The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, Third Edition

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.

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.

THE CIRCULAR STORY FORM

The most popular story design seems to be the circular or closed form, in which the narrative returns to its starting point. In this structure you might bring the hero literally full circle back to the location or world where she started. Perhaps the Return is circular in a visual or metaphoric way, with a replay of an initial image, or the repetition of a line of dialogue or situation from Act One. This is one way of tying up loose ends and making a story feel complete. The image or phrases may have acquired a new meaning now that the hero has completed the journey. The original statement of the theme may be re-evaluated at the Return. Many musical compositions return to an initial theme to rephrase it at the ending.

Having your hero Return to her starting point or remember how she started allows you to draw a comparison for the audience. It gives a measure of how far your hero has come, how she's changed, and how her old world looks different now. To give this circular feeling of completion and comparison, writers will sometimes put their heroes through an experience at the Return that was difficult or impossible for them at the beginning, so the audience can see how they have changed. In Ghost, the hero was unable to say "I love you" in his Ordinary World. But at the Return, having died and passed many tests in the land of death, he is able to say these all-important words so that his still-living wife can hear them.

In Ordinary People, the young hero Conrad is so depressed in his Ordinary World that he can't eat the French toast his mother makes for him. It's an outward sign of his inner problem, his inability to accept love because he hates himself for surviving his brother. In the Return, having passed through several death-and-rebirth ordeals, he goes to apologize to his girlfriend for acting like a jerk. When she asks him to come inside for some breakfast, this time he finds he has an appetite. His ability to eat is an outward sign of his inner change. This actual change in behavior is more dramatically effective than Conrad just saying he feels different, or someone else noticing that he's grown and remarking on it. It communicates change on the symbolic level, and affects the audience indirectly but more powerfully than a blatant statement. In a subtle way it gives a sense that a phase of his life is over, that a circle has been closed, and a new one is about to begin.

ACHIEVEMENT OF PERFECTION

The "happy endings" of Hollywood films link them with the world of fairy tales, which are often about the achievement of perfection. Fairy tales frequently end with a statement of perfection, like "and they lived happily ever after". Fairy tales bring the shattered family back into balance, back to completion.

Weddings are a popular way to end stories. Marriage is a new beginning, the end of an old life of being single and the beginning of a new life as part of a new unit. New beginnings are perfect and unspoiled in their ideal form.

Striking up a new relationship is another way to show a new beginning at the end of a story. In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart makes a difficult Resurrection sacrifice, giving up the chance to be with the woman he loves. His reward, the Elixir he brings away from the experience, is his new alliance with Claude Rains. As he says, in one of the most famous tag lines in the history of the movies, "Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

THE OPEN-ENDED STORY FORM

Storytellers have thought of many ways to create a circular feeling of completion or closure, basically by addressing the dramatic questions raised in Act One. However, once in a while a few loose ends are desirable. Some storytellers prefer an open-ended Return. In the open-ended point of view, the storytelling goes on after the story is over; it continues in the minds and hearts of the audience, in the conversations and even arguments people have in coffee shops after seeing a movie or reading a book.

Writers of the open-ended persuasion prefer to leave moral conclusions for the reader or viewer. Some questions have no answers, some have many. Some stories end not by answering questions or solving riddles, but by posing new questions that resonate in the audience long after the story is over.

Hollywood films are often criticized for pat, fairy-tale endings in which all problems are solved and the cultural assumptions of the audience are left undisturbed. By contrast the open-ended approach views the world as an ambiguous, imperfect place. For more sophisticated stories with a hard or realistic edge, the open-ended form may be more appropriate.

FUNCTIONS OF THE RETURN

Like the journey's other stages, Return with the Elixir can perform many functions, but there is something special about being the last element in the journey. Return is similar to Reward in some ways. Both follow a moment of death and rebirth and both may depict consequences of surviving death. Some functions of Seizing the Sword may also appear in the Return, such as taking possession, celebrating, sacred marriage, campfire scenes, self-realization, vengeance, or retaliation. But Return is your last chance to touch the emotions of the audience. It must finish your story so that it satisfies or provokes your audience as you intended. It bears special weight because of its unique position at the end of the work, and it's also a place of pitfalls for writers and their heroes.

SURPRISE

A Return can fall flat if everything is resolved too neatly or just as expected. A good Return should untie the plot threads but with a certain amount of surprise. It should be done with a little taste of the unexpected, a sudden revelation. The Greeks and Romans often built a "recognition" scene into the endings of their plays and novels. A young man and woman, raised as shepherds, discover to everyone's surprise they are prince and princess, promised to each other in marriage long ago. In the tragic mode, Oedipus discovers the man he killed in the Ordeal was his father and the woman he joined with in sacred marriage was his own mother. Here the recognition is cause for horror rather than joy.

The Return may have a twist to it. This is another case of misdirection: You lead the audience to believe one thing, and then reveal at the last moment a quite different reality. No Way Out flips you a totally different perception of the hero in the last ten seconds of the film. Basic Instinct makes you suspect Sharon Stone's character of murder for the first two acts, convinces you she is innocent in the climax, then leaps back to doubt again in an unexpected final shot.

There is usually an ironic or cynical tone to such Returns, as if they mean to say, "Ha, fooled ya!" You are caught foolishly thinking that human beings are decent or that good does triumph over evil. A less sardonic version of a twist Return can be found in the work of writers like O. Henry, who sometimes used the twist to show the positive side of human nature, as in his short story "The Gift of the Magi." A poor young husband and wife make sacrifices to surprise each other with Christmas presents. They discover that the husband has sold his valuable watch to buy his wife a clip for her beautiful long hair, and the wife has cut off and sold her lovely locks to buy him a fob for his beloved watch. The gifts and sacrifices cancel each other out but the couple is left with a treasure of love.

REWARD AND PUNISHMENT

A specialized job of Return is to hand out final rewards and punishments. It's part of restoring balance to the world of the story, giving a sense of completion. It's like getting your grades after final exams. Villains should earn their ultimate fate by their evil deeds and they should not get off too easily. Audiences hate that. Punishment should fit the crime and have the quality of poetic justice. In other words, the way the villain dies or gets his just comeuppance should directly relate to his sins.

Heroes should get what's coming to them as well. Too many movie heroes get rewards they haven't really earned. The reward should be proportionate to the sacrifice they have offered. You don't get immortality for being nice. Also if heroes have failed to learn a lesson, they may be penalized for it in the Return.

Of course, if your dramatic point of view is that life isn't fair and you feel justice is a rare thing in this world, then by all means reflect this in the way rewards and punishments are dealt out in the Return.

THE ELIXIR

The real key to the final stage of the Hero's Journey is the Elixir. What does the hero bring back with her from the Special World to share upon her Return? Whether it's shared within the community or with the audience, bringing back the Elixir is the hero's final test. It proves she's been there, it serves as an example for others, and it shows above all that death can be overcome. The Elixir may even have the power to restore life in the Ordinary World.

Like everything else in the Hero's Journey, returning with the Elixir can be literal or metaphoric. The Elixir may be an actual substance or medicine brought back to save an endangered community (a feature of several "Star Trek" TV plots and the object of the quest in Medicine Man). It may be literal treasure wrested from the Special World and shared within a group of adventurers. More figuratively, it may be any of the things that drive people to undertake adventure: money, fame, power, love, peace, happiness, success, health, knowledge, or having a good story to tell. The best Elixirs are those that bring hero and audience greater awareness. In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the physical treasure of gold is revealed to be worthless dust, and the real Elixir is the wisdom to live a long and peaceful life.

In the tales of King Arthur, the Grail is the Elixir that, once shared, heals the wounded land. The Fisher King can rest easy again. If Percival and the knights had kept the Grail for themselves, there would have been no healing.

If a traveler doesn't bring back something to share, he's not a hero, he's a heel, selfish and unenlightened. He hasn't learned his lesson. He hasn't grown. Returning with the Elixir is the last test of the hero, which shows if he's mature enough to share the fruits of his quest.

THE ELIXIR OF LOVE

Love is, of course, one of the most powerful and popular Elixirs. It can be a reward the hero doesn't win until after a final sacrifice. In Romancing the Stone Joan Wilder has surrendered her old fantasies about men and said goodbye to her old, uncertain personality. The payoff for her is that unexpectedly, Jack Colton comes for her after all, miraculously transporting a romantic sailboat to her New York neighborhood to sweep her away. He has transmuted the Elixir he was after — the precious emerald — into another form, love. Joan gets her reward of romance, but she has earned it by learning that she could live without it.

THE WORLD IS CHANGED

Another aspect of the Elixir is that the wisdom which heroes bring back with them may be so powerful that it forces change not only in them, but also those around them. The whole world is altered and the consequences spread far. There is a beautiful image for this in Excalihur. When Percival brings the Grail back to the ailing Arthur, the King revives and rides out with his knights again. They are so filled with new life that flowers burst into bloom at their passing. They are a living Elixir, whose mere presence renews nature.

THE ELIXIR OF RESPONSIBILITY

A common and powerful Elixir is for heroes to take wider responsibility at the Return, giving up their loner status for a place of leadership or service within a group. Families and relationships get started, cities are founded. The hero's center has moved from the ego to the Self, and sometimes expands to include the group. Mad Max, the loner hero of George Miller's Road Warrior and Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome, forsakes his solitude to become Mentor and foster-father to a race of orphaned children. The Elixir is his skill at survival and his recollection of the old world before the apocalypse, which he passes on to the orphans.

THE ELIXIR OF TRAGEDY

In the tragic mode, heroes die or are defeated, brought down by their tragic flaws. Yet there is learning and an Elixir brought back from the experience. Who learns? The audience, for they see the errors of the tragic hero and the consequences of error. They learn, if they are wise, what mistakes to avoid, and this is the Elixir that they bring away from the experience.

SADDER BUT WISER

Sometimes the Elixir is heroes taking a rueful look back at their wrong turns on the path. A feeling of closure is created by a hero acknowledging that he is sadder but wiser for having gone through the experience. The Elixir he bears away is bitter medicine, but it may keep him from making the same error again, and his pain serves as fair warning to the audience not to choose that path. The heroes of Risky Business and White Men Can't Jump have been down a road of learning that mixed pain and pleasure. They ultimately lose the prize of love, must Return without the woman of their dreams, and have to console themselves with the Elixir of experience. These stories create a feeling that the account is closed and the heroes are being presented with the final balance.

SADDER BUT NO WISER

A "sadder but wiser" hero is acknowledging that he's been a fool, which is the first step to recovery. The worse kind of fool is the one who doesn't get it. Either he never sees the error or he goes through the motions but has not really learned his lesson. Even after enduring terrible ordeals, he slides back to the same behavior that got him in trouble in the first place. He is sadder but no wiser. This is another kind of circular closure.

In this style of Return, a roguish or foolish character seems to have grown and changed. Perhaps he is a clown or Trickster, like Bob Hope in the Crosby-Hope pictures or Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours or Trading Places, who swears he has learned his lesson. However, in the end he fumbles the Elixir and returns to an original error. He may fall back to his original, irrepressible attitude, closing the circle and dooming himself to repeat the adventure.

For this is the penalty of failing to return with the Elixir: The hero, or someone else, is doomed to repeat the Ordeals until the lesson is learned or the Elixir is brought home to share.

EPILOGUE

Just as some stories may have a prologue that precedes the main action, there may also be a need for an epilogue that follows the bulk of the story. An epilogue or postscript on rare occasions can serve to complete the story, by projecting ahead to some future time to show how the characters turned out. Terms of Endearment has an epilogue that shows the characters a year after the main story has ended. The feeling communicated is that even though there is sadness and death, life goes on. Look Who's Talking has an epilogue that shows the birth of the baby hero's little sister nine months after the main plot has been resolved. Stories that show a group of characters at a formative or critical period, like American Graffiti or war movies such as Glory or The Dirty Dozen, may end with a short segment that tells how the characters died, progressed in life, or were remembered. A League of Their Own has an extensive epilogue in which an aging woman ballplayer, having remembered her career in flashback for the main body of the film, visits the Baseball Hall of Fame and sees many of her teammates. The fates of the players are revealed and the surviving women, now in their sixties, stage a game to show that they still know how to play ball. Their spirit is the Elixir that revives the hero and the audience.

These have been a few of the purposes and functions of Return. There are also pitfalls to avoid in Returning with the Elixir.

PITFALLS OF THE RETURN

It's easy to blow it in the Return. Many stories fall apart in the final moments. The Return is too abrupt, prolonged, unfocused, unsurprising, or unsatisfying. The mood or chain of thought the author has created just evaporates and the whole effort is wasted. The Return may also be too ambiguous. Many people faulted the twist ending of Basic Instinct for failing to resolve uncertainty about a woman's guilt.

UNRESOLVED SUBPLOTS

Another pitfall is that writers fail to bring all the elements together at the Return. It's common for writers today to leave subplot threads dangling. Perhaps in the hurry to finish and deal with the main characters, the fates of secondary characters and ideas are forgotten about, even though they may be extremely interesting to the audience. Older films tend to be more complete and satisfying because the creators took time to work out every subplot. Character actors could be counted on to do their bit somewhere at the beginning, the middle, and the end. A rule of thumb: Subplots should have at least three "beats" or scenes distributed throughout the story, one in each act. All the subplots should be acknowledged or resolved in the Return. Each character should come away with some variety of Elixir or learning.

TOO MANY ENDINGS

On the other hand, the Return should not seem labored or repetitive. Another good rule of thumb for the Return phase is to operate on the KISS system, that is: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Many stories fail because they have too many endings. The audience senses the story is over but the writer, perhaps unable to choose the right ending, tries several. This tends to frustrate an audience, dissipating the energy the writer has created. People want to know the story's definitively over so they can quickly get up and leave the theater or finish the book with a powerful charge of emotion. An overly ambitious film like Lord Jim, trying to take on a dense novel, can exhaust an audience with climaxes and endings that seem to go on forever.

An extreme example of keeping it simple might be the karate match that forms the climax of The Karate Kid. When the last kick is delivered and the hero wins, the credits roll immediately in a burst of final theme music. There is almost no denouement. We know the kid is bearing the Elixir of lessons learned well in his training.

ABRUPT ENDINGS

A Return can seem too abrupt, giving the sense the writer has quit too soon after the climax. A story tends to feel incomplete unless a certain emotional space is devoted to bidding farewell to the characters and drawing some conclusions. An abrupt Return is like someone hanging up the phone without saying goodbye, or a pilot bailing out without bringing the plane in for a landing.

FOCUS

A Return may feel out of focus if the dramatic questions, raised in Act One and tested in Act Two, are not answered now. Writers may have failed to pose the right questions in the first place. Without realizing it, a writer may have shifted the theme. A tale that started out as a love story may have turned into an expose of government corruption. The writer has lost the thread. The story will not seem focused unless the circle is closed by Returning to the original themes.

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 experience.

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.

Like many movies, Titanic is "bookended" by an outer tale, set in modern day, that serves several important story functions. First, by using actual documentary footage of the Titanic wreck on the bottom of the sea, it reminds us that this is more than a made-up story — it's a dramatization of a real event. The wreck of the ship and the mournful, homely relics of its human passengers bring out one of the most powerful elements in the production — that this could happen, this did happen, and it happened to people like us.

