The Hero’s Journey
I made this little project using Instagram stories over the course of 12 nights on the graveyard shift while studying Campbell and hanging with my 3 month old daughter, Lila. Yea, pinching all those emoji’s into place.
Get the full ‘Anatomy Of A Heist’ Series here: charleskunken.com/season4
Joseph Campbell spent his life studying the great myths of human history. He searched high and low scouring every corner of the globe. And his findings? They all told the same story, what he dubbed The Monomyth or The Hero’s Journey. This was all captured in his most famous book, The Hero With A Thousand Faces (1949).
What Campbell saw was that we humans have a common way of comprehending the world and this primal human understanding is reflected in the way we tell our tales.
Star Wars (1977) popularized The Hero’s Journey when George Lucas studied it specifically to tell one of the great contemporary legends about Luke Skywalker and The Death Star.
This post is my go at explaining the monomyth using another contemporary lense: Instagram.
I think Joseph Campbell and George Lucas and Lila would all agree that Instagram stories are just a new medium for an old pursuit: the search for human connection.
This 12 step outline is the version summarized by Christopher Vogler in his analysis of Campbell in from his own book, The Writer’s Journey, originally published in 1992.
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Drop me a line: charlie@charleskunken.com
Other Posts In The Anatomy Of A Heist Series
Storytelling Resources
The LIST
The 41 films conducted during the research project (full explanation here)
The Skytalkers podcast recently aired an episode in which they ran Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) through the heist tracker - the one we made together during paternity leave ;) charleskunken.com/blog/the-anatomy-of-a-heist-the-16-conventions-part-1-of-3).
Star Wars plus heists? Yea…we just had to take this inspiration from our friends at Skytalkers and contribute our own ‘Milk in The Matrix version of ‘is Solo a heist film?’