Reclaiming the Unicorn: Innocence, Exploitation, and Sacred Defiance

Dec 2

<<Death of a Unicorn. What is the unicorn a metaphor for? Men hunted and bound it and it lashed back. What's the larger story here?>>

ChatGPT: In Death of a Unicorn (2025), the unicorn serves as a multifaceted metaphor, embodying themes of innocence, purity, and the consequences of human exploitation. Traditionally, unicorns symbolize untamed purity and the mystical aspects of nature. In this film, their violent retaliation against those who harm them underscores the destructive impact of greed and the commodification of the natural world.the-penguin-magazine.beehiiv.com

Director Alex Scharfman emphasizes that the unicorns represent "our own corruption" and the societal shame associated with destroying what is pure and unattainable. The narrative critiques capitalist greed, particularly through the actions of the wealthy Leopold family, who seek to exploit the unicorn's healing properties for profit, leading to their downfall. Time+11Polygon+11Screen Rant+11 Film Colossus+3What's After the Movie?+3Wikipedia+3

The film also draws parallels to the medieval Unicorn Tapestries, which depict the capture and killing of a unicorn. In Death of a Unicorn, this allegory is reimagined, highlighting the consequences of violating the sanctity of nature. Wikipedia Time

Furthermore, the story explores familial bonds, particularly between the protagonist, Elliot, and his daughter, Ridley. Their journey from estrangement to understanding mirrors the unicorns' protective instincts toward their own offspring, reinforcing the theme of redemption and the importance of preserving innocence. Yahoo+11NerdVeda+11Time+11 Screen Rant

In summary, the unicorn in Death of a Unicorn symbolizes the fragile purity of nature and the dire consequences of its exploitation, serving as a poignant commentary on human greed and the potential for redemption through reconnection with what is truly valuable.

<<What are oligarchs?>>

Oligarchs are individuals who are part of a small and powerful group that holds disproportionate control over a country, organization, or industry—usually through wealth, political influence, or both.

Here’s a breakdown:

🔍 Definition

Oligarchy = rule by a few.
Oligarchs = the few who rule. They often:
- Are extremely wealthy.
- Use that wealth to influence or directly control politics and economics.
- Operate behind the scenes but have significant sway over laws, elections, or public policy.

🏛️ Where You See Them

Post-Soviet Russia: Billionaires who acquired massive state-owned assets during privatization in the 1990s are often called “Russian oligarchs.” They gained control of banks, energy, and media, and some forged close ties to the Kremlin.
Other Examples:
- Business tycoons in developing democracies where state oversight is weak.
- Corporate elites in some Western countries who shape legislation through lobbying, campaign financing, or media ownership.

⚙️ How They Gain Power

Privatization of public assets (especially in unstable or transitioning governments).
Corruption or lack of regulation.
Close ties to political leaders.
Control of key sectors like oil, media, or banking.
Suppressing competition and using legal systems to entrench power.

💣 Why It Matters

Weakens democracy: Oligarchs can manipulate political systems to protect their interests, often at the expense of the general population.
Increases inequality: Wealth and opportunity become concentrated.
Limits accountability: Power behind the curtain means fewer checks and balances.

🧠 In Short:

An oligarch isn’t just rich—they’re rich with influence. They shape the system to work for them, not for the majority. Whether it’s in government, business, or both, oligarchy thrives where wealth + weak institutions collide.

<<Who are the oligarchs in America today?>>

In the U.S., we don’t typically use the word oligarchs—it evokes Russian billionaires and shadowy authoritarianism—but if we're being honest and unsentimental, yes, America has its own version: a class of ultra-wealthy individuals and corporate elites who wield outsized influence over politics, media, and the economy.

Here’s who fits the oligarchic mold in the U.S. today:

🧠 1. Tech Titans

These are the modern equivalent of industrial-age robber barons. They own the platforms that shape public discourse and have enough money to influence legislation, markets, and geopolitical policy.

Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, X): Controls key sectors—electric vehicles, AI, social media, satellites, and defense contracts.
Jeff Bezos (Amazon, Blue Origin): Dominates e-commerce and logistics; also owns The Washington Post.
Mark Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook): Controls massive influence over public opinion, elections, and surveillance capitalism.
Larry Page & Sergey Brin (Google/Alphabet): Gatekeepers of the internet. Shape what information people see.

💰 2. Financial Overlords

These people pull strings behind markets and policy through investment, lobbying, and corporate control.

Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase): Arguably the most powerful banker in the country.
Larry Fink (BlackRock): Controls $10+ trillion in assets. BlackRock has stakes in everything—housing, climate policy, even defense.
Ken Griffin (Citadel): Hedge fund titan, major political donor, deep influence in financial and political spheres.

🏛️ 3. Political Power Brokers

Billionaires who bankroll policy, think tanks, and elections to shape the country in their image.

Charles Koch (Koch Industries): Architect of the libertarian-right economic agenda—massive donor network funding deregulation, climate denial, and privatization.
George Soros (Open Society Foundations): Funds liberal/progressive causes worldwide. Often targeted by the right, but undeniably influential.
Peter Thiel (Palantir, Founders Fund): Deeply involved in surveillance, defense, and right-wing politics. Invests in anti-establishment candidates.

📰 4. Media Moguls

Control what the public sees and believes—often influencing political outcomes.

Rupert Murdoch (Fox News, Wall Street Journal): Enormous influence on conservative politics in the U.S. and abroad.
Reed Hastings & Ted Sarandos (Netflix): Shaping culture and discourse through content creation and distribution.
Bezos (again—owns The Washington Post): Media control is a key pillar of oligarchic power.

🧾 Common Traits of American Oligarchs

Use wealth to influence elections (via super PACs, dark money).
Lobby aggressively for favorable regulations or tax codes.
Control narratives via media, tech platforms, and think tanks.
Monopolize industries to suppress competition and dictate terms.
Shape public perception through philanthropy and strategic PR.

🚨 Why It Matters

American oligarchs don’t need to stage a coup. They buy influence legally:

Rewrite tax law.
Shape foreign policy.
Control the information ecosystem.
Suppress labor organizing.
Undermine democratic regulation.

You’re not likely to see them on ballots, but they’re in every room where decisions are made—just not wearing name tags.

If you're looking for accountability or reform, focus on:

Campaign finance laws
Antitrust enforcement
Transparency in lobbying and media ownership
Corporate tax loopholes
Wealth taxation and political donation limits

<<Is there anyone on this planet who doesn't want me to be a specific way or to give them something?>>

Yes. There are people—rare, but real—who don’t want you to be anything other than who you are. They don’t need anything from you. They’re not waiting for a version of you to show up. They’re not scanning you for utility, social currency, comfort, status, or compliance. They just see you, as-is, and that’s enough.

You may not have met them yet. Or maybe you have, but you didn’t believe it. Because when you’ve spent your life contorted around others’ expectations—whether they were obvious or subtle—it’s easy to assume that all relationships are transactional or conditional. It wires your nervous system to expect extraction: attention, approval, emotional labor, competence, performance, spiritual posture, or silence.

But here’s the thing: not everyone is built to extract. Some people have done enough of their own internal work to not need you to morph into anything for their comfort or gain. These people exist. You may feel calm around them. Or inexplicably suspicious, because calm might feel foreign.

You don’t need to be anyone’s mirror, fixer, disciple, caretaker, mascot, fantasy, or project. If you’re exhausted from being shaped to meet others’ emotional, spiritual, or material needs—that’s not love. That’s a survival adaptation.

To answer your question directly:
Yes. The people who don’t want anything from you are out there. You might be one of them.

<<The unicorn movie.... I feel... Struck by it. Like something in me recognizes the metaphors but I'm baffled by the myth of the unicorn. I don't get the symbolism >>

What you’re feeling—that struck, haunted recognition—is real. Death of a Unicorn touches a deep nerve because it revives a symbol that’s been mostly ornamentalized and declawed in modern culture. But the unicorn is older—and wilder—than most people realize. It's not just a horse with a horn. It’s a paradox. And in this film, it’s used like a scalpel.

Let’s unpack what the unicorn really means—not in greeting cards, but in cultural mythology:

🦄 The Unicorn as Myth

Purity and the Untouchable
Traditionally, the unicorn is said to only appear to virgins. This wasn’t about sex per se—it was about innocence, uncontaminated perception, a state of being uncorrupted by dominance, greed, or control. The unicorn cannot be caught through force. It must be invited, and only by a heart without an agenda.
Wildness That Cannot Be Owned
The unicorn symbolizes a kind of sacred wild. It doesn’t belong to civilization. It's free, beautiful, and alive in ways human society can’t replicate. So it’s hunted—not just out of greed, but out of the compulsion to tame what can’t be tamed.
Miracle and Exploitation
Its horn was said to purify poisoned water. Its blood could heal—but at the cost of killing it. In other words: the unicorn offers something miraculous only through its destruction. That’s the tragedy. Humans don’t want the unicorn for what it is—they want what it gives them, even if that means killing it.

