Storytelling is most successful when it taps into the ancient immutable truths at the root of human experience. In the fabrication of fictitious worlds, as in life, the roles of various personality types conspire to maintain a balance of identities. Beverly Hills 90210 will sustain the same kind of endurance as have the great myths of ancient Greece and Rome because it draws so heavily—and so well—on the defining archetypes of human experience. Here then is a brief schematic exegesis of the parallels between 90210 and the timeless stories that mark the dawn of Western civilization.
Andrea as Athena
With her emblematic clipboard and eyeglasses, Andrea is Athena (Minerva, to the Romans), the goddess of wisdom. Like Athena, Andrea reigns as a virgin despite her new motherhood. And like Athena, Andrea is ever-helpful to mortals--witness her many volunteer jobs over the seasons. This altruism, of course, is one of the few "Jewish" traits Andrea is allowed. (By including Andrea in their circle, the 90210 Olympians can know "otherness." David Silver [see below], son of an oral surgeon named Mel, is probably Jewish too, but since David lacks Andrea/Athena's qualities he can't acknowledge his faith; he'd be toppled from Olympus.)
Athena's domain is crafts; Andrea's, the school newspaper. Born from Zeus's head, Athena sides with males in most mythic arguments. Andrea, though she often antagonizes Brandon and Gil in the newsroom, is still the only 90210 goddess who engages in intellectual discourse. Significantly, she also takes on her opponents in person, while Kelly, Brenda, and Donna can face men only over the phone, and Kelly only in baby talk.
Kelly as Aphrodite
Kelly, the blonde man-magnet, is Aphrodite (Roman Venus), the goddess of physical beauty, sexual love, and fertility. Aphrodite was born of sea foam; Kelly is the daughter of the frothy, asexual, recovering cokehead Jackie. Kelly/Aphrodite "marries" not Dylan or Brandon (her god-equals) but David/Hephaestos (see below), her stepbrother. Long after their parents' divorce, Kelly and David continue to live together by the foamy sea in a state of barely suppressed hard-on (David) and frisky friendship (Kelly). David, not Dylan or Brandon, is Kelly's soulmate, the one male with whom she can drop the baby talk.
Brenda as Artemis
Brenda is Artemis (Roman Diana), the huntress. Artemis shuns the company of the other Olympians, preferring the forest, where she hunts in the company of wild beasts. Brenda refuses to pledge a sorority, comes "that" close to marrying outside the circle (while real-life Shannen marries professional wild thing Ashley Hamilton in a backyard ceremony), and finally takes up the study of drama among the Anglo-Saxon gods of RADA. Greek and Roman women turned to Artemis in physical matters: menstruation, childbirth, death. Today, girls watch Brenda deal with a breast cancer scare, a pregnancy scare, and a struggle with smoking. Artemis is often depicted as multibreasted; Shannen/Brenda settled for silicone augmentation.
Donna as a mortal
Donna is clearly a mortal—not even a siren, although she has functioned as a quasi-siren to David on his radio show. Pre-Olympian creator Aaron
Spelling endowed his daughter Tori/Donna with rudimentary powers to allow her access to Mt. Olympus: She is able to shop, drive a car, and clasp schoolbooks to her chest. Father Aaron also permitted Tori/Donna to alter her appearance, most noticeably her nose, so as to be able to vie with the immortals. Donna's main contribution to myth is her disastrous date with Bacchus at the West Beverly prom.
David as Hephaestos
David is Hephaestos (Roman Vulcan), husband of Aphrodite (Kelly) and the buffoon of Mt. Olympus. Yet young David, 90210's hip-hop nightmare, is the only Olympian with any mechanical aptitude. He is always plugged into a video camera, microphone, walkman, or electronic keyboard. Hephaestos/David came by these special skills naturally: He's the half-brother of Athena/Andrea, the patron of weaving and spinning.
