Joseph Campbell gives several illustrations of magical flights, and suggests the motif stands for a hero's attempts to stall the avenging forces in any way possible, by throwing down "protective interpretations, principles, symbols, rationalizations, anything [to] delay and absorb" their power.
What the hero throws down in a chase may also represent a sacrifice, the leaving behind of something of value. The little girl of the fairy tales may find it hard to part with the lovely scarf or comb given by the animals. Heroes of movie adventures sometimes have to decide what's really important, and toss money out the window to slow their pursuers and save their lives. Campbell cites the extreme example of Medea. Escaping with Jason from her father, she had Jason cut up her own brother and toss his pieces into the sea to delay the pursuit.
CHASE VARIATIONS: PURSUIT BY ADMIRERS
It's most common for heroes to be chased by villains, but there are other possibilities. An unusual variant of the chase is pursuit by admirers, for example in Shane, at the beginning of Act Three. Shane has been out on the farm trying to stay away from gunfighting, but now the brutality of the villains in the town draws him back. He tells the little farm boy (Brandon De Wilde) to stay behind, but the boy follows him at a distance. Behind the boy follows the boy's dog, who has also been told to stay home. The point is made that this kid is as faithful to Shane as a dog. It's a chase scene with a twist: Rather than hero fleeing villain, hero is being pursued by his admirer.
VILLAIN ESCAPE
Another chase scene variant is the pursuit of an escaped villain. A Shadow captured and controlled in the Ordeal escapes at this stage and becomes more dangerous than before. Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, feeling betrayed by FBI agent Clarice, escapes and begins to kill again. King Kong, taken to New York to be displayed in chains, escapes and goes on a rampage. Countless movie and TV Westerns depict a villain trying to make a getaway, then being ridden down and tackled by the hero prior to a final fistfight or gun duel. Such scenes were a staple of the Roy Rogers and Lone Ranger serials and TV shows.
As mentioned above, villains may steal back the treasure from the hero or make off with one of his team members. This could lead to pursuit by the hero and rescue or recovery.
SETBACKS
Another twist of The Road Back may be a sudden catastrophic reversal of the hero's good fortune. Things were going well after surviving the Ordeal, but now reality sets in again. Heroes may encounter setbacks that seem to doom the adventure. Within sight of shore the ship may spring a leak. For a moment, after great risk, effort, and sacrifice, it may look like all is lost.
This moment in the story, the climax of Act Two, may be the Delayed Crisis spoken of earlier. It could be the moment of greatest tension in Act Two and should set the story on the final path to resolution in Act Three.
The Road Back at the end of Act Two may be a brief moment or an elaborate sequence of events. Almost every story needs a moment to acknowledge the hero's resolve to finish, and provide her with necessary motivation to return home with the elixir despite the temptations of the Special World and the trials that remain ahead.
THE WIZARD OF OZ
The Wizard has prepared a hot-air balloon with which he hopes to take Dorothy on The Road Back to Kansas. The people of Oz gather to see them off with a brass band. However; it's seldom that easy. Toto, seeing a cat in the arms of a woman in the crowd, runs after it, and Dorothy runs after Toto. In the confusion, the balloon wobbles off with the Wizard aboard and Dorothy is left behind, apparently stuck in the Special World. Many heroes have tried to return using familiar means — old crutches and dependencies. But they find the old ways as artificial and difficult to control as the Wizard's hot-air balloon. Dorothy, guided by her instincts (the dog) knows deep down that this is not the way for her. Yet she is ready to take The Road Back, and keeps looking for the proper branching of the path.
Heroes gather up what they have learned, gained, stolen, or been granted in the Special World. They set themselves a new goal, to escape, find further adventure, or return home. But before any of those goals are achieved, there is another test to pass, the final exam of the journey, Resurrection.
QUESTIONING THE JOURNEY
1. What is The Road Back in A League of Their Own? Awakenings? Unforgiven? Terminator 2? From the writer's point of view, what are the advantages and disadvantages of heroes being ejected or chased from the Special World? Of leaving voluntarily?
