PUNCTUATION
The final function of Return is to conclude the story decisively. The story should end with the emotional equivalent of a punctuation mark. A story, like a sentence, can end in only four ways: with a period, an exclamation point, a question mark, or an ellipsis (the three or four little dots that indicate your thoughts have just trailed off vaguely. Example: Do you want to go now, or...).
The needs of your story and your attitude may dictate ending with the feeling of a period, an image or line of dialogue flatly making a declarative statement: "Life goes on." "Love conquers all." "Good triumphs over evil." "That's the way life is." "There's no place like home."
An ending can give the effect of an exclamation point if the intent of the work is to stir action or create alarm. Science fiction and horror films may end on a note of "We are not alone!" or "Repent or perish!" Stories of social awareness may end with a passionate tone of "Never again!" or "Rise up and throw off chains of oppression!" or "Something must be done!"
In a more open-ended approach to structure, you may want to end with the effect of a question mark, and the feeling that uncertainties remain. The final image may pose a question such as "Will the hero Return with the Elixir or will it be forgotten?" An open-ended story may also trail off with the feeling of an ellipsis. Unspoken questions may linger in the air or conflicts may remain unresolved with endings that suggest doubt or ambiguity: "The hero can't decide between two women, and therefore..." or "Love and art are irreconcilable, so..." or "Life goes on... and on... and on..." or "She proved she's not a killer, but..."
One way or another, the very ending of a story should announce that it's all over — like the Warner Bros, cartoon signature line "That's all, folks." Oral storytellers, in addition to using formulas like "...and they lived happily ever after," will sometimes end folktales with a ritual statement like "I'm done, that's that, and who'll ease my dry throat with a drink?" Sometimes a final image, such as the hero riding off into the sunset, can sum up the story's theme in a visual metaphor and let the audience know it's over. The final image of Unforgiven, a shot of Clint Eastwood's character leaving his wife's grave and returning to his house, signals the end of the journey and sums up the story's theme.
These are only a few of the features of Return with the Elixir. As we come full circle, let's leave a little opening for the unknown, the unexpected, the unexplored.
THE WIZARD OF OZ
Dorothy's Return begins with saying goodbye to her Allies and acknowledging the Elixirs of love, courage, and common sense she has gained from them. Then, tapping her heels and chanting "There's no place like home," she wishes herself back to Kansas where she started.
Back home in the Ordinary World, back to black and white, Dorothy wakes up in bed with a compress on her head. The Return is ambiguous: Was the trip to Oz "real" or was it the dream of a girl with a concussion? In story terms, however, it doesn't matter; the journey was real to Dorothy.
She recognizes the people around her as characters from Oz. But her perceptions of them have changed as a result of her experience in the Special World. She remembers that some of it was horrible, some beautiful, but she focuses on what she's learned — there's no place like home. Dorothy's declaration that she will never leave home again is not meant to be taken literally.
It's not this little frame house in Kansas to which she refers, but her own soul. She is a fully integrated person in possession of her best qualities, in control of the worst, and in touch with the positive forms of masculine and feminine energy within her. She has incorporated every lesson she has learned from every being along the road. She is finally happy in her own skin and will feel at home no matter where she is. The Elixir she brings back is this new idea of home, a new concept of her Self.
And so the Hero's Journey ends, or at least rests for a while, for the journey of life and the adventure of story never really end. The hero and the audience bring back the Elixir from the current adventure, but the quest to integrate the lessons goes on. It's for each of us to say what the Elixir is — wisdom, experience, money, love, fame, or the thrill of a lifetime. But a good story, like a good journey, leaves us with an Elixir that changes us, makes us more aware, more alive, more human, more whole, more a part of everything that is. The circle of the Hero's Journey is complete.
