The election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. earlier this month offered the very thing our movie franchises and television series have denied us for two decades: catharsis.
For a writer, it turns out I may suffer from a staggering lack of imagination.
I will confess to anxiously entertaining all the apocalyptic post–Election Day scenarios contemplated by even our most sober pundits and analysts: the disillusion-fueled outrage on the left should Trump eke out a narrow Electoral College win despite losing the popular vote to Biden; or, the armed militias activated by the president in the event of his loss. Like the set of a Snake Plissken movie, store windows on Fifth Avenue and Rodeo Drive were boarded up; correspondingly, I barricaded my own front and balcony doors as I watched, sick to my stomach, an endless caravan of MAGA-bannered pickup trucks roar past my home in the liberal bastion of Los Angeles the weekend before Election Day. I girded for the possibility (if not inevitability) of social breakdown, fully aware I would not be cast in the part of uber-competent dystopian hero—the Rick Grimes or Mad Max—in that story.
What I never imagined—not once, even fleetingly—was that upon receiving official word of a Biden/Harris victory, cities across the country, and the world over, would spontaneously erupt into large-scale celebration worthy of an MGM musical. Ding-dong! The witch is dead! It was a perfectly conventional—and conventionally predictable—Hollywood ending, yet I never saw it coming.
The galaxy celebrates the death of Darth Vader
Despite all the warnings I’ve issued about the unconscious maleficent messaging in our commercial fiction—stories in which messianic saviors redeem our inept/corrupt public institutions (Star Wars and superhero sagas), armed men with badges act without even the smallest measure of accountability (action movies and police procedurals), and environmental destruction/societal collapse are not merely inevitable but preferable (Mad Max: Fury Road, The Walking Dead), because apocalypse absolves us from our burdensome civic responsibilities—this election season has exposed my own susceptibility to pop-cultural conditioning.
It wasn’t merely a spirit of doomism I nursed throughout October; it was an unchallenged assumption that the interminable Trump narrative would simply do what all our stories now do: hold us in a state of real-time presentism (“We’ll have to wait and see” and “I will keep you in suspense” are common refrains from the outgoing president) rather than arrive at definitive conclusion.
The erosion of cathartic narrativity is a subject I’ve admittedly addressed a lot here on the blog since I first published “Journey’s End” over five years ago, but it’s essential to understanding how the Trump presidency came to be, and why we all felt such an atavistic sense of relief when it reached an end on November 7.
Around the turn of the millennium, storytellers mostly abandoned the Aristotelian narrative arc—with its rising tension, climax, and catharsis—in favor of “storyless” fiction with either a satirical-deconstructionist agenda (Family Guy, Community) or to emulate the kind of open-ended worldbuilding previously the exclusive province of tabletop RPGs and videogames (Game of Thrones, Westworld).
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Christopher Vogler’s industry-standard screenwriting instructional The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, here’s an in-depth look at why the time-honored storytelling principles it propounds are existentially endangered in our postnarrative world… and why they’re needed now more than ever.
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell identified the “monomyth”—the universal narrative patterns and Jungian psychological archetypes that provide the shape, structure, and emotional resonance of virtually every story in the Western literary canon.
As it’s more commonly known, this is the “Hero’s Journey,” in which the status quo is disrupted, sending our protagonist on a perilous adventure—physically or emotionally or both—through a funhouse-mirror distortion of their everyday reality (think Marty McFly in 1950s Hill Valley, Dorothy in Oz) in which they encounter Mentors, Shadows, Allies, and Tricksters throughout a series of escalating challenges, culminating in a climactic test from which they finally return to the Ordinary World, ideally a bit wiser for their trouble. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to a given episode of The Big Bang Theory, the Hero’s Journey is the foundational schema of storytelling.
