Self-Mythology in Win or Lose
Pixar’s new miniseries Win or Lose focuses on a co-ed middle school softball team called the Pickles. Each episode covers the same week period of time leading up to the championship game, with the audience being able to see this week from a different character’s perspective.
Obviously, Win or Lose is a show about perception - both personal perception and the perception of others. The show demonstrates how things are never incredibly clear - the direct actions or personal views of one person does not necessarily resonate to the point of being seen and interpreted the same way by others. But it also does not necessarily make the action inherently bad - it’s just different.
I would have described this series as consisting of several intersecting stories, but I think that makes it sound as if stories do not naturally intersect. Every action or decision I make has an impact on the way others are experiencing, interpreting or understanding their own stories and life. All of our stories are intersecting, even if we may not realise it.
What’s more interesting, I think, is that Win Or Lose demonstrates the process of Self-Mythologisation. We see how it happens, often why it happens, and the impact it has on our understandings of both self and the world around us.
Self-Mythology is a very human act, where we habitually tell stories about ourselves where we are centered in the narrative. In other words, Self-Mythologsing is the creation of a narrative that makes us our own heroes and protagonists. This can be in more extreme forms, where I personally see myself as a hero and the most important, or it can be more subtle, demonstrating simply our own perceptions and points of view. An individual’s self-mythology demonstrates their own perception of self, as well as how they perceive the influence and experiences of others.
Self-mythology is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it inherently positive. It is simply a fact of human narratives, and the way our points of view paint our experiences so strongly. We are, as people, just stories at the end of the day, and it is through our stories that we construct ourselves, our experiences and connections with others, and also our understanding of both the physical and social worlds we inhabit.
I obviously spend a lot of time on this channel talking about storytelling, and particularly more cultural forms of storytelling like mythology, folklore and legends. And when we talk about these stories, we think of them as inherently social - and by social, I mean involving more than one person. But sociality, and socialisation, is not something that only happens when directly around other people. We are inherently affected by the social all the time, even when we close our doors and are, temporarily, alone.
Storytelling, and even our formal cultural forms of storytelling, do not necessitate a group of people to do it. Jay Mechling, a folklorist, has an article about Solo Folklore that I highly recommend. In it, he stresses that folklore is something which can be performed in a group of any size, whether it be large, two people, or even alone. In fact, Mechling goes on to talk about how folk events - whether they be storytelling or other connections to the folk group like cooking - happens in relativity to an observer, which can be the same as the person taking the action. Because when I do something, I’m not just doing it, I’m also observing that action taking place.
This is also how mythology, and more importantly for our discussion today, self-mythology, can be a one person show and still be mythology. The stories I tell about msyelf, even if they do not leave my own mind or my own room when I am alone, are still present, still observed, and still understood.
That all being said, when the story reaches a new audience - say someone finally observes that personal narrative I was telling - and suddenly the story can be perceived and understood differently than maybe it was from the previous audience.
This is what I particularly liked about Win or Lose - the differences that exist between the self-mythology of different characters. The way one sees the reality of a particular event can be different to the other. While these two realities may seem unable to exist at the same time, I think it still can due to the ways we understand ourselves and our experiences.
We see the various characters’ own self-mythology in the form of cartoon paintings of self and world in a different way. Their inner thoughts and understandings of self are drawn to a larger and more dramatic effect. For anxious Laurie, for example, her anxiety becomes mentally manifest as “Sweaty” - a blob which feeds on and explores Laurie’s mental state.
Let’s use, as an example, the dichotomy of Vanessa and Rochelle. Rochelle is Vanessa’s daughter, and so their stories intersect consistently, and highly impact the experiences of the other in a way that is only comparable to Laurie and the Coach, who are the other child/parent pairing.
We met Rochelle first. She’s the daughter of a single mom who takes on a lot of the stress of the home environment. Her own personal viewpoint is as an adult businesswoman, because of her focus on needing money to support her family, as well as the very adult pressures she feels due to her position in the family. Unlike the other members of the team, Rochelle has to raise the money for her involvement in the team herself. We see her struggle with this, while also not sharing the experiences of it with her mother, when the price for joining the team goes up.
We see Rochelle’s daily activities and her intense focus on achieving. She goes around school as both a kid, and as her adult businesswoman, works the concession stand to make extra money, and significantly helps her mother with household responsibilities to help out due to her mother’s multiple jobs.
In a morning montage, we see Rochelle care for her mother who is struggling in the morning. We see her physically brush her mother’s teeth to help make her mother get out of bed and ready for the day.
However, when we see Vanessa’s point of view, Rochelle’s help is nowhere present in her own morning montage. Instead, it’s Vanessa’s strength and resilience as a single mother that pushes her through, and, more importantly for Vanessa, it’s the support and love of her social media followers.
One of Vanessa’s jobs is working as an influencer. We see her own support and coping mechanism physically manifest in the form of floating hearts to represent her various likes and followers. For Vanessa, it is through the support of her online community of other single moms, as well as her own intense need to just get on it things, that makes her get up and ready in the morning.
These two differnet stories of what the morning looks like may seem contrary to one another. It may seem like one person is right and the other is wrong. But that is not necessarily the case. Both of these can be true simultaneously. While Vanessa may have grown unaware of the various help and support her daughter does around the house, Rochelle also is unaware often of the true life and struggle her mother goes through. Rochelle often sees herself as the responsible one, but we frequently see Vanessa standing up to take on responsibilities for her daughter and her family, just in ways that Rochelle does not see.
