Mythic Structure in Screenwriting

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Mythic Structure in Screenwriting

Sue Clayton
To cite this Article Clayton, Sue(2007) 'Mythic Structure in Screenwriting', New Writing, 4: 3, 208 223
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Sue Clayton
London, UK
Many analyses of screenwriting and story structure deal with the mythic underpinning of the screenplay text both those like McKee that reference the classical
Aristotelean three-act model of the hero and his quest, and the followers of
Campbell and Vogler who posit certain monomyths as universal paradigms for
cinema storytelling. The monolithic nature of these theories makes them hard for
writers to work with in a specific and personal way; and there is also the inference,
especially with Campbell et al. that working with myth is an unconscious process,
embedded in our acculturisation and not something we make conscious choices
about. In this article I will examine further the critical literature around writing and
mythology. Then I will present two detailed analyses of how I have worked with
mythological themes across not just story and dialogue but character, image,
landscape and music. The first of these examples, The Disappearance of Finbar,
a feature film I co-wrote and directed, debates notions of myth and magical realism
in modern Europe; the second, Jumolhari, a feature screenplay co-written with
Bhutanese film-makers, explores the cultural specificity of our mythic models, and
shows how in this case certain concepts in Bhutanese Buddhist mythology challenge
our practices of mythic storytelling in both form and content.
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doi: 10.2167/new571.0
Keywords: mythology, screenwriting, cultural difference, narrative theory, storytelling
Introduction
As a cinema screenwriter and director I have always consciously worked
with mythological tropes in story material. Moreover, while film theory and
criticism has not focussed much on this aspect of the film text, there has been
for many years in the discourses of screenwriting practice (Campbell, 1949;
McKee, 1997; Vogler, 1992) a currency of ideas around mythic paradigms in
narrative structure, which claims that these paradigms are universally found
in cinema narrative. However these works, which draw on ideas from Propp,
Jung and a notion of the collective unconscious, tend to conflate analysis of
storytelling structure with the material of myth itself, identifying latent
systems and archetypes in current cinema, and offering prescriptive
formulas for screenwriting while having little to say about the actual process
of writing. How does a writer work with myth? At a conscious or unconscious
level? And similarly in what way, and at what level, do audiences and critics
respond to such references? Do only myths from our own history and culture
resonate? If not, what issues or problems might arise if one worked with
material or structure from an unfamiliar tradition? And is there a kind of
universal narrative and an underlying set of narrative principles suggested by
mythological material?
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INT. J. FOR THE PRACTICE AND THEORY OF CREATIVE WRITING
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2007 S. Clayton
Vol. 4, No. 3, 2007
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I propose in this piece to give a brief summary of the texts mentioned above,
as they are core texts in the teaching of screenwriting and have exerted
considerable influence on the film industry itself (both McKee and Vogler run
high-profile programmes worldwide attended by not only writers but also
producers and studio executives, and Vogler himself has been an executive at
Fox Studios since 2000). I will then analyse the process of writing two of my
own screenplays in the context of working with mythic material and structure:
the first, The Disappearance of Finbar (1996) a magical realist tale which draws
eclectically on Irish, Scandinavian and Latin American references; and the
second, Jumolhari (2007), a collaborative work-in-progress which references
two very different traditions the Western individual hero quest story and the
non-linear, cause-and-effect discourse of Bhutanese Buddhist fairy-tale and
attempts to bring them into dialogue with each other.
Myth in Screenwriting Theory

