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