Cycle of History

I had resigned myself to the fact that I would not be seeing Wildwood in theaters…and then I checked and the local theater still has it playing this weekend? So that’s a thing I might do tomorrow afternoon.

If you are on Facebook, I apologize that my photos aren’t going up fast enough (I need to sort and caption them, and there are literally thousands of them). I’m also slightly behind on book reviews.

Stray Gods is fun so far.

Cycle of History

Last Sunday, my Dad and I went to the theater to see V for Vendetta in the theater for its twentieth anniversary, which was fantastic–both because it’s a great movie, and also because my Dad and I were the only ones there. Presumably most people were waiting for the actual anniversary date, this past Thursday–the Fifth of November. Before the film itself actually played, there was a short introduction by the director, James McTeigue* in which he talked about the story, the way it resonated when the comic was written, and why it continues to resonate to audiences decades later. He mentioned the “cycle” we go through in history of liberty and fascism/authoritarianism, and, uh…

…We do know that history isn’t literally a cycle, right?

Okay, alright, I’m possibly misunderstanding, and given that the guy is giving a brief introduction before a movie, he doesn’t have time to give a full explanation of the themes, and his own view of history. Mr. McTeigue might very well have a much more nuanced view of the subject than I give him credit for here. 

But history isn’t a cycle! It certainly isn’t an eternal cycle with fascism, given that fascism is a fairly recent element on the stage of human history. Now it certainly feels that way, now, in the Twenty-First Century, because fascism was A Thing in the mid Twentieth Century and somehow, it keeps popping back up like an evil weed. For people alive today, the obvious way to make someone in fiction evil is to make that villain a fascist–dress them up in Nazi clothes, or have them spew Nazi rhetoric. Fairly simple! Except sucky people existed before the Nazis. Maybe if you argue authoritarianism recurs throughout history, I could take that more seriously, but even then I don’t know that we’d say it does.

Tyranny? It’s a much more vague term, and it certainly does recur throughout history, going back to ancient times. One of the first works of literature we have on record, Gilgamesh, is about a tyrant who goes through some character development. I wouldn’t call this a ‘cycle’, though I can understand why that idea spreads.

It is a lot easier to get a handle on history if you apply a pattern to it. And it’s a comforting idea, because if you’re going through a hard time with everything going on in the world, to imagine that this is the down part of the cycle–just hold on a bit, and the good parts will come back. And yeah, no, things aren’t going to be miserable forever, but that doesn’t mean you can assume they’ll turn out alright.  People have to actually, you know, do things.

I think it’s Pratchett who said, “History doesn’t repeat–but it rhymes.” That is a probably more accurate assertion on how things go in the world over time.

In fiction, of course, you can do what you want, especially with an entirely fictional world. You can portray the world as going through an eternal cycle, and then when your characters break the cycle it comes across as much more powerful. Make sure that you actually make the cycle–one thing I see in both discourse and in canon in Star Wars recently is the idea that all of galactic history is a cyclical, constant battle between Jedi and Sith, which, uh… plainly isn’t true. Things in the galaxy aren’t always peachy, but by the time of The Phantom Menace the Sith and Jedi haven’t been in open conflict for a thousand years.

I also really like the idea of mythological characters stuck in a cycle and trying to break out of it. Because with myths, there are archetypes and recurring themes, so you have the idea that characters in the story know they’re trapped by the cycle and are doing their darndest to get out of it, by any means possible.

Wheel of Time also plays with the notion of a cyclical history (it’s in the name!), and in fact one of the villains’ motivations is to break the cycle. He’s gone insane with the realization that he keeps reincarnating into the world over and over again, and decided it’d all be better off if he just completely destroyed the world. There’s also the fact that while the world of that series goes through cycles, the characters quite explicitly don’t know all of the details of how the last cycle went–much of the previous Age was lost, so while they know some of the basics, so much of the information they would have to understand how things should go is just not there, outside of the knowledge the villains have–and they’re not sharing.

I think applying this sort of thing to fictional universes works very well! I think it feels a lot sillier in a real-world setting though, because the real world doesn’t quite work that way–at least not in such specific terms (then again, if you have a sort of ‘hidden world’ within the real one in fiction, you can find a way to use it). Because the problems we face now aren’t ancient, eternal problems–they’re problems for us right now, ones that we can deal with and sort out. 

—

*Yeah, I guess we tend to forget that despite their names all over the marketing, this movie wasn’t directed by the Wachowskis.