The film "Raiders of the Lost Ark," a timeless story about the heroic quest for a sacred object and the conflict between good and evil, employs cross-cultural, durable symbols to establish quickly a locus of motives with a large, differentiated movie audience. The archetypes of the quest and of shadow are at the core of this film; they…

The focal image of the film "The Black Hole" functions as a visual metaphor for the sacred, order, unity, and eternal time. The black hole is a symbol that unites the antinomic pairs of conscious/unconscious, water/fire, immersion/emersion, death/rebirth, and hell/heaven. The black hole is further associated with the quest for…

"Star Trek II" is a treatment of the penultimate stages of the monomyth in which the hero descends into the underworld and is reborn. This psychological sense of rebirth is evoked in modern audiences by the film. In particular, the doppelganger (psychic double) motif, so often associated in film, literature, and myth with the…

"Battlestar Galactica," ABC-TV's prime-time science fiction series for 1978-79, illustrates how popular, mass media entertainment can communicate contradictory meanings that correlate with unresolved cultural tensions. The ambiguity of visual design is especially confusing because it is contrapuntal to the simplicity and clarity of the…