by Lance Lee
But she is progressively involved and provoked despite herself. Periodically she goes to visit her mother in a retirement home who doesn’t remember who Julie is and who has truly withdrawn from life, spending her days before a television set, unable to remember the past. Without the past we are no more than a shadow watching shadows. Thus the metaphor of the Platonic cave points beyond the absence of the perception of the truth to the absence in any meaningful sense of life itself.
Dumbfounded by Olivier’s challenge to live, and his resolve to do whatever he can to make that happen, Julie realizes in the crisis that her effort to be uninvolved as a solution to suffering is impossible. She meets her late husband’s mistress, who is pregnant with her husband’s child. She gives her the family home, and, assured Olivier loves her, goes to him. In the final sequence, we see her both make love and weep as she rejoins the suffering that is life. Freud’s variety of methods to cope with suffering cannot hide the fact that suffering endures; the implication is that to live fully, one must embrace that suffering. It’s like C. S. Lewis with his wife in the film Shadowlands as she makes clear to him one day that the happiness they share now while she is in a state of remission from cancer is part of the pain then, when the remission ends. Pain and pleasure are as inextricably bound, as we saw, as are creativity and destructiveness in Nietzsche and Winnicott: they are contained in each other.
The action in Blue also makes it clear that far from being a muse, Julie was the compositional force behind her husband. In the End it is clear she will create as a woman and an artist in her own right. She has found herself, and in the act of finding herself makes the New Beginning her own. It is Julie’s story that will continue, not another’s: Olivier and the others in her life are caught up in her choices.
This positive outcome is the more usual direction the action necessarily follows in response to the heroine or hero making the wrong decision in the present. The action of such a story necessarily focuses on what, then, is the right decision, which can mean as much or as little as a screenwriter has the ability and vision to create.
Both the wrong decisions in the past and in the present bring us to the same end down different roads, one through discovery of a repetitive past that is challenged, one through challenge to the wrong decision taken in the Beginning of the action. Both lead to a moment when the wrong decision can be relived and undone. Tragedy grows from a failure both to relive and to change that decision, serious drama from a successful effort. A screenplay/drama with either form of the wrong decision gives screenwriters and dramatists a very practical idea of how they must develop the story. This is as true of comedy too, where those decisions and their consequences may be laughed at as absurdities, yet an end is reached where continuance into normal reality becomes possible and the past is laid to rest. Either the past is overcome, as in Analyze This, or turns into the present, as with The Importance of Being Earnest, where “Ernest” succeeds by recovering his past and making it the present in the form of his name, which allows the marriages to go forward.
True Heroines and Heroes and False
Heroines and heroes are a varied lot. We can identify and triumph with them, as we saw, from good to bad. They may begin as weaklings and become admirable and strong at the end, like Terry in On the Waterfront. Bess may take us into a descent into the heavy in Breaking the Waves, or Tomas and Tereza into a moment of earthly paradise certain to be brief in Unbearable Lightness. John Nash takes us through madness to a sanity rooted in love in A Beautiful Mind, while Ichimonji in Ran takes us into tragedy by misjudging his unloving older sons.
Comic heroes and heroines are caught up in the comic angle of vision where what might be tragic turns absurd. They take us on a flight from reality either by their flirting with tragedy or taking denial to the extreme of farce, with us all the while conditioned by our underlying awareness reality cannot be escaped. But comic protagonists move just as much within realities conditioned by the weight of the past and whatever wrong decisions are made there or in the present. They too arrive at the promise of a New Beginning where reality is reestablished and normalcy will prevail. In doing so, comic heroines and heroes complete themselves too, whether Paul Vitti resigning from the mob in Analyze This, or Jack becoming Ernest and winning his wife and life with a past in The Importance of Being Earnest, or the denizens of Much Ado about Nothing dancing riotously around the estate before a double marriage is held.