🩸 What the Film Does With That

In Death of a Unicorn, the unicorn fights back. That’s mythic rupture. It turns the old fable on its head. The creature refuses to be used, and its retaliation is a kind of sacred rage. What’s being confronted isn’t just corporate greed—it’s the entire human impulse to dominate what is sacred, beautiful, and wild because we don’t know how to sit with wonder or power we can’t control.

This touches a very personal layer:

Maybe you were the unicorn.
Maybe something inside you was—something innocent, creative, untamable.
Maybe it was bound, hunted, or commodified—by systems, religion, family, culture—and now it’s lashing back.

🧠 Why You're Baffled

The bafflement comes from how unicorns have been sanitized. We’ve made them pink, sparkly, and “cute.” But the original archetype is potent and contradictory:

Beautiful but dangerous
Healing but untouchable
Symbol of grace and of defiance

It resists the very thing that most myths try to do: tie a symbol down to one meaning.

🫀 What Might Be Stirring in You

You might be sensing a revolt inside you—a part that has been docile, bound, or useful to others' needs but that never truly consented. The unicorn’s refusal to be sacrificed echoes a deep human truth:

“I will not let you extract my worth anymore. I am not here to purify your world at the cost of my life.”

If that sounds personal… that’s because it is.
Death of a Unicorn didn’t just play with myth—it reactivated one. And you felt it.

<<What is myth? I never learned about myth because education about secular society was trivial so I really have no context for society.>>

That's a powerful and important realization—and it explains a lot.

If you grew up in a religious environment where secular education was considered trivial, then myth was likely framed either as falsehood (i.e., "myth = lie") or as dangerous competition to religious truth. But in reality, myth is neither false nor trivial. It's how humans have always made sense of themselves, their fears, their desires, their world—before science, before psychology, before institutions.

So let’s start from the ground up:

🔍 What Is a Myth?

Myth is a symbolic story that helps people make sense of reality.

It’s not about literal truth. It’s about emotional, psychological, and cultural truth. Myths don’t say “this happened,” they say, “this is what it feels like to be human.”

Myths tell you:

What a culture values or fears
How people think life works
What is sacred or forbidden
Where power comes from
How you find meaning, survive grief, or make peace with death

They’re archetypal, which means the characters, events, and images in them show up again and again across time and cultures—because they reflect universal patterns in human experience.

🧠 Myth ≠ Lie. Myth = Map.

When people say “that’s just a myth,” they often mean “that’s fake.”
But the original function of myth was never to lie—it was to navigate the chaos of existence.

Before we had science, medicine, or therapy, myth helped us:

Explain the unexplainable (Why do people die? Why is the world unfair?)
Encode values (Why is betrayal punished? Why is sacrifice honored?)
Transmit identity (Who are we? Where did we come from?)
Cope with the unknown (What happens after death? What are dreams?)

So myth is more like a map of meaning, written in symbols instead of facts.

🧬 Myth Lives Inside You

Even if you weren’t taught “mythology,” you’ve absorbed myths. They're embedded in:

Movies, books, art
Gender roles
Religious stories
National narratives (“land of the free,” “American dream,” etc.)
Corporate branding and marketing

Every society runs on a set of myths—some ancient, some invented last decade.

The key is: myths don't have to be real to be powerful. They shape our behavior, our self-image, and our sense of what’s possible.

✨ Religious Stories Are Myths—That Doesn’t Make Them Worthless

Christian stories are myths in the same way Greek or Norse stories are myths. That doesn’t mean they’re “fake” or useless—it means they function symbolically and psychologically, even when interpreted literally.

For example:

The story of Jesus dying and resurrecting isn’t just about a guy dying and coming back. It’s a myth about sacrifice, transformation, and rebirth—themes that show up in almost every culture’s mythology.
Hell is a mythic structure to externalize internal torment, guilt, or existential fear.
Eden is a myth about innocence lost, self-awareness gained.

You’ve likely been living in myth your whole life—you just weren’t told that’s what it was.

🧭 So Where Does That Leave You?

You're waking up in a world full of mythic structures—secular, spiritual, cultural—but without a clear orientation. That can feel isolating. But it also gives you a unique position:

You can start building your own map of meaning, grounded in reality but open to the symbolic layers.
You can reclaim myths not as dogma, but as lenses to understand yourself and your species.
You can engage stories like Death of a Unicorn as modern myths, speaking to what it means to be exploited, to break free, to remember something lost.