In fact, social media itself is a large disconnect for the two. Rochelle does not follow her mother’s account, and therefore only sees an occasional post. She thinks Vanessa only posts positive things, skewing the perspective on what their life is like. However, when we see Vanessa, we see how often she turns to her followers for support, discussing openly the struggles and difficulties she faces.
And, again, there is no side that is inherently wrong. Vanessa does post good things, and her perspective and storytelling on the matter may make it seem like she’s skewing things differently than Rochelle would like. But that is also Vanessa’s reality, both the high and the lows. In fact, Rochelle’s perspective on the hidden nature of Vanessa’s social media comes from Rochelle’s own use of multiple accounts to hide and change her story depending on location and aspect. Therefore, it would track that she would assume the same of Vanessa.
The group dynamic of the series, and the emphasis on their intersecting stories, helps to really push the importance of perception, and the impact our mythologising has on our understanding of both ourselves and others. We are constantly presented with these differences, often given back to back.
The series released two episodes at a time, often grouping them together to present juxtaposed narratives. Vanessa and Rochelle, for example, were released at the same time. This meant that we are more aware of the differences their narratives presented, and we remember where each character is at similar time-frames, knowing what may or may not be coming next.
The self-mythologising in Win or Lose is primarily driven by the inner characterisations, the coping mechanisms in which each character sees themselves in certain facets in order to better approach themselves or the world. Laurie’s friend Sweaty demonstrates her own self-mythologising as being under the thumb of a larger, more fierce-some foe who frames themselves as a friend. The umpire and teacher, Frank, imagines himself in armour, inspired by his love of fantasy novels. Taylor and Yuwin reveal inner children who they keep shielded from the world.
This separation of inner and outer selves is a good demonstration of how we tell our stories and our experiences in different ways depending on the setting. The way we hold our inner selves is slightly different to the way we tell our stories when in other company. Again, this is not in a negative way, it’s just a human way. The way Taylor and Yuwin hide their inner selves is incredibly similar to the ways we hide aspects of ourselves from different parts of society at different times.
During the first bits of lockdown, back in March and April of 2020, I was finishing up teaching at my university. Obviuosly, I had finish out my seminars online, from home, like most teachers and pretty much everyone else. I remember coming out of my first seminar, and my husband commented “I’ve never heard your teaching voice before”. It made me realise how I inherently spoke differently when teaching in front of a class compared to when I was just hanging out at home. This change in my presentation of self wasn’t anything conscious, but something that we all inherently do.
This is because the things we think of as “ourselves” are inherently performances for other people, and, yes, that includes ourselves as well. Our understanding of what this self is is impacted by our history, our bodies, our own experiences and our interactions with different other social world and beings.
Win or Lose shows individuals’ inner selves as something that can directly interact, deal with problems, and impact the world, even though it is not something that is actually physically manifest. Lori’s anxiety sweaty ball, for example, physically weighs her down, pushing her, moving things, and other aspects of world impact. Despite this, we all know, including Lori, that Sweaty isn’t actually impacting the world, but it’s impacting Lori and the way that she navigates both herself and the world she interacts with. It’s her social worlds, but one she doesn’t reveal to others.
Rochelle’s business woman persona is one which paints how she views herself, but also how she presents herself to others. Whenever she needs to buck up and act more adult, this is how she paints herself. Therefore, the way she presents herself to others is part of her self-mythologising, but is also presented as a way to navigate her own presentation to others to achieve what needs achieving.
Taylor and Yuwin’s hidden inner children, on the other hand, were selves which were hidden and nurtured away from prying eyes. These are the selves only reserved to show particular people, like the way that I am only a particular kind of person with my husband, and not in front of anyone else.
I think what I love most about Win or Lose is also that not every member of the team gets their own episode. There are glimpses of other people, who also get different perspectives when shown from other people’s view points. My favourite example of this is Tom, the tall first baseman for the Pickles. We get different glimpses of him throughout the series. In one, he’s a threat to Yuwin’s relationship to Taylor. But for Taylor, she seems to infer that there is something of concern happening to Tom’s brother. He also seemingly is stressed from his family life, turning to Rochelle and unethical means to achieve academically, and expressing to Vanessa that, despite her poking into Rochelle’s private life, that he wishes she was his mother.
Despite this glimpses, we never get a full episode on Tom. We don’t see his inner self, or his struggles. We don’t hear his self-mythology, but through the experience of the show, we learn that this still exists, even if we don’t see it.
Win or Lose helps to paint a picture about how storytelling is all about perspective, and how a difference in perspective shifts narratives and understandings. All stories are impacted by the narrator and the experiences they have and currently are facing. Win or Lose helps to paint the way that self-mythologising happens at all times, and how this perspective also impacts our views and the stories we tell of ourselves and others.
One of the amazing things about mythology is that sometimes we get the same story but told from a different perspective, and because of that it feels so massively different. Because this is what the reality of life is - that our stories and our histories all look so different when only looked at from a slightly different person who may not even be massively involved.
So each of our character’s self-mythologising is just that - their own stories, their own perspective, not just on the events happening around them but, more importantly, of themselves. The same week can be so different depending on whose story of the week we’re listening to. This also means that each person’s narrative should be given importance, because each is painting the story, the event, the world, and themselves, in a unique way.