Annotated Bibliography 10

Vogler, Christopher. “Epilogue: Looking Back on the Journey.” The Writer’s
Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. Third Edition. Studio City, CA. Michael
Weise Productions. 2007.

Summary
In this section Vogler gave an overview of the Hero's Journey and illustrates the different stages. For this purpose he uses four different movies: Titanic, The Lion King, Pulp Fiction, and The Full Monty. Vogler also talks about the Star Wars saga and it's relation to the Journey. Then Vogler gives us some warnings and guidelines for the use of the Hero's Journey storyline. First he warns against using the Journey as an exact blueprint, he explains that there is no exact formula for writing a story about a Hero's journey and the ultimate goal is to touch the "universal human emotions." This is especially true in the example of Pulp Fiction where the stages are jumbled showing that the model is just a guideline, that the needs of the story dictate the structure, and that any stage of the Journey can appear at any time. Another point that he makes is that you should have only one plot, but many subplots in your story. Titanic is a great example of this because it has the main plot which is the story of the ship and it's crash and sinking, but then there are the subplots of all the passengers on the boat which are what make the story so good because they touch on all of the universal human emotions and appeal to all audiences through familiarity of socioeconomic status and age. In all of the film examples that Vogler uses in this section he identifies each of the stages in the Journey to demonstrate the variety of order while still using the stages.

Reaction
Although this was by far the longest reading in the book, it also left me with the least to talk about. I have seen all of the movies that he talked about besides pulp fiction which made it very easy for me to understand his analysis of the movies. The book threw some light on the writing of scripts for me and showed how much thought there is actually involved in the writing of screenplays for movies.

Questions
1. Is there a particular stage in the Journey that carries particular importance to the making of a good movie?
2. What type of film is the most successful in using the Hero's Journey?
3. Do you think that the Hero's Journey model makes movies to generic in today's Hollywood?