Mythic Structure in Screenwriting

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Mythic Structure in ScreenwritingSue Clayton

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Mythic Structure in Screenwriting

Sue Clayton

London, UK

Many analyses of screenwriting and story structure deal with the mythic under-pinning of the screenplay text

both those like McKee that reference the classical

Aristotelean three-act model of the hero and his quest, and the followers ofCampbell and Vogler who posit certain monomyths as universal paradigms forcinema storytelling. The monolithic nature of these theories makes them hard forwriters to work with in a specific and personal way; and there is also the inference,especially with Campbell et al. that working with myth is an unconscious process,embedded in our acculturisation and not something we make conscious choicesabout. In this article I will examine further the critical literature around writing andmythology. Then I will present two detailed analyses of how I have worked with

mythological themes across not just story and dialogue but character, image,landscape and music. The first of these examples, The Disappearance of Finbar,a feature film I co-wrote and directed, debates notions of myth and magical realismin modern Europe; the second, Jumolhari, a feature screenplay co-written withBhutanese film-makers, explores the cultural specificity of our mythic models, andshows how in this case certain concepts in Bhutanese Buddhist mythology challengeour practices of mythic storytelling in both form and content.

doi: 10.2167/new571.0

Keywords:mythology, screenwriting, cultural difference, narrative theory, storytelling

Introduction

As a cinema screenwriter and director I have always consciously workedwith mythological tropes in story material. Moreover, while film theory andcriticism has not focussed much on this aspect of the film text, there has beenfor many years in the discourses of screenwriting practice (Campbell, 1949;McKee, 1997; Vogler, 1992) a currency of ideas around mythic paradigms innarrative structure, which claims that these paradigms are universally foundin cinema narrative. However these works, which draw on ideas from Propp,Jung and a notion of the collective unconscious, tend to conflate analysis ofstorytelling structure with the material of myth itself, identifying latentsystems and archetypes in current cinema, and offering prescriptiveformulas for screenwriting while having little to say about the actual processof writing. How does a writer work with myth? At a conscious or unconsciouslevel? And similarly in what way, and at what level, do audiences and criticsrespond to such references? Do only myths from our own history and cultureresonate? If not, what issues or problems might arise if one worked withmaterial or structure from an unfamiliar tradition? And is there a kind ofuniversal narrative and an underlying set of narrative principles suggested bymythological material?

1479-0726/07/03 208-16 $20.00/0 2007 S. ClaytonINT. J. FOR THE PRACTICE AND THEORY OF CREATIVE WRITING Vol. 4, No. 3, 2007

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I propose in this piece to give a brief summary of the texts mentioned above,as they are core texts in the teaching of screenwriting and have exertedconsiderable influence on the film industry itself (both McKee and Vogler runhigh-profile programmes worldwide attended by not only writers but also

producers and studio executives, and Vogler himself has been an executive atFox Studios since 2000). I will then analyse the process of writing two of myown screenplays in the context of working with mythic material and structure:the first,The Disappearance of Finbar(1996) a magical realist tale which drawseclectically on Irish, Scandinavian and Latin American references; and thesecond, Jumolhari (2007), a collaborative work-in-progress which referencestwo very different traditions the Western individual hero quest story and thenon-linear, cause-and-effect discourse of Bhutanese Buddhist fairy-tale andattempts to bring them into dialogue with each other.

Myth in Screenwriting Theory

The sense that a modern form might make allusion to ancient texts isfurther enhanced by the frequent references in screenplay manuals toAristotlesPoetics. Aristotle is not directly concerned with the relation betweenmyth and narrative, but he does offer a set of influential ideas about the natureand structure of a well crafted story. Many Hollywood how-to manuals haveconstrued from these ideas the notion of the story arc and three-act structurewhich they see as key to cinema storytelling (Field, 2003; McKee, 1997; Root,1987). Thompson (2003: 38) notes that even television soap-opera and sitcom

manuals routinely quote Aristotle in the context of narrative development:

To paraphrase from Aristotles Politics and Poetics (a book which youshould probably have on your shelf) a story is composed of threesections: a beginning introduces a complication to a characters life.launching the story. The middle section presents developing action, aseries of revelations and discoveries, which drives the story forward. Theendresolves the story conflict, often through a reversal of fortune for themain character. (Smith, 1999: 93)

(It hardly needs pointing out that such uses can appear gratuitous not least

in the odd referencing of thePoeticsand Politicsas a compound work, above.)Other classical Greek terms such as that ofhamartia the fatal flaw andcatharsis, are also widely used in manuals like those mentioned above, withliberal exemplars given from Macbeth to Bugsy Malone (Root, 1987: 9495) todefend claims of the ubiquitousness, if not universality, of these structures anddevices in cinema storytelling. Moreover, as Aristotle drew the diktats of hisPoeticsfrom empirical analysis of the epic poems and tragedies of his culture,McKee seemingly finds it difficult to debate the question of form and structureseparate from that of manifest content. McKee propounds neo-Aristoteliancritic Norman Friedmans genre and plot categories from his Form and

Meaning in Fiction (1975) by way of Goethes seven types of genre, Poltisthirty-six dramatic situations and Metzs eight syntagmas, validating acorpus of plot paradigms ultimately based on classical material, albeit diluted(McKee, 1997: 7986).

