Philosophy and Popular Culture

I researched it (via IMDB) and figured out that Napoleon Dynamite came out in the August before my Senior year of high school.  Though my dad tried to get me to go watch it in the theatre with him, I'd never heard of it so we went to see something else.  Bad decision.  I then got to spend the next 6-ish months listening to my friends quote it over and over and over until finally it came out on video and I watched it with my best friend Tonya.  I was lucky, I think, to watch it with someone who already thought it was hilarious.  Had I not, I'm not sure I would have appreciated it.  At least, not at first.  But I did, so...I did.  I, like the entire nation, was captivated by this tall, gangly, moon-boot-wearing, Jewfro'd anti-hero.

He is truly an iconic figure.  Just do an image search and look at the number of drawings, costumes, and caricatures.  And so, since he was created, I've watched with considerable interest the development of Napoleon's influence on popular culture.  Let me give you two examples.  A commercial, and this year's "epic" movie.  Stop for a moment and think...can you imagine either of those existing in pre-Napoleon society?  Since the phenomenon of Napoleon Dynamite pop culture has undergone a revolution.  The geek, the nerd, the odd-ball, and the character...they've all been glamorized and elevated to icon status.  Shows like The Big Bang Theory, Chuck, Pushing Daisies, The IT Crowd, and Community.  All of them are built around the celebration of characters who don't quite fit into the normal concept of "cool".  They're nerds and misfits.  But really...what are "nerd" and "geek" but words created to describe people who simply didn't fit the mould?


This is where I turn to philosophy.  I happen to be a huge fan of Carl Jung.  I've always been fascinated by his theories on archetypal characters (for those of you wondering where you've heard that phrase before, think this scene, at about 0:35).  Regarding art, Jung believed that there were two kinds.  There was the psychological and the visionary.  The psychological (or art pertaining to the world of human experience) he wasn't particularly interested in, and I won't waste time discussing it.  The visionary, however, was of great interest to him.  Visionary art dealt with things beyond human experience and comprehension:

It is a strange something that derives its existence from the hinterland of man's mind--that suggests the abyss of time separating us from pre-human ages, or evokes a super-human world of contrasting light and darkness.It is a primordial experience which surpasses man's understanding, and to which he is therefore in danger of succumbing.  The value and the force of the experience are given by its enormity.

The visionary artist catches a glimpse of this "unfathomed abyss".  Human experience being insufficient to explain it, he is forced to strive for something beyond human experience.  This is the point where Freud would step in and claim that these visions are the product of the artist's subconscious.  Jung, however contradicts this belief--

The truth is that it takes us away from the psychological study of the work of art, and confronts us with the psychic disposition of the poet himself...The vision is not something derived or secondary, and it is not a symptom of something else.  It is true symbolic expression--that is, the expression of something existent in its own right, but imperfectly known.

Of course, you may be wondering what all of this has to do with popular media and Napoleon Dynamite.  Stay with me, I'm getting there.


In his essay Psychology and Literature, Jung says the following:

If we consider Goethe's Faust...the question that we must answer is this:  In what relation does it stand to the conscious outlook of his time?  Great poetry draws its strength from the life of mankind, and we completely miss its meaning if we try to derive it from personal factors.  Whenever the collective unconscious becomes a living experience and is brought to bear upon the conscious outlook of an age, this event is a creative act which is of importance to everyone living in that age.  A work of art is produced that contains what may truthfully be called a message to generations of men.  So Faust touches something in the soul of every German.  So also Dante's fame is immortal, while The Shepherd of Hermas just failed of inclusion in the New Testament canon.  Every period has its bias, its particular prejudice and its psychic ailment.  An epoch is like an individual; it has its own limitations of conscious outlook, and therefore requires a compensatory adjustment.  This is effected by the collective unconscious in that a poet, a seer or a leader allows himself to be guided by the unexpressed desire of his times and shows the way, by word or deed, to the attainment of that which everyone blindly craves and expects--whether this attainment results in good or evil, the healing or an epoch or its destruction.

When Napoleon Dynamite was made, society was in the midst of one of these epochs.

Historically, he came towards the beginning of a time of huge societal change.  The digital age was undeniably in full swing, but the full significance of such an age were still being ironed out.  Web 2.0 was becoming a reality.  MySpace was at its peak, and about to begin its decline.  Facebook was still relatively unknown, limited to college students.  Google was only just beginning to claim domination of the internet from Yahoo and the already-on-the-verge-of-a-joke AOL.  You still needed an invite to use Gmail.  Twitter didn't exist.  Blogs were just starting to come into fashion (I think...I didn't have a huge internet presence back then).  The idea of social networking online--something that now seems as natural as breathing and checking facebook--was still just a hopeful glint in Mark Zuckerberg's eye.  

The realization of the true potential of the "world wide web" was finally happening.  The world was becoming truly connected.  Any information you could possibly want was just coming into the reach of your fingertips.  But ironically, with this explosion of connection came an almost paradoxical loss of identity.  Suddenly you were becoming one small grain of sand on a vast beach of other identical grains.  One friend in 637 (and that is a number on the lower side).  One tweet in a screaming crescendo.  One face in millions.  The more the connection to the world, and even just your own country...your own state...your own school, the more clearly you realized that you were a single soul amongst hundreds, thousands...billions!  What possible significance could you have?  What possible identity that wasn't the exact same as everyone else around you?

