THE FULL MONTY
At the opposite end of the spectrum from Titanic is a little film that Fox produced at the same time through its Searchlight division. As a work in the iconoclastic independent film spirit, it makes a good contrast with the old-time Hollywood epic scale of Titanic, and yet both films exhibit the signposts of the Hero's Journey. The Full Monty expresses it on a more intimate scale but the elements loom large in it nonetheless.
The Full Monty tells the comic adventures of a group of men whose ORDINARY WORLD is the ailing steel town of Sheffield. The men are different from one another, gay and straight, fat and thin, divided by social class and race, and yet they are united by the new conditions of their society. In the old days, sketched by a hilariously upbeat promotional film from the 1960s, Sheffield was a booming industrial center where the men were in charge, earning the wages and heading the households. Now the world has been stood on its head. The mills have been closed, the men are out of work, and it's a service economy in which the women are more likely to be the breadwinners.
Gaz is the principal protagonist, a boyish man whose immaturity isolates him from his ex-wife and son. His OUTER PROBLEM is to scrape together some money, his INNER challenge is to earn his son's respect and to learn to respect himself. He gets his CALL TO ADVENTURE when he sees his ex-wife and her girlfriends exercising their freedom by taking in a male strip show. He conceives the idea of raising money by staging a strip show of his own, recruiting a chorus line from the rejected men of Sheffield.
There are many REFUSALS from his skeptical friends and associates, who are not eager to expose themselves. These men, like all men, have many secrets to protect and conceal. Gaz doesn't want the other men to know he's done jail time. His overweight friend Dave hides his lack of sex drive, which leads his wife to think he's having an affair. Gerald, Gaz's former boss at the steel mill, has kept secret from his wife the fact that he lost his job months ago. Lomper, the mill security officer, has hidden the fact that he's gay, perhaps even concealing it from himself. Guy is a fellow who can't dance, but makes up for it by revealing a secret — he has the fullest monty of them all. His willing self-exposure sets an example for the men who will all be slowly unveiling themselves throughout the movie. Horse is the best dancer of the lot and becomes a kind of MENTOR to the rest, along with Gerald, who has been taking ballroom dancing lessons with his wife. But even Horse has a secret — the reason for his name — and this one is never revealed.
Gaz's steadfast MENTOR in his quest is his son Nathan, a Wise Young Man who voices an emotional wish early in the story, "Why can't we do normal things once in a while?" He keeps Gaz honest and on the track, and at the end gives him the courage to face the ultimate exposure, the final test of his commitment to something.
Gaz CROSSES THE FIRST THRESHOLD when he holds an audition for his male strip show. He turns an ENEMY into an ALLY, recruiting his old supervisor who initially wanted nothing to do with the project. The men slowly reveal themselves and experiment with the SPECIAL WORLD of trusting each other and allowing themselves to be honest and vulnerable.
Their APPROACH is a phase of preparation and rehearsal, in which they learn more about themselves. An encounter with Death marks the central ORDEAL, when Dave has severe doubts and wants to quit the enterprise, and Lomper's mother dies. In addition the men are arrested for indecent exposure when their dress rehearsal is captured on a plant security camera. It looks like they're finished. But this is quickly followed by REWARD, a phase in which Gaz gets reassurance that word of his show is spreading; the arrest has been good for their publicity. Lomper and Guy also reap a reward, discovering that they care for each other as they run from the police.
In another thread of the plot, Dave faces an ORDEAL of honesty, revealing to his wife the true reason for his lack of sexual interest. His REWARD is the knowledge that she loves him anyway, which gives him courage to rejoin the strip show. On THE ROAD BACK, he joins the men in the final preparations for the big act.
The hall fills with rowdy women. The RESURRECTION is enacted when Gaz gets cold feet at the thought of exposing himself, not only to women, but to a few men who have slipped into the hall. His involvement with the group seems to die for a few moments as the other men go on stage without him. But his son encourages him to go on and he is REBORN with a late entry into the strip act, passing the final test of commitment and honesty. The men reveal themselves totally, RETURNING WITH THE ELIXIR of self-knowledge, cooperation, understanding, and self-respect. They have found a new way to be men in the new society.
The Full Monty connected with audiences because of its infectious good humor and its upbeat music and dance, which combined effectively with the realistic settings and believable, down-to-earth characters. It is a "feel-good" movie that communicates a sense that the filmmakers like people and believe that though they are complex and troubled, they are basically good and are capable of change. The audience has the identification and satisfaction of cheering for the underdogs. The film has a visual inventiveness that employs many poetic touches like the image of Dave and Gaz stranded in a canal on a sinking abandoned car as Gaz's practical son Nathan scampers away on the bank. Meanwhile the multilayered plot, telling little stories about six men and a boy, is organized into a coherent dramatic experience by the use of Hero's Journey motifs and devices. By their actions within this framework, these ordinary men are transformed into heroes for the edification and enjoyment of the audience. And because of the universal recognition of the Hero's Journey pattern, audiences around the world could find something of themselves in this story.
STAR WARS
Before closing the book on the permutations of the Hero's Journey in popular films, I have to acknowledge the lasting impact of the Star Wars series. The first Star Wars film, now re-titled Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, was released in 1977 as I was just beginning to digest the ideas of Joseph Campbell, and was a stunning confirmation of the power of the mythic patterns I had found there. Here was a fully developed expression of his concept of the Hero's Journey, exactly as Campbell described. It helped me work out the theory and test my own ideas, and it quickly became one of those quantum movie events, breaking records and setting a higher standard for what a movie could be.
As I began to teach "mythic structure," the film provided a convenient, widely seen example to demonstrate the movements and principles of the Hero's Journey, in which the function of the parts were simple, clear, and vivid. It entered the language of pop culture, providing useful metaphors, symbols, and phrases that expressed how we all felt about good and evil, technology and faith. It spawned a billion-dollar industry of sequels, prequels, ancillaries, franchises, and a whole universe of toys, games, and collectibles. Entire generations have grown up under its influence, and it has inspired countless artists to think big and pursue their dreams of creativity. It filled the same function for millions that the old myths did, giving standards for comparison, providing metaphors and meaning, inspiring people to stretch beyond their earthly bounds.
If the Star Wars movie of 1977 had been a one-shot cinema event, its cultural impact would still have been considerable, but its influence was tripled by the continuation of the series with Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Episode VI Return of the Jedi (1983). Series creator George Lucas had always planned a vast canvas on the scale of Wagner's Ring cycle, an epic tale that might take a dozen movies to tell in full. For the following sixteen years fans wondered if Lucas would ever fulfill the promise of more films, extending the saga into the past and possibly into the future. In what is known as "the Expanded Universe," various side-plots and back-stories were developed in comic books, novels, cartoon series, and TV specials, but it was only in 1999 that Lucas returned to the film series, eventually producing three "prequel" films that told the story of the generation before Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, and revealed the events and character flaws that led to the development of Darth Vader, the series' supreme embodiment of evil.