"The long and winding road, that leads..." The Beatles

Two words which are often confused are topic and theme. Lecture 3 focused on theme (idea). Topics are subjects (more on this in a moment). Themes are complete thoughts about something or other, and films and works of literature often have more than one theme. For example, the topic (subject) of Plato's "Parable of the Cave" is reality or perception or human limitation. A theme suggested (themes are suggested) by the parable is that humans are limited in their understanding of reality because humans have limited perceptions and individual points of view.

The topic is framed as a word; the theme is a complete clause or sentence that relates the subject to human (after all, the reader/viewer is a human...usually) experience. Here's another example: love is a topic; the word by itself says nothing about love. There are oodles of themes (ideas) about love: love is blind; love conquers all; love is painful; etc.

Last week we looked at how an idea (theme) could generate a story (dialogue, film, novel, etc.). This week we are looking at how a common or popular topic can be the foundation for lots of works of literature and film. The topic is road trips. Different works use the framework of a journey (across the sea, to another planet, just down the street to the supermarket) to build a story on. Different "road" works suggest different themes (ideas), just as the single subject love can be used as the basis of many stories with many different ideas.

Road trips are the basis of songs, stories, movies, works of art, and they have been for thousands of years. Odysseus making his way back to Ithaca after the Greek victory at Troy is an eleven-year trip with adventures, lust, human weakness, human ingenuity. J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a long journey to destroy a ring of power that threatens to corrupt the ring bearer, as any sort of power has the potential to corrupt a person. George Miller's Road Warrior is a futuristic knight's quest to preserve human civilization and dignity in a post-apocalyptic world where hardship and scarcity have turned many people to their baser animal selves, and Chevy Chase in is a cross-country homage to a person's obsessive determination to reach a goal no matter what.

The term "road picture" became popular with a string of seven Bob Hope and Bing Crosby movies that began with The Road to Singapore (1940) and ended with The Road to Hong Kong (1962). The movies, which took the boys to exotic locales, were showcases for adventures, gags, songs, Hollywood satire. The plots were thin, and the focus was on entertainment--not a bad thing.

But stories about journeys are ancient. The topic works so well because, as writers such as Joseph Campbell have pointed out, life is a sort of journey. We move through space and time; we have experiences (some adventurious, some amusing, some tragic, some ecstatic), and we imagine/hope that through experience we will grow, learn, develop, reach goals and accomplish things. A four-year (or so) journey through college is not the same as the journey of a great hero who faces dragons and wizards and temptresses. But college, on a human level, does have it's obstacles and puzzles and temptations. The story is a larger-than-life (exaggerated, embellished) journey that suggests the more mundane journey through college or around the workplace or into a relationship. The story (topic) suggests ideas (themes) about human nature.

Everyman

Everyman (author unknown) is a fifteenth-century morality play--an allegory (it is clearly symbolic; one thing represents something else) and which attempts to teach a lesson. The name Everyman itself is a a straightforward symbol: the main character represents every person. A character named Death, represents, well, death. The journey along the road of life towards death is another easily-decrypted symbol: every person moves through his/her life and will eventually die.

If this play seems awfully simple and preachy, that's because it is. Literature exists in context, and the sophistication that allows a 21st-century reader to wrestle with Cormac McCarthy's thematically-challenging The Road is not the same audience for which Everyman was written. Theatre majors probably know that much of early theatre was religious in nature (the Greek tragedies were performed at the great festivals that honored the gods and goddesses, for example). Most people in England in the fifteenth century could not read, did not have leisure time to philosophize and debate fine points of theology. Morality plays, sometimes performed on huge carts--mobile stages--in front of the large churches, were ways the Church (Roman Catholic at the time) could teach ideas about scripture, moral choices, doctrine to the masses. The stories were obvious, direct, didactic, but in a world where most people died quite young and labored in fields sixteen-hour days, six days a week, the plays/stories were also highly entertaining; they provided a welcome break from hardship and monotony.

The story centers around a journey. God, angry at how humans have become sinful, calls to Death and asks him to seek out people to be judged. Death approaches Everyman who does not want to take the journey to be judged before death, and Everyman asks Death if he can bring along some friends for the journey. Everyman approaches Fellowship and Family and Meterial Goods, and all come up with excuses why they can't accompany Everyman on the journey. Everyman meets up with characters named Good Deeds and Knowledge, Beauty, and so on, and they are able to help him along the way. Everyman is required to go through the rituals of confession, penance, etc., and eventually all but Good Deeds leave Everyman.

In case the theme (idea/message) of the play is still too difficult for the audience, there is an epilogue that spells it out.

but we're not in the fifteenth century any more

If you are looking for a road book to end all road books, you might want to try George Meegan's The Longest Walk: The Record of our World's First Crossing of the Entire Americas.

This is a work of non-fiction following the progress of a man and his unbroken, six-year, 19,000+ miles walk from the bottom of Tierra del Fuego to the top of Alaska.

Ideas suggested by literature, films, arts, music are often much subtler nowadays, but there's still a huge range.

Danny Leiner's Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle does satirize popular culture, but it does not require much thought. Albert and Allen Hughes's The Book of Eli has much of the same pop culture satire and a message that is not too far removed from Everyman, but it also tickles some issues as we see what human nature unchecked can be like and how human carelessness can lead to global disaster. Then there is Cormac McCarthy's The Road (you could look at John Hillcoat's film version, of course). This work has much of the bitter satire of nearly all post-apocalyptic works, but it demands much more thought than L.Q. Jones's action-and-humor-driven A Boy and His Dog. After reading The Road several suggestions come to mind: this is a literal struggle against nature, humanity, despair in a world torn apart by nuclear disaster; it's the story of a parent's struggle to preserve his child, to pass on survival (natural, urban, social) skills to a successive generation; it's an allegory about the grim determination to "carry the fire" (keeping the spark of life glowing) even though life, the universe, and everything seems burdonsome, self-perpetuating, pointless; it's a religious allegory peppered with symbols and allusions.

There are loads of variations; here are a few:

In the end, Everyman and most other journey stories before and after it suggest some element of our own journeys through life. Sometimes we have physical journeys (a trip to Europe) where we experience new wonders. But we can also map our less geographical roads--we have career paths and relationship goals, and we attempt to find the right path to live our lives as we quest to discover meaning in a confusing, changing world. We may not travel with Merlin and Medusa and Appolonius of Tyana, Pan, The Abominable Snowman and the Giant Serpant in George Pal's The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (based on the Charles Finney novel), but our more-pedestrain walks along the road of life is still about discovering the mysteries and marvels along the way: