Day 138: Story Structure Notes #4

[Part One]

[Part Two]

[Part Three]

OK, let's power on into the last part of the hero’s journey. The hero has received a call to adventure, crossed over the threshold into a strange realm, been tested on a road of trials, fought towards the depths of chaos and magic, and had a meeting with a goddess or an atonement with a father. Now, from this depth of weightlessness, from the sacred inner sanctum or the height of the tallest tower, the hero must set their sights on home.

Stories are codified maps of rejuvenation and rebirth. They’re not power fantasies - about the nerdy kid becoming a superhero and being able to beat up his bullies - although Hollywood often focuses on this most satisfying aspect of the journey. For the circle to become complete the hero must dive to the depths of the lake and steal the glittering pearls - and then bring them all the way back up onto the land so that the pearls may benefit the people on the banks who were left behind. The hero touches the eternal when meeting the goddess, overcomes the power structure of the old world represented in the father, wins some ultimate boon, and then must take that boon back so that the external world may be enlightened in the same way that the hero just was.

There is no room for ego in this - although of course there is plenty of room for ego in the tensions of whether the quest will be successful. The hero fights against their ego continually. But stories are always stories of oneness. The external world, as it falls into disrepair and disease, births the unlikeliest of seeds: a peasant orphan, a lazy hobbit, a young girl scared and clinging to her parents’ coattails. This individual then journeys to the heart of the world’s problem - growing into extraordinary power as they do so, and then uses that power to bring back some trinket or wisdom that will set right the disease of the world.

The first step on this return is often a refusal. For the inner sanctum, at the bottom of the circle, mirrors the status quo of the ordinary world at the top. There is safety and comfort in both. Often times, then, the hero fights down to a state of bliss and blessing, and finds they do not want to leave. The love interest’s bed is too perfect, the Arkenstone under the mountain too wondrous. Often the hero will have to be reminded of their responsibilities to the external - that they weren’t adventuring for themselves, but for the poor suffering townsfolk all across the land. With great power comes… well, you know.

Once the hero sets off, there can be a road of trials back out of the chaos realm - again mirroring the road of trials down towards the middle. It is often here, in fact, where the atonement with the father happens. The meeting with the goddess is delicious and empowering, and then forcing themselves back away from this perfect point the hero is faced with everything rigid and aggressive for which the structure of the ordinary world stood.

Let’s say a fairytale land is being tormented by a dark lord atop his tower. The hero adventures away from the safety of her village (crossing the threshold), fights her way to the centre of a magical forest (road of trials) where she earns the blessing of the spirit of the woods (meeting with the goddess). She is now the most powerful warrior in the land. But she can’t stand around and enjoy being swooned at by attractive lads (refusal of return). She’s got a responsibility. So she fights her way to the black tower, duels with the dark lord, and in defeating him frees the land and all its inhabitants.

Or perhaps the power structure, the father, of the story’s world is seen as not inherently evil, not in need of overthrowing, but just in need of being refreshed. Perhaps the king’s daughter falls ill, and only a magical elixir guarded by a sacred but dangerous dragon can save her. The hero journeys all the way to the dragon’s lair, steals the elixir, but awakens the dragon in the process. The hero has no desire to kill the dragon, a divine beast who protects the world, so the hero runs. The road of trials back up from the bottom of the circle will now be what Campbell refers to as a Magical Flight - fleeing the manifestation of the chaos world all the way back to the threshold between realms.

Or perhaps when the dragon awakens the hero charms it - plays the flute given to him by the goddess, or uses cunning and wiles to trick it, or bests it in battle to win its respect. Now the magical flight will take the form of a delightful ride, with the hero as emissary, borne on the wings of the beast that is now transformed into the most dazzling of allies. Spirited Away has a gorgeous version of this, with Chihiro being carried back to the boundary between worlds by the dragon Haku, who is in turn transformed mid-flight by Chihiro who remembers his true form as the spirit of the Kohaku River - and thus the final trappings of darkness are shed and the adventure almost ready to be ended.

