Hero’s Journey – Page 2 – The Heroine Journeys Project

Written by Katerina Daley; ed. assistance by Nancer Ballard.

The 2014 film Divergent (a loose adaptation of the first book in the young adult dystopian series of the same name by Veronica Roth) follows sixteen year old Beatrice “Tris” Prior (Shailene Woodley) as she navigates crises of self-identification and political conspiracies. In the film’s futuristic version of Chicago, citizens are separated into factions based on defining traits: Abnegation (selflessness), Erudite (intelligence), Amity (kindness), Candor (honesty), and Dauntless (bravery). Some members of the society, however, are categorized as Divergent, meaning they have behavioral elements which correspond to more than one faction and as a result they are perceived as threats to the carefully organized system. Of course, our protagonist Tris happens to fall into this latter category.

Tris is assaulted by three masked attackers. Upon unmasking one of them, she realizes it is one of her closest friends. Her sense of betrayal is immediately apparent.

The film presents many of the same aspects of the novel that could be categorized as touchstones of a Heroine’s Journey. Tris, as a Divergent, seeks a sense of wholeness that her fragmented society denies her. She leaves home and the comfort of her mother’s unconditional love to pursue a life in the predominantly male Dauntless faction. She is betrayed by someone she had believed to be a good friend when he attempts to sexually assault her, which fundamentally shakes her worldview.

In repackaging the narrative as an action film, however, Tris’s emotional journey is weakened and her action-based journey becomes the main focus. This shift in perspective causes the film to be read most easily as a typical Hero’s Journey. Tris begins the film in the Ordinary World of her life in Abnegation, unaware of the existence of Divergents. Once she takes the requisite placement test all sixteen year olds must take, her Call to Adventure occurs when she is forced to choose between factions and expected to choose to remain in Abnegation. Her Refusal of the Call is quite clear: she chooses to leave.

Tris undergoes a typical training sequence with her mentor/romantic interest Four.

Upon arriving in Dauntless, she has a Meeting the Mentor moment when she meets a Dauntless leader named Four (Theo James), who takes her under his wing as he is himself an Abnegation-to-Dauntless transfer. (He will also become her love interest, despite the sizable age difference the film adds. In the novel, there is a year or two between them; in the film, it is closer to eight years.) Tris Crosses the Threshold into a New World when she begins engaging in Dauntless training, quickly Meeting Tests (physical fights that she initially loses), Allies (a few friends such as Al, Will, Christina, and Uriah), and Enemies (the bloodthirsty Peter and Eric).

She suffers an emotional Death when she is assaulted by Peter and Al, but this Death results in her Rebirth as a stronger, hardened member of Dauntless. Along the way, she learns of the plan to wipe out her former faction Abnegation by the intercession of her brother, with whom she is supposed to have no contact. This fear drives her for much of the film, and when it becomes clear that the Erudite faction intends to do much more than just wipe out the Abnegation by means of mind-controlled Dauntless soldiers, her status as Divergent allows her to escape unharmed. She ultimately proves victorious and Seizes the Sword while engaging in a battle with the Erudite leader Jeanine (Kate Winslet), whom she stabs and then injects with the same mind-control serum the leader used on the Dauntless.

By the film’s end, Tris’s journey is far from over, but with three films remaining in the series, it is clear that Hollywood intends to present her journey as a female Hero’s instead of as a Heroine’s.

Written by Nancer Ballard; ed. assistance by Sage Calder.

While researching hero and heroine journey arcs, I came across a piece by Christopher Vogler, a Hollywood Development Executive, who claims to have played a central role in ensuring that the hero’s journey narrative has dominated American movies over the last thirty years.

Sylvester Stallone in Rocky IV, an example of the Hero's Journey — Sylvester Stallone in Rocky IV, an example of the Hero’s Journey

According to Vogler, while studying cinema at the University of Southern California, he came across Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s with a Thousand Faces. Having seen Star Wars, he recognized the similarity between the plot of that movie and Hero’s Journey arc described by Campbell and wrote a paper for a class theorizing that a key to the Star Wars’ success was its tracking of the hero’s journey. Later, when Vogler began working as a story analyst at Fox and other Hollywood studios, he applied his theory to the scripts that came across his desk. He also talked with several of his colleagues who apparently found his ideas interesting, but not earth shattering.

However, before long Vogler got a job at Disney which had a strong corporate culture under Michael Eisner’s and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s leadership. Vogler reports that memos were a big part of Disney’s corporate identity, and everyone who worked at Disney at that time had to learn the memo art form, following the example of Katzenberg, an absolute master.

According to Vogler, the discipline of writing succinct development notes and story coverage and research memos kindled within him a desire to “once and for all” get all of Campbell’s ideas down as creative principles and to use them as building blocks for constructing stories and tools for troubleshooting story problems. He took time off from his job as a story analyst and spent a week in New York with his friend, David McKenna, watching movie clips, then came back and wrote a seven page memo which he refers to as “The Memo that Started it All” and sent it to Disney executives.

At first not much happened but Vogler had faith, picturing his memo flying off fax machines all over town. And sure enough some people began to take notice. Before long a junior executive at Disney saw the memo and tried to pass it off as his own. Vogler, alerted to the usurpation by a colleague, immediately sent a memo to Katzenberg asserting his status as true owner and asked to be elevated to story development. Katzenberg immediately called Vogler and put him to work doing research and development for The Lion King. When Vogler arrived he found “the Memo that Started it All” had preceded him, and the animators were already outlining their story boards using the Hero’s Journey stages. Thereafter Vogler’s memo served as a springboard for numerous other hit movies, his own book, and a teaching gig at UCLA. According to Vogler, people continue to attribute special powers to the original seven-pager, and at one point, a museum dedicated to screenwriting requested a copy for a display of milestone documents and books in the history of screenwriting.

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If Vogler’s description of his success and formative role in American movies sounds a little contrived, perhaps its because Vogler’s story of his own success so neatly tracks the steps of the tale on which he has made his fortune– complete with entry into new world (Disney) absolute master mentor (Katzenberg), enemies and allies (the usurping junior exec. and Vogler’s loyal colleague), success that nearly goes off the rails twice (first when the memo goes unnoticed and a second time when the junior exec. tries to appropriate Vogler’s memo), and his kinsmen’s final affirmation of special powers and his place as an enduring leader of the screenwriting tribe. Of course, it’s possible that some people experience life in exactly this fashion.

To be sure, the hero’s journey is the narrative pattern for Disney children’s movies and many American coming-of-age films and weekly television dramas. (However, many American films made prior to 1970 also follow the hero’s journey pattern, and many critically acclaimed films made in and out of the United States have more causally complex or ambiguous patterns and themes. To see an analysis of Academy Award winning films that follow and don’t follow the hero’s journey pattern, click here.

And, you might also ask yourself, what if a woman had written the memo? And then, written another memo about what happened to her when that young junior executive passed off the ideas of a lowly female story analyst as his own? Might her second memo have plotted a different, heroine’s tale?

We will never know. Instead, we have this website. We may have some catching up to do, but we are not starting from scratch– as future blogs and other pages of the site illustrate, women such as Maureen Murdock, Victoria Schmidt, Carol Pearson, and Jean Shinoda Bolen have covered much ground that we hope to expand upon. We invite you to join the conversation and contribute your stories as well.