
legends.
"Arthur" means bear (Artorious, Latin and cf. Arcturus),
and Camelot
was the "garden" in the legend. The association is
surface. The
underlying meaning, however, is burial and resurrection,
which bears
have long symbolized. Maggie, who thought she was somehow
responsible
for the death of her previous boyfriends, in this episode,
begins to
lose her fear of intimacy and is resurrected to a new life.
The Merging of Real Worm and Ideal Place
Northern Exposure, which premiered in summer 1990, begins
with the day
of reckoning for Joel Fleishman, a quintessential Jewish
New Yorker
who had borrowed $125,000 from the State of Alaska with
the promise
that he would practice medicine in an Alaska community
following his
graduation from Columbia Medical School. Joel arrives in
the remote
bush village of Cicely with inveterate notions about
culture and
civilization, but episode by episode he finds them all
challenged by
the new setting, people, lifestyles, sentiments, and
viewpoints. Here,
the show's creators--Joshua Brand and John Falsey--have
the urban,
opportunistic, patronizing, neurotic Eastern doctor
encountering the
laid-back, self-reliant, cooperative, open-minded Western
country
folks who give as much credence to folklore as they do to
modern
science. Joel considers himself far more knowledgeable
than these
rural hicks and, despite his more "civilized" background,
just as
capable when it comes to fending off danger and surviving
the
elements. As if listing credentials, he says in one
episode: "I've
walked down 42nd Street at midnight.... I've stiffed
cabbies."
Yet for all that he has seen and experienced, Joel's
understanding and
appreciation of life remain superficial. Although reared
in the
nation's most populated city, Joel is uncomfortable around
people
except as objects of study. Although he often proclaims
Judaism as his
religion, science takes precedence. His scientific
curiosity sometimes
pries open his mind and heart, but his skepticism and
suspicion
usually dominate. Ironically, he is confronted with issues
of humanity
and democracy because of his roles as doctor and community
leader. He
becomes an example of the hero who blunders into
adventure. His life
in the city and training as a doctor have made him ready
for this
adventure in Cicely. Despite his usual behavior, he is a
good man, and
the audience often feels the straggle of his progress more
than he.
Joel illustrates for us that science alone, his religion,
will not
serve him or society. Science will give way to a belief
system that
incorporates science and religion, the natural and the
supernatural,
as they once were.
In contrast to Joel, Cicely's different kinds of people of
different
temperaments, heritage, and religion have a much more
encompassing
view of community, life, and the cosmos. They recognize
the need for
tolerance and harmony: tolerance because many
cultures--native tribes,
Russian, French, Jew, Japanese, African-American,
Anglo-Saxon, to name
a few--come together in this one place; and harmony
because the people
here in this remote, isolated place cannot escape either
the radiance
or danger of both its wilderness and civilization. In
Cicely, enough
trouble comes from the elements and so the residents try
to get along.
They try to practice mutual acceptance, love, and respect,
not just
for physical survival, but also for the spirit. Thus, the
journey
inward in order to experience rapture leads to the journey
outward to
find connection with, and a place in, the cosmos. As in
all mythic
tales, the individual's journey inward takes a public path
that
requires help of others and experience of both good and
bad.
When Ed Chigliak, the town's film-buff teenager, says a
250-year-old
spirit is sitting next to him at The Brick restaurant/bar,
the folks
at the bar accept him at his word. Sure it's possible. Why
not? Chris
Stevens, the town's radio DJ and unofficial spiritual
leader, even
seeks the spirit's advice on how to restore his voice that
a woman
stole. When the cure is said to be sex with Maggie, she
tries to
oblige. When Joel throws a temper tantrum, the townspeople
do not
retaliate but ignore him until he gets over it, trusting
that he
eventually will come to his senses. When powerbroker and
former
astronaut Maurice Minniefield rejects his Korean son
"because he is
not white," no one preaches or condemns. Instead Chris
helpfully
points out that such feelings are not instinctive, but
cultural.
