Strategy+Business – August 2019

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and I connected dots I’d never connected before: Nobody owns the hero’s jour-

ney. Nobody owns any of these archetypes. But we all take them, and alter them

to reflect our own cultures. I thought back to that TV show in Changsha, where

I’d pigeonholed one of the performers as the Springsteen of China, and I re-

alized I’d been wrong. Springsteen’s influences can be traced back from Bob

Dylan to Pete Seeger to John Steinbeck to Walt Whitman, and eventually all

the way back to Homer. The boy groups? The Vienna Boys choir and the 16th-

century Italian castrati. The girl groups? They took to the stage as the sirens

in ancient Greece, with earlier lineups in Egypt, Babylon, and Judea. Even the

endless tranche of superhero movies — wherein a superhero with “personal is-

sues” works out his inner conflicts by destroying an American city — find their

shapeshifting character origins in Egyptian, Greek, Indian, Norse, and Chinese

mythology. The beloved Chinese Monkey King alone could make 72 different

transformations. The only real difference between now and then is that instead

of hurling city buses and wreaking havoc on modern municipal infrastructure,

Zeus was throwing lightning bolts.

Whether I was guilty of unconscious bias I’ll leave for others to decide. And

so far as the Hollywood executives’ attitude goes, the ancient Greeks had a word

for that, too: hubris.

For decades, Hollywood ruled over the entertainment world because it

could make archetypal movies bigger, better, and louder than anyone else. But to

take a page from the Marvel canon, that dominion has now been challenged by

the gods of Silicon Valley.

The new local tentpoles

Growing up in Mumbai during the 1970s, the legendary computer graphics chip

designer Raja Koduri was enthralled by movies. You may not know his work at

Apple, AMD, or Intel (where he’s now senior vice president and chief architect of

the core and visual computing group), but you’ve been awed by the graphics his

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