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