2. What have you learned or gained from confronting death, defeat, or danger? Did you feel heroic? How can you apply your feelings to your writing, to the reactions of your characters?
3. How do your heroes rededicate themselves to the quest?
4. What is The Road Back in your story? Is it returning to your starting place? Setting a new destination? Adjusting to a new life in the Special World?
5. Find the Act Two/Act Three turning points in three current feature films. Are these single moments or extended sequences?
6. Is there an element of pursuit or acceleration in these sections? In The Road Back section of your own story?
Now comes one of the trickiest and most challenging passages for the hero and the writer. For a story to feel complete, the audience needs to experience an additional moment of death and rebirth, similar to the Supreme Ordeal but subtly different. This is the climax (not the crisis), the last and most dangerous meeting with death. Heroes have to undergo a final purging and purification before reentering the Ordinary World. Once more they must change. The trick for writers is to show the change in their characters, by behavior or appearance rather than by just talking about it. Writers must find ways to demonstrate that their heroes have been through a Resurrection.
We weary Seekers shuffle back towards the village. Look! The smoke of the Home Tribe fires! Pick up the pace! But wait — the shaman appears to stop us from charging back in. You have been to the land of Death, he says, and you look like death itself, covered in blood, carrying the torn flesh and hide of your game. If you march back into the village without purifying and cleansing yourselves, you may bring death back with you. You must undergo one final sacrifice before rejoining the tribe. Your warrior self must die so you can be reborn as an innocent into the group. The trick is to keep the wisdom of the Ordeal, while getting rid of its bad effects. After all we've been through, fellow Seekers, we must face one more trial, maybe the hardest one yet.
A NEW PERSONALITY
A new self must be created for a new world. Just as heroes had to shed their old selves to enter the Special World, they now must shed the personality of the journey and build a new one that is suitable for return to the Ordinary World. It should reflect the best parts of the old selves and the lessons learned along the way. In the Western Barbarossa, Gary Busey's farmboy character goes through a final ordeal from which he is reborn as the new Barbarossa, having incorporated the lessons of his Mentor, Willie Nelson, along the way. John Wayne emerges from the ordeal of death in Fort Apache and incorporates some of the dress and attitudes of his antagonist, Henry Fonda.
CLEANSING
One function of Resurrection is to cleanse heroes of the smell of death, yet help them retain the lessons of the ordeal. The lack of public ceremonies and counseling for returning Vietnam War veterans may have contributed to the terrible problems these soldiers have had in reintegrating with society. So-called primitive societies seem better prepared to handle the return of heroes. They provide rituals to purge the blood and death from hunters and warriors so they can become peaceful members of society again.
Returning hunters may be quarantined safely away from the tribe for a period of time. To reintegrate hunters and warriors into the tribe, shamans use rituals that mimic the effects of death or even take the participants to death's door. The hunters or warriors may be buried alive for a period of time or confined in a cave or sweat lodge, symbolically growing in the womb of the earth. Then they are raised up (Resurrected) and welcomed as newborn members of
the tribe.
Sacred architecture aims to create this feeling of Resurrection, by confining worshippers in a narrow dark hall or tunnel, like a birth canal, before bringing them out into an open well-lit area, with a corresponding lift of relief. Baptism by immersion in a stream is a ritual designed to give the Resurrection feeling, both cleansing the sinner and reviving him from symbolic death by drowning.
TWO GREAT ORDEALS
Why do so many stories seem to have two climaxes or death-and-rebirth ordeals, one near the middle and another just before the end of the story? The college semester metaphor suggests the reason. The central crisis or Supreme Ordeal is like a midterm exam; the Resurrection is the final exam. Heroes must be tested one last time to see if they retained the learning from the Supreme Ordeal of Act Two.
