Imaginary Worlds - The Hero's Journey Endgame

Episode Date: April 3, 2019

Ever since George Lucas cited Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” as the inspiration for Star Wars, Hollywood screenwriters have used Campbell’s theory of The Hero’s Journey as the blueprint for making movies, especially stories about epic protagonists. But as we reach a saturation point of sci-fi fantasy and superhero franchises, has The Hero’s Journey outstayed its welcome? I talk with pop culture journalist Abraham Riesman, and musical composer Peter J. Casey, who explains how The Hero’s Journey took over Broadway. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Own each step with Peloton. From their pop runs to walk and talks, you define what it means to be a runner. Whatever your level, embrace it. Journey starts when you say so. If you've got 5 minutes or 50, Peloton Tread has workouts you can work in. Or bring your classes with you for outdoor runs, walks, and hikes led by expert instructors on the Peloton app. Call yourself a runner. Peloton All Access Membership Separate.

Learn more at onepeloton.ca slash running. This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioningconditioning oils. So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way

and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. This year is going to be epic. Three massively huge sci-fi fantasy franchises are coming to a conclusion. I promise to fight for the living. On April 14th, Game of Thrones will air its final season, which is six episodes long, but they're going to be six massive 90-minute episodes that have taken years to make, and I can't even imagine the budget.

Even if there's a small chance, we owe this. On April 26th, Avengers Endgame comes out, which is a sequel to last year's crossover movie Avengers Infinity War. out, which is a sequel to last year's crossover movie Avengers Infinity War. And Endgame is apparently going to be the end of the line for the original Avengers team after like 20 something movies. And in December, Star Wars Episode IX will conclude the new trilogy and the entire Skywalker saga that began way back in 1977. But the thing that I'm really excited about is that so many characters, heroic characters, that have become part of our cultural landscape are going to wrap up their stories.

I really want to know what's going to happen. Are they going to die? If they do, is it going to be a heroic death or a death that feels unfair and needs to be avenged? And if they survive, will they get endings that allow them to live on in our collective imagination or in other media? Or are we going to be disappointed? Are we going to spend months hashing out why their endings were such a big letdown? And throughout all of this, I keep thinking about the hero's journey. And what I mean by that is the concept of the hero's

journey, as it was first introduced by Joseph Campbell in his 1949 nonfiction book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Now, Joseph Campbell was a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College. He was fascinated by the way that mythology from around the world and throughout time all have similar ideas and characters. For instance, in every culture, you can find a myth that's very similar to Noah and the Great Flood. Now, Campbell did not think that was a coincidence, but he did not see it as a sign of God either. He believed in the theories of Carl Jung, who was a psychiatrist around the same time as Sigmund Freud, and Jung believed that human culture is created when people tap into a collective unconscious network of ideas, a shared universe, if you will.

And by the time Joseph Campbell retired in the 1970s, his work was well-respected but fairly obscure. And then George Lucas cited The Hero with a Thousand Faces as one of the inspirations for Star Wars, specifically Campbell's idea of a monomyth, the myth of a hero who goes on a journey, which you can find in just about any culture. And suddenly, this retired liberal arts professor became an overnight sensation. People were

treating Joseph Campbell as a guru with sagely advice on how to live their lives. And he appeared in a series of interview shows with Bill Moyers on PBS. Why are there so many stories of the hero or of heroes in mythology? Well, because that's what's worth writing about. A hero probably is someone who has given his life to something bigger than himself or other than himself. And if you're thinking, the hero's journey, I feel like I know this. What is this again? Trust me, you know it.

You've seen it a thousand times. The hero's journey begins with an ordinary person living an ordinary life, or at least whatever the definition of ordinary is in their world. Now you just help us out today and find yourself a place where you won't get into any trouble.

Someplace where there isn't any trouble. Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? Suddenly, there's a call to adventure. You're a wizard, Harry. I'm a what? A wizard, and a thumping goodin' I'd wager, once you trade up a little. No, you've made a mistake. I mean, I can't be a wizard. I mean, I'm just Harry.

Just Harry. Now, the hero may be yearning for something more in life, but the call to adventure scares them. At first, they don't want to go. You must learn the ways of the Force if you're to come with me to Alderaan. Alderaan? I'm not going to Alderaan. I've got to get home. It's late. I'm in for it as it is. I need your help, Luke. She needs your help.

Welcome, Neo. As you no doubt have guessed, I am Morpheus. Once the hero accepts the call to adventure, they cross the threshold into a new world with the help of a wise mentor or a supernatural element. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill. The story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill.

You stay in Wonderland. And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Along the way, the hero makes new allies. You have my sword. And you have my bow. And my axe. Mr. Frodo's not going anywhere without me. The hero also faces enemies and tests of mental and physical endurance.

Katniss Everdeen, District 12. The hero stumbles along the way and has to resist temptation to turn around or give up. I killed him, but nothing stopped. You killed the God of War, you stopped the war. Exactly what we have to do now. We need to stop the gas, come on. No, all of this should have stopped. Diana!

The fighting should have stopped. Eventually, the hero reaches the Cave of Darkness, where all hope seems lost. The white legacy is more than bricks and mortar, sir. I wanted to save Gotham. I failed. lost. But that's when the hero finds the elixir, which could be a magic item, but usually it's knowledge or insight that helps the hero complete their journey. Use the force, Luke. Let go. And after their victory, the road back offers the hero some kind of redemption or resurrection.

And they realize that what they set out to find was not the same as what they needed to learn. You might have noticed that most of the heroes in that montage were male. That is not a coincidence. In the original monomyth, as laid out by Joseph Campbell, the hero was always a guy. Women would show up as either a goddess or a temptress. Of course, today there's no reason to stick to those gender roles. I mean, look at Captain Marvel. It's about to make a billion dollars worldwide. You might have also noticed that most of the movies I chose are from the last few decades. That is not a coincidence either.

In the 1980s and 90s, Hollywood screenwriters took Joseph Campbell's ideas and distilled them into bullet points and eventually screenwriting books. It started with Christopher Vogler's The Mythic Journey, followed by Robert McKee's Story, Blake Snyder's Save the Cat, and many, many, many more. Now, I studied The Hero's Journey when I was making student films, and for 10 years, I used it as a blueprint to try and become a screenwriter. I mean, outside my day job, I went to so many writing classes in LA and eventually New York, and I read those books, and I even went to seminars by some of the authors. And I don't think that people who teach The Hero's Journey or the writers who follow it are being cynical. I mean, I know from firsthand experience that they sincerely want to tell great stories, and they want to empower other people to tell great stories. In fact, I put a call out on social media to you, my listeners, to hear what your thoughts are on The Hero's Journey.

And some people left messages saying that The Hero's Journey was very meaningful to them, well beyond entertainment. I took a class in college that was about applying it, looking at all the different movies that had The Hero's Journey in it and looking at the narrative and the structure and then applying it to your own life. have the hero's journey in it and looking at the narrative and the structure and then applying it to your own life and it really helped me because at the time my mom had just died and I had left full-time ministry and the idea of kind of seeing my life in the hero's journey was just eye-opening and super helpful and then you know to be able to compare myself to different characters stories was just really insightful and helped me get through some, like, crazy difficult times. I've been working with middle school and high school youth for over 10 years teaching immersive narrative theater through the lens of The Hero's Journey.

And I can still, every year, find new and amazing gems in art and art literacies through it. So I'm very much strongly opinionated about the hero's journey as a positive tool and perhaps, if not, the kind of blueprint of evolution itself. When I was a kid, I lived through the gender conforming of Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz and so, so many Disney princesses whose only change might have been their newfound love of the domestic. They just wanted to get home. So what we have now is something amazing. We have heroes like Buffy and Katniss and Wonder Woman and Daenerys and Sansa and Arya

and, of course, the fabulous Rey. But not everybody felt quite as positively about the hero's journey. When storytellers lean too heavily on it, there's tropes that we lean into. The other problem is, too, that it tends to be very predictable. Ultimately, the whole goal of the story is to change the character and the audience gets to watch it along the way. But what's happening is that that structure has been done so many times over and over again that it's become repetitive and predictable and boring. And a lot of times, as a filmmaker, film festivals will be turned off to something like that. I have also started to question the hero's journey, or at least the way that we think about it now.

Because Joseph Campbell did not set out to create a blueprint for how to make a movie. He was just pointing out patterns that he noticed. I mean, if anything, he wanted modern Western readers to understand that stories and traditions from other cultures or from the past that may seem strange or even repulsive to us, spoke to the human condition just as much as the rituals in our daily lives do, the ones that we take for granted. And the best writing teachers would say, the hero's journey is a tool for writing, it is not a rule.

And, you know, I've seen every Marvel and DC movie. I'm usually there opening weekend. And if they're done well, I get so excited when the hero emerges from the cave of darkness and comes into their full potential. But more often I'll see a movie like Guardians of the Galaxy, which back in 2014 felt like a breath of fresh air. But the storyline of the main character, Peter Quill, to me felt like a very predictable hero's journey. Like that was the price of admission for all the other stuff in the movie. The moments that I really thought about afterwards because they were so unexpected.

