Originally posted on mythicramblings.com on Jun 1, 2015.

Wait! I mean rambling about mythology! So read on to hear about the nature of mythology and happy endings, focusing on Jupiter Ascending and Ex Machina. As always, major spoilers after the jump.

I was in Florida to celebrate my sister’s graduation from Florida State University. I am, obviously, super proud of my sister and her academic accomplishments. I’m very excited to see what she’s going to do with her life. No pressure. But what was really preoccupying my mind during the week was the fact that, a few years ago, I was graduating from the same school, full of the same dread and anticipation and optimism about what my future, my “happy ending” was going to be. And, short of a few things, my happy ending has changed. A large part of this has to do with growing up which is, in uber mythological terms, the changing of a personal myth. As I’ve not only grown up, but also changed as all humans do over the course of lives, my personal myth as adapted, and thus so has my happy ending.

The very nature of myth is pretty fluid. It has to be. Otherwise mythology would become stagnant and cease to have any sort of hold on human imagination. I posit (1 big word point!) that this is because mythology is a way to interpret and therefore changes from person to person, culture to culture, generation to generation. Let’s use a quick example, made possible by contributions from viewers like you — or just my brother.

My brother, over some amazing burgers at Monk’s in Tallahassee, told me about Jeremy England’s work. England is presently being heralded as the “new Darwin” for his work in physics. He puts forth that atoms have a tendency to bond and adapt with other atoms in order to best utilize energy. The part benefits from the whole, essentially. When this happens, England continues, what is then created out of this bond is the origin of life. This contests and builds upon the traditional scientific definition of life and adaptation. This alteration opens up a great philosophical and scientific debate for minds greater than mine. But the act of even altering a definition seems, to me, to be a wonderful analogy for defining mythology.

For my comps during my Master’s we had to define mythology. I eventually settled on the interpretation of myth as franchise (different mythologies build on a built-in consumer base with brand recognition in the form of familiar iconography and timeless storytelling elements). The exercise itself, however, was to show that mythology is really just a way of thinking about things. Just how England is challenging a presumed concept (How does life come to be?), studying mythology challenges assumptions about norms, revealing them to be very specific to place and time. When I say that mythology is franchise, it is reflective of my own consumerism, international conglomerate lens. I guess this means I’m very materialistic?

To beat this explanatory horse even more into the afterlife, mythology is like algebra. The number 4 is not just 4. It’s also

• 2 + 2
• 8 × ½
• 12 ÷ 3
• 5-1
• 2²
• √16
• super complicated equation using logarithms and functions and it blows your mind how good at math I am

4 is simultaneously all these equations. Similiarly, mythology is multiple modes of understanding all happening at the same time. The parts of a myth you choose to emphasize, or the characters you choose to focus on, or how the rising action rises, or how the falling action falls – these are all indicative of and betray the hegemonic (2 big word points!) clearing you’re in. Through the study of mythology, we’re more easily able to isolate elements that influence the core myth. And thus ends my spiel and myth recruitment speech!

What does this have to do with happy endings? I’ve seen two movies recently that have made me reassess my previous definition of a happy ending in films. I don’t know if I can say that this is a trend. I definitely think that I personally am becoming more attracted to it and that it speaks to Millennials. Previously I would have said that a happy ending can really only occur in certain types of movies. The protagonist conquers the antagonistic person or situation, or gets the love interest, or triumphantly changes their situation and the world. These are all, of course, generalizations. Please, keep your litany of exceptions to yourself. Or start your own website.

Essentially, all the lose ends are happily and neatly (and usually unrealistically) tied. On the surface of it, Jupiter Ascending totally falls into that category. It is revealed that an ordinary Earth girl, Jupiter, is an illegal Russian immigrant in America working to scrub toilets. She is also the reincarnation of an inter-galactic business tycoon who owned many planets. This would normally not matter, except that Jupiter’s previous self wrote the current Jupiter into her will, giving the entire planet of Earth to Jupiter. And now previous-Jupiter’s children all want to take Earth away from Jupiter, either through legal or nefarious means.