The stages of the Hero’s Journey
The book’s influence on the visionary young filmmakers who came of age studying it was quantum: George Lucas consciously applied Campbell’s theory to the development of Star Wars (1977), as did George Miller to Mad Max (1979), arguably transforming a pair of idiosyncratic, relatively low-budget sci-fi projects into global phenomena that are still begetting sequels over forty years later. After serving Western culture for millennia, in the waning decades of the twentieth century, the Hero’s Journey became the blueprint for the Hollywood blockbuster.
In the 1990s, a story analyst at Disney by the name of Christopher Vogler wrote and circulated a seven-page internal memo titled “A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” a screenwriter-friendly crib sheet that was notably used in the development of The Lion King (a classic Hero’s Journey if ever there was one), evolving a few years later into a full-length book of its own: The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of which was published this past summer. The nearly 500-page revised volume is partitioned into four sections:
MAPPING THE JOURNEY: Here Mr. Vogler characterizes the mythic archetypes of the Hero, Mentor, Threshold Guardian, Herald, Shapeshifter, Shadow, Ally, and Trickster.
STAGES OF THE JOURNEY: Each monomythic “beat”—The Call to Adventure, Crossing the First Threshold, Approach to the Inmost Cave, etc.—is given thorough explanation and illustration.
LOOKING BACK ON THE JOURNEY: Using the tools he teaches, Mr. Vogler provides comprehensive analyses of Titanic, Pulp Fiction, The Lion King, The Shape of Water, and Lucas’ six-part Star Wars saga.
THE REST OF THE STORY: ADDITIONAL TOOLS FOR MASTERING THE CRAFT: The appendices are a series of essays on the history, nature, and cultural dynamics of the art and craft of storytelling. After 350 pages of practical technique, Mr. Vogler earns the privilege of indulging a bit of literary theory here, and his insights are fascinating. He devotes an entire chapter to the subject of catharsis, “comparing the emotional effect of a drama with the way the body rids itself of toxins and impurities” (Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 4th ed. [Studio City, California: Michael Wiese Productions, 2020], 420). Stories, in that sense, are medicinal; their alchemical compounds have healing properties—more on this point later.
Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey codifies mythic structure for contemporary storytellers, demonstrating its form, function, and versatility through more accessible terminology than Campbell’s densely academic nomenclature, and by drawing on examples from cinematic touchstones familiar to all: The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Titanic, etc. Like The Hero with a Thousand Faces before it, The Writer’s Journey has become, over the last quarter century, an essential catechism, affecting not merely its own generation of scribes (including yours truly), but the successive storytelling programs that stand on its shoulders, like Save the Cat!
Comparison of Vogler’s Hero’s Journey and Snyder’s “beat sheet”
But why is it essential? If Campbell and Vogler and Blake Snyder have simply put different labels on narrative principles we all intuitively comprehend from thousands of years of unconscious conditioning, why study them at all? Why not simply trust those precepts are already instinctive and immediately type FADE IN at the muse’s prompting?
Because just as a doctor requires an expert’s command of gross anatomy even if no two patients are exactly constitutionally alike, and an architect is expected to possess a mastery of structural engineering though every building is different, it behooves the storyteller—be them screenwriter, novelist, playwright, what have you—to consciously understand the fundamentals of the narrative arts:
The stages of the Hero’s Journey can be traced in all kinds of stories, not just those that feature “heroic” physical action and adventure. The protagonist of every story is the hero of a journey, even if the path leads only into his own mind or into the realm of relationships.
The way stations of the Hero’s Journey emerge naturally even when the writer in unaware of them, but some knowledge of this most ancient guide to storytelling is useful in identifying problems and telling better stories. Consider these twelve stages as a map of the Hero’s Journey, one of many ways to get from here to there, but one of the most flexible, durable, and dependable.
ibid., 7
I’ve read and reread previous versions of The Writer’s Journey endlessly, and I take new insight from it each time: An excellent primer for aspirants, it yields yet richer dividends for experienced writers—those that can readily appreciate it vis-à-vis their own work. Though this updated edition, which includes two brand-new essays in the appendices (“What’s the Big Deal?” and “It’s All About the Vibes, Man”), was certainly sufficient reason in its own right to revisit The Writer’s Journey, I had a more compelling motivation: I wanted to see for myself how Mr. Vogler makes a case for the type of conventional story arc he extols in the face of mounting evidence of its cultural irrelevance in our postnarrative era.