So I've started to wonder, has the hero's journey worn out its welcome? Or is it full of eternal truth, but the problem is people aren't being creative enough with it, either through a lack of imagination or because of pressure from the studios who want a guaranteed hit. I don't know the answer, but I talked with two people who have an interesting take on this subject, and we will hear from them just after the break. A special message from your family jewels brought to you by Old Spice Total Body. Hey, it stinks down here. Why do armpits get all of the attention?

We're down here all day with no odor protection. Wait, what's that? Mmm, vanilla and shea. That's Old Spice Total Body deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now.

Abraham Reisman is one of my favorite pop culture journalists. He covers comics for the website Vulture, and he's working on a biography of Stan Lee, which will come out next year. Now, Abe is a geek through and through, but he hopes that in 2019, Game of Thrones, The Avengers, and Star Wars will mark the end of an era, the end of the hero's journey as the major paradigm for sci-fi fantasy storytelling. That said, he did used to really believe in it. I realized actually probably the most recent time that I really fell into that trap was in college when I sort of rediscovered Star Wars. I'd kind

of abandoned it as childhood nonsense. And then in college, the Star Wars DVDs first came out, which really dates me. And I remember watching them and suddenly feeling like, oh my God, this is the best way to live my life is to try and think about every single like test that I take and every paper that I write as just another step along my path to greatness. You know, growing up with a million heroes journey stories, I'm sure sort of broke my brain to a certain extent to the point where that was the way I motivated myself. Well, to play devil's advocate, I mean, you know, what if people will say, like a lot of people in Hollywood will, you know, say, yeah, but I mean, you know, these are, these are tools, not rules. And also it works. People love

it. What's the harm in giving people what they want? I would say the harm is the monomyth is a machine designed intentionally or not to make you a narcissist. The monomyth is all about how a singular entity has the entire universe laid out for him or her, of course, usually him. And everything that happens is only relevant insofar as it affects him. That's a mindset that the older I get, the more I think is the cause of a lot of problems in the world. It leads to this sense of avarice and covetousness and i just think it's not healthy to constantly be exposed to heroes journey stories you know and also too i remember like i mean the first matrix movie is a classic i loved it but i remember the the moment that that that rubbed me the wrong way and i still think about it 20 years later is when neo asked morpheus about what what about all these other people that i'm killing you know like the guards at this bank or whatever, you know, and he says, well, they're not evolved, you know, don't worry about them. the great comic series written by grant morrison um the invisibles and the invisibles famously very early on like shockingly early on in its narrative has this standalone issue that explores

the entire life cycle of this rando guard who gets shot by the heroes early on in the story. And Grant Morrison included an issue shortly after that that's just about the nuanced, difficult life that this guard had experienced and his just abrupt death and how completely unjust that is. And I feel like, you know, now that we're talking about it, I'm realizing there's a lot in profile writing in nonfiction that gets hero's journey-ified. You know, it's easy to fall into the trap of going like, he came from nothing and then he, you know, had this spark of talent and then he faced all these problems and then eventually he overcame them and now he's reached his peak.

And then he also had to go into the cave of darkness. Had to go into the cave of darkness. You're right, you're right. You know, the long dark tea time of the soul, as Douglas Adams would put it. Yeah, exactly. Now, we're going to hear more from Abe later on, but first, I would like you to meet somebody else. When I was looking to see who would critique The Hero's Journey, I came across this really interesting blog post from a musical theater composer in Australia named Peter J. Casey. And he argued that The Hero's Journey has taken over Broadway. And I've always liked musicals, but that had never occurred to me.

Now, the idea first occurred to Peter when he was reading books on how to write musicals. I think what really struck me was what music theatre writers call the I Want song or the I Wish song. And it's now treated as if it's almost an obligatory part of a musical. And it just isn't. There are some great musicals that use them. My Fair Lady has a song that starts with, All I Want Is A Room Somewhere. So it's certainly not the case that they don't belong in musicals. They do, but they don't belong in every musical.

