In my travels I learned that Australia, Canada, and many countries in Europe subsidize their local filmmakers, in part to help preserve and celebrate local differences. Each region, department, or state operates as a small-scale movie studio, developing scripts, putting artists to work, and producing feature films and television shows. For America, I like to imagine a version of a decentralized Hollywood in which every state in the Union functions like a movie studio, evaluating the stories of its citizens and advancing money to produce regional films that represent and enhance the culture of the locality while supporting the local artists.
HEROPHOBIC CULTURES
Here and there in my travels I learned that some cultures are not entirely comfortable with the term "hero" to begin with. Australia and Germany are two cultures that seem slightly "herophobic."
The Australians distrust appeals to heroic virtue because such concepts have been used to lure generations of young Australian males into fighting Britain's battles. Australians have their heroes, of course, but they tend to be unassuming and self-effacing, and will remain reluctant for much longer than heroes in other cultures. Like most heroes, they resist calls to adventure but continue demurring and may never be comfortable with the hero mantle. In Australian culture it's unseemly to seek out leadership or the limelight, and anyone who does is a "tall poppy," quickly cut down. The most admirable hero is one who denies his heroic role as long as possible and who, like Mad Max, avoids accepting responsibility for anyone but himself.
German culture seems ambivalent about the term "hero." The hero has a long tradition of veneration in Germany, but two World Wars and the legacy of Hitler and the Nazis have tainted the concept. Nazism and German militarism manipulated and distorted the powerful symbols of the hero myth, invoking its passions to enslave, dehumanize, and destroy. Like any archetypal system, like any philosophy or creed, the heroic form can be warped and used with great effect for ill intention.
In the post-Hitler period the idea of hero has been given a rest as the culture re-evaluates itself. Dispassionate, cold-blooded anti-heroes are more in keeping with the current German spirit. A tone of unsentimental realism is more popular at present, although there will always be a strain of romanticism and love of fantasy. Germans can enjoy imaginative hero tales from other cultures but don't seem comfortable with home-grown romantic heroes for the time being.
THE HERO AS WARRIOR
More generally, the Hero's Journey has been criticized as an embodiment of a male-dominated warrior culture. Critics say it is a propaganda device invented to encourage young males to enlist in armies, a myth that glorifies death and foolish self-sacrifice. There is some truth in this charge, for many heroes of legend and story are warriors and the patterns of the Hero's Journey have certainly been used for propaganda and recruitment. However, to condemn and dismiss these patterns because they can be put to military use is shortsighted and narrow-minded. The warrior is only one of the faces of the hero, who can also be pacifist, mother, pilgrim, fool, wanderer, hermit, inventor, nurse, savior, artist, lunatic, lover, clown, king, victim, slave, worker, rebel, adventurer, tragic failure, coward, saint, monster, etc. The many creative possibilities of the form far outweigh its potential for abuse.
GENDER PROBLEMS
The Hero's Journey is sometimes critiqued as a masculine theory, cooked up by men to enforce their dominance, and with little relevance to the unique and quite different journey of womanhood. There may be some masculine bias built into the description of the hero cycle since many of its theoreticians have been male, and I freely admit it: I'm a man and can't help seeing the world through the filter of my gender. Yet I have tried to acknowledge and explore the ways in which the woman's journey is different from the man's.
I believe that much of the journey is the same for all humans, since we share many realities of birth, growth, and decay, but clearly being a woman imposes distinct cycles, rhythms, pressures, and needs. There may be a real difference in the form of men's and women's journeys. Men's journeys may be in some sense more linear, proceeding from one outward goal to the next, while women's journeys may spin or spiral inward and outward. The spiral may be a more accurate analogue for the woman's journey than a straight line or a simple circle. Another possible model might be a series of concentric rings, with the woman making a journey inward towards the center and then expanding out again. The masculine need to go out and overcome obstacles, to achieve, conquer, and possess, may be replaced in the woman's journey by the drives to preserve the family and the species, make a home, grapple with emotions, come to accord, or cultivate beauty.
Good work has been done by women to articulate these differences, and I recommend books such as Merlin Stone's When God Was a Woman, Clarissa Pinkola Estes' Women Who Run with the Wolves, Jean Shinoda Bolen's Goddesses in Everywoman, Maureen Murdock's The Heroine's Journey, and The Woman's Dictionary of Myth and Symbols as starting points for a more balanced understanding of the male and female aspects of the Hero's Journey. (Note to men: If in doubt on this point, consult the nearest woman.)
THE COMPUTER CHALLENGE
Shortly after the first edition of this book came out, a few people (threshold guardians) jumped up to say the technology of the Hero's Journey is already obsolete, thanks to the advent of the computer and its possibilities of interactivity and nonlinear narrative. According to this batch of critics, the ancient ideas of the Journey are hopelessly mired in the conventions of beginning, middle, and end, of cause and effect, of one event after another. The new wave, they said, would dethrone the old linear storyteller, empowering people to tell their own stories in any sequence they chose, leaping from point to point, weaving stories more like spider webs than linear strings of events.
It's true that exciting new possibilities are created by computers and the nonlinear thinking they encourage. However, there will always be pleasure in "Tell me a story." People will always enjoy going into a story trance and allowing themselves to be led through a tale by a masterful story weaver. It's fun to drive a car, but it can also be fun to be driven, and as passengers we might see more sights than if we were forced to concentrate on choosing what happens next.
Interactivity has always been with us — we all make many nonlinear hypertext links in our own minds even as we listen to a linear story. In fact, the Hero's Journey lends itself extremely well to the world of computer games and interactive experiences. The thousands of variations on the paradigm, worked out over the centuries, offer endless branches from which infinite webs of story can be built.
THE CYNIC'S RESPONSE
Another of my deep cultural assumptions that was challenged as I traveled is the idea that one person can make a difference, that heroes are needed to make change, and that change is generally a good thing. I encountered artists from Eastern Europe who pointed out that in their cultures, there is deep cynicism about heroic efforts to change the world. The world is as it is, any efforts to change it are a foolish waste of time, and any so-called heroes who try to change it are doomed to fail. This point of view is not necessarily an antithesis of the Hero's Journey — the pattern is flexible enough to embrace the cynical or pragmatic philosophies, and many of its principles are still operative in stories that reflect them. However, I must acknowledge that not every person or culture sees the model as optimistically as I do, and they might be right.