There are many different ways for the formula to play out. What matters is that the chaos world, the opposite of the ordinary life from the beginning of the story, must be penetrated to its core, and some aspect of it brought back into ordinary life, thus transforming not just the hero but their world as well.

This is done by a return crossing back over the threshold. The magical world is left behind, and the regular world rejoined. In Spirited Away, after one final test is passed, Chihiro’s parents are returned to her, and together they cross the river and walk out of the abandoned theme park, the spirit world fading around them, and they find their car where they left it, buried beneath dust and leaves. Dorothy clicks her heels three times and awakens out of Oz. The hobbits travel back to the Shire. John McClane descends from the Nakatomi Plaza, his inner cowboy having defeated the shadow self/brother of that blonde terrorist, having atoned with the father embodied in Hans Gruber, and having realised his selfishness in his failing marriage. The journey into the unconscious is complete, and the revitalised McClane is ready to step back into his role in society down at street level as a cop and a husband.

This is the change Campbell refers to as Master of Two Worlds, and Freedom to Live. Neo, having achieved god-status and transcended the danger of Agent Smith, can step between the Matrix and the real world at will. He is master of both realms, and will use this power to rebalance the relationship between man and machine. In children's films where a put-upon kid from the real world is thrust into a magical world, this last section is regularly visualised with the kid back in their town/school/home, facing whatever was initially causing them harm, and defeating it with ease. The school bullies don’t realise they’re now picking on the chosen warrior and champion of the galaxy. The diving board that was too high to jump from is now nothing for one who has flown on dragon wings. Your step-father is not so scary when you’ve duelled in single combat with the Lord of Darkness himself..

The boon has been won, carried back over the threshold, and is now used to revitalise the kingdom. Normality returns - but a normality somehow changed, enlarged, now containing a drop of the chaos world that at the beginning of the story had been drained dry. The two worlds often must remain separate, and there is a sadness at leaving the magical realm - allies met usually cannot pass back across the threshold, all that was unknown and exciting must now be integrated into the everyday - but the worlds are not removed from one another as they were at the outset. An element of the ordinary - the hero - has penetrated to the core of the magical, and brought back an element of the magical - the Ultimate Boon - into the ordinary. As I said in that post about The Matrix, it’s like yin and yang.

And that, really, is the essential quality of a completed story: balance. There’s no necessity for a happy ending, let alone a happily ever after - but for the hero’s journey to be complete the ordinary world at the conclusion of the quest should be deeper, fuller, and more honest than it was at the outset.

In actual fact, this honesty in really good stories usually transcends the simplistic moralising of Hollywood. The cosmic cycle repeats through destruction as much as it does rebirth. If there is a God then he is a murderer as much as a creator. There are vicious beasts in the basements of the unconscious. But behind this ferocious rising and falling of forms there is something everlasting and untarnished. The hero’s apotheosis generally requires some conception of this - an ability to stare directly at the furnace of existence and face the fact that we all are swallowed in the flames - but through this to comprehend that we are not just what is swallowed but also what swallows: the furnace, the flames, the ever-nourishing energy of life.

So the hero’s journey isn’t necessarily palatable, but its complete cycle should ultimately be a comfort. We are led into dark forests, and then we are led back out again. We have faced that which was hardest to face - pretty universally the fact that we’re all someday soon going to die - and through that awareness of death we have found the courage to live anew. The cycle is complete. The story, for the moment, is over.

Day 135: Ascended

So glad I got that post done last night. I’ve been putting it off for ages. My understanding of that particular area of the hero’s journey has always been muddled, all the elements were hard to get straight in my head, how the goddess related to the father, whether apotheosis came later, all that stuff. I think I’m clearer now on Campbell’s model. 

Much of the problem is that in a lot of contemporary stories, i.e. films and TV, the actual vital element of the quest is often hidden. In Back to the Future the quest is for Marty McFly to go… well… back to the future. He’s trapped in the past and must find a way to return home. But that’s not really the story. The story is that his ordinary world has fallen into stagnation because his father couldn’t stand up for himself, because the whole family lets life happen to them, rather than they happening to life. And Marty must journey over the threshold into a magical kingdom, a pastel-and-bubblegum 1950s, and penetrate to the heart of the cancer, and rejuvenate his teenage father, and his world.