Second, by introducing the character of Old Rose, the bookend device connects this story of another time with our own day, and reminds us that the Titanic disaster was not so long ago, within the span of one human life. Old Rose dramatizes the fact that there are many people alive today who remember the Titanic, and a few who actually survived it.

Third, the framing device creates mystery — who is this elderly woman who claims to be a Titanic survivor, and what happened to the jewel the explorer is so eager to get? Did Rose find love and did her lover survive? These question marks are hooks that engage the audience's attention and create suspense even though we know the general outcome of the Titanic story.

Titanic begins by introducing us to one HERO of this mini-story, the very contemporary figure of Brock Lovett, the scientist/businessman/explorer who can't quite decide how to present himself to the public. His ORDINARY WORLD is that of a showman trying to raise money for his expensive scientific adventures. His OUTER PROBLEM is trying to find a treasure, a diamond thought to have been lost on the Titanic; his INNER PROBLEM is trying to find an authentic voice and a better system of values.

The figure of the scientist-explorer is common enough to have become an archetype, expressed as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation, Professor Challenger; Allan Quartermain of King Solomon's Mines; the explorer-showman Carl Denning of King Kong, and the contemporary Indiana Jones. These fictional characters are reflections of real adventuring archaeologists and researchers like Howard Carter, Hein-rich Schlieman, Roy Chapman Andrews, and Jacques Cousteau. Robert Ballard, the scientist-adventurer-businessman who actually found the wreck of the Titanic, is one model for Lovett in the movie, and actually went through his own Hero's Journey in choosing how to regard the ship. At first he came as a kind of scientific conqueror, but gradually was moved deeply by the human tragedy and decided the wreck site was a sacred place that should be left undisturbed as a memorial to those who died on the ship.

In this plot thread, the young scientist is following a prime directive: find the treasure. But through the magic of the old woman's story, a tale that occupies the body of the film, the explorer is transformed from a money-driven capitalist to a true explorer of the heart, who comes to understand that there are more important treasures in life than jewels and money.

THE OBJECT OF THE QUEST

What is the Holy Grail Lovett seeks in his quest? It's a diamond called "The Heart of the Ocean," a name that links the theme of love with the setting of the film. The jewel is a true MacGuffin — something small and concrete to focus the audience's attention and symbolize the hopes and aspirations of the characters. A diamond is a symbol of perfection, of the immortal, eternal power of the gods. Its facets, with their mathematical precision, are physical proof of the grand design, of the creative hand and mind of the gods. Like the gods, certain substances, such as gold, silver, and jewels, seem to be immortal. Where flesh and bone, leaf and tree, even copper and steel, corrode away, jewels remain, untouched, unchanged. They miraculously survive the crushing power of the bottom of the sea in perfect condition. Jewels and precious metals have always been used, along with incense, perfumes, beautiful flowers, and divine music, to connect religious and dramatic presentations to the world of the gods. They are little pieces of heaven, islands of perfection in an imperfect world, "doors of perception" giving a glimpse of Paradise. "The Heart of the Ocean" is a symbol for the idealized notions of love and honor that the movie reveres.

Lovett ransacks the ship with his remote-controlled robot but doesn't find the bit of heaven he's seeking, at least not in the way he anticipated. Opening the safe he's retrieved, he finds rotted pulp that was once money and a miraculously preserved drawing of a beautiful young woman, wearing nothing but the diamond he is looking for. Lovett makes a CNN broadcast that is a CALL heard by Old Rose and her granddaughter Lizzy Calvert.

Old Rose's ORDINARY WORLD is that of an elderly but active artist living in Ojai, California. She is a HERO in her own drama, bringing her long life to a climax and conclusion, but she also serves as a MENTOR for Lovett and the audience, guiding us through the special world of the Titanic and teaching a higher system of values. Her OUTER PROBLEM is how to get across the Titanic experience; her INNER PROBLEM is dredging up these strong memories that for a long time have been swimming in her unconscious. She issues her own CALL to Lovett, claiming to be the woman in the drawing he has found, and asserting that she knows something about the diamond. After some REFUSAL to accept her story, he accepts and brings her out to his research vessel, where she begins to tell her story of the Titanic's first and last days at sea.

MAIN STORY — ORDINARY WORLD

Now the movie leaves the framing device to fully enter the main story and the world of the Titanic. We see the ship in her new-minted glory for the first time. The bustling dock is the ORDINARY WORLD stage on which the main protagonists or HEROES, young Rose and Jack, are introduced. Rose gets an elaborate ENTRANCE as one of the beautiful possessions in the entourage of Cal Hockley, her fiance and the SHADOW or villain of the piece, a sneering "heavy" straight out of a Victorian melodrama. We also meet the sub-villain, Hockley's henchman Lovejoy, who executes Cal's arrogant wishes.

Our first sight of Rose is her hand in a delicate white glove, emerging from the motorcar. The hands of the lovers, twining and separating, will become a continuing visual thread. She is elegantly dressed but feels a prisoner, as Old Rose tells us in voice-over. She is a HERO on a journey, but at this moment wears the mask of the VICTIM archetype, a damsel in distress, beautiful but powerless.

Cal represents the arrogance and bigotry of his class and also the dark, Shadow side of manhood and marriage. He is at one extreme of a POLARITY, representing repression and tyranny, with Jack as his polar opposite representing liberation and love. Although the Titanic is a great feat of the imagination, built by honest laboring men, it has deep, fatal flaws, the fault of arrogant men like Cal. He has bought into and identified with the hubristic aspects of the Titanic, believing fully that it is unsinkable because it was created by men of Cal's exalted class, by "gentlemen." He claims that "not even God himself could sink her." In the world of myth, a statement like that is sure to bring down the wrath of the gods, who listen carefully and punish swiftly.

Rose's mother, Ruth DeWitt Bukater, is another SHADOW figure, representing the dark side of femininity, the repressive, smothering potential of motherhood, a witchy, scheming queen like Medea or Clytemnestra.

Rose has received a dark CALL TO ADVENTURE, being manipulated into marrying a man she doesn't love. As Rose CROSSES THE THRESHOLD of the gangway with her mother and Cal it is a kind of royal procession, but Rose experiences it as a march to slavery, and the Titanic as a slave ship taking her to captivity in America. She doesn't quite REFUSE THE CALL but is certainly a reluctant hero.

Now we meet the second principal HERO, Jack, who with his ALLY, the young Italian immigrant Fabrizio, is gambling, risking everything on fate or chance. A clock is ticking, setting up a MOTIF of time running out, of the general shortness and preciousness of life. Jack's ORDINARY WORLD is that of drifting and adventure, trusting to luck and his own skills and gifts. The CALL TO ADVENTURE comes, on one level, as he wins the card game and a pair of third-class tickets on the Titanic. He shows no RELUCTANCE or fear at this level — he's not the reluctant kind of hero. However, the IRONY is thick as he declares himself and Fabrizio to be "the luckiest sons-of-bitches alive." If he knew what awaits him, he might have cause to be afraid.

Jack is a slightly superhuman figure who doesn't appear to have major flaws, but he will have an INNER PROBLEM, trying to find and win the love of his life. If he has a flaw, it's that he's a little too cocky and arrogant, which later worsens his problems with Cal and Lovejoy. His OUTER PROBLEM or challenge is first to climb into society and then to survive the disaster. He is something of a CATALYST HERO, one who is already fully developed and who doesn't change much, but who spends his energy in helping others to change. He is also a TRICKSTER HERO, using deceit and disguise to penetrate the enemy's defenses. In the end he makes the ultimate heroic SACRIFICE, giving his life to save the woman he loves.

Together Jack and Rose form a pair of POLAR OPPOSITES, male and female, poor and rich, but also express the great oppositional forces of Flight and Restriction. Jack stands for freedom, no boundaries, not accepting the limits imposed by society, an Icarus daring to fly above his station. At the beginning of the film Rose is aligned, against her will, with the opposite force of Restriction, bound by society's conventions, by the force of her mother's grasping will, by her promise to marry Cal Hockley, the dark prince of society. She is a Persephone being dragged down to the underworld. Cal, like Pluto, the god of the underworld who kidnapped Persephone, obsesses about money and is harsh and judging. Pluto was the god of wealth and one of the official judges of the dead. Persephone's lover in the underworld was Adonis, a phenomenally beautiful youth. Like Adonis, Jack comes to Rose in her dark imprisonment and reminds her of the joys of life.

Rose's INNER PROBLEM will be to break away from her ORDINARY WORLD, to re-align herself with the freedom and ability to fly that Jack embodies. Her OUTER PROBLEM will be sheer survival so she can implement what she's learned in a long, happy life.

Titanic elaborately explores the function of MENTOR, with a number of characters wearing the mask at different times. In addition to Old Rose, Molly Brown does the MENTOR job, guiding Jack through the SPECIAL WORLD of First Class and, like a fairy godmother, providing him with a proper costume so he can pass as a gentleman.

Captain Smith is supposed to be a MENTOR for the entire voyage, a leader and the king of this little world. But he is a fatally flawed king, arrogant and complacent, overconfident on the triumphal final voyage of his career.

Jack wears the mask of MENTOR for Rose, teaching her how to enjoy life and be free. He fulfills the fantasy of many a young woman by freely offering the gift of commitment. From nothing but a glance he decides he can't abandon her, for "I'm involved now." Later, when the ship goes down, he gives her the vital knowledge of how to survive by staying out of the water as long as possible and swimming away from the suction of the sinking ship.

Another MENTOR to Rose is Thomas Andrews, the architect of the ship. She wins his respect by her intelligent questions about the Titanic, and he rewards her by telling her how she can find Jack when he is trapped below decks. In this he is a Daedalus to Rose's Ariadne. Daedalus was the architect of the deadly Labyrinth, and gave its secrets to the young princess Ariadne so she could rescue her love, Theseus, who ventured into the Labyrinth to battle a monster that represented the dark side of her family.

CROSSING THE THRESHOLD in Titanic is celebrated with an elaborate sequence depicting the ship "stretching her legs." This movement climaxes with Jack and Fabrizio on the bow of the ship, and Jack exulting, "I'm king of the world.'" Jack and Rose have other Thresholds to cross — each entering the other's world and both entering a Special World of love and danger.

TESTS, ALLIES, and ENEMIES play out in conflicts between Jack and Rose and the forces of Restriction. Jack and Rose connect and become ALLIES when she tries to kill herself by jumping off the ship. He RESCUES her and wins an invitation to dine with Rose and Cal in First Class. He enters that SPECIAL WORLD with the help of MENTOR Molly Brown, and is TESTED severely at the dinner by the taunting of his ENEMIES, Cal and Rose's mother. He passes these tests and stands up to their ridicule, delivering his credo, an expression of the movie's theme: Life's a gift, learn to take it as it comes, make each day count. He wins Rose's greater respect and guarantees further clashes with Cal.

Rose's TEST comes a little later when Jack, promising to show her a "real party," guides her into the SPECIAL WORLD of Third Class. In a sequence of wild music, dancing, and drinking, Rose is initiated into the world of Dionysus, the god of intoxication, passion, and ecstasy. It's a test of her society girl standards — will she be offended by the earthy, brawling orgy? She passes the test by outdoing the immigrants with her drinking, smoking, and dancing.

The stage of APPROACH is expressed in the lovers' tentative romantic dance with each other, including the lyrical moment when Jack positions Rose at the bow of the ship, making her its figurehead, teaching her how to fly, how to balance between life and death. If he is king of the world, now she is queen.

Rose makes a deeper APPROACH when she asks Jack to draw her picture, trustingly exposing her naked self to him. This is a TEST for Jack which he passes by acting like a gentleman and a professional artist, enjoying the erotic moment but not taking advantage of her vulnerability.

THRESHOLD GUARDIANS abound as the lovers draw near to the Inmost Cave and the beginning of an elaborate, multi-leveled ORDEAL. Dozens of White Star Line stewards stand guard at doors, elevators, and gates, and a squadron of them, like a pack of hunting dogs, is sent by Cal to seek out the lovers. Jack and Rose, fleeing from Restriction, find themselves deep in the hold where they face an ORDEAL on the level of intimacy. They climb into the Inmost Cave of the luxury motorcar and join as lovers. In the "little death" of orgasm Rose's hand streaks the window glass, looking like the hand of a drowning victim, drowning in love. By crossing this great threshold, they have died to the old life and are reborn in the new.

The death-bringing ORDEAL for the Titanic comes moments later when the ship hits the iceberg, the mute, inexorable force of Nemesis, that spirit sent by the gods to punish prideful mortals. The death of the ship and of hundreds of passengers occupies the next major movement of the drama.

Jack and Rose harvest some REWARD from their death-and-rebirth experience. They are bonded, supporting each other in the struggle to survive. This is tested when Rose is given a chance to escape in a lifeboat. Sensing that Cal will abandon Jack to die, Rose fights her way back onto the ship to share her fate with Jack's.

THE ROAD BACK is the battle for survival, which includes a classic CHASE as Cal, impatient for the ship to do its work, tries to hasten Jack and Rose's death with bullets. The other characters face life-and-death tests, some choosing to die with honor, others to live at all costs, and some, like Lovejoy, dying despite their most ignoble efforts to survive. Act Two concludes with Jack and Rose balancing on the stern rail and riding the ship as it plunges toward the bottom.

RESURRECTION commences as Jack and Rose fight to preserve the warmth of life in the frozen sea. Finding that the bit of floating wreckage they cling to will support only one person's weight, Jack puts Rose's life ahead of his in a classic HERO'S SACRIFICE. He has already lived a full life and has experienced perfect happiness with her. She is relatively new to freedom and life, and he charges her to live richly and fully enough for both of them. He lets go of life, confident of being RESURRECTED in her heart, in her memories.

Rose herself goes to the edge of death, but is RESURRECTED as the lone lifeboat searches for survivors in the sea of dead faces. In a final TEST of all she has learned from Jack, she summons the strength to swim to get a whistle from a dead officer's lips, calling for rescue. With that Old Rose concludes her story, returning us to the framing device in modern day and counting the toll of the Titanic's dead.

The robot sub leaves the wreck in peace and silence. On the research ship, Lovett tosses away the cigar he had saved to celebrate finding the diamond, a little SACRIFICE of an old personality trait. He admits to Rose's granddaughter that he spent three years thinking of the Titanic but never really got its message. He has been TRANSFORMED by the ORDEAL, and his REWARDS are his insight and the sympathy of Rose's granddaughter. Is there a glimmer of romance, a chance to fully live out the truncated love of Jack and Rose in another generation? He has not found the physical treasure he came seeking, but has he, like Jack, found a greater treasure in the new world of emotion?

Old Rose goes to the railing of the research ship, echoing her flying scene at the bow with Jack. She even climbs up on the railing as she did so long ago. In a final moment of SUSPENSE we don t know her intention — will she jump, joining Jack in the sea at last, like a belated Juliet joining her Romeo in death? But instead she pulls out the diamond and in a quick flash we see young Rose finding it in her pocket beneath the Statue of Liberty, an ELIXIR rewarded for survival. With a little cry of final dramatic CLIMAX, Old Rose releases it into the water where, like Jack, it spirals down into mystery, a last SACRIFICE that says her experience and memories are more important than any physical possession. This is the ELIXIR, the healing message the movie means to send the audience home with.

