its magic power.
Seeker; enter the Inmost Cave and look for that which will restore life to the Home Tribe. The way grows narrow and dark. You must go alone on hands and knees and you feel the earth press close around you. You can hardly breathe. Suddenly you come out into the deepest chamber and find yourself face-to-face with a towering figure, a menacing Shadow composed of all your doubts and fears and well armed to defend a treasure. Here; in this moment, is the chance to win all or die. No matter what you came for, it's Death that now stares back at you. Whatever the outcome of the battle, you are about to taste death and it will change you.
DEATH AND REBIRTH
The simple secret of the Ordeal is this: Heroes must die so that they can be reborn. The dramatic movement that audiences enjoy more than any other is death and rebirth. In some way in every story, heroes face death or something like it: their
greatest fears, the failure of an enterprise, the end of a relationship, the death of an old personality. Most of the time, they magically survive this death and are literally or symbolically reborn to reap the consequences of having cheated death. They have passed the main test of being a hero.
Spielberg's E.T. dies before our eyes but is reborn through alien magic and a boy's love. Sir Lancelot, remorseful over having killed a gallant knight, prays him back to life. Clint Eastwood's character in Unforgiven is beaten senseless by a sadistic sheriff and hovers at the edge of death, thinking he's seeing angels. Sherlock Holmes, apparently killed with Professor Moriarity in the plunge over Reichenbach Falls, defies death and returns transformed and ready for more adventures. Patrick Swayze's character, murdered in Ghost, learns how to cross back through the veil to protect his wife and finally express his true love for her.
CHANGE
Heroes don't just visit death and come home. They return changed, transformed. No one can go through an experience at the edge of death without being changed in some way. In the center of An Officer and a Gentleman, Richard Gere survives a death-and-rebirth ordeal of the ego at the hands of drill instructor Lou Gossett. It dramatically changes Gere's character, making him more sensitive to the needs of others and more conscious that he's part of a group.
Axel Foley, with a villain's gun to his head in Beverly Hills Cop, seems sure to die, but is rescued by the bumbling, naive white detective Rosewood (Judge Reinhold). After this rescue from death, Foley is more cooperative and willing to submerge his gigantic ego in the group.
THE CRISIS, NOT THE CLIMAX
The Ordeal is a major nerve ganglion of the story. Many threads of the hero's history lead in, and many threads of possibility and change lead out the other side. It should not be confused with the climax of the Hero's Journey — that's another nerve center further down near the end of the story (like the brain at the base of a dinosaur's tail). The Ordeal is usually the central event of the story, or the main event of the second act. Let's call it the crisis to differentiate it from the climax (the big moment of Act Three and the crowning event of the whole story).
A crisis is defined by Webster's as "the point in a story or drama at which hostile forces are in the tensest state of opposition." We also speak of a crisis in an illness: a point, perhaps a high spike of fever, after which the patient either gets worse or begins to recover. The message: Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better. An Ordeal crisis, however frightening to the hero, is sometimes the only way to recovery or victory.
PLACEMENT OF THE ORDEAL
The placement of the crisis or Ordeal depends on the needs of the story and the tastes of the storyteller. The most common pattern is for the death-and-rebirth moment to come near the middle of the story, as shown in the Central Crisis diagram.
A central crisis has the advantage of symmetry, and leaves plenty of time for elaborate consequences to flow from the ordeal. Note that this structure allows for another critical moment or turning point at the end of Act Two.
However, an equally effective structure can be built with a delayed crisis that comes near the end of Act Two, about two-thirds to three-quarters of the way into the story.
The delayed-crisis structure matches closely with the ideal of the Golden Mean, that elegant proportion (approximately three to five) that seems to produce the most pleasing artistic results. A delayed crisis leaves more room for preparation and Approach and allows a slow buildup to a big moment at the end of Act Two.
Whether the crisis is at the center of the story or nearer the end of Act Two, it's safe to say every story needs a crisis moment that conveys the Ordeal's sense of death and revival.
POINTS OF TENSION
Act Two is a long stretch for the writer and the audience, up to an hour in an average feature film. You can look at the three-act structure as a dramatic line stretched across two major points of tension, the act breaks. Like a circus tent hanging on its poles, structure is subject to gravity — the waning of the audience's attention in the time between these peaks of tension. A story that has no central moment of tension may sag like a circus tent that needs an extra support pole in the middle. Act Two is an hour-long chunk of your movie, or a hundred pages of your novel. It needs some kind of structure to hold it in tension.
The crisis at the halfway point is a watershed, a continental divide in the hero's journey, that acknowledges the traveler has reached the middle of the trip. Journeys naturally arrange themselves around a central event: getting to the top of the mountain, the depth of the cave, the heart of the forest, the most intimate interior of a foreign country, or the most secret place in your own soul. Everything in the trip has been leading up to this moment, and everything after it will be just going home. There may be even greater adventures to come — the final moments of a trip may be the most exciting or memorable — but every journey seems to have a center: a bottom or a peak, somewhere near the middle.
The words crisis, critic, and critical come from a Greek word that means "to separate." A crisis is an event that separates the two halves of the story. After crossing this zone, which is often the borderland of death, the hero is literally or metaphorically reborn and nothing will ever be the same.
WITNESS TO SACRIFICE
The reality of a death-and-rebirth crisis may depend upon point of view. A witness is often an important part of this stage, someone standing nearby who sees the hero appear to die, momentarily mourns the death, and is elated when the hero is revived. Some of the death-and-resurrection effects in Star Wars depend on the presence of witnesses, such as the two robot Allies, R2D2 and C3PO. In an elaborate Supreme Ordeal sequence, they are listening by intercom to the progress of their heroes, Skywalker and company. The robots are horrified to hear what sounds like the heroes being crushed to death in a giant trashmasher deep in the Inmost Cave of the Death Star.
These witnesses stand for the audience, who are identifying with the heroes and feeling the pain of death with them. It's not that audiences are sadistic and enjoy seeing their heroes killed. It's that we all relish a little taste of death every now and then. Its bitter flavor makes life taste sweeter. Anyone who has survived a true near-death experience, a sudden close call in a car or plane, knows that for a while afterward colors seem sharper, family and friends are more important, and time is more precious. The nearness of death makes life more real.
A TASTE OF DEATH