Poetic Longing

Recently, in a dim theater watching George Miller’s film?Three Thousand Years of Longing, I had an experience of the mythical poetic?impact conveyed by Joseph Campbell.?

No surprise?his film explicitly casts mythological exploration as the?main cast member.

Based on?The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, a 1994 collection of five mythical short stories by British novelist, A.S. Byatt, the film follows a narratologist (an actual job title), named Alithea Binnie, her encounter with the mythological Djinn, and the escapades the djinn made over three thousand years before coming to grant Alithea three wishes. As a quick point of reference, a djinn is a spirit figure from pre-Islamic Arabian mythology (sometimes portrayed as a genie).?

The djinn has had a long history in myth, from more recent tales of Aladdin to Charles Perralt’s fairy tale?The Three Ridiculous Wishes, to?One Thousand and One Nights, and long before that in Mesopotamian and Persian literature and oral traditions. The unfolding (or retelling) of this djinn’s story over three thousand years is a story about aloneness and love. It is also a story about?our love of story?and why narrative as an act of creation has become so central to our understanding of mythic ideas.?

To examine this film via a mythopoetic lens would require the generation of a lot more words than afforded in this sampling, as well as spoil those gripping moments that make Miller’s endeavor quite exceptional.

Still, there's no spoiler to suggest that metaphors for the current motifs in our world abound. For instance, I grabbed a firm hold of the foibles of the two main protagonists -- overdoing their apparent redoubtable strengths -- to manifest over-identifying as a sadist and monster.

Even the landscapes throughout the story speak, describing a dying world, a post-heroic?realm. In?Creative Mythology, Joseph Campbell reflects on such Waste Lands saying,?

What, then, is the Waste Land? It is the land where myth is patterned by authority,?not emergent from life; where there is no poet’s eye to see, no adventure to be lived, where all is set for all and forever: Utopia!?Again, it is the land where poets languish and priestly spirits thrive, whose task. . . to repeat, enforce, and elucidate cliches. (373)?

The Waste Lands in?Three Thousand Years?span a speculative history, but isn't that not unlike any history?

Often constructed and patterned by authority, neither organic nor endogenous to emergent, creative life. They repeat, enforce, and elucidate cliches; most Waste Lands are designed specifically for?that purpose.?Which paradoxically, heightens the importance of a harboring, expatiating cinematic experience.

In slipping into a dreamy?space of projected?immersion, we can imagine a world beyond cliches. We can portalize a place where a face-to-face encounter with a divine djinn can rend?the fabrications.?

In the darkness, stretching across time and space, what lay before us -- larger than anything we’ve seen before -- sparks the imagination.?To apportion an image where the Waste Land is recast, and poets no longer languish.?

We can imagine a world -- where, even when surrounded by darkness and the occasional candy-wrapper crunching, popcorn-chomping loudmouth -- a shaft of illumination suddenly appears.