"Culture is learned behavior," Chris tell the puzzled
Maurice. "You
can unlearn it." In Cicely, everybody knows everybody's
business and
has an opinion on it, but "there is never any intent to
hurt or to
expose," Joshua Brand told New York magazine (Kasindorf
48).
The people of Cicely rarely plow ahead in their own
self-interest, but
will call a town meeting whenever another's rights are
involved. They
confer about what to do with the body of the frozen 19th
century
Frenchman and whether to succumb to their curiosity and
pry open the
package that arrives in town addressed to someone unknown.
Even
outsiders warrant love and respect. When a stranger leaves
a baby in
Joel's office, everyone takes turns caring for her. Soon
the mother
returns, and Marilyn Whirlwind, the receptionist, readily
gives up the
baby. Joel is livid. "What kind of mother was that? Leaves
a baby in a
strange place with a bunch of strangers .... How do we
know she's not
going to do it again?" Marilyn knows: "She won't." Marilyn
knows what
the mother knew when she left the baby in Joel's office:
"She knew
we'd take care of her," Marilyn tells Joel.
In this one short scene, Joel comes face to face with the
cultural
differences of the real world and the ideal place. In New
York or most
any city, leaving a baby in a strange place, even with the
intent that
it would be only temporary, would constitute neglect. Real
world
authorities might justifiably suspect, as Joel does, that
the mother
might again leave the child, possibly at "some truck stop
gas station
or at an overlook by the side of the road," as Joel says.
It would be
up to the anonymous authorities to do something. In
Cicely, however,
no one assumes the worst about the mother or anyone else
for that
matter. Trust is inherent. Cicely's townspeople trust that
the mother
has a reason for leaving suddenly, and she trusted them to
take
responsibility for the child. Cicelians assume their
responsibility
without question, complaint, or legislation. No group need
advocate
its rights, protect its turf, or mandate its duties,
because the
rights, respect, and responsibility already exist.
As far as they have advanced on the road of trials,
however, the
people of Cicely remain less than perfect. Joel is not the
only one in
Cicely who faces moral dilemmas and slips on the way to a
solution.
Holling and Chris have gone on drunken benders over their
misspent
youth, Marilyn has agonized over choices between love and
career, and
Maurice has often put ambition and pride before
consideration of
others. Maggie has punched Joel--not once, but several
times--which
eventually culminated in a ferocious consummation of their
relationship. Even Ed, the most innocent of characters,
has betrayed a
confidence and suffered the pangs of conscience. The show
displays
human beings who make mistakes, who occasionally are
drunkards,
thieves, and ruffians, who can be selfish, rude, and
condescending.
Yet their inherent goodness remains, which all see despite
the
momentary outward lapses. Like the symbols of ying and
yang, which
represent the male and female principles with light and
dark inside a
single circle with a small circle of light on the dark
side and a
small circle of dark on the light side, people are good
and bad and
everything in between. The Western idea of opposites do
not apply in
this television series, and that leaves the characters
free to grow in
all directions. While we might look upon missteps and
errors as "bad,"
these characters grow beyond their problems and their
errors, learning
and applying the lessons as they move to the next trial.
The focus is
on the process, the continuum, the movement toward rapture.
While the show may seem like a revisit to an idealized
1960s, it is
not mere re-enactment. The sixties slogan of "sex, drags,
and rock 'n
roll" has been redrafted. Chris plays rock and roll, but
he adds
multicultural music. Sex is more loving and intimate, and
no one is a
drug addict. Peace, love, brotherhood, and sisterhood
dominate, but
there also are quarrels and lawsuits. We are back to the
earth, but
the earth needs cleaning up. If the sixties represented a
return to a
pastoralism of new starts, release from urban problems, and
rediscovered democracy, then Northern Exposure's Cicely
represents the
last chance in America's last frontier. The journey is
both outward
towards others and inward towards the realization that all
ideologies
and theologies are one. Bliss comes from the inward
journey and
informs the outward body's journey how to act. Alaska is
the symbol of
both journeys.