Brandon as Apollo
Like Apollo, no false word ever falls from Brandon's lips, a function of his direct link between God and all men. In him only a vestige of the primitive remains, but this whiff of baseness calls to every archetypal siren in the country: psychotic Emily Valentine; trippy little Ariel (herself the namesake of Prospero's "mad spirit"); young S&M-er Claire; and anthropologist-feminist-sack artist Lucinda, to name a few. Like many a Greek and Roman god, Brandon enjoys a prurient relationship with his sister.
Dylan as Poseidon
Like sea-god Poseidon (Roman Neptune), surfer Dylan usually has both the storm and the calm under his firm control. But last season Dylan kissed the sea, and the sea bit back: he lost his fortune to a fake clean-up-the-ocean company. As Dylan is currently without a lover, 90210 writers should take their cue from myth: Poseidon's lover was snake-haired Medusa the Gorgon. Like Poseidon, Dylan falls in love with one woman after another, drives a "golden car," and rules the briny depths from his splendid palace beneath the sea (his suite at the Bel Age Hotel).
Steve as Pan
Steve is Pan, the noisy, merry god with the feet of a goat, the "embodiment of free-ranging libido" (Richard Carlyon's Guide to the Gods). Lusting for a constant string of merry nymphs, he is rejected time and again due to terminal ugliness.
Brandon and Dylan, and to some extent Brandon and Steve, also illustrate the classic belief that true love—intellectual love—exists only between males. "A fully realized female tends to engender anxiety in the insecure male," writes Sarah B. Pomeroy in Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves. "Unable to cope with a multiplicity of powers united in one female, men from antiquity to the present have envisioned women in 'either/or' roles."
LATE-BREAKING OLYMPIAN NEWS: At this writing, Mt. Olympus has sublet Brenda's old bedroom to a foreign goddess, Valerie of Buffalo. At the end of the 1994 season premiere this apparent sycophant finally revealed her place in myth: While gabbing on the cordless to a fellow nymph back in Buffalo, dissing the Olympians for their grandiose sense of self, Valerie opens a small box and begins rolling a joint. With her disdain for the disco and love of hemp, Valerie is Demeter (Ceres), goddess of corn and queen of the fruitful earth. Protector of marriage, she provides the Walshes with "someone to wait up for," as Mom Walsh puts it.
With this sturdy underpinning of archetypal characters, Beverly Hills 90210 should have enough plots to take us well into the next millennium. I'm looking forward, especially, to the inevitable pairing of Valerie and Dylan, whose Greek counterparts' romance finally took off when Poseidon took the shape of a horse.
A version of this article originally appeared in Issue 7, summer of 1993, the year Beverly Hills 90210 won a Golden Globe Award for Best TV Series—Drama. The next season (season 4) our friends at 90210 left West Beverly (Donna Martin Graduates!), and a lot has changed since then. Key members of the cast have come and gone: Brandon, Brenda, Valerie Malone and Claire Arnold. Dylan left and came back; Noah and Matt Durning (Attorney at Law) showed up, Steve got married, and Gina skated in (she appears in her last episode tonight).
Kelly has gone from a ditzy blond, to an advocate for the domestically abused, drug runner for the ill, a one woman support system for shoplifting teens and mixed-up rehab patients. She and the latest in a revolving door of fiancees, Matt Durning (Attorney at Law), are crusaders for all those in need. Is she still Aphrodite? Can she be the goddess of sexual love and fertility even after she had a miscarriage and discovered she may never be able to have children?
Can Steve still be a noisy, merry Pan with a new wife and child?
What about Dylan as Poseidon? He married the Noxema girl and left the show in a fit of grief after she died in a tragic Mafia-related car shooting instigated by her father. Has his bitterness driven him to lose "control over the sea and all its gods and creatures," or has it, along with his drug-abuse and misogyny, cemented his likeness to the "unruly wildness of the sea"?
The parallels to the great myths undoubtedly still exist, they have simply shifted over time. How have character developments and plot twists changed the relationships of these characters to the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome? Post us your theories, dear readers, and the best gets a free Hermenaut T-shirt (so be sure to include a working email address along with your post in the Wicked Pavilion).
—ci
