Is the Heros Journey freeing us or keeping us captive

hello

my name is megan and i am a filmmaker

writer and director

so what are the interconnected threads

that bind these identities together

what are the lines that interplay

between

stories i’m a storyteller

and i’m interested in how stories shape

the world we live in

and or how the world we live in shapes

the stories that we tell

and more specifically how if there are

billions of people on this earth alive

and dead how there are only a few

universal story structures that we

continue to tell to this day

and one in particular that is considered

the gold standard

of hollywood of books of writing courses

and it’s called the hero’s journey i’m

sure many of you have heard of

this it was coined by joseph campbell in

1949

after he’d studied hundreds of thousands

of years of myths

and archetypes from all over the world

now it was a 17-step structure when he

created it and christopher vogler later

turned it into

12 steps when he was working at disney

and this is

the structure that we use today

now even if you don’t know all the steps

by heart i’m sure that you know

it because they say it is ingrained in

our cultural dna

it’s a tale as old as time you have an

ordinary man

living an ordinary life and

one day he gets a call perhaps

metaphorically from god or within

himself

to go on a journey a quest

now first and this is important he

denies a call

he is considers himself too small

or perhaps he doesn’t believe he’s the

hero that he’s meant to be

but of course the mentor comes along to

impart some wisdom on him and

off the hero goes to his journey he

crosses the threshold

and when he gets into this magical new

world it’s there that he meets

tests and allies and mentors

things get pretty tough for the hero and

it gets so tough in fact that he

descends into the abyss

or has a dark knight of the soul and

right at the moment when you think all

is lost he’s either died

or metaphysically metaphorically or in

reality

he learns something and he rises above

and on the other side he gets a reward

and then he heads back on his journey

back to the kingdom where he came from

but of course there is a final test has

this hero really learned his lesson

is he truly the hero we think he all is

so then he passes the test and on his

way back he’s now a master of two worlds

and imparts the wisdom to the the

kingdom that he came from

so my question is is

story structure that was coined by a

white man

in 1949 is it still considered universal

can it still be universal or is it

somehow

keeping us stuck in the white

supremacist

patriarchal capitalist society that we

live in

so let me tell you a story i grew up in

baltimore maryland

united states of america uh it’s often

known for the tv series the wire

or as you say in france

and it’s much more than that but we’ll

leave it there

i grew up to divorce parents my mom was

a

administrative assistant my dad was a

marine and later went to business

and i was kind of this quirky outsider

kid who

was enchanted by the magic of the world

around me and around five or six years

old i had this what you could say was a

calling to be an actress

now i didn’t come from a family of

actors but looking back

i realized that having a script in my

hand helped me make sense of the chaos

of the world around me

so years later i didn’t really know what

i was going to do with his acting career

since we didn’t come from

a family of actors i had a neighbor that

came around and he told me that there

was this

acting school called baltimore school

for the arts it was considered one of

the best arts high schools in the world

it boasts alumni like jada pinkett smith

or tupac shakur

so i auditioned and i was one of 13

people to get in

there i met my chosen family and

i studied every structure you could

imagine meisner technique senoslovsky

the method shakespeare clowning and at

the age of 18

i started in a really bad horror movie

and i thought now i’m ready

i’m ready for los angeles so i moved

3500 miles away alone

to hollywood to be an actress now while

i was there i

i was poor so to get by i had to work

lots of different jobs i worked in

casting i worked as a personal assistant

i worked in waiting tables

all while studying and trying to be an

actress america

um and i tried to morph myself into

every possible thing you could imagine

as well i dyed my hair

brunettes i was a curious blonde

i even turned myself into a spy but

for eight years i only landed small

roles here and there

and so i finally walked into my agent’s

office and i was like look what what

gives you know

i haven’t landed a job in like eight

years

and he looked at me and he said look

you’re talented

you’re good but

when you walk into the room they see a

white girl and they

called in a lopez maybe think about

changing your name

so i looked at him and i said i

am megan adele lopez they can’t see the

blood of my cuban gangster father

coursing through my veins end

of my blonde-haired blue-eyed mother

from baltimore

i am the embodiment of scarface

say hello to my little friend i said and

i shot him in the face

no i didn’t really shoot him in the face

i don’t believe in violence

but i did um understand at that point

that mixed-race kids don’t really fit

into hollywood structure they don’t

really

know what to do with us and i got

depressed because i mean for 20 years my

whole

identity had been an actress i didn’t

know what to do with myself i started

taking drugs

all kinds of drugs bad ones like um

crystal meth

and cocaine and and i started drinking a

lot and um

putting myself in compromising positions

and then one day i was driving

home from this party because the guy

wouldn’t take no for an answer and

um i fell asleep and i woke up right as

my car was going straight into the wall