But isn't that an old formula? I mean, that goes back almost as far as Broadway theater. It certainly doesn't go back to shows like, say, Showboat, and it doesn't go back to shows like Oklahoma. I mean, Oklahoma introduces you to your hero first off. He walks on stage and sings about how great the weather is. At no stage does he say, you know, I kind of like it here in Oklahoma, but I sure do wish we were a state. Like at no stage does he announce what is going to drive him for the rest of the show. Or boy, I sure would like to take Laurie to that box dance. That happens, but it doesn't happen in the way that we expect these things to happen in a musical now. And the problem for me is that

it's often forced onto a narrative where it doesn't necessarily belong. So I asked Peter if he could name a popular musical, something more recent than Oklahoma, that just would not exist in its current form because it doesn't sync up with the hero's journey. He pointed to the longest running show in Broadway history for the last 30 years, Phantom of the Opera. I think you could rewrite Phantom of the Opera to be a pretty standard hero's journey. But as it stands, it's an odd parable about a young, talented woman who falls in love with a sexy murderer mentor. She's attracted to him, and they don't get together, and he really is a killer. And she, I don't know, kind of

redeems him with her kindness, because she's not put off by his physical disfigurement. And I don't know what hero's journey that could possibly be when she really only takes action at that one point. It's at that point where she refuses to be put off by his disfigurement. She has one act of kindness. The rest of the tale is her being pursued and her passively waiting for things to happen, like for her boyfriend to turn up and rescue her. Oddly, that show still runs and still runs just fine. It's doing great business. And remember when Abe Reisman said that magazine profiles will often follow the hero's journey? Peter thinks the same thing is true for this current trend of biographical musicals. And you see it again and again with bio musicals, which is we'll start with Cher, or we'll start with Charlie Chaplin, or we'll start with our historically accurate figure, but we'll start at the point where they deserve to succeed.

And we in the audience, of course, it's a cheat because we know they succeed or we wouldn't know the name of the musical we're watching. So how did the hero's journey take over Broadway? Peter suspects that it started with Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. They had a big hit with Little Shop of Horrors. And then in the late 1980s, Disney hired them to write the songs for The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. Those movies were such big hits, they basically brought Disney animation back from the dead. And they brought Disney to Broadway. And of course, those movies are now being remade as

live action films. And the current generation of Broadway composers grew up watching those animated Disney musicals by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. I think what Howard Ashman retaught Hollywood was that these numbers can be both entertaining and emotionally involving. And if we're dealing with, as it was then, ink on a cell, it's even more important that it be emotionally involving. So it's quite extraordinary what they pulled off with the opening number of Beauty and the Beast. It's what I call an Ashman opening because there's both the this is the world we're in. And there's the central characters I want moment, but it's all encompassed in the one song. And there's the central characters I want moment, but it's all encompassed in the one song. And I think Hollywood learned the wrong lesson from that in terms of what fed back into musicals.

I think that they took away the idea that the characters should have an I want moment and the idea that we should establish the world that we're in. And sadly, because Ashman died, and he died quite young, I don't think he was around to say, oh, no, we don't do it the same way every time. That's not what I meant. I think he would have said we achieve these things, but we achieve them in a way that suits the story we're telling, not we achieve them in the same way regardless of the story we're telling. Another factor that is bringing Hollywood to Broadway, real estate prices. Mounting a show is more expensive and riskier than ever.

That's why so many musicals are now based on familiar movies, which often follow the hero's journey. If we're now charging routinely triple figures, even to see the flops, we have to ask ourselves, well, what does an audience get for that i mean a movie is much cheaper to go and see and uh this is a one-off live event i can't watch it again and again at my leisure there is no netflix for theater so we have to ask ourselves well what are we giving the audience and are they right to expect more? And if they do expect more, can we get away with that formula or do we need to be ahead of our audience, be more creative than they expect us to be? Yeah, it's funny. It kind of reminds me of the Robert Altman movie, The Player,

which was about Hollywood. But Altman said that the real villain of that movie is not the Tim Robbins character, the sleazy movie executive, but it was actually the audience. Because every time anyone tried to do anything different or new or creative, the audience would be like, no, no, no, no, no, no. We really want you just to stick to the thing that we're familiar with. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes the audience is the villain and we are responsible for them being the villain. I think if we continue to tell the same story in the same way for the same ticket price in the same sized room in the same cities of the world. I mean, the same could be said for Game of Thrones, The Avengers and Star Wars.

They're too big to fail. Although Game of Thrones could give us a totally messed up ending because it's TV, and TV is where things are starting to change, especially with smaller shows that have to stand out from the pack. So they take a lot of risks. For instance, one of my favorite shows last year was Cobra Kai, which is streaming on YouTube TV. The show is a sequel to The Karate Kid,

which is one of the classic hero's journeys of the 1980s. And they got a lot of the original cast back. But Cobra Kai is about the villain from The Karate Kid, which is one of the classic hero's journeys of the 1980s. And they got a lot of the original cast back. But Cobra Kai is about the villain from The Karate Kid, Johnny Lawrence, who is trying to redeem himself. And Daniel LaRusso, the hero from The Karate Kid, is kind of the antagonist of the show. But neither one is really a hero or a villain. And they're not even sure if they're going through a hero's journey or a midlife crisis. But it is so much fun and the show constantly subverts my expectations. I heard you beat up a bunch of teenagers in that parking lot out there. Oh, that?

