By Maya Zuckerman, Spring | Summer 2016

Breaking Free of The Hero Myth

We humans and the way we interact with narrative, we’ve come a long way. We’ve evolved from the days of stories round a campfire, epic tales of heroes fighting monsters in far away lands, the gods playing tricks with the mortals, the hubris of humanity, and legends of beautiful and scary creatures who filled the oceans, forests, and skies.

Those ancient tales served as teaching tools for elders to explain the wonders and horrors of the world around them, to teach children what it takes to become an adult, and to perpetuate tribal legacy. The Hero’s Journey was a tool for adolescents to learn their role in the community and how to mature through use of metaphors such as quests, gods, monsters, and magic. The stories were most commonly circular—the journey away and the eventual return, echoing the cycles of life. It’s not surprising that mythologist Joseph Campbell saw variations of this universal story structure in nearly every culture he studied.

We can still easily recognize the same Hero’s Journey model in our 21st century mass media. The story line hasn’t evolved; it has been kept in its circular model. Hero leaves for the quest, learns from the mentor, fights the monsters, dies and resurrects, finds his power, returns with the elixir. Wash, rinse, repeat, ad infinitum.

Mass media has been stuck in an endless and simplified stage of the Hero’s Journey, striking all the familiar notes with blunt instruments and ever-improving digital effects, before fading into rolling credits. The mainstream is full of these narratives. From a plethora of superhero movies, television shows, and comic books, the narrative of the savior is alive and well. Our narrative sensibility—a reflection of our developmental stage as a civilization — remains mired in perpetual adolescence.

Mass communication drones on with the simplest form of the Hero’s Journey narrative—the masculine form—and perpetuates the drama triangle, an ever-present tension where characters take turns putting on certain masks (whether knowingly or through circumstance) of the Victim, the Persecutor, and the Hero/Savior. As an audience we have no choice but to identify with one of those three. The hero-savior archetype usually sacrifices something in order to save us all. And in our deep-seated expectation that a hero will rise to save us, we give our own power away. Someone who will make a difference always arrives in the nick of time, don’t they? In a world where we all need to roll up our sleeves and get to work on huge challenges ranging from runaway climate change to poverty and inequality, the paradigm of the hero-savior, endlessly repeated throughout the media, actually disempowers us. We need alternative narratives that show empowered and diverse people taking on the biggest challenges and coming together to transform a situation, not just ‘save the day.’

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