Why should we be watching commercials director Rupert Sanders' film Snow White and the Huntsman when Romain Gavras' No Church in the Wild music video for Kanye West begs our attention? Whatever unrest Kanye artfully evokes with Gavras' references to insurrection and political strife is truer to the temper of modern living than this over-extravagant CGI fairytale. Updating the Snow White legend into a vampire-zombie-cyber-goth fashion show results from commercial calculation more than any credible feeling for the ideas of innocence, selflessness, hope, beauty (and their opposites) that the Snow White story used to instruct. Charlize Theron strikes her usual psychotic anger poses as Ravenna, a vengeful queen lusting for eternal youth and power while Kristen Stewart as Snow White again anguishes over her obligation and destiny. A Monster and Twilight mash-up to no purpose. SWATH may trigger reflex pretensions about feminism and narcissism (including Chris Hemsworth's stolid Huntsman) but at the same time it is uprooted from the basic needs of storytelling and deep emotional identification. So many jumbled motifs occur in Sanders' SWATH that it resembles the promiscuity of music videos that ransack our cultural heritage out of art directors and costume designers' mad zeal. SWATH plunders the recent melting, morphing history of F/X?everything from that damnable The Lord of the Rings trilogy to Avatar yet never achieves the exotic originality of such magnificent Chinese fantasies as Chen Kaige's The Promise, or Zhang Yimou's Hero and Curse of the Golden Flower that evoke authentic cultural memory. Romain Gavras, son of polemical filmmaker Costa Gavras, supplies similar cultural evocation for Kanye West?political consciousness as a form of style, music video as quasi-political internet communique. No Church in the Wild's only message concerns the amoral panic that SWATH disregards. Kanye West's current artistic project uses imagination to create new myths; his innovations constantly provoke (though not always successfully as in the visually striking yet metabolically abrasive Niggas in Paris music video), But No Church in the Wild pinpoints the loveless circumstances of modern living that SWATH placates with meaningless. non-spiritual fantasizing. Kanye uses the history of cinematic agit-prop to recall its absence/ignorance in today's media but SWATH exploits fairytale mythology without the philological intelligence found in Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves. To read the full piece at City Arts [click here](http://cityarts.info/2012/06/01/promiscuous-myths/).
