on campbell's hero's journey
The thing that trips people up about the hero's journey β Campbell's monomyth, the Luke Skywalker thing, the Refusal of the Call and the Crossing of the Threshold and the Apotheosis and the other fourteen stages Campbell enumerated that nobody can actually remember β is that they think it's a discovery. They think Joseph Campbell, sitting in his apartment in Greenwich Village in the 1940s with his library of folklore and his Jungian assumptions, cracked some deep pattern in human storytelling that had been sitting there invisible since the Epic of Gilgamesh, and that the pattern's subsequent dominance in Hollywood screenwriting is the natural consequence of Campbell having been right. And so arguments about Campbell tend to collapse into arguments about whether the pattern is real β does it actually describe all myths, or is Campbell cherry-picking, or are the categories so baggy they describe anything. And those are fine arguments, they have answers (the categories are baggy, the selection is cherry-picked, Rank and Raglan and Frobenius had most of the structure before Campbell was out of graduate school), but they miss the actually interesting question.
The actually interesting question is: how did a mediocre piece of mid-century comparative mythology end up as the operating system of the global entertainment industry?
Because it did. If you've been in a pitch meeting in the last thirty years, or sat through a screenwriting class, or read any book with "Writer's" in the title, you have been exposed to some version of the hero's journey, and the version you were exposed to is not actually Campbell's. It's a 1985 Disney interoffice memo.
Joseph Campbell was a comparative-mythology professor at Sarah Lawrence who spent his career doing what was basically a middlebrow-intellectual's job β absorbing a truly impressive amount of world folklore, running it through a Jungian filter, and producing highly readable syntheses. He was not a folklorist in the disciplinary sense, meaning he was not doing the unglamorous field-and-archive work that actual folklorists do (going to specific villages, recording specific tellers, tracking specific variant texts across specific regions, arguing with other folklorists about whether a given story belongs to type ATU 300 or ATU 303). Campbell was doing something much higher-altitude, which was taking folklorists' raw material and philosophizing about it. This is a valid thing to do. It is also not the same thing the folklorists are doing, and the folklorists knew it, and have spent most of the last seventy-five years mildly annoyed about Campbell getting credit for their discipline.
When he published The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949 β with Bollingen, which is its own institutional story, Bollingen being the Mellon-funded Jung-adjacent press that basically created the American market for serious-but-not-academic comparative-mythology and religious-studies books β the work it was doing was synthesis, not discovery. Otto Rank had published a hero-myth pattern in 1909 based on Freudian family romance. Lord Raglan, the British amateur, had done a 22-point hero archetype in 1936. Frazer's Golden Bough, from the 1890s-1920s, had been collapsing worldwide ritual patterns into unified schemas for fifty years. Leo Frobenius had done his twelve African expeditions identifying the descent-into-underworld motif at the turn of the century. Jung's whole collective-unconscious apparatus was already mainstream in cultured circles. Campbell took all of this, added his own extensive reading in Joyce (he borrowed "monomyth" from Finnegans Wake, which tells you something about his self-positioning) and Native American and Asian mythology, and produced a highly readable version in which the disparate strands were woven into a single seventeen-stage narrative pattern.
It is a good synthesis. I am not dunking on the book. The book is genuinely compelling and Campbell is a first-rate prose stylist. What the book is not, and what Campbell never quite claims it is but also never quite claims it isn't, is a rigorous piece of scholarship. The categories expand and contract to fit the evidence. The examples are selected. The non-conforming myths are quietly dropped or forced into the pattern. This is how synthesis always works, it's not disqualifying, but it means the book operates more like a Malcolm Gladwell product than like, say, Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale from 1928, which is boring and technical and actually holds up.
So Campbell publishes in '49 and the book finds its audience β the educated liberal-arts reader, the kind of person who's going to end up in publishing or teaching or advertising or, in the specific case we care about, movies.
This is the first pivot point.
Because in the late '60s and early '70s, George Lucas, who had gone through USC film school and was in the process of writing a pulpy science-fiction thing called Star Wars, picked up The Hero with a Thousand Faces and β according to every interview he's given since β used it to structure the screenplay. Lucas talked up Campbell constantly, called him his "Yoda," had him up to Skywalker Ranch, arranged for Bill Moyers to film the Power of Myth PBS series there right before Campbell died in 1987. This is the official origin story of the hero's journey in Hollywood, the one everybody knows: Lucas read Campbell, Campbell worked, the industry took notice, the rest is cultural history.
