In the thematic play Tarantino is staging, faith in the divine leads to control and mastery while belief in luck puts one at the mercy of random events.
Once we become aware of the Polar Opposites in play, we stick with the story. Suspense tightens as we root for one side or the other to prevail or to hope that the polar conflict will lead to a new possibility by the end.
The Polarities don't get much more obvious than this image from Snow White. What do Snow White and the Queen represent?
THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY: ONE CHARACTER, TWO POLES
Polar Opposites can occur within a single character. In Clint Eastwood's The Bridges of Madison County, Francesca is a loving Iowa farm wife who supports her husband and kids in their mundane pursuits. But she's also a displaced Italian with music and romance in her soul. Her inner being embodies two Polar Opposites.
Screenwriter Richard LaGravenese dramatizes the polarities when he temporarily removes Francesca's family, slightly altering her Ordinary World. LaGravenese then has globetrotting Robert bring the world and the possibility of extramarital romance to Francesca's doorstep. A good wife would shun him. A romantic Italian would woo him. Which Polar Opposite within her will respond?
By the time the film reaches its climax, the new lovers must decide how to proceed. Francesca returns to her role as farm wife, but the romantic in her will continue to live, too. She becomes something that she wasn't before. The same is true of gadfly Robert. Until meeting Francesca, he was taking each moment on its own terms. As he leaves her, she has given him a spiritual home which will live in his heart for the rest of his life.
The Bridges of Madison County succeeds because its Polar Opposites are both complex and clear. The two poles are joined together to create something that hadn't existed at the beginning of the story.
The point is that the matter of Polar Opposites is a tool that opens an entire realm of productive questions that can launch the storyteller forward and can craft the inspirational visions into a workable dramatic structure.
THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
1 What are some of the Polar Opposites in vampire movies? In the Star Wars movies? In Sex and the City?
2 Brainstorm a list of twenty possible Polar Opposite pairs (e.g., Honest vs. Deceitful, Nervous vs. Calm, Flexible vs. Unyielding). Then hatch stories and conflicts that could be generated from each pairing.
3 What Polar Opposites are present in your own life? In your family? In your local community? In your state/province? In your country? Can you generate story ideas from these polarities?
NOTE FROM VOGLER
This notion of polar opposites was among the earliest storytelling principles that David and I agreed on, finding delight in movies and plays that expressed the flip sides of a human quality, like Shakespeare's study of knighthood through his contrasting characters Henry V and Falstaff. I've written a bit about story polarity in the third edition of The Writer's Journey, comparing it to magnetism and electricity, and trying to describe how it sometimes reverses itself temporarily, throwing characters out of their comfort zones with comic or dramatic effects.
Perhaps David and I are drawn to polarity as a storytelling device because we are polar opposites in many ways. Compared to me, he is a neat freak, and we couldn't be more different in our approaches to deadlines. His rule is “Read the script or do the assignment as soon as it comes into your hand, then relax.” Mine is “Relax and put off doing the job until the last possible moment.” It has made for some interesting tensions in our professional collaborations.
CHAPTER SIX
THE MEMO THAT
STARTED IT ALL:
A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO
THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES
—— VOGLER ——
From time to time people ask me for a copy of the original seven-page memo that was the foundation of The Writer's Journey. For many years I lost track of the original version and could only offer to send people the longer versions that evolved later, or point them to my book, where the memo was embedded in the first chapter, but they weren't satisfied with these solutions, apparently believing there was something almost magical about that original terse, blunt statement of my beliefs. They had to have the “legendary seven-pager” which I had called “A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” but I was never able to lay hands on the original short version. Until now, that is.
After upheavals of home and office, and sifting through many files and boxes, I have finally come across the raw, original text of The Memo, and I offer it here to you, with the hopes it will have some of the magical effect on you that people attribute to it.
A Practical Guide to Joseph Campbell's
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Christopher Vogler
“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”
—Willa Cather
INTRODUCTION
In the long run, one of the most influential books of the twentieth century may turn out to be Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
The book and the ideas in it are having a major impact on writing and storytelling, but above all on movie-making. Filmmakers like John Boorman, George Miller, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Francis Coppola owe their successes in part to the ageless patterns that Joseph Campbell identifies in the book.
The ideas Campbell presents in this and other books are an excellent set of analytical tools.
With them you can almost always determine what's wrong with a story that's floundering; and you can find a better solution almost any story problem by examining the pattern laid out in the book.
There's nothing new in the book. The ideas in it are older that the Pyramids, older than Stonehenge, older that the earliest cave painting.
Campbell's contribution was to gather the ideas together, recognize them, articulate them, and name them. He exposes the pattern for the first time, the pattern that lies behind every story ever told.
Campbell, now 82,* is a vigorous lover of mythology and the author of many books on the subject. For many years he has taught, written, and lectured about the myths of all cultures in all times. The Hero with a Thousand Faces is the clearest statement of his observations on the most persistent theme in all of oral traditions and recorded literature—the myth of the hero.
In his study of world hero myths Campbell discovered that they are all basically the same story—retold endlessly in infinite variations. He found that all storytelling, consciously or not, follows the ancient patterns of myth, and that all stories, from the crudest jokes to the highest flights of literature, can be understood in terms of the hero myth; the “monomyth” whose principles he lays out in the book.
The theme of the hero myth is universal, occurring in every culture, in every time; it is as infinitely varied as the human race itself; and yet its basic form remains the same, an incredibly tenacious set of elements that spring in endless repetition from the deepest reaches of the mind of man.
Campbell's thinking runs parallel to that of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who wrote of the “archetypes”—constantly repeating characters who occur in the dreams of all people and the myths of all cultures.
Jung suggested that these archetypes are reflection of aspects of the human mind—that our personalities divide themselves into these characters to play out the drama of our lives.
He noticed a strong correspondence between his patients' dream or fantasy figures and the common archetypes of mythology, and he suggested