Miraculous might be the most popular elements in visual culture throughout the history. The term first appears in the religious context, and is now widely adapted in popular culture including films, TV shows, and animations, etc. Synonyms of miraculous include: supernatural, magical and marvelous etc. The audience of those miraculous visuals, whether religious or not, is always attracted to this interesting element. It is different from the violent or the sentimental since the visuals target a really wide range of audience, regardless of age, race, sex, and taste. According to Hood, “ever since we are born, we generate knowledge through our intuitive thinking, which leads us to both natural and supernatural beliefs” (Hood, 2010). In this essay, I am going to explore in-depth the question of why we are attracted to the miraculous, along with the historical application of a number of miraculous elements, followed by a close examination of a couple of examples with different appeals of the miraculous. Moreover, the miraculous will be contrasted with the horrific or horrendous that is generally known to excite a sense of horror in people. Horrific and paranormal as the most widespread form of mediated horror is most commonly found on screen; however its original characteristics are often present in literature and religion. There are many kinds of horror present in contemporary media, from the delightfully scary to the utterly terrifying. To go even further, horror is believed to engage people’s primal fears; therefore it can be believed as catching or disturbing. Some fears people go through are personal and perennial; others are social. While they take specific forms at particular times in particular places they invariably seem to arise from a fear of social upheaval and anarchy.
The Power of Belief
Humans, unlike animals, are exquisite specie born with supernatural thinking which include religion, paranormal activity, and wishful thinking (Hood, 2010). Superstitious belief is a proof of the existence of supernatural thinking in our mind. Many people are searching for and responding to the transcendent and the sacred in the details of their lives or with everyday activities (Hood, 2010). We believe that bird poop equals to richness and we see black cat as a symbol of bad luck; we often wear lucky charms during important occasions, and we purchase horseshoe-shaped charms for good luck; people frequently seek advices from fortune telling and tarot telling, and some even find them to be real afterwards. Superstitious practices is related to the belief of supernatural, and they do reduce the stress caused by uncertainty because many people still appreciate to wear a lucky charm and perform certain rituals for important occasions.
Aquinas’s Definition of Miracles
Thomas Aquinas distinguished three types of miracles. The highest rank of miracles is that something only God is responsible for and which nature can never do, for example, the recession of the sun and the separation of a river. Miracles of the second rank are ordinary things that are rare, and are done by either angle of demons, such as the resurrection of dead animals. A miracle from the third rank is what happens quite frequently but evokes a sense of wonder; it can be the birth of a baby, or a beautiful sunset (Thomas).
The First Rank
In Chinese mythology, Houyi the Sun Shooter, there is an element which can be seen as an example of the first rank of miracle. In this mythology, the sun's true forms are the ten Sun-birds, which are all offspring of the God of the Eastern Heaven. Every morning, one of the Sun-birds would take turn to rise and light up the world. However, one day, the Sun-birds grew tired of the routine and decided that all of them were to rise at the same time. The heat on earth then became horribly intense. As a result, crops died; lakes and ponds dried up, and humans and animals hided in shelters, or collapsed from exhaustion.
The Second Rank
In the movie “Heaven is for Real”, a four-year-old Colton Burpo says he experienced Heaven during emergency surgery. He told his family that he had an out-of-body experience when he could look down and see the doctor operating, and see his mother calling people to pray in the waiting room. After he got out of the hospital, he began to learn about things that happened before he was even born, he spoke of meeting his great-grandfather, who died long before his birth, his unborn sister that died in a miscarriage whom no one had told him about, and meeting Jesus, describing his physical appearance. While supporting his son publicly, Colton’s father also did some research online, where he found out about a Lithuanian girl who had a similar experience as his son. The girl painted a portrait of Jesus, and Colton stated that her portrait was similar to how Jesus looked when he visited Heaven. This film was based on a true story, which sounds surprising. If we go online, there are countless examples of people who believe they have actually experienced such supernatural things. Even when science has account for most of the things in modern world, we still believe that the world is actually enchanted.
