The Hero’s Journey is dead
“I grew up on Star Trek, the original series. It was a formative influence on my identity and my understanding of the world.”
(Jenkins, in Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling, p. 15)
Hi, I’m Christoph and as a transmedia business innovator and college professor, it is my firm belief that the Monomyth, or Hero’s Journey, is outdated as a creative tool for writers in the media and entertainment industry.
In a galaxy not so far, far away, George Lucas cited Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the inspiration for Star Wars (Lucas, 1977). Ever since, Hollywood screenwriters, Broadway musical writers, and many other creative writers have used Campbell’s theory of the hero’s journey as a blueprint for making emotionally engaging stories. Campbell (1949) conducted in-depth research and comparison of mythology and concluded that there is a structure to be found in all ancient myths. There is a common thread, he argues, that runs through myth and legend, across cultures, and presents itself in stories told throughout the world. The themes described in Campbell’s work have permeated American culture, appearing on stage, in movies, and in stories that have become part of everyday life. This work of comparative mythology stimulated Vogler (1985, 1992, 1998, and 2007) to develop a similar but more practical structure, with the Hollywood screenwriter clearly in mind, A Practical Guide to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Vogler, 1985). Vogler later updated his work, publishing under the title The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters (Vogler, 1992 and 1998), and revised it again almost 10 years later in The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (Vogler, 2007).
Lewis (2003) and Bordwell (2006) note that, once George Lucas confirmed he had used the concept of the hero’s journey as a creative tool to write the journey of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars (1977), it soon became a guiding tool for creative writers and other entertainers, who hoped to recreate Lucas’s financial success. The simple structure of a single story with a single hero still works and is not outdated, given the success of Star Wars (Lucasfilm), Star Trek (Roddenberry), Iron Man (Marvel), and Avatar (Cameron). The question might arise, however, of whether audiences need something more — not to replace the concept of the hero’s journey, but to complement this creative tool. Standing on the shoulders of Campbell (1949) and Vogler (1992, 2007) might be more interesting than just standing next to them. Looking at the origin story of Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, one might say that the way people consume those stories has changed, and thus there is room for a more contemporary or evolved way to tell stories. Rose (2011) also concludes that the digitalization of society is reshaping Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the way we tell stories.
The main purpose of storytelling using the concept of the hero’s journey as a creative tool shifted from sharing examples of normative behaviour to entertainment purposes. As the monomyth became a guiding tool for many creative writers, it led to the “death of the author”, as its predictability reduced its entertainment value. Barthes and Howard (2013) even argue that using the concept of the hero’s journey as a tool creates more restrictions for creative writers than guidance. Zuckerman concluded that “it seems that we are stuck in an endless and simplified stage of the hero’s journey, striking all the familiar notes before we fade into rolling credits” (2015). Given all the changes the current context for creative writing has undergone since the original context of those myths, this essay examines in detail the contextual change that drives the need for a broader perspective: the WHO-context changed, the WHEN-context changed and the WHY-context changed. These are the key factors that will be explored to examine the thesis statement: the monomyth, or the hero’s journey, is outdated as the main creative tool for writers and, unless it is accompanied by complementary structures to broaden the perspectives of writers, it will become obsolete as a tool for creativity.
Searching for arguments to keep using the journey of the hero as a guideline for creative writers, Palumbo (2009) provided in The Monomyth in Star Trek one of many demonstrations of how the monomyth works as an underlying plot structure. However interesting this opposing viewpoint might be, Palumbo does not take into account the emancipation shift the audience has made (the WHO-context). Moreover, he does not examine the multi-platform shift that creative storytelling has made (the WHEN-context). Finally, he does not distinguish between the use of the hero’s journey as a writing tool and its use as a creative tool for writers (the WHY-context).
To begin with, the WHO-context changed.
Using the concept of the hero’s journey as a creative tool, modern writers should understand that their audience has changed and so has the role of storytelling for that audience. In tribal times, stories or myths were told around the campfire, mainly in patriarchal societies. Tribes were ruled by men, and men were the driving force in those small societies. Men continued being the main protagonists in our world. It is only in the last century that there has been a shift from that patriarchal society towards a matriarchal society. The role of emancipated women in society is shifting from a passive one towards a more participatory protagonist one. Zuckerman states in the article “The Gendered Journey” that “the need to identify with female characters who take on these challenges in storytelling is also growing” (2015). Considering the evolution of Disney princesses and the ambition to create new female heroes in the entertainment industry in general, for example Katniss in The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012; Kirby, 2015), one could argue that they are only female characters whose transformations are still the result of the classic hero’s journey. Donaldson (2017) states that “scholarly arguments tend towards two positions: that a female hero is an oxymoron; or that she should be limited to battles on behalf of women in which she champions feminine characteristics and challenges the belief that femininity is not heroic”. Neither of these positions takes archetypal heroism into account.
