Movies and the Mind

by William Indick

  Star Wars

  Now a fully developed hero, Luke needs no encouragement to join the rebels in their desperate battle against the Imperial Death Star. As master of the two worlds, (the outer world of spaceship fighting and the inner world of the Force), Luke goes into battle with Obi-Wan’s voice in his head as his spiritual guide. At Luke’s moment of critical development, he trusts Obi-Wan’s telepathic advice to “use the force.” Luke ignores the external spaceship controls and relies solely on his internal control of the Force to fire the fatal blow on the Death Star, delivering the freedom to live to the good people of the galaxy. In the final scene, Luke receives a medal of honor as a reward for his heroism. The galaxy has been saved, and all is well with the universe … until the next episode.

  The Lord of the Rings

  After destroying the ring in the fires of Mt. Doom, Frodo and Sam experience a magic flight via a rescue from without on the wings of giant eagles. Frodo crosses the return threshold by going back to the Shire, but he feels awkward in his role as master of the two worlds. Though he loves his quiet home, his adventure as Ringbearer has changed him forever. He leaves Middle Earth with Gandalf, Bilbo and the elfin race, going on to become an immortal legend for all time. However, he leaves Sam with the legacy of their great adventure. Within this legacy is the symbolic meaning of the journey—the notion that every person is a hero, no matter how large, as long as he is willing to fight for what he believes in. This legacy is the eternal freedom to live.

  Reviewing the Hero’s Journey

  The beauty of Campbell’s model is that once the stages are understood in terms of their psychological function, any story, movie or myth can be analyzed in reference to the basic structural elements. Below, Campbell’s stages from The Hero with a Thousand Faces are broken down into three-act structure to correspond with theatrical screenplays.

  7

  Archetype Evolution

  In the dream of the modern day neurotic and in the frames of a new Hollywood blockbuster, we can identify the ancient archetypes that were first expressed in the stories of our primordial ancestors. The male persona in the dream world has developed from the Hunter Hero tradition. He is the member of the tribe who must go out from the safety of the “world of common day” into the wilderness, where danger, the unknown and beasts with mystical powers exist. The female persona has developed from the Maiden Hero tradition—the member of the tribe who must be rescued from the dangers of the wilderness. Sadly, this basic dichotomy between a proactive and assertive hero and a passive female heroine has been inherited from our distant past and ingrained as a basic part of our collective unconscious. The passive female hero archetype is the by-product of a patriarchal Western mythology. Campbell noted that Eastern mythologies tend to be “matriarchal” rather than patriarchal, and that female heroes in Eastern myths are often more assertive. In Western myths, the male hero generally plays the lead role, while the female plays the subordinate role of “maiden in distress.”

  The Princess Hero

  The maiden’s character arc is resolved by marrying and being carried off by her savior to live with him happily ever after. Hence, the princess motif is rewarding for both males and females. By slaying the dragon, the knight gains not only heroism and a beautiful bride, he also gains social status, power and the job security of being heir to the throne. In rescuing the maiden, the hero not only proves his worth, he also claims his birthright. For girls, the only path to identity development is that of being saved by a male. So, if a girl is going to play a passive role in her own identity development, she might as well be a beautiful and rich princess, rather than an ordinary, poor peasant girl.

  The Evil Stepmother

  The evil stepmother motif was an even more psychologically signi-ficant archetype in the days before modern medicine, when death at childbirth was relatively frequent and commonplace. Though the loss of a mother at birth would be psychologically traumatic for any child, this loss may have special significance for girls, who look towards their mothers as primary role models and mentor figures. The evil stepmother archetype must have sounded a powerfully resonant chord for thousands of girls who had to grow up in the house of a stepmother rather than a biological mother.

