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Introduction
How can a film avoid locking its viewer into ideological immobility? Film undoubtedly
has the power to absorb a viewer into a wholly constructed world, so how can a film avoid
making that absorption mythic? How can it express to the viewer that the way it presents things
and creates meaning is not all that can be done? Jean-Louis Baudry (1974-1975: 41) would argue
that a film must reveal its own construction within the text for such an effect to be achieved.
However, myth does not have to hide its own construction for it to affect its reader’s outlook.
Seeing a newspaper being printed will not halt the meaning conveyed by the front page’s
headline. Additionally, Baudry’s (2009: 184) claim that the ideological effect of cinema relies on
the ritual of immobile spectators devoting their attention to the screen does not account for the
digital age, where the cinematic apparatus is fragmentary, split off into countless small screens
that can draw viewers into a film world at any moment. Furthermore, their viewing can be
interrupted by notifications, buffering, or events outside the device, such as a friend trying to get
the viewer’s attention, and nonetheless, in all these cases, the film can still have its ideological
effect. What becomes apparent is that a film’s mythic qualities rely on the social structure
through which the viewer orders the world. Myth can be successfully transmitted if the viewer
can incorporate that text into their preexisting structure, and this is the crux of our issue. As
Susan Sontag (2001: 13) writes, “What we decidedly do not need now is further to assimilate Art
into Thought, or (worse yet) Art into Culture.” My introductory question is therefore: what role
does the film text play in the prevention of such assimilation?
It is not enough for a film to avoid being mythic by exposing the cinematic apparatus. In
this thesis, “myth” is understood within the scope of Roland Barthes’ definition as presented in
his essay “Myth Today” (1990): a semiological system wherein a sign is made the mere signifier
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of a second-order concept that distorts the contingency of the sign’s original meaning. A mythic
text does not hide the original meaning but instead shifts focus toward a new concept brought by
forces that did not influence the content of the original sign. The role of myth is to “naturalize”
the new concept by relying on a reader who “sees a kind of causal process” in the relationship
between signifier and signified, as if myth was “a factual system, whereas it is but a semiological
system” (Barthes 1990: 131). The mythic character of cinema is not solely the result of a