of the 405 freeway

now luckily nobody was injured including

me

my car was totaled but

i learned that at that moment in order

to be my own hero i needed to step away

and play it safe and so i went a more

traditional story and i got married

and i went in marketing and i moved to

chicago

now of course like most callings um they

don’t always go away mine happened to

morph into writing

i realized that writing gave me the

words that hollywood wasn’t willing to

give me

and at first i didn’t want to have to do

anything with any structures because i

wanted some freedom i had studied acting

for so long

and this point i just wanted to have fun

but of course i’m ambitious and i’m a

bit competitive

so i wanted to know how the big boys

were doing it and this is when i found

the hero’s journey

and i loved it i mean this i was like

this isn’t just

a story structure this is a way to live

your life

this is a blueprint for how to get

through the tough times

i use this journey sometimes sometimes

help me get out of bed to

have the courage to leave my abusive

relationship i use

this journey to have the courage to

apply

to be the global digital business

director of the new york times

i got the job and they moved me to paris

where i now live it also gave me the

journey to leave that

gave me the courage to leave that job

and to enter filmmaking

but of course as i was reading

voraciously about the hero’s journey

i came across an interview by joseph

campbell and

in this interview joseph campbell said

that he didn’t believe women really

could be a part of the hero’s journey

because we were born with the journey

inside of us we were the goal he said

and that was creation to become a mother

now as somebody who never wanted

children of her own i didn’t take this

very well

i was furious i felt rejected

i realized oh okay so this is what’s

happening

basically hollywood and the movie

industry they’re making

heroes into shiro’s but women still

don’t really exist

in this world so i started looking for

for

new structures and that’s when i came

across

the virgin’s promise by kim hudson and

the heroine’s journey by marine murdoch

who had studied under joseph campbell

i mean these were these were good they

were they took into account the women’s

journey but they still

felt like they were trapping us in this

patriarchal

structure so i thought you know what i’m

going to try

and write my own structure and i’m going

to do it

in the form of a young adult feminist

fantasy novel

because obviously it can’t be in this

world that we live in i said it in the

future and i did it with this girl

named isla who was a protagonist and i

was going to make her into

the sacred goddess she would embody

everything

that there was to be a female

she would be allowed to feel all of her

feelings

and she would not be a strong

independent woman and she would still

lead a revolution for six years

i wrote this i toiled i wrote it a

hundred thousand words three times

while working full time at the new york

times

and i failed i failed miserably i just

i couldn’t figure out how to write

outside of this structure

it was like i felt like i was trapped

inside this patriarchal world

where they turned the room temperature

to freezing cold

and even my imagination couldn’t get me

out of it

you know they tell you to study the

geniuses before you before you even

think

about writing the future or breaking

free from it

but if the geniuses before you didn’t

care about you or

or you didn’t exist in their world then

why should i

care about what they have to say about

me

that’s when i realized it i shouldn’t

have to care what they have to say

just because at one point in joseph

campbell’s career he believed

these old-fashioned beliefs of the way

the world worked

didn’t mean that the structure that he

had

unearthed that was universal that had

universal truths about what it meant to

be human wasn’t

of me

you know i um

hollywood and and novels they’ve all had

biases ingrained in them for years

and the the rebel archetype in me

wants to burn it all down it really does

but the wise old crone archetype knows

that in order to really

to really change the world we need to

transform the energy

transcend it the story structure itself

was neutral

it’s like it’s like money

money is neutral it’s just

what we do with the money how we spend

it what we spend it on whose hands it

gets into

that makes it seem like money is

intrinsically evil

so with this newfound knowledge i went

back to isla uh

my protagonist and i thought you know

what

i am gonna use a hero’s journey and i’m

going to turn in isla not just into the

sacred goddess but to sacred everything

she will be born not just from the fire

but from the water

and i created a new kind of human called

the haleen

who were too complex too mixed too

daunting

were killed off for hundreds of years

until ayla came around

and learned how to integrate all parts

of herself to lead the world to a new

vision of itself

we can’t be so angry at the world that

we don’t see

the gifts that it gives us i mean we can

be angry at the world

but we can’t let that stop us from

seeing the gifts

stories help us not just

see our past but also help us to

prophesize and imagine our futures

to create a new world we don’t yet need

to change the transformational

structures of our ancestors

we need different people with different

beliefs different stories

different mentors different allies

different struggles to come forward

to become their type of hero

now with isla i was able to tell my

story through her and she’s in good

hands right now with a literary agent

who’s out chopping it around to

publishers

you know despite of and because of

how the world is today i

need to believe in heroes

and i’m looking forward to the different

heroes that arise

thank you