In order to appreciate the state of commercial adolescence to which Generation X has been disproportionately consigned, one needs to consider Tim Burton’s Batmanin its sociocultural context: how it inadvertently provided a blueprint to reconceptualize superheroes from innocent entertainment meant to inspire the imagination of children to hyperviolent wish-fulfillment fantasies for commercially infantilized adults.
The weekly theatrical debut of a new franchise tentpole, voraciously bulling aside the $200 million–budgeted blockbuster released a mere seven days prior, is par for the course nowadays, but back in 1989—thirty summers ago per the calendar, though seemingly as recently as yesterday by the nebulous barometer of memory—we’d never before experienced anything like that.
That was the year that gave us new entries in such ongoing adventures as Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid, Lethal Weapon, James Bond, and Back to the Future, lowbrow comedies Police Academy, Fletch, and Vacation, as well as slasher staples Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Halloween—to say nothing of launching all-new franchises with Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Major League, Pet Sematary, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Weekend at Bernie’s, and Look Who’s Talking. To anyone who’d grown up in the nascent home-video era—that period in which all the aforementioned series (save 007) were born and could thusly be re-watched and obsessed-over ad infinitum—1989 was the Christmas of summer-movie seasons.
Michael Keaton in Tim Burton’s “Batman” (1989)
But none of those films, huge as many of them were, dominated the cultural spotlight that year as pervasively as Tim Burton’s Batman, released on this date in 1989.
Out of the Shadows
I can hear my thirteen-year-old nephew now: “One superhero movie? Wow—how’d you handle the excitement?”
Yeah, I know. But it was exciting. I was thirteen myself in 1989, spending most of my free time with my grade-school gang at the neighborhood comic shop down on Broadway, steeped in a subculture that hadn’t yet attained popular acceptance. Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) had been the only previous attempt at a reverent comic-book adaptation, and, creatively and financially successful though it was, most of that goodwill had been squandered in the intervening decade by a succession of increasingly subpar sequels (through no fault of the marvelous Christopher Reeve, who makes even the worst of them watchable).
Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder in “Superman: The Movie”
As for Batman: It’s crucial to remember, and easy enough now to overlook, that in the late eighties, the prevailing public perception of the character was not Frank Miller’s Dark Knight, but rather Adam West’s “Bright Knight” from the self-consciously campy acid-trip of a TV series that had aired twenty years earlier. In the wake of that show’s cancelation, a concerted effort was made by the character’s creative custodians at DC Comics—first Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams, then Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers, and most effectively Miller with his aptly titled The Dark Knight Returns—to reestablish Batman as the “nocturnal avenger” he was originally conceived to be.
“Dark Knight Triumphant” (July 1986); art by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley
But if you weren’t following the comics—and, in those days, few over thirteen years old were—the predominant impression the name “Batman” conjured wasn’t the ferocious Miller rendering above so much as this:
Because where is the line drawn, exactly, between inspiration and imitation? If the narrative arts are a continuum in which every new entry owes, to a certain extent, a creative debt to a cinematic or literary antecedent, is originality even a thing?
If so, what is it, then? How is one to construe it concretely, beyond simply “knowing it when we see it”? And, as such, is there a way for us as artists to codify, or at very least comprehend, the concept of originality as something more than an ill-defined abstraction to perhaps consciously strive for it in our own work?
THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND INFLUENCES
Since it was Star Wars that provoked those questions, let me start with this: George Lucas is one of my eminent creative influences. When I was in high school in the early nineties, during that long respite between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, when Star Wars was more or less placed by its creator in carbon-freezing, I became aware that the same mind had conceived two of my favorite franchises, and went to great lengths to study Lucas’ career: how he learned the art of storytelling, where his ideas came from, how he managed to innovate the way in which blockbusters were created and marketed.
“Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” mastermind George Lucas, my first creative idol
In order to more fully appreciate what Lucas created in 1977 when he made Star Wars—a work of fiction so thrilling and inspired it seemed to emerge fully realized from his singular imagination—it behooves us to consider the varied influences he drew from. The 1936 Flash Gordon film serial Lucas watched as a child provided the inciting animus—a grand-scale space opera told as a series of high-adventure cliffhangers. (It also later informed the movie’s visual vocabulary, with its reliance on old-fashioned cinematic techniques like opening crawls and optical wipes.)
In a case of east meets west, Joseph Campbell’s study of comparative mythology The Hero with a Thousand Faces provided a general mythic and archetypal blueprint to endow Lucas’ sprawling alien-world fantasy with psychological familiarity, while Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress served as a direct model for the plot he eventually settled on (after at least three start-from-scratch rewrites). Lucas ultimately patterned the series’ three-part narrative arc after Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings cycle (which later directly influenced his high-fantasy franchise-nonstarter Willow), because, prior to Star Wars, closed-ended “trilogies” weren’t really a thing in commercial cinema.
In addition to his cinematic and literary interests, Lucas is also a passionate scholar of world history (as evidenced by Indiana Jones, particularly the television series), and a direct line can be drawn from the X-wing assault on the Death Star to the aerial dogfights of World War II, to say nothing of the saga’s allusions to the Roman Republic, Nazi Germany, and the Vietnam War. As for where the Force and lightsabers and the twin suns of Tatooine came from… who knows? The sheer number of disparate interests that met, mated, and reproduced within the confines of Lucas’ brain can never be fully accounted for, even by the man himself.
It may surprise you to learn this, but the events of Star Wars never actually happened—the majority of them, anyway. I mean that sincerely—not for a minute should that be interpreted as snide or condescending. But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself…
In 1983, George Lucas brought his Star Wars trilogy to a close with Return of the Jedi (oh, those bygone days when movie franchises actually reached—wait for it—a conclusive resolution). Throughout the eighties, the series lived on by way of a pair of made-for-television Ewok movies and the Saturday-morning cartoons Droids and Ewoks, which continued to stoke interest in the franchise—and its lucrative action-figure line… for a while. But by the end of the decade, with no new big-screen productions to energize the fan base, Star Wars had resigned its position at the top of the pop-cultural hierarchy.
George Lucas looks to the horizon
Lucas, who had always been a forward-thinking businessman as much as he was a visionary filmmaker (he negotiated a reduced fee for writing and directing the original Star Wars in return for ownership of sequel and merchandising rights, which the studio deemed worthless and was only too happy to relinquish), had plans to revisit the Star Wars galaxy in a prequel trilogy that had been part of his grand design when he was developing the earlier films—hence the reason, in case you never thought to ask, they are numbered Episodes IV through VI. Even though the prequels themselves were some years off—production on The Phantom Menace wouldn’t commence until 1997—he began laying the groundwork to return Star Wars to its lofty place in the cultural consciousness by commissioning science-fiction author Timothy Zahn to write a trio of novels set five years after the events of Return of the Jedi—what later became commonly known as “the Thrawn trilogy” (named for its chief antagonist).
