The Myth Of ‘Myth Of Man’
There is a chance that Myth of Man, the first narrative film from Jamin Winans in a decade, is a wrenchingly beautiful film about a truly dangerous idea. It can be read as such, but it absolutely also can be read very differently. The difficulty in trying to talk about it is that it really could be the case that Winans believes a truly dangerous thing, yet managed to make a wrenchingly beautiful film about it. Is this true?
To put it bluntly: either the film likely is a meditative exploration of empathy and connection in a cruel, indifferent, and unfair world; or it likely is a pandemic-infused indictment of choosing technological pseudo-salvation over thoughts and prayers.
That latter reading might just be a deeply unfortunate result of any particular viewer’s desire to literalize the world of the film into specific and concrete things about the world we live in. It’s possible instead that the film is intended to be read entirely within the confines and context of the specific world it constructs, and the specific challenges of living in it, and not through such a direct mapping onto our own.
Last weekend in the midst of something of a streaming drought I’d decided that it finally was time for me to sit down and rewatch Ink, Winans low-budget fantasy from 2009 and The Frame, his low-budget fantasy from 2014. Checking to see if he was on Bluesky (he is not), what I found instead was someone touting Winan’s new film. In some strange coincidence, the year I sat down to rewatch old Winans, suddenly there was new Winans. I went into Myth of Man knowing nothing beyond its one-sentence logline: “Ella embarks on a whimsical odyssey between life and death, convinced she has received a message from her creator.” If you continue reading, you’ll be spoiled well beyond that tease.
Ella is a visual artist without speech or hearing, and in fact the film is a silent film, making use only of music and muffled, indistinct analogues to the ambient sounds of the scene at hand.
While she draws people she sees around town (cited in the credits as various Muses), those mostly are for herself. The public outlet for her creativity is in operating a contraption which provides the soundtrack to a Prophet’s projection of a story upon a multi-faceted set of screens, on which is shown what’s referred to in the credits as the titular Myth.
In this myth, the Creator is shown descending to the world from an exploding meteor, painting the world into existence, then creating a child whom he imbues with life through music that emanates from two horn-like instruments behind his head and into those behind the child’s own. The Creator then departs back to his meteor, leaving the child to find its way dancingly through the beautiful world—until a monster appears and chases the child through the woods.
Defeated and dying, the child collapses and sends music from her horns into the sky toward the meteor.
Nothing happens. No one comes.
The child dies, alone.
The Creator then descends and retrieves the child only after it is dead.
Ella is drawn to this myth in part because being without hearing and without speech, she longs to have a connection to the Creator of the sort she assumes other speaking and hearing people must have. Without hearing and without speech, her divine instruments appear to be silenced. To this end, she abandons her habit of trying to “speak” to the Creator by holding her artwork to the sky and its nightly passing meteor, instead attempting to use the soundtrack device to send sounds powered by her drawings.
This, too, failing to convince the Creator to return to his abandoned and seemingly adrift world, the soundtrack device nonetheless encounters a glitch in which mysterious symbols are burned onto one of its components. Ella begins to see these symbols appearing above the heads of certain people she encounters around the city, and as a sort of divine message unto itself.
She becomes convinced that if she can capture all of their voices in song, that’s the key to then being able to capture the attention of the Creator.
Here’s the important thing to know about the world and city in which Ella lives: every now and then, with little warning, a red dust storm encroaches. Sirens sound, alarm lights spin, and citizens run for special cover. Being touched by the storm means death: immediate death from prolonged exposure, a slower one from brief exposure which leaves you scarred and cracked.
Every citizen’s arm includes a sort of health indicator: a narrow strip on the bicep indicating green for healthy or red for unhealthy. The faster a red light blinks, the closer you are to death.
Ella, mysteriously, discovers that when she touches someone in their final throes their health indicators sync up. After she’s been glancingly caught by the dust storm, these people she touches appear with her inside a vision of a maelstrom-threatened landscape made entirely of her own artwork—or, really, her own memories as manifested in versions of her artwork.
The legal status of art in the city is unclear. While the Prophet’s performances appear to be sanctioned, they are part and parcel of a commercial activity: selling what the credits refer to as an Antidote, but which for all we know actually is nothing more than snake oil.
Meanwhile, Ella encounters Seeg who is running around the city guerrilla-solider style constructing gigantic murals of his deceased wife and daughter, for which he regularly is harassed by stormtroopers who descend from the sky.
Art used to separate hurting people from their money, or art used for communing with a city over loss.
Late in the film, citizens are drawn to the central tower—the seat of government, or corporate headquarters, or indeed perhaps both—where a spectacular new technology is unveiled.