I love Jupiter Ascending. I talked about it at length on my podcast (you can listen to that episode here). It’s a legal space opera and it was tailor-made for fangirls of fantasy and science fiction like myself. In the end, Jupiter defeats all of the previous Jupiter’s children, gains legal ownership of Earth, and gets the guy, a wolf-spliced Channing Tatum with wings. Happy ending, right? A lot of people would say no. We see Jupiter return to being a maid. She is still liable to be in a ton of trouble if the American customs office ever catch her. And her owning Earth doesn’t really mean anything because the only way Earth is valuable is because its abundance of natural resource, humans, were ripe for harvesting to be made into rejuvenating, glowing bath water for inter-galactic people to use in order to stay young. Oh, did I not mention that previously?

Yeah, Jupiter Ascending sets up an entire economy around a few dynasty families (for one of which previous Jupiter was the matriarch) owning many, many planets where they populated the planets with people, waited a few hundreds of thousands of years until the planet could no longer sustain the population, then quickly harvested everyone. Gross, right? Sick. We’re people! We don’t deserve to be livestock! We saw Soylent Green! We are not down for that!

And that’s Jupiter’s reaction. She doesn’t want her whole family to become glowing bath water! So she fights really hard to keep control of Earth. And she triumphs! She saves Earth. She owns Earth!

But, like I said above, that doesn’t really mean anything. No one on Earth would or could recognize her authority. That would entail revealing to all of the governing bodies on our planet that there’s a larger body and economy that they were a part of, but actually aren’t any longer because Jupiter has taken us out of that economy. It was made very clear throughout the film that the only measuring unit of power in space, the only currency, is how much of that life-juice you have. Jupiter has, approximately, 0.

So Earth has been taken out of this human trafficking situation. Great. Except it’s still happening on other planets, in other worlds, with other families. In Hollywood we’re used to seeing our heroes take on insurmountable tasks to save absolute strangers just because it’s what is “right” and what “should be done” even if the character is only half as nice as Jupiter (many examples of this, but the first that comes to mind is Elysium). By any other film’s standard, Jupiter should have made it her mission to stop the human harvesting across all the worlds. But she doesn’t. Her immediate concern is her family’s safety, who are in the clutches of Balem Abrasax, the new head of previous Jupiter’s company. This is a respectable and realistic motivation. But after the sun has set on the final scene of  Jupiter blading across the Chicago skyline in her anti-gravity boots (yup, a real thing), you realize that she hasn’t actually solved anything. She’s still an illegal immigrant maid. And people are still being harvested across the galaxy.

A lot of people bring up this ending, how delusional and and far-fetched it was (actually, that last criticism pertains to the movie as a whole). But if we look at it from Jupiter’s perspective, we see someone who just realized that there’s so much more to the universe than what she previously thought. That’s a lot to process. But there are immediate and pressing concerns, like her family’s safety. Studies have shown that humans have much more empathy for the individual than for the masses. It’s easier to wrap your head around how one person may be affected by something rather than, say, a planet of persons (or even planets). Our tiny, puny, little human minds would explode from trying to empathize with all those experiences.

And, realistically, what could Jupiter have done to stop the human harvesting? She blows up a refinery, so that puts a dent in production. The Abrasax family (previous Jupiter’s family) is just one family/business doing this. Yes, they’re the largest. But that’d be like taking down Coca-Cola’s main production plant and expecting the entire soda industry to be stopped. That just isn’t going to happen.

Jupiter is not the reluctant hero who saves the whole world (world meaning more than just our planet). And that, I think, is just fine. Sometimes it’s nice to see a hero who is just concerned with their own immediate needs and doesn’t try to take on the weight of the world. We see a similiar thing happen in Ex Machina.

