How The Hero’s Journey Is Totalitarian
Years of movies have primed people to think that you can save the world by finding the right button and just pushing it. Or finding the bad guy and murdering him. Batman, James Bond, the Avengers, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, every blockbuster really.
But the world doesn’t work that way. To ‘save’ the world the world has to change, it’s not a voyage of personal discovery. Power relations have to change, usually violently. Basically, you have to root for the bad guys, the ones trying to make a change.
This is fundamentally not what heroes do. Heroes can go anywhere and do anything—they can even have superpowers—but they must fly in a loop. They must return to where they start. This is literally the hero’s journey, and it dominates imperial art. So let us look through the fever dreams of late capitalism (movies) to see what they say about its heart.
The Hero’s Journey
Almost every adventure film is oriented around what Joseph Campbell called the hero’s journey. This narrative form is so common that we think it’s the only one.