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The most notable opposition to this critical tradition has not denied thesignificance of mythic material and structure, but has rather sought touniversalise it. Campbells iconic Jungian-influencedThe Hero With A ThousandFaces(1949) attempted to consolidate the principles and themes of storytelling

across a variety of cultures in an engaging if not always scientific or rigorousmanner, embracing the core narratives of the Judaeo-Christian, Celtic, Islamic,Buddhist and Hindu cultures. He presents his project thus:

Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dream-like mumbo-jumbo of some red-eyed witch-doctor of the Congo, or read withcultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse; now and then crack the hard nutshell of an argument of Aquinas, orcatch suddenly the shining meaning of an Eskimo fairy-tale: it willalways be the one, shape-shifting yet marvellously constant story thatwe find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of moreremaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told. (Campbell,1949: 3)

Campbell develops his monomyth of the hero and the quest as fundamentalto the narratives of all cultures. This notion comprises a number of stagesthrough which the individual hero passes: first the heros call to adventurefrom the ordinary world and his initial refusal of the call, then encourage-ment from mentor figures to enter a different world or space in which the heroendures sustained struggle against enemies to reach what Campbell calls theInmost Cave, the place where secrets and knowledge lie. Only then is he able

to take possession of the Elixir, a physical or spiritual gift or a privileged pieceof knowledge. Finally the hero must attempt to cross back to his home worldwith this precious gift, at great and possibly ultimate cost to himself. Thisnotion of a single, universal and translatable myth was criticised by sometheorists for its ahistoricism:

Accepting, so to speak, myths own philosophy of time, for [somecontemporary approaches] history is at best an intrusion; the inter-pretive enterprise consists in finding the atemporal cores of meaning.(Rose, 2001: 300)

However Campbells work appeared to resonate with the interests of cinemapractitioners in their work on story, and found favour not only with film-makers such as George Miller, Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas,1 but alsowith teachers of screenwriting via the work of Campbells protegeChristopherVogler in his equally iconicThe Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellersand Screenwriters (1992).

Voglers book takes the stages of Campbells heros journey the Call toAdventure, Meeting with the Mentor, Return with the Elixir, and so on anduses them both as a way of analysing existing films such as Titanic and StarWars, and to present a prescriptive model of screenwriting which incorporates

the structural framework of the journey, and identifies archetypical characterswho occur in it such as the Herald, the Trickster and the Threshold Guardian(Vogler, 1992: 2935). Mindful of the shifts in global culture since Campbellsday, Vogler (1992: xvi) addresses issues of what may be construed as cultural

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imperialism in Campbells model, acknowledging that some contemporarycultures remain herophobic, and embracing criticism that the heros journeyis skewed in favour of Western-influenced happy endings and tidy resolu-tions; the tendency to show admirable, virtuous heroes overcoming evil by

individual effort. However these reservations do not undermine Voglers(1992: ix) conviction that

The heros journey exists somewhere, somehow, as an eternal reality, aPlatonic ideal form, a divine model. From this model, infinite and highlyvaried copies can be produced, each resonating with the essential spiritof the form.

There exists a kind of critical chasm between the prescriptive works of McKeeand Vogler, with their claims that all stories are based on paradigms of the heroand the quest, and schools of academic film theory and criticism which tend to

be based around close textual criticism and would shy away from, forinstance, Jungian notions of a collective unconscious as agent of storytellingstructure and content. And yet to the vernacular writer in this culture, thenotion of, for instance, the heros quest, and trappings such as the mentor, thegift and so on, do feel to us as familiar and natural as the quotation fromAristotle above about a beginning, a middle and an end. From a theoreticalstandpoint, one could wish for a synthesising of work done in the variousfields around mythological structure and content at the level of psychoanalysisand semiotics, anthropology, textual criticism and ideological critique.

Myth and Magical Realism in Postmodern Europe

The Disappearance of Finbar is a feature film, financed by seven Europeansources and distributed worldwide by Buena Vista International, which I co-wrote and directed. It tells the story of teenager Finbar Flynn who, tired of thepressure on him to be a football star, climbs onto the flyover that overshadowshis drab Dublin housing estate, and jumps. However no body is found on theroad beneath and it is up to his friend Danny, the storyteller of the film, to findFinbar a journey that takes him to the Arctic wastes of Lapland, and has a

transformative effect not just on Finbar but Danny too.The film was loosely based on Carl Lombards novel The Disappearance of

Rory Brophy (1992), a multistranded text set in a mythical near-future whichnods to Latin American magical realism, as for instance in the surreal nature ofFinbars disappearance he claims to have jumped into a truckful of sugar-beet and been exported to Gothenburg. An additional context, as I havediscussed further elsewhere (Clayton, 2007a) is that both the film and thenovel came out of a historical ethos where ideas of a consolidated Europe andthe notion of a pan-European culture were being much discussed (see alsoWayne, 2002). Thus the notion of Europe as a site, a space, and the issues of

defining ones local culture in relation to it, were part of the subtext. Myintention was to use the story to examine notions of home in the broadestsense of the term and debate issues of change, belonging and migration. I willattempt below to map out the matrix of cultural and mythological tropes


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which the film acquired in its writing, filming and in its audience and criticalreception.

Although we ultimately changed the heros name from Rory to Finbar forplot reasons (the film makes a play on the name of Finbar and his ultimate

hide-out destination, the Finn Bar), my starting point in the interpretation ofthe story was a comment made by Lombard in discussion that he had chosenthe heros name for a comedic touch as Rory, or Ruari, is considered in Irishculture to be a heroic forename, meaning great king and personified by RoryOConnor, the last High King of Ireland. By contrast the surname Brophy hethought was popularly perceived as a more proletarian name (perhapsbecause of its association with several renowned felons who were deportedto Australia). This tonal contradiction adds to the characters symbolism:Rory/Finbar bears the resonance of past Irish heroes like Oisin and Finn MacCumhail, also condemned to be wanderers, yet at the same time he remains

trapped on a mundane housing estate

the ordinary world referred to byVogler (1992: 8198), overshadowed by a trans-European highway to a widerworld.

As I progressed the films story the narrative of Oisin in particular took onfurther resonance. Having sojourned long in Tir na n-Og, the Land of Youth,with the Kings daughter, Oisin declares his intention to return to Ireland tovisit his father. However his bride tells him this will be impossible becauseOisin has unwittingly spent three hundred years in Tir na n-Og and his pastlife in Ireland is long gone. She provides Oisin with a magic steed on which toreturn home, but warns that if his foot ever touches the ground he will be left

in Erin, and become his true age. Oisins foot does touch the ground and he isleft stranded there, old and isolated from the imaginary Land of Youth and ofdreaming. Thus in the legend the desire for home is something at once bothdesirable and fraught with danger and uncertainty. In The Disappearance ofFinbar, Finbars attitude to home too is plagued by ambivalence: the film startswith his being given a heros send-off as he goes to join a prestigious football-club in Zurich. However he returns without any precious knowledge(Campbells term); only a sense of failure and increasing alienation from hisschool:

FINBARIve already got one sentence- nine years in thisclassroom. You wouldnt get it for armed robbery!

and from the mire of furtive coupling and early parenthood in which hisfriend Danny is trapped:

FINBAR

So what will you do? Get married, and in no time atall youll be pushing buggies. Jaysus, Danny! You

talk like a fuckin prat!After this fight with Danny, Finbar scales the flyover, gives a two-fingeredgesture of scorn to his shadowy underclass world and vanishes. Yet when atthe end of the film Danny finds Finbar at the far side of Europe (briefly his


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own Tir na n-Og), Finbar grins sheepishly at news of Katie, his one-timeseducer, and is so affected by Dannys tales of home and his mothers grief thathe uproofs himself again and vanishes the next day. It is assumed he is on ameat-truck headed for Murmansk (in other words, symbolically even further

from home) but in the final voice-over an emotional Danny ponders whetherFinbar will in fact return to Ireland.

DANNY (V. O.)

. . . to that flyover where trucks and lorries criss-cross the continent, to wonder why there he shouldfeel such a deep, and inescapable, sense of home.

Thus myths of leaving and returning are invoked constantly in the action anddialogue, with Finbar remaining caught between the desire to, in Campbellsterms, return with the Elixir (the experience he has gained, as did Oisin in histhree hundred years) to revisit those he loves; and the fear that returning to theordinary world will destroy him, with his loved ones both smothering himand failing to comprehend the wisdom or knowledge he has brought fromoutside.

While the story of Oisin was my central mythic paradigm, I consider myproject with myth not simply to transpose a story from one context to another;rather more to make structural and allusive reference to myths and theirthemes, and in doing so allow other layers or accretions of meaning to buildup around them and affect them, resonate with them. Thus from the original

idea of the hero-wanderer, The Disappearance of Finbar acquired allusions tolater Irish Gothic inMelmoth the Wanderer(1820), a constructed legend about ascholar who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for a hundred and fifty extrayears of life, which contains stories within stories and influenced the shape ofthe films narrative. Similarly, having selected my co-writer Dermot Bolgerbecause of themes expressed in his play The Lament for Arthur Cleary (1989), Ifound that these themes came to pervade our screenplay too. The play tells thestory of an Irish expatriate who returns to the Dublin of his youth after livingon the Continent for 15 years. It shows Arthur vainly trying to recall theDublin of his past, which seems to have gone forever. Arthur is the wandererwho, unlike Finbar, did return, and like Oisin, was disappointed. Bolgerslyrical vein as he describes the Dublin of Arthurs childhood is present equallyin our descriptions of the young Finbars Dublin which gives it an oddlymournful tone, as though even before he has left, Finbar and we alreadymiss and lament this Dublin. The film generates further allusions to theimpossibility of ever returning to the place one has left for instance in theyearning traditional pipe music, in the sentimentality of Finbars fathers IrishCountry and Western songs, and in Dannys grandfather telling old tales ofDublins past and, with the liberty of dementia, speaking directly the films

thematic question:GRANDPA

Where are we now, Danny? What happened?