The Third Rank
The third rank of miracles refers to things that happen quite frequently but we consider them to be amazing. In the stories of the Bible, there are many examples of Christ healing the sick. Those people, who are probably going to be healed by doctors later in a long period of time, heal in an instant, with the power of God. In modern days, there are also many ordinary things which make us feel a sense of wonderfulness. For example, when someone surprisingly found a rare four-clover leaf in a bush, when you looked out of the window and saw a beautiful rainbow which existed for a couple of minutes, or when you happened to get a lucky script from a random fortune cookie. These are all the things that happen in our ordinary lives, which can make us feel joyful and hopeful, and make us feel enchanted.
Journey to the West
“Journey to the West”, written by Wu Cheng’en in the 16th century, stand among the Four Great Classical Novels of the Chinese literature. It is inspired by The Buddhist Records, traditional folklores and Yuan opera. The book is about a monk called Xuan Zang, who travels to the Western Regions, which refer to Central Asia and India, to obtain Buddhist sacred texts. The stories and characters from this book are widely used, especially in Beijing opera, and have been adapted many times in modern film, television, stage and other media.
The miracles of the “Journey to the West” have been passed from a generation to generation, and it is a story believed by almost all the young children in China. Since I was eight years old, the older people have been telling me about the story of the Monkey King, and I usually watched the TV show together with my grandmother. Yet everything from this story was unbelievable, it miraculously attracted me to it. The Monkey King is a humanlike monkey who comes out of a stone and who can see all the truth of the world with his flammable eyes. Xuan Zang is a monk who believes in the kindness in this world and often mistakenly believes in the monsters because he was deceived by their appearance. Zhu Bajie is a humanlike pig who can talk and have thirty-six variations. All those animals in the story are given humanity, they think and talk like humans, and they have different emotions. Ever since the children learn about the story, they automatically believe that it is true, because the Chinese are born with the belief of such supernatural things.
The recent ad from Pepsi in China featured the Monkey King and has gained huge success; it has gone viral through all the social media and has a huge awareness among the Millennial by providing them with nostalgic feelings for their innocent childhood, when Monkey King has been a belief for everyone.
Miracles in Popular Visual Culture
Fantasies
According to Fowkes’ book “The Fantasy Film”, Fantasy is “ a self-coherent narrative which, when set in our reality, tells a story which is impossible in the world as we perceive it” (Fowkes, 2010). Fantasy’s appeal may lie on its engagement with the audience in the imaginative experience that is outside the framework of the reason and the boundaries of everyday reality.
In fantasies, we are able to escape together with the main characters to an alternative universe, which is imaginative and playful, where we can leave all our pressure and boredom behind. For example, in the “Wizard of Oz”, Dorothy escaped from her boring life into a world with flying witches, a living scarecrow, and a talking lion. In “Alice in Wonderland”, Alice escaped from the boundaries of reality into a rabbit hole, where all the impossible things happened - a tea party with the rabbit, a conversation with a talking cat, a meeting with a caterpillar who smokes hookah, and a battle with the poker card army. When immersing in the story of “Peter Pan”, children can escape from their growing pains to a wonderland, where children never grow up, and they never need to face the pressure of teenagers. All those stories enable us to get away from our tedious reality, into a dreamland where our sense is greatly stimulated with amazement.
In the digital media lately, we can surprisingly see some childhood fantasies being made into TV shows and target adults, for example, “Once Upon A Time” by ABC Network, and “Beauty and the Beast” by CW network. Even as adults, we are still attracted to those self-indulgent stories. The reason behind this could be that those adult fantasies provide us with a childish distraction from our important adult duties. Childhood, after all, is the place where leisure and play is permitted, and by immersing ourselves in the stories, we would be able to leave the serious world behind (Fowkes, 2010).
Harry Potter
“Harry Potter” is a series of seven novels written by the British author, J.K. Rowling, and is later made into films, which gained a huge success in its popularity globally. It is about Harry Potter, an orphan who discovers at the age of eleven that he has an inborn magical ability and his adventure in the Wizarding world, which exists alongside with the non-magical world, starts where he learns magical skills in Hogwarts and overcomes problems with his teachers and friends.