The official origin story is, like most official origin stories, approximately true but missing the actual mechanism. Star Wars came out in 1977. The hero's journey did not become a dominant screenwriting concept in 1977. Nobody at the studios in 1977 was writing development notes in Campbell's vocabulary. Nobody at UCLA film school in 1977 was teaching the seventeen stages. What Lucas did was tell a good story and then, after the fact, articulate the Campbell connection as part of his own self-narrative. That self-narrative did not propagate immediately. It propagated about eight years later, through a specific piece of corporate paper.
In 1985, a story analyst at Walt Disney Pictures named Christopher Vogler β who had encountered Campbell at USC, same as Lucas, and had written a Campbell-framed paper on Star Wars as an undergraduate β wrote a seven-page memo. The memo was titled A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and it was addressed to Disney's development executives. What it did was take Campbell's seventeen stages, boil them down to twelve, rename several of them in more accessible terms, and β this is the crucial move β reframe the whole thing as a tool for script doctoring. Not a theory of myth. A tool for diagnosing what's wrong with a floundering draft.
This is the actual birth moment of the hero's journey as the Hollywood framework it is today. Not Campbell in 1949. Not Lucas in 1977. Vogler in 1985, on seven pages of Disney stationery, describing Campbell's monomyth as "an excellent set of analytical tools" with which a development executive can "almost always determine what's wrong with a story that's floundering."
Read that sentence again. The sales pitch is not "this is true." The sales pitch is "this is useful." Specifically, useful for the labor of studio development, which is the labor of sitting in rooms with writers and telling them why their third act isn't working and what to do about it.
The memo went around Disney. Vogler would later describe it as "the 'I have to have it' document of the season." It moved laterally through the industry in the way Hollywood documents do, by photocopying and by gossip. Within a few years every story editor in town had seen it or something derived from it. Vogler got moved to Disney Feature Animation. He did story work on The Lion King, which was developed according to the memo's principles and which is β and this isn't a coincidence β the most textbook hero's-journey Disney movie ever made. Then he expanded the seven pages into a 1992 book, The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, which is still in print, now in its third or fourth edition, and which is what most working screenwriters actually mean when they say "Campbell." They don't mean Campbell. They mean Vogler retelling Campbell.
And the difference between Campbell and Vogler matters, because Vogler did not just simplify β he operationalized. Campbell's seventeen stages are a descriptive pattern he claims to have found in the mythological record. Vogler's twelve stages are a prescriptive checklist for fixing screenplays. Campbell says "here is a pattern in stories." Vogler says "here is where to put things in your story so it works." The vocabulary shifts from scholarship to engineering. The Refusal of the Call becomes a story beat you can flag in a notes session. The Crossing of the Threshold becomes a place in the script, around page 25, where a specific thing should happen. The monomyth becomes a grid.
And this is the key thing to understand about why it took over. Hollywood in the mid-80s was in a very specific institutional situation. The old studio system had collapsed in the late 60s, the New Hollywood auteur era had burned itself out by about 1980, and what replaced it was the high-concept, development-driven, executive-run industry that still exists today β the one that runs on pitches, coverage, notes, and script doctoring. This industry needed a shared vocabulary. When a VP of development sits down with a writer to discuss a troubled third act, both of them need to be able to talk about the problem in the same terms. Prior to the mid-80s there wasn't really a shared terminology. After the mid-80s there was: Campbell via Vogler, plus Syd Field's Screenplay (1979) with its three-act paradigm, plus Robert McKee's Story (eventually 1997 in book form but taught as a seminar for a decade before). These three became the grammar of studio development. The hero's journey is one of them and in many ways the most influential because it claims the widest coverage β it's not just structure, it's character, it's psychology, it's the meaning of the whole enterprise.
Which is, when you step back, extremely funny. Campbell wrote a book about the spiritual journey of the hero as a psychological metaphor for individuation, a framework he absorbed from Jung and philosophized about in a vaguely mystical register, and the book's actual afterlife is as a corporate tool for standardizing the notes meeting. The thing sold as a universal truth about the structure of human storytelling across ten thousand years of civilization is, operationally, the reason your friend's Black List script got a pass from Fox because it was "missing an Ordeal beat."