So many of our stories are like this, hiding the true meaning in subplot, or beneath layers of imagery, and you can only fully see and understand the tropes like meeting the goddess and apotheosis by peeling back these layers.

It can also be tricky because mainstream cinema, with its three-act structure, tends to deform and contort Campbell’s perfect circle somewhat, to provide the most satisfying emotional payoff for the audience. The first act is usually the time to establish the protagonist and their ordinary world. Show them bored at work, bullied at school, trapped in routine, in an unhappy marriage, whatever is the status quo. Then comes the call to adventure, and the act ends with the crossing of the threshold. So a quarter of the journey, in a third of the film.

The second act is usually the road of trials, meeting a gang of plucky sidekicks who will help them out and villains who will try to thwart their progress. A snappy training montage.

Then the stuff at the bottom of Campbell’s circle, everything I was discussing yesterday, gets drawn out across the end of act two and much of act three. Take The Matrix. Neo meets a sort of goddess in the Oracle, roughly halfway through the film. But the truth she imparts actually takes Neo a lot of screen time to fully process and assimilate. He goes on a final trial - to rescue Morpheus - and then must face the father/power-centre in Agent Smith, and even touch defeat and death, before he reaches apotheosis, a rebirth into godhood. Then the final quarter of Campbell’s circle (which I’m going to break down in a post soon) is squashed into the very last moments of the film.

I guess the circle is the archetype, it’s every element progressing to the next with minimum effort. You’d perhaps have a dull story if you timed it out too precisely. By stretching that emotional core down at the bottom of the circle out across much of the latter half of the film, you build to a crescendo that delivers a powerful climax, floods the audience’s brains with chemicals of release, then a rapid comedown of denouement leading out to the end titles and the lights come up and the audience leaves still aglow in that post-coital wash of happy and exhausted emptiness.

OK I’ve got to go soon, I’m off for the rest of the day and all of tomorrow to help my friend with some manual labouring work - but let me just have some more of a think about The Matrix before I go…

So the Oracle is the goddess, she represents the vital energy of the Matrix’s cosmos. What Neo learns from her is that he isn’t the One, that he’s not special, that he’s close but no cigar. But really, I think, what he learns is that prophecies are bullshit. He learns that there’s no external force separate from himself that is going to imbue him with power and turn him into a hero. There’s no magic sword for him to lift that will transform him into a hero.

But he decides he’s going to go rescue Morpheus anyway. Screw all this noise. He doesn’t need a prophecy - he doesn’t need what is in fact yet more structure foisted upon him from the outside. If he wants to face what is too terrifying to face, if he wants to go on the true journey into the centre of the dark fortress (although at this stage he’s still only going in to get his friend and get back out) then he’ll damn well do it by himself.

This is a vital moment of self-discovery. That it is our own individual will that drives us. That you can feel like your ship is buffeted on the winds - either through a robot simulation that controls your very perception of reality, or a prophecy that forces you into the framework of a hero - or you can stand at the wheel sailing that ship. This is the second most important discovery Neo makes, and it is accompanied in the film by a great visualisation of him coming into this power. Guns. Trenchcoats. A hotel lobby that gets utterly, insanely, decimated.

But then what’s the most important discovery? It’s after Neo plucks Morpheus from the clutches of the evil that cannot be faced, gets him to safety, and then, instead of running, turns back around. The evil that cannot be faced will destroy anyone who is not ready, but Neo is ready. Agent Smith stands before him. Neo crouches into his fighting stance, crooks his finger, beckons. Bring it.

The embodiment of every dark aspect of the subconscious, everything that we fly from, and the hero who has become master of his own destiny: these two stand and spar. The flurries come too fast for us mere mortals to track. Any of us would be torn apart. But the hero remains, matches blow for blow, drives the darkness back.

He earns a respite, and now is the time to flee. These are the voices of his allies, the mere mortals, the last remnants of his ego, telling him to run. He does so, and it looks like he will escape, and then he turns a corner and there the evil stands, waiting, and pierces him through the heart.