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This brings us to the notion of history and to Roses criticism above of theuse of myths in an ahistorical context. As I said earlier, my concern with thisfilm and in others was not simply to reference past myths but to createa structure where a multitude of related mythic allusions can be made.

Further, I wanted to make a cinema that participates in the creation of newmyths-and the myth of Europe is one that looms large here. The Disappearanceof Finbarprogresses from a kind of Irish consciousness, as detailed above aquestioning of the status of national and regional histories and cultures tosomething larger as Danny forges across Europe trying to find Finbar andbring him home. At one level I continued to make reference to traditionallegend for instance the dominant theme of the Finnish Kalevala cycle issuicide, and in Finnish Lapland Finbar is thus lauded as a hero a would-besuicide who lived to tell his tale; and Kullervo like Finbar is seduced by awoman with whom he cannot remain (Achte & Lonnqvist, 1975: 98100). But

beyond these literary references I sought to work with newer tropes andallusions. The deserted dock where Dannys grandfather recounts tales of hislong-dead Swedish sailing mates is contrasted with the anodyne new Stock-holm airport, full of polite but bland faces. The flyover in Dublin rhymes withanother metaphor, not mentioned in the source-texta wind-farm in furthestLapland, which becomes Finbars new home and reinforces the idea of a pan-European culture that reaches even to the margins. There is a definite politicaledge to these accretions of myth and image: the film is set in a near-futureEurope which is at once a more open place with fewer nation-state boundaries,and yet at the same time fraught with increasingly harsh divisions around race

and class. Dannys mother is courted by a policeman who seems to havesinister and far-reaching knowledge of Finbar and unsettles Danny with hisquestions. The bland Stockholm airport turns noir when Danny, in anImmigration queue to ask about Finbar, is watched by serried rows of nervousAfrican and Asian migrants. And in the original script of the film, whenDanny reaches Stockholm he enters Rinksta, a fictional version of Rinkebywhich is Stockholms ghetto, a place teeming with refugees from all over theworld. The writing and production here threw up an interesting contradiction,described by Wayne:

Investor pressure led to the dropping of a scene that would have helpedmake the link between Finbars disappearance and the films allegory ofpolitical and economic exile which is part of the hidden story ofmigration into Europe Danny goes to [Rinksta where] the displacedare ghettoised on mega-estates, where dozens of exiled nationalitieshave come together. A Moroccan asks him whether hes got a campaignand a poster because all the missing are here. Meanwhile a white racistis shouting in the market square at the immigrants telling them theyare not really Swedish . . . The investors however found this scene tooblunt, detracting from the magical realist qualities of the film. (Wayne,

2002: 18)To me there is a false opposition here between the films political intention (asseen by Wayne and by the films producers) and the producers perceivedpreference for what Wayne later calls whimsy (Wayne, 2002: 18). To me, what


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is termed magical realism is not simply whimsy and is not in opposition to therealpolitik rather it can be a way of approaching political topics tangentiallyand of speaking of them in a different register. Thus the Rinksta scene (whichwas filmed but not, for reasons Wayne elaborates, included in the final cut)

would have worked mythically and metaphorically as a kind of Babel whereall the voices of the world articulate their loss and their messages home akind of transit-lounge of peoples through which Danny must pass to findFinbar, to be likened perhaps to the Inmost Cave of Campbells structure. Thepolitical point was being made from a left-field perspective, a magicalperspective. The Moroccan is both real and the creature of myth: his postersand campaigns are tangible enough but the formulation of his clues to Dannyas to Finbars whereabouts are the stuff of fairy-tale and fable. His function isto be the voice of babble, of energy, of excess, of chaotic community, in thecontext of affluent, organised, white Sweden. To quote Dhaen (1995): 194):

Carlos Fuentes, in an article in which he describes how he came to writeabout Mexico the way he does, says that one of the first things he learnedwas that There are no privileged centres of culture, race politics. It isprecisely the notion of the ex-centric, in the sense of speaking from themargin, from a place other than the or a center, that seems to me anessential feature of that strain of postmodernism we call magicalrealism.

In conclusion, in The Disappearance of Finbar I was able to draw on Celtic andScandinavian myth, and through other European myths and metaphors

produce something that audiences and critics saw as European. Though Inever make a direct allusion to any myth or mythic character in the screenplay,its provenance is apparently understood.

