Joseph Campbell and other theorists of myth argue that the collective development of human consciousness (Perennial philosophy) parallels the developing consciousness of the individual (Jungian psychology). Both types of evolution are explained in myth as an individual (hero’s) journey. This journey moves the individual out from known territory (the parochial/the home/ego-consciousness) to unknown territory (often a descent into strange or terrible lands/unconsciousness) where the individual is sometimes aided (mentors/gods/shamans/dreams), and is often sorely tested (demons/Shadow-self ), in a search for a treasure or boon gold/grail/enlightenment/individuation) that the individual then shares with the culture upon returning home (cultural enlightenment/awareness of the...

The Odyssey is probably one of the earliest Western models of the hero’s perennial journey home. As such, it offers not only an exemplar version of the journey home, encompassing the sacred marriage, the father quest, and the Grail quest, but also an explicit model for analyzing The Natural in Chapter 4 and an implicit model for discussing many of the other films explored in later chapters. Finally, the Odyssey documents a significant shift in the evolution of human consciousness, a movement away from matriarchy and the realm of preconsciousness toward patriarchy and the realm of consciousness. The epic poem,...

All of the films discussed in this chapter—The Natural, Bull Durham, The Piano, and Thelma and Louise—tell the story of the sacred marriage with a god/goddess consort. In each case a mythic hero or heroine makes a literal and a psychological journey from a place of ignorance/innocence to knowledge/transcendence guided by another male or female figure and is ultimately rewarded by a sexual/spiritual union with that figure. Roy Hobbs’ journey in The Natural takes him more than sixteen years, Crash Davis in Bull Durham travels from town to town during the entire length of his baseball career. Ada’s...

Campbell explains that “There is a little motif that occurs in many narratives, related to a hero’s life, where the boy says, ‘Mother, who is my father?’ She will say, ‘Well, your father is in such and such a place’ and then he goes on the father quest.”¹

Finding the father is finding the self. As Campbell explains, “there’s a notion that the character is inherited from the father, and the body and very often the mind from the mother. But it’s your character that is the mystery, and your character is your destiny. So it is the discovery of...

This section of the book further develops the model of the perennial journey home by focusing on films that address the American character and the American journey home at particular points in time. Chapter 6, for example, explores the nature of the quest for home during the 1930s Depression era as evidenced in such Hollywood blockbusters as The Wizard of Oz, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Gone with the Wind. Chapter 7 takes this same sociohistorical approach by looking at a contemporary manifestation of the quest myth—the current era’s attempt to reconcile scientific and technological ways of knowing with...

The universal quest myth not only manifests itself through such permutations as the father quest or the sacred marriage quest; it also emerges in cultural myths—historically and culturally grounded interpretations of archetypic stories. If, as Joseph Campbell notes, the universal myth transcends cultural and historical conditions to speak to the elemental and identical nature of the human condition, the cultural myth relates the individual to his particular society and affirms the individual as a part of the larger whole.¹

Janice Rushing and Thomas Frentz explain that a cultural myth “is a narrative whole which the critic reconstructs from singular...

The growth of technology, particularly since the development of the atomic bomb, the computer, and the World Wide Web, has been exponential. The Y2K problem, also known as “the millennium bug,” served, for many, to illustrate technology’s potentially devastating impact on all areas of human life in the year 2000. It also served, interestingly enough, as a dramatic counterpart to the invention of the atomic bomb, whose potentially devastating impact shadowed the second half of the twentieth century and still influences us today. Not surprisingly, therefore, a recent permutation of the quest myth has focused on contemporary society’s collective fears...

The Star Wars trilogy, perhaps more than any films in the history of Hollywood cinema, are the quintessential hero quest films. While offering the most clearly articulated version of the Odyssean hero’s journey outward, inward, and homeward, they also draw on such cultural myths as the western cowboy hero and Arthurian legend, and such universal myths as the father quest, the Grail quest, and the quest to reconcile technology/science with humanity/spirit. Most significantly, these films manifest the clearest articulation of Perennial philosophy, Jungian psychology, and Zen Buddhism.

Since George Lucas, the trilogy’s creator, writer, and producer, and the director of...

The idea of celebrating films that present a unified mythic vision—such as the perennial journey home—in the midst of the contemporary era of fragmentation and deconstruction could be viewed as anachronistic. And indeed, as Rushing explains:

The positions on the relationship of myth to cultural consciousness can be roughly divided into two opposing “camps”; skeptics for whom “false” and “consciousness” go together . . . and champions for whom “myth” is a nonliteral “truth”—a natural, meaningful, even beautiful expression of psychological and sociological orientations to reality.¹

Those in the myth as false or ideological group take their...