Because here is the final and most important discovery. The hero who finds their own agency, who begins sailing their own ship, what they discover in the heart of the deepest darkness, the truth that most cannot stand to look upon, is that the ship and the ocean upon which it sails are one and the same. The hero is the darkness, and the darkness is the hero. Self is Other, and Other is Self.

Neo cannot die to Agent Smith and the forces of eternity, because Neo has realised that he himself is those forces of eternity.

He rises, the doors of perception cleansed, seeing reality as it truly is, in all its splendour (and late-90s computer graphics). He doesn’t even have to duel with Agent Smith any more, there is no fight, the thing that cannot be faced is nothing, is chaff to the wind. Forms rise and fall. All individuals die, but only as waves on a sea that is eternal. Neo is the waves, but Neo is also the sea. Death and life, these are but mutually-arising concepts signifying something greater and beyond their two extremes. Neo has touched the realm of this beyond, touched and become it. He is ascended.

Right. And on that note I'm gonna post this bad boy up, and go ascend to the role of lifter of heavy objects. See ya!

Day 134: Story Structure Notes # 3

[Part one]
[Part two]

OK let's do this. We're talking story structure. The hero's journey and the monomyth. So I've looked at how stories are a descent from an ordinary world into a magical realm of subconscious imagery and chaos, to attain some goal, and then a journey back, bringing something of the darkness up into the light, integrating it into the status quo, using it to heal the wounds of the ordinary world and set a new normal.

After the Call to Adventure and the Crossing of the Threshold, after a succession of challenges faced along the Road of Trials, the hero finally reaches the deepest, most mystical point of their quest.

This is the stage, at the bottom of the circle, that Joseph Campbell refers to as the Meeting with the Goddess, and the Atonement with the Father.

The hero, representing the striving of the discrete, impermanent Self, has journeyed to the beating heart of the cosmos, and here touches something everlasting and boundless, and learns that they and it are one and the same. This universal energy, growing from the tree of life, flowing from the spring of life, is symbolised in the Goddess, an archetype of all that is desired and blissful and nourishing. In meeting with her, possibly joining with her, the hero discovers that her grace is also their grace, her lifeforce their lifeforce, whether they be lowly pig farmer, downtrodden beat cop, or nerdy high-school kid.

After, or instead of, this meeting, the hero may face whatever represents the highest power structure of their story's universe. This power is symbolised in the father - in the ogre terrorising the village, the sorcerer atop the black tower, the head terrorist, the main bully, the T-Rex, the director of the CIA, or the uber-macho cyborg Terminator sent back from a hellish future on a mission to erase the hero from existence.

The hero faces this, and reconciles with it - through peace and understanding, or sticks of C-4 and a hydraulic press. But either way, the old power is dissolved, and the hero takes up the new.

It should be noted that the goddess doesn't have to be a woman, and the father doesn't have to be a man. These symbols have been used because our stories have grown out of sexist, or at least patriarchal, societies, and for straight men nothing represents nourishment like motherly goddesses, desire like nubile goddesses, and existing power like father-gods. But it doesn't have to be that way.

The point is that in the inner sanctum the hero finds either (or both) the opposite of everything that was stagnant at the outset of the journey, or the centre of the rigid structure that was causing the stagnancy. The first is flowing, living, chaotic. The second is firm, unyielding, ossified. A fountain, or a dragon guarding a fountain. And in this space, having shattered the old world order, the hero floats, weightless.

In Garden State, Zach Braff's character Andrew Largeman begins the film trapped in stasis. Bored, failing at adult life, numbed by antidepressants, it takes a literal call to adventure, on his telephone, informing him of the death of his mother, for Andrew to begin a journey to break apart that stasis. Returning home for the funeral, he stops taking his medication, and enters a world of shifting symbols and uncertainty and adventure. He encounters allies, and is tested in the trials of navigating the road into adulthood. He meets a woman, Sam, played by Natalie Portman, who in some ways functions as an ally, but in her romantic relationship with Andrew also represents the goddess, the selfless loving aspect of the universe that Andrew has been denying himself since as a child he caused the accident that paralysed his mother, which paralysis would ultimately lead to her death.

