The Writer's Journey

by Christopher Vogler

  In psychoanalysis, catharsis is a technique of relieving anxiety or depression by bringing unconscious material to the surface. The same is true, in a way, of storytelling. The climax you are trying to trigger in your hero and audience is the moment when they are the most conscious, when they have reached the highest point on a ladder of awareness. You are trying to raise the consciousness of both the hero and the participating audience. A catharsis can bring about a sudden expansion of awareness, a peak experience of higher consciousness.

  A catharsis can be combined with a simple physical showdown, for a satisfying emotional effect. In Red River, Tom Dunson and Matthew Garth come together for an explosive fight to the death. At first Garth won't fight. He is determined not to be provoked into abandoning his principles. Dunson hammers at him until Garth is forced to fight back to save his own life. They commence a titanic battle and it looks for all the world as if one or both of them must be killed. They crash into a wagon loaded with domestic goods — calico, pots and pans — and destroy it, suggesting the death of hope for building home, family, or society on the frontier.

  But a new energy enters the scene: Tess, an independent woman who has come to love Matthew Garth. She stops the fight with a gunshot to get their attention. In

  an emotional climax — a genuine catharsis -— she spews up all her feelings about the two men, and convinces them that their fight is foolish, because they really love each other. She has changed a deadly physical showdown into an emotional catharsis, a moment of highest awareness.

  Catharsis works best through physical expression of emotions such as laughter and crying. Sentimental stories can bring an audience to a catharsis of tears by pushing their emotions to a climax. The death of a beloved character, like Mr. Chips or the doomed young woman in Love Story, may be the climactic moment. Such characters are inevitably "resurrected" in the hearts and memories of those who loved them.

  Laughter is one of the strongest channels of catharsis. A comedy should crest with a gag or a series of gags that create a virtual explosion of laughter, jokes that relieve tension, purge sour emotions, and allow us a shared experience. The classic Warner Bros, and Disney short cartoons are constructed to reach a climax of laughter, a crescendo of absurdity, in only six minutes. Full-length comedies have to be carefully structured to build to a climax of laughter that releases all the boxed-in emotions of the audience.

  CHARACTER ARC

  A catharsis is the logical climax of a hero's character arc. This is a term used to describe the gradual stages of change in a character: the phases and turning points of growth. A common flaw in stories is that writers make heroes grow or change, but do so abruptly, in a single leap because of a single incident. Someone criticizes them or they realize a flaw, and they immediately correct it; or they have an overnight conversion because of some shock and are totally changed at one stroke. This does happen once in a while in life, but more commonly people change by degrees, growing in gradual stages from bigotry to tolerance, from cowardice to courage, from hate to love. Here is a typical character arc compared with the Hero's Journey model.

  The stages of the Hero's Journey are a good guide to the steps needed to create a realistic character arc.

  LAST CHANCE

  The Resurrection is the hero's final attempt to make major change in attitude or behavior. A hero may backslide at this point, making those around think he's let them down. Hope for that character is temporarily dead, but can be resurrected if he changes his mind. The selfish loner Han Solo in Star Wars turns his back on the final attempt to crack the Death Star, but shows up at the last minute, showing that he has finally changed and is now willing to risk his life for a good cause.

  WATCH YOUR STEP

  The Resurrection can be a potential misstep for a returning hero who may be walking a narrow sword-bridge from one world to the next. Hitchcock often uses heights at this point in a story to stand for the potential failure to return from the Special World alive. In North hy Northwest, Cary Grant's and Eva Marie Saint s characters end up hanging from the stone portraits on Mount Rushmore, keeping the audience in suspense about their ultimate fates until the last possible moment. The climaxes of Hitchcock s Vertigo, Saboteur, and To Catch a Thief all take heroes to high places for a final struggle between life and death.