There is, somewhere, a folk-tale genesis to ourShane,Home Alone,ET, butit is lost in slick production, slick marketing, and a cultural distancingfrom our folk-tale roots. We are a thin upper branch on a thick tree ofancient lore. The Europeans are the trunk.The Disappearance of Finbaris adelightful offshoot. It is tale, saga, myth, magic. (Reid, 1997)

At the same time the film evokes modern Europe, through shots of the trans-European highway, the sterile culture of video games, the pop video throughwhich Finbar is finally located and the wind-farm which signifies the finalfrontier of the new Europe.

The Disappearance of Finbar is shot through with translated elements ofpopular culture while largely rejecting the clear generic markers of theHollywood paradigm. (Wayne, 2002: 74)

Dhaen argues that this ability to take given elements such as mythic tropesand popular references and skew them, as it were, allow them room to

resonate with each other, is what allows texts to speak new meanings inrelation to what was perceived as the dominant culture:

Magical realist writing appropriates the techniques of the centr-al linethen uses them, not realistically to duplicated existing reality, but . . .


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rather to create an alternate world correcting so-called existing reality. Itis a way of access to the main body of Western literature for authors notsharing in, or writing from the privileged centres of this literature forreasons of language, class, race or gender, or it is a means for writers

coming from the privileged centers of literature to dissociate themselvesform their won discourses of power, to speak in behalf of the ex-centricand un-privileged. (Dhaen, 1995: 195)

Thus I hope I have demonstrated that the monomyth of Campbell, like themyth of single European culture or sensibility, exists not as a central andlimiting truth but as a historical collection of narratives and images to beworked with and constantly re-perceived and re-presented from the marginsthe ordinary places. Further, in a postmodern culture one might even saythere is in fact no centre (of Europe; of classical or global mythology). Thecentre has itself become a myth.

Jumolhari: The Western Hero Meets Dharma and Karma

In The Disappearance of Finbar I was attempting to construct a matrix ofmythic references, and to produce new meaning both by assembling adiversity of sources and by approaching them from a new cultural perspectivefrom the peripheries, as it were, of Europe. With a more recent project, I haveencountered other challenges and problematics. Bhutan is a small non-alignedBuddhist kingdom in the Himalayas which has been culturally isolated since

the 8th century until the last 20 years or so, so that its particular brand ofMahayana Buddhist religion and culture still pervades secular life to aremarkable degree (see Croisette, 1996; Pommaret, 2001). However in recentyears, various cultural agencies in Bhutan such as the Ministry of Languageand Culture and the Centre for Bhutan Studies have sought debate as to howthe country should negotiate global culture and media, while maintaining itsunique cultural standpoint. This debate has been taken up by BBS, thetelevision station, and by Kuensel, the daily newspaper. In this context,Bhutans fledgling film-makers seek to synthesise their extraordinarily richoral and visual (painting) tradition into a cinema which will not only express

their traditional views and stories, but which will engage with the newvalues of the MTV generation and help keep their culture dynamic andprogressive. Being invited to co-write with Bhutanese writers and directorsmeant having to assess again the cultural standpoint from which I interpolatemyth, and test for myself whether Campbells monomyth of the herosjourney would make sense in this other non-Western culture, both in terms ofits manifest content and in terms of the associated paradigmatic narrativestructure.

Working in partnership with documentarist Dorji Wangchuk, producerPema Rinzin and actress Lhaki Dolma, the four of us agreed a simple narrative

which we thought would have appeal for both a Bhutanese and internationalaudience. The story begins with Ellis, an American IT expert consulting on asatellite station in Bhutan and hoping to climb Jumolhari, a mountain in thewest of the country, when his work in Bhutan is finished. But climbing this


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mountain is forbidden on three counts: the Bhutanese government, while theyallow guided trekking, do not permit mountaineering as part of theirenvironment policy; also in this pantheistic culture, tribal groups like theLayas consider the mountains to be the home of deities, and say that bad luck

will occur if the deities are provoked. Thirdly, Jumolhari is close to Bhutansborder with China, and since Chinas invasion of Tibet (194951) theBhutanese have an extreme fear of Chinese activity near their borders afear greatly heightened since the recent completion of the railway from Beijingto nearby Lhasa in Tibet (ORourke, 2006). Thus the mountain figures as acomplex symbol of Bhutan itself, trying to maintain its independence andprotect its myths and mysteries. Ellis however disregards the restrictions,deciding that they do apply to himself as a savvy foreigner with no belief insuperstition. He tricks Kencho, his young Bhutanese guide, by saying he onlyintends to do a cross-country trek, but at the base of Jumolhari he declares hisintention to climb and his party are helpless to stop him. Storms andavalanches follow, and Ellis is swept off the mountain and trapped in a kindof ice-cave praying he will be rescued.

