The Writer's Journey

by Christopher Vogler

  These witnesses stand for the audience, who are identifying with the heroes and feeling the pain of death with them. It's not that audiences are sadistic and enjoy seeing their heroes killed. It's that we all relish a little taste of death every now and then. Its bitter flavor makes life taste sweeter. Anyone who has survived a true near-death experience, a sudden close call in a car or plane, knows that for a while afterward colors seem sharper, family and friends are more important, and time is more precious. The nearness of death makes life more real.

  A TASTE OF DEATH

  People pay good money for a taste of death. Bungee-jumping, skydiving, and terrifying amusement park rides give people the jolt chat awakens fuller appreciation of life. Adventure films and stories are always popular because they offer a less risky way to experience death and rebirth, through heroes we can identify with.

  But wait a minute, we left poor Luke Skywalker being crushed to death in the heart, or rather the stomach, of the Death Star. He's in the belly of the whale. The robot witnesses are distraught at hearing what sounds like their master's death. They grieve and the audience grieves with them, tasting death. All of the filmmaker's artful technique is dedicated to making the audience think their heroes are being ground to a paste. But then the robots realize that what they thought were screams of death were in fact cries of relief and triumph. The robots managed to shut off

  the trashmasher and the heroes have miraculously survived. The grief of the robots and of the audience suddenly, explosively, turns to joy.

  THE ELASTICITY OF EMOTION

  Human emotions, it seems, have certain elastic properties, rather like basketballs. When thrown down hard, they bounce back high. In any story you are trying to lift the audience, raise their awareness, heighten their emotions. The structure of a story acts like a pump to increase the involvement of the audience. Good structure works by alternately lowering and raising the hero's fortunes and, with them, the audience's emotions. Depressing an audience's emotions has the same effect as holding an inflated basketball under water: When the downward pressure is released, the ball flies up out of the water. Emotions depressed by the presence of death can rebound in an instant to a higher state than ever before. This can become the base on which you build to a still higher level. The Ordeal is one of the deepest "depressions" in a story and therefore leads to one of its highest peaks.

  In an amusement park ride you are hurled around in darkness or on the edge of space until you think you're going to die, but somehow you come out elated that you have survived. A story without some hint of this experience is missing its heart. Screenwriters sometimes have a lot of trouble with the length of Act Two. It can seem monotonous, episodic, or aimless. This may be because they've conceived of it as simply a series of obstacles to the hero's final goal, rather than as a dynamic series of events leading up to and trailing away from a central moment of death and rebirth. Even in the silliest comedy or most light-hearted romance, Act Two needs a central life—or—death crisis, a moment when the hero is experiencing death or maximum danger to the enterprise.

  HERO APPEARS TO DIE

  The long second act of Star Wars is kept from sagging by a central crisis section in which the borders of death are thoroughly explored in not one, but a series of ordeals. At another point in the giant trash compactor sequence, Luke is pulled under the sewage by the tentacle of an unseen monster. It was this scene that really made me understand the mechanism of the Ordeal.

  First, the audience and the witnesses at hand (Han Solo, Princess Leia, the Wookiee) see a few bubbles come up, a sign that Luke is still struggling, alive, and breathing. So far, so good. But then the bubbles stop coming. The witnesses begin reacting as if he were dead. In a few seconds you begin to wonder if he's ever coming up. You know George Lucas is not going to kill off his hero halfway through the film and yet you begin to entertain the possibility.

  I remember seeing a preview screening of Star Wars on the Fox lot and being completely taken in by the critical few seconds of this scene. I had invested something of myself in Luke Skywalker and when he appeared to be dead, I instantly became a disembodied presence in the screen. I began flitting from surviving character to character, wondering who I could identify with next. Would I ride through the rest of the story as the spoiled Princess Leia, the selfish opportunist Han Solo, or the beastly Wookiee? I didn't feel comfortable in any of their skins. In these few seconds I experienced something like panic. The hero, for me, was truly in the belly of the whale, inaccessible, effectively dead. With the hero dead, who was I in this movie? What was my point of view? My emotions, like the basketball held under water, were depressed.

  Just then Luke Skywalker explodes to the surface, slimy but alive. He has died to our eyes, but now he lives again, rebirthed by the companions who help him to his feet. At once the audience feels elated. The emotions ride higher for having been brought down so far. Experiences like this are the key to the popularity of the Star Wars movies. They fling heroes and audiences over the brink of death and snatch them back repeatedly. It's more than great special effects, funny dialogue, and sex that people are paying for. They love to see heroes cheat death. In fact they love to cheat death themselves. Identifying with a hero who bounces back from death is bungee-jumping in dramatic form.

  HERO WITNESSES DEATH

  Star Wars has not given us enough of a taste of death yet. Before the Ordeal section is over, Luke witnesses the physical death of his Mentor, Obi Wan, in a laser duel with the villain Darth Vader. Luke is devastated and feels the death as keenly as if it were his own. But in this mythical world, the borders of life and death are deliberately fuzzy. Obi Wan's body vanishes, raising the possibility he may survive somewhere to return when needed, like King Arthur and Merlin.

  To a shaman like Obi Wan, death is a familiar threshold that can be crossed back and forth with relative ease. Obi Wan lives within Luke and the audience through his teachings. Despite physical death he is able to give Luke crucial advice at later points in the story: "Trust the Force, Luke."

  HERO CAUSES DEATH

  The hero doesn't have to die for the moment of death to have its effect. The hero may be a witness to death or the cause of death. In Body Heat the central event, William Hurt's Ordeal, is murdering Kathleen Turner's husband and disposing of his body. But it's a death for Hurt too, deep in his soul. His innocence has died, a victim of his own lust.

  FACING THE SHADOW

  By far the most common kind of Ordeal is some sort of battle or confrontation with an opposing force. It could be a deadly enemy villain, antagonist, opponent, or even a force of nature. An idea that comes close to encompassing all these possibilities is the archetype of the Shadow. A villain may be an external character, but in a deeper sense what all these words stand for is the negative possibilities of the hero himself. In other words, the hero's greatest opponent is his own Shadow.

  As with all the archetypes, there are negative and positive manifestations of the Shadow. A dark side is needed sometimes to polarize a hero or a system, to give the hero some resistance to push against. Resistance can be your greatest source of strength. Ironically, what seem to be villains fighting for our death may turn out to be forces ultimately working for our good.

  DEMONIZATION

  Generally the Shadow represents the hero's fears and unlikeable, rejected qualities: all the things we don't like about ourselves and try to project onto other people. This form of projection is called demonizing. People in emotional crisis will sometimes project all their problems in a certain area onto another person or group who become the symbol of everything they hate and fear in themselves. In war and propaganda, the enemy becomes an inhuman devil, the dark Shadow of the righteous, angelic image we are trying to maintain for ourselves. The Devil himself is God's Shadow, a projection of all the negative and rejected potential of the Supreme Being.

  Sometimes we need this projection and polarization in order to see an issue clearly. A system can stay in unhealthy i
mbalance for a long time if the conflicts are not categorized, polarized, and made to duke it out in some kind of dramatic confrontation. Usually the Shadow can be brought out into the light. The unrecognized or rejected parts are acknowledged and made conscious despite all their struggling to remain in darkness. Dracula's abhorrence of sunlight is a symbol of the Shadow's desire to remain unexplored.

  Villains can be looked at as the hero's Shadow in human form. No matter how alien the villain's values, in some way they are the dark reflection of the hero's own desires, magnified and distorted, her greatest fears come to life.

  DEATH OF A VILLAIN

  Sometimes the hero comes close to death at the Ordeal, but it is the villain who dies. However, the hero may have other forces, other Shadows, to deal with before the adventure is over. The action may move from the physical arena to a moral, spiritual, or emotional plane. Dorothy kills the Wicked Witch in Act Two, but faces an ordeal of the spirit: the death of her hopes of getting home in Act Three.

