The Hero’s Journey as Anti-Narrative: Descent to Dissent on the way up towards Revolution and Resolution in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Disney’s

Résumé

It can be argued that Campbell’s text The Hero with a Thousand Faces is principally concerned with the individual adventurer, the man or the woman, who embarks on the journey with the goal of breaking the bonds of his or her Oedipal attachments in order to achieve a state of liberation which mostly means not becoming an adult psychoneurotic. Campbell tells us that the stages of the journey are represented in the ritual actions of cultural rites of passage, ceremonials staged by members of a collective in order to usher the individual across difficult thresholds of transformation so that he or she may find the forms and proper feelings of his new estate. Campbell’s elaboration of the phases of the journey for the individual are rich with detail and illuminating evidence for his thesis about the hero’s ultimate objective which he describes as exiting the nursery. But, what of the collective who both reproduce the conditions of the rites of passage for the individual and stand witness to his or her becoming? What is their role in the advance of the hero towards liberation? Is it simply to watch and wait?