When we began the project it was seen as a cultural dialogue, an exchangeof views along East-meets-West lines. Some remnants of that exchange remainand I quote below for context two expositional scenes where Ellis and hisguide Kencho debate their values in relation to the myths of the mountain. Atthis point in the story, Ellis has travelled to the base-camp of Jumolhari withthe guide Kencho and their horsemen. Ellis has not yet revealed his intention

to climb Jumolhari, though Kencho suspects that something is amiss. Howeverthe horsemen discover specialised climbing-gear in Elliss belongings, andthey demand that Kencho confront Ellis as to why he has such gear with him.

66. EXT. CAMPFIRE DAY, LATER

Mist is closing in on the camp and a LIGHT RAIN has started to fall.Whistling, the Cook prepares food under his covered station. By his sideKencho, shivering, watches Ellis standing impassive by the sputtering camp-fire.

KENCHO

You know Ellis that we believe the mountains arewhere our deities live?

ELLIS (EVENLY)

Yes.

KENCHO

The goddess of Jumolhari is called Jumo. The talegoes that she was betrayed by her lover, and that eversince she is angry at man. So when you misbehave

then the mountain will be angry. This is what thehorsemen fear, and what the yak herders said too.Its hard to say, do we really believe in the anger ofJumo? (sighs) I dont know. But we believe that all


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mountains have a spirit and it is a sign of respect tonot climb them. So we dont climb them.

ELLIS (TONELESSLY)

I know. I understand.

No-one speaks. The only sound is the RAIN falling. Beneath her hood, Kencholooks up at Jumolhari, now shrouded in mist, and says a moments prayerunder her breath, mustering all the force of her personality. Then speaks outclearly

KENCHO

So, now you understand do you promise not toclimb?

Ellis doesnt look at her.

ELLIS (EVENLY)

No. Sorry.

There is a heavy SILENCE. Ellis keeps a neutral, bland expression. The Cookavoids looking at Kencho not wanting to see the hurt in her eyes. Kencho bitesher lip, then HURLS her tin cup of scalding tea at Ellis in frustration. Ellis is soshocked that he FALLS BACK into the soaking mud. He wipes the tea and rainfrom his face. (Jumolhari, 2006)

In a reverse scene minutes later, Ellis explains his own perception of the

mountains significance.

70 INT. KENCHOS TENT NIGHT, LATER

The camp is quiet. Kencho lies in her sleeping-bag, wide awake. Thinking.Suddenly she hears someone unfastening the tent-flap. She sits bolt upright.Ellis creeps into the tent and crouches opposite her. Kencho looks at Ellis insurprise. But when he speaks he doesnt meet her eye, instead he stares intothe darkness.

ELLIS (MEDITATIVE)

For you, I know, there are spirits everywhere. Inevery house, tree or river. Everything you do, everydaily gesture, every ritual. In your meals, in yourspeech. Everything means something. Do youunderstand?

Theres a moments silence. Kencho continues to listen.

ELLIS (CONT.)

But thats not how it is for me, Maybe for most peoplein the world. Most people live in a kind of blankness.

They dont know what the hell theyre doing, or whytheyre doing it. They just do it. They mostly dontdare stop and ask themselves any questions But forme, the mountain its a challenge, a journey I know


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I want to take. Its me and the mountain. Where I cansee everything from the highest place, and just once,even for a few moments, know why I am there.

Kencho says nothing. There is only the sound of their breathing and the gushof the mountain river outside. Ellis reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls outa wad of bills rupees and dollars which he sets down in the dark onKenchos sleeping-bag.

ELLIS (contd)

I hope you wont get into trouble going back. Say hito Tashi for me. Hope he gets better soon.

Finally Kencho speaks, almost a whisper.

KENCHO

Tashi is perfectly healthy.

ELLIS

What? (realising) So why? Why did you come?

Kencho speaks so low that Ellis hardly hears her.

KENCHO

I didnt think he could stop you from doingsomething stupid. (beat) I thought I could.

Kencho turns away from Ellis and lies down again. There is nothing Ellis cansay. He awkwardly gets up and stumbles out into the blackened night.(Jumolhari, 2006)

This strategy pitting the values of one against the other in a kind of even-handed debate took us so far, but seemed limiting in its formality andreliance on the stated, articulated views of the characters. However by thisstage, certain concepts relating to Bhutanese Buddhism that figured inresearch material we discussed, began to have an effect on the narrativestructure itself. These were concepts around time principally about cyclical

or non-linear time structures; around subjectivity; the dream; and theBhutanese take on the look or point-of-view, a topic much discussed in filmtheory (see Bordwell, 1985).