Advocating a return to Jungian archetypal theory, Donaldson (2017) argues that “the masculinity of the archetype may be as successfully performed by a female hero as by a male hero. Once this premise is accepted, the female hero should be expected to undergo the same trials and perform the same function as a male hero; in short, she should navigate the heroic monomyth outlined by Joseph Campbell”. However, one needs to look further to facilitate the identification of the female audience in modern storytelling. It is not because the hero is replaced with a heroine that the female audience can identify with the main character. Reviewing research on the many ways Disney portrays female characters, one could conclude that there is an evolution in gender stereotyping. In the early days of Disney, people would watch princesses who just wanted to get home. There was no real transformation. It was the prince or the knight who featured in the climactic scenes.
Today, however, society has evolved into a more matriarchal world where emancipated heroines like Elsa have come to the fore and endured their own transformations. Azmi et al. (2016) state that “female characters in Frozen differ from the female characters in previous Disney movies, such as The Little Mermaid and Tangled”. By comparing the speech characteristics of both the male and female characters in Frozen, Azmi et al. (2016) show that both used an almost equal number of female speech elements in their dialogues. Interestingly, although the female characters do not behave stereotypically, their speech still contains the elements of female speech, such as the use of empty adjectives, questions, hedges, and intensifiers. Azmi et al. (2016) argue that “the blurring of boundaries between male and female speech characteristics in Frozen is an attempt to break gender stereotyping by showing that female characters share similar characteristics with heroic male characters; thus, they should not be seen as inferior to the male characters”.
Research by Hine et al. (2018) confirms that Disney is indeed presenting viewers with more diverse, androgynous, and balanced characters. However, more recent research by Palupi concludes that “although Disney attempts to represent its princesses as the independent women, it still does not let the princesses conduct their quest without any help from men. This is caused by the lack of self-confidence they suffer as women, who mostly think that they are not as good as men in accomplishing a quest” (2019, p. 4). Research by Hine, Ivanovik and England (2018) complicates and enhances the current discussion regarding the influence of gender role models, particularly those within the Disney franchise. Children viewing a newer Disney film did not change their perceptions of princesses more broadly. Moreover, Hine et al. (2018) concluded that a large proportion of children did not identify specific main female characters as princesses at all. This demonstrates that it is not because the hero is replaced with a heroine that the female audience can identify with the main character.
Convinced that the concept of the hero’s journey is an outdated tool for creative writers, the psychotherapist and mythologist Maureen Murdock wrote The Heroine’s Journey, which was published in 1990. Relying on Joseph Campbell’s model of the hero’s journey, she adapted this monomythic pattern to the needs of female psychology and the need to identify with the main character. Examining in detail the transformation of Katniss in The Hunger Games, Golban and Fidan find a nice example of the concept of the heroine’s journey:
Suzanne Collins’ novel The Hunger Games has as its central metaphor the monomythic journey of the heroine. During her heroic enterprise, Collins’s protagonist, Katniss, turns inward, discovers and embraces her feminine nature, and seeks a satisfactory life paradigm as a result of which she attains the inner integration and reconciliation of both masculine and feminine aspects of her personality; she also understands and accomplishes her purpose in life. By recognizing the mythical and archetypal situations, which are subverted or inverted in the novel, Collins revises the significance of private and public achievements in the contemporary community. (Golban and Fidan, 2018, p. 96)
Katniss’s journey as a heroine is not the only female exception to the classic hero’s journey. While George Lucas used the concept of the hero’s journey as a creative tool to write the journey of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, it is interesting to observe how Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens does not follow the classic hero’s journey as previously conceptualized. Instead, Doctor (2017) states that “the storyline of The Force Awakens follows the contemporary heroine’s journey while conforming to the essential construct of the hero monomyth. First, the contemporary heroine’s journey focuses primarily on the greater good and secondarily on her own personal journey, which is the converse of the traditional hero’s journey. Second, the contemporary heroine’s self is awakened and called to adventure in a different way than the traditional hero. Third, the traditional hero receives guidance on his journey, while the contemporary heroine pushes ahead alone, striving to save her society from despair” (2017). That is why the journey of the hero is outdated and needs to be complemented with contemporary structures like the journey of the heroine.
Secondly, the WHEN-context changed.
