Another blog post about the monomyth

This exercise disrupted my perception of the monomyth's universality. As other members of my group have mentioned, we concluded that the Dark Knight was intended to not encompass the myth in whole, but a specific section of the three-part structure. A debate in class over whether our approach synchronized with the monomyth's intentions-- because it did not embody the myth in full-- brought up points about the validity of the generalizations that occurred when attempting to apply the myth. I believe that Chris Nolan's Batman trilogy as a complete volume does perfectly adhere to the monomyth structure. However, the Dark Knight does not. When I tried to force the skeleton of the myth into the body of the plot, it came to my attention that the monomyth in full demands a sense of completion. To "return" is to both achieve reconciliation with and departure from the world of adventure. Some enlightenment has been attained in the other world that transforms and betters the hero's existence in the ordinary, hence "master of two worlds." The Dark Knight ends with the death and moral demise of Harvey Dent, along with Batman's hopes for a peaceful return to the ordinary world. Order has not been restored to Gotham, and the hero's internal discord has not been resolved.

But the structure itself deserves scrutiny. Is it a storyline or a collection of motifs? By using a "universal" standard of comparison, are we finding what we expect to find or what is actually there? By insisting upon generalization, whatever cultural context and specific meaning a myth has is subordinated to a structure that was forged from a unilateral Western perspective. Furthermore, by assuming that the monomyth must be found in every modern or classical narrative, we risk forcibly reinterpreting the architecture of a story and imposing a specific meaning on perceived "similarities" that may have a markedly different cultural designation.

On another note, the only movie examined by another group whose plot I recall well enough to have input is Spirited Away. The two disagreements I had with that group's analysis were "crossing the first threshold" and "belly of the whale." I identify the first threshold as applicable to either one of two physical boundaries: when Sen and her family enter the train station, or when they cross the dried up river that marks the beginning of the amusement park grounds. I tend towards the latter because it has more symmetry with my choice for the belly of the whale. To me, it is the point at which there is no turning back-- in Spirited Away, when evening falls and the spirit world becomes manifest, the transformation of the sterile riverbed into a large body of water prevents return to Sen's old world.