The sense that a modern form might make allusion to ancient texts is
further enhanced by the frequent references in screenplay manuals to
Aristotles Poetics. Aristotle is not directly concerned with the relation between
myth and narrative, but he does offer a set of influential ideas about the nature
and structure of a well crafted story. Many Hollywood how-to manuals have
construed from these ideas the notion of the story arc and three-act structure
which they see as key to cinema storytelling (Field, 2003; McKee, 1997; Root,
1987). Thompson (2003: 38) notes that even television soap-opera and sitcom
manuals routinely quote Aristotle in the context of narrative development:
To paraphrase from Aristotles Politics and Poetics (a book which you
should probably have on your shelf) a story is composed of three
sections: a beginning introduces a complication to a characters life.
launching the story. The middle section presents developing action, a
series of revelations and discoveries, which drives the story forward. The
end resolves the story conflict, often through a reversal of fortune for the
main character. (Smith, 1999: 93)
(It hardly needs pointing out that such uses can appear gratuitous not least
in the odd referencing of the Poetics and Politics as a compound work, above.)
Other classical Greek terms such as that of hamartia the fatal flaw and
catharsis, are also widely used in manuals like those mentioned above, with
liberal exemplars given from Macbeth to Bugsy Malone (Root, 1987: 9495) to
defend claims of the ubiquitousness, if not universality, of these structures and
devices in cinema storytelling. Moreover, as Aristotle drew the diktats of his
Poetics from empirical analysis of the epic poems and tragedies of his culture,
McKee seemingly finds it difficult to debate the question of form and structure
separate from that of manifest content. McKee propounds neo-Aristotelian
critic Norman Friedmans genre and plot categories from his Form and
Meaning in Fiction (1975) by way of Goethes seven types of genre, Poltis
thirty-six dramatic situations and Metzs eight syntagmas, validating a
corpus of plot paradigms ultimately based on classical material, albeit diluted
(McKee, 1997: 7986).
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International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing
The most notable opposition to this critical tradition has not denied the
significance of mythic material and structure, but has rather sought to
universalise it. Campbells iconic Jungian-influenced The Hero With A Thousand
Faces (1949) attempted to consolidate the principles and themes of storytelling
across a variety of cultures in an engaging if not always scientific or rigorous
manner, embracing the core narratives of the Judaeo-Christian, Celtic, Islamic,
Buddhist and Hindu cultures. He presents his project thus:
Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dream-like mumbojumbo of some red-eyed witch-doctor of the Congo, or read with
cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Laotse; now and then crack the hard nutshell of an argument of Aquinas, or
catch suddenly the shining meaning of an Eskimo fairy-tale: it will
always be the one, shape-shifting yet marvellously constant story that
we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more
remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told. (Campbell,
1949: 3)
Campbell develops his monomyth of the hero and the quest as fundamental
to the narratives of all cultures. This notion comprises a number of stages
through which the individual hero passes: first the heros call to adventure
from the ordinary world and his initial refusal of the call, then encouragement from mentor figures to enter a different world or space in which the hero
endures sustained struggle against enemies to reach what Campbell calls the
Inmost Cave, the place where secrets and knowledge lie. Only then is he able
to take possession of the Elixir, a physical or spiritual gift or a privileged piece
of knowledge. Finally the hero must attempt to cross back to his home world
with this precious gift, at great and possibly ultimate cost to himself. This
notion of a single, universal and translatable myth was criticised by some
theorists for its ahistoricism:
Accepting, so to speak, myths own philosophy of time, for [some
contemporary approaches] history is at best an intrusion; the interpretive enterprise consists in finding the atemporal cores of meaning.
(Rose, 2001: 300)
However Campbells work appeared to resonate with the interests of cinema
practitioners in their work on story, and found favour not only with filmmakers such as George Miller, Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas,1 but also
with teachers of screenwriting via the work of Campbells protege Christopher
Vogler in his equally iconic The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers
and Screenwriters (1992).
Voglers book takes the stages of Campbells heros journey the Call to
Adventure, Meeting with the Mentor, Return with the Elixir, and so on and
uses them both as a way of analysing existing films such as Titanic and Star
Wars, and to present a prescriptive model of screenwriting which incorporates
the structural framework of the journey, and identifies archetypical characters
who occur in it such as the Herald, the Trickster and the Threshold Guardian
(Vogler, 1992: 2935). Mindful of the shifts in global culture since Campbells
day, Vogler (1992: xvi) addresses issues of what may be construed as cultural
211
imperialism in Campbells model, acknowledging that some contemporary

cultures remain herophobic, and embracing criticism that the heros journey
is skewed in favour of Western-influenced happy endings and tidy resolutions; the tendency to show admirable, virtuous heroes overcoming evil by
individual effort. However these reservations do not undermine Voglers
(1992: ix) conviction that
The heros journey exists somewhere, somehow, as an eternal reality, a
Platonic ideal form, a divine model. From this model, infinite and highly
varied copies can be produced, each resonating with the essential spirit
of the form.
There exists a kind of critical chasm between the prescriptive works of McKee
and Vogler, with their claims that all stories are based on paradigms of the hero
and the quest, and schools of academic film theory and criticism which tend to
be based around close textual criticism and would shy away from, for
instance, Jungian notions of a collective unconscious as agent of storytelling
structure and content. And yet to the vernacular writer in this culture, the
notion of, for instance, the heros quest, and trappings such as the mentor, the
gift and so on, do feel to us as familiar and natural as the quotation from
Aristotle above about a beginning, a middle and an end. From a theoretical
standpoint, one could wish for a synthesising of work done in the various
fields around mythological structure and content at the level of psychoanalysis
and semiotics, anthropology, textual criticism and ideological critique.
Myth and Magical Realism in Postmodern Europe