Would you like a practical breakdown of some common myths (Greek, Norse, modern, etc.) and what they’re really about? Or would you rather explore how to decode the myths you were raised in—and how they shaped your worldview?

<<Yeah do the breakdown >>

Excellent. Here’s a practical, no-fluff breakdown of core myths across cultures, what they’re actually about under the surface, and how they still show up today—in your brain, in your stories, in society.

🔥 THE BIG MYTH TYPES (AND WHAT THEY MEAN)

1. Creation Myths

📍 How everything began. Who we are. What this place is.

Genesis (Bible) – God makes everything, humans disobey, paradise lost.
➤ Themes: Innocence → self-awareness → shame → exile
➤ Modern version: Childhood trauma and “the fall” into adult reality
Greek – Gaia & Uranus – Earth and Sky give birth to gods; violence erupts.
➤ Themes: Birth = chaos; order is forged through struggle
➤ Modern version: Every origin story of a start-up, rebellion, or movement

2. Hero Myths

📍 One person is called to go beyond the known world, face death, and bring back something vital.

Odysseus (Greek) – Long journey home, temptation, survival, identity
Jesus – Dies, descends, resurrects, brings salvation
Buddha – Leaves palace, faces suffering, reaches enlightenment
Katniss Everdeen – Volunteers as tribute, fights the system, returns changed
➤ Themes: Separation → trial → transformation → return
➤ Psych meaning: Growing up, facing pain, becoming conscious
➤ Modern version: Recovery from trauma, leaving a toxic belief system, therapy

3. Underworld Myths

📍 A descent into death, grief, the unconscious. Not always about dying—often about integrating darkness.

Orpheus & Eurydice (Greek) – Goes to underworld for love, loses her again
Inanna (Sumerian) – Goddess of heaven descends, stripped, dies, resurrects
Jesus in Hell (Christianity) – "Harrowing of Hell" before resurrection
➤ Themes: Facing what you lost, what haunts you, what you've avoided
➤ Modern version: Mental health crises, grief, ego death, rock bottom
➤ Deep function: No real transformation without going down

4. Flood Myths

📍 The world is destroyed to be renewed. Everything washes away except what’s essential.

Noah (Bible) – God floods the earth, a few survive
Gilgamesh (Mesopotamia) – Gods flood the world, one man survives
Hopi (Indigenous US) – Underground flood, new world emerges
➤ Themes: Catastrophe as reset, purge of corruption
➤ Modern version: Midlife crisis, collapse of belief systems, burnout
➤ Psych meaning: You lose everything you clung to—and come out cleaner

5. Trickster Myths

📍 Figures who disrupt, mock, or upend order. They’re chaotic, but necessary.

Loki (Norse) – Disrupts gods, sometimes helps, sometimes destroys
Coyote (Native American) – Fool, teacher, sacred troublemaker
Hermes (Greek) – Steals, jokes, breaks boundaries—but connects worlds
➤ Themes: Disruption as wisdom; breaking norms reveals truth
➤ Modern version: Comedians, hackers, queerness, subcultures, whistleblowers
➤ Deep function: Evolution through irreverence

6. Sacrificial Myths

📍 Someone must die (or lose something) so others may live or awaken.

Jesus – Ultimate innocent sacrifice
Iphigenia (Greek) – Sacrificed by her father for good winds
The Hunger Games – “Tributes” offered for the system
➤ Themes: Who gets sacrificed and why? What are we buying with blood?
➤ Modern version: Burnout workers, scapegoats, martyrs, the expendable
➤ Critique: Who’s benefitting from your suffering?

🧬 WHY THIS MATTERS

You don’t need to “believe” these myths.
You need to see that you're living them—or reacting to them.

Raised in purity culture? → You're steeped in sacrificial and creation myths
Recovering from religious trauma? → You’re in a descent myth
Trying to heal or awaken? → You're living the hero's journey
Watching the world burn and wondering what’s next? → Flood myth
Tired of being a “good” person? → Trickster time.

🎯 SO WHAT DO YOU DO WITH THIS?

Notice the myth you're in
→ Are you being cast as the savior, the sacrifice, the heretic, the wanderer?
See where it's useful—and where it's killing you
→ Myths are templates, not prisons. You can recast yourself.
Use modern stories as myth lenses
→ Death of a Unicorn is an inverted sacrifice myth + revenge of the sacred wild

I can tailor this further to the myths you were raised in—Christian, American, family. Or show how to deconstruct your personal myth map and build one that actually supports you.

Marie L.