Alaska is crucial to Northern Exposure because of its
isolation.
Certainly there are rural, rugged, and remote places in
Montana, the
Dakotas, and Wyoming, but they are too near to many
external
distractions to represent the spiritual journey inward.
They all are
within a day or two's drive to someplace else, to New
York's theater
district, Ohio's major league baseball parks, or
California's beaches.
In Alaska, however, escape from anything is difficult,
from moral
dilemmas to the daily struggle to survive. Only a few
major roads
exist and only one of them leads out--to Canada. That is
why Alaskans
refer to every place outside the state as "Outside" with a
capital
"O;" it's a proper name, designating a specific place.
Alaska also represents liberation and possibilities. The
land is
virgin, mostly uninhabited, unbounded, and open to dreams
of better
lives and a better society of diversity and harmony. In
Northern
Exposure's Alaska, we have a sense of place so broad that
it expands
beyond the frontier to the urban centers. The landscape
brings the
daily struggle of life and death to a personal level to
incorporate as
well the old hunting myths of the native Americans and the
pastoral
myths of the Americans who come from the lower 48 states.
Within the
landscape, as well as in the hearts and minds of its
inhabitants, we
have the ideas of creation/destruction and
birth/death/resurrection.
The underlying principle of Northern Exposure's developing
myth
remains the same as the hunting, pastoral, and planting
myths but is
unique for two reasons. First, it is a truly United
States' myth
because it finds unity in cultural diversity and in the
infinite
variety of human emotions and thoughts, "e pluribus unum,"
out of
many, one. Northern Exposure views the world not like a
melting pot,
but like a pot of stew in which individuality and autonomy
need not be
threatened or obliterated by the "other." Northern
Exposure offers a
benign woodland and a welcoming town populated with
different kinds of
people who are a lot like us. Second, it demonstrates that
this
variety, in a supportive urban environment that is part of
the natural
world only underscores the human nature which we all
share. As the
human Cicely, who with her partner Roslyn founded the
town, said: "In
Cicely the human spirit soared," and the result was
freedom. Freedom
is exactly what the United States' founders found so
important that
they insisted upon a Bill of Rights to protect it.
It's the Flinging the Counts
One episode of Northern Exposure serves as an example of
how myth, one
that works for and speaks to the modern global community,
is weekly in
the making. In this episode a universal theme speaks for
the global
community by changing the blood sacrifice necessary in all
major myths
to a bloodless sacrifice. The different storylines share
the same
theme but emphasize different aspects. In so doing, this
episode, like
many others, can reach diverse viewers, each of whom
"reads" the story
according to his or her own life experience and situation.
The episode "Burning Down the House," broadcast on 3
February 1992,
has Chris preparing for a show of his performance art,
which involves
flinging a cow from a giant catapult. Maggie learns that
her parents
are getting a divorce and then suffers the loss of her
home in a fire.
Joel recognizes Larry Coe, the chimney sweep, as a former
professional
golfer who had left the game after failing to sink an easy
putt in an
Augusta National. Each storyline centers on the central
theme of
destruction and creation, of how endings--that of a cow,
Maggie's
home, her parents' marriage, and Larry's career--can
become the source
of new beginnings. Here, the writers have woven the death
and
resurrection theme from myths of all societies into a new
pattern.
Rituals marking the pattern of birth leading to new life
exemplify
that "the nature of life itself" must be "realized in the
acts of
life."(n7)
Chris begins and ends this episode; he is the alpha and
omega. The
name, Christopher, means "light bearer" (cf. Buddha, which
means the
enlightened one), and in his words and actions, Chris
serves to
illuminate the meaning behind the characters' experiences.