  A villain's death should not be too easy for the hero to accomplish. In an Ordeal scene in Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, the hero tries to kill a spy in a farmhouse with no real weapons at hand. Hitchcock makes the point that killing someone can be much harder than the movies usually make it seem. Anyone's death has an emotional cost, as well, as the movie Unforgiven repeatedly shows. Clint Eastwood's bounty hunter kills but is painfully aware his targets are men just like him. Death should be real, and not a mere plot convenience.

  THE VILLAIN ESCAPES

  The hero may wound the villain at the Ordeal or kill the villain's underling. The chief villain escapes to be confronted once again in Act Three. Axel Foley has a death-and-rebirth confrontation with the criminal mastermind's lieutenants in Act Two of Beverly Hills Cop, but the final showdown with the main Shadow is held back for Act Three.

  VILLAINS ARE HEROES OF THEIR OWN STORIES

  Keep in mind that while some villains or Shadows exult in being bad, many don't think of themselves as evil at all. In their own minds they are right, the heroes of their own stories. A dark moment for the hero is a bright one for a Shadow. The arcs of their stories are mirror images: When the hero is up, the villain is down. It depends on point of view. By the time you are done writing a screenplay or novel, you should know your characters well enough that you can tell the story from the point of view of everyone: heroes, villains, sidekicks, lovers, allies, guardians, and lesser folk. Each is the hero of his own story. It's a good exercise to walk through the story at least once in the Shadow's skin.

  HOW HEROES CHEAT DEATH

  In the classic hero myths the Ordeal is set up as a moment in which the hero is expected to die. Many have come to this point before and none have survived. Perseus' Approach to the monster Medusa is choked with statues of heroes turned to stone by her glance. The labyrinth which Theseus enters is littered with the bones of those who were eaten by the monster inside or who starved trying to find their way out.

  These mythic heroes face certain death but survive where others have failed because they have wisely sought supernatural aid in the earlier stages. They cheat death, usually with the help of the Mentor's gifts. Perseus uses the magic mirror, Athena's gift, to approach Medusa and avoid her direct gaze. He cuts off her head with his magic sword and keeps it from doing further harm by stowing it in his magic pouch, another Mentor's gift.

  In the story of Theseus, the hero has won the love of Ariadne, daughter of the tyrant Minos of Crete, in the Approach phase. Now, when Theseus must go into the uncertain, deadly depths of the Labyrinth, he turns to Ariadne for aid. The princess goes to the Mentor of the story, the great inventor and architect Daedalus, designer of the Labyrinth. His magical help is of the simplest kind: a ball of thread. Ariadne holds one end while Theseus winds through the Labyrinth. He is able to find his way back from the house of death because of his connection to her — because of love, the thread that binds them.

  ARIADNE'S THREAD

  Ariadne's Thread is a potent symbol of the power of love, of the almost telepathic wiring that joins people in an intense relationship. It can tug at you like a physical connector at times. It's close kin to the "apron strings" that bind even adult children to their mothers — invisible wires but with greater tensile strength than steel.

  Ariadne's Thread is an elastic band that connects a hero with loved ones. A hero may venture far out into madness or death, but is usually pulled back by such bonds. My mother tells me she had a medical emergency when I was a child that almost killed her. Her spirit left her body and flew around the room, feeling free and ready to leave, and only the sight of my sisters and me snapped her back into life. She had a reason to go on living, to take care of us.

  The Old English word for a ball of thread is a "clew." That's where we get our word clue. A clue is a thread that a seeker traces back to a center, looking for answers or order. The skeins of thread that connect one heart to another may be the vital clue that solves a mystery or resolves a conflict.

  CRISIS OF THE HEART

  The Ordeal can be a crisis of the heart. In a story of romance it might be the moment of greatest intimacy, something we all desire and yet fear. Perhaps what's dying here is a hero's defensiveness. In another story it might be a dark moment in the romance when the hero experiences betrayal or the apparent death of the relationship.

