Are We Over the Hero’s Journey?
“All the heroes I know are dead,” Natalya Simonova tells James Bond in the 1995 Martin Campbell film Golden Eye. She wants 007 to stop being a hero—a call to end heroism or has the hero’s journey come to an end—that Campbellian idea that all heroes in story cross the same milestones. She’s not the only fictional character to complain about heroes.
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Morgan Freeman says, “heroes are out of fashion,” in the 2006 Bruce Beresford film Contract. And more recently, Maya Rudolph says, “I hear the universe saying ‘your heroes are dying,’” in Amy Poehler’s Wine Country. In response, there’s been a resounding rise of the anti-hero, from the begrudging Nolan Batman in Dark Knight to Deadpool, Joker, Logan, and even last year with Oppenheimer, Napoleon, and The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. As Alfred ominously foretells in the Dark Knight, “You either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.”
Nonetheless, they point to an important question: Is the hero’s journey dead? Well, yes and no. It’s true, we have been seemingly stuck in endless calls to adventure, but the hero’s journey is just the first half of a greater process of lifetime growth. The rest of it entails embarking upon a heroine’s journey.
Most famously, George Lucas used the hero’s journey in making Star Wars—A New Hope, based on Joseph Campbell’s theory of the monomyth, which essentially argues that all of mythology’s epics could be boiled down to 17 steps, which then Christopher Vogler further sanitized and distilled into 12. The idea is that if you utilize these stages, drawing fundamentally from mythological motifs and archetypes, you’re guaranteed to tell a psychologically satisfying story that readers and audiences will want to read or watch again and again.
The proof is in the success of Star Wars, a film that no one wanted made, no one really believed in. Up until then, fantasy sci-fi was for kids. But Lucas bent the genre to put cowboys in space on a journey of mythological proportion, breaking records and becoming the highest grossing film of all time, surpassing Jaws, which led Steven Spielberg to take out a congratulatory ad in the New York Times where Artoo reels in Jaws.
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When asked about his storytelling methods, Lucas pointed to Joseph Campbell as his mentor, even inviting him to Skywalker Ranch to do a 6-hour PBS interview with Bill Moyers, which was later published as The Power of Myth and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 58 weeks in 1988. The notion that storytelling had a blueprint galvanized Hollywood into churning out copy-cat blockbusters hoping to follow in Lucas’s footsteps, eventually leaving some writers to wonder if it’s all too formulaic.
Thus, beyond a mere passing character thought, there seems to be an authorial critique, a consensus that the hero’s journey has become a tired trope. William Miller believes that the problem is in the sequels. What happens to the hero after? Generalizing here, but his argument goes: Every great movie has produced seriously bad sequels. But you don’t have to look too far to debunk this assertion, given the success of so many films in the Marvel universe or the Fast & Furious franchise juggernaut.
Ken Miyamoto makes the bold claim that the hero’s journey is dead because the truth is, we all hated Luke Skywalker. Really? That’s a proof when Star Wars still ranks as the #2 top lifetime grossing film, when adjusted for inflation, beat out only by Gone with the Wind. Christoph Vandewiele says that either the hero’s journey must die or the author is redundant. He calls it an “outdated theoretical model.”
But is it outdated or have we Boomers, Gen-Xers, and some Millennials—we who have been raised on Star Wars—have we simply outgrown it? Have we middle-aged out of the genre? To say that it no longer speaks to us as a model, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t still speak to some. We can’t make the mistake of assuming that because we’ve tired of it, all future generations must be as well.
George Lucas wrote about the coming-of-age experience, and Luke Skywalker is a prime example of a young adult coming into adulthood, representing the ego-defining psychological experience of individuation—separating from the all-consuming “self” and becoming an individual without an inflated ego. It’s a process, and mythology has already paved the way, hence the reference to its archetypes. As Lucas says, “I’m telling an old myth in a new way.”
Still, what comes after coming of age? Campbell argued that the monomyth stood for the journey of “everyman” (what he explains to mean as every person regardless of gender … also let’s not forget that he wrote this in 1949). The proof of the monomyth was in mythology and psychology, a claim he never takes the time to actually prove. But if we may revert to the Jungian psychological underpinnings of his theory, individuation—that psychological path of coming into selfhood—is represented by the hero’s journey, if only partially.
Check out Nadia Salem’s The Monomyth Reboot here:
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Initially, your ego and self are born together, undifferentiated. Through the process of individuation and coming of age, confronting archetypes such as the persona and shadow, your ego inflates and deflates until, at the conclusion of the journey, it is properly sized and wholly separated from the self. This is a heroic, praiseworthy achievement. But it’s not done. Once fully realized as a distinct entity different from the self, the ego yearns for a return and reintegration with the self. This is also a process, and it’s known as the heroine’s journey.
The best articulation of the heroine’s journey has been Maureen Murdock’s, The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness. In it, she explains that in her practice and experience, women go through nine stages to achieve wholeness, stages drawn from Campbell’s monomyth and retooled. I would add that for storytelling purposes, the heroine’s journey is as genderless as the hero’s journey. Just as the hero’s journey is a coming of age, the heroine’s journey is a coming of middle age, a journey accessible to anyone on a path of growth and individuation—with the ultimate goal of achieving a reunion with the forsaken self.
And so, in some respects, I agree with William Miller. At times, there has been a paucity in sequels that matched the tenor and verve of its origin story. Take for example the sequels to The Matrix, which were so bad, people are still talking about it 20 years later. At the end of those, Neo dies at last, putting audiences out of their misery. For the Wachowskis, they were taking a deconstructionist, postmodern approach, which is a bit much to put on a movie and it showed. They failed to realize that the end result of postmodernism followed to its logical conclusion, according to Friedrich Nietzsche, is nihilism.
However, in 2021, Neo is resurrected because his consciousness is incomplete unless and until he’s reunited with Trinity, his other (better) half, in The Matrix Resurrections. Philosophically speaking, this is the transmodern turn, recapturing some salient, necessary old ways, traditions, beliefs, or manners that were previously deconstructed as categorically baseless or untrue but are now being seen as true enough for some. Monomythically and psychologically speaking, Neo embarks on a heroine’s journey to be reunited with his “self” in the conclusion of a life fully individuated to achieve harmony and a lasting peace. In The Matrix, he came of age, in Resurrections, he came of middle of age.
Lana Wachowskis is not the first or the last to employ the heroine’s journey in story. Its blueprint can be found in the mythology of Eros and Psyche, the novels Jane Eyre, To Kill a Mockingbird, Their Eyes Were Watching God, TV series such as Picard and Mandalorian, and movies from Snow White to Frozen, and myriad others including Star Trek (2009), Skyfall, Guardians of the Galaxy, Oscar winners like A Beautiful Mind, Rocky, Gladiator, Moonlight, and The Shape of Water, oldies like It’s a Wonderful Life and The Sound of Music, and newbies like Barbie, plus countless others.
Yes, as intimated by Alfred, actualized by Neo, and embodied by the monomyth, die a hero and be reborn in the footsteps of the heroine.
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