Joseph Campbell: “What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea”

I suspect most screenwriters familiar with Joseph Campbell have a connection with him based on some version of The Hero’s Journey they have picked up along the way. Or maybe they’ve seen the 6-hour TV series “The Power of Myth”, a fascinating conversation between Campbell and Bill Moyers. Possibly a few have tried to work their way through Campbell’s first book, the seminal “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, but I’m guessing most never made it beyond a few chapters. It is, after all, a scholarly work.

I bring up Campbell because the other day, I posted this question: Why are there so many Protagonist orphans? It spawned a wide-ranging conversation, ultimately leading to Joseph Campbell. At some point in the thread of comments, TripDreamer posted this:

Killer Films producer David Kaplan made a comment on twitter denouncing Campbell. I asked him why and he told me that 90% of the scripts he reads follow the same formula and this, he insinuated, made them flat and, well, formulaic. These books can only give you so much guidance, it’s up to us to inject soul, heart, voice, and identity into a story.

I thanked TripDreamer for posting that, even though it pained me to read it. Not that I doubt Kaplan’s assessment as I’ve read far too many scripts of the ilk he describes as well. However to come to a situation where someone would associate the words “formulaic” and “flat” with Joseph Campbell seems to me… well, almost blasphemous.

I have studied Joseph Campbell since my junior year at the University of Virginia. What he accomplished in his career as an author, teacher, thinker and speaker is nothing short of phenomenal. The problem lies not with Joseph Campbell. The problem lies with what people in Hollywood — specifically writers — have done with Campbell. By essentially reducing the mass of his work to The Hero’s Journey, then to reduce that to a twelve stage pattern to fit into an easily digestible screenwriting paradigm basically falsifies both Campbell and his work.

Therefore I thought I would attempt this week to open the door just a bit to a wider appreciation of Joseph Campbell by spotlighting some memorable quotes of his I have picked up along the way. Here’s the first one:

“What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.”

The beauty of so many of Campbell’s observations is they not only have meaning for us personally in our own lives, but also as writers. How? By making the subject of the quote the Protagonist of our story.

“What each Protagonist must seek in his/her life never was on land or sea. It is something out of the Protagonist’s own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone other than the Protagonist.”

Let’s parse this further by looking at the first line as referring to the External World of the story universe, the realm of action and dialogue.

The second line then refers to the Internal World of the story universe, subtext and intention, emotions and feelings. In other words the “unique potentiality for experience” is that which lies within the Protagonist.

Looked at this way, we can see how wrong-headed it is to conceive of The Hero’s Journey as being primarily about twelve stages in the External World. Sure, you can write a script like that, but more than likely it will come off as “formulaic” and “flat” because the story is lacking the single most important element of all: Psychological meaning.

Everything that happens in the Plotline must be tied intimately and directly to the Protagonist’s “unique potentiality for experience.” Indeed it’s not a stretch to assert that for Campbell, that is the whole point of The Hero’s Journey: For the Hero Within that has always been inside the Protagonist as potential to emerge into the Light. Which is to suggest the events of the Plotline service the grand story of metamorphosis (or to use Campbell’s preferred term transformation).

A battle is a battle. A sword is a sword. A death is a death. It is only through the meaning attached to those events precisely because of the Protagonist’s “unique potentiality for experience” that a story means any bloody thing at all. Otherwise it’s just noise.

To speak metaphorically — which Joseph Campbell would approve wholeheartedly! — screenwriters who use The Hero’s Journey merely as a pattern to structure their story’s Plotline and nothing more, they are seeking life on “land or sea,” when in fact the real life, the animating life of a story exists beyond that which we can see and touch, it dwells in the Internal World of the Protagonist and other character’s “unique potentiality.”

If you want to write scripts that land on a producer’s desk that come off as “formulaic” and “flat,” then stick to the realm of “land or sea.”

If you want to write scripts that come alive in the imaginations of readers, the words lifting up off the page and emerging as a movie in their minds-eye, go into your story’s Internal World, go into your Characters, go into your Protagonist and find the “unique potentiality” that exists there.

Tomorrow: More thoughts on Joseph Campbell.

UPDATE: Man, I love the GITS community. “The Power of Myth” used to be on YouTube, then got pulled. But @LaFamiliaFilm found it online, at least 5 of the 6 episodes [the third hour seems to be inoperative]. You can see it here. 

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