Dissolve now to Old Rose falling asleep, surrounded by photos of her long, full life. Here, after FINAL ORDEAL, is FINAL REWARD, fulfillment of Jacks prophecies — Rose is an adventuress, a pilot, an actress, riding horses by a California pier, having babies, living a life for both of them, part of the ELIXIR she brought back. The dark wounds of her family history have been healed.

Rose dreams, and in that SPECIAL WORLD the Titanic and its passengers live again, RESURRECTED by the power of the unconscious. Through Rose s eyes, we pass the THRESHOLD GUARDIANS of the White Star Line one last time, entering the heaven of First Class where all the good folk live eternally. (The villains are conspicuously absent, no doubt bobbing in a frigid, wet hell.) Jack stands at his old place by the clock, a supernatural being conquering time. He extends his hand, they touch again, they kiss, and the ship's company applaud this final SACRED MARRIAGE. Camera up to the ceiling dome, the vault of heaven, and its white purity fills the screen. Rose has her ELIXIR.

THE END

Titanic is certainly not a perfect movie, and there are boatloads of critics to point out its flaws — a certain bluntness in the writing: a tendency to end scenes with crude, obvious utterances like "Shit!", "Oh, shit!", and "I'll be God damned!" For a while at the beginning the movie seems to have Tourette's Syndrome. There is a sense of pandering to the modern audience in an exaggerated attempt to make the story "relevant" with contemporary dialogue and acting styles; and there is a one-dimensional quality to some characters, especially the sneering, unshaded villains.

Although well played by Billy Zane, Cal in the screenplay is one of the weakest parts of the design, and would have been a more effective rival if he were more seductive, a better match for Rose, real competition for Jack, and not such an obvious monster. Then it would have been a real contest, not a one-sided match between the most attractive young man in the universe and a leering, abusive cad with a bag of money in one hand and a pistol in the other.

The chase scene in which Cal is shooting at Jack and Rose while the Titanic is sinking strikes some people as absurd dramatic overkill and takes them out of the movie. Perhaps it serves a story purpose — Cameron may have felt he needed his heroes to endure one more round in the belly of the Titanic and used Cal to drive them there — but another device, such as needing to go back in to rescue someone, could have achieved the same effect.

Maybe this round of ordeals isn't needed at all. The movie would benefit from cutting and this sequence of underwater tension seems repetitive after they've already burst through so many gates. The whole sequence seems to be structured to build up to a climactic shot in which Jack and Rose run from a wall of water — an iconic tableau of their struggle with the force of death. However, this shot is one of the least effective illusions in the movie, for the actors' faces are queasily pasted onto the stuntpeople's bodies by some electronic magic which has not quite been perfected. The whole sequence could be cut or trimmed — there's enough tension, already.

However, we are here not to bury Caesar, but to analyze him — how does Cameron succeed, what outweighs the flaws in his design?

A GREAT STORY

First, the fate of the Titanic and its passengers is a great epic story in its own right, and has worked its fascination since the day the ship went down. A dramatization of the Titanic disaster, only recently unearthed in a film vault, was produced by a German company within weeks of the tragedy. It was only the first of many documentaries and feature films, not to mention countless books and articles, about the disaster. Like the tragic, fairy-tale story of Princess Diana, the events around the sinking of the Titanic fall into dramatic patterns that harmonize with deep, archetypal images, shared and understood by everyone.

Epilogue: Looking Back on the Journey SYMBOLISM OF "TITANIC"

From its archaic, archetypal name on down, the Titanic is laden with symbolism and meaning. The ship's name is a choice that reveals much about the psychology of its builders. In the movie, Rose asks Bruce Ismay, the businessman behind the Titanic project, why he chose that name. He replies that he wanted a name to evoke great magnitude, moving Rose to comment on the Freudian overtones of male preoccupation with size.

However the movie doesn't address the mythological origins of the word "titanic," which were certainly known to the classics-trained English gentlemen who chose that name. It refers to the immense Titans, giant predecessors and deadly enemies of the gods. The Titans were fundamental forces from the beginning of time — greedy, rude, and ruthless — and the gods had to fight a great battle to defeat them and imprison them under the earth before they spoiled and looted everything. When the press of the time called first-class passengers like Astor and Guggenheim "Titans of industry and capital," they were indicating more than the gigantic size of their empires.

A few years before the Titanic was built, German archaeologists unearthed a Hellenistic temple called the Pergamon Altar that depicted in dramatic relief the battle between the gods and the Giants, recalling an earlier epic struggle with the gods' age-old enemies, the Titans. This monument is virtually a storyboard in stone for what would be a great special-effects movie. The builders of the Titanic, who probably had seen pictures of these reliefs, chose to identify themselves and their clients not with the gods but with their ancient enemies, the Titans. They were truly challenging the gods by this choice. Many people felt, even before the ship sailed, that the builders were tempting fate to give the ship such a grandiose name. Even worse was to claim that it was unsinkable. That was a foolish blasphemy, challenging the almighty power of God. A superstitious aura surrounds the Titanic, something like the curse of King Tut's tomb, a belief that the builders called down the wrath of God by their arrogance and pride.

The story of the Titanic resonates with an old literary concept, The Ship of Fools. Storytellers created this satirical form around the time of Columbus' first voyage to the New World. One of the first expressions was Sebastian Brant's narrative poem, "Das Narrenschiff," printed only two years after Columbus first successfully crossed the Atlantic. It tells of a ship's passengers bound for Narragonia, the land of fools, and is a scathing depiction of the follies of its time. It was widely translated and adapted into books and plays.

The Ship of Fools is an allegory, a story in which all the conditions of life and levels of society are lampooned savagely in the situation of a boatful of pathetic passengers. It is a sardonic tale, harshly depicting the flaws in the people and social systems of its time.

Titanic goes in for broad-brush social criticism as well, portraying the rich and powerful as foolish monsters, and the poor as their noble but helpless victims. The exceptions are Jack, who is poor but not helpless, and Molly Brown, who is rich but not monstrous. She is the nouveau riche American who rose from the same level as Jack and who may represent the healthy side of the American immigrant experience — ambitious, climbing the social ladder, but also big-hearted, egalitarian, generous, and fair. Titanic is more hopeful, less cynical than The Ship of Fools, suggesting that a few can transcend their foolishness and victimization to live full, meaningful lives.

The irony of "The Ship of Fools" was derived from the point of view, the audience's knowledge that the struggles of the passengers are meaningless and foolish because they are all trapped and doomed anyway. Titanic has some of that ironic feeling as Jack and Fabrizio exult in their good fortune at winning tickets on a ship that we know will sink. Irony goes with the territory in a story about a ship that we know is fated to destruction.

The idea of The Ship of Fools is summed up in the old phrase "We're all in the same boat." It shows that despite our foolish attention to superficial differences of birth, wealth, and status we are all trapped by the absolutes of life, all alike in being subject to inevitable forces like gravity, fate, death, and taxes.

A ship isolated at sea on a long journey becomes a convenient symbol of the human condition, of the soul's lonely passage through life. The isolation of the Titanic in the North Atlantic makes her a little world, a microcosm, a nearly perfect model of the society of her time, in which the two thousand people on board represent all the millions alive at that time.

Like the ship itself, the scale of this story is epic, larger than life, big enough to tell the story of a whole culture, in this case of the whole Western world at that time. This vast story is made comprehensible and digestible by selecting the lives and deaths of a few who represent qualities and polarities present to some degree in all members of the culture.

Like its epic predecessors, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Arthurian romances, or the Ring Cycle of Wagner, Titanic tells part of a vast story, the bridging of two worlds, the Old World and the New. Within these enormous supertales are hundreds of substories and epic cycles, each with its own dramatic structure and completeness. No single work can tell all the threads, but the individual story can communicate the sense, the dramatic facts, of the entire situation. Titanic has been criticized for not dramatizing this or that substory — the Carpathias race to the scene, the stories of the Astors and Guggenheims, the difficulties of the telegrapher in getting out distress calls, etc. But no film could tell all the substories. Storytellers of the future can choose other incidents and personalities to highlight. It will take the combined output of many artists to fully tell the tale of the Titanic, just as it has taken Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Strauss, Kazantzakis, Hallmark Productions, Classic Comics, and thousands of other artists to fully tell the epic story of the Odyssey, itself only one of dozens of epic cycles in the superstory of the Trojan War.

As a story about the rapid crossing of the Atlantic, Titanic symbolizes this century's preoccupation with speedy travel and increasing global consciousness. It speaks of centuries of European culture passing to America, of the waves of immigrants filling the American continents, lured by the seductive promise of freedom. In the film the Statue of Liberty is a recurring symbol of the immigrant dream, a lighthouse beckoning the newcomer. Poor doomed Fabrizio pretends he can see her all the way from Cherbourg.

The Statue of Liberty, a gift from the people of France to the people of America, is a colossal example of the ancient practice of sending statues of gods and goddesses from a founding city to its colonies to connect them by a psychic thread, a religious tie. France and the United States went through revolutions at the same time and are linked by their devotion to liberty, one of many cultural links between New World and Old.

The context of Titanic's release has to be taken into account in evaluating its success. It came out at a time when we were becoming more aware of a global society and links between Europe and America. Shocks like the Gulf War, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the fall of Communism in Russia joined with unpredictably shifting worldwide weather patterns to make a time of uncertainty when the ship of life seems fragile. We were two years away from the end of the century and in a mood to look back at the beginnings.

The stage was set for the new Titanic movie by the discovery a few years before of the wreck's location on the ocean floor. The finding of the ship was a major triumph of science and a powerful psychological moment. For centuries it has been impossible to find ships lost at such depths. The Titanic being buried in the sea for so long, then found again, makes a strong symbol of our surprising power to recover lost memories from the subconscious. It is a godlike thing to be able to go down and see the Titanic, and a true Hero's Journey to recover lost treasure from the subconscious.

The discovery led to the fantasy of raising the Titanic, as described in Clive Cussler's novel, Raise the Titanic, but soon the fantasy became a real possibility. The experts agree it is feasible to raise the pieces of the ship, and many artifacts have been brought up, but for the moment the consensus is that it's better to leave the wreck where it lies as a monument to its victims. The spectacular drama of seeing live TV of the wreck with its poignant human remains helped provide the right climate for releasing another Titanic movie.

Much has been made of the inclusion of a young love story as a factor in Titanic's great popularity. It was a kind of Romeo and Juliet plot device, an easily relatable tale of young people from warring factions falling in love.

Romance is the genre Cameron has chosen to present the Titanic story, and by making that choice he opens the story invitingly to women. He could have chosen other genres, telling the Titanic story as a mystery, a detective story, a treasure hunt, or even as a comedy. At times it is all of those things, but the primary theme and design principle is romantic love, and the structure is that of a romance. For that choice he gains a clear-cut formula with a high degree of audience identification — a triangular relationship in which a woman must be saved from domination by a cruel older man through the intervention of a younger rescuer.

This triangulated relationship is a familiar pattern in romance novels and in the country of film noir and hard-boiled fiction. It provides the three-cornered stage for conflict, jealousy, rivalry, betrayal, revenge, and rescue just as do the stories of Guinevere, Lancelot, and King Arthur, the romance novels where the heroine must choose between two men, and the film noir motif of the young woman who must choose between Mr. Big and the young drifter or detective.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays the drifter corner of the triangle in Titanic. The secret of his remarkable attractive powers may be that he projects the archetypal mask of the sensitive young man, displaying both masculine action and feminine sensitivity. He is well suited to play Jack, a Peter Pan, a puer aeternas (eternal youth) who remains forever young by his beautiful, sacrificial death. Rose is another Wendy, a girl in bedclothes running around a ship dodging an evil Captain Hook while the eternal youth teaches her how to fly and how to embrace life. The iceberg and the ticking of the clock fulfill the same archetypal purpose as the crocodile which has swallowed a clock in Peter Pan. They are projections of the Shadow, the unconscious force that threatens to destroy us, sooner or later, if we don't acknowledge it.

Further back in our mythic past, Jack's slight, youthful persona resonates with David, the giant-killer, and especially with doomed young gods like Adonis and Balder, who die tragically young. Jack is also a twin with Dionysus, the god of revelry, passion, intoxication, who appeals to the wild side of women, who drives them wild. The drunken dance in the lower depths of steerage, in which Rose is drenched head to foot in beer, is a true Dionysian revel and her initiation into those ancient mysteries, with Jack as her initiator.

Jack is a HERO, but of a specialized type, a CATALYST hero, a WANDERER who is not greatly changed by the story but who triggers change in the other characters. Jack is an ethereal, otherworldly creation who leaves no trace except in Rose's heart. There's no record of him being aboard the Titanic and he left no legacy, not even a silver bullet, unless you count Old Rose's memories. One character, Bodine, Lovett's sidekick and a kind of THRESHOLD GUARDIAN to Old Rose, even suggests that the whole thing could have been her romantic invention, a story too good to be true. Like all travelers to the other world, Rose has to be taken on faith.

The character of young Rose is a manifestation of the "damsel in distress" archetype. As such she is a sister of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, princesses caught between life and death and wakened by a kiss; the Twelve Dancing Princesses rescued from enchantment by a young man who makes himself invisible to follow them into their world; Psyche in love with the mysterious young flying god Cupid (Eros); Persephone kidnapped to an underworld hell by a cruel king; Helen of Troy snatched away from her brutal husband by a sensuous young admirer; and Ariadne rescued from a bad marriage by the passionate, artistic god Dionysus.

Women struggle with the "damsel in distress" archetype because it perpetuates patterns of domination and submission, and can encourage a passive, victimized attitude. However, it is an easy archetype to identify and empathize with, representing the feelings of anyone who has felt powerless, trapped, or imprisoned. The "woman in jeopardy" is a staple of movie and TV plots because it creates instant identification and sympathy and raises the emotional involvement of the audience. In Titanic the audience can both feel sorry for Rose in her imprisonment and enjoy seeing her become free and active as she tears away the "damsel in distress" mask and grows into the role of Hero.

There may be another factor in the movie's particular appeal to women. Titanic is a special-effects movie that does not scream science fiction, war, or macho male adventure. It offers a spectacle that does not exclude or ignore the interests of women, and is given human scale with an emotional melodrama dealing with issues of love and fidelity.

For men as well as women, Titanic fulfills another contract with the audience, providing an unparalleled opportunity for COMPARISON. The movie offers examples of human behavior in a set of dire, extreme circumstances against which viewers can measure themselves. People can enjoy speculating, from the safety of their seats, on how they would act in a similar situation. How would I have handled the challenge of the Titanic? Would I face death with honor and courage, or would I panic and act with selfish frenzy? Would I fight for life or would I sacrifice my place in the lifeboat so women and children could go first?

The movie has the fascination of a train wreck or a highway smashup. It's natural to contemplate and compare when we see such a disaster, to measure our own luck against that of the victims. We watch with compassion but also with relief that we are not among the suffering. We seek lessons and make conclusions about fate and honor from what we see.

People describe certain movies as spectacular, but forget that the word comes from the ancient Roman spectacles, which were ritual dramas, combats, races, games, and contests enacted in the arenas and amphitheaters throughout the empire. In those days the most thrilling (and expensive) form of entertainment was the "Naumachiae," the staging of great sea battles, in which the arena would be flooded and the spectators treated to the sight of ships ramming each other and capsizing, of sailors and doomed passengers drowning.