Napoleon Dynamite came at the very beginning of this revolution.  In a way, he anticipated it.  And he offered a solution to the problem.

Jung continues on in his essay to explain the inherent problems of these historical epochs.  Inevitably, they lead to imbalances in society.  As he put it "An epoch is like an individual; it has its own limitations of conscious outlook, and therefore requires a compensatory adjustment."  It is these imbalances that lead to the creation of the archetype.  

The Jungian Archetype.  This is one of my absolute favorite ideas in literary theory.  The archetype is a figure born of the collective subconscious.  The "collective unconscious" is exactly what it says--a collective pool of ideas that are universally understood while simultaneously avoiding any rigid definition.  This pool is populated by the archetype--a universally recognized figure rather akin to a Platonic form.  Think of the Hero, the Savior, the Physician, or the Mother.  These are figures recognizable even beyond cultural lines, appealing virtually universally to all mankind, but an archetype can be more societally specific.  Jung refers repeatedly to Goethe's Faust.  In the great works of visionary art an artist is tapping into this collective unconscious and finding the archetype of the age.  He cannot create anything else.  The era creates the archetype.  

It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which creates Goethe.  And what is Faust but a symbol?  By this I do not mean an allegory that points to something all too familiar, but an expression that stands for something not clearly known and yet profoundly alive. Here it is something that lives in the soul of every German, and that Goethe has helped to bring to birth.  could we conceive of anyone but a German writing Faust or Also sprach Zarathustra?  Both play upon something that reverberates in the German soul--a "primordial image,"...

More often than not, the archetype addresses some problem with the spirit of that particular Historical Epoch.

These primordial images are numerous, but do not appear in the dreams of individuals or in works of art until they are called into being by the waywardness of the general outlook.  When conscious life is characterized by one-sidedness and by a false attitude, then they are activated--one might say, "instinctively"--and come to light in the dreams of individuals and the visions of artists and seers, thus restoring the psychic equilibrium of the epoch.  

Which brings us back to Napoleon.  If you've been paying attention, you will be realizing right about now that what I am implying is that the movie Napoleon Dynamite is a piece of Great Visionary Art.  Maybe such a claim has just lost me all my credibility, but maybe not.  After all...why not?


As previously established, Napoleon came at the beginning of one of Jung's Epochs.  The homogenization of society was creating an ever greater imbalance.  The overabundance of connection and information was leading to a loss of identity and basic human awareness.  And into the breach stepped The Individual.  Quirky, odd, and independent from the demands of Homogenized Society.  In his humorously innocent exclamation "just follow your heart.  It's what I do." he offered an alternative to the culture of conformity that seemed almost inescapable.  Napoleon Dynamite became the balancing archetype to counteract the faults of this new era in history.
">


Napoleon's guileless acceptance of himself opened the door.  The way to reclaim your identity from the masses was to embrace your quirks and your eccentricities--all those things you'd previously kept so carefully hidden from the world.  In a stroke the world became intoxicated with the freedom of weirdness unleashed.


Of course, the obvious argument against this idea is that Napoleon was simply not innovative.  There were shows previously that dealt with nerds, geeks, misfits, etc.  Niche markets and cult films have always existed.  But that, I would respond, is exactly the point.  Niche markets and cult films.  Before Napoleon, the nerdier things of this world remained quietly in the back rooms of society, enjoyed by those who enjoyed them, but tacitly ignored by the greater populace.  It was Napoleon who changed that, in two ways.  First, in the creation of "Nerd Chic".  Suddenly nerdy was the new cool.  And second, in the type of dorkiness he glamorized.  It is a dorkiness made up the random, the strange, the non sequitur, but never the truly bizarre or inscrutable.


The irony is that in this instance the creation of the saving Architype was, paradoxically, the harbinger of its own doom--at least in this particular culture.  Society was hungering after a Unique Hero to save it from Identityless Homogeneity.  This Unique Hero was instantly recognized in Napoleon Dynamite.  And, having recognized him, he was then put up as the model after which a person ought to form his or her own life.  Do you see the contradiction?


The problem came in the misunderstanding of society as to what was important of this new Ideal.  People assumed that it was the form of him--his randomness, his oddness--that made him so unique.  Thus, if they adopted the same sort of eccentricities with the assumption that they, too, would then be unique.  But what Napoleon was by nature these new imitators were by art, and eccentricity is no longer eccentric when adopted by the masses.  Where Napoleon was refreshingly genuine, a movie like Scott Pilgrim is tongue in cheek, bordering on smug.  Look at how nerdy we are; look at how much random we've wedged in; look at how counter-culture we can be.  In the attempt to break out of the sameness of a homogenized worldwide culture, all we succeeded in doing was creating a new type of unvarying super-minority.

The fact remains, however, that Napoleon stood out as an Archetypal figure.  He did answer the need of society so perfectly that he couldn't help but be recognized.  So what was it that marked him out so clearly.  I would suggest that it was the function rather than the form.  Which is to say, it was his philosophies that ought to have been emulated, rather than his particular method of putting them into practice.

"Just follow your heart.  It's what I do."

These words sum up the true value of The Individual.  Napoleon wasn't trying to be random or weird.  He was being himself.  Himself just happened to be hilariously random and weird.  But rather than try to also be random and weird, perhaps our the balance our Archetypal Individual was meant to convey was simply for all of us also to be ourselves.  Not defined either by conformity or rebellion, but simply by a true knowledge of ourselves.