The moment of story consumption has changed as the media and technology has evolved. The creator is no longer fully in control of the moment of narrative consumption. After the emergence of technology, storytelling found its way to radio, cinema, and portable devices, making it possible to consume stories in any way, anytime, anywhere. By the definition of cross-media storytelling, a story can be told now on almost any medium. This makes it possible to consume cross-media stories any time of the day, not only while taking time to only listen to those stories, but also while combining the story consumption with other activities such as eating, commuting, sports and other forms of leisure. This form of cross-media storytelling opened the door to transmedia, a form of storytelling described by Jenkins (2006) as a narrative that “unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole” (p. 95).
Using transmedia storytelling techniques, modern creative writers can now take into account many other aspects of storytelling. The gaming narrative, where the player has control over the hero’s journey, requires a less rigid structure, allowing room for this co-creative narrative and interactive storytelling. Describing how to bring interactivity into Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey, Delmas, Champagnat and Augeraud (2007) state that “Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey’ is only a first stepping stone and needs to be adapted into a new interactive execution architecture based on the needs of interactive storytelling, especially in the domain of serious games”. Galanina (2018) states that “in videogames, the monomyth (J. Campbell), using three main stages, exodus, initiation, and returning, becomes the basic narrative structure. In modern videogames that leads to a sort of ‘democratization’ of the hero phenomenon”.
However, gaming is not the only transmedia platform that needs a new interactive structure of the hero’s journey. Examples such as The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999), The Dark Night (Nolan, 2008) and the research of Myers (2017) on the relationship between Lucasfilm, Fox and fans, demonstrate that interactivity with the original creative text is increasingly important in this new transmedia context. Interactivity between the original creative writer and fanboy authors is a crucial part of creative storytelling, in which new content is produced in a transmedia context by multiple individuals, all tapping into a common story world at different moments, in different locations, using different media platforms and technology. Analysing multiple polymediated narratives, Herbig and Herrmann state:
Modern stories are the product of a recursive process influenced by elements of genre, outside content, medium, and more. These stories exist in a multitude of forms and are transmitted across multiple media and platforms. Particularly in this media age, the definitions of terms such as “content”, “consumption”, and “authorship” are changing. For instance, audiences are no longer assumed to be passive consumers of media (Tyma, Herrmann, & Herbig, 2015). Academics, producers, and advertisers alike attempt to account for the ways they are blogging, Tweeting during broadcasts, Facebooking spoilers, writing fan fiction, or being involved with participatory television talk shows dedicated to one particular series. These people are active participants, both consumers and producers simultaneously. On the other side, the producers, directors, and writers - traditionally thought of as the authors of our public texts - are now forced to interact and react to their audiences in ways that position them as much as interpreter as creator (McGee, 1990). This can be seen most clearly in the recent transformation of stories being created for television (Mittell, 2015). After all, even what we refer to as television is changing, as we binge on Netflix, have continual access via mobile devices, and watch screens within screens, easily flipping from one show to another (Brasel & Gips, 2011). Because of our changing relationship to both medium and content, coming to terms with the creation and continuation of narratives and mythology on serialized television is a daunting, yet necessary inquiry. (Herbig & Herrmann, 2016)
While referring to The Collective Journey of Jeff Gomez, Zuckerman states that “the metanarrative in the collective journey can be viewed as the synthesis of all stories, experiences, history, ideas, beliefs of all humanity. It is comprised of the narratives of all who ever lived” (2016). Even though Star Wars is used many times as an example of the success of the hero’s journey in Hollywood, Hassler-Forest and Guynes (2017) clearly demonstrate how the story world of Star Wars evolved into transmedia storytelling as defined by Jenkins (2010).
“In that way, these polymediated narratives create mythological worlds that are not bound by Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. The intersection of transmedia and myth leads to interactive stories built around worlds rather than just a single character” (Herbig & Herrmann, 2016, p. 6)
The possibility of transmedia story consumption is also why the journey of the hero is outdated and needs to be complemented with concepts like the collective journey and other structural patterns for transmedia storytelling. Through their research, Javanshir et al. (2020) concluded that “these patterns can be used to extend transmedia language and help form taxonomies, by identifying common patterns and their usages amongst various forms of transmedia stories” (p. 42).
Thirdly, the WHY-context for the use of the concept of the hero’s journey as a creative tool changed.
Omni-presence leads to predictability. A creative tool loses its ability to stimulate creativity the moment the audience is too familiar with the structure. A writer should understand that the hero’s journey as a storytelling structure, is not only present anymore in myths and creative stories. The purpose or the role of myths can be defined as using storytelling as a tool to share values among group members, educating newer generations about transformational processes that come from good behaviour, and making sure the whole group shares the same definitions of what is right or wrong.