As the
religious references pervading the episode demonstrate,
Chris signals
the way to transcendence. Reminiscent of Christ's walk to
Calvary,
Chris carries a telephone pole through town past the
townspeople. Just
as Jesus worked as a carpenter, Chris works in his shed on
his wooden
catapult. Unlike Christ, he is not the sacrifice, but like
the
spiritual leaders of the Old Testament, he prepares for an
animal
sacrifice. He seeks the appropriate cow (reminiscent of
the Hindu
sacred cow, thus adding a Hindu symbol to the myth), one
that is no
longer productive in milk, but is still edible. Cicely's
townspeople
intend to eat this sacrifice, taking in food for life, in
the same way
that certain New Guinea societies of old practiced
cannibalism in a
ritual where boys were initiated into manhood and
Christians today
take in the body and blood of the Savior in the Holy
Eucharist. Life
eats life to live--the paradox of life.
Besides merging both Old Testament and New Testament
symbolism,
Chris's performance art also reflects the rituals of the
planting and
hunting cultures. Chris plans a sacrifice that is a gift
in the name
of art--just as sacrifices in hunting cultures were gifts
to the
deity. His sacrifice also is the art itself--just as
sacrifices in
planting cultures represented the deity. Chris's cow will
serve art
and be art. Chris's act will unite opposites, reveal the
balance of
death and life, which, Campbell said, are aspects of the
same
thing--being and becoming. Even Chris's choice of
materials for the
catapult is significant. Everything has been recycled,
picked up from
his friends and neighbors' backyards, basements, and
pickup tracks.
Each piece--the pole, chain, lights, and ultimately the
piano--are one
thing and yet another. So with the individual, who,
Campbell said,
must pass through fear and desire to the mystical
realization of
consciousness and life, of one spirit united with all
life, of one
radiance shining through all things. "The function of
art," Campbell
said, "is to reveal this radiance through the created
object. When you
see the beautiful organization of a fortunately composed
work of art,
you just say, 'Aha!' Somehow it speaks to the order in
your own life
and leads to the realization of the very things that
religions are
concerned to render."(n8) This is Chris's quest.
Chris eventually learns from Ed that Monty Python had
flung a cow in
the movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The reference
to the movie
itself echoes the theme of the spiritual quest and the
need for
religious symbol. For Chris to repeat the act would not be
creation--true art. Repetition, Chris notes, is the death
of art, and
inspiration doesn't grow on trees.(n9) However,
inspiration does grow
on trees--the tree of life and the tree of death, such as
Christ's
cross and Buddha's bo tree. Chris knows that real art
creates more
than a moment--it creates myth. Maurice initially fails to
understand
Chris' disappointment. Then in a rare moment as a
sympathetic and wise
father figure, Maurice reminds Chris that a soldier "goes
over,
around, under, or through" physical barriers. Like the
knights who
sought the grail, Chris must overcome all barriers that
prevent him
from creating, from becoming. Chris finds hope through
Maurice's
interest and sympathy.
Meanwhile, Maggie's mother comes to Cicely to break the
news of her
impending divorce. Jane O'Connell says the separation is
amiable and
auspicious. She confesses that she never was happy as
housewife and
socialite, and that the couple had stayed together for the
children.
She anticipates a wonderful life now and is planning a
daring
excursion. Maggie, who through distance, time, and wishful
thinking,
has come to view her mother and father as the Ozzie and
Harriet of
Grosse Pointe, Michigan, refuses to believe her mother's
discontent.
She fears that acceptance of this fact would forever
invalidate any
memories of a happy childhood. Although her mother
sacrificed for the
benefit of her children, Maggie is unwilling to
reciprocate and adjust
her version of the past in order to give her mother her
blessing.
Maggie clings to her fabrications of how life was as she
looks at
pictures of Christmases past.
Maggie forgets that she had fled her childhood home to
escape her
"pathologically polite" mother and domineering father. She
had wanted
no part of the debutante lifestyle or predestined roles
for rich,
suburban girls. She forgets the discomfort she always felt
pending
each visit home. In Alaska, she has become an independent
woman in
workclothes, content with her life and new extended
family. Although
she believes she has severed all the important ties to her
former
life, she reluctantly begins to discover other ties that
bind. She
finds she is inextricably linked to her past.