  It is natural for a child to feel that a parent is unduly harsh, cruel or uncaring. These feelings could be exacerbated when a child suspects that a stepparent doesn’t love her as much as her “real” parent would. The “real” parent is dead. Since she is dead and not present, she could be idealized as a figure that is diametrically opposite to the stepparent. Where the evil stepmother is cold, harsh, punitive and cruel, the “real” mother would be warm, kind, loving and gentle. The little girl’s hatred of her stepmother and her earnest desire for love and contact with her real mother leads to a psychic projection. The stepmother is cast into the role of the wicked witch, depicted plainly in princess hero stories such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in which the archetype plays a dual role as both evil stepmother and wicked witch. This dual archetype owes its descent most directly from Medea in Greek mythology. Medea was both a powerful dark sorceress and a jealous, vengeful mother who killed her children and boiled them in a stew to be eaten by their own father.

  The Fairy Godmother

  As in the myth of the birth of the hero, the maiden hero’s saga is derived from a childhood fantasy of noble or divine parentage. The deep psychological wish for the dead mother is fulfilled in the child’s fantasy world by actually resurrecting her as a spirit, in the form of the fairy godmother. This resurrected ideal parent satisfies a universal desire for a warm, loving and nurturing mother. In Cinderella, the Fairy Godmother fulfills the mother fantasy, but since she is also supernatural, she can supply the heroine with the supernatural aid she needs to win her prince. In The Wizard of Oz, Glinda the Good Witch is Dorothy’s mentor/fairy godmother, providing love, care and supernatural aid.

  Passivity

  The passivity of the female hero must have an effect on the collective unconscious of girls and women throughout society. We identify personally with the heroes in the stories we hear. What life lessons and models are formed in the minds of young girls when the heroes in all their stories rarely take an active stance in their own development? The implicit message is that a girl cannot achieve a positive identity through action, assertiveness or competitive striving. A girl must instead be patient, hopeful, passive and above all, beautiful. Furthermore, the explicit message is that a girl’s personal sense of identity achievement can only be fulfilled through marriage with an ideal man. It is not the girl herself who can make herself happy though personal growth. It is the male who, by saving and seizing the girl, fulfills her destiny for her.

  Obviously, the ancient archetype does not fit in well with modern expectations in contemporary Western society, in which girls are encouraged to actively seek out their own goals and identities. Contemporary depictions of the princess archetype present a more assertive and proactive female hero. As modern mythmakers create films and stories for today’s women and girls, they tend to borrow themes from non–Western mythology in order to find heroines that are more assertive.

  Sleeping Princesses

  Jealous of her stepdaughter’s beauty, the wicked queen in Snow White dresses her stepdaughter in rags and puts her to work as a scullery maid. But the princess shows hope and patience, the hallmarks of her theme song “Some Day My Prince Will Come.” Hope and patience are two of the princess hero’s main strengths—much different than the male hero’s strengths of courage and vigor. The evil stepmother tells her guard to kill Snow White, but the kindly guard has pity on her. He tells her to escape into the forest, where she finds shelter in the house of the Seven Dwarfs. Here we see another quality of the princess hero. Rather than saving herself, she is saved by others who have pity on her.

  Snow White plays a motherly role by taking care of the Seven Dwarfs—cleaning their house, cooking their meals, making sure they wash, and sewing their clothes. The Seven
Dwarfs, in return, play a fatherly role in Snow White’s life—protecting and defending her from the Queen. In these scenes, we see another common princess theme: the girl must prove herself a good potential mother before she can be accepted by the prince as a bride. The evil stepmother is also a wicked witch, and she tricks Snow White into eating an apple that puts her into the “sleep of death.” The dwarfs destroy the Witch and preserve Snow White in a glass coffin, until she is awakened by the Prince, who rescues her with the magic power of “love’s first kiss.”

