Pretty soon every film franchise in the world will be rebooted with this origin-myth style: a black-eared rodent called Michael will be tentatively hailed, at the end of a three-hour film culminating in a helium-inhalation tragedy, as "Mickey … Mouse".
Social scientists have identified various forms of communication by which myths, styles of living, mores, and traditions are passed either from generation to generation or from one segment of society to another.
The myth: Learning styles are often referred to as VAK – students are categorised as visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learners.
In an amusingly provocative and strangely apt passage, he spends some time comparing Islamic State with the Church of Jedi – two religious or pseudo-religious groups that employ myth as a style or lifestyle gesture.
What's more, it has perpetuated the myth that Brazilian style can be reduced to its most pedestrian, predictable and patronizing cliché: "life's a beach," where Brazilian designers are interested in dressing only the scantily clad whose feet seldom leave the sand.
The masculinity of his myth and prose style made Ernest Hemingway the writer to topple for a generation of novelists in the last century.
Compared to Karl Rove's "revvin' up your engine" myth-making cinematic style, Jerry Bruckheimer's movies look like "Lizzie McGuire".
Somebody tells you not to mix Zima with Drambuie, somebody says that rewriting Icelandic myths in the style of Candace Bushnell is a really bad idea, but you may feel compelled to go ahead and do it anyway.
But the business of architecture was not for Mr. Mockbee, who had also begun to paint in a myth-laden vernacular style; in 1991 he started teaching at Auburn University.
If the film is also the McCartney family's effort at Camelot-style myth making ("We had proved what we set out to prove," Sir Paul says at the end, "which is there was life after the Beatles"), they certainly have a right to play that game.