Maggie ultimately is forced to confront her idealized
memories when
her mother accidentally burns down her house and with it
all her
symbols of the past--the photographs, possessions, and
icons to her
five dead lovers. Maggie's mother inadvertently becomes
the agent of
her daughter's rebirth as she was of Maggie's actual
birth. With
everything gone, with the symbols destroyed, Maggie must
leave the
symbolic womb that had protected, comforted, and in some
ways isolated
her from the present reality. She must now focus on the
universal
meaning of the continuum of life. Her emersion, like birth
itself, is
traumatic. Now homeless, she must begin anew.
Chris, sitting with Maggie in the ruins, envies her
budding creation.
Suddenly realizing how to help them both, he asks if he
can take
something from the ruins to fling from his catapult. They
sort through
the rabble. Maggie finds a pair of expensive shoes
belonging to her
mother--the only item that remains unscathed. The irony of
"There's no
place like home" from The Wizard of Oz is relevant here.
In a comic
sense, Maggie's home is "no place." Her imaginary home in
Grosse
Pointe is gone along with her illusions of a happy place,
and her
actual home also is destroyed. In spite of the loss,
Maggie's
situation sparks new beginnings. The shoes later serve to
restore the
mother-daughter relationship but on a new level, free from
illusions
and misconceptions. As Maggie leaves the ruins of her
house, Chris
plays "As Time Goes By" on Maggie's charred, out-of-tune,
upright
piano, which he has chosen to fling.
Each storyline shows that every action creates action and
reaction,
and that people and their lives--past, present, and
future--are
intertwined. Together these people create community.
Within each
person is the power of creation and destruction, not only
for himself
but for others. No one can ignore the possible effects of
that power
on herself or others. In this episode, we see overlapping
causes and
effects, the continuum and interdependence of all things.
As viewers,
we find lessons appropriate to our own lives through one
of the
characters who best relates to our circumstances. Thus, we
can, in
effect, choose our myth to suit our problems or choose our
myth to
suit our place in the quest.
At the end of the episode, the townspeople gather like
those at
Calvary to watch Chris' performance art. Chris explains
the change in
the sacrifice. He tells them "it is not what you fling,
but the
flinging" that counts. It is not the sacrifice itself but
the act of
sacrificing that counts. Catharsis in this episode occurs
when Chris
unleashes the piano, and it flies through the air as the
audience
gasps in appreciation. The piano symbolizes the people who
made it,
the performers who played it, the audiences who heard the
performances, and the people of Cicely who saw it hurled
and heard its
last sounds. The piano, in its arc across the sky,
represents the
brief time of a life and the folly of clinging to things.
The
resurrected piano becomes a different type of art and its
crash to
earth--with its triumphant, resounding chords--is the
beginning of a
new song heard only at the moment of destruction.
In this act, Chris demonstrates that radiance is revealed
through the
object of the sacrifice; it is not the object itself. The
developing
myth in Cicely moves from the old blood sacrifices to
products of
human life, which sometimes take possession of and crowd
our lives. We
need myths to help us put aside the "things" of our
lives--whether
they are cows, childhood fantasies, or desire for
possessions, fame or
power. We need to let go of whatever prevents us from
finding freedom
within ourselves and from forming relationships--man's
true art and
truly important work. Life becomes a series of human
opportunities to
create and destroy, and life--not death--becomes the goal
and the
good. Finally, Northern Exposure reminds us that if we can
see the
mystic in the most common events, good and bad, we daily
touch God,
and our spirit, like Cicely's "soars to freedom."
Works Cited
Campbell, Joseph and Bill Moyers. Betty Sue Flowers, ed.
The Power of
Myth. New York: Doubleday, 1980.
Kasindorf, Jeanie. "New Frontier." New York 27 May 1991:
44-49.
~~~~~~~~
By Annette M. Taylor, Dayton, OH. and David Upchurch,
David Upchurch, Assistant Professor, Department of
English, Ball State
University, Muncie, IN.