The mythographic and musical model of interpreting storytelling in Krzysztof Skonieczny’s TV series “Blinded By The Lights” and its literary source

Abstract

The adventures of a Warsaw-based drug dealer described in the narratives of Żulczyk’s Blinded by the Lights novel (2014) and Skonieczny’s streaming series (2018) obviously are drawn from the British hip-hop composition Blinded by the Lights by The Streets (2014), both from it’s musical and narrative structure. This, in turn, is undoubtedly derived from the archetype of the mythical journey of the hero described in Jonathan Campbell’s seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). Żulczyk’s prose may indeed be a kind of extended gloss to the piece by The Streets, which takes the hero’s story to a higher narrative level. At the same time, however, it becomes a pre-text for the series, which can already draw on both narratives and define itself in relation to them. The above analysis shows how this interpretative dependence can be defined by the use of different models of interpretation that are embedded in two cultural patterns: the archetypal narrative prototype of a monomyth and the narrative-musical form of a hip-hop storytelling based on the cultural framework of the mythical katabasis.