The Disappearance of Finbar is a feature film, financed by seven European
sources and distributed worldwide by Buena Vista International, which I cowrote and directed. It tells the story of teenager Finbar Flynn who, tired of the
pressure on him to be a football star, climbs onto the flyover that overshadows
his drab Dublin housing estate, and jumps. However no body is found on the
road beneath and it is up to his friend Danny, the storyteller of the film, to find
Finbar a journey that takes him to the Arctic wastes of Lapland, and has a
transformative effect not just on Finbar but Danny too.
The film was loosely based on Carl Lombards novel The Disappearance of
Rory Brophy (1992), a multistranded text set in a mythical near-future which
nods to Latin American magical realism, as for instance in the surreal nature of
Finbars disappearance he claims to have jumped into a truckful of sugarbeet and been exported to Gothenburg. An additional context, as I have
discussed further elsewhere (Clayton, 2007a) is that both the film and the
novel came out of a historical ethos where ideas of a consolidated Europe and
the notion of a pan-European culture were being much discussed (see also
Wayne, 2002). Thus the notion of Europe as a site, a space, and the issues of
defining ones local culture in relation to it, were part of the subtext. My
intention was to use the story to examine notions of home in the broadest
sense of the term and debate issues of change, belonging and migration. I will
attempt below to map out the matrix of cultural and mythological tropes
212
which the film acquired in its writing, filming and in its audience and critical
reception.
Although we ultimately changed the heros name from Rory to Finbar for
plot reasons (the film makes a play on the name of Finbar and his ultimate
hide-out destination, the Finn Bar), my starting point in the interpretation of
the story was a comment made by Lombard in discussion that he had chosen
the heros name for a comedic touch as Rory, or Ruari, is considered in Irish
culture to be a heroic forename, meaning great king and personified by Rory
OConnor, the last High King of Ireland. By contrast the surname Brophy he
thought was popularly perceived as a more proletarian name (perhaps
because of its association with several renowned felons who were deported
to Australia). This tonal contradiction adds to the characters symbolism:
Rory/Finbar bears the resonance of past Irish heroes like Oisin and Finn Mac
Cumhail, also condemned to be wanderers, yet at the same time he remains
trapped on a mundane housing estate the ordinary world referred to by
Vogler (1992: 8198), overshadowed by a trans-European highway to a wider
world.
As I progressed the films story the narrative of Oisin in particular took on
further resonance. Having sojourned long in Tir na n-Og, the Land of Youth,
with the Kings daughter, Oisin declares his intention to return to Ireland to
visit his father. However his bride tells him this will be impossible because
Oisin has unwittingly spent three hundred years in Tir na n-Og and his past
life in Ireland is long gone. She provides Oisin with a magic steed on which to
return home, but warns that if his foot ever touches the ground he will be left
in Erin, and become his true age. Oisins foot does touch the ground and he is
left stranded there, old and isolated from the imaginary Land of Youth and of
dreaming. Thus in the legend the desire for home is something at once both
desirable and fraught with danger and uncertainty. In The Disappearance of
Finbar, Finbars attitude to home too is plagued by ambivalence: the film starts
with his being given a heros send-off as he goes to join a prestigious footballclub in Zurich. However he returns without any precious knowledge
(Campbells term); only a sense of failure and increasing alienation from his
school:
FINBAR
Ive already got one sentence- nine years in this
classroom. You wouldnt get it for armed robbery!
and from the mire of furtive coupling and early parenthood in which his
friend Danny is trapped:
FINBAR
So what will you do? Get married, and in no time at
all youll be pushing buggies. Jaysus, Danny! You
talk like a fuckin prat!
After this fight with Danny, Finbar scales the flyover, gives a two-fingered
gesture of scorn to his shadowy underclass world and vanishes. Yet when at
the end of the film Danny finds Finbar at the far side of Europe (briefly his
213
own Tir na n-Og), Finbar grins sheepishly at news of Katie, his one-time
seducer, and is so affected by Dannys tales of home and his mothers grief that
he uproofs himself again and vanishes the next day. It is assumed he is on a
meat-truck headed for Murmansk (in other words, symbolically even further
from home) but in the final voice-over an emotional Danny ponders whether
Finbar will in fact return to Ireland.
DANNY (V. O.)

. . . to that flyover where trucks and lorries crisscross the continent, to wonder why there he should
feel such a deep, and inescapable, sense of home.
Thus myths of leaving and returning are invoked constantly in the action and
dialogue, with Finbar remaining caught between the desire to, in Campbells
terms, return with the Elixir (the experience he has gained, as did Oisin in his
three hundred years) to revisit those he loves; and the fear that returning to the
ordinary world will destroy him, with his loved ones both smothering him
and failing to comprehend the wisdom or knowledge he has brought from
outside.
While the story of Oisin was my central mythic paradigm, I consider my
project with myth not simply to transpose a story from one context to another;
rather more to make structural and allusive reference to myths and their
themes, and in doing so allow other layers or accretions of meaning to build
up around them and affect them, resonate with them. Thus from the original
idea of the hero-wanderer, The Disappearance of Finbar acquired allusions to
later Irish Gothic in Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), a constructed legend about a
scholar who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for a hundred and fifty extra
years of life, which contains stories within stories and influenced the shape of
the films narrative. Similarly, having selected my co-writer Dermot Bolger
because of themes expressed in his play The Lament for Arthur Cleary (1989), I
found that these themes came to pervade our screenplay too. The play tells the
story of an Irish expatriate who returns to the Dublin of his youth after living
on the Continent for 15 years. It shows Arthur vainly trying to recall the
Dublin of his past, which seems to have gone forever. Arthur is the wanderer
who, unlike Finbar, did return, and like Oisin, was disappointed. Bolgers
lyrical vein as he describes the Dublin of Arthurs childhood is present equally
in our descriptions of the young Finbars Dublin which gives it an oddly
mournful tone, as though even before he has left, Finbar and we already
miss and lament this Dublin. The film generates further allusions to the
impossibility of ever returning to the place one