There is so much variety in stories, so much similarity in storytelling pattern. That Julie, Ichimonji, Terry, Edie, Jack/Ernest, Algy, Gwendolyn, Paul Vitti, and Michael Corleone are all heroes and heroines drives home to us the peculiarity of dramatic structure, as reflected in the fundamental story pattern that encompasses so many wines in one bottle.
Similarly, we have encountered equally diverse false heroes—Taro and Jiro in Ran, Sonny in The Godfather—and failed heroines and heroes like Val and John in Lantana. Their similarities are revealing. Val is no more in control of her emotions than Sonny; Taro and Jiro are manipulated as easily as Terry before Edie electrifies him in On the Waterfront. It is hard to say how true heroes and heroines differ from false and failed in the Beginning, although we are immediately able to spot the difference because we are pointed to it by the story. But Taro, Jiro, Sonny, Val, and John are all dumb in handling—not that all dumb characters are false heroines and heroes, like Hamlet. The failure of a true hero or heroine leads to tragedy, while the failure of a false one may be sad or dramatic but not decisive in consequence in the way characteristic of a true hero’s failure. Nonetheless, a dumb development seems typical of the false hero, at best. All too often the false hero turns out to be a well-rounded type, like Sonny. What we are sure of with a false hero is that he cannot complete the journey of the action and bring it to a New Beginning except in the case where he is swept away with all around him, as with Jiro in Ran, so that the possession of the story moves to others.
The possession of the story is the key. That possession may be contested, but the story belongs to the true hero to take control over: he will go through whatever growth is necessary to do so. Hamlet is paradoxical in this as in so many other ways. Hamlet indeed grows in the dumb mode, yet to possess the story must act in a way his growth makes impossible for him. So we constantly see him in the story not acting at the very moment he should, as in his return to Elsinore from England knowing Claudius has tried to kill him. He slides by us, his inactivity disguised by the activity of those around him, until his final, lethal and spontaneous outburst at the climactic duel. Yet just as with the false hero, Hamlet loses ownership of the ongoing story, thereby giving the future to Fortinbras.
We go with the hero through his struggles sometimes with gritted teeth because of his moral nature, but by the end his triumph is ours and his failure moves the triumph we share to others. His wholeness, so typical a feature of the hero or heroine in the moment of success, is ours too. The wealth of his character laid bare in tragic defeat is also ours, for the true hero does not go down easily. But understanding the journey the hero takes us on is served only so far by observing the workings of the fundamental story pattern in a given screenplay or drama or by tracing the impact of the weight of the past or key wrong decision taken then or in the Beginning. The structural pattern of dramatic action may contain the hero’s journey, but that journey presents a second pattern embedded within the greater. We need to look at the nature of the journey these figures take us on within the action that contains their variety without stultifying the imagination or making the immediate action predictable.
CHAPTER 10
The Nature of the Hero’s Journey
ALL the preceding essays lead toward contemplating the nature of the journey on which our endlessly varied heroes go. That journey is rooted in the psychic realities described by Freud and Winnicott and embedded in the argument we are having with ourselves beginning with Descartes’ extreme dualism, a model that Freud accepted along with the materialist, reductive natu
re of nineteenth-century science. Nietzsche rebelled against that model, and Winnicott developed an alternative to dualism in the language of contemporary psychoanalysis. Drama comes down firmly against a dualistic view of reality and experience; the necessity for spelling out how that occurs and both what that means and what its relevance is to screenwriting has arrived. Exploring the dramatic alternative to dualism goes a long way in answering the question in the preface I sometimes pose to writers concerning why we shouldn’t get rid of the world of film and drama in the name of some altruistic endeavor.
First we need to review Joseph Campbell’s work, which sums up the pattern and role of the hero in human behavior as reflected broadly in mythology, just as we saw Freud in effect give a primer on the roots of conflict in Civilization and Its Discontents, Nietzsche wrestle with how opposing, formative forces can reach a point of union, and Winnicott reflect on the relation of destructiveness to creativity and the point of playing in relation to finding the true self.
