A longstanding discussion within the humanities has been whether culture is shaped by universal laws and perennial ideas, or whether it is in fact strongly historical. A central issue for both views has been language. In the heyday of Structuralism in the 1960s scholars such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Algirdas Greimas, Tzvetan Todorov and Gérard Genette tried to find universal grammars and universal discursive features in storytelling and mythmaking. The structuralist endeavor was in several respects fruitful, providing some basic tools to describe narratives. However, its language-based idea of grammar-like linguistic structures at the basis of storytelling was – in hindsight – problematic because it prevented structuralists from trying to look for those brain structures, those basic mental mechanisms, that support and mould the narrative “grammars.” Structuralism was inspired by the cognitive revolution that began in the 1950s (with Chomsky and others) but missed the later cognitive and neurological breakthroughs since the 1970s.

In the 1970s the language metaphor was used for a radically different purpose. Language was not seen as a vehicle for expressing meanings existing elsewhere – in the world and in the human life experience – but something created by the signifying systems of language. This fitted well with a 1970s-90s view within the humanities of culture as being a radical flux so that different cultures, genders and ethnicities fully lived in their own cultures or were indoctrinated with prevailing dominant discourses.

I have advocated a radically different approach to film studies that shuns language metaphors and analyzes films based on an embodied bio-cultural approach to film analysis, which aims at steering a middle course between strong culturalism and strong universalism. The main idea is that humans are not born with a clean slate that can be programmed at will by different language-like cultural systems but are born with an embodied brain that has a series of innate capabilities. Many of those capabilities are located in specific parts of the brain and become activated by the interaction with the environment. The last thirty years have produced incredible advances in our knowledge of the human brain and its evolutionary history. Thanks to fMRI scanning and numerous other techniques the understanding of the functioning of the human brain has increased rapidly.