The Problem with Archetypes

Late­ly I’ve been read­ing all of Robert E. Howard’s Conan sto­ries, and, look­ing past the deli­cious­ly pulpy swords & sor­cery genre-ness of it all, many of the tales wres­tle with the ten­sions between civ­i­liza­tion and bar­barism. Late­ly I’ve been think­ing a bit regard­ing how media of all sorts (news­pa­pers, tele­vi­sion, online, video, video games, et al.) por­tray real peo­ple as arche­types in a tac­it nar­ra­tive. I recent­ly fin­ished a game called The Sabo­teur in which the play­er takes the part of an Irish­man in Occu­pied France, killing Nazis. As you play the game, you end up killing a lot of Nazis. And, as I played, I began to real­ize that Nazis & Nazism have become the arche­typ­al stan­dard of evil in our cul­ture. I see two prob­lems with this kind of thing, one gen­er­al, one spe­cif­ic.

The gen­er­al issue is that arche­types are, by their very nature, resis­tant to nuance, immutable, and less than real. Arche­types are eas­i­ly pack­aged and media cre­ators of all types should con­scious­ly avoid pack­ag­ing each sto­ry that comes along into an arche­typ­al dichoto­my: hero/villain, good/evil.

The spe­cif­ic issue, in the case of the game The Sabo­teur, is that, by treat­ing Nazis as the arche­type of evil, the true hor­rors of Nazism in the Third Reich can be sim­ply ignored. Nazis become mon­sters instead of men. You don’t need to under­stand a mon­ster. You don’t try to under­stand a mon­ster. You don’t ask “Why a mon­ster?” You just kill them.

Plen­ty of media nar­ra­tives fit this bill. Yes­ter­day, when, about a half mile down the road from me, 3 women were saved from a life of rape, abuse, and cap­tiv­i­ty, the arche­typ­al nar­ra­tive was imme­di­ate­ly placed upon the scene. Charles Ram­sey: Hero; Ariel Cas­tro: Mon­ster; Gina deJe­sus, Aman­da Berry, Michelle Knight: Damsels in Dis­tress. It’s all too easy. You can make a sto­ry out of any­thing by impos­ing arche­types and then adding flour­ish­es, like, in the case just men­tioned: fake satel­lite news report­ing.

When it’s easy, you get lazy. Peo­ple who are con­vict­ed of crimes are treat­ed as mon­sters. Every per­son who works in pub­lic safe­ty or in the mil­i­tary is auto­mat­i­cal­ly a hero. This kind of lazi­ness does seri­ous dam­age to peo­ples’ lives, gut-lev­el pub­lic opin­ion, and to crit­i­cal think­ing skills of the peo­ple who prop­a­gate it. I hope adding just one lay­er of com­plex­i­ty can make this point stand out a bit more.

Instead of say­ing that con­vict­ed crim­i­nals are evil, let’s just say they’re bar­bar­ians. So, peo­ple who are in, or have been in jail are bar­bar­ians, and peo­ple who aren’t and haven’t are civ­i­lized. There’s no good or evil here, just a lev­el of social sophis­ti­ca­tion. In this con­text where is there space for good or evil? Well, who would the bar­bar­ians kill? Child moles­ters and rapists. Why? A bar­bar­ian would say “Because they’re evil. Mon­sters.” and leave it at that. But that’s still wrong. A soci­ety in which rooms full of chil­dren are mur­dered by a gun­man, ath­letes and spec­ta­tors are shred­ded by bombers, and a trio of broth­ers enslave young women for a decade is not a soci­ety that can afford to rely on lazy nar­ra­tive arche­types. We have to be will­ing to exert our­selves enough to ask earnest­ly uncom­fort­able ques­tions. Arche­types worked in pulp fic­tion fan­ta­sy sto­ries in the 1930s, but this isn’t the Hybo­ri­an Age. Evil does­n’t look like a crazy frog beast. It looks like every­one. And, more impor­tant­ly, so does Good.

A bar­bar­ian has no need for nuance: if it’s a mon­ster, kill it. A civ­i­lized per­son must ask “Why a mon­ster?”