Furthermore, the literary fairy tale had various social functions. Zipes (1988) concluded that “for the most part, these early literary fairy tales were not intended for children” (p. 10). Stories using the hero’s journey as a backbone are, as noted by Hineline (2018), “prominent in essays on social issues, fund-raising appeals and political speeches, and they are the bedrock of theatre. Foundational narratives are at the roots of major religions and of conflicts between them, and narrative has been proposed as an organizing basis for psychological wellbeing as well as a source of empathetic reactions” (p. 21).
Beyond essays and classical narratives, one encounters the concept of the hero’s journey in education, therapy, and even tourism. Delmas et al. (2007) demonstrated how this concept can be used for educational games. Moreover, Gouvea et al. (2019) stated that “storytelling is a technique that has been getting attention in organizations for a long time. Due to its playfulness, stories can attract the reader and contribute to triggering tacit knowledge, facilitating communication, stimulating exchange and creativity. Thus, it could be a useful tool to capture lessons learned”. Brown and Moffet (1999) also conclude that the hero’s journey can help educators transform schools and improve learning. Goldstein (2005) explored the ways in which the hero’s journey metaphor offered support to new primary school teachers, due to its emphasis on transformation and growth, and found that the metaphor was helpful to the students.
Duffy and Guiffrida (2014) revealed a three-phase process of counsellor and supervisor development, similar to the process of development and transformation described in the hero’s journey. Many aspects of Campbell’s treatment of the hero’s journey as a conceptual metaphor in therapy have been examined. Scarlet (2017) studied the use of a hero’s journey through acceptance and commitment therapy. Klees (2016) examined a case study on the use of the role method in individual drama therapy. Lawson (2005) concludes that the counsellor’s understanding of Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey “can assist the client’s development” (2005). Robertson and Lawrence (2015) also examined the hero’s journey from a relational–cultural perspective and illustrated the “ways in which counsellors can aid clients in making sense of the struggles they face on their own personal journeys”.
Superhero tourism, or transformational tourism, is the third example an industry using Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey. Robedlo and Batle (2017) demonstrate how transformative travel draws on the metaphor of Campbell’s archetypical journey of transformation (the hero’s journey). Using a phenomenological approach, they analyzed touristic experiences that foster transformation and identified eight factors: personal situation, unfamiliar activities, interaction with people, live the moment, difficulty, setting, reflection and integration. The research of Robedlo and Batle (2017) concludes that in order to describe that transformative travel process, the three stages of the hero’s journey (departure, initiation and return) are applied as a storytelling structure towards the tourism consumers.
However, the usefulness of the hero’s journey concept to many other industries is a serious disadvantage for its use as a creative tool for writers. Runco and Jaeger (2012) state that creativity requires both originality (or novelty) and effectiveness (or utility). Simonton (2012) adds a third criterion — surprise. The mere omnipresence of the journey of the hero in society makes it less impactful and original as a creative tool for writers and takes away the element of surprise.
Enter the End Game.
In conclusion, even though George Lucas cited Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the inspiration for Star Wars (Lucas, 1977) and Vogler offered a practical structure for writers in The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters, Hollywood screenwriters, Broadway musical writers, and many other creative writers should not be too hasty in solely depending on these structures as a creative tool. The monomyth, or the hero’s journey, should be considered an inspiring but outdated theoretical model, deriving from creative stories and myths dating from another period entirely, when people lived differently, listened to or read stories in another context, and used other media technology to consume stories. Looking at this triple W-argument — using Who, When and Why — the audience, the moments when stories are consumed and the purpose as to why stories are created, differ from their original context. This makes the concept of the hero’s journey too restrictive for current creative writers in a transmedia entertainment world. Scholars and business analysts who argue for the use of Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces or Vogler’s practical mythic structure by pointing to the financial achievement of some of Hollywood’s greatest success stories consider the concept of the hero’s journey as a tool for success measured in dollars, not in creativity.
As Campbell’s work was based upon insights from myths from old societies, contemporary writers looking for a creative tool today should understand that the way people live has since evolved. We now live in a global world. Men are no longer the sole protagonist in our society, and the emancipation of women demands an updated form of identification with the protagonists and thus updated structures to help writers in their creative process. Stories are no longer told unidirectional towards the audience, and interactive or digital technology has an immense impact on our ability to consume and interact with stories from multiple platforms. The journey of the hero is now omnipresent and is even used in schools and workplaces, in therapeutic sessions, and even in new status tourism. Through its omnipresence, however, the concept of the hero’s journey loses its element of surprise and thus its power as a creative tool.
All three of these factors are reasons to understand that it is “Game Over” for the hero’s journey and time to build further on the works of Campbell and Vogler and evolve from the monomyth, or hero’s journey, into new territory.
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