I want to follow up on this post from yesterday in which I started attempting to reclaim the ideas of Joseph Campbell from what seems to be some pretty severe strictures writers are putting onto them, especially in how they are viewing and using The Hero’s Journey. For when we have Hollywood producers “denouncing Campbell” because of the preponderance of scripts that are “formulaic” and “flat,” obviously something is awry.

As with yesterday’s post, here is a quote from Joseph Campbell:

“Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.”

If you study Campbell, one of the more obvious things you will notice is how he inverts the sense of the words “myth” and “metaphor.” Whereas those of a scientific or purely rational bent look at myth as denoting something false or lacking realism, Campbell asserted that myths offer a greater Truth than anything in the realm of mere logic. He said, “Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.”

Myths speak to qualities like beauty, honor, love, family, community, personhood and so on. Myths are laden with riches because they have multiple layers of meaning. Myths are powerful because they traffic in universal themes, motifs and dynamics. Likewise Campbell transforms metaphor from a linguistic category into dynamic way of looking at narrative, how words and images are lenses which are capable of telescoping and magnifying the meaning of… well, everything.

So when Campbell uses terms like “myth” and “metaphor,” he is taking a radical action of yanking them from the mundane world of common usage, and transforming them into energizing and dynamic entities. From a writer’s perspective, this offers a remarkable opportunity to transform the way we approach story so that everything that happens — every line of dialogue, every action or event, every relationship, every moment — is replete with layer upon layer of emotional, psychological, aesthetic, even spiritual meaning.

In terms of screenwriting, let me pull in another quote from Campbell:

“Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.”

Let me use this observation as a metaphor for the state of The Hero’s Journey in contemporary Hollywood. Some screenwriters look at it as a ‘fact,’ there is this paradigm of 12 stages and every screenplay must conform to that pattern. I don’t think this is out an allegiance to Campbell or the theory so much as it is a reflection of the desperation writers have to try to find some way, any way to quantify and concretize Story. Whatever the motivation, when someone cracks open a script and reads a “formulaic” and “flat” story that hits all the marks of the supposed 12 stages of The Hero’s Journey, I would suggest that the writer of that script is not looking at The Hero’s Journey as a metaphor, but rather literal truth. Campbell would decry that take.

On the other hand, it seems after two decades in which The Hero’s Journey has been popularized in Hollywood, there may be something of a backlash precisely because so many scripts follow the same pattern, therefore coming off as “formulaic” and “flat.” Here we have the other perspective, those who would deny the validity of Campbell’s ideas, atheists if you will.

The problem is who in this conversation is taking into account the broader context of Campbell’s world view? Story, like life itself, is dynamic, organic, a vital entity, so therefore by necessity The Hero’s Journey is an attempt to articulate something about the universality of narrative and the human adventure, but by no means the sum of the Truth to which it points.

So circling back to the original quote, “Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.” Here are two possible interpretations of this observation as it relates to screenwriting:

* The Hero’s Journey is not literal truth, it is metaphorically true. To the degree we get caught up in following every jot and tittle of some supposed paradigm or systemic version of The Hero’s Journey, we have it all wrong. Rather we should view The Hero’s Journey as a window through which we may climb into Inner World of story, see its beating heart, hear its pulsing soul. [And by the way, I would say this is true about every approach to screenplay structure including mine].

* When we work with and write our stories, why not consider them as myths where their “narratives and images are to be read… as metaphors.” That opens up every aspect of our stories to be “psychologically symbolic,” lending meaning upon meaning, association upon association, feeling upon feeling to the characters, scenes and moments we write.

The more you read Joseph Campbell, the more you realize that The Hero’s Journey exists in service to the larger truth, how we as humans live our own unique, individual myth. The story may be the journey, but the meaning and importance of the journey is discovering all aspects of who we are and through that process raising our consciousness. And we can bring that same perspective to the journey of our story’s characters, most especially the Protagonist.

Tomorrow: More on Joseph Campbell.

UPDATE: Novelist, playwright and poet Julian Gough [@juliangough] tweeted this in response to my post:

Ah, Campbell. How he is misunderstood by modern Hollywood. I was just talking about him (2/3rds down).

Gough was referring to a Boing Boing interview with him. Here is the excerpt in question:

TC: The gaming pioneer Richard Bartle talks about games in mythic terms: how your personal encounter with a game space maps quite closely to the mythical idea of “the hero’s journey.” You go in as this novice, this noob, make your way through perils and challenges, become heroic and powerful, and triumph over adversity.

This surely describes our experience of so many game-worlds. At the very end of Minecraft, you slay a dragon, for goodness sake! Markus has gone for the mythic bullseye.



JG: Yeah. I’m a huge fan of the original book about the hero’s Journey, by Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I’ve read it quite a few times, and love his idea that there is one mythic story through all cultures – the monomyth – and that if you tease out the elements of any myths in any part of the world, they are the same story.

The next step, which is the one that interests me, is that this monomyth is essentially a metaphor for the individual journey that we all have to go in our lives. Whether we leave the house or not, whether we pick up a sword or not, we are going to have to go on a journey, encounter the universe, and try not to be destroyed by it – try to grow, and to come out of it with knowledge.

The trouble is that we start to believe that a myth is actually a set of facts, and that destroys it. If we think it’s actually a story about a guy who got nailed to a tree, or who went up to heaven off the top of a building – if we think these things actually happened, it kills it for us, because these are stories that are trying to go beyond language and words, beyond what we can say, to the unsayable truth.

 Campbell’s argument – he wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces just after World War Two – was that we live in a time when all the myths are dead, and this means that we’re in trouble, because it means that we don’t actually know how to achieve wisdom. We don’t have a stable myth that works, and so it is the job of the artist to try and make myths that are alive again. Campbell was really excited when Star Wars came out, because George Lucas had famously based Star Wars on The Hero with a Thousand Faces. And by god it worked – in every single culture around the world! 
I think computer games can serve the function of religion. They can do the good bits that religion used to do, and hopefully not do the bad bits…



Precisely. Metaphor, not facts. Story as personal journey.