Day 119: Story Structure Notes #1

Doing some thinking about story structure in that first Bourne film, The Bourne Identity. Want to write something about it, but need to get it straight in my head. Just gonna make some notes here.

Monomyth, then. The hero’s journey. The concept, mostly from Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, that all stories are essentially one story, with a structure that comes up time and time again. Stories tell the song of human growth, of the individual self’s journey into the universal, a cosmic unity, and back again.

So the world of the story is a circle, split in two.

Ordinary and magical. Light and dark. Life and death. Order and chaos. Conscious and unconscious. Village and forest. Kansas and Oz. The pastoral, bucolic, peaceful, tranquil calm of the Shire, and the big scary wild world of the rest of Middle Earth.

The hero's journey is the movement from the ordinary into the magical, on a quest to steal fire, slay a dragon, find a treasure, rescue a kidnapped non-gender-specific person - to learn, to grow, to change - and then the movement back up to the ordinary, using whatever pearls or insights were attained to heal the ills that had become ossified within the status quo, and setting a new "normal". 

So the hero starts at the top of the circle, in the ordinary world, comfortable yet aware (perhaps only dimly) that things are a little off. Luke Skywalker bored on the farm on Tatooine. Neo a miserable office worker and twilight hacker, isolated and restless. Bilbo Baggins fat and lazy at Bag End. Harry Potter living in the cupboard in Privet Drive, being, let's be honest, criminally abused by the Dursleys.

Then comes the herald, and the call to adventure. A wind blowing in from lands unknown. A note. A treasure map. A dead body. A wizard organising an unexpected party. In Star Wars it’s the message for Obi-Wan hidden within the droid, and Obi-Wan’s desire for Luke to accompany him to Alderaan. In Harry Potter it’s the letters from no one. For Neo the herald is the white rabbit tattoo, leading him to Trinity, and Morpheus, and the promise that his whole life has been a lie, and that that lie can end, and he can awaken to the truth, if he just has the guts to swallow the red pill. Whatever form the call to adventure takes, it’s a signifier that change is coming. All that was congealed and rigid and routine in the hero’s life is about to get liquefied, shaken up, turned on its head.

There can be a step around here that Campbell calls the refusal of the call. This is Luke saying to Obi-Wan that Obi-Wan must be crazy, Luke has to go home and tidy his room, play with that little T-16 model he’s got, finish his chores. He’s scared, and he doesn’t feel ready to become an adult just yet, now it comes to it.

This is also Neo coming back in off the ledge outside his office, letting the agents take him into custody. Bilbo waking up after the party to say, hang about, dwarves? Gold? I must have been mad. I’ll go and do the washing up and forget about that nonsense. It’s the wobble, the fear, the uncertainty of the task.

Generally the hero gets over this moment, or else the adventure comes to get the hero instead. The Empire burning Luke’s homestead. Gandalf hurrying Bilbo away to meet the Dwarves, without even his pocket handkerchief. Hagrid busting down the door to the hut on the Scottish island when Uncle Vernon refuses the call on Harry’s behalf.

Then comes the crossing of the threshold. This is the point at which the hero pierces, or is thrust through, the boundary between the ordinary and magical realms. The point his adventure truly begins. Sometimes there’s a threshold guardian blocking the door. A squadron of stormtroopers amassing in the hangar in Mos Eisley to stop the Millenium Falcon from blasting off. The physical barrier of Platform 9 ¾. Sometimes there’s a crucifixion or death into the underworld. A night-sea journey. A trip into the belly of the whale. Star Wars has both those last two as well, because George Lucas really leaned on Campbell’s words to help him turn his gibberish drafts into a workable screenplay.

But the point is that crossing realms is not easy, it takes either an immense force of will on the part of the hero, or a violent move on the part of the chaos world reaching up and grabbing the hero, pulling them down.

If there’s a flight or night journey across the threshold it can be magical and weightless and serene, though, if the hero is confident and ready. The broomstick ride in Kiki’s Delivery Service, the Hogwart’s Express rocketing through the dusk. Or it can be trippy and vomit-inducing and painful, like Neo’s existentially revolting awakening into the goopy mech-spider hell of the Real.

But however it happens, the hero must break out of the routine of the world within which they have been thus far living, and into a deeper, wider world of symbols, archetypes, shifting forms. Survival in this strange land will involve a number of trials...

[Part Two]