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... the continuous development of art is bound up with the Apollonian and Dionysian duality-just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual strife with only periodically intervening reconciliations.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I aim to provide the public with beneficial shocks. Civilization has become so protective that we're no longer able to get our goose bumps instinctively. The only way to remove the numbness and revive our moral equilibrium is to use artificial means to bring about the shock. The best way to achieve that, it seems to me, is through a movie .
Alfred Hitchcock
Of all the Greek myths, the story of Orpheus, the musician/poet of Thrace, remains one of the most pervasive in western society. One reason for this would seem to be that the myth and the religion that developed from it embrace the two extremes of Creek religion-the Dionysian and the Apollonian, extremes that still provide vital symbolism relevant to contemporary mythic behavior and, if one can believe Nietzsche, artistic creation. The Dionysian side of the Orphic tale is manifest in the hero's quest for his dead wife, Eurydice, in the underworld, and it is in this part of the myth that we see the fascination with death, as embodied in a female figure, that characterizes many recent versions of the story. The Apollonian side of the myth is inherent in a) Orpheus' loss of Eurydice by looking at her before he has brought her back to the surface from Hades, and b) his anti-female despondency and his preaching of the Apollonian religion (to all-male audiences) following the second loss of Eurydice. The continued singing by Orpheus' head once the poet/musician has been torn limb from limb by the female followers of Dionysus symbolically extends to both extremes. In these events, we see the Orphic desire to escape from the archetypal world of the female-and from the mortality implicit in the necessity of sexual reproduction-towards a more spiritually oriented immortality that in many ways foreshadows elements of Christian mythology. Because of its artist hero, and because of its mid-point symbolisms, the Orpheus myth has dimensions that the more linearly conceived myths lack. As one author has put it, ". . . in this particular story, mythology is considering,...