No, I didn't beat up any teenagers. I kicked the shit out of a bunch of assholes who deserved it. Well, Johnny Lawrence calling someone else an asshole, that's right, Schmidt. Yeah, what's that supposed to mean? Look, I'm not here to rehash the past. Just stay away from my daughter's friends. Your daughter's friends? Yeah, that makes sense.

Nice company she keeps. What the hell is that supposed to mean? It means those friends of hers were wailing on a kid half their size. And maybe you don't know your daughter as well as you think you do. Get your house in order, LaRusso. Who the hell do you think you're talking to? And Abe Reisman says, ironically, comic books are another good source for experimental storytelling. Because unlike comic book movies, actual comic books are made cheaply and quickly. And the characters can never age, or aging is often temporary.

place where you have to generate so much content that if you have a trope that's really tired, people are just not going to be interested in it because there's such a blizzard of other things that are available to them. And because you have to tell so many stories that if you keep using the same story over and over again, it gets really old really fast. That doesn't mean that there aren't hero's journey stories in comics, but I feel like they're much more uncommon than they are in comic book adaptations on the big screen. Another place that Abe goes to to find unexpected stories about heroes and villains is professional wrestling. In professional wrestling, in order to keep things interesting, you'll very often have somebody who is a good guy, also known as a face or a baby face, become evil and become what is called a heel.

That's sort of the villain in professional wrestling. And that's called a heel turn. And that's very common in professional wrestling and to a lesser extent common in superhero comics and very common in real life. to a lesser extent, common in superhero comics and very common in real life. Well, it's interesting because I feel like a lot of politicians, especially when they're running for president, it starts with the purity of the hero's journey. Yeah.

And then by the time they've been president for at least two years, let alone four to six to eight years. I know. It's amazing. It's like, you know, Tommy Karketty in The Wire where, like, he starts out as the young idealist and then you hear the older politicians and operatives telling him, at some point, you're going to have to eat your first bowl of shit

and people are going to hate you for it. What do you think will break this? I mean, the fact is that this formula makes money and it's reliable. Oh, yeah. People love it. And so what would break the cycle, do you think? I think if you could have less caution in coming up with your stories about superheroes and other epic protagonists, if you could have people who are willing to roll the dice a little bit more, you could see some gradual trend slightly away from the hero's journey. I mean, you know, Logan is the end of a hero's journey,

and Logan's one of my all-time favorite superhero movies. Logan, Logan, you still have time. Charles, the world is not the same as it was. We're taking a risk hanging around here, you know that. And where we're going, Eden, doesn't exist. Her nurse got her from a comic book. You understand? It's not real. You know, it's tremendous. And you can do stories like that really well. It's just you can also do them very lazily. And more often than not, I think they fall into that category. What else could break the cycle? Looking at the way people tell stories in other cultures,

which, by the way, is something that Joseph Campbell always encouraged. In fact, I was telling Abe that one of the reasons why I think the animated movie Into the Spider-Verse felt so fresh and new to people was because it was heavily influenced by anime and manga. My favorite anime is kind of a pedestrian choice, but it's a masterpiece nonetheless, is Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, which is a tremendous manga and an amazing anime as well. And that's not a hero's journey. I mean, if anything, it's a deep subversion of it because it's about a few characters, one of whom discovers he is sort of the chosen one,

but he's this awful destructive force that people who are very much not the chosen one have to combat. And as he overcomes obstacles, you really wish that the obstacles were even harder to overcome. And I think you're right. I mean, there probably are cultural differences that influence the way those stories are told. And it'd be nice to see, you know, more borrowing of that sort of thing. Or, you know, you think about Aboriginal myths in Australia, where everything's kind of cyclical,

and it's not a linear story from beginning to end. You know, you have the dream time and this notion that everything just sort of repeats with variation, and you don't have, you know, you have the dream time and this notion that everything just sort of repeats with variation and you don't have, you know, an end to a story where everything is put into place. But after all these years, the hero's journey is what audiences have come to expect, especially with sci-fi and fantasy. It's easy to give them what they want. It's harder to make them want something else. Well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman.

Special thanks to Abe Reisman, Peter J. Casey, and special thanks to Eric Love, Tim Viola, Jan Cambo Piano, and everybody else who called in to leave messages. So what are your thoughts of the hero's journey? You can let me know in the show's Facebook page. I tweeted emolinski and imagineworldspod, and the show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Thank you.