QUESTIONING THE JOURNEY
1. What is the Elixir of Basic Instinct? Big? City Slickers? Fatal Attraction? Dances with Wolves?
2. What is the Elixir your hero brings back from the experience? Is it kept to herself or is it shared?
3. Does your story go on too long after the main event or climax is over? What would be the effect of simply cutting it off after the climax? How much denouement do you need to satisfy the audience?
4. In what ways has the hero gradually taken more responsibility in the course of the story? Is the Return a point of taking greatest responsibility?
5. Who is the hero of the story now? Has your story changed heroes, or have characters risen to be heroes? Who turned out to be a disappointment? Are there any surprises in the final outcome?
6. Is your story worth telling? Has enough been learned to make the effort worthwhile?
7. Where are you in your own Hero's Journey? What is the Elixir you hope to bring back?
Now that we have come to the end of the Road of Heroes, it may be useful to examine how this model works in some representative film stories. I have chosen Titanic, Pulp Fiction, The Lion King, and The Full Monty as movies that made creative, entertaining use of the Hero's Journey archetypes and structures. I also want to say a few words about the Star Wars saga, which has been much a part of the development of the Hero's Journey idea.
Analyzing these films and tracing the Hero's Journey in them has been a rewarding exercise, revealing some story flaws but also surprising levels of meaning and poetic connection. I strongly recommend you try this for yourself on a movie, novel or story of your own. This material pays back a rich reward when you apply it to a story or a life situation. However, before presenting these analyzes, a few warnings and guidelines are in order.
CAVEAT, SCRIPTOR
First, Caveat Scriptor! (Let the writer beware!) The Hero's Journey model is a guideline. It's not a cookbook recipe or a mathematical formula to be applied rigidly to every story. To be effective, a story doesn't have to concur with this or any other school, paradigm, or method of analysis. The ultimate measure of a story's success or excellence is not its compliance with any established patterns, but its lasting popularity and effect on the audience. To force a story to conform to a structural model is putting the cart before the horse.
It's possible to write good stories that don't exhibit every feature of the Hero's Journey; in fact, it's better if they don't. People love to see familiar conventions and expectations defied creatively. A story can break all the "rules" and yet still touch universal human emotions.
FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION
Remember: The needs of the story dictate its structure. Form follows function. Your beliefs and priorities, along with the characters, themes, style, tone, and mood you are trying to get across, will determine the shape and design of the plot. Structure will also be influenced by the audience, and the time and place in which the story is being told.
The forms of stories change with the needs of the audience. New story types with different rhythms will continue to be created. For instance, thanks to television and MTV styles of cutting, the attention span of the world audience is shorter these days and its sophistication is greater than ever before. Writers can build faster-moving stories and can assume the audience will be able to handle twists and shortcuts in familiar structures.
New terms are being created every day and new observations about story are being made every time one is written. The Hero's Journey is only a guideline, a starting point for hammering out your own story language and rules of thumb.
CHOOSE YOUR METAPHOR
The pattern of the Hero's Journey is but
one metaphor for what goes on in a story or a human life. I have used hunting, college classes, and human sexual response as metaphors to help explain the pattern I see in story, but these are far from the only possibilities. Work out a different metaphor or several of them, if it helps you understand storytelling better. You might find it useful to compare a story to a baseball game, with nine innings instead of twelve stages, and terms like "Seventh-Inning Stretch" instead of Seizing the Sword. You might decide the process of sailing a boat, baking bread, rafting a river, driving a car, or carving a statue makes a more meaningful comparison to telling a story. Sometimes a combination of metaphors is needed to illuminate different facets of the human journey.
The stages, terms, and ideas of the Hero's Journey can be used as a design template for stories, or as a means of troubleshooting a story so long as you don't follow these guidelines too rigidly. It's probably best to acquaint yourself with the Hero's Journey ideas and then forget about them as you sit down to write. If you get lost, refer to the metaphor as you would check a map on a journey. But don't mistake the map for the journey. You don't drive with a map pasted to your windshield. You consult it before setting out or when you get disoriented. The joy of a journey is not reading or following a map, but exploring unknown places and wandering off the map now and then. It's only by getting creatively lost, beyond the boundaries of tradition, that new discoveries can be made.
