“Ex Machina” and The Hero’s Journey

In my current Core I: Plot class, Lecture 2 is a dive into The Hero’s Journey as articulated by Joseph Campbell. I asked writers in the course to name some movies they felt best represented this narrative archetype and Ex Machina came up. Great example of the key elements of The Hero’s Journey — Separation / Initiation / Return (with a twist), Call to Adventure, Transformation, etc. As I was reflecting on it, I had a thought and this is what I wrote:

All three such interesting movies, but let me focus on Ex Machina to make a point: If you think about the three main characters — Caleb, Nathan, Ava — in a way, each of them goes on a Hero’s Journey:

* Caleb: As Protagonist, he clearly goes on one as he departs his Ordinary World and travels into an Extraordinary World in Nathan’s compound and in his relationship with Ava, falling in love with her representing a massive emotional shift from where he began his journey. As such, his Hero’s Journey takes place in the present.

* Nathan: He has already gone on a Hero’s Journey in separating himself from the normal world and secluding himself in a new world, one of his own creation populated by human robots. What happens to him at the conclusion of Act Three is the terminal point of his own journey, thus we can think about his as happening pretty much in the past.

* Ava: She doesn’t separate from the Ordinary World — Nathan’s compound — until the very end, so the Denouement represents her entrance into a New World. Therefore we can look at her Hero’s Journey as happening largely in the future.

A point this drives home: All characters are the protagonists in their own story. They have that agency about their actions. We, as writers, can learn about our characters to greater depth if we take time to look at the story universe through their eyes as a protagonist, even if they don’t have that narrative function. We can understand their world view and way of being much better by walking a metaphorical mile in each of their shoes.

Caleb, Ava, Nathan, Ex Machina (2015)

The last point — working with all of the characters as if they were the protagonist in their own story — is solid advice, but this other idea is really interesting, in effect extending the concept of each character as protagonist, then looking at their timeline relative to The Hero’s Journey. Could they be at the end of it? In the middle of it? Or at the beginning? Might the story’s conclusion actually be the start of a character’s own distinctive Hero’s Journey after The End?

Hm…