The books were released successively in ’91, ’92, and ’93 (my best friend Chip and I couldn’t get down to the local bookstore fast enough to buy a copy of each upon publication, though being a year older, he got to read them first); they were New York Times bestsellers that not only got their intended job done—reigniting public interest in a dormant media franchise—but also led to an endless, ongoing series of novels that explored every facet of the Star Wars galaxy: No character or event was too small to be the focus of its own story. Thus, the Star Wars Expanded Universe (SWEU) was born. Han and Leia had twins! Luke got married! Chewbacca sacrificed himself for the Solos’ son Anakin! A universe of stories, far beyond the contained narrative arc of the classic trilogy, took on a life of its own and captured the imagination of a generation that invested itself in the ongoing space opera collectively known as Star Wars—a vast, complex continuity that Lucasfilm maintained with curatorial oversight to prevent inconsistencies and contradictions in the expansive mythos, which comprised movies, books, comics, TV shows, RPGs, and video games.
The Force awakens? For many fans, it never went dormant
Even if you think you know the answer, it’s very possible your information is outdated.
Detective Comics no. 27, the first appearance of Batman
In 1939, illustrator Bob Kane (1915–1998) was tasked by DC Comics editor Vin Sullivan to devise a character for Detective Comics that could complement—and ideally capitalize on the success of—the costumed hero who had the year earlier made his debut in the pages of Action Comics: Superman. Inspired in equal measure by Leonardo da Vinci’s 1485 design sketches of an “ornithopter,” a 1930 mystery movie entitled The Bat Whispers, and the 1920 silent film The Mark of Zorro starring Douglas Fairbanks, the commercially savvy Kane managed in short order to assemble the Bat-Man “from an assortment of pop culture debris that together transcended the sum of its parts” (Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human, [New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011], 17). Part nocturnal predator, part avenging angel—with a secret identity as a millionaire playboy, to boot—Batman was the Gothic (k)night to Superman’s sunny savior of the day. An enduring icon had, against astronomical odds, been created, albeit removed from a narrative framework:
“‘When I created the Batman,’ admitted Bob Kane, ‘I wasn’t thinking of story. I was thinking, I have to come up with a character who’s different,’ and as an artist he was clearly more concerned with pictures than plot. [Writer Bill] Finger, however, was a born story man, blessed with enough pictorial sense to realize what would work in comics” (Les Daniels, Batman: The Complete History, [San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999], 23).
Finger, a friend and former high-school classmate of Kane’s, further fleshed out the character, whom he saw “as a combination of Alexandre Dumas’s swashbuckler D’Artagnan from The Three Musketeers (1844) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective Sherlock Holmes” (ibid.), and wrote countless Batman scripts in the years that followed. By even Kane’s own admission, Finger embellished and contributed to many aspects of the mythos (including rechristening what was initially New York as “Gotham City”), yet was never credited as co-creator of Batman: “Bob Kane had made his deal with DC Comics on his own, and Finger was merely Kane’s employee” (ibid., 31).
Lest anyone doubt the real-world superheroic capabilities of a fictional character, let me state for the record that Batman taught me how to read.
For in watching the syndicated reruns of the Adam West series in the late seventies—the kitschy opening credits, specifically—my not-yet-literate mind eventually recognized a correlation between the splashy title-card logo and repetitive choral chant that accompanied it, and “Batman” became the first word I could read and write. Absolutely true story.
I loved the old Batman show—the pop-art color scheme and Dutch angles (not that I took conscious note of such stylistics at the time) were like a cartoon come to life. The camp humor? Entirely lost on me: When Batman and Robin slid down the Batpoles and zoomed off in the Batmobile—staged in that glorious life-sized playset of a Batcave—the sense of adventure was kinetic. And when the villain-of-the-week left our heroes for dead in some Rube Goldbergian contraption—their fate to be determined in twenty-four agonizing hours!—the tension was excruciating.
Unlike most of my heroes at that time—Michael Knight, the Duke boys—the Dynamic Duo weren’t confined to the limited jurisdiction of their own fictional worlds, but rather popped up elsewhere, too, in animated form on The New Scooby-Doo Movies and Super Friends, and I never quite understood why no one had thought to put Adam West, Christopher Reeve, and Lynda Carter in a movie together; with no concept of copyright issues or irreconcilable aesthetics or what later came to be called “shared cinematic universes,” it seemed like a no-brainer to assemble an all-star superhero team from the preexisting talent pool.