So Andrew and Sam and some old school friends sit around a fire at the heart of the movie's narrative. It's late at night. Andrew has been stripped of the trappings of his ego through his trials, and stripped of his literal clothes through some impromptu pool partying. He sits by the flickering fire, wrapped in a blanket, and when someone asks just what happened to his mother all those years ago, anyway, he finds he is finally ready to talk.

He tells the story of the horrendous mistake he made as a kid, a little kid, too young and innocent to be held accountable, he now sees - and the power structure of guilt and regret and a pain too hot to go near is finally and fully melted, crumbled apart, and Andrew and Sam are left, as the other friends conveniently slip away, to commune with the universal in the most tried and tested way a man and a woman have yet found.

Later, when Andrew confronts his father, standing up to him, forgiving him for the fact he could never forgive Andrew for his childhood mistake, it is mostly a formality. The atonement has already occurred within Andrew, and this is but a playing out.

In Clueless, which is the best teen comedy ever made, fyi, the protagonist Cher's meeting and atonement comes when she faces the fact that it is she herself who has been "clueless", that she has been focused on her own petty needs and ego rather than on the people closest to her, and that scuzzy, annoying, awkward-dancing Paul Rudd is the man her heart has desired all along. These truths were always there, underneath all else, waiting to be discovered - but it took Cher a long road of trials to prepare herself for finding them.

The next steps of the hero's journey, again related, again not necessarily separate, are termed by Campbell as Apotheosis and the Ultimate Boon.

Apotheosis is the hero's transcendence into immortality. Touching the living energy of the universe, recognising the truth of Being, the hero comes to embody the very power they sought. Whether through a meeting with the glory of the goddess, or a smashing of the structure of the father, the hero ascends to become not a ship tossed on the seas of life, but the tumult of the ocean itself.

If the hero is in an action film, now is when they force themselves up from a major beating and go kick ass - think Neo reborn and dodging Agent Smith's blows with ease at the end of The Matrix. If they're Luke Skywalker they turn off their targeting computer and discover they know when to fire their missile through oneness with the Force. In Hook the apotheosis is the moment the miserly lawyer, who had been repressing his childlike joy and sense of wonder, finally finds how to fly, and becomes Peter Pan. It's the point the hero steps into the role they were always born to take, the mantle they were born to wear, when every false garment of ego has been shed and they stand bright and shimmering and coursing with eternal life.

And this is great for them, but the hero's journey is not about getting to be a badass, but healing the ills of the world. The Ultimate Boon refers to some element of the state of weightless power that may be snapped off and brought back across the barrier from the depths of the magical realm and into the ordinary world. It is the pearls of wisdom, the elixir of life, the golden fleece. If the hero's journey was a search for a missing princess, then the boon is the princess herself - because sadly women are often relegated in stories to an embodiment of everything that was vibrant and living in a kingdom that has been lost. The princess is a symbol, she lacks agency, she is not a human but a pointer for, I don't know, a branch aflame with the graceful fire of the chaos world that must be brought back to light the darkness of the home, let's say. And there's nothing wrong with being a symbol, now and again, but if all I ever saw of my gender in thousands of years of stories was as a stand-in for a magical twig, I'd be pretty pissed off as well.

Anyway, the Ultimate Boon is about completing the hero's cycle. As in the Taoist symbol of yin and yang, the hero must return or smuggle back from the depths some spoonful of darkness into the light. The healthy light world contains a dash of darkness, the healthy life a touch of death. In a gorgeous parallel, the hero is the single fleck of the ordinary that may penetrate the inner sanctum of magic, and in return a single fleck of the magical - the Ultimate Boon - may be brought back into the ordinary. And in such a way balance may be restored, and the truth remembered that beneath the illusion of the separateness of all things, whether order and chaos, life and death, or Self and Other, everything is in fact one.

But bringing this boon back is easier said than done. Next time I'll finish this series off by looking at the Journey Home...

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]