Through a simple if clearly uncomfortable procedure involving the severing of the tips of the divine instruments, replacing them with a sort of two-pronged plug, people are transformed into what the credits refer to as the Enhanced: they now are both cured from the dust storm sickness if they have it, and completely impervious to the effects of the storms going forward.
The catch? There doesn’t appear to be universal healthcare in this world: to become Enhanced, you need to pull a lever, and receive a shiny, metallic ticket. (The credits refer to Winners.) Your entry shoots up from a machine into the sky.
Almost exactly like a prayer.
Ella finds the entire idea extremely distasteful.
At this point, I began to wonder: was the film an indictment of “thoughts and prayers” despite the fact that the film’s protagonist, the very person through whom we are meant to be experiencing this world, is a proponent of thoughts and prayers? Could our protagonist, in fact, be meant as a sort of surprise antagonist?
This idea is somewhat complicated by the fact that she regularly goes out of her way to make connections to people, even or especially other outcasts, up to and including risking her own life in an attempt to save them. She doesn’t, in actuality, simply leave people to their own devices, or to the vagaries of “thoughts and prayers”.
She acts to help.
The film then had me thinking again, leading in uncomfortable directions.
Enhancement severs you from the divine: yes, you’re now safe from the dust storm, but at what cost? Is the film then in fact critiquing the turning to technology at the expense of faith? Is this, in fact, an anti-vax movie? More importantly, perhaps, once you see this as a distinct possibility, is there a way to unsee it?
So, okay.
There is a way in which to map the metaphorical world of Myth of Man onto the real one in which we live such that the film is a critique of turning to technology and away from faith. In point of fact, a way in which the red dust storm is analogous to something like Covid, the Enhancement analogous to something like mRNA vaccines, and Ella’s position being that all we need against disease are thoughts and prayers.
The question, then, is whether this is an over-reading of the film’s intentions. One that comes from mistakenly wanting too much to literalize the film’s events into being about some specific and concrete part of the world in which we, the viewers, actually live.
Frustratingly, I don’t think this question is resolvable in any real or at least final sense. This reading is implicated, if not (as I’ll argue below) inevitable.
How, then, does the other reading of the film work? The one that’s about empathy and connection. The one in which I so desperately want to believe.
As always with such things, here’s where we need to talk about things that happen at the end of the film.
Ella attempts to transmit the songs they’ve assembled up to the Creator as that meteor streaks across the night sky. Still, nothing happens. Worse yet, two or her compatriots finally succumb to their red dust storm sickness. Seeg (who has spent most of the film resisting Ella’s implorations to believe), having joined in with the ineffective singing, staggers forlornly over to a bulletin board where he notices, pulls, and then crumples and tosses to the ground, an advertisement on which Ella later discovers the mysterious symbols that had become burned into a component on the soundtrack device.
She, too, gives up. It’s all apparently been a mistake. An accident. Not a message from the Creator.
For a moment, she find a brief happiness in running into the Prophet’s assistant, who is now Enhanced. Despite her reservations about that technology, she’s nonetheless glad to see a familiar face and embraces her. The assistant does not return the embrace. Ella seems shaken by the contact, while the assistant seems to reassure her that the she is still the same person Ella knew. Ella, though, is flatly unconvinced.
It only became clear to me on second viewing what, exactly, Ella realizes in this moment.
The Enhanced are untouchable.
You cannot feel them, and presumably they cannot feel you, which is why the assistant doesn’t even bother to return the embrace. Having spent the entire film making connections with other outcasts—up to and including literally finding communal, transcendent power in actual, physical touch—her city slowly but steadily is becoming filled with people who literally can no longer be reached.
This is when and where I began to disavow the literalist reading of the film as anti-vax propaganda. This one scene, very late in the film, is the key, I think, to understanding that you need to read the text as and for itself. You need to concern yourself not with real world events through which you’ve lived but specifically with the depicted events of this singular, fictional city.
The underlying story here in fact and in the end is about empathy and connection, although possibly also might be a philosophical critique of too often turning to technology rather than to each other. Winans’ previous film, the 2020 documentary Childhood 2.0 reportedly is something of a diatribe against what social media use is doing to children. It’s difficult to think this somehow would not have informed and influenced what he was doing in Myth of Man.
(Whatever reservations the film has about technology they aren’t about technology per se. The Prophet uses technology to project. Seeg uses technology to make art. He even builds technology that lets other see what Ella sees.)
