The workings of a dream factory

The "hero's journey" is supposed to be the mythological template from which all stories derive - a conclusion Campbell reached after a lifetime's comparative study of the world's myths. Campbell was very influenced by Jungian psychology, which also adores mythic "archetypes", and via him a huge amount of pop-Jungian buzz-words have become popular in Hollywood. In fact, Campbell himself was utterly promiscuous in his theoretical borrowings, snatching phrases from Freud as happily as from Jung, but the producers, directors and writers who think his work solves every dramatic problem under the sun are obviously not so interested in that. The Hero... is spoken of in Hollywood almost as if it is a religious text, and reading it a mystic revelation. In reality, though, most of them probably haven't read it, as the book is quite heavy-going, and rely instead on the simplified interpretation provided by Christopher Vogler in his book The Writer's Journey. Vogler was a script analyst at Disney who wrote a brief "guide" to Campbell which soon became required reading in the industry. Now he is employed on vast sums of money to probe writers with questions about the "threshold guardians" in their scripts in an effort to improve mediocre material.

The "hero's journey" goes like this. A hero living in the ordinary world receives a call to adventure. At first s/he refuses the call, but with the aid of a mentor crosses the first threshold and embarks on his/her journey. After meeting tests, allies and enemies, s/he approaches the inmost cave where s/he undergoes the supreme ordeal, and escapes with some prize - a sword, or magical talisman, or the "elixir of life". S/he is pursued on the road home by enemies, symbolically dies and is resurrected, and returns to the ordinary world with the elixir, transformed, and so transforming the world s/he left at the beginning.

This pattern is very obvious in the original Star Wars. Obi Wan is the mentor; the supreme ordeal is where Luke is pulled under the water of the Death Star trashmaker and we think he is dead. In The Empire Strikes Back, the inmost cave and supreme ordeal are when Luke is on Yoda's planet. In all three of the original films there is a battle scene in which Luke is almost killed but "resurrected".

Others have used it quite transparently - for example Terry Gilliam in The Fisher King, the eponymous hero being a favourite of Campbell's - but scores of film-makers use the approach for stories with no apparent mythical element at all. The underlying theory is that stories work because they follow the pattern of myth, which has the resonance it has because myths tap into, and are metaphors for, common human experience. We are all the "hero", and the "journey" is a metaphor for life.

Vogler explicitly relates his version of Campbell to the "three-act" paradigm all Hollywood producers, writers and script analysts have long since sworn by (act two starts with crossing the first threshold, act three with the "road back"). At one level this three-act system is simply a statement of Aristotle's view that all stories must have "a beginning, middle and end". But the Hollywood dramaturgists go further than this, and specify precise proportions between acts, and even at what page in the script the acts should start.² There is an element, even a large one, of truth in both the "hero's journey" and the "three-act" paradigm. Indeed, if there wasn't, these approaches would not have proved so popular and influential. But there are other reasons than their partial truthfulness and practical use which have made these "models" so vital in contemporary Hollywood.

It's child's play to point to films which violate either the "three-act" structure (try and find the clear turning points in Mean Streets), or have nothing much to do with a hero's journey, except in so far as you can make anything fit if you try hard enough. But the element of truth is important.

It's true that stories often have power because at their core they are about some universal, common human experience; and it's surely true that many myths are metaphors for life. A story narrowly focused on some specific social ill, for example, will often feel best suited for an American-style TV movie ("disease of the week", as they like to put it), or will feel like somewhat declamatory propaganda.

But even mythological templates can serve an ideological purpose, something to which Campbell is quite oblivious. Take, for example, the myth of Icarus. Daedelus makes wings for himself and his son, Icarus, to escape imprisonment, attaching the wings to their bodies with wax. Despite warnings, Icarus flies too close to the sun, the wax melts, and he plunges into the sea. No doubt it's possible to interpret this as a general life-metaphor. But it is surely, first and foremost, a story about knowing your place, and not meddling with things outside your role in life - about social and political power. Neither Campbell nor his Hollywood disciples seem in the slightest aware of this side to mythology.

Similarly, it is undoubtedly true that stories need beginnings, middles and ends, and that in some way the end resolves whatever conflict is established at the beginning.³ Thus far, any story can be divided into three "acts". But what does an "end" mean; what does "resolution" mean? In Hollywood it almost invariably means a finished, absolute resolution of whatever problem: "order" is restored and the world is once again a safe, or better, place - which often takes the form of a "happy ending". But it is not only that stories shouldn't have to have happy endings; more than that, a "resolution" can raise questions it doesn't seek to answer.

