The Compression Principle
History records one man once.
Myth records what a thousand men held in common.
That is why the invented figure can often carry more truth than the real one.
An excellent insight drawn from Christopher Nolan’s casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and the backlash that ensued, tells a much deeper truth, which we see permeated and played out everywhere recently – influencing social cohesion and geo-political machinations, is summed up here.
“Here we are asked to accept, at face value and with no explanation, that Nyong’o is a believable stand-in for the most beautiful Greek woman ever imagined.”
“This is why films are generally terrible now, and the Greeks diagnosed it long before Hollywood existed. Mythos — story and narrative — must reflect Logos: the rational order of how the world actually works. Stories that survive three thousand years, like the Odyssey, survive because they encode real patterns in profound ways. You can draw generations of wisdom from a single one of them. That is why they resonate. Not because they entertain you, but because they tell you the truth about how the world works.
Modern films fail because their writers have inverted the order. They build stories around how the world should be rather than how it is — mythos severed from logos — and so the stories crumble on contact. And no matter how many times some commenter types “it’s just a made-up story,” it will never talk a people into accepting the steady defacing of the myths their civilization was built upon.”