Now, Ex Machina is a brilliant sci-fi film and if you haven’t seen it I don’t even want you reading this blog. Well, I mean, I do. Just, go ahead, watch it, then listen to my podcast where I talk about it. And after you’ve done that, I want you to read this review of the film by Film Crit Hulk, who is by far my favourite film reviewer (excluding letterboxd user friendlyshark). I happen to agree with this interpretation and could have laid it all out for you myself. But I prefer Hulk’s capitalized yelling. To sum it up, Hulk’s analysis says that Caleb is not the protagonist of the film, not even a little bit. If anything, he exhibits a lot of the same troubling beliefs and habits that Nathan does. The protagonist and hero of Ex Machina is Ava.

To remind those of you who saw the film like the good, little film enthusiasts that you are, Ex Machina follows a young coder, Caleb, who wins a lottery to visit the home/estate/fortress of the CEO of his Google-esque company. Upon his arrival, this reclusive CEO, Nathan, informs Caleb that he will be the human element in a Turing test to evaluate the first artificial intelligence. But as Caleb and Ava, the stunning AI, get to talking, Caleb starts to have feelings for Ava, leading us down the predictable “hero saves the entrapped boon” path. Or does it?

Ava being the protagonist might be surprising. After all, Caleb is the first character we meet. His is the perspective we see through the most. We are rooting for him to “get the girl,” right? So why does he end up on the floor, locked in Nathan’s bedroom, left to an almost certain death? The answer lies in how we as viewers felt about it afterwards. And, speaking for myself and almost everyone I’ve talked to about the film (upwards of 3) in a very scientifically accurate study, it’s because the ending unfolded naturally and logically from the understanding of Ava as the protagonist.

During the film’s final scenes, I definitely sat there in the theatre thinking, “Oh…oh, no…she’s not…she’s leav-…oh dear…no…welp, she’s gone.” I was shocked at the ending, but only because I couldn’t believe Ava actually made it out and that she had the guts/practical programming to ensure her happy ending. Caleb was someone who she’d known for all of a handful of brief conversations. She’s not going to bring him along and potentially have him jeopardize her freedom by saying, “Great, you’re my girlfriend now, let’s go back to my place.” She’s out for herself. And, just like Jupiter thinking about her immediate and personal needs, Ava isn’t wrong or lesser for doing that. She doesn’t try to fix/repair/free all the robots, or to make things work romantically with Caleb. She’s not out to champion AI rights, or to punish Nathan for gross and massive breaches of privacy. She has her priorities (freedom, passing for human, and people watching on a corner) and wants to accomplish them first.

This may sound selfish, and perhaps it is. But I think it is 1) realistic of our capabilities as humans/robots and 2) speaks to the current generation of Millennials. Millennials are typified as self-centered and focused on social networking more than current events. They are also pushing for more grassroots community projects while simultaneously seeking global connectivity. But everything always happens after taking care of oneself and nurturing one’s own personal desires and needs. A large part of the Millennial culture is to do what makes you happy. This Forbes article does a great job laying out where exactly the financial priorities and engagements lie for Millennials today.

Jupiter and Ava are treating themselves — to happiness. Would it be nice to try to end the human harvesting across all galaxies? Sure. Would it be nice to fall in love with a nice programmer? I guess. But are focusing on yourself and understanding your limitations more pressing? Of course. Treating, understanding, and enabling yourself are some of the most popular and beneficial things people are doing currently to be happy. And this concept is spreading to many movements, like feminism and civil rights, where the concept of equality is tied to feeling empowered to be whatever type of person you want to be. I believe it’s only going to keep growing from here. Just you watch, more and more people are going to view equality and happiness as simply accepting other people as they choose to be.

If you want to be “traditional”, go ahead. If you want to start a new tradition, go ahead with that too. It seems like films are currently creating characters who are more and more okay with being themselves and not aspiring to fit into previous archetypal molds. And that’s just fine. That’s my idea of a good happy ending.

And so another ramble ends. Let me know if you like this “other happy ending” trend and what other shows/movies you think speak to it. I’ll see you next time!