DESIGN TEMPLATE
You may want to experiment with the Hero's Journey as an outline for plotting a new story or troubleshooting one in the works. In Disney Animation we have used the Hero's Journey model to tighten up storylines, pinpoint problems, and lay out structures. Hundreds of writers have told me they plotted their screenplays, romance novels, or TV sitcom episodes using the Hero's Journey and the guidance of mythology.
Some people begin to plot a movie or novel by writing the twelve stages of the journey on twelve index cards. If you already know some of the major scenes and turning points, write these down where you think they match up with the twelve stages. In this way you begin to map out your story by filling in the gaps in your knowledge of the characters and what happens to them. Use the ideas of the Hero's Journey to ask questions about your characters: What are the Ordinary and Special Worlds for these people? What is my hero's Call to Adventure? How is fear expressed in Refusal? Is it overcome by Meeting with a Mentor? What is the First Threshold my hero has to cross? And so on. Before long the gaps fill and you can progress to chart Hero's Journeys for all the characters and subplots until the complete design is worked out.
You may find that a certain scene matches with the function of one of the stages, but it comes at what seems to be the "wrong" point in the Hero's Journey model. In your story a Mentor might be needed to present a Call and Refusal in Act Two or Three instead of Act One, as the Hero's Journey model appears to indicate. Don't worry about this — put in the scene wherever it seems right to you. The model only shows the most likely place for an event to occur.
Any element of the Hero's Journey can appear at any point in a story. Dances with Wolves begins with a hero's Ordeal or Resurrection that you usually expect to see at the midpoint or end of a Hero's Journey, and yet the story works. All stories are composed of elements of the Hero's Journey, but the units can be arranged in almost any order to serve the needs of your particular story.
This is why you use index cards rather than writing the stages on a single sheet of paper. You can move the cards around to situate scenes as needed, and you can add more cards in case a movement like Call and Refusal needs to be repeated a number of times (as was the case with Titanic).
You may find that as you visualize your story, you will think of some scenes that don't seem to match any particular stage of the journey. You may have to invent your own terminology or metaphors to cover this category of scenes, as well as tailoring the Hero's Journey terminology to suit your own picture of the universe.
DEMONSTRATION OF THE IDEA
Now let's look at four very different films to demonstrate how the motifs of the Hero's Journey keep being re-created with new combinations of the old patterns.
When the great ocean liner Titanic, on its maiden voyage from Liverpool to New York, scraped against an iceberg and sank on the evening of April 14, 1912, a story of extraordinary emotional impact began to form. Stunned news reports flashed around the world, telling of over fifteen hundred people lost, more than half the souls aboard the supposedly unsinkable luxury liner. Then came the individual stories of cowardice and courage, arrogant selfishness and noble self-sacrifice. The threads were bound together into one great epic which, with its powerful elements of terror, tragedy, and death, was retold for succeeding generations in the form of books, articles, documentaries, feature films, stage plays, and even a musical or two. The Titanic disaster became part of Western popular culture, a subject of abiding fascination like the Pyramids, UFOs, or Arthurian romance.
Then, after eighty-five years of Titanic stories, an unusual coalition of two Hollywood studios, Paramount and 20th Century Fox, offered the public yet another version — James Cameron's Titanic. Not only did this one top all the other Titanic-related movies in its production values and opulence, it was also the most expensive movie ever made, costing more than two hundred million dollars to produce and many millions more to advertise and distribute. Director and writer James Cameron's vision, requiring the pooled financial resources of two studios, was so colossal that many observers predicted the same fate for the movie as the ship. This new movie was sure to sink, possibly taking the studios and their top executives down with it. No matter how popular it would be, no matter how fantastically well-executed were the special effects, such an arrogantly enormous production could not possibly recoup its costs.