So far Elliss story had been a kind of moralistic quest story, suggesting bothclassical three-act structure, and Campbell and Voglers 12 steps of the herosjourney. Ellis has hishamartiaor tragic flaw (his stubbornness); his irreversibleinciting incident (his decision to betray his guide and climb) which will leadhim into the second act of rising and falling action literally in Elliss caseashe ascends the mountain and meets his end-of-Act 2 climax when the stormand avalanche occur. In Campbellian terms, Ellis has responded to the Call (of

the mountain), is about to face the Road of Trials in search of his Elixir (to seeeverything from the highest place, and just once, even for a few moments,know why I am there); and he will soon quite literally enter his Inmost Cavethe ice cave. However the notion of the hero as self-willing subject, in control


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of his/her destiny, began to appear inappropriate as our group debated thenotion ofkarma, whereby it is not simply the final, decisive and cataclysmicaction of the hero which might have effects and consequences, but rather thatevery small movement or action, whether he is aware of it or not, has

consequences for himself or others that cannot be gainsaid or avoided.According to Buddhist principles, Elliss actions are part of a wheel ofcause-and-effect, and the pattern of his journey, the arc of his story, will bedictated partly by merit or demerit he may have obtained through previousdeeds, and partly by the animist spirits that surround him. Even modernBhutanese hold these animist beliefs, which come from Bon, a religion onwhich its Tibetan-influenced, Mahayana Buddhism is founded.

Happiness in phenomenal things depends on (the lords of) the soil.

Fertile fields and god harvests . . .

Although half (of such effects) is ordained by previous action,The other half comes from the lords of the soil. (anon, quoted inSamuel, 1993: 179)

Thus while Ellis makes his linear journey and climbs the mountain, his actionsare observed from another perspective or point-of-view of whom? On thisthe Bhutanese writers were very clear while minor spirits will act as guidesor portents (each character has a leitmotifof a guardian animal), the over-riding participant in Elliss story is Jumo, the guardian deity of the mountainJumolhari. Thus the story develops a kind of split point-of-view, so that

descriptions and shots of Ellis in the landscape are not the neutral wide-shotsof the objective narrating camera, but have an implied subjectivity fromanother position.2 Thus we developed the idea that the linear narrative ofElliss quest was enveloped, as it were, by a more complex temporal and point-of-view narrative structure where Elliss past and future deeds, and the deedsof others, are perceived as part of the storys cause-and-effect, and areinterpolated by Jumo, the organising spirit, the dispenser ofkarma.

As well as complicating the tenses and time structure of our story, thisdevelopment suggested the need for a device to ultimately bring Ellis andJumoin whom he does not believe, and whom he cannot seeinto dramatic

contact with each other. As Dwyer (2006) has argued, film-makers fromBuddhist and Hindu religions do not shy away, as Judeo-Christian and, moreespecially, Islamic faiths generally do, from representing deities cinematically;and in local Bhutanese films such as Chorten Kora (2005) we see actual deitieson-screen (Clayton, 2007b). However for the non-Bhutanese audience we hadto consider Ellissand through his, our own secularism, and likely inabilityto suspend disbelief at such a meeting. Our solution was to remove Ellis, as itwere, to another level of the narrative, from which he dreams about hismountain adventure and subsequent meeting with the goddess. Elliss storythus begins and ends in a small Bhutanese hospital after his accident, when his

memories and dreams of the event become inflected by fantastical ideas, sothat the ultimate meeting with the goddess is in a more appropriate register.Working with the idea of Elliss dream of Jumo led to a further exchangebetween myself and my co-writers, around our different understanding of


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dream material. In the Bhutanese Buddhist cosmology, with its belief inreincarnation and its emphasis on pantheism, dreams are not products of theindividual psyche but rather direct communication from the divine. Faure(2004: 151) comments:

The Freudian interpretation tends to reduce dreaming to an unconsciousmonologue. The ancients knew that there are different kinds ofdreams, some of which imply either vertical communication with higherspheres or horizontal communication with other human beings. InBuddhism . . . revelations are often mediated by dreams or visions.

Picking up from our earlier debate around subjectivity and point-of-view, weestablished that in the climactic dream meeting with the deity Jumo, Ellis ismore object than subject: the dreamer in Buddhism is seen by the dream (thebeing from Faures higher sphere who seeks to communicate), and not vice

versa. It is her gaze, not his, that controls the cameras look. Further, inBuddhist cosmology, the dream world is considered to be more significantthan the everyday world orsamsara. This allows us to play further in the scriptwith what is real and what is not; and in doing so comment indirectly on thenature of cinema as a form, echoing analogies made in Bhutanese monk andfilm-maker Khyentse Norbus meditative essay Life as Cinema(2003).