  Sometimes great drama comes from heroes dropping the ball at the last moment just before reaching their goal. The heroes of Quest for Fire come back to their people with the elixir of flame, but at the threshold of their world, the fire goes out, dropped into the water by accident. This apparent death of all hope is the final test for the hero, the leader of the quest. He reassures the people, for he knows the secret of fire; he has seen the more advanced tribe using a special stick to make fire at his Ordeal. However, when he tries to copy their technique, he finds he has forgotten the trick. Again hope seems dead.

  But just then his "wife," a woman he met on the adventure and a member of the more advanced tribe, steps in and gives it a try. The men are not too happy about this, being shown up by a woman and a foreigner at that. However, only she knows the secret (spitting on your hands before using the fire-stick). She succeeds, fire blooms, and the possibility of life returns to the tribe. In fact the tribe itself has passed a final test by learning that the combined knowledge of men and women is needed to survive. A stumble at the final threshold has led to Resurrection and enlightenment.

  The misstep for a hero might not be a physical event, but a moral or emotional stumble at the threshold of return. In Notorious there are both physical and emotional tests in the closing moments. Alicia Hueberman (Ingrid Bergman) is in grave physical danger from being poisoned by the Nazis, while Devlin (Cary Grant) is in danger of losing his soul if he doesn't rescue her from the clutches of the enemy where his own devotion to duty has placed her.

  THE FALSE CLAIMANT

  A common Resurrection moment in fairy tales involves a last-minute threat to a hero who has gone on a quest to achieve impossible tasks. As he stakes his claim on the princess or the kingdom, a pretender or false claimant suddenly steps forward questioning the hero's credentials or claiming that he, not the hero, achieved the impossible. For a moment it looks like the hero's hopes are dead. To be reborn, the hero must provide proof that he is the true claimant, perhaps by showing the ears and tail of the dragon he slew, perhaps by besting the pretender (the Shadow) in a contest.

  PROOF

  Providing proof is a major function of the Resurrection stage. Kids like to bring back souvenirs from summer vacations, partly to remind them of the trips, but also to prove to the other kids that they really visited these exotic locales. Not being believed is a perennial problem of travelers to other worlds.

  A common fairy-tale motif is that proof brought back from the magic world tends to evaporate. A sack full of gold coins won from the fairies will be opened in the Ordinary World and be found to contain nothing but wet leaves, leading other people to believe the traveler was just sleeping off a drunk in the woods. Yet the traveler knows the experience was real. This motif signifies that spiritual and emotional experiences in a special world are hard to explain to others. They have to go there for themselves. Special World experiences may evaporate if we have not truly made them part of our daily lives. The real treasure from traveling is not the souvenirs, but lasting inner change and learning.

  SACRIFICE

  Resurrection often calls for a sacrifice by the hero. Something must be surrendered, such as an old habit or belief. Something must be given back, like the libation the Greeks used to pour to the gods before drinking. Something must be shared for the good of the group.

  In Terminator 2 the shapeshifting villain is destroyed in a physical climax, but the story brings the audience to a higher emotional climax when the robot hero, the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), must sacrifice himself to keep from causing future violence. In another sense, the boy John Connor is the hero at this point and must sacrifice part of himself, his Mentor/father
figure, by allowing the Terminator to leap to his death. A similar self-sacrificial climax is found in Alien 3, when Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), knowing she has a monster growing inside her, gives herself up to destruction for the good of the group. The classic sacrifice in literature is found in Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, where a man gives his life on the guillotine to save another man's life.

  Sacrifice comes from Latin words meaning "making holy." Heroes are often required to sanctify a story by making a sacrifice, perhaps by giving up or giving back something of themselves. Sometimes the sacrifice is the death of members of the group. Luke Skywalker, at the climax of Star Wars, sees many of his comrades killed in the effort to destroy the Death Star. Luke also gives up part of his personality: his dependence on machines. With Obi Wan's voice in his head, he decides to "Trust the Force," and learns to trust human instinct rather than machinery.

