By Steven Pressfield | Published: May 23, 2012
Last week we were talking about the “hero’s journey” in myth. This week let’s talk about movies.
Matt Damon as Jason Bourne. The "amnesiac story" is a classic "hero's journey"
The neophyte writer, when he arrives in Tinseltown, very soon gets wised up to the lingo—“inciting incident,” “Act Two curtain,” “All Is Lost moment” and so forth. It’s not so much that there’s a “formula.” But there’s definitely a “vocabulary.”
The reason there’s a vocabulary is that certain structural concepts work in stories, and others don’t. How do moviemakers know this (forgetting for a moment William Goldman’s famous axiom, “Nobody knows anything”)? They know by the box office. The Monday morning ticket figures. Audiences line up for some movies and run away from others.
William Goldman said another very smart thing. He said “Screenplays are structure.” What he meant was that the building blocks of the story and how they are arranged are the most important elements in the success of a screen drama or comedy. What comes first, what comes second, what’s left in, what’s left out. If the architecture works emotionally, the movie will work, even if the casting is less than inspired and the dialogue fails to rise to Academy Award level.
What’s interesting to me is that these building blocks often parallel, beat by beat, Joseph Campbell’s throughline of the “hero’s journey.”
Herewith those beats in myth: the hero starts out unconscious, the hero receives a “call,” the hero ventures forth, meets outlandish characters, receives aid from unexpected sources (often divine or semi-divine), suffers, is lost, despairs, and finally returns home—often in a guise unrecognizable to others.
That’s a movie. That’s a screenplay.
In the prototypical screen story, the protagonist starts out in “normal” life. Think about Taken, The Hangover, Bridesmaids. But something is out-of-kilter or potentially out-of-kilter. Suddenly: a shock! The inciting incident propels the hero out of normal life and into movie life.
We have launched ourselves upon the “hero’s journey.” (more…)
By Steven Pressfield | Published: May 16, 2012
“The hero’s journey” sounds a bit melodramatic, I admit. But hey, it’s real. If the phrase rings mythic, it’s because its origins (at least in expression) lie in myth.
Quetzalcoatl. Believe it or not, we've all got a lot in common with this dude.
What are myths? They’re the ancient, collective legends of the human race. The Odyssey, the epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf; the sagas of the Buddha or Prometheus or Quetzalcoatl.
The hero’s journey, as Joseph Campbell famously observed, appears again and again in these myths. The specifics vary, but the overall contours remain remarkably consistent.
1. The hero starts as “stuck” and unconscious.
Like Luke Skywalker toiling on Uncle Owen and Aunt Varoo’s evaporator farm, he’s a slug. A peon. And he knows it.
LUKE SKYWALKER
If there’s a bright center to the universe,
you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.
2. The hero receives “the call”—which he often resists.
When the messenger Palamedes came to summon Odysseus to join the Greeks in the war against Troy, Odysseus pretended to be insane so he wouldn’t have to go. He sowed his fields with salt. Palamedes cleverly placed the hero’s infant son Telemachus in the path of the plow. When Odysseus turned the blade aside, his ruse was revealed. He was drafted into the journey.
3. The hero wanders far from home—often for a long, long time.
Odysseus was gone ten years. The children of Israel wandered for forty. The hero’s journey lasts for such a length of time that the hero fears that it will never end.
Though the hero may strive on his journey to achieve a specific goal (reach the Spice Islands, find and capture the Golden Fleece), his primary object is simply to get back home.
4. The hero endures trials.
The hero encounters obstacles. He faces ordeals; he experiences adventures. He suffers, he is lost; he despairs.
(more…)
By Steven Pressfield | Published: May 9, 2012
I netflixed The Power of Myth last week and watched it over a couple of nights. Have you ever seen it? It’s the PBS series that Bill Moyers did in 1988, interviewing Joseph Campbell. The program was great then and it’s great now.
You meet all kinds of people on the hero's journey
What I realized, re-watching Joseph Campbell (tragically he died a couple of years after the series aired) was what a powerful influence his books and thought have had on me. The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Follow Your Bliss, The Power of Myth. I decided I would dedicate the next few Writing Wednesdays to exploring those subjects. I don’t know exactly what I think about them, but writing is a very efficient way to find out.
What exactly is “the hero’s journey?” What is it in myth? What is it in our psyches? Is it the software we live by? We know George Lucas built Star Wars (and Luke Skywalker’s inner journey) around the concepts in Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces. But how does that stuff impact you and me? As artists, do we have hero’s journeys? What are they? What do they mean? Is the hero’s journey the same for women as for men?
What is the hero’s journey in story terms? Novelists and screenwriters use bits and pieces all the time, often unconsciously. The hero’s journey in one form or another is the template for almost every screen story from Conan the Barbarian to The Hangover. Concepts like the inciting incident and the All Is Lost moment come straight from Joseph Campbell’s studies of myth and legend. Is the hero’s journey still alive today? Can you have one in a cubicle or on Facebook? (more…)
