101: dreams, mazes, & tombs

THIS WEEK: I watched 'La Chimera'

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While watching Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera (2023), I kept thinking that the film was referencing a Greek myth that kept showing up in my courses last year: the myth of Orpheus, who goes to rescue his dead lover from the Underworld and ends up losing her forever on the way up because he breaks Hades’ only stipulation for her release: don’t look back. After the movie, on the train home, I realized that it wasn’t the Orpheus myth I was thinking about, but another Greek myth, one featuring a maze. I took to Google—“greek.myth string maze”—and realized that the hero I was thinking of was Theseus, whose lover Ariadne gives him a ball of yarn so that he can make his way out of Daedalus’ maze, thereby saving his life and allowing him to emerge from the maze, a hero.¹