Titanic is a spectacle in this tradition. Lives were certainly sacrificed to the effort to put on this show, and the movie itself presents a feast of death, the deaths of fifteen hundred people being re-enacted for our entertainment and edification. There is still something compelling about the spectacle of death on such a massive scale, like the gladiatorial combats and ritual sacrifices of the ancient world. A vast amount of life force is being released all at once, and in an almost ghoulish way we feast on it. At the sight of people hurtling from a great height to smash against various machinery our eyes grow big, as if we are drinking in the sight of death. We study the sea of frozen faces for signs of how they died and how it will be for us.

Titanic plays on fears that have a high degree of identification for the audience — the universal fear of heights, fear of being trapped and imprisoned, fear of drowning in a bottomless sea, fear of fire and explosion, fear of loneliness and isolation.

The movie offers an imaginable horror. It could happen to anyone. Since it provides a complete spectrum of the society of its time, any viewer can find an identity there, as a well-off member of the ruling class, as a worker, as an immigrant, as a dreamer, as a lover. And we can appreciate the truth that certain inexorable forces — nature, death, physics, fate, accident — affect all of us, across the spectrum without exception. For a while the human story is reduced to one archetype — the Victim.

Titanic is a coherent design in part because it observes the unities of time, place, and theme. The confinement of the central story to the time from the Titanic's sailing to her death concentrates the dramatic energy. This concentration intensifies in the second half of the film which follows the surging events in real time, moment by moment. Confining the action to one place, the world of the ship alone at sea, makes it into a microcosm of life. It is an island of life in a dead sea, just as this island Earth is adrift in an ocean of space. And the ideas and arguments of Titanic are woven into a coherent design by concentrating on a single theme — that love liberates us and transcends death.

Cameron casts his arms wide in beckoning the audience to identify with his story. There's room enough on that ship for all of us. We can all identify with touches like the Turk who, while the boat sinks, frantically tries to read a corridor sign with a Turkish-English dictionary. We are all strangers somewhere. We're all in the same boat.

The movie is cast to appeal to a broad range of age groups. The young have the youthful love story to relate to, the old are invited to identify with Old Rose, who is still lively and active, and the baby-boomer generation is represented by the scientist-explorer and Rose's granddaughter.

The movie is not quite universal in that you don't see black or Asian faces. Certainly the slave experience is mentioned as a metaphor of Rose's emotional captivity, although here is where metaphor breaks down — Rose's pampered life is hardly the same as the Middle Passage in the bowels of the Amistad. However, the symbols of Titanic seem broad enough that almost everyone around the world can find something of themselves in it.

Where Cameron is most successful is as a visual and emotional poet. Titanic is a tapestry, a weaving of plots and threads. He finds poetry in braiding together the big story and the little story. He articulates connections very well, connections between the little story of Lovett and the big story of Old Rose's colorful life, between the little story of Jack and Rose and the big story of the Titanic, which is in turn part of the bigger story of the 20th century.

He organizes all this connection by finding a SYMBOL to concentrate and focus it, the narrow eye of a needle to pass all the threads through. "The Heart of the Ocean," connecting in its name the threads of romance and the sea, is a metaphor tying together all the plot lines, making them into a coherent design. (Cameron uses a wedding band to similar purpose in The Abyss.)

The jewel has a European pedigree, was once a crown jewel of the ill-fated Louis XVI, and makes a good symbol of the treasure of European experience and wisdom, art and beauty, but also class warfare and bloodshed.

Old Rose's action of tossing away the diamond at the end is a powerful poetic image that brings all the plot threads together for a real DENOUEMENT, an untying of all the knots and a smooth finish for all the plot threads. Lovett doesn't get the treasure but has a shot at love, Cal is thwarted and doesn't get Rose's heart or the diamond, Old Rose has kept her secret and now returns it to the sea. It was something private between her and Jack, hers to withhold all these years, hers to give back now.

The audience feels the material value of the stone — it's still a shock to see something worth so much money tossed away — but by that shock the whole experience of Titanic is concentrated into a symbol of fading memory. The emotions, the unconscious materials stirred up by the movie can recede to their proper place, though the memory will linger. As the stone spins away, we see how the filmmaker wants us to regard the Titanic. Let it remain where it is, a mystery and a monument to the human tragedy.

Old Rose, like every hero returning from a journey to the unconscious, had a choice to face. Do I scream and shout about my elixir, try to exploit it or evangelize about it? Or do I simply go about the business of my life, letting what I have learned radiate out from me and inevitably change, revive, rejuvenate those around me, and then the whole world? Do I choose an outer or an inner path to express my elixir? Obviously, Rose took the latter path, containing and internalizing the treasure from the special world, a poetic lesson taught by the Celtic tales, where heroes who come back and brag about their adventures in the Underworld find nothing but seaweed where they thought they'd collected fairy treasure. But the rare one, like Rose, keeps the fairies' secrets and lives a long and happy life.

James Cameron honors his Celtic ancestors with the folk music that plays below decks and whenever emotion surges. It makes a strong contrast with the courtly European dance and church music played in first class, and contributes to the poetic feeling. This is the epic telling of the Titanic by a Celtic bard, accompanied by pipes and harps as in days of yore.

This is supported by visual poetry and structural connectedness like the serpentine braiding of a Celtic graphic design. Simple polarities, bow and stern, above decks and below, first class and third, light and dark, give strong symmetrical axes for an almost mathematical composition. Cameron's design offers a number of poetic metaphors — the boat as a model of the world, the diamond as a symbol of value and love, the clock as a symbol of fleeting time, the angel statue on the main staircase as an image of Rose s innocence. In the broad strokes of a pop song, the movie provides metaphors against which the audience can compare themselves, a set of tools for interpreting their own lives.

Finally, CATHARSIS is the elixir this movie provides, the healthy purging of emotions that Aristotle identified and that audiences still want above anything. People rewarded this story for giving them the rare chance to feel something. We are well defended against emotion, and the movie hammers away with shocking effects and strong sentiments until even the most jaded and guarded must feel some reaction, some release of tension. Shots of panicking passengers fighting for lifeboat spaces, of Jack and Rose battling to survive, and of terrified victims falling to their horrid deaths bring the tension to an almost unbearable pitch, and yet there must be something rewarding and satisfying about this, for people stayed in their seats and many returned for multiple viewings. They couldn't get enough of the emotions released by this film. It gives the chance for a shudder of horror and a good cry, valuable sensations in any age.

The audience witnessing this spectacle goes through an ordeal along with the characters. Joseph Campbell used to say that the purpose of ritual is to wear you out, to grind down your defenses so that you fall open to the transcendent experience. Wearing you out seems to be part of Titanic's strategy, making you feel something of what the passengers felt by immersing you in the Titanic world for so long.

In this cynical, jaded time, it takes courage to be so nakedly emotional, for both the filmmaker and the audience. Movies like Titanic, The English Patient, Braveheart, Dances with Wolves, and Glory are taking a big risk in being sentimental on a grand scale. The darkness of the theatre offers the audience some protection — they can cry silently and few will witness their emotional vulnerability. But the filmmakers must expose emotions in public, under the full light of a cynical society, and deserve some respect for this act of courage.

IN THE WAKE OF TITANIC

What will be the long-term effect of Titanic on the movie industry? Its success shows that the big gamble sometimes pays off Big production values generally do pay off in the long run — even Cleopatra, the film that nearly sank 20th Century Fox in the 1960s, eventually made back its production costs and is now a jewel in the company crown. Titanic turned a profit quickly, and its success will undoubtedly encourage others to spend big in hopes of hitting the same kind of jackpot.

In the short run, however, some executives responded by setting tight limits on their budgets. Although the Fox and Paramount executives had won the gamble, they didn't enjoy the suspenseful period before the film opened, and they didn't want to sweat like that again. Of course they reserve the option of making Titanic-sized exceptions now and then if all the key executives in the company are agreed that its worth the risk on a specific project.

In all likelihood, other films will be made on the scale of Titanic and even greater quantum levels will be reached. There will always be an audience for spectacle, especially when it moves many of us emotionally. On the other hand, small-budget films at the opposite end of the spectrum can be more profitable in relation to their cost. The major Hollywood studios are learning from the example of independent filmmakers, developing lower-budget films for carefully targeted, specialized audiences, to keep profit flowing while they gamble on the big ones.

It's likely also that filmmakers will be influenced by Cameron's choice to build his script around a young love story, which is widely regarded as a significant factor in the film's success. It's becoming a rule of thumb in Hollywood that an expensive period piece has a better chance if it features a romantic melodrama, preferably with young lovers to make it inviting for the core of the moviegoing audience.

Some critics worry that the weaknesses of the script will become institutionalized because Titanic made so much money, and that future writers will be forced to "dumb down" their scripts to appeal to the mass audience needed to offset the big budgets. That would certainly be nothing new; studios and producers have always argued for broader appeal in expensive productions. But maybe there's another scenario, in which audiences thirst for more sophistication and reward filmmakers who try harder to make their stories both more intelligent and more emotionally universal.

SYNERGY

James Cameron has spoken of a certain synergy that operated with Titanic, a combination of elements that somehow adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Just as certain combinations of chemical elements sometimes produce unexpected powers and capacities, so the elements of acting, sets, costumes, music, effects, story, context, the needs of the audience, and the skills of the artists combined into a mysterious, organic whole which has an emotional and transformative power greater than the sum of the individual parts.

Part of that synergy is the use of the motifs and archetypes of the Hero's Journey, such as tests, crossings, ordeals, suspense, death, rebirth, rescues, escapes, chases, sacred marriages, etc. These devices give the audience reference points in the long story and contribute to making it a coherent design, directed to maximum cathartic effect. In the tradition of the Hero's Journey, Titanic explores death but makes the case for the full embrace of life.

Ultimately the success of the film is a mystery — a secret compact between the audience and the story. Like the men in the mini-sub we can shine some light on this mystery, but in the end we must simply withdraw and wonder.

THE LION KING AND OTHER PROBLEMS

In the summer of 1992 I was asked by the executives at Disney Feature Animation to review story materials on a project called "King of the Jungle." It came to be known as The Lion King and eventually turned into the most successful animated film Disney had done so far, but at the time it was just another opportunity to use the tools of the Hero's Journey on story problems.

As I drove to "animation country" in an anonymous industrial district of Glendale, California, I recalled what I knew of the project so far. This was an unusual undertaking, a departure from the Disney tradition of adapting popular children's literature or classics. For the first time it was an original story idea, cooked up by Jeffrey Katzenberg and his team of young animators on the company jet. They were on a flight back from New York where they had just previewed their latest work, Beauty and the Beast.

Katzenberg, a recent and enthusiastic convert to animation, engaged the animators in a discussion of the moment when they first felt the stirrings of adulthood. He related his own moment of feeling he had become a man, and they all realized it was an interesting thing to make a movie about. They began discussing formats and settings that could support such a story, and eventually hit on the idea of doing it entirely in the world of African animals. Disney had not done an exclusively animal-driven animated feature since Bambi in 1942, so it seemed fresh and also could play on the public's fondness for nature shows. It would avoid some of the problems of animating humans. To animate a human character you have to represent a particular ethnic group and choose certain hair and skin colors, which may prevent audience members with different features from fully identifying with the character. Much of this limitation is swept away with the use of animals, where human concerns about race and genetics are less relevant.

A father-and-son story was developed by borrowing inspiration from Hamlet. Katzenberg liked to bolster animation stories with plot elements from several sources so that a treatment for The Odyssey or Huckleberry Finn might be woven together with themes and structure from It Happened One Night or 48 Hours. The Lion King had elements of Bambi but was made richer and more complex by weaving in some Hamlet plot elements. These included a jealous uncle who bumps off the hero's father and unjustly assumes the throne, and an unready young hero who gradually gathers his will and strikes back.

One of my first assignments, after having read the "King of the Jungle" treatment, was to read Hamlet carefully and draw out elements we could use in our script. I did a Hero's Journey analysis of the Hamlet plot to illustrate its turning points and movements, and then listed many of its memorable lines which the writers could use to playfully evoke the Shakespearean connection. The Disney animated films were conceived to work for all levels of the audience, with physical gags for the youngest kids, irreverent verbal wit and action for teenagers, and sophisticated inside jokes for the adults. Some of Shakespeare entered the script, especially through the character of Scar, the villain, voiced by the English actor Jeremy Irons. He delivered twisted Hamlet references in droll and ironic fashion, with a knowing wink to the grown-up audience.

Arriving at the Disney animation complex, I entered the special world of what would become The Lion King. Every animator's cubicle was plastered with photos and drawings of African life and several of the staff had made photo safari trips to Africa to gather inspiration. Storyboards were set up in the theatre and I sat down with the animators and designers to see the latest presentation by the directors, Rob Minkoff and Roger Ailers.

Here was an opportunity to test some of the Hero's Journey ideas on a major project. I was one of literally hundreds of people giving their opinions on the story, but for a moment I had a chance to influence the final product by my reactions and arguments. I took notes as the animators unfolded the story that was to become The Lion King.

To the rhythms of "The Circle of Life," the African animals gather to honor the birth of a young lion, Simba, whose father is Mufasa, ruler of the region around Pride Rock. One guest at the gathering is a strange old baboon, Rafiki, who is chased away by the King's advisor, a fussy bird named Zazu. Simba grows into a sassy young cub who sings "L Just Can't Wait to be King." Disobeying his father, he sneaks off to explore the spooky Elephant's Graveyard with his young lioness playmate Nala, and there they are terrorized by two comically scary Jackals, servants of Mufasa's jealous brother Scar. Mufasa rescues them but sternly rebukes Simba for disobeying him.

Simba is just beginning to learn the lessons of kingship from his father when Mufasa is cruelly killed in an antelope stampede, thanks to Scar's underhanded trickery. Scar makes Simba think he caused his own father's death, and Simba, fearing Scar will kill him, escapes across the desert like Hamlet leaving the court of Denmark after his uncle killed his father.

In Act Two, a guilt-wracked Simba comes to the SPECIAL WORLD of a lush jungle area where he meets two funny sidekicks, fast-talking meerkat Timon and tubby warthog Pumbaa, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the piece. To get his mind off his guilt, they teach him the take-it-easy philosophy of "Hakuna Matata" and show him how they live on the jungle's never-ending banquet of bugs. Simba grows into a powerful teen-aged lion and one day has a violent encounter with another lion who was menacing Pumbaa. However it turns out to be Nala, who has grown into a beautiful and powerful young lioness. Their love blossoms in a romantic duet. But Nala is on a mission. She tells him how Scar has tyrannized Pride Rock, enslaved the animals, and tried to take her as his mate. She pleads with him to return and take his rightful place as king. Haunted by his guilt and unsure of his strength, Simba hesitates. Like many heroes, he isn't eager to leave the pleasures of the SPECIAL WORLD. But his father's spirit appears (like the ghost of Hamlet's father in Act One of "Hamlet") and urges him to face his destiny.

In Act Three, Simba shakes off his guilt, returns to Pride Rock, and confronts Scar. A fierce battle breaks out. Simba's "manhood" and right to be king are put to the ultimate test. Simba's ALLIES come to his aid, and Scar falls from power with a touch of poetic justice, echoing the way he allowed Mufasa to fall to his death. Simba takes his father's place and "The Circle of Life" continues.

