Word: mythical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...poem, divided into 24 parts, is a cumulative free-translation/interpretation of the full mythic cycle of Jason and the Golden Fleece. Taking as its sources the Argonautica of Apollonios Rhodios and Euripides's Medeia, its story goes as follows: Jason, feared by his uncle, Pelias, king of Iolcus, because an oracle has said Jason will kill him, is sent to fetch the Golden Fleece in the eastern land of Kolchis. Pelias has promised Jason the kingdom--if he can return. Jason reaches Kolchis and finds the Fleece well protected by Aeetes, king of Kolchis. But Medeia, the sorceress princess...
...point he is actually transformed into flesh and almost killed in a Corinthian slave uprising. While this clown stumbles about Corinth like Jimmy Olson, cub reporter for the Daily Planet, Superman Gardner delves into more universal themes, mustering all of his authorial prowess to drastically alter the mythic conception of Jason and Medeia...
Holden came to the U.S. after 30 years on the British stage and played with such leading men as Clark Gable, Alan Ladd and Walter Pidgeon. But it was not until she fretted over Mickey Rooney in the Andy Hardy series that she acquired mythic-mother status. She played the role in 15 Hardy pictures...
There are, however, somewhat discomforting jabs at allegory and significance. Marvin is the soiled knight striving after honor, Borgnine the dark primitive force he must conquer. Aldrich's idea of making his stereotypes into mythic archetypes is to pump them up with hot air. When Borgnine and Marvin finally lock in combat they seem less likely to wreak havoc than to simply deflate each other...
This is not, of course, an accident. Hitler himself would have approved the mythic stature (if not the odium) that posterity has accorded him: his entire life was conceived as a prodigious drama - "Qualis artifex pereo!" as Nero is supposed to have said ("What an artist dies with me!"). Even the name of his superstate, the Tausendjahrige Reich, or Thousand-Year Reich, was derived from prophetic myths about the Christian millennium: a time when, after a cosmic battle between Christ and Antichrist, the forces of evil are locked away forever, the dialectic of history is abolished, and a reign...