For a god, he’s a man’s man. You can tell because he’s often pictured carrying a long wand with a large, pine cone tip as a testament to his potency within the natural world.
Indeed, long before Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis woke up surrounded by live animals and the smell of moral death in a Las Vegas hotel room, Dionysus (or Bacchus) had already perfected the fine art of debauchery and drunkenness — making him one of the most popular Greek gods in the entire pantheon.
We love the bad boys. We watch their antics with a giddy sense of glee, which explains why Hollywood adores drunken idiots who get into all kinds of vulgar trouble and continues to deliver movies splattered in bodily fluids and expletives.
The billion-dollar Hangover franchise is the latest manifestation of Dionysian myth, but it goes all the way back to the very beginning of human history as humans struggled with the split between a noble soul and an impulsive, yearning little body.
The bastard son of Jupiter (Zeus), and born “to a virgin,” Dionysus was handed the throne when his omnipotent father took off for a brief foray. Things were supposed to be OK because Zeus assigned the mighty Titans to take care of him and protect him from his wife, the jealous Juno (Hera). Yet, Juno bribed the Titans and lured young Dionysus with a looking-glass, eventually cutting him apart, boiling him with herbs and eating him piece by piece.
Pomegranates sprang from the ground with each drop of blood, and when Zeus discovered the treachery he reassembled the various pieces with Apollo’s help. In some versions of the myth, Dionysus even rises again — from the ground, from Hades, from the throbbing veins of earth like a gushing fountain at Bellagio — to revisit the living in a moment of blind celebration.
James G. Fraser, the noted scholar and author of seminal text on folklore and mythology The Golden Bough, said every Greek household sacrificed to “Dionysus of the tree.” People planted poles, killed goats, and even tore children part limb by limb in a bid to please this largely misunderstood deity who became synonymous with wine — but whose roots tap the essence of all living things.
Dionysus represents vigorous and stubborn life – the reckless assertion of hope in a world designed to die – so even if he died a violent death, he was destined to rise again. And again. And again.
Religious scholars have certainly noted the parallels between Dionysus and the story of Jesus, as well as the grafting of tree worship onto the Christian calendar via Christmas and our annual idolatry of the pine.
The ancients knew they had to piggyback on a popular chunk of pagan narrative to really proselytize the masses and plant a stake for a new faith. The same is true now, only the motivation is different: The powers that be aren’t trying to sell religion.
In this secular age, it’s more lucrative — and more powerful — to sell movie tickets.
And so far, The Hangover franchise has sold more than $1-billion US worth of tickets over two films, with the Thursday opening of the third poised to make it the most profitable R-rated franchise in film history.
In case you haven’t seen the first two movies, The Hangover featured a group of “civilized” men — responsible members of the adult community — who lose it over the course of a bachelor party in Vegas, and later, Asia.
They lose teeth, and for a brief moment, they lose their civilized way. They marry strippers, get tattoos and drink, drink, drink to the point of oblivion.
The very success of the films affirms the cultural need for movies that embrace idiotic abandon, especially at challenging times. The first film came out in 2009 without a whole lot of fanfare, but its crisp images of the Strip in the light of day — and its bleary-eyed protagonists — clearly touched a resonant chord in the wake of the economic collapse and it became one of the biggest films of the year, ranking sixth overall.
It wasn’t the first time an R-rated movie came out of nowhere to conquer the box office with asinine, boy behaviour. National Lampoon’s Animal House blew the doors off the ticket wicket in 1978 with its cinematic shenanigans and Old School surprised everyone in 2003 when it racked up close to a $100-million on a next-to-nothing budget.
Even before the “college movie” became a genre, comics were up to the challenge of providing accessible insanity to the masses, allowing them to thumb their nose at the establishment alongside Charlie Chaplin, or indulge in goofy debauchery with the Three Stooges.
Clearly, we need these glorious screw-ups. And we need them to be men. Dionysian humour is particularly tailored to the male form, often proving so unpalatable to female sensibilities, they’re rejected on principle.
Men don’t need any encouragement to be stupid narcissistic hedonists, one might say.
Yet, where else are men going to find the affirming comfort of true acceptance for every flaw? How else could they possibly feel superior to Bradley Cooper unless he’s passed out under a urinal with vomit on his shirt?
Movies like the Hangover offer everything an old-fashioned Dionysian festival would have offered the ancient: a chance to commune with our wild side without feeling shame and a chance to embrace the gods through carnal means.
It may seem like it’s all about getting sick, going too far and making dreadful mistakes. But in fact, it’s about healing because all the bad stuff is going to happen anyway. Ritual makes it easier to process.
Hangover director Todd Phillips says the new, and final, instalment in his unholy trilogy takes a slightly different turn from the first two because there isn’t as much excessive drinking and partying. “It’s kind of a movie about a crisis,” he told journalists who visited the set last year.
“Much to the chagrin of most people, it goes darker … Funnily enough, there’s a line in (it) … ‘And then, everything went black …’ I thought it’s a great tagline for this movie because it makes you think “Oh, is it another blackout?” No, no, no. It just got very dark.”
Evidently, Phillips recognizes it’s not the party that enlightens and changes our rancid behaviour. It’s the Hangover that lets us see the light.
