The Hack Of A Thousand Faces

Stop using Joseph Campbell to excuse shitty storytelling

A fairly reliable indicator of how powerful an idea can be is by how much damage is done by people who fuck it up.

Joseph Campbell had some really brilliant insights into story telling that are of the kind that are almost hard to appreciate how awesome they were because of how much they have been used and abused since he put them out there.

So, the other day, I'm talking about Avatar and what a crap example of story telling it is. It's a conversation I've had more than I would have thought I'd ever have, but it's happened a lot ever since I wrote a satire script that has been pretty popular. ("Pretty popular" = "read by more people than most of the crap I write on this blog which is of little interest to anyone outside my own head")

Somewhere in the conversation, my friend acknowledges that there are flaws in the story, that it's not that tightly constructed. "But hey," he says, "it's just the hero's journey".

Just the hero's journey.

Aaaaarrrgh!

As if Joseph Campbell had ever said that a story just needs to hit a few milestones and then you can just fuck around when it comes to the details. As if the hero's journey is even a template to write stories on.

I don't blame my friend too much, though. He's hardly the only person to completely miss the point of the hero's journey. Like this one fucktard who wrote this book called The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers . Or, unofficially, The Misrepresentation of Joseph Campbell for Hacks Looking For Easy Answers.

What Joseph Campbell said was that there are themes in stories from around the world that have similarities because there are some things about being human that are universal. We're all born to a mother, we all fall in love, we all have responsibilities, we all die, we all need to eat, we all want to gain status, we all faces choices between security and risk...

As a result of having all these commonalities as humans, then despite cultural differences, some of the struggles faced by the hero of any given story will be similar to other stories. Even if those stories originate in cultures that had absolutely no contact with each other.

Campbell went as far as to create an essential list of some of the elements that show up time and time again in different myths. It's a sequence called "The Hero's Journey". It includes stages like "the call to adventure", and "the belly of the whale", and other archetypes of a hero's progress through any given story.

Details, schmetails. The actual stages aren't important here. What's important is that his analysis of the "monomyth" was a great insight.

What's the problem? The problem is that many people took this idea to mean that now these elements were defined and catalogued, frozen into a static list of elements that a story has to have in order to attain the universality of appeal among all potential audiences. You can find on the web examples where people lay it out like a blueprint for storytelling .

No. A thousand times no.

Just because Campbell was able to identify these elements in stories told in ancient and diverse cultures does not mean they reveal a platonic ideal of stories to which all stories must aspire.

Campbell identified elements that were similar, but never said that they were essential. The elements of the hero's journey revealed to us the universality of humanity in stories already written. But that does not mean it works the other way that the universality of humanity should be deliberately constructed into stories that have not yet been written.

Campbell could not have been more clear about it:

"There is no final system for the interpretation of myths, and there never will be any such thing."

His goal was to try and see through the particulars of stories to find the symbols that reveal the humanity being conveyed. Sort of like deciphering a code. Once he deciphered it, though, he was not saying there is only one message that the code can be used for, and only one sequence the code can ever be arranged in. Or that new code can't be written.

If you want, though, you can copy that same code over and over again. If you want to make a colour by numbers piece of formulaic hack writing, then the hero's journey is not a bad place to start. If you want to make a platform for creating a spectacle, then the hero's journey as laid out in books like The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers will serve you well.

I have a friend who is a good writer who hates the whole hero's journey thing because he says he has seen it destroy good writers. There's something seductive about the idea that there exists a formula to elevate your writing from mere personal narrative to universal mythology. Writers taken in by this seduction will sacrifice their personal touch in favour of this rigid and ritualized story structure, ruining everything that gave it appeal in the process. I totally sympathize with my friend's complaint.

The problem isn't the hero's journey, though, it's the complete misunderstanding by people who want a magic formula for story telling. Or, worse, are taken in by the hubris of trying to push their story into the realm of mythology instead of allowing their personal story to be pulled into relevance by a natural connection to an audience.

What the hero's journey reveals to us is not that we have some kind of fundamental model for stories built into our DNA. It's that we all have within us a potential to find a current, living, breathing version of the hero's journey.

Successful stories in the past that elevated themselves to mythology succeeded because they caught the times. Some even reached deep enough to outlast their era, though it becomes debatable how much the story found universality in the future and how much it created that universality. Is Shakespeare still relevant because his stories are so universal, or do we refer back to the universality of his stories because they are now taught to us as being part of what our culture is made from?

In any case, for successful stories, the storyteller was able to look inward to the specific to find the universal. By pursuing a personal narrative, they caught a universal mythology.

It happened by building a bridge between the world view of the storyteller and the audience.

It did not happen by the story teller filling out a grocery list of audience expectations.

Star Wars probably did more to spread the idea of the hero's journey in our culture than just about anything else. George Lucas even had Joseph Campbell come to the Skywalker Ranch to view and consult on the later films.

Star Wars does conform pretty well to the hero's journey. So much so that it made Lucas famous enough to afford a Skywalker Ranch and start having Joseph Campbell himself come over for a coffee and a chat about heroes and journeys. If the hero's journey is so great for making movies, then why did the later movies, made after Lucas started talking directly to Campbell, suck so hard?

Not to mention that Lucas's earlier, pre-editing, drafts of Star Wars were largely rambling pieces of shit. The hero's journey most likely ensued in Star Wars as a result of the collective effort of many talented people involved in the movie.

The reason that a movie can suck hard even if you have Joseph Campbell whispering the hero's journey directly into your ear is that the relationship between storyteller and audience does not exist in a list. Like it or not, it's a matter of feel. The best writers in the world can't guarantee they will catch the dragon's tail of a truly great story.

More importantly, there are great stories of our time which do not follow the static version of the hero's journey. 1984 by George Orwell , for example. Without getting into tedious details, I think you could argue, as my friend once did, that 1984 breaks many elements of the archetype of the hero's journey that most people are convinced are necessary. Just one, obvious, example is that the hero in 1984 does not succeed in his journey.

Where I disagree with my friend is that this does not mean the hero's journey is proven wrong by a counter example. It means that the hero's journey evolves with us and our culture. 1984 has the real hero's journey, the one that ensues from a storyteller who is in tune with the zeitgeist in which they are writing.

The hero's journey is worth knowing, because it's the kind of measuring stick that gives shape and form to the discussion of stories. It's like knowing music. Learning chords and harmonies helps you describe what songs are, but doesn't give you the inspiration to make music that moves anyone.

A hero's journey has to arise from a balance between the storyteller and their culture. Go to far in the individual direction, and you're masturbating in public. Go too far in the direction of mythology, and you're a hack.

There's only one hero's journey that will help a storyteller, and that's their own.□

PS: Avatar didn't even achieve the archetypal hack-fest version of the hero's journey. If it had, it would have at least had an internally consistent logic, which it didn't. Just saying.

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