As the presentation concluded, it wasn't difficult to see the Hero's Journey elements in The Lion King. Simba is a classic hero whose ORDINARY WORLD is that of privilege and the knowledge that he will one day be king. His first CALL is his father's demand that he grow up and face the responsibilities of kingship. Earning the right to rule the land as king is a metaphor for adulthood in many fables and fairy tales. His cockiness and disobedience constitute a REFUSAL OF THE CALL. He receives other CALLS — the temptation to explore the forbidden zone, a call of childhood romance from Nala, and most drastically, the death of his father that calls him to enter a new phase of life in which he has to run away to survive.

'Simba has many MENTORS throughout the story. His father is his first great teacher, showing him the path of kingship and the Circle of Life, but he also learns diplomacy and statecraft from Zazu and something of the magical side of life from Rafiki. In Act Two his MENTORS are Timon and Pumbaa, teaching him their Hakuna Matata lifestyle. At the end of Act Two, Nala comes to teach him about love and responsibility, and his fathers spirit is a supernatural MENTOR encouraging him to face his destiny. In the climax, Nala, Timon, and Pumbaa become his ALLIES against Scar. Nala is also a kind of SHAPESHIFTER from Simba's point of view, changing drastically from a playful cub into a sleek, powerful she-lion, presenting him a face of love but also demanding that he do something to save his domain.

The energy of the SHADOW is manifested in Scar and his underlings, the Jackals. Scar represents the dark side of kingship, totalitarian and compassionless. He can be read as a harsh model of adulthood, in which the early wounds dished out by life have become excuses for jealousy, cynicism, sarcasm, and a victim complex that turns into tyranny when the lifelong victim finally gets power. He is the dark possibilities in our hero, Simba. If Simba doesn't shake off his guilt and take responsibility, he could turn out the same way, a rogue male living bitterly on the fringes, waiting for a weakness to exploit. The Jackals are a lower form of life than the lions, living by scavenging rather than by noble hunting. They are bullies who readily follow the tyrant because they enjoy tormenting his subjects and lording it over them.

Rafiki, the crazy baboon witch doctor, was one of the most interesting characters in the script, combining elements of a MENTOR and a TRICKSTER. In early versions, I felt his function was not clear. He was played for comedy, as a loony fellow who came around to make magical noises but who commanded no respect. The king regarded him as a nuisance and Zazu, the king's bird advisor, shooed him away when he approached the baby Simba. He had little to do in the script after the first scene, and appeared mostly for comic relief, more TRICKSTER than MENTOR.

In the meeting that followed the storyboard presentation, I suggested taking him a little more seriously as a MENTOR. Perhaps Zazu was still suspicious and

would try to run him off, but the more wise and compassionate Mufasa would let him approach the child. I had the impulse to accentuate the ritualistic aspects of the moment, referring to the rituals of baptism and christening, or the coronation ceremonies in which a new king or queen is anointed on the forehead with holy oil. Rafiki would bless the baby lion, perhaps with berry juice or some substance from the jungle. One of the animators said Rafiki already carried a stick with strange gourds tied to it, and came up with the idea of Rafiki cracking open one of the gourds in a mysterious gesture and marking the lion cub with a colorful liquid.

I thought, too, of the presentation rituals in various religions, in which the holy books, images, and artifacts are held up for veneration. I remembered that the Catholic churches I grew up with had stained-glass windows strategically placed to create stunning effects when beams of colored light fell on the altar. It occurred to me that when Rafiki held up the baby lion to show the assembled animals, a beam of sunlight from the clouds could strike the cub, giving the divine stamp of approval to the specialness of this child and to Mufasa's royal line. There was an almost audible crackle of energy in the room at that moment. The image came into several minds at once and I experienced the frisson, the shiver down the back that always tells me when an idea expresses the truth of the story.

One hotly-argued issue at this stage was the matter of Mufasa's death. Some of the animators felt that the graphic depiction of the death of a parent (even an animal parent) was too intense. In the storyboards, Mufasa is trampled to death in an antelope stampede and the young Simba is shown approaching, nudging, and sniffing the corpse, looking for signs of life but finally understanding that his father is dead. Some felt this was too strong for young children.

Others replied that Disney has always shown the dark, tragic, and brutal side of life, and that though the company has often been criticized for it, such scenes are part of the Disney tradition, from the death of Bambi's mother to the death of Old Yeller, the family hound in a movie of the same name. Walt weathered a squall of controversy around Old Yeller's death, and later came to feel that killing off a beloved character was a breach of his contract with the audience. When the question came up on the animated adaptation of The Jungle Book, Walt insisted, "The bear lives!"

In the end, it was decided that The Lion King would confront death directly, and the scene was shot as originally boarded. The arguments that prevailed were that the movie was striving for the realism of a nature documentary, that the audience was used to seeing realistic treatments of animal violence, and that we were making a movie for the entire spectrum of the audience, not just for infants who might be traumatized by the scene. I agreed with this choice, feeling that it was true to the animal world we were trying to depict, but was somewhat disappointed when the movie then strayed from realism in Act Two, with carefree comedy replacing what would have been a desperate struggle to survive.

I was bothered by one structural element in Act One — the excursion to the scary Elephant's Graveyard. Instinctively I felt that though it was a good scene, it was in the wrong place. It was a dark visit to the country of death, and it felt more appropriate as the stage for an Act Two ordeal. Act One was already heavily weighted with the death of Simba's father, and I felt the Elephant's Graveyard sequence both made the first act too long and overwhelmed it with death energy. I suggested saving the Graveyard location as an INMOST CAVE for an Act Two central crisis of death and rebirth, and replacing the Act One scene with some other transgression by Simba that tests his father's patience, but with a lighter, less morbid tone. This bit of advice was not taken and who can say if it would have made any difference.

I do feel, however, that the movie is weakened by the turn it takes in Act Two. The almost photographic realism of the Act One animal scenes is replaced with a more old-fashioned Disney cartoon style, especially the comic rendering of Timon and Pumbaa. Simba is a growing carnivore and there is nothing realistic about him subsisting on a diet of bugs. I feel the movie missed a big chance to follow through on the promise of the first act with a realistic series of TESTS, leading to a life-threatening ORDEAL near the midpoint. Someone should have been teaching Simba real survival skills, how to stalk his prey, how to hunt, how to fight for what is his. I offered a range of possibilities. Timon and Pumbaa could teach him, he could meet another lion to teach him survival skills, or Rafiki could appear to carry on the teaching of Mufasa. I advocated creating a scene where Simba is truly tested, a real ORDEAL in which he discovers his mature power in a battle with a crocodile, a water buffalo, a leopard, or some other formidable foe.

The development of Simba from a scared little cub into a jaunty teen-aged lion is handled too quickly, in my opinion, with a few quick dissolves of him growing older as he crosses a log bridge. A montage of scenes of him learning to hunt, first comically and then with greater assurance, would have been more effective storytelling. Timon and Pumbaa add much-needed comic relief to the story, but fail to dramatize the stages of Simba's development, the individual lessons that he has to learn. They teach him how to kick back and enjoy life, but they don't give him what he really needs. The lessons learned in Act Two (be laid back, relax, enjoy life, don't stress out, be scoundrelly and a little gross, recognize love when you find it) don't prepare Simba for the ORDEAL he must ultimately face.

Meanwhile I felt there was more work for Rafiki to do in this story. I wanted him to be more like Merlin, an experienced wise man who had perhaps been the king's counselor at one time, who pretends to be crazy so he can appear harmless to the usurper, and who is charged with looking after the young prince as he grows up in obscurity, training him for the moment when he's ready to take his rightful throne. I advocated weaving him into Act Two as a MENTOR who accompanies Simba into the SPECIAL WORLD and does a MENTOR'S function — giving the hero something needed to complete the journey and outface death. Rafiki was needed to teach real survival lessons that Timon and Pumbaa failed to impart. I envisioned Rafiki showing up soon after Simba arrived in the SPECIAL WORLD, and that he would guide Simba through a series of escalating tests that prepared him for his ultimate showdown with Scar. Of course Timon and Pumbaa would still be there as welcome comic relief.

The character of Rafiki grew significantly through the rest of the development process. The animators ended up making him a true MENTOR, a gruff Zen master who gives Simba tough advice and hard knocks, but also the gift of inspiration, guiding him to the vision of his father's spirit. He wasn't as active or present as I would have liked, although a couple of brief scenes were added in the first half of Act Two. Rafiki witnesses the devastation of Pride Rock by Scar and, thinking Simba is dead, sadly smears a drawing of him on a cave wall. Later, Rafiki's shamanic powers tell him that Simba is still alive and, after adding an adult lion's mane to the rock drawing, he sets out to summon the young hero to his destiny.

Rafiki really comes into action at the end of Act Two as he takes Simba on a vision quest that has elements of a CALL and REFUSAL, and an ORDEAL in which Simba has an encounter with death (the ghost of his father) and wins a REWARD in the form of enhanced self-confidence and determination.

The encounter with the father's ghost is another borrowing from "Hamlet," although in Shakespeare the young hero encounters his father's ghost in Act One. It made for a powerful scene in The Lion King, although one that small children sometimes find confusing. When I saw the film I heard children in the audience ask their parents questions like "Wasn't he dead before?" and "Is he back alive again?" The appearance of the ghostly father is dramatic and emotionally moving, but it plays mostly on the verbal and intellectual level. Simba gets encouraging advice, but the lessons are not dramatized as tests. The teaching of Rafiki is more satisfyingly concrete and physical — the baboon shaman raps him on the head to teach him a lesson about putting his mistakes in the past.

At the time of the storyboard presentation, the details of Simba's return to Pride Rock had not been worked out. We discussed many options. Simba could leave the SPECIAL WORLD with Nala, Timon, and Pumbaa, agreeing to face Scar together. Simba and Nala could go together, after having a parting of the ways with Timon and Pumbaa, who might show up later having had a change of heart. The final decision was to have Simba go off alone during the night, leaving Nala, Timon, and Pumbaa to wake up and find him gone the next morning. Rafiki tells them Simba has gone to take his rightful place, and they hurry to join him.

Act Three marches swiftly to the climactic battle, although it feels somewhat weighted down by Simba's lingering guilt over his belief that he caused his father's death. Scar dredges it up again, hoping to turn the lions against Simba by getting him to admit his responsibility for his father's death. I felt the writers played too heavily on this note, making the story seem turgid and overly melodramatic, and turning Simba into an angst-ridden modern protagonist, more appropriate to a novel than to an animated film about animals. However, it does provide a RESURRECTION moment in which Simba passes a final test by accepting responsibility for his father's death instead of running from it.

The Lion King can be faulted for giving center stage to the male characters and relatively little energy to the females. Nala is fairly well developed but Simba's mother is underutilized and passive. She could have been more significant in training Simba in Act One and resisting Scar in Act Two. This imbalance is addressed in Julie Taymore's stage version of The Lion King, which gives more weight and action to female characters, and which makes Rafiki a female shaman.

There was considerable suspense around the release of The Lion King. None of us in the production knew how the film would play for the audience. The Disney animated films had been climbing in popularity with The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, and many wondered if The Lion King would fail to top them. To everyone's relief, it performed even better, becoming the most successful animated film to date, and the most profitable motion picture in history. Why? Partly because people were delighted by the animation of the animals and the exuberant, African-flavored music, but also thanks to the universal power of the Hero's Journey patterns in its story. The challenge of growing up and claiming your rightful place in the world is a classic Hero's Journey motif that naturally struck something deep in many people. The familiar rhythms of the Journey were not the only principles guiding The Lion King — in fact, at times, they were outweighed by other concerns like low comedy and sheer fun — but I can say that this is one case where they were applied consciously to make the work more accessible to a broad audience and more dramatically satisfying.

For the past few years, the film that young people were most interested in talking about was Pulp Fiction. They wanted to know how on earth the structure of the Hero's Journey could be found in that film. Its defiance of the conventions of structure, content, framing, dialogue, and editing intrigued them. They enjoyed its passionate intensity and sardonic humor. Some people were offended by its vulgarity and flashes of violence, but most admired the film for proving that unorthodox subject matter and uncompromising style can be both entertaining and highly successful. However, despite its innovative qualities, Pulp Fiction can be interpreted with the reliable old tools of the mythic Hero's Journey. Seen this way, the film in fact presents at least three distinct journeys for three different heroes; Vincent, Jules, and Butch.

THE POST-MODERN MIRROR

Young people may have responded to Pulp Fiction because it reflects the post-modern artistic sensibility they grew up with. Post-modernism is the result of a world blown apart, fragmented into millions of pieces by a century of war, social disruption, and rapid technological change. The doors of perception have been shattered by machines and the frantic pace of electronification. Young people now come to awareness in a high-intensity bombardment of random images and brief story segments torn from all the previous styles of art and literature. The bits may have an internal consistency and obey some rules of the old story world, but they assault the consciousness of the young in no apparent order.

Young people perceive the world as reflections in a shattered mirror, whether they channel-surf to cut up the stories themselves or have the stories chopped up for them by MTV-style editing. They are accustomed to juggling story lines, time periods, and genres at staggering speed. Because of the archival nature of television, constantly churning images and eras, post-modern kids live in a stew of styles. The young can costume themselves in fashions ranging from '60s hippie to heavy metal headbanger, from cowboy to surf dude, from gangsta to grunger to preppie. They

master the idioms and attitudes of all these options and more. On their interactive, multi-media computers, they are comfortable with randomly sampling bits of entertainment and information without concern for the old world's notions of time and sequence.

Pulp Fiction reflects the postmodern condition in both style and content. Postmodernism is most apparent in its unusual structure, which disregards the conventional cinema's respect for linear time. The sequences appear to have been sliced up with a samurai sword and thrown in the air, although in fact the order of scenes has been carefully chosen to develop a coherent theme and produce a definite emotional effect. The signs of postmodernism are also present in the film's content. The nightclub where Vincent and Mia dance is a perfect postmodern microcosm. Contemporary characters find themselves in an environment peopled by icons of former eras — Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elvis Presley, Jayne Mansfield, Ed Sullivan, Buddy Holly, Dean Martin, and Jerry Lewis. Most of these people are dead, but they eerily live on through their immortal images. Vincent and Mia perform novelty dances from the 1960s to music that hasn't been heard in movies for thirty years. Pulp Fiction is part of the pop-culture jet stream, flowing easily out of the current collective unconscious, charged with images and sounds from previous eras.

RELATIVITY AND WORLD CULTURE

Pulp Fiction is postmodern also in its sense of cultural relativity. Although the film is set in America, it is shot through with a sense of worldwide culture and a global viewpoint. The characters are constantly comparing one culture to another, one set of standards to another. Jules and Vincent discuss the peculiar way American fast food is named and consumed in other countries, and marvel at drug laws in other lands. Butch, the American boxer, compares notes with a South American woman cabdriver on personal names in different cultures — her Spanish name is poetic and meaningful, while in America, he says, our names don't mean anything. This consciousness of other cultures may have contributed to the film's worldwide popularity.

