I was absolutely fascinated the other day, when I was watching Sesame Street with my godson, and it occurred to me that they’re very free with the use of the word ‘monster’. Now, words are meant to be used in a number of different ways, and the crazier you get the more refreshing - provided you possess the mastery. Is there wrong usage of words? I believe yes, but clever breaking of rules is always great. Words are, at the end of the day, vessels or clouds of meaning. Associations vary with everyone’s personal experiences and what they’ve been taught. There are so many things going on in one’s brain when one reads or listens. So much data is accessed and processed in the background.
Let’s say my godson grows up on Sesame Street, and the edge of the word ‘monster’ is taken off for him. Maybe monster means anything that’s not humanoid or something that defies the biological norm. My godson might then also take in stride that just because something doesn’t fit the norm, it doesn’t necessarily have to have negative connotations attached to it. Maybe he might create parallels with this positive monster concept for anything he can’t understand at a first glance. I can’t help but see this as a wonderful thing.
As a student of myth, I can’t help but think about Marina Warner. She takes the example of the monstrous female archetypes in… well, pretty much everything. Myth is the vapour of human minds simmering in the sun throughout history. The monstrous female appears everywhere, an inversion of all that male-dominated families consider safe. The monstrous female is sexual liberated, unbound by convention and tradition, and rejects the maternal role. As an element of myth for centuries, this archetype is pretty firmly cemented in our minds.
Warner talks of personalities like Madonna as examples of those who fight this trend. Madonna embraced sexuality, touted it, and gave the same middle finger to convention. All right, so she might have lost her way at some point by giving into sensationalism, but that’s not the point. The point is that she wore all that had been considered negative like a badge, and she made it cool, changing the way people perceived it. Madonna (along with many others) was messing around with myth.
Is Sesame Street doing the same thing on a subtler level, though? I think it has the potential to do this. I’ve heard it being criticised for labelling things, putting ideas and concepts in boxes (words), impressing rigid negative connotations on children. The major example is Oscar the Grouch. He’s a grouch. It’s part of his name. So he has to be a grouch, right? By labelling him, they’ve done all sorts of things to how he sees himself, not to mention how others see him.
But this monster business - I think it’s wonderful. I think it’s an example of how altering myth can eventually change our outlook and the way we deal with concepts hardwired into us.
That said, what do I now use to talk about something that is monstrous?
See around 1:36 (‘monster you could be’):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGohKgNOXnU
Look at how unassumingly Feist says the word:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ9WiuJPnNA&feature=relmfu
This is more just because I’m sad REM broke up:
