The hero must descend to the shadows
Continuing with my posts for film and TV writers, today I will tell you the seventh stage or milestone 7 of the Hero's Journey, the descent into hell, the underworld or the cave.
Remember that it is essentially a model for adventure films, in which a character goes from being a normal human to becoming a hero capable of saving the world, his community, or the galaxy.
This scheme, I never tire of repeating it, is what film producers expect in the international market. In theory, if you are a genius of writing, you can skip it, but since that does not happen in most cases, my recommendation is that you know it, handle it, and then decide conscientiously if you are going to use it or not. .
This scheme works even for our articles in Steemit, for our videos on YouTube, as well as for the theater and many other performing arts.
Where is the hero?
The hero has already left his village, his stable universe. He has imposed himself a mission, for example, take a ring to the place where he belongs (The Lord of the Rings), go to study magic at the Hogwarts Academy (Harry Potter) or become the Dragon Warrior (Kung Fu Panda.)
The hero already knows his friends, whether the Furious Seven (again Kung Fu Panda), Chuwacca or R2D2 (Star Wars).
Where did your hero, your character ,come from? Has he escaped from a burning country? Let's say to my Venezuelan friends: did he escape via Maiquetia’s airport to meet his girlfriend waiting for him in the United States? Think of this scheme, and surely your character will be vivid and exciting.
Who are your character's friends? An aunt who lends him the dollars to buy the fly ticket? An official of the Embassy of the United States who felt sorry for him, and even though he knows that the boy wants to stay in USA, gave him the visa?
Look how, with stories that we all know and that can happen to ourselves, we can build a story with The Journey of the Hero scheme.
The opponents of your character will be, for example, the political police that persecutes the boy in Venezuela and wants to imprison him, the Embassy official tired of so much Venezuelan immigrant, who denies him the visa, until another official, in the same office, pity him. Notice that these two opposing characters in two officials of the same rank color the characters.
The not turning point
Your hero can not back down, he was already on the plane from Maiquetia heading to Miami. Since Neo took the little red pill, now he will know the truth about the Matrix. And Harry Potter already threw himself against the 9 ¾ platform wall, crossed it, and rode on the Hogwarts Express.
What is the point where your character can not go back?
The battles
Now your hero will live a thousand battles, one after another, in crescendo, during the second act and also the third.
In dramaturgy for cinema and television, action is the motor of history.
The characters are not what they say or think of themselves (that would be something else, it would be French cinema), THEY ARE WHAT THEY DO.
For almost an hour that can last the second act of your movie, the hero will fight against the dementors (Harry Potter), against Darth Vader (Star Wars), against the agents in black (The Matrix).
And each time the battles will be more difficult, the road is uphill, the hero is saved by the hair.
He has met a mentor who has taught him some arts, such as Master Shifu or Yoda.
But he is the one who has to become a master, and that goal is going to take him to the limits, is going to take him to hell, to the underworld, to the cave.
Why does the hero descend to hell?
Because he must know death closely, he must have a symbolic death to be reborn, to return renewed to the world, with a superior knowledge that cannot be acquired in the vulgar world where his battles began, and less in the stable universe from which he started.
The hero, throughout the journey, changes, becomes wiser, more powerful, more superhuman.
Neo, after being shot and almost killed, is able to recognize the algorithms of the Matrix, and stop bullets in the air. Harry Potter grows more and more as a magician every time he travels to one of the many underworlds he has to visit in the saga.
Your character could live a season in the underworld. The Venezuelan emigrant will arrive in Miami, excited, and they will stop him at the airport. They will not return him immediately to Caracas, maybe they will confuse it with a terrorist, maybe they will accuse him of anti-American activities.
They will take him to a dark prison cell, surrounded by real terrorists, demented, drug traffickers and psychopaths. That, symbolically, for a Venezuelan middle class boy who just wanted to meet his girlfriend, represents a trip to the underworld.
And the worst thing is that, in reality, many Venezuelans in the process of emigrating are going through it.
What symbolically means the descent of the underworld
The great heroes of the Greco-Roman epic like Odysseus or Aeneas, descend to hell, and dialogue with the heroes who are no longer in this world.
On an individual level, Joseph Campbell would tell us that the dreams of death and of traveling to the underworld signify fear of death, and that they are a necessary stage to grow, to start living in the real world, without being afraid that underneath from the bed there is a monster.
At the collective level, they would be archetypes that are repeated in many cultures, as Mircea Eliade has shown: children are circumcised, and then "buried" in a kind of grave, or in a cave, before they can become warriors, male members of the tribe of full right.
Your character must symbolically travel all these milestones, to be able to mutate, to stop being an ordinary human being, and to become someone extraordinary, someone who we gladly accompany in their adventures, on the screen.
It sounds silly, but it works. If you pay attention to these steps, you memorize them and when you watch a movie you try to remember them, you will see that they fit perfectly in many of those successful scripts of the international industry, call it Coco or The Hunger Games.
What happens to our hero when he leaves the cave? Has he news powers, has he found a hidden truth that haunted him? Has our Venezuelan immigrant in Miami discovered a way to prove that he is not a terrorist and to be allowed to enter the United States?
Notice that I just mention those possibilities, and it make you want to continue watching the movie. But we will continue with that movie in our next post.
Óscar Reyes-Matute
(Samuel Ibn Motot / שמואל אבן מתת)
Video recommended:
What is the Hero's Journey?: Pat Soloman at TEDxRockCreekPark
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