In the Italian neo-realist classic Da Sica's Bicycle Thieves, an unemployed worker pawns his family's sheets for a bike which he needs for a new job. When the bike is stolen, he embarks on a journey across the city with his young son to find it. He fails to do so, and after thinking he's put his son on a bus home, steals a bike leaning on a wall. He's caught, and his son witnesses his humiliation. There's no simple resolution here,⁴ but there is no question that the story has ended. It has ended, however, not with a crass restoration of "order", but with a more complex emotional and political question, which hangs unanswered in the air.

"Resolution" in Hollywood, happy ending or not, usually has a quite specific ideological content. The hero faces a series of obstacles which have to be overcome. And s/he does overcome them: all that is required to do so is courage and determination. There is rarely a place in Hollywood films for the idea that the social obstacles might simply be too severe for the hero to conquer them. And in this, of course, "three-act" structure as it is understood in Hollywood is simply a version of the American Dream. Anyone, with enough courage and will, can achieve whatever they want.

It's true that sometimes film-makers are forced to change endings to make them happy.⁵ But it's more complex than mere studio cowardice. Aristotle's concept of "catharsis", (the purging of emotion), in Hollywood rarely means more than that the audience leaves the cinema feeling everything is all right now. More challenging notions, or the idea that the audience should think for themselves about problems or reflect on their lives, are ruled out, because they don't fit with an ideology of unlimited possibilities for personal success.

This also means, of course, that in Hollywood films certain types of character and plot material are no-go areas. Movies about working class people, whether engaged in struggle or not, are fantastically rare, and if there is a struggle, it's to climb the social ladder. Mike Nichols' Working Girl is about Melanie Griffith fulfilling the American Dream and moving up from secretary to boss (albeit a nice boss, not like tyrannical Sigourney Weaver). This is not only because the subject matter itself is beyond the ideological pale and too risky financially. It's also because it would be unthinkable in the dominant screenwriting paradigm, which rarely allows for more than one hero/ine, excluding the possibility of collective action, and largely prohibits the possibility of an unfinished, "the struggle continues"-type conclusion. In the Hollywood universe, there's nowhere for Melanie Griffith to go, if she's talented and intelligent, except management (and marriage to Harrison Ford); no other kind of ending is possible. The only other positive "resolution" would be the overthrow of exploitation, and they're plainly not going to "go there". (Actually there is one other conclusion, which is that such a character fulfils their real potential by getting a job as a dancer or singer; but she would almost certainly have had to be a waitress).⁶

These formulas, from Syd Field to Chris Vogler, are popular in the Hollywood system because they provide easy guidelines to tell fundamentally ideological stories. Of course the quality of films suffers additionally from the fact that many film-makers treat them literally as (crude) formulas. Hollywood films seem formulaic because they are.

Both Syd Field and Robert McKee are great fans of Chinatown, written by Robert Towne and directed by Roman Polanksi. Field, for example, shows at great length how his version of the three-act paradigm functions in Towne's script (including a "mid-point" crisis). Whether Towne was aware he was writing to such a paradigm or not, it is of course one thing when an intelligent writer's material is structured according to these patterns (and Chinatown does not have a simple, corny "resolution"). But it's another when someone thinks that all you have to do is fit any old meaningless drivel into a set of structural norms, and you have a story that works. There's no doubt that the scripts of all those noisy, bombastic, big-budget adventure movies from Godzilla to Eraser were analysed to death to check where their "plot points" were, and possibly, Campbell-style, where thresholds were crossed and who was wearing the mask of the "shadow". But they remain meaningless drivel - or in so far as there is meaning, it is average American-bourgeois ideology.

There are thousands of screenwriters in America burrowing away at their scripts, with their Field or McKee or Vogler open at the relevant page, but their material is often so poor because the entire approach they have been taught to adopt is so simple-minded and superficial. These "how to" manuals spend a lot of time discussing whatever pet theory they have about structure, but much less on how the meaning of a story is determined by its structure. Consequently you get structure empty of content, mere "spectacle", as Aristotle would have said. No amount of structural refining can give life to dead, hackneyed or vapid material. Structural models can make order out of chaos, but what gives a film its power is passion and fresh ideas. Hollywood scripts are often like those structures in the grounds of mansions called "follies" - perfectly designed bits of masonry serving no purpose at all.