Most of the audiences of Harry Potter have felt an empathy with the supernatural hero through the development of the entire series. From the first release of the movie to the last, it has been an entire decade. Audiences of Harry Potter are growing together with the characters in the film: as Harry develops through his adolescence, he learns to overcome not only magical problems, but also social and emotional, including “ordinary teenage challenges, such as friendships, infatuation, romantic relationships, schoolwork, and exams, along with anxiety, depression and stress” (Hajela, 2005). These are all growing pains that ordinary teenagers are facing in modern society, and are the life patterns of Harry Potter’s audiences.
The story of “Harry Potter” also features an escape of the main hero from oppressive and unimaginative Muggle world to the Magical world. By traveling into the magical world together with Harry, the audiences often imagine themselves as part of the community that is in opposition to the real-world Muggle - those who don’t care for the series, and/or anyone who seems to lack imagination (Fowkes, 2010)
Superheroes
The superhero genre was for the first time introduced during the early twentieth century as comic books by Marvel and DC Comics, which are still the two most influential producers by far. With the development of technology and the increasing popularity of those comics, superhero genre is now being produced in films, animations, and TV shows. Considering that the scientific knowledge behind those superhero movies and TV shows are not fully developed, which means the phenomena is not yet to be explained scientifically, I felt the sense of miraculous from those movies and TV shows and thereby decided to include the discussion of the genre in my paper.
Superhero movies usually start with a threat posed by a super villain, which is faced by the entire world. After the unstoppable mass destruction of people and property, a superhero with unbelievable super powers appeared to save the world. According to Duncum on the pleasure of the horrific, the mass destruction followed by a restoration, is meant to bring a sense of hope that the world will get better (Duncum, 2006). The saviors with super powers only appears on screen, in the real world, however, where many countries are facing the threats of terrorists, people are usually helpless. The existence of superheroes itself is a miracle in those movies and TV shows, and a sense of hope it conveys serves the reason why people are getting immensely attracted to it.
Conclusion
We are living in a world which is now evolving into a scientific era, a world which is becoming disenchanted. People are trying to explain the entire phenomenon by science, but at the same time, many other things remain unexplained. And for those that are not able to be explained by science, humans start to develop their own valid or wished reasoning. As mentioned earlier by Hood’s research, humans intuitively search for patterns, purpose and causality and we believe that things does not happen randomly (Hood, 2010). Even in this technology-saturated world, most of us still believe in magic, supernatural powers, and miracles, whether religious, or not. For example, there are many natural types of scenery in China which look like some certain religious objects. Some people in China believe that it is the miracle of the great power of nature, while others believe that these are carved by the hands of the God. The pleasure of miraculous is based mainly on our belief - a belief that our lives are significant even if we are doing ordinary things every day, a belief that the world is still enchanted, and a belief that miracles exist. As soon as we decide to look up for the answers in the Bible, we learn that in the course of thousands of years the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy has proved to be true as regards some important miracles, or even doomsdays that were prophesized and indicated the precise day of a great end. Miraculous and fearsome often go hand-in-hand, thus in cinema alone the audiences can witness horror films of the iconic Universal Studio’s that echoed the fears of the Great Depression of the 1930s; the epoch was followed by Hollywood science fiction horror series that mostly dealt with nuclear threats, communism, and humble science and technology advances of the 1950s; perhaps the most prominent films of the 1960s were those that addressed the full collapse of sexual taboos on the screen and allowed the expression of feminism, and the subsequent diminution of the power of men. Lastly, horror alone has been displayed by September 11, 2001, on the screen as a new and unprecedented nature of evil present in contemporary American society that has become vulnerable and their ordinary lives affected, as if forever.
References
Duncum, P. (Ed.). (2006). Visual Culture in the Art Class: Case studies. Reston, VA: National Art Education Association.
Fowkes, Katherine A. (2010). Fantasy Film: Wizards, Wishes, and Wonders. Retrieved from http://www.eblib.com
Hajela, Deepti. (2005). "Plot Summaries for the First Five Potter Books". Retrieved from SouthFlorida.com. Archived from the original on 15 May 2010.
Hood, B., M. (2010). Supersense: Why We Believe In The Unbelievable. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49(2), 386-387. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5906.2010.01516_9.x
Thomas, A. (1975). Summa contra Gentiles. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.