The characters in Pulp Fiction are engaged in debate about value systems, reflecting the postmodern sense that no single code of ethics is adequate anymore. Jules and Vincent argue the moral significance of foot massage and the cosmic importance of a pattern of bullet holes. Where Vincent sees a meaningless accident requiring no response, Jules sees a divine miracle demanding a complete change of behavior. In the postmodern universe, everything is relative, and moral values are the most relative of all. Although the audience has seen Jules as a cold-blooded killer, he can seem like a hero compared with those around him. The story appears to say that Western society's narrow value judgments about morality are outdated. In the new world, each person must select his or her own moral code, argue it fiercely, and live or die by it.

THE ETERNAL TRIANGLE IN PULP FICTION

One of the pop-culture streams tapped by Pulp Fiction is the tradition of film noir and its sources in the hard-boiled fiction of 1930s and '40s pulp magazines. Like Titanic, the film employs the powerful archetype of the Eternal Triangle. The Mr. Big of Pulp Fiction is Marsellus Wallace, mysterious crime boss; the Young Woman is Mia, Marsellus' wife; and Vincent is the Young Man, who as usual finds himself attracted to the Young Woman, testing their loyalty to Mr. Big. Vincent passes through this ordeal without betraying Mr. Big, like a Grail-questing knight refusing to yield to grievous bodily temptation. But, as we shall see, in another arena, another branch of his Hero's Journey, Vincent fails a more spiritual test.

"PROLOGUE" AN ORDINARY WORLD

In Pulp Fiction's opening segment, tided "Prologue," two young people sit talking in a "normal Denny's, Spires-like coffee shop in Los Angeles." What could be more ordinary than this world? However, it turns out this young man (Pumpkin) and woman (Honey Bunny) are discussing the pros and cons of various forms of armed robbery. It's a different kind of ORDINARY WORLD, an underworld of low-level criminals, a world most of us would rather not think about. It's too horrifying to consider that all around us are legions of dull-witted crooks waiting for their chance to rob us or kill us, perhaps sitting right across from us in our favorite '50s coffee shop.

Pumpkin's first words are characteristic of a REFUSAL — "No, forget it, it's too risky. I'm through doin' that shit." Apparendy Honey Bunny has just issued a CALL by proposing they rob another liquor store, their line of crime until now (their ORDINARY WORLD). While demeaning Asians and Jews who run liquor stores, the English-accented Pumpkin talks himself and Honey Bunny into robbing the restaurant, where there are no security guards or cameras, and where the employees have no need to play hero. He evokes a MENTOR of sorts, referring to the story of a bank robbery in which the robbers used terror and trickery to seize control. Working each other into a frenzy, Pumpkin and his daffy girlfriend CROSS THE THRESHOLD, waving their guns, bringing the possibility of instant death into play. Then with a swirl of retro surfer music, we are thrown into the main tides and the body of the movie.

This opening sequence exercises the cinematic rule of "Disorientation leads to suggestibility." You don't know if these punks are the heroes of the story or, as it turns out, mere bookends. The filmmaker's intention is to leave you a bit disoriented and guessing about their importance. You're also left guessing about the fate of these hotheads and the people in the restaurant.

VINCENT and JULES

Now for the first time, we see our two protagonists, Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield, driving in a big American car. They, too, are in their ORDINARY WORLD having a mundane conversation about the subtle differences in fast-food menus and customs in the countries of Europe. Vincent has spent some time in Europe where things are different — a Big Mac is called Le Big Mac in France, and the rules about drugs in Amsterdam are different. He has been to a SPECIAL WORLD and has the experienced air of a hero reliving a previous adventure.

Vincent and Jules stop at an apartment building and take guns from the trunk of their car. The feeling is that this is just another day at the office for them, a routine job in their Ordinary World.

As they approach the apartment to perform their mission, the conversation turns to Mia (a SHAPESHIFTER), wife of their criminal boss Marsellus Wallace (Mr. Big). This is the first note of a CALL TO ADVENTURE for Vincent, who has been put in the difficult position of being asked by Marsellus to escort his wife on a date while he's in Florida. The danger of this Call is made clear (a form of REFUSAL) in the complex philosophical discussion about foot massage. Jules points out that a Samoan gangster named Antwan Rockamora was thrown off his balcony into a greenhouse just for giving Mia a foot rub. Jules thinks the punishment was out of proportion to the crime, but Vincent understands very well that a foot massage could be a sensual experience and could get you killed. Nonetheless he has accepted the Call and will be Mia's escort. He promises not to get in trouble with Mia and denies that it will even be a real date, but Jules is skeptical.

After a long pause at the door, they CROSS A THRESHOLD, entering the apartment of Three Young Guys "obviously in over their heads." They have something which Marsellus Wallace wants, and apparently they have tried to stiff him in a deal for the contents of a mysterious briefcase. Jules, menacingly standing over the leader, Brett, intimidates him by eating his fast food and questioning him about what restaurant he bought it from. It's not a Wendy's or McDonald's hamburger, it's a Big Kahuna burger. Kahuna is Hawaiian magic, so it suggests big magic coming. Certainly there is magic in the briefcase, whose glowing contents hypnotize Vincent when he opens it to check on them. What's in the briefcase? It doesn't matter because it's just a MacGuffin, and in keeping with the Hitchcock tradition, Tarantino never bothers to say what it really is. It's enough that it's something of importance to the characters, something worth the risk of dying for. It's a Holy Grail or a Golden Fleece, a symbol of all the desires that draw heroes into quests.

Confronting the terrified young men, Vincent and Jules are HERALDS bringing a fatal CALL, acting at this moment as the allies of Death, the servants of the SHADOW. They are agents of Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, who brings punishment on those who offend the order of the gods. The god in this case is Marsellus Wallace. Brett and Roger have offended Mr. Big by trying to cheat him in the deal for the briefcase.

Jules makes his power manifest by shooting Roger without provocation. Before executing Brett, Jules performs a ritual, reciting the Bible passage from Ezekiel 25:17 which is his trademark:

"The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brother. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you."

This, in effect, is a statement of the theme of the movie, a complex statement that can be interpreted many ways. On this reading, Jules seems to identify with only part of the message, the part about "great vengeance and furious anger," for he and Vincent empty their guns into Brett when the speech is done.

Then a miracle occurs. While Jules' friend Marvin, who has been there all along, mutters in a corner, a Fourth Young Man bursts out of the bathroom, firing away at Jules and Vincent with a heavy handgun. The miracle is that the bullets seem to have no effect. The Young Man is blown off his feet by return fire from Jules and Vincent.

This sequence establishes the Ordinary World for the protagonists of this thread of the story. They are enforcers for a powerful gangster, a notch or two above the level of the two kids in the coffee shop, but not far above. They are trying to work out an ethical system between them, and are concerned about the limits of honor and duty. The twin heroes are traveling down the same road so far, but their paths are about to split because of their differing reactions to the miracle that has just occurred.

"VINCENT VEGA AND MARSELLUS WALLACE'S WIFE"

A title card now establishes that the prologue or framing device is over and the first of the pulp fiction short stories is about to begin. But before bringing Vincent and Mia together, the storytellers introduce two new characters, Marsellus Wallace and Butch Coolidge, projecting ahead to Butch's story thread. Marsellus, described as sounding like "a cross between a gangster and a king," sits talking to Butch, a knocked-around prizefighter. In Butch's Hero's Journey, he is in his ORDINARY WORLD, getting a dark CALL to throw a fight.

Marsellus is both HERALD and MENTOR, godlike, seen only from behind, possessed of a MENTOR'S wisdom and a definite philosophy of life. Perhaps significantly, he has a Band-Aid on the back of his neck. Was he simply cut while shaving his perfectly bald head, or does the Band-Aid cover something more sinister — like the alien brain implants from the 1950s classic Invaders From Mars? Like the glowing contents of the briefcase, it poses a puzzle which the moviemakers decline to solve.

Marsellus counsels Butch to swallow his pride and give up his shot at being featherweight champion of the world in return for the sure thing. Butch doesn't hesitate before accepting his Call to throw the fight. He takes the money unhesitatingly. He seems to be accepting the Call, but in fact, as we later learn, he is planning to REFUSE this particular Call, intending instead to win the fight and collect big money by betting on himself

Vincent and Jules enter with the briefcase, but are dressed quite differently than in the previous scene. They wear T-shirts and shorts, which look a little out of place in the bar. Later we'll see that several days have passed since we last saw Vincent and Jules, and that they have been through several major ORDEALS.

Vincent clashes with Butch, mocking him as a washed-up palooka, in a confrontation typical of the TESTS, ALLIES, ENEMIES phase. Vincent throws a challenge, which Butch refuses to rise to. The chance encounter with Butch is a TEST which shows a flaw in Vincent, a lack of respect for his elders. He should know that Butch is an experienced hero, a potential MENTOR who could teach him a few things, but instead he makes fun of him. Butch's REFUSAL to rise to this challenge shows that he is mature and careful. He sees that Vincent is a friend of Marsellus and wisely decides to let it ride — for now. However, a potential ALLY has been turned into an ENEMY by Vincent's arrogance.

The thread now follows Vincent, who has previously received the CALL to take Mia on a date. In keeping with the criminal underworld theme, Vincent approaches his own kind of MENTOR — his drug dealer, Lance — before CROSSING THE THRESHOLD to deal with Mia. The Mentor's lair is an old house in Echo Park. This Mentor, like a shaman equipping a hunter with magic potions and healing herbs, presents an array of heroin options for Vincent's selection. Vincent pays top dollar for the strongest stuff.

Vincent shoots up and cruises over in a blissful daze to pick up Mia. Here is another of Vincent's flaws — he is weakened by his drug addiction. Vincent CROSSES A THRESHOLD as he enters Marsellus' house. He passes by strange metal sculptures, like THRESHOLD GUARDIANS from some primeval culture. There's a sense that the gods are watching.

Inside, Mia operates in the godlike realm of Mr. Big, playing with Marsellus' toys. Like Mr. Big in many noir movies, she watches from a hidden upper room, manipulating Vincent by remote control with her disembodied voice. The rules are different in this SPECIAL WORLD. In Vincent's ORDINARY WORLD, he and his gun are the absolute rulers. Here, a barefoot woman holds the power of life and death. She calls the tune and selects the theme music for the evening.

Moving further into the SPECIAL WORLD, Vincent takes Mia to the strange '50s cafe for a TESTS, ALLIES, ENEMIES scene. Jackrabbit Slim's is a model of the postmodern world, in which images of the recent past are continually chopped up, recycled, and harnessed to new tasks. Legendary faces like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, and Buddy Holly are reduced to waiting tables and delivering hamburgers.

In a typical Hero's Journey Stage Six bar scene, Mia and Vincent TEST each other out. Menu choices assume great importance as clues to character. Phallic cigarettes are rolled and ignited. They get the measure of one another through cool but probing dialogue. Vincent boldly tests Mia by asking about her relationship with the fellow who was thrown out the window. He passes her TESTS by asking diplomatically, without assuming she was in the wrong. They become ALLIES.

They are linked in another way, revealed when Mia gets up to "powder her nose," in fact, to snort cocaine. Like Vincent she is weakened by her addiction and it will lead to her ORDEAL.

The cue to enter the dance contest is an APPROACH, moving them a step closer to the life-and-death matter of sex. From the way they groove together on the dance floor, it's clear they would have fantastic sex. Their dance moves and hand gestures reflect the SHAPESHIFTER archetype, as they try out various masks and identities in the APPROACH to love.

Vincent and Mia return to her house to face a SUPREME ORDEAL. Mia is looking very seductive, and Vincent retires to the bathroom to steel himself. He talks to his image in the mirror, convincing himself not to have sex with Mia. In this area, at least, he passes an important TEST, remaining loyal to his boss despite strong temptation. His motivation may not be so noble — he knows Marsellus will probably find out and kill him if he does fool around with Mia — but he passes the TEST nonetheless.

Meanwhile Mia finds Vincent's heroin in his coat, and mistaking it for cocaine, snorts it greedily and passes out. Vincent finds her with blood running from her nose and panics. Here Vincent is not just facing Mia's death, but also his own — for he will surely be killed if Mia dies. It was his heroin, his weakness, that caused the problem, along with Mia's lust for sensation.

Vincent races to his Mentor's house (THE ROAD BACK) where a frantic search for a medical book, a marker pen, and a huge adrenaline needle commences.

Vincent digs deep for the hero's courage to plunge the needle into Mia's heart. In a weird reversal of the classic scene from vampire movies, driving a stake into her heart is actually the way to bring her abruptly back to life, a RESURRECTION. Vincent, like Sir Lancelot, has the godlike power to bring someone back from the land of the dead.

Vincent returns Mia to her house (RETURN WITH THE ELIXIR) where, pale and wan, she gives him a kind of ELIXIR, a feeble joke from the TV pilot she appeared in. They part with another ELIXIR, a sense of friendship and mutual respect arising from sharing an ORDEAL together. They promise each other they won't tell Marsellus what happened. You get the feeling that if anything ever happened to Marsellus Wallace, these two would probably get together.

BUTCH'S STORY

The story now switches to another thread, the Hero's Journey of Butch, the boxer. It takes us back to Butch's early ORDINARY WORLD, a scene from his childhood in suburbia, where he watches a Speed Racer cartoon on TV in 1972.

A CALL TO ADVENTURE is issued by a HERALD or MENTOR, Captain Koons, the Air Force officer who brings the gold watch that belonged to his father and forefathers. In a long monologue Koons describes the watch's tradition of being carried by American soldiers in Butch's family. He relates the ORDEAL that he and Butch's father endured in the Vietnamese prison camp. The watch becomes an emblem of manly tradition that connects it to symbols like the magic swords that heroes inherited from their fathers. However, we're brought crashing back to reality with the earthy detail of where Butch's father hid the watch for five years, and Captain Koons used a similar hiding place for two years after Butch's father died. Fulfilling the DONOR function of a MENTOR, the officer gives the watch to Butch.

We're then thrown back to the present where we see Butch getting another CALL — this time his manager calling him into the ring for the fight he's supposed to throw.

"THE GOLD WATCH"

A title card now makes it clear we are taking up a major thread of another Hero's Journey. We find out, through the radio that plays in the taxicab outside, that instead of throwing the fight as agreed with Marsellus, Butch has won the fight and

killed the other boxer. He has refused Marsellus' CALL, but has answered other calls — the CALL of his own spirit to fight well, and the CALL of temptation to cheat Marsellus and collect a lot of money.

Butch CROSSES A THRESHOLD as he leaps from a window into a dumpster. He boards the cab and begins stripping off the attributes of a prizefighter, leaving this part of his life behind. In a TESTS, ALLIES, ENEMIES scene, his attitude is probed through his conversation with Esmerelda Villalobos, the woman cabdriver from Colombia. She explains her name has a beautiful, poetic meaning ("Esmerelda of the Wolves"), and Butch says his name, like most American names, doesn't mean anything. Again the note of cultural relativity is sounded. She is morbidly curious about what it feels like to kill a man. Instead of horrifying her, it seems to turn her on. Everything is relative. Butch himself offers a rationalization for having killed the other boxer. If he was a better fighter, he'd be alive. He makes an ALLY of her and wins her promise to tell the police she never saw him.

By his actions he has made ENEMIES of Marsellus Wallace and his crew. We see Marsellus sending his minions to hunt down Butch, all the way to Indo-China if necessary.