After all, said the critics who specialize in reviewing movies before they are made, it had so many strikes against it. First, everyone knows how the story turns out. They dance, they hit the iceberg, they die. That vital element of surprise, of not knowing what happens next, would be lacking.
Second, it was a period piece, set in the obscure time before World War I, and everyone knows period pieces are expensive and often unpopular because they are not "relevant" to modern audiences. Third, the structure of the script was considered as flawed as the design of the Titanic, forcing audiences to endure an hour and half of melodrama, the length of a normal movie, before delivering the iceberg and the action. It had a tragic ending, which is usually death at the box office. At over three hours long, it was almost twice the ideal picture length from the point of view of theatre owners, who could schedule fewer screenings per day. And finally, its featured players were not considered big stars at that time.
Twentieth Century Fox executives, who had put up most of the money in return for the international distribution rights, had particular cause to worry. The Titanic story was familiar in the U.S. and the U.K., but not in Asia and other foreign markets. Would the vital international audiences turn out for a costume drama about a long-ago shipwreck?
Well, they did, in unprecedented numbers, and repeatedly. To the amazement of everyone, including the filmmakers, audiences around the world embraced Titanic on a scale as huge as the ship itself. Its fantastic costs were recouped within two months, ensuring that Fox and Paramount would reap immense profits. It remained number one at the box office around the world for more than 16 weeks. A sweep of the Academy Awards, with the film pulling down fourteen nominations and eleven Oscars, including best picture and best director, provided another boost in revenue. The soundtrack hit number one on the charts and perched there for four months.
Titanic fever extended far beyond attending the movie or listening to the music. We live in a collecting society, where the ancient urge to own little pieces of a story can be indulged on a fantastic scale. In the same impulse that caused Neolithic people to carve bone models of their favorite goddess or totem animal, the contemporary movie audience wanted to own a piece of the Titanic e
xperience.
They bought models of the ship, books about the movie, movies about the movie, and movie props such as lifeboats, deck chairs, and china offered in luxury catalogs. Some even went so far as to sign up for an expensive ride to the bottom of the sea in a high-tech submarine, to actually visit the wreck of the great ship and the somber graveyard of its passengers.
As the film continued to be the number-one box office attraction for four months, people began to wonder what was going on. What was fueling this unusual response to a mere movie?
QUANTUM MOVIE EVENTS
Certain films, because of surprising box office success or memorable content, become permanent monuments on the cultural landscape. Titanic, like Star Wars, Easy Rider, Close Encounters, and Independence Day, has become such a monument. Movies of this type are quantum events, breaking through old shells and boundaries, flinging the idea of a movie to a whole new level. These quantum-event films capture something that resonates in many, many people. They must express some nearly universal emotion or satisfy a widely shared wish. What was the universal wish that Titanic granted?
Naturally, I'm inclined to think the movie succeeded because it satisfies the universal wish for meaning, and that it does so through extensive use of Hero's Journey motifs and concepts. As James Cameron said, in a letter to the Los Angeles Times, March 28, 1998, Titanic "intentionally incorporates universals of human experience and emotion that are timeless — and familiar because they reflect our basic emotional fabric. By dealing in archetypes, the film touches people in all cultures and of all ages."
These archetypal patterns turn a chaotic event like the sinking of an ocean liner into a coherent design that asks questions and provides opinions about how life should be lived.
As a story on an epic scale, Titanic indulges the luxury of a leisurely storytelling pace, taking its time to set up an elaborate framing device which has a complete Hero's Journey structure of its own. In this plotline, parallel to the central story of the Titanic's passengers, at least two Hero's Journeys are unfolded: one of a scientist-adventurer seeking a physical treasure, the other of an old woman returning to the scene of a great disaster to relive a grand passion. A possible third Hero's Journey is that of the audience, traveling into the Titanic world to learn the dead ship's lessons.
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