When I wrote my post about Harry Potter being as predictable as mainstream comics, I was being facetious. But some time after that I was thinking about comparing Harry Potter to Star Wars as well. And in the course of wiki-ing about, I came to page on The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
See, there was this dude called Joseph Campbell and he came up with this funda of the monomyth. This funda basically says that every story about a hero follows the same basic pattern – which is set out in great detail over here. So the hero must face a challenge, must have a guiding father figure, must face trials on a journey, and must have a confrontation with another father figure. It’s some sort of story which every proto-culture1 evolves.
When George Lucas wrote Star Wars, he followed the formula as explained by Joseph Campbell to a tee. By doing so, he apparently activated visceral and genetically hardwired triggers within us, which explains why we all watched the movie so often and louwed it so much despite the story being, well, kinda crap.
The problem which subsequently arose was that after George Lucas made his packet, other junta decided that he was on to a good thing and decided that whenever they wrote a screenplay or a book, they’d follow the monomyth template also. This explains why most major movies are very much like each other, and also why Harry Potter is so predictable – or rather why it fails to be truly surprising.
Anyway, figuring out which plot points in the Harry Potter series correspond to which stage of the monomyth is left as an exercise to my beloved readers. I am just going to go ahead and write the next post, after which I shall see a movie. Or read The Writing on the Wall. Or something.
1But not protoculture.