The quest to establish the few basic stories of which all others are versions has quite a long pedigree; the "hero's journey" is just another one of these. Michael Hauge, author of Writing Screenplays that Sell, thinks the story of stories is David and Goliath (hero faces apparently impossible odds). It is probably true that understanding the "archetype", or well-known prototype, of a story is artistically useful. But again, in Hollywood this method - establishing what the pattern of the story resembles to work out how it should evolve - has given way to a spate of films which are simply self-conscious reworkings of classic tales (from Clueless, based on Jane Austen, to Ten Things I Hate About You, on Shakespeare). There is nothing inherently wrong with doing this - Shakespeare himself only twice wrote plays from original stories, the rest were borrowed; the Greek tragedians almost never invented stories, but used well-known myths - but in Hollywood it seems to be the mark of the producers, at least, losing confidence, if not giving up. They want to know something works, and don't have the real tools to judge whether it works or not, so something with proven literary and commercial success is a safe bet - or, failing that, something which conforms to a model of how structure operates.

Of course, big-budget Hollywood movies are usually formulaic at a more obvious level. Since they are these days so ludicrously expensive to make, investors want to be sure they won't lose money, and follow like sheep whatever has recently been successful. Science fiction, or historical dramas, or musicals, are "out" until somebody breaks the taboo and has a hit, whereupon you get a rash of SF, historical dramas or - though this hasn't happened, despite Evita - musicals. The old-style thriller is currently almost dead (in America), subsumed into megabuck action-adventure; the Western still limps into view occasionally, where in the '40s and '50s it was one of the staples. But it's important to understand that Hollywood has a keen understanding that story-telling has structure, and before serious money is sunk into a project, they want to feel there is something which has been proven to work at script level.

However, as William Goldman (top scriptwriter, with credits like Butch Cassidy and Marathon Man) famously commented, nobody in Hollywood knows what makes a film successful, and frequently - normally - they miscalculate.⁷ So they're always on the look-out for new theories. Recently there have been script gurus making their buck by alleging that "three-act" structure has been dead since Pulp Fiction, and writers need a new paradigm with twenty-odd features on the check-list. You wonder what Shakespeare would have made of it.

Another factor, also, has made the Campbell/Vogler model attractive to Hollywood writers, most of whom still are men. The hero, ostensibly, doesn't have to be male; but if you look at the "journey" deduced from myth, it is plainly a "he" who is on it. The hero's journey is also, in contemporary language, about the male effort to assert himself in the wake of feminism. Think of City Slickers and its sequel, about a city businessman learning to be a cowboy. This imagery, of the days when men were men, calling on men today to rediscover the wild, elemental force inside them (while keeping in touch with their feelings) runs through many mainstream movies.

A content-less "structure" emptied of meaning thus lies at the heart of most Hollywood films. Because they are meaningless, or tell us nothing new or thoughtful or surprising, the films basically insult us in their entire conception, not merely because the dialogue and characterisation are shit or they expect us to be dazzled by special effects even if the story is as thin as gruel. The success of The Matrix, for example, is in part due, I think, to the fact that there's something a bit more intelligent about it - even if it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny.

I don't mean to say that it's wrong for films to aim primarily to entertain, or that only profound "art house" movies are worth making. I loved The Matrix, and many other action-packed mainstream films. Alfred Hitchcock saw himself firstly as an entertainer, whose great joy was to play with his audience without a "philosophical" purpose. But look at the "rules" of contemporary screenwriting Hitchcock broke: the heroine snuffs it in Psycho half way into the film, leaving no love interest for the man who is searching for her; The Birds ends without any resolution at all. Films like Vertigo have a nasty, misanthropic undercurrent no modern studio would touch with a bargepole. Films should be entertaining. But most of the films coming out of Hollywood today are barely even that. Something more than an effort to please the crowd needs to be going on, or the films are circus, not drama, hardly justifying the millions of dollars they cost.

They are formulas and nothing more.

It was not the intention of the script gurus, some of whom have useful and intelligent things to say⁸, but the dependence on very specific, strict "rules' about structure has killed a great deal of creativity in Hollywood.