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
Thirty-five years after I—along with an entire generation raised on the same pop-cultural diet, it turns out—first dreamed it, the team formerly known as the Super Friends are getting the tent-pole treatment next month with the release of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Warner Bros.’ opening-salvo attempt at the kind of license to print cash shared cinematic universe Marvel has so deftly pioneered (to the envy of every studio in Hollywood). Fanboy anticipation is at a full boil, if enthusiasm on social media is any barometer; many are counting down the days with a breadth of fanaticism ordinarily reserved for the Second Coming, others forecasting the would-be mega-franchise’s stillbirth, but all are anxiously awaiting Dawn.
Not me, though. I can say with absolute and irrevocable certainty that I’ll be sitting out Batman v Superman—in theaters, on home video, on cable. In perpetuity.
Last week, we looked at the Joker as portrayed by Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton’s 1989 blockbuster Batman and analyzed his five traits:
Criminally, murderously sociopathic
Wickedly macabre sense of humor
Grandiose/theatrical
Artistic/aesthetic
Egomaniacal
This interpretation somewhat varied from those that had come before it: He was certainly more lethal than Cesar Romero’s Clown Prince of Crime from the old Adam West series, and artistic is such a singular Tim Burton peculiarity—a signature he left on the crazy-quilt mosaic that comprises the Joker in his ever-evolving mythic totality; in American Idol’s clichéd parlance, Burton “made it his own.” His Joker shared an undeniable DNA strand with the arch-villain created by Jerry Robinson, Bill Finger, and Bob Kane in 1940, the one later personified by Romero in the sixties, as well as then-contemporary comic incarnations as envisioned by Frank Miller (The Dark Knight Returns), Alan Moore (The Killing Joke), and Grant Morrison (Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth), despite the markedly different aesthetics within which each of those varied interpretations were realized.
Because where is the line drawn, really, between a reinterpretation and an altogether different character? How does an artist (in a vocationally general sense) redefine a folkloric figure to reflect his own personal idiosyncrasies, the sociocultural conditions of the day, or both, while still working within the recognizable parameters of a time-honored fictional creation?
To commemorate his seventy-fifth anniversary, the United States Postal Service recently released a sheet of stamps featuring an illustration of Batman from each of the four culturally designated periods of comic-book history: Golden Age; Silver Age; Bronze Age; Modern Age. In light of Entertainment Weekly’s recent observation that we seemed to have reached peak Batman saturation, I can’t help but feel a nostalgic longing for the Batman of my youth. My Batman. You know the one I mean: The Batman that hopped behind the bubbled windshield of the Batmobile, an earnest Robin riding shotgun, fiery thrust of the afterburner blasting my heroes from the Batcave…
Hmm. That could’ve been several different Batmans—even in those more innocent times (for him and me)—now that I’m thinking it over. My first exposure to the Caped Crusader came in the form of syndicated afternoon reruns of the old Adam West series (which had ended its run over a decade earlier); at some point, my not-yet-literate mind recognized a correlation between the show’s splashy opening logo and repetitive choral chant that accompanied it, and “Batman,” to my mother’s surprise and delight, became the first word I could read and write. (She was, mercifully, apparently either unaware of or unconcerned with the admonitions of Fredric Wertham a quarter century prior.) Batman also had a strong animated presence at the time, appearing concurrently in a Filmation series that served as a de facto sequel to the ‘60s live-action show, as well as the long-running Super Friends franchise from Hanna-Barbera. (That these aired on competing networks, something that would never happen today, only serves to illustrate how comic-book characters have gone, in my lifetime, from licensed-property afterthoughts to tightly leashed, billion-dollar corporate assets. But, that’s a topic for another article…)
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