In an APPROACH phase, Butch makes a phone call to check on his winnings. He goes to his French girlfriend, Fabienne, at a motel and they make plans to skip the country once he's collected his money. Their flirtatious talk, characteristic of intimate APPROACH scenes, seems to be more of the seemingly banal chatter that marks the early scenes between Vincent and Jules. It has the same sense of cultural relativity and differing value systems. Here the distinctions are along gender lines, as the girlfriend tries to make Butch understand her precise attitude about potbellies on women. They make love and the night ends with a false sense that all will be well.

A new and immediate CALL TO ADVENTURE is sounded the next morning as Butch discovers she has failed to retrieve his father's watch from his apartment. Without consulting any Mentors, he overcomes his fear of being caught by Marsellus and goes to get the watch. Driving to his apartment, he is CROSSING THE THRESHOLD into a SPECIAL WORLD of increased danger.

After a careful APPROACH to his apartment, Butch takes possession of the watch, SEIZING THE SWORD. However, he encounters a THRESHOLD GUARDIAN sent by Marsellus to kill him. It's Vincent, who has been reading a book

in the bathroom (the comic spy thriller Modesty Blaise by Peter O'Donnell). Foolishly, in a fatal, tragic mistake, Vincent has underestimated his opponent, and has left his gun sitting on the kitchen counter. Butch hears the toilet flush, grabs the gun, and kills Vincent. It's a near-death ORDEAL for Butch, but its the tragic CLIMAX for Vincent, who has been brought down by one of his flaws — his disrespect for his elders. He is punished with true poetic justice, and in a humiliating way, being caught gunless while exiting the toilet. We don't know it yet, but Vincent also appears to be paying the price for having denied a miracle — the miracle of escaping the bullets of the Fourth Young Man in the earlier scene. His death at this point seems like divine punishment for having refused to acknowledge divine intervention.

With the REWARD of the watch in his pocket, Butch hits THE ROAD BACK, trying to get to his girlfriend. On the way, he literally runs into his SHADOW, Marsellus, ramming him with the car when he sees Marsellus crossing the street. However, Butch is also injured and dazed when his car collides with another car, a quick REVERSAL. Marsellus, appearing dead to a bystander, comes back to life (RESURRECTION) and staggers towards Butch with a gun.

Butch wobbles into the "Mason-Dixon Gunshop" and Marsellus follows him (a CHASE typical of THE ROAD BACK). Butch punches Marsellus and is about to kill him when he's stopped by the gunshop owner, Maynard, who is armed with a shotgun.

Butch and Marsellus don't realize they've stumbled into an INMOST CAVE more sinister than anything they have encountered, an underworld beneath the underworld in which they live. Maynard knocks out Butch and summons his brother Zed, like him, a SHADOW projection of the worst aspects of white American male culture. Marsellus and Butch wake up, chained and gagged with S&M gear, in the still deeper cave of the dungeon beneath the store.

Zed brings up a leather-clad creature, The Gimp, from a still deeper pit beneath the floor. Whether he is their retarded brother or a poor victim driven mad by their torture, The Gimp suggests the horrors that await Marsellus and Butch. Marsellus is chosen to be the first victim of the evil brothers' sadistic attention, and is taken into a room once occupied by another victim, Russell. There is a sense in this adventure that others have gone before and have not won their round with death.

Butch hears the sounds of the two brothers raping Marsellus, a terrible ORDEAL that brings death to Marsellus' manhood. (In these scenes, again, is a sense of relativity. No matter how harshly we may have judged Marsellus and Butch for their behavior, there are still worse villains and lower circles of hell. Marsellus and Butch look like villains or SHADOWS from society's point of view, but compared to the denizens of the gunshop they are HEROES.)

Butch sees an opportunity and escapes, punching out The Gimp, who falls limp and hangs himself on his leash. Butch escapes upstairs and actually has his hand on the door, ready to leave, but has a crisis of conscience. He decides to make a true hero's SACRIFICE, risking his life by returning to rescue Marsellus, even though he knows Marsellus wants to kill him for not throwing the fight. He selects a samurai sword from the many weapons at hand (literally SEIZING THE SWORD), and descends once again into the INMOST CAVE for his ultimate ORDEAL.

Butch kills Maynard, and Marsellus grabs a shotgun, shooting Zed in the groin. Marsellus is free, having rebounded from almost certain death, a RESURRECTION. Butch's heroic action balances the moral books for Butch's killing of the other boxer. Marsellus is TRANSFORMED by the experience, and grants a BOON to Butch, sparing his life and allowing him to escape so long as he promises not to tell anyone what happened, and to stay away from Los Angeles. Then he calls upon a MENTOR, Mr. Wolf, for help in cleaning up the situation.

Butch SEIZES A SWORD, so to speak, taking the motorcycle that belonged to one of the monstrous bikers. On this steed the hero takes THE ROAD BACK to collect his fair lady. Although he may not be able to collect the ELIXIR of the gambling money, the hero has been rewarded with a greater ELIXIR of life. He rides off with Fabienne on the motorcycle, which bears the significant name of "Grace," an ELIXIR granted to those who make the right moral choices on the Hero's Journey.

"THE BONNIE SITUATION"

Now the thread of Vincent and Jules is picked up again at the moment when Jules recites his Bible passage in the apartment of the Young Men, and we hear the scripture for a second time. The Young Man bursts out shooting at them, clearly a death-dealing ORDEAL. By rights they should be dead, but somehow they survive and the bullets pock the wall all around them.

The two young men react quite differently to their brush with death. Vincent dismisses it as a lucky break or coincidence, but Jules has an APOTHEOSIS. He is deeply moved and recognizes it as a miracle, an act of God, a sign which requires a change in attitude. Their reaction is a kind of TEST, one which Vincent appears to fail and Jules appears to pass with flying colors. Jules wins a REWARD from the experience, a greater spiritual awareness, but Vincent gets nothing out of it.

(The fact that we have already seen Butch kill Vincent makes this scene a kind of RESURRECTION for Vincent; we have seen him die, but now we see him alive again. This is another manifestation of the fractured postmodern time sense, which says the notion of linear time is an arbitrary convention.)

On the ROAD BACK from this death-and-rebirth moment, Vincent makes a deadly error, again due to his flaw of lack of respect. He has insufficient respect for the tools of death, and waving the gun around in the car, accidentally puts a bullet through the head of their accomplice Marvin in the backseat.

Jules recognizes that this must be cleaned up and drives to the house of his friend and ALLY, Jimmy Dimmick, played by Quentin Tarantino. He appears to be a middle-class fellow whose connection to the criminal world is never specified. He is worried about the moral wrath of his wife, Bonnie, who will soon be returning home from the night shift. (Here the filmmaker is creating contrast between the criminal underworld and the bourgeois world in which most of us live. The joke is that they are more afraid of Bonnie's irritation than of the danger of the law coming down on them for manslaughter.)

Jules and Vincent try to clean themselves up, but are only partially successful. Jules scolds Vincent for getting blood all over the guest towels, another sign that Vincent is careless and disrespectful, traits which we know will get him killed. He is in danger of turning another ALLY, Jimmy, into an ENEMY.

Jules calls Marsellus for help, and he in turn summons a MENTOR and ALLY in the form of Winston Wolf, played by Harvey Keitel. His name links him with Esmerelda Villalobos, Esmerelda of the Wolves, an Ally in another thread of the story They fulfill some of the same functions performed by Animal Helpers in many folktales.

Wolf appears to be a specialist in problem solving, experienced at getting rid of inconvenient evidence. He arrives at supernatural speed and takes charge of the problem, issuing orders authoritatively However, once again Vincent is disrespectful of his elders, and balks at being ordered around. Wolf handles it with humor but also unquestionable authority, making it clear that Vincent should not make an ENEMY of his ALLY.

Wolf supervises as Vincent and Jules cleanse the bloody car. The whole sequence is a protracted RESURRECTION for the young men, in which they and their vehicle are purified before the RETURN. Meanwhile Jimmy has to make a SACRIFICE, surrendering sheets and towels for the cleanup, but Wolf prompdy compensates him with a REWARD of money for new furniture.

Then, acting precisely like a shaman putting warriors through a cleansing ordeal of RESURRECTION, Wolf orders Vincent and Jules to strip off their bloody clothes. He makes Jimmy hose them down with icy water as they soap themselves clean of the blood. Next Jimmy issues them new clothing, significantly, boyish shorts and T-shirts. They look like schoolboys or college kids instead of tough gangsters. Like returning hunters, they have been put through a death-and-rebirth ritual that makes them innocent children again. Now they can re-enter the ORDINARY WORLD cleansed of the death they have faced and dealt with. Throughout, they have hung onto the mysterious briefcase, an ELIXIR which they brought back from the ORDEAL in the yuppie apartment.

Wolf escorts them to an auto graveyard where the body and the car will be disposed of. He says farewell and goes off with his young girlfriend Raquel, daughter of the junkyard owner, showing how an experienced Mentor enjoys his ELIXIR, won through "correct" behavior by the rules of this movie's universe. He compliments Jules for showing respect to his elders, a sign of character.

"EPILOGUE"

Finally, the narrative returns to the original scene in the diner for the Epilogue, the last word on the subject. While Pumpkin and Honey Bunny plan their stickup, Jules and Vincent review what has happened. Vincent, typically, tries to dismiss it, but Jules insists they have seen a miracle today. He resolves to live his life differently from now on, "walking the Earth" like Cain in the TV series "Kung Fu." This seems to mean wandering about doing good and seeking peace rather than living a criminal life. He has truly been through a moral RESURRECTION and transformation. Vincent doesn't value any of this and gets up to go to the bathroom, the same action that ultimately gets him killed.

As a final TEST of Jules' resolve, Pumpkin and Honey Bunny start screaming and waving their guns around. Pumpkin tries to seize the ELIXIR of the mystery briefcase, opening it and falling under its spell, but Jules gets the drop on him. (Pumpkin's attempt echoes the fairy-tale motif of the False Claimant, who appears just as the hero is ready to claim his reward.)

Jules talks calmly but intensely to Pumpkin and Honey Bunny. He makes a deal with Pumpkin, giving him money from his wallet in return for leaving the briefcase alone. It's a final moment in which we are balanced between life and death. Jules recites his Bible passage for a third time, although on this reading it has a totally different meaning for him. Where before he identified with the wrathful face of God, dealing death to the unrighteous, now he identifies with the hand of mercy and justice, trying to be the blessed one "who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness." He has moved his center from thoughtless killing to a new level of heroic action, from which he can use his warrior skills for good. He is able to defuse the potentially deadly situation and walks away with the ELIXIR in hand. A SHOWDOWN which would normally leave at least one person dead has been handled with finesse and grace worthy of Mr. Wolf. Jules has grown from being a SHADOW, a ruthless killer, to being a true HERO. Pumpkin and Honey Bunny walk away with the ELIXIR of their lives, which they won by making the right decision and keeping cool under Jules' orders. If they are smart, they will move up the ladder of souls and prepare for adventures on the level of Jules and Vincent.

Vincent and Jules walk away with the ELIXIR-filled briefcase. The tale is "over," although we know that in linear time, there is still much of the story ahead. Vincent and Jules will now deliver the briefcase to Marsellus at the bar, Vincent will show disrespect for Butch and will undergo his ORDEAL with Mia, Butch will not throw the fight and will kill Vincent before surviving his ORDEAL with Marsellus. The real ending, if these events are rearranged in linear sequence, is the moment when Butch and his girlfriend ride off on the motorcycle.

The theme of Pulp Fiction seems to be the testing of men by ordeals. Different characters react differently to their respective confrontations with Death. Despite the relativistic tone of the film, the storytellers do seem to have a moral point of view. They sit in God's chair, dealing out the punishment of death for Vincent, who offends against the moral code of the movie, and rewarding Jules and Butch with life

for making the right choices in the scheme of the film. In this the filmmakers, despite the appearance of unconventionality, are quite conventional, following a moral code as strict as that in a John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock movie.

The most interesting case is that of Vincent, who faces ordeals in two completely different arenas, with different results. In the arena of love and loyalty, on his date with Mia, he behaves with chivalry and courage, like a knight of old, and for this he is rewarded by brief survival. But in the arena of respect for Higher Powers and for his more experienced elders, he fails, and is swiftly punished. Once again a relativistic note is sounded, suggesting that mastery over one area of life doesn't necessarily mean mastery of all aspects.

The interwoven Hero's Journeys of Vincent, Jules, and Butch present a full spectrum of heroic possibilities, encompassing the dramatic, the tragic, the comic, and the transcendent. Like Joseph Campbells definition of myth, Pulp Fiction is a "shapeshifting yet marvelously constant story... with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told."

THE FULL MONTY

At the opposite end of the spectrum from Titanic is a little film that Fox produced at the same time through its Searchlight division. As a work in the iconoclastic independent film spirit, it makes a good contrast with the old-time Hollywood epic scale of Titanic, and yet both films exhibit the signposts of the Hero's Journey. The Full Monty expresses it on a more intimate scale but the elements loom large in it nonetheless.

The Full Monty tells the comic adventures of a group of men whose ORDINARY WORLD is the ailing steel town of Sheffield. The men are different from one another, gay and straight, fat and thin, divided by social class and race, and yet they are united by the new conditions of their society. In the old days, sketched by a hilariously upbeat promotional film from the 1960s, Sheffield was a booming industrial center where the men were in charge, earning the wages and heading the households. Now the world has been stood on its head. The mills have been closed, the men are out of work, and it's a service economy in which the women are more likely to be the breadwinners.

Gaz is the principal protagonist, a boyish man whose immaturity isolates him from his ex-wife and son. His OUTER PROBLEM is to scrape together some money, his INNER challenge is to earn his son's respect and to learn to respect himself. He gets his CALL TO ADVENTURE when he sees his ex-wife and her girlfriends exercising their freedom by taking in a male strip show. He conceives the idea of raising money by staging a strip show of his own, recruiting a chorus line from the rejected men of Sheffield.

There are many REFUSALS from his skeptical friends and associates, who are not eager to expose themselves. These men, like all men, have many secrets to protect and conceal. Gaz doesn't want the other men to know he's done jail time. His overweight friend Dave hides his lack of sex drive, which leads his wife to think he's having an affair. Gerald, Gaz's former boss at the steel mill, has kept secret from his wife the fact that he lost his job months ago. Lomper, the mill security officer, has hidden the fact that he's gay, perhaps even concealing it from himself. Guy is a fellow who can't dance, but makes up for it by revealing a secret — he has the fullest monty of them all. His willing self-exposure sets an example for the men who will all be slowly unveiling themselves throughout the movie. Horse is the best dancer of the lot and becomes a kind of MENTOR to the rest, along with Gerald, who has been taking ballroom dancing lessons with his wife. But even Horse has a secret — the reason for his name — and this one is never revealed.

Gaz's steadfast MENTOR in his quest is his son Nathan, a Wise Young Man who voices an emotional wish early in the story, "Why can't we do normal things once in a while?" He keeps Gaz honest and on the track, and at the end gives him the courage to face the ultimate exposure, the final test of his commitment to something.

Gaz CROSSES THE FIRST THRESHOLD when he holds an audition for his male strip show. He turns an ENEMY into an ALLY, recruiting his old supervisor who initially wanted nothing to do with the project. The men slowly reveal themselves and experiment with the SPECIAL WORLD of trusting each other and allowing themselves to be honest and vulnerable.