No doubt this is only true for film-makers whose creativity was pretty meagre to begin with, and really talented writers and directors either ignore these "rules" altogether, or work through them without treating them as rules at all.⁹ A large part of the problem stems from the studio executives who wouldn't know quality if it slapped them in the face and are looking for little more than reassurance that they won't lose their jobs.¹⁰

But the end result is that nowadays it seems reasonable to think that a film "isn't bad, considering it's Hollywood". When you think of the marvellous movies that have come out of Hollywood in the past, this is very sad. Independent American film is still thriving (although here, no less than in Los Angeles, film makers lap up the script gurus" words of wisdom), and the Hollywood execs are always on the look out for something fresh they can "discover". This impoverishment of the mainstream American output is not only due to the absurd sums of money involved and anxiety over profitability; it's also because there are indeed fundamental formulas employed across the board which have contributed - certainly in the hands of lesser talents - to impoverishing the art of American story-telling.¹¹

1. Although writers are notoriously low in status in Hollywood, with a few exceptions, they do far more than write the dialogue, as people often assume. A screenwriter also structures the film, and determines what action takes place, even if nobody is speaking. Sometimes, the story from its inception was the writer's idea, although a writer can be hired for a project initiated by a producer, director or the studio itself.

2. Vicky King's How To Write A Movie in 21 Days suggests that you've already got your script if you have 120 blank pages in front of you. Fill in a turning point on page 17, then another on page 83, and you're away.

3. Aristotle's Poetics, which the gurus tend to love, might be held responsible for some of Hollywood's problems, especially with his emphasis on "plot' over "character". But it's quite clear that for Aristotle, dramatic action had a different meaning than it does in the American film industry today: "To produce this effect merely by stage-effects is less artistic... Those who employ spectacle to produce an effect, not of fear, but of something merely monstrous, have nothing to do with tragedy..."

   The "beginning, middle and end" idea might sound banal and silly, but it isn't. The problem with a lot of movies is that the writer hasn't understood what story is being told, therefore where it starts, what's relevant in the middle, and when it's ended.

4. In Robert Altman's The Player, a satire on all this Hollywood stuff, the producer played by Tim Robbins accidentally murders a writer outside a cinema where he has been watching Bicycle Thieves (or The Bicycle Thief as it sometimes, illiterately, known). When one of his colleagues wonders if they should do a remake, Robbins comments that they'd no doubt give it a happy ending.

5. There are two classic examples. Adrian Lyne's original ending for Fatal Attraction had Glyn Close thankfully murder Michael Douglas, but preview audience reaction was so negative that they changed it. George Stulzer's The Vanishing in its original Dutch version has one of the most terrifying endings in film history. The American version, which Stulzer directed himself (presumably on the grounds that if anyone was going to screw up his film it might as well be him), has a happy ending.

6. I want to be clear that I'm not indicting Hollywood films for not being socialist. If the only worthwhile, not to say great, works of art were socialist, there'd be very few of them - if any. Rather, the problem with the formulas is that they crush imagination, and force stories into very narrow ideological boxes.

7. Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade is a fascinating and honest account of being a Hollywood screenwriter. It's worth noting that Goldman is widely accepted as the real guru of the American structural approach, but hasn't written a book specifically on it. Most of those who have are not practising screenwriters, or at least have no major credits, but are analysts (basically what we call script editors) who started their careers as 'readers" for the studios, writing reports on the huge number of projects submitted for consideration.

8. Robert McKee's Story is surprisingly thoughtful, and relies for many of its examples on non-Hollywood (European and Japanese) films. Lew Hunter's Screenwriting gets down to the real business of creativity to a considerable extent. And there is the occasional work which challenges the "rules" and accepted framework altogether: see Danciger and Rush's Alternative Scriptwriting, which includes a critique of three-act structure from a politically radical standpoint. Syd Field's classic manuals are Screenplay and The Screenwriter's Workbook.

9. Two successful, idiosyncratic film-makers who regularly flout and confound the rules are Spike Lee and Woody Allen. Whatever you think of their output, in this they are to be applauded. Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanours is a conscious playing around with the rules, especially of genre, consisting of two parallel stories, one a comedy which ends tragically, one a noirish thriller which ends happily.

10. Altman's The Player is again full of jokes on this theme. Predicting the failure of a movie pitched to him by Richard E Grant ("it's got no second act"), Tim Robbins screws over his rival by handing him a project he knows will fail. Then he saves the day by completely changing the film - the new ending has Bruce Willis save Julia Roberts from the electric chair, where the original idea was that she died "because these things happen".

11. In Britain, it should be said, we tend to have the opposite problem - films with absolutely no sense of structured story-telling at all, with scripts that would have benefited from some American-style rewriting. But that, so to speak, is another story.