People interested in storytelling have been obsessed with the “Hero’s Journey” for decades, which a fantastically sexist man hacked together as a concept from a poor interpretation of James Joyce and of cherry picked anthropological evidence.

What pisses me off is that the idea has taken such complete hold of artist’s imagination that it makes people only want to talk about “Narrative” with respect to storytelling, and it misses the most essential aspect of storytelling in that good stories are always inherently plural in their nature. A good story is a cacophony of potentially true narratives all vying for your soul on stage with no easy answer, not a simple list of plot points delivered to convince you of a particular belief and singular structure through which to see a set of events.

This leads to a massive learned blindspot about advertisement in that artists lose sight of the fact that Advertisement is the annihilation of Storytelling where the natural human invitation for the audience to interpret and construct their own unique Narrative is buried in an avalanche by an overwhelming reifying force that simplifies a complex reality down to a single corporate produced Narrative. People who do sports wear Nike.

Advertisement is the attempt to annihilate art, it can be seen no other way no matter how many artists the advertisement industry employs in the process.

Many people will be shocked, however, to learn that academic folklorists and scholars of ancient literature almost universally reject Campbell’s theories as nonsense—and for good reason. Campbell’s outline of the “hero’s journey” is so hopelessly vague that it is essentially useless for analyzing stories across cultures. It also displays ethnocentric, sexist, heteronormative, and cisnormative biases and it encourages people to ignore the ways in which stories are fundamentally shaped by the cultures and time periods in which they are produced.

…

Campbell starts out with the assumption that every great story must be focused on a single hero, whom he generally assumes to be a heterosexual man. According to Campbell, the “hero’s journey” begins with the hero living in a state of normality, which is disrupted by some kind of “call to adventure,” which takes the hero into the realm of the “unknown,” which “is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, super human deeds, and impossible delight.

talesoftimesforgotten.com/…/the-heros-journey-is-…

For those who disagree, can you not see how directly this imposed definition of what a Story is slots perfectly into rationalizing Advertising and focusing on it as the true purpose of an Artist?

I think you’re giving Campbell way more credit than he is generally given by the writing community at large. Yes, that is one way to write a story, but it’s certainly not the only method taught. For example, slice-of-life stories are completely acceptable, however it is harder to get some of the nuance across to new writers. The hero’s journey is an easy starting point, that’s all. And I really don’t think Campbell was trying to say that’s how everything should be. He was making observations about what he already saw in popular western media.

I don’t understand your seeming conflation of advertising and art, which seems like a separate point from your criticism of Campbell. Advertising does not control art, nor vice versa. It makes more sense to look at things through the lens of money: art can be basically free to create (writing, drawing, street art are all pretty cheap). Anyone can do it. Now, something like making a film is not cheap. It can cost millions of dollars, and not many people have enough lying around to do so without getting a return on that investment. In other words, film has to make money. They know the hero’s journey will sell because it is easy for the average Westerner to digest and enjoy. So you see a lot more hero’s journey stories on the screen than you do in the wide world of books, which can afford to be more experimental or art-driven. Someone like Banksy isn’t worried about finding a rich buyer to recoup the cost of his stencils and paint. Would you agree?

Advertising is a different beast altogether, and I’m not sure why you would criticize it for not being art. It was never supposed to be that.