For this monomyth exercise, my group watched Guardians of the Galaxy. As expected, it was a pretty easy movie to fill out on the chart, but I found one thing about it pretty interesting. In case you haven't seen the movie, it follows the journey of a group of heroes consisting of Peter Quill, Rocket, Groot, Gamora, and Drax. I don't believe that the monomyth could fully be applied to just Peter, the main character and hero. There are certain steps of the monomyth that Peter doesn't quite fit into (or that I don't believe he fits into) but other members of their group do. For example, it never seemed to me that Peter "stayed from the path". He makes funny comments about doing something other than what they had planned on but I think that's more for laughs than being crucial to the plot. Drax, on the other hand, calls up the Guardian's enemy, Ronan, to fight and kill him. This was definitely never in the Guardian's plan to face Ronan on their own.
Also, the apotheosis step I thought was really interesting when applied to this movie. The Guardians don't gain any special powers at the end, instead the apotheosis step happened when they all decided that they'd rather fight together than die alone. All of their abilities and talents make them a force to be reckoned with and they're able to save their planet this way, with everyone working together. This step literally would not have been able to be completed if not all of the Guardians were a part of the story.
I think this is really interesting when applied to the monomyth. Could Peter Quill have been a hero without the Guardians? Could his story have fulfilled the monomyth in a satisfactory way? Or did he need the other heroes in order to be considered a hero? I think the answer to my last question is yes, he needed the other Guardians in order to be a hero. These heroes need each other in order to function as heroes; without each other they're nothing (if they hadn't become heroes, they'd all be criminals, actually). I think this is all really interesting, the fact that the monomyth must be applied to multiple people in this example in order to actually work, rather than each individually, but what do you think? Do you agree or disagree with the Guardians not functioning in the monomyth without each other?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This was a cool point. I'd like to know when perceptions of the hero as not an individual but a collective arose. Even the monomyth defines separate roles for the "sidekicks" and assumes a single hero.
ReplyDeleteI remember watching this and thinking the same thing. I also remember our group discussing who the goddess was as well as the mentor. I think its worth thinking that about applying the monomyth to the guardians as a group rather than singling them all out and applying it individually.
ReplyDelete