Their APPROACH is a phase of preparation and rehearsal, in which they learn more about themselves. An encounter with Death marks the central ORDEAL, when Dave has severe doubts and wants to quit the enterprise, and Lomper's mother dies. In addition the men are arrested for indecent exposure when their dress rehearsal is captured on a plant security camera. It looks like they're finished. But this is quickly followed by REWARD, a phase in which Gaz gets reassurance that word of his show is spreading; the arrest has been good for their publicity. Lomper and Guy also reap a reward, discovering that they care for each other as they run from the police.

In another thread of the plot, Dave faces an ORDEAL of honesty, revealing to his wife the true reason for his lack of sexual interest. His REWARD is the knowledge that she loves him anyway, which gives him courage to rejoin the strip show. On THE ROAD BACK, he joins the men in the final preparations for the big act.

The hall fills with rowdy women. The RESURRECTION is enacted when Gaz gets cold feet at the thought of exposing himself, not only to women, but to a few men who have slipped into the hall. His involvement with the group seems to die for a few moments as the other men go on stage without him. But his son encourages him to go on and he is REBORN with a late entry into the strip act, passing the final test of commitment and honesty. The men reveal themselves totally, RETURNING WITH THE ELIXIR of self-knowledge, cooperation, understanding, and self-respect. They have found a new way to be men in the new society.

The Full Monty connected with audiences because of its infectious good humor and its upbeat music and dance, which combined effectively with the realistic settings and believable, down-to-earth characters. It is a "feel-good" movie that communicates a sense that the filmmakers like people and believe that though they are complex and troubled, they are basically good and are capable of change. The audience has the identification and satisfaction of cheering for the underdogs. The film has a visual inventiveness that employs many poetic touches like the image of Dave and Gaz stranded in a canal on a sinking abandoned car as Gaz's practical son Nathan scampers away on the bank. Meanwhile the multilayered plot, telling little stories about six men and a boy, is organized into a coherent dramatic experience by the use of Hero's Journey motifs and devices. By their actions within this framework, these ordinary men are transformed into heroes for the edification and enjoyment of the audience. And because of the universal recognition of the Hero's Journey pattern, audiences around the world could find something of themselves in this story.

STAR WARS

Before closing the book on the permutations of the Hero's Journey in popular films, I have to acknowledge the lasting impact of the Star Wars series. The first Star Wars film, now re-titled Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, was released in 1977 as I was just beginning to digest the ideas of Joseph Campbell, and was a stunning confirmation of the power of the mythic patterns I had found there. Here was a fully developed expression of his concept of the Hero's Journey, exactly as Campbell described. It helped me work out the theory and test my own ideas, and it quickly became one of those quantum movie events, breaking records and setting a higher standard for what a movie could be.

As I began to teach "mythic structure," the film provided a convenient, widely seen example to demonstrate the movements and principles of the Hero's Journey, in which the function of the parts were simple, clear, and vivid. It entered the language of pop culture, providing useful metaphors, symbols, and phrases that expressed how we all felt about good and evil, technology and faith. It spawned a billion-dollar industry of sequels, prequels, ancillaries, franchises, and a whole universe of toys, games, and collectibles. Entire generations have grown up under its influence, and it has inspired countless artists to think big and pursue their dreams of creativity. It filled the same function for millions that the old myths did, giving standards for comparison, providing metaphors and meaning, inspiring people to stretch beyond their earthly bounds.

If the Star Wars movie of 1977 had been a one-shot cinema event, its cultural impact would still have been considerable, but its influence was tripled by the continuation of the series with Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Episode VI Return of the Jedi (1983). Series creator George Lucas had always planned a vast canvas on the scale of Wagner's Ring cycle, an epic tale that might take a dozen movies to tell in full. For the following sixteen years fans wondered if Lucas would ever fulfill the promise of more films, extending the saga into the past and possibly into the future. In what is known as "the Expanded Universe," various side-plots and back-stories were developed in comic books, novels, cartoon series, and TV specials, but it was only in 1999 that Lucas returned to the film series, eventually producing three "prequel" films that told the story of the generation before Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, and revealed the events and character flaws that led to the development of Darth Vader, the series' supreme embodiment of evil.

The master plan for organizing this huge canvas of six feature films seems to reflect a polarized view of the universe and of the hero myth itself, allowing full exploration of the dark and light possibilities of the heroic model. The films released in the 1970s and '80s represent the positively charged, optimistic view of heroism, in which the young hero Luke Skywalker is severely tempted by power and rage but ends up triumphant and morally balanced, an example of what Campbell calls "the Master of Two Worlds." The dramatic intention is quite different in the three prequel films (The Phantom Menace/1999, Attack of the Clones/2002, Revenge of the Sith/2005). Though sprinkled with moments of lightness and humor, the overall tone is dark and tragic, showing the destruction of a human spirit by fatal flaws of anger, pride, and ambition.

A mythic theme that seems to run through all the films is a fascination with the emotional territory between fathers and sons. The impact of positive male role models, surrogate fathers and mentors like Obi Wan Kenobi, Yoda, Qui-Gon Jinn, Luke's Uncle Owen, and Mace Windu is emphasized, but the series is as much interested in the effect of absent or distant fathers and negative role models on a young man's developing personality.

The first three films released portray Luke Skywalker's quest to discover the identity of his father and his struggle with the dark tendencies in his own nature. Episode IV, the film released in 1977, more or less follows an Arthurian model, with the young nobleman raised in humble surroundings, unaware of his true nature, and watched over by a Merlin-like figure (Obi-Wan) who gives him a powerful weapon that belonged to his father, a light saber similar to Arthur's sword Excalibur.

In the next two films, Luke will discover more of his parentage and learn that Princess Leia is his twin sister. His relationships with surrogate fathers will continue to develop, losing Obi-Wan as a living influence (though his ghostly presence continues to guide Luke) and gaining a new father figure in Yoda. As he learns to master the Force he is tempted by the dark side, represented by the villainous Darth Vader, who eventually reveals himself as Luke's true father. Like many a hero before him, Luke must confront the fact that his father was not perfect, and that he has some of the same dangerous tendencies that made his father a tyrant and a monster. In this section the plot somewhat resembles the Wagnerian scenario of Siegfried, the young hero who must re-forge a broken sword that represents the failure of the previous generation.

Luke passes a major Resurrection test in Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, when he has the opportunity and the motivation to kill his father, for Lord Vader is threatening to turn Luke's sister Princess Leia to the dark side of the Force. Luke spares his father's life, signifying his choice to uphold the positive side of the Force. The evil Emperor who has manipulated Darth Vader and is a kind of evil father figure for him now begins to destroy Luke with powerful lightning bolts. Moved by the sight of his son's impending death, Vader reverses polarity and goes over to the light side of the Force, throwing the Emperor to his death. Vader, dying himself from the struggle with the Emperor, asks Luke to remove his helmet, revealing the fragile human beneath the mask of technology. He seeks forgiveness and his son grants it. Luke, though wounded, dismembered, and sorely tempted by his own dark potential, ends up as a positively charged hero, able to use his powers responsibly for the good of all. He is even able to forgive the fact that his own father chopped off his arm and tried to kill him. One of the final images of Episode VI, theoretically the absolute end of the series, is that of the ghost of Darth Vader, redeemed and forgiven, standing benevolent watch over his son alongside the ghosts of Obi-Wan and Yoda, a trinity of father figures.

Sixteen years after the release of Episode VI, Lucas returned to his unfinished canvas to fill in the first three episodes, detailing the ascendancy of Luke's father, the young Jedi knight Anakin Skywalker, and his corruption into the totally evil Darth Vader. Continuing his exploration of father-son or mentor-student relationships, in Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), Lucas begins with a young Obi-Wan training under his wise master, Qui-Gon Jinn. Qui-Gon and a galactic princess, Padme Amidala, find a brilliant, strong-willed nine-year-old boy, Anakin Skywalker, who is a slave on the desert planet of Tatooine where his son Luke Skywalker will later be raised. The boy, unnaturally skilled in mechanics and piloting, seems to be the fulfillment of a Jedi prophecy that a "Chosen One" will bring balance to the Force. But already the seeds of evil are present in the child, who has a quick temper and is difficult to control. Only Yoda seems to notice something is wrong with the boy, and warns that pride and anger may come to dominate in him.

Interestingly in a story about fathers and sons, the boy Anakin has no father in the conventional sense. Like many mythic heroes of the past, his birth was almost miraculous, an "immaculate conception," for his mother was impregnated not by a human father but by mysterious microscopic life forms called "midi-chloridians" that the Jedi believe are channels for the Force. An important element in the moral compass of the Star Wars series is how humans will make the transition from purely organic creatures into beings of the future enhanced or modified by technology and machines. There are warnings implied throughout the series that though the technological possibilities are marvelous, we must be careful not to get out of balance, and yield too much of our humanity to the chemical and mechanical possibilities that will come our way in the future. The fact that Anakin has no natural father leads him to be alternately seeking and rebelling against father figures, and helps explain how he is able to become the monstrous, more-than-half-machine that is Darth Vader.

The complex chronology of the films places the watcher of the prequels in a curious position. On the one hand, young Anakin seems to be doing the archetypal job of the hero, as the primary active character and someone whose fate we should care about. But it's very difficult to identify fully with a character who we know will turn out to be a science fiction equivalent of Hitler or Genghis Khan, even if we know he will be ultimately redeemed. Though the prequel films performed extremely well at the box office, the dramatic experience of watching them was necessarily muted by the knowledge that their principal hero is fated to be a despicable villain. Many people watched the prequel films with a certain detachment, unable to get behind the hero's struggles as they had with Luke Skywalkers in Episodes IV-VI.

Some of the audience's need to identify with positively charged characters was transferred from Anakin to other members of the cast in the three prequel films, such as Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan, Princess Padme Amidala, and others. Nevertheless a certain chilliness hangs over the prequel films, part of the artistic risk that Lucas took in attempting such a large and complex composition. Anakin's story grows darker as the films progress. In Episode II: Attack of the Clones, his special status as a genius allows him to fall prey to pride and arrogance. His mixed feelings about father figures leads him to rebel against positive role models like Obi-Wan and Yoda and to seek the twisted counsel of negative father possibilities like Senator Palpatine/Darth Sidious.

That most human element, love, is awakened in the young Anakin by his secret romance and marriage with Princess Amidala. However, his capacity to love becomes distorted by the death of his mother at the hand of Tusken raiders. In a sequence that recalls the Western movie universe of John Ford's The Searchers,

Anakin finds his mother horribly tortured by the savages and overreacts to her death, unleashing a tide of bloody revenge that makes him almost unredeemable in an audience's eyes.

In Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Anakin becomes obsessed with the fear of losing that which he loves, Princess Amidala, and is haunted by prophetic dreams of her dying in childbirth. He is thus easy prey for the temptations of Senator Palpatine, who holds out the promise of an elixir that can rescue loved ones from death. Anakin makes further bad choices, preventing positive Jedi mentor Mace Windu from killing Palpatine and allowing Palpatine to kill Windu. When Amidala pleads with him to leave public life, Anakin errs again, choosing to remain at the center of things in the vain hope of overthrowing Palpatine someday.

Paradoxically, Anakin nearly causes that which he fears the most, Amidalas death, by almost strangling her when he suspects she has betrayed him to Obi-Wan. She dies of a broken heart after giving birth to the future Luke and Leia. Anakin's descent into monsterhood is completed in a final duel with Obi-Wan, who cuts off both his arms and one leg, leaving him to roll near the scorching lava of a volcano. Palpatine, now revealed to be the evil schemer Darth Sidious, rescues Anakin and uses machines to turn him into the less-than-human creature we know as Darth Vader. In this dark and tragic climax, the only ray of hope is that the infants Luke and Leia are sent to be raised by surrogate parents, Luke going to his aunt and uncle on Tatooine and Leia being raised by a noble family, the Organas, on the planet Alderaan.

Audiences and critics had mixed reactions to the three prequel films, ranging from strong criticism of comic elements like the character of Jar-Jar Binks to expressions of disappointment that Lucas seemed to have lost some of the bright, cheerful spirit of episodes IV-VI. One possible explanation for the markedly different tone of the prequels is that Lucas was in a different stage of his life when he returned to his youthful creation. In making the first three films in the '70s and '80s, Lucas had only a short walk backwards to reach his childhood, and was firmly in touch with the optimism and hopefulness of youth. The road back to innocence was a lot longer by 1999, and his perspective was no longer that of a young rogue filmmaker, but that of a responsible parent and head of a huge network of companies. Although in Episode I Lucas was dealing with the early childhood of his protagonist, Anakin Skywalker, the boy genius in the film sounds more like a world-weary adult.

Though Lucas has said he has completed his original vision with the six feature films, the universe he founded continues to be developed in countless novels, comics, animation series, and games. It has a definite life of its own, quite apart from the intentions of its creator, and it has been embellished by original contributions from fans who feel they own it. And we are entitled to wonder if someday, perhaps in a universe far, far away, one version of the original scheme will ever be realized, one that called not only for three prequel films, but also three sequels, presumably Episodes VII, VIII, and IX, that might deal with the further adventures of Luke, Leia, and Han Solo, and perhaps their descendants or students. It would be interesting to see, in that hypothetical universe, how the perspective of the creator might mellow, perhaps producing a tone completely different from those of the first six films, in a future where humans will have to make ever more difficult choices about the Force and the god-like possibilities of technology. Having explored idealized goodness in the first three films, and the roots of evil in the prequels, Lucas and his successors might find a synthesis in a future triad of films that finally brings a balance to the Force.

In 2001 I participated in the making of a documentary film, A Galaxy Far; Far Away, looking into the "Stars Wars phenomenon" that was cresting in the public imagination because of the revival of the series. The film took a light-hearted view of the curious obsessions of Star Wars fans and the importance of the movies in their lives. Given that fathers and sons are so significant in the films, it's not surprising that a major conclusion of the filmmakers was that the Star Wars saga is one of the few cultural events that unites generations, making strong bonds between fathers and sons. Many young men interviewed for the documentary reported that the Star Wars films were among the few movies that fathers and sons could watch together, and that they had become an important part of family memories. Despite their occasional flaws and missteps, the films collectively are an impressive achievement of the mythic imagination, continuing the epic tradition and proving that abundant energy still surges in the motifs of the Hero's Journey.

The beauty of the Hero's Journey model is that it not only describes a pattern in myths and fairy tales, but it's also an accurate map of the territory one must travel to become a writer or, for that matter, a human being.

The Hero's Journey and the Writer's Journey are one and the same. Anyone setting out to write a story soon encounters all the tests, trials, ordeals, joys, and rewards of the Hero's Journey. We meet all of its Shadows, Shapeshifters, Mentors, Tricksters, and Threshold Guardians in the interior landscape. Writing is an often perilous journey inward to probe the depths of one's soul and bring back the Elixir of experience — a good story. Low self-esteem or confusion about goals may be the Shadows that chill our work, an editor or one's own judgmental side may be the Threshold Guardians that seem to block our way. Accidents, computer problems, and difficulties with time and discipline may torment and taunt us like Tricksters. Unrealistic dreams of success or distractions may be the Shapeshifters who tempt, confuse, and dazzle us. Deadlines, editorial decisions, or the struggle to sell our work may be the Tests and Ordeals from which we seem to die but are Resurrected to write again.