To learn something in a Special World is one thing; to bring the knowledge home as applied wisdom is quite another. Students can cram for a test but the Resurrection stage represents a field trial of a hero's new skills, in the real world. It's both a reminder of death and a test of the hero's learning. Was the hero sincere about change? Will she backslide or fail, be defeated by neuroses or a Shadow at the eleventh hour? Will the dire predictions made about hero Joan Wilder in Act One of Romancing the Stone ("You're not up to this, Joan, and you know it") turn out to be true?
PHYSICAL ORDEAL
At the simplest level, the Resurrection may just be a hero facing death one last time in an ordeal, battle, or showdown. It's often the final, decisive confrontation with the villain or Shadow.
But the difference between this and previous meetings with death is that the danger is usually on the broadest scale of the entire story. The threat is not just to the hero, but to the whole world. In other words, the stakes are at their highest.
The James Bond movies often climax with 007 battling the villains and then racing against time and impossible odds to disarm some Doomsday device, such as the atomic bomb at the climax of Goldfinger. Millions of lives are at stake. Hero, audience, and world are taken right to the brink of death one more time before Bond (or his Ally Felix Leiter) manages to yank the right wire and save us all from destruction.
THE ACTIVE HERO
It seems obvious that the hero should be the one to act in this climactic moment. But many writers make the mistake of having the hero rescued from death by a timely intervention from an Ally — the equivalent of the cavalry coming to save the day.
Heroes can get surprise assistance, but it's best for the hero to be the one to perform the decisive action; to deliver the death blow to fear or the Shadow; to be active rather than passive, at this of all times.
SHOWDOWNS
In Westerns, crime fiction, and many action films, the Resurrection is expressed as the biggest confrontation and battle of the story, the showdown or shootout. A showdown pits hero and villains in an ultimate contest with the highest possible stakes, life and death. It's the classic gunfight of the Western, the swordfight of the swashbuckler, or the last acrobatic battle of a martial arts movie. It may even be a courtroom showdown or an emotional "shootout" in a domestic drama.
The showdown is a distinct dramatic form with its own rules and conven-tions. The operatic climaxes of the Sergio Leone "spaghetti Westerns" exaggerate the elements of the conventional showdown: the dramatic music; the opposing forces marching towards each other in some kind of arena (the town street, a corral, a cemetery, the villain's hideout); the closeups of guns, hands, and eyes poised for the decisive moment; the sense that time stands still. Gun duels are almost mandatory in Westerns from Stagecoach to High Noon to My Darling Clementine. The so-called Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881 was a brutal shootout that has become part of the myth of the American West and has spurred more film versions than any other.
Duels to the death form the climaxes of swashbucklers such as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Seahawk, Scaramouche, and The Flame and the Arrow; knights battle to the death in Ivanhoe, Excalibur, and Knights of the Round Table. Duels or shootouts are not fully satisfying unless the hero is taken right to the edge of death. The hero must clearly be fighting for his life. The playful quality of earlier skirmishes is probably gone now. He may be wounded or he may slip and lose his balance. He may actually seem to die, just as in the Supreme Ordeal.
DEATH AND REBIRTH OF TRAGIC HEROES
Conventionally heroes survive this brush with death and are Resurrected. Often it is the villains who die or are defeated, but some tragic heroes actually die at this point, like the doomed heroes of They Died with Their Boots On, The Sand Pebbles, Charge of the Light Brigade, or Glory. Robert Shaw's character, Quint, is killed at this point in Jaws.
However, all these doomed or tragic heroes are Resurrected in the sense that they usually live on in the memory of the survivors, those for whom they gave their lives. The audience survives, and remembers the lessons a tragic hero can teach us.
In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the heroes are cornered in an adobe building, surrounded and outnumbered. They run out to face death in a climax that is delayed to the final seconds of the film. The chances are good they're going to die in a hail of bullets, but they'll go down fighting and are granted immortality by a final freeze-frame, which makes them live on in our memories. In The Wild Bunch the heroes are elaborately killed, but their energy lives on in a gun which is picked up by another adventurer who we know will carry on in their wild style.
CHOICE
Another possibility for a Resurrection moment may be a climactic choice among options that indicates whether or not the hero has truly learned the lesson of change. A difficult choice tests a hero's values: Will he choose in accordance with his old, flawed ways, or will the choice reflect the new person he's become? In Witness, policeman John Book comes to a final showdown with his ultimate enemy, a crooked police official. The Amish people watch to see if Book will follow the violent code of his Ordinary World or the peaceful way he has learned in their Special World. He makes a clear choice not to engage in the expected shootout. Instead he puts down his gun, leaving the villain armed, and stands with the silent Amish. Like them, he is a witness. The villain can't shoot when there are so many witnesses. The old John Book would have shot it out with his opponent, but the new man chooses not to. Here is the test that proves he's learned his lesson and is a new man, Resurrected.
ROMANTIC CHOICE
The Resurrection choice may be in the arena of love. Stories like The Graduate or It Happened One Night take heroes to the altar at the climax, where a choice of spouses must be made. Sophie's Choice is about the impossible choice of a mother who is told by the Nazis to pick which of her two children will die.
CLIMAX
The Resurrection usually marks the climax of the drama. Climax is a Greek word meaning "a ladder." For us storytellers it has come to mean an explosive moment, the highest peak in energy, or the last big event in a work. It may be the physical showdown or final battle, but it can also be expressed as a difficult choice, sexual climax, musical crescendo, or highly emotional but decisive confrontation.
THE QUIET CLIMAX
The climax need not be the most explosive, dramatic, loud, or dangerous moment of the story. There is such a thing as a quiet climax; a gentle cresting of a wave of emotion. A quiet climax can give a sense that all the conflicts have been harmoniously resolved, and all the tensions converted into feelings of pleasure and peace. After a hero has experienced the death of a loved one, there may be a quiet climax of acceptance or understanding. The knots of tension created in the body of the story come untied, perhaps after a gentle tug from a final realization.
ROLLING CLIMAXES
Stories may need more than one climax, or a series of rolling climaxes. Individual subplots may require separate climaxes. The Resurrection stage is another nerve ganglion of the story, a checkpoint through which all the threads of the story have to pass. Rebirth and cleansing may have to be experienced on more than one level.
The hero may experience a
climax on different levels of awareness in succession, such as mind, body, and emotion. A hero might go through a climax of mental change or decision which triggers a physical climax or showdown in the material world. This could be followed by an emotional or spiritual climax as the hero's behavior and feelings change.
Gunga Din combines effective physical and emotional climaxes in succession. Cary Grant and his two English sergeant pals have been badly wounded, leaving the water carrier Gunga Din, once a clown, to act as the hero and warn the British army of an ambush. Although wounded himself, Gunga Din climbs to the top of a golden tower to blow a bugle call. The army is warned and many lives are saved in an action scene which is the story's physical climax, but Din himself is shot from the tower and falls to his death. However, his death is not in vain. He is recognized as a hero by his comrades and is Resurrected. In a final emotional climax the Colonel reads a poem which Rudyard Kipling has written in Din's honor. Superimposed on the scene is Din's spirit, dressed in full army uniform and grinning as he salutes, Resurrected and transformed.
Of course, a well-made story can bring all levels — mind, body, and spirit — to climax in the same moment. When a hero takes a decisive action, her whole world can be changed at once.
CATHARSIS
A climax should provide the feeling of catharsis. This Greek word actually means "vomiting up" or "purging," but in English has come to mean a purifying emotional release, or an emotional breakthrough. Greek drama was constructed with the intent of triggering a vomiting-up of emotions by the audience, a purging of the poisons of daily life. Just as they took purgatives to empty and cleanse their digestive systems from time to time, the Greeks at regular times of the year would go to the theatre to get rid of ill feeling. Laughter, tears, and shudders of terror are the triggers that bring about this healthy cleansing, this catharsis.
The Writer's Journey Page 20