There is within this underlying story of empathy and connection also a story about death: the red dust storm isn’t Covid and therefore Enhancement vaccination but instead the storm simply is death writ large, for this depicted city. Death comes for us all, and life cannot help but include death. We have ways of escaping it, but only ever temporarily. Enhancement, then, can be read as something akin to immortality. What remains, then, is something of a meditation on how to go about being able to live in a world where people die.
Ella’s answer is to connect.
Ella’s answer to a cruel, indifferent, and unfair world is solidarity.
Enhancement’s answer is further, and irrevocable, separation.
In the end, bereft now after encountering the assistant, and further succumbing to her own red dust sickness, Ella sees Seeg in line for Enhancement.
Once again flinching at the procedures’ severance of a patient’s connection to the divine, she tries to convince the people in line that the procedure is wrong. She even tries, once more, to convince Seeg. At this point, it’s arguable that Ella no longer necessarily sees the divine as being literally about the Creator but instead about the fact that as his creations, we are all part of the divine.
Enhancement is separation from the divine not because it cuts off the divine instrument but because it cuts us off from one another.
Ella fails to convince, but she has one last gambit.
She steals Seeg’s ticket, cuts the line, and sits down to be subjected to the Enhancement procedure.
It’s unclear here whether this is Ella’s final surrender to her cruel, indifferent, and unfair city, or if she’s trying to shock Seeg out of his own resignation. Whichever the case, Seeg pleads with her to stop, then storms in and pulls Ella from the machine—but not before the first cuts have been made into her divine instruments.
One quick, final thought about the problematic reading. The one I do think is an errant one. The one that overly literalizes the film into being about Covid. It seems to me there likely are only three options to consider.
In the first, Winans intended this reading, which would be extremely disappointing. In the second, he didn’t even notice this reading, which would be truly inexplicable. In the third, he didn’t intend or agree with this reading, nonetheless knew it was there, and didn’t worry about it—which in today’s intertwined political and informational environments, an argument might be made, could be viewed as indefensible.
(I’m not normally one to add a remark to a post an entire day after publishing unless I do it as an addendum, but it should be noted: Winans made this film over the course of the decade ensuing from 2015, so the script would have been written prior to Covid-19. While that offsets the concern to a degree, it’s not as if anti-vax sentiment was invented in 2020, and the reading remains implicated.)
My adoration for this film is real, if unfortunately partly ambiguous. Between this and Sinners, I do not think there will be any filmmaking more invigorating than this for the rest of the year. However: I can’t adore it unreservedly, and my adoration cannot willfully ignore that all three options above are problematic, each in its own way.
Today would have been my father’s eighty-eighth birthday, if not for the fact that last month was the seventeenth anniversary of his death.
It should come as no surprise that a film such as this in its final moments presents a thing over which people will argue and disagree. Here’s how I see it.
Seeg falls to his knees in the middle of the street, Ella dying on his lap. Her life indicator goes out. The projector he built to allow others to see what Ella sees flickers to life, and begins to project images upon a nearby wall. Images of what she’s experienced and the people with whom she’s experienced it. The brief night having fallen, In the sky above Seeg the streaking meteor explodes.
Out of the images on the wall comes a translucent silhouette of the Creator, who comes to stand over them both.
The end.
This is where, for me, the metaphorical nature of the film makes itself most known.
Decades ago, in response to a television critic lamenting that in Twin Peaks revealing Laura Palmer’s killer to be a Bob-possessed Leland Palmer the show had placed evil outside the human being rather than within us where it belongs, I argued that what they’d missed was that Twin Peaks in many ways was myth. Bob—referred to by one character as “the evil that men do”—was a necessary device of drama to transform the idea of evil into cinematically presentable action.
We’re dealing here in metaphor and in myth. It is a film, after all, called Myth of Man.
Ella herself falls into the trap of trying to literalize a myth. Entranced by the one related by the Prophet, she attempts to create for herself a connection to the Creator that mimics the one depicted there. None of her efforts succeed, because she’s misreading the location and the nature of the divine.
You can read the end as the Creator actually having manifesting in the city, returning for Ella at the moment of her death. Or, you can read it as a dramatization of the film’s underlying theme.
Regular readers know that I’ve a penchant for writing about pop culture that’s about empathy and connection. Myth of Man makes a very specific argument about the nature of these things.
This, right here, is the divine.
The divine is to be found in simple, human connection. Surely it’s to be found in one of us holding and staying with another as they encounter the death which cannot help but be one part, the final and inescapable part, of a life. That exploding meteor isn’t happening for Ella or for Seeg, but for us, and that silhouette isn’t manifesting for Ella or for Seeg but for us.
If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. Divinity is the capacity to make being here easier for each other, or harder for each other.
If anything in the universe is divine, it is us, here, together in a world where the end must come for us all.