In summary, Bhutanese ideas around narrative cause-and-effect, and thenotion of points of view beyond that of the individual hero, seemed to meto offer important challenges to both the classical and the monomyth modelof mythic storytelling. While this was a source of great excitement to me

creatively, what was most inspiring to the Bhutanese was beginning tounderstand the potential of cinema language in expressing their complexand abstract systems of subjectivity. Norbu, their most renowned film-maker,has since Travellers and Magicians (2003) continued to worked with dreamnarrative, and a local critic has made reference to the productive interface ofcinema, myth and religious thought:

No wonder cinema halls and Buddhist monasteries have the same buttersmell that of popcorn and butter-lamp. (Gyeltsen, 2006)

Conclusion

I hope I have been able to illustrate by these two case histories a number ofpoints from a practitioners perspective. Firstly, that using myth in screen-writing and film-making is not, and need not be, the ahistorical transposing ofold story material into Hollywood paradigms; secondly, that mythic materialitself becomes continually new by being reused in different contexts andalongside other sources. Thirdly, my view would be that the work of bothMcKee and the classical structure advocates, and Campbell and theexponents of the universal heros journey, have in some sense limited the

creative possibilities of working with myths, not by constraining their manifestcontent, but by limiting their form of address in the context of prescribingnarrative structure, and assuming moreover that our associated film grammar,based on fairly rigid notions of shot, cut, point-of-view and cinematic space,


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covers all voices, all universes, all points of view. Burgeoning new worldcinemas such as those of Bhutan and of, for instance, Iran, Korea and Thailand,bring to the table not just new stories but new ways of telling them, whichchallenge our preconceptions as viewers and practitioners. There are openings

not just for cultural differences of content, but for new aesthetic strategieswhich allow cinema to re-evaluate its role as teller of myth and tale.

Note on screen texts

The Disappearance of Finbaris available on DVD from a wide number of sitesincluding www.amazon.co.uk. Jumolhari is in production development. Thescreenplay was publicly performed at Fusion Cultures: Memory, Migration,(Re)-Mediation, a Conference held at the University of Greenwich, December2006.

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to Sue Clayton, c/o Media Arts,

Arts Building, RHUL Egham Hill, Egham, Surrey TW20 OEX, UK ([email protected]).

Notes

1. Campbell and Lucas met after a lecture of Campbells in San Francisco in 1983,after which they met on a number of occasions. Campbell describes viewingLucassStar Warstrilogy at a screening arranged by the director, and his pleasureat the way his mythological paradigms had been worked into the films: What I

saw was things that had been in my books but rendered in terms of the modernproblem, which is man and machine (Campbell, 1990: 181182).

2. This is a technique not very familiar to American or European cinema, though itswas used to great effect in Thomas Vinterbergs Festen (1998), where the house-party for hero Christinas father is sometimes seen neutrally, sometimes through asubjectivity which we finally identify as the ghost of his dead twin sister, whomtheir father drove to suicide.

References

Achte, K. and Lonnqvist, J. (1975) Suicide in Finnish culture. In N. Farberow (ed.)

Suicide in Different Cultures.USA: University Park Press.Bordwell, D. (1985) Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of WisconsinPress.

Campbell, J. (1949) The Hero With a Thousand Faces. New York: Harper Collins.Campbell, J. (1990)The Heros Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work(P. Cousineau,

ed.). San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.Clayton, S. (2007a) Visual and performative elements in screen adaptation. Journal of

Media Practice8 (1). London: Intellect Press.Clayton, S. (2007b) Film-making in Bhutan: The view from Shangri-La. New Cinemas

4 (3). London: Intellect Books.Croisette, B. (1996)So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas.

New York: Vintage.

Dhaen, T. (1995) Magical realism and postmodernism: Decentering privileged centers.In L. Zamora and W. Farris (eds) Magical Realiam: Theory, History, Community. USA:Duke University Press.

Dwyer, R. (2006)Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema. London: Routledge Press.Evan Smith, P. (1999) Writing Televisions Sitcoms. New York: Berkely Press.


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Faure, B. (2004) Double Exposure: Cutting across Buddhist and Western Discourse. USA:Stanford University Press.

Field, S. (2003) The Definitive Guide to Screenwriting. UK: Ebury Press.Friedman, N. (1975) Form and Meaning in Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press.Gyeltsen, T. (2006) Enlightenment at 24 Frames a Second. Bhutan: Kuensel.

Lombard, C. (1992) The Disappearance of Rory Brophy. London: Fourth Estate.McKee, R. (1997) Story.New York: Harper Collins.Norbu, K. (2003)Life as Cinema. www.landmarktheatres.com/travellersmagicians.html.ORourke, B (2006) Tibet railroad shows signs of strain. Asia Times Online 16 August.

On WWW at www.atimes.com/atimes/China/HH16Ad01.html.Pommaret, F. (ed.) (2001) The Living Religious and Cultural Traditions of Bhutan. New

Delhi: National Museum Press.Reid, P. (1997) Review ofThe Disappearance of Finbar. Palm Beach Post 11 April.Root, W. (1987) Writing the Script: A Practical Guide for Films and Television. USA: Holt

(Henry) & Co.Rose, P. (2001) Teaching classical myth and confronting contemporary myths. In M.

Winkler (ed.) Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.Samuel, G. (1993) Civilised Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies. Washington:

Smithsonian Institution Press.Thompson, K. (2003)Storytelling in Film and Television. USA: Harvard University Press.Vogler, C. (1992) The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters.

USA: Michael Weise Productions.Wayne, M. (2002) The Politics of European Cinema. London: Intellect Books.


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Mythic Structure in Screenwriting

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