  Joseph Campbell describes what we might call the romantic branches of the Ordeal in two chapters of The Hero with a Thousand Faces called "Meeting with the Goddess" and "Woman as Temptress." As he says, "the ultimate adventure... is commonly represented as a mystical marriage... the crisis at the nadir, the zenith, or at the uttermost edge of the earth, at the central point of the cosmos, in the cosmos, in the tabernacle of the temple, or within the darkness of the deepest chamber of the heart." In stories of love, the crisis may be either a love scene or a separation from a loved one. Crisis, remember, comes from a Greek word meaning "to separate."

  In Romancing the Stone the crisis is both a physical Ordeal and a separation of loved ones. Joan Wilder and her shapeshifting companion Jack Colton enter a literal Inmost Cave where they take possession of the giant emerald, El Corazon. But that's much too easy and a few moments later they go through a real Supreme Ordeal as their car plunges over a waterfall and they dive out. Joan Wilder disappears under the water for several shots. The audience sees Jack Colton struggle ashore, and for scant seconds we are left wondering if Joan has died. Those few seconds are sufficient for the magic of the Supreme Ordeal to work. Joan then appears, struggling onto a rock in the foreground. That she has died and been reborn is clearly acknowledged in the dialogue. On the opposite bank, Colton cries out, "I thought you drowned." Joan acknowledges, "I did."

  Colton is elated by their physical survival, but now the focus of the crisis for Joan shifts to the emotional plane. The untrustworthy Colton is on the opposite side of the raging river with the jewel. A real test of their love is coming. Will he keep his promise to meet her in the next town, or will he simply run away with El Corazon and break her heart? Will she be able to survive in the jungle of the Special World without him?

  SACRED MARRIAGE

  In stories with emotional and psychological depth, the Ordeal may bring a moment of mystic marriage within a person, a balancing of opposing inner forces. The fear and death aspect of the Ordeal may haunt the wedding: What if this doesn't work out? What if the part of myself I am walking to the altar with turns and overwhelms me? But despite these fears, heroes may acknowledge their hidden qualities, even their Shadows, and join with them in a sacred marriage. Heroes are ultimately seeking a confrontation with their anima, their soul, or the unrecognized feminine or intuitive parts of their personality.

  Women may be seeking the animus, the masculine powers of reason and assertion that society has told them to hide. They may be trying to get back in touch with a creative drive or a maternal energy they've rejected. In a moment of crisis, a hero may get in touch with all sides of her personality as
her many selves are called forth en masse to deal with her life-and-death issues.

  BALANCE

  In a Sacred Marriage both sides of the personality are acknowledged to be of equal value. Such a hero, in touch with all the tools of being a human, is in a state of balance, centered, and not easily dislodged or upset. Campbell says the Sacred

  Marriage "represents the hero's total mastery of life," a balanced marriage between the hero and life itself.

  Therefore the Ordeal may be a crisis in which the hero is joined with the repressed feminine or masculine side in a Sacred Marriage. But there may also be a Sacred Breakup! Open, deadly war may be declared by the dueling male and female sides.

  THE LOVE THAT KILLS

  Campbell touches on this destructive conflict in "The Woman as Temptress." The title is perhaps misleading — as with "The Meeting with the Goddess," the energy of this moment could be male or female. This Ordeal possibility takes the hero to a junction of betrayal, abandonment, or disappointment. It's a crisis of faith in the arena of love.

  Every archetype has both a bright, positive side and a dark, negative side. The dark side of love is the mask of hate, recrimination, outrage, and rejection. This is the face of Medea as she kills her own children, the mask of Medusa herself, ringed with poison snakes of blame and guilt.

  A crisis may come when a shapeshifting lover suddenly shows another side, leaving the hero feeling bitterly betrayed and dead to the idea of love. This is a favorite Hitchcock device. After a tender love scene in North by Northwest, Cary Grant's character is betrayed to the spies by Eva Marie Saint. Grant goes into his mid-movie Ordeal feeling abandoned by her. The possibility of true love that she represented now seems dead, and it makes his Ordeal, in which he's almost gunned down by a crop-dusting plane in a cornfield, all the more lonely.