  In Sleeping Beauty, a very similar tale is told. On the day of her birth, the princess’s three fairy godmothers each give her a magical gift. He first gift is beauty, and the second is song. But before the third gift is bestowed, a wicked witch places a curse on the princess, which will kill her on her sixteenth birthday. The third fairy godmother has pity on the princess. She cannot reverse the curse, but she gives the princess a third gift. When her sixteenth birthday arrives, the princess will not die—she will sleep. The princess hero’s stereotypically feminine gifts represent beauty, creativity and passivity—gifts that will serve her well as a bride, but won’t help her defeat the witch and rescue herself. Instead, like Snow White, she must passively sleep and wait for the valiant prince to slay the witch and rescue her with love’s first kiss. It is also significant that all of this occurs on Sleeping Beauty’s sixteenth birthday, a traditional date for a girl to be married off by her father and carried away by her new owner, her husband.

  Sleeping Beauty and Snow White represent the extreme examples of feminine passivity, as these heroes actually sleep through their critical moments of identity development. Their epiphanies and apotheoses are achieved through passive acceptance of a male’s sexual contact—“love’s first kiss”—which is symbolic of marriage, the moment at which a nubile young girl is initiated from the childhood state of virginal maidenhood to the adult state of marriage and motherhood. The patriarchal system in which the girl is passed from father to husband as a passive object rather than as an independent being is recapitulated in the themes of these ancient tales. The dwarfs, in the place of Snow White’s absent father, give her away to the prince, and they live happily ever after. Sleeping Beauty is handed over from her father the king to her husband the prince, a marriage that was arranged on the day she was born, and resolved while she slept passively on a bed of roses.

  Cinderella Stories

  Cinderella combines the princess motif with a slightly more proactive maiden hero. Though Cinderella’s father was a gentleman, she was not born a princess—she must become one. Cinderella is a poor girl, an orphan who must overcome an evil stepmother and cruel stepsisters to win her prince. The motif of the cruel stepsister is another psychologically signi-ficant theme in traditional societies, in which the only way young women can actively define their identities is by marrying the best suitor. In the old days, there must have been great competition between maidens for the best bachelors. Certainly, this competition was often the fiercest between sisters and stepsisters in the same house. For Cinderella, any force that would have come between her and her Prince Charming would be perceived as being cruel and evil.

  The Cinderella hero is much more active than Snow White or Sleeping Beauty. Like the male hero, she must actively pursue her goal in order to achieve the identity she desires. She must find a prince and win him in order to become a princess. Though Cinderella is a bit more proactive, at her critical moment of development she does not actively save herself or capture her prince. Cinderella is rescued from her locked chamber by her male household pets, and she is taken away from her unhappy household by her Prince. Cinderella merely waits for him to come and save her.

  A similarly passive resolution is seen in The Wizard of Oz. At the moment of Dorothy’s ordeal—when she is locked in the chamber of the witch’s castle—rather than saving herself, she is rescued by Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion. Once again, it is the male figures that play the active role, while the female hero remains passive. Even when Dorothy destroys the wicked witch, she does so by accident. She was throwing water to dowse the fire on Scarecrow’s arm, and the liquidation of the witch was a fortunate side effect. Though she kills the beast, the female hero is not yet allowed to be actively violent or assertive.

  Little Princesses

  When Sara’s (Shirley Temple) father in The Little Princess (1939) goes to war, her boarding school headmistress becomes her evil stepmother. The key to Sara’s heroism is her desire to reunite with her father, because to him, she knows she will always be “a little princess.” In Annie (1982), another character from the 1930s, the little orphan (Aileen Quinn) escapes her version of the wicked stepmother, the housemother of her orphanage. She becomes an American princess by finding a rich father, capitalist king Daddy Warbucks (Albert Finney). In the 1930s, Shirley Temple played the role of the little princess archetype in a host of films such as Little Miss Marker, Poor Little Rich Girl, Dimples, Curly Top, Little Miss Broadway, Heidi, and of course The Little Princess. Though she lost the role of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz to Judy Garland, Shirley Temple’s image still persists as the dominant icon in the little girl hero genre. Since the days of Shirley Temple, the little princess theme has been played out, either literally or figuratively, in dozens of films. Most recently, The Princess Diaries (2001) and What a Girl Wants (2003) both play upon the theme of a normal American girl discovering her aristocratic roots, and setting off on a journey to establish her princess identity. While the princess motif is clearly a ubiquitous theme in stories that appeal to little girls, the theme seems to be equally popular among adult audiences.