Campbell’s Hero
The Campbellian hero quintessentially goes on a journey at the end of which, if successful, he returns to society with a great gift, an elixir of life: “The boon that he brings restores the world.”1 That has an uncanny echo to the sentiments at the end of Schindler’s List as Stern gives Schindler the ring the Jews have made with its inscription “Who saves one life, saves the world.”
The mythological hero is lured, carried away, or voluntarily proceeds to adventure. At the threshold of adventure he encounters a guardian which he must defeat or conciliate, although mythologically winning or losing comes to the same. Win, and the hero goes on alive; lose, he falls into the underworld and has his adventure there. The hero finds himself in a strange land once across the threshold and is tested severely. At the nadir of his fortunes, the hero obtains the greatest gift, the ultimate award which the ordeal carries as its prize. That can appear as a sacred marriage, meaning union with the mother goddess or one of her avatars, or as recognition from the father-creator. The hero may even become divine himself. If the powers that be are still in opposition, then the marriage appears as a bride theft, recognition by the father as fire theft; both marriage by theft and father recognition/fire theft represent a maximum expansion of being involving “illumination, transfiguration, freedom.”2 The hero returns as the powers’ emissary, or in flight. At the edge of the strange land the hero must overcome any obstacles in his way and leave behind any supernatural, transcendental figures before returning to familiar ground. The “elixir” he returns with is, as we saw, restorative.
Campbell gives a circular diagram of the stages of the hero’s journey: the “Call to Adventure,” appearance of a “Helper” (or opponent), the “Threshold of Adventure,” “tests,” more helpers or opponents; and (1) “Sacred Marriage” or (2) “Father Atonement” and/or (3) “Apotheosis” and (4) “Elixir Theft.” This is followed by “Flight” and return to the threshold, as a “Return” or “Resurrection” or “Rescue.”3 These latter involve a climactic struggle to cross from the world of adventure into that of everyday reality, where the community endures from which the hero departed on his adventure. The hero then bestows the elixir on his community to renew its life force.
Curiously, a three-part journey is revealed if one straightens Campbell’s circular diagram. We begin with the “Call to Adventure” and end with the hero’s successful return and giving of the elixir. In the Beginning, which is up to crossing the threshold, a problem appears which the hero feels impelled to deal with; in the Middle, across the threshold, the hero is tested but deals with that problem; and in the End he must struggle across the threshold again back to the reality he left behind with whatever he has gained to renew the life of his community. It is not identical to the Past, Beginning, Middle and End (Acts 1, 2, 3), and New Beginning of drama’s fundamental story pattern, but the family likeness is striking. The Past is implicit in the life the hero is leading up to the point he is called to action. The third part of Campbell’s schema combines the End with the New Beginning. The crisis and climactic return are placed together by Campbell, the flight and the threshold struggle that enable the hero to return to his community. In drama the crisis ends the Middle, Act 2, and propels us into the climactic action of the End, Act 3. There is both a transparent consonance between dramatic structure and the overall mythological pattern of the hero’s quest and, just as importantly, a difference manifested in how much more tightly defined and causally structured drama is. At the same time, dramatic stories are rarely myths, although carried out by heroes and heroines. Thus the most curious thing about the consonance between Campbell and drama is the structural nature of that resemblance.
This is a critical point. Campbell points out myths rarely tell the entire hero story, concentrating often enough on some aspect of it. But the fundamental story pattern is always the same, while simultaneously infinitely varied in actual story content. It is the underlying pattern of dramatic structure that echoes Campbell’s full hero’s quest, which every screenplay thus carries through structurally: we could say, drama is the story with a thousand faces.
It is more intriguing than this. Heroes start off on a “primordial” level in mythology cycles, moving from primal, timeless creative figures to extraordinary but created ones. Those give way to purely human heroes involved in the hero’s quest for the elixir that renews the world. It is the hero’s burden to restore the creative flow of a world that has lost its way and become frozen, so that the present is an illusion and the past wholly, and repetitiously, dominant. The Winnicottian implication is striking, given his position that a creative response to experience is the sign of health in an individual. In Breaking the Waves we witness the frozen society represented by the elders with which Bess’s emotionality is at such odds. To think of that society as an Apollonian order that has rigidified is interesting and true; to think of it as an unhealthy perpetuation of the past into the present is more revealing.
The Campbellian divine or semidivine hero becomes a culture hero, once heroes move from the fabulous into human history. Huang Ti, in Chinese mythology, may talk at the age of seventy days and be emperor by the age of eleven, which indicates the continuing strain of the miraculous in him, but his key characteristics are his ability to control passion, explore the arts, and elaborate culture and the state.4 This ability to control and use passion is a central feature, for the culture hero, the father-founder of a society, is one who is not a plaything of either Eros or Thanatos, any more than Michael is on his return from Sicily in The Godfather or Kane is in High Noon. It is Book’s failure to control his violence that betrays him in Witness and leads to his inability to “keep the girl.” Schindler, from the start, lacks self-control where greed and sex are concerned; by the end of Schindler’s List, he has recalled his wife and spent his money to save lives. A heroine like Julie in Blue tries to withdraw from passion, with the result the action tests her withdrawal and forces her to discover what she needs in order to live: love and creativity.
The hero either descends in his adventure or ascends; in either case the deeds he must accomplish are proportionate to the depth with which the myth is treated. In drama, a hero can be a James Bond or Indiana Jones, their deeds bound to the familiar world, displaying only the extraordinary depth of their capacity, or the hero may be involved in profound moral transformation like Schindler in Schindler’s List. The hero’s power may be treated as predestined, in which case he is someone to be contemplated, or he may manifest his powers through action, in which case he is to be imitated. Both roads for Campbell lead to the revelation of the omnipotent self that is in all of us. If the hero takes off from a historical figure, culture soon invents deeds suitably mythological in nature for him from childhood. It’s worth mentioning Emerson’s view, so sadly lost as we trace American thought from him through Thoreau to a figure like William James, that the more deeply we are in touch with our true selves, the more we are in touch with the true self of everyone else.5
For Campbell the hero’s life goes through distinct, recognizable stages. Since the hero even as a child has the burden of restoring the creative power of the universe to his community, he usually has special powers from birth. Often the hero as child or youth goes through a period of exile: Abraham is hidden from Nimrod in a cave, and as a child discovers the angels and nature of God. Heracles “only” strangles serpents in his crib. Often the young hero is despised or abused. “In sum: the child of destiny has to face a long period of obscurity.”6 Terry has been a bum for years in On the Waterfront; Schindler has been a failure in everything he has undertaken before he comes to Krakow. In Shane or Pale Rider or Unforgiven, the hero has a past he is trying to escape and goes through a period of disguises as a hired farm helper, a minister, and a pig farmer. In Blue Julie subordinates self and creativity to her husband in a false view of the world before the accident; in Wild Strawberries Isak Borg discovers a lifetime of supposed achievement has been lived in a moral wilderness and he must, even at the end, try and set things right.
It is during this period of obscurity that the mythological hero learns the lessons of the “seed powers,” those primeval forces governing the universe. This is less true in drama, where the period of “obscurity” often amounts to an avoidance of self and responsibility that must finally be overcome. Once the mythological hero returns from this period of obscurity, he wins recognition by provoking a crisis through the assertion of his heroic nature. In On the Waterfront this is echoed in Terry as he begins to assert his own conscience, which threatens all those who had taken him for granted. Schindler must steer a careful course among his Nazi cronies after his conscience is stirred into action with the liquidation of the ghetto in Schindler’s List; nonetheless, at one point he ends in jail, and at another the “joke” of watering Jews in broiling train cars grows thin as Schindler mercifully perseveres after the others stop. The western hero shedding his clerical collar or farm clothes is instantly a figure of menace to the bad guys. Why is the hero such a danger? Because his “return,” or assertion of his hero nature, threatens to break apart the patterns of experience prevailing to that point.