Joseph Campbell teased out the 12 steps of every hero’s journey. Although every hero (or heroine) is different, they all go through the same stages. Recognizing these stages is a great opportunity for a writer to improve his or her writing. Although writers may worry about being predictable, without these stages, stories are often considered unsatisfying or shallow. They say the best way to learn the stages is to see how they apply to other stories. So I’m taking my favourite movies and books and applying the stages. If I’m brave, I’ll even apply them to movies and books I didn’t like and show why they don’t work.
Remember, remember the fifth of November
The gunpowder treason and plot.
I know of no reason the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
V for Vendetta is a great story.
It has many of my favourite features: a skilled but crazy person, witty
and intellectually stimulating dialogue, a dystopian society, romance and
explosions.
Although V is the title character and one of the most interesting,
the story is not about him. It is about
Evey Hammond. V’s hero’s journey begins
well before the movie starts, though he completes it before the credits roll.
Evey’s Hero’s Journey:
1)
Ordinary World, the baseline:
This is established in the first few scenes.
We see Evey dressing up, watching Lewis Prothero on television. His bombastic aggressive delivery puts FOX
news to shame, letting us know that this is a world without much tolerance for
difference. In case we had any doubt,
the final formula of Strength through Unity, Unity through Faith makes it very
clear.
Evey slips out into the deserted street
but we immediately know someone is following her. Two men confront her and she maces them only
to discover they are Fingermen. Now we
know even more about this world. There
are secret police with absolute authority.
Since these two bullies are part of it, we know there is no
recourse. They threaten to rape Evey. The audience can now understand that this is
a dystopian world of cruel and arbitrary authority.
2)
Call to Adventure: In sweeps V
to save her in a veritable whirl of violence and verbiage. After beating the Fingermen, he takes Evey to
a rooftop to watch as he destroys the Old Bailey to the William Tell Overture.
3)
Call Refused: Evey goes back to
her ordinary life at the local broadcast station but is having trouble fitting
back in. Her eyes have been opened to
her world and now she can’t quite go back to willful blindness.
4)
Meeting with the Mentor: V
comes back into her life, targeting the station for his next act of civic
disobedience and his general call to arms.
He tells the country that they are personally responsible for letting matters
get so out of hand, trading their freedom for the security of a prison. He calls on them to join him in a year to
regain their rightful place.
5)
Crossing the Threshold: the
police have come to arrest V but Evey maces one of them when he threatens the
masked avenger. The policeman knocks her
out and V takes her to his underground lair.
Joseph Campbell uses a lot of underground and cave imagery for his
stages and this works on both a literal and metaphorical way. Evey has been brought beneath the ground for
a time of growth, she has been immersed in a new world and the audience knows
she can never be the same again.
6)
Tests, Allies and Enemies: This
part is the bulk of the movie. Evey fails
her initial test, betraying V when he comes to kill Bishop Lilliman. She finds her ally in Stephen Fry’s Deitrich,
who hides her in his home at great personal risk. But hiding is not enough, Deitrich’s actions
put him in conflict with the authorities, who raid his house. Evey is taken and put in an isolation
cell. She is interrogated mercilessly.
7)
Approach/Preparation: Evy can
no longer hide from what her world has become.
All of her illusions have been stripped away. But now she is beginning to find her own
strength. She discovers a small scroll
of toilet paper with the biography of a previous prisoner. The prisoner refused to yield or feel guilty
about her choices in life. Evey begins
to see that there is another way.
8)
Face Your Fear: Evey is brought
to the interrogation room for the final time and told: either betray V or be
executed. Calmly, she tells them she’d
rather be executed. She’s not afraid of
what they can do to her any more. She
has found her authentic self.
9)
Seizing the Sword: Instead of
being executed, Evey is released. We
discover that the entire prison has been a setup by V. He tortured her and forced her to face her
fears. The beautiful and powerful scene
of Evey standing on a rooftop, crying in the rain, as her previous self is
washed away is one of the images which sticks with me from this film.
10)
The Road Back: V releases Evey,
telling her they can’t hurt or frighten her anymore. Evey promises to return before the planned
revolution.
11)
The Return: Typically, this
refers to returning to the previous ordinary life, but we never see that on
screen. Instead we see Evey return to
V’s lair on the eve of the revolution. I
think this symbolically shows that V ‘s world is her new reality. Before she lived in a world of shadows and
lies but now she sees the true world beneath.
12)
Elixir/Healing: After V’s
death, Evey launches the train which will blow up Parliament and turns back to
Detective Finch, who has been pursuing V and Evey throughout the movie. She asks him: “Do you like music?” which was
one of the first things V said to her.
Despite his death, she is stepping into his role, continuing to
broadcast his message.
It all fits together surprisingly neatly. It makes sense to an audience on a
subconscious level, which is why the pattern is repeated almost constantly.
For V, we never quite see his ordinary world, although it is implied
with the flashbacks featuring Valerie in the time before the authorities took
over. We know that he was experimented
on and gained powers of strength and speed.
(I won’t call him a superhero because he doesn’t quite fit the “hero”
half of that equation.) He seeks
vengeance on those who took his life from him.
I would argue that we see the last half of his hero’s journey in the
film. He, too, has to face his fear and
let Evey into his life. He claims her
love as his reward but returns back to his dark world to complete his
mission. In the end, he is healed
because he understands he is more than just an instrument of vengeance, he
regains his humanity. Then dies. Not quite a happily ever after but not every
story can go there.
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