  Adult Princesses

  The Cinderella story of an ordinary woman winning the heart of a rich and charming prince remains so appealing that a new movie based on this basic theme seems to come out almost every month. Recently, Jennifer Lopez starred in Maid in Manhattan (2002), in which a common chambermaid wins the heart of a prince who is heir to a rich and powerful political dynasty. One of the biggest hits in this genre was Pretty Woman (1990), in which Julia Roberts plays a common hooker who wins the heart of a prince of industry. A basic truism in movies is that if a film has a female lead as the star, 99 percent of the time that film is either a romantic comedy or a romantic drama. While male heroes in movies have many quests, the female hero is almost always searching for love. However, the archetypes are evolving. One sign of evolution is the emergence of new female heroes who think and act differently. Of course, society’s initial reaction to people that are different tends to be bewilderment.

  “What’s Wrong with That Girl?”

  A common plot device in female hero stories is to cast a hero who is different from typical girls. In Beauty and the Beast (1991), Belle is considered odd and eccentric because she displays the archetypal qualities of the male hero. She is individualistic, intellectual, independent and unsatisfied with the status quo. The female heroes in the Disney’s films of the latter half of the twentieth century—Belle, The Little Mermaid, Pocahontas and Mulan—all epitomize the girl who is marginalized in her society because she epitomizes the qualities of the male hero. These heroines represent a development in the princess archetype, because they are all much more assertive and proactive than traditional princesses such as Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. These “tomboy” princesses provoke their own changes in character, and their stories tend to share some common motifs.

  Rejecting the Suitor

  Belle, in Beauty and the Beast, wants nothing to do with Gaston, the powerful Adonis who everyone thinks she should marry. Belle wants to choose her own husband—a critical choice of destiny that has been denied to nubile girls in traditional societies since antiquity. The freedom to choose one’s own husband has been an extremely significant theme for girls throughout history. This issue is represented in stories by the princess who rejects her suitors. By denying the father’s or society’s choice for her mate, the princess asserts her autonomy in an untraditional show of independence.
The rejecting of the suitor is a universal theme in Native American myths, and it is recapitulated by Disney in Pocahontas (1995). The first step on the hero’s path of individuality is rejecting the path of conformity that is laid out before her. By rejecting the suitor, the heroine chooses her own path and displays the traditionally masculine qualities of strength and independence.

  A similar theme is seen in the rejection of the father-king’s domination and control over his daughter’s life. The princess who yearns to be free of her father’s tyranny represents a strong and assertive heroine who rebels against her father rather than passively accepting his will. Princess Ariel in The Little Mermaid displays her independence by venturing off into the land of humans, despite her father’s objections. Princess Jasmine in Aladdin (1992) ventures off into the city disguised as a peasant girl in order to briefly escape the palace and her father’s domination. In Roman Holiday (1952), Princess Ann (Audrey Hepburn) escapes her father’s bodyguards in order to experience Rome as a normal girl. And in a shamelessly borrowed story line, Anna (Mandy Moore) in Chasing Liberty (2004) is an American princess—the president’s daughter—who escapes her Secret Service bodyguards to experience Europe on her own. All of these stories (and many more just like them) represent a mélange of traditional and contemporary archetypes. By rebelling against the father-king, the princess hero shows that she is proactive and assertive. However, the bulk of the story still invariably revolves around the princess falling in love with a prince-in-rags figure, who also invariably saves the princess from some form of danger or peril. But in the end, by choosing this pauper-prince as her lover, the princess rebels against the father-king again, because the all-important choice of suitor is hers and not his.