  Luke undergoes another personal sacrifice at the climax of the second film in the series, The Empire Strikes Back. Here he is escaping from the Emperor and loses a hand in the getaway. In repayment, he gains new control over the Force in the third film of the trilogy, Return of the Jedi.

  INCORPORATION

  Resurrection is an opportunity for a hero to show he has absorbed, or incorporated, every lesson from every character. Incorporation literally means he has made the lessons of the road part of his body. An ideal climax would test everything he's learned, and allow him to show that he has absorbed the Mentor, Shapeshifter, Shadow,

  Guardians, and Allies along the way. By the time the heroes of City Slickers endure their climax, they can apply everything they've learned from a variety of Mentors and antagonists.

  CHANGE

  The higher dramatic purpose of Resurrection is to give an outward sign that the hero has really changed. The old Self must be proven to be completely dead, and the new Self immune to temptations and addictions that trapped the old form.

  The trick for writers is to make the change visible in appearance or action. It's not enough to have people around a hero notice that she's changed; it's not enough to have her talk about change. The audience must be able to see it in her dress, behavior, attitude, and actions.

  Romancing the Stone has a well-developed sense of Resurrection that is realized in visual terms. At the action climax of the film, Joan Wilder and Jack Colton unite to defeat the villains, rescue her sister, and reclaim the treasure. But Jack immediately pulls away, putting Joan's romantic plot line in jeopardy. Perfection through a man was within her grasp, but it's snatched away at the last minute. Jack gives her a farewell kiss and tells her she always had what it takes to be a hero, but ultimately he follows money rather than his heart. Colton goes after the emerald, which has been swallowed by an alligator. He dives off a high wall, leaving Joan romantically bereaved and unsatisfied. The action plot has ended in triumph, but the emotional plot appears to be a tragedy. In effect, Joan's hope of emotional completion is dead.

  From the shot of Joan looking out over the parapet there is a slow dissolve to a matching shot of her Resurrected self in a New York office a few months later. Her agent is reading Joan's latest manuscript, based on her real-life adventures. It's apparent from every choice on the screen that Joan Wilder has changed, that in some way she has hit bottom, died, and been emotionally reborn. The manuscript has brought the hard-hearted agent to tears. She pronounces it by far Joan's best book, and notes that it was completed very quickly. The Ordeals of the Special World have made Joan a better writer, and she looks better as well, more "together" than we've ever seen her.

  At the end of the scene, Joan is put through a final emotional test. The agent refers to the conclusion of the book, which unlike Joan's real life, ends with the hero and heroine united. She leans in close and, in her forceful way, calls Joan "a world-class hopeless romantic."

  Joan could have caved in here, perhaps crying about the sad reality that she didn't get her man. Or she could have agreed with the agent's assessment of her as hopeless. The old Joan might have cracked. But she doesn't. Joan passes this emotional test with her answer. She gently but firmly disagrees, saying, "No, a hopeful romantic." Her look tells us she is still in some pain, but that she really is all right. She has learned to love herself regardless of whether or not some man loves her, and she has the self-confidence she lacked before. Later, on the street, she is able to brush off men who would have intimidated her before. She has been through a Resurrection. She has changed, in appearance and action, in ways you can see on the screen and feel in your heart.

  THE WIZARD OF OZ

  The Wizard of Oz is not as visual as Romancing the Stone in its depiction of how the hero has changed and yet there is rebirth and learning, expressed in words. The Resurrection for Dorothy is recovering from the apparent death of her hopes when the Wizard accidentally floated off in the balloon. Just when it looks as though Dorothy will never achieve her goal of returning home, there is another appearance by the Good Witch, representing the positive anima that connects us to home and family. She tells Dorothy she had the power to return home all along. She didn't tell Dorothy because "She wouldn't have believed me. She had to learn it for herself."