The mythologists knew, by the way. They have known for decades. The actual folklore and myth scholars β Alan Dundes, people in that tradition β have been saying since basically the moment Campbell became culturally dominant that the monomyth is too vague to do the analytical work it claims. The phrase "Campbell soup of myths that loses all local flavor" is a direct quote from a scholar named Consentino, and it captures the objection exactly: that when you flatten every hero-story into the same seventeen stages you have not found a deep pattern, you have erased the thing that makes each story belong to its place and its people. The Inuit hero-myth and the Greek hero-myth and the Yoruba hero-myth are not three variations on the same story. They are three different stories, embedded in three different material and spiritual worlds, doing three different cultural jobs, and the act of forcing them into a single grid is itself a mid-century Western move, specifically the move of a worldview that thinks it has achieved a universal perspective and is entitled to reorganize other cultures' stories to prove it. This is a pretty basic critique. It's been made since the '60s. It has never penetrated the storytelling-guru industry because the storytelling-guru industry doesn't need it to be true, it just needs it to be usable, and it's very usable.
The other thing the mythologists point out, which you almost never hear in the pop-Campbell discourse, is that Campbell had some pretty weird politics. He was, by most accounts of people who knew him, pretty casually antisemitic in the way cultured midcentury Americans often were, drifted right as he aged, ended his life as a sort of crank about what he called the "mass society" and what he saw as the spiritual hollowness of modernity. The Bill Moyers interviews from 1988, which are how most Americans first encountered Campbell, carefully present him as a benign old sage saying things like "follow your bliss" β a phrase that got weaponized by everybody from self-help gurus to Silicon Valley founders β and what they don't show you is that Campbell's bliss-following was pretty close in structure to a kind of Nietzschean-lite individualism that is politically much more reactionary than the hippies who quoted him tended to realize. This is actually the through-line that connects Campbell to Jordan Peterson, who is Campbell's purest living disciple, just with the politics rendered legible: a Jungian framework, a romanticization of traditional masculinity, a vision of the individual hero as unfettered from community, all of it defended by gesturing at universal psychological structures that are, when you poke them, mostly the individualism of a specific postwar American imagination with a mythological costume on.
I'm not saying don't read Campbell. Read Campbell. The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a genuinely interesting book, the prose is beautiful, and there is real pleasure in watching a smart reader weave a thousand mythological fragments into a single pattern. Just know what you're reading. You are not reading a scholarly discovery. You are reading a mid-century popularizer's synthesis of earlier work, which happened to be congenial to the needs of the 1980s Hollywood development apparatus, which needed a shared language for diagnosing scripts, which adopted the synthesis via a seven-page memo, and which now teaches the synthesis as if it were a discovered fact about the human mind. The book is not the thing. The memo is the thing. The memo is what screenwriters actually encounter, and the memo is what's propagated, and the memo is what shaped every Pixar movie and every Marvel movie and every streaming-era prestige drama pilot script you've watched in the last fifteen years.
Which means that when people complain about how every Hollywood movie feels the same now β every superhero movie has an Ordeal in the same place, every fantasy franchise has the same Refusal of the Call, every animated family film ends with the same Return With The Elixir β what they are complaining about is not a failure of storytelling imagination. They are complaining about a specific piece of mid-80s corporate standardization working exactly as designed. The Vogler memo was engineered to produce uniform results. It produces uniform results. The complaint that modern movies feel formulaic is structurally identical to the complaint that Starbucks coffee tastes the same in every city. The uniformity is the product.
And the reason the whole apparatus continues to function, and why no serious structural critique has dislodged it, is the same reason it took over in the first place. It's not that people believe it's true. It's that the alternative β actually teaching writers how story works, which requires knowing a lot about specific stories in specific traditions and is hard and expensive and doesn't scale β is something no studio development apparatus has ever been willing to pay for. The memo is cheap. The memo works well enough. The memo gives executives a vocabulary. The grid stays. The movies rhyme with each other because they are all being made against the grid, and the grid was never the universe of stories, it was just the cheapest piece of software that sat between the writer and the executive.
