Tag Archives: joseph campbell

The Mythology of Star Wars

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In 1987 a groundbreaking conversation took place between scholar Joseph Campbell and journalist Bill Moyers on the topic of mythology, this conversation was recorded at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch and was turned into a famous 5 part series called ‘The Power of Myth’. In this series, Joseph Campbell delved deep into the world of mythology, and even discussed the archetypal figures that Lucas had used in the Star Wars films. Joseph Campbell left this earth shortly after in 1988, but Bill Moyers returned to the Skywalker ranch in 2000 to further discuss with George Lucas, the mythological grounding which his movies were based on. The result is another fascinating 5 part conversation series on mythology, watch this if you are a fan of Joseph Campbell or Star Wars, or film analysis in general, and you will surely find something of worth!
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Joseph Campbell’s ‘Monomyth’

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Joseph Campbell was an extraordinary man with an extensive knowledge on world mythology, symbolism and psychology; he borrowed elements from Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, and his concept of archetypes, and used them both to help bridge a gap between East and West and all of the world religions and rituals. Joseph Campbell is most famous for his formulation of the fascinating and widely studied ‘monomyth’ theory, which states that all myths and stories – whether they be from religious texts or fiction novels – follow the same narrative structure, which he called the ‘the hero’s journey’. This structure was outlined step by step in Campbell’s best selling book, ‘The Hero With a Thousand Faces’, and is referred to as the ‘monomyth’, or one-myth, which is an archetypal journey or transformation that is repeated in every story told by man, in an endless circular pattern. The reason this theory is so popular, is that it touches on that intuitive element found in every man, that nothing is really separate, and that man and the universe is really interconnected in every way.

Zelda

1). The Call to Adventure
2). Crossing of the Threshold (Entering the Unknown)
3). Trials and Tribulations of the Journey
4). Attainment of Enlightenment
5). Return of the Hero

Take a good look at any myth, story, novel or movie, and chances are you can see all of the same elements, simply wearing a different mask. The short video below shows one such example of the ‘monomyth’, found in the great sci fi masterpiece: ‘The Matrix’.

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Hindu Mythology: Hanuman

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Hinduism

Hanuman from the Hindu story Ramayana

Hanuman is the monkey servant who opens up his chest to reveal two little dolls, a boy doll with blue skin and a girl doll with fair skin. The boy doll is the avatar/incarnation of the Hindu God Vishnu, called Rama (or Ram), who came to earth thousands of years ago to rescue the planet from the demon king Ravana. The girl doll was Sita, Rama’s wife. When Ravana kidnapped Sita, the pure hearted Prince Rama rushed to rescue her, but he couldn’t do it alone.
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Screen Narrative

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This week’s reading by Stadler & McWilliam, titled Screen Narratives: Traditions and Trends, dissects the patterns and structures of film, television and game narratives. Stadler & McWilliam take the reader on a journey through the history of screen narrative, from the traditional three-act narrative to the fragmented and multi-strand narratives that have become increasingly popular since Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994). Stadler & McWilliam differentiate between the terms plot and story, which are often confused as meaning the same thing, and they also introduce the structuralism technique for analysing narratives, using the movie Natural Born Killers (1994) as an example. The authors then compare film narrative with television narrative and finish off by exploring the narrative found in video games.

 Stadler & McWilliam (2009, p. 156) suggest that movies such as Crash (2004), Babel (2006) and Pulp Fiction (1994) indicate that screen narratives are ‘becoming more complex, adventurous and experimental’, compared to the classical narration style which typically follow a three-act structure (beginning, middle and end), fragmented narratives are often ‘broken up into jumbled segments featuring an array of characters in different places or non-sequential timelines’ (Stadler & McWilliam, 2009, p. 157). I’ll draw from the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) to illustrate this style of narrative structure. The movie begins with Jim Carrey’s character Joel Barish waking up in his bed, he then skips work and catches the train to Montauk. Upon arriving he sits on the beach and opens his diary only to notice pages missing that he doesn’t remember ripping out, ‘it appears this is my first entry in two years’ he thinks to himself. Later he meets a girl with blue hair called Clementine and they appear to hit it off.

 The audience would assume at this stage that the movie is running in a sequential order that is characteristic of the classical narration style, but this idea is shot down fairly suddenly. Joel is seen parked outside his girlfriend’s house when a man walks up to his car and asks him what he’s doing there, the scene then jumps to Joel driving in the night, crying over what we expect to be the eventual breakup of his new relationship. We eventually discover that he was crying because his girlfriend had her memory of their relationship completely erased, out of sadness and rage he goes to the clinic that erased her memory and asks them to do the same for him. Joel is asleep for the rest of the movie while scientists on computers attempt to erase his past relationship, the narrative then shifts from memory to memory of the good and bad times that they had together. Eventually he wakes up and has completely forgotten about Clementine, and the audience soon discovers that the sequence of events that then follow lead to the events of the beginning of the movie.

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