  The Tin Woodsman asks bluntly, "What have you learned, Dorothy?" She replies that she's learned to look for her "heart's desire" in her "own back yard." Like Joan Wilder, Dorothy has learned that happiness and completion are within her, but this verbal expression of change is not as effective as the visual and behavioral changes you can see on the screen in the Resurrection scene of Romancing the Stone. Nevertheless, Dorothy has learned something and can now step up to the last threshold of all.

  Resurrection is the hero's final exam, her chance to show what she has learned.

  Heroes are totally purged by final sacrifice or deeper experience of the mysteries of

  life and death. Some don't make it past this dangerous point, but those who survive

  go on to close the circle of the Hero's Journey when they Return with the Elixir.

  QUESTIONING THE JOURNEY

  1. What is the Resurrection in King Kong? Cone with the Wind? The Silence of the Lambs? Death Becomes Her?

  2. What negative characteristics has your hero picked up along the way? What flaws were there from the beginning that still need to be corrected? What flaws do you want to preserve, uncorrected? Which are necessary parts of your hero's nature?

  3. What final ordeal of death and rebirth does your hero go through? What aspect of your hero is Resurrected?

  4. Is there a need for a physical showdown in your story? Is your hero active at the critical moment?

  5. Examine the character arc of your hero. Is it a realistic growth of gradual changes? Is the final change in your character visible in her actions or appearance?

  6. Who learns anything in a tragedy where the hero dies, where the hero didn't learn his lessons?

  Having survived all the ordeals, having lived through death, heroes return to their starting place, go home, or continue the journey. But they always proceed with a sense that they are commencing a new life, one that will be forever different because of the road just traveled. If they are true heroes, they Return with the Elixir from the Special World; bringing something to share with others, or something with the power to heal a wounded land.

  We Seekers come home at last, purged, purified, and bearing the fruits of our journey. We share out the nourishment and treasure among the Home Tribe, with many a good story about how they were won. A circle has been closed, you can feel it. You can see that our struggles on the Road of Heroes have brought new life to our land. There will be other adventures, but this one is complete, and as it ends it brings deep healing, wellness, and wholeness to our world. The Seekers have come Home.

  RETURN

  Quest for Fire has a wonderful Return sequence that shows how storytelling probably began, with hunter/gatherers struggling to relate their adventures in the outer world. The film's heroes enjoy the fruits of their quest at a barbecue around
a campfire. The Trickster clown of the hunting party now becomes the storyteller, acting out an adventure from the Tests phase, complete with sound effects and a funny mimed impression of a mammoth Threshold Guardian they met on the quest. A wounded hunter laughs as his injuries are tended: in film language, a declaration of the healing power of stories. Returning with the Elixir means implementing change in your daily life and using the lessons of adventure to heal your wounds.

  DENOUEMENT

  Another name for the Return is denouement, a French word meaning "untying" or "unknotting." ( noue means knot). A story is like a weaving in which the lives of the characters are interwoven into a coherent design. The plot lines are knotted together to create conflict and tension, and usually it's desirable to release the tension and resolve the conflicts by untying these knots. We also speak of "tying up the loose ends" of a story in a denouement. Whether tying up or untying, these phrases point to the idea that a story is a weaving and that it must be finished properly or it will seem tangled or ragged. That's why it's important in the Return to deal with subplots and all the issues and questions you've raised in the story. It's all right for a Return to raise new questions — in fact that may be highly desirable — but all the old questions should be addressed or at least restated. Usually writers strive to create a feeling of closing the circle on all these storylines and themes.

  TWO STORY FORMS

  There are two branches to the end of the Hero's Journey. The more conventional way of ending a story, greatly preferred in Western culture and American movies in particular, is the circular form in which there is a sense of closure and completion. The other way, more popular in Asia and in Australian and European movies, is the open-ended approach in which there is a sense of unanswered questions, ambiguities, and unresolved conflicts. Heroes may have grown in awareness in both forms, but in the open-ended form their problems may not be tied up so neatly.