Venus and Adonis

MAURICE: 

You won't be able to do it if you can't relax and let people look at you.

It's the human form, as it is, naked, 

in all of its weakness and beauty.

JESSIE: 
Oh, yeah?

MAURICE: 

What would your mother say?

JESSIE: 

She says if I weren't born, 
She'd be better off.

JESSIE: 

Is this it?

MAURICE: 

This is it.

There.

You see?

JESSIE: 

Is her name Venus?

MAURICE: 

No.

Venus is a Goddess.

Accompanied by Eros,

She creates Love and Desire in us mortals,

leading often to Foolishness and Despair.

The Usual Shit.

For most men, a woman's body is 

The Most Beautiful Thing They Will Ever See.

JESSIE: 

What's The Most Beautiful Thing

a Girl Sees?

Do you know?

MAURICE: 

Her First Child.

Are you all right?

JESSIE: 

I'm not doing any more

of that modeling, I can tell you that.

MAURICE: 

The model for Venus was a Real Woman, 

just like you, that's what caused all The Fuss.

JESSIE: 

Do a bit, then.

MAURICE: 

Now?

JESSIE: 

If you're so good at it.

MAURICE: 

"Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand?

Come, let me clutch thee:

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still."

Now, tell me, who wrote that?

JESSIE:

I don't know.

MAURICE: 

Really?

JESSIE:

All right then, smart-arse, what about this?

"I should be so lucky,

lucky, lucky, lucky.

I should be so lucky."

Well? Who wrote it?

MAURICE: 

Not a clue.

JESSIE: 
Well, there you are then.

Hey, it's like A Beach down there.

MAURICE:

I Iived by The Sea when I was a child.

It always calms me.

Shall we go to The Seaside, Venus?

JESSIE: 

I'd rather go to Topshop.

MAURICE: 

(CHUCKLING)

I'll take you to Lunch.

JESSIE: 

Take me somewhere posh.

MAURICE: 

Posh?

JESSIE: 

I want to meet someone really famous, not just you.

Who are these bastards?

MAURICE: 

Some of these arseholes were very well-known.

JESSIE:

For what?

MAURICE: 

You cheer me up, you know.

JESSIE: 

You have a laugh at me, don't you?

MAURICE: 

Just a little.

JESSIE: 

I'll get you back.

MAURICE: 

You will.

Don't you worry.

BILL MOYERS: 

And what does it mean, do you think, to young boys today. 
That we are absent these myths?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL:

There was no problem in these old days. 

The boy came out with a different body, and he’d gone through something.

BILL MOYERS: 

What about the female? 

I mean, most of the figures in the temple caves arc male. 

Was this a kind of secret society for males only?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

It wasn’t a secret society, 

it was that the boys had to go through it. 

Now, we don’t know exactly what happens with the female in this period, because we have very little evidence to tell us. 

In primary cultures today, the girl becomes a woman with her first menstruation. 

It happens to her; I mean, nature does it to her. 

And so she has undergone the transformation, and what is her initiation? 

Typically it is to sit in a little hut for a certain number of days, and realise what she is.

BILL MOYERS: 

How does she do that?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

She sits there. She’s now a woman. 

And what is a woman? 

A woman is a vehicle of life, and life has overtaken her. 

She is a vehicle now of life. 

A woman’s what it’s all about; 

the giving of birth and the giving of nourishment. 

She’s identical with the earth goddess in her powers, and she’s got to realize that about herself. 

The boy does not have a happening of that kind. 

He has to be turned into a man, and voluntarily become a servant of something greater than himself.

The woman becomes the vehicle of nature; the man becomes the vehicle of the society, the social order and the social purpose.

BILL MOYERS: 

So what happens when a society no longer embraces powerful mythology?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

What we’ve got on our hands. 

As I say, if you want to find what it means not to have a society without any rituals, read The New York Times.

BILL MOYERS: 

And you’d find?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Well, the news of the day.

BILL MOYERS: 

Wars…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Young people who don’t know how to behave in a civilized society. 

Half the…I imagine that 50% of the crime is by young people in their 20s and early 30s that just behave like barbarians.

BILL MOYERS: 

Society has provided them no rituals by which they become members.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

None. There’s been a reduction, a reduction, a reduction of ritual. 

Even in the Roman Catholic Church, my God, they’ve translated the Mass out of the ritual language into a language that has a lot of domestic associations. 

So that, I mean, every time now that I read tile Latin of the Mass, I get that pitch again that it’s supposed to give, a language that throws you out of the field of your domesticity, you know. 

The altar is turned so that the priest, his back is to you, and with him you address yourself outward like that. 

Now they’ve turned the altar around, looks like Julia Child giving a demonstration, and it’s all homey and cozy.

BILL MOYERS: 

And they play a guitar.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

They play a guitar. 

Listen, they’ve forgotten what the function of a ritual is, is to pitch you out, not to wrap you back in where you have been all the time.

BILL MOYERS: 

So ritual that once conveyed an inner reality is now merely form, and that’s true in the rituals of society, and the personal rituals of marriage and religion.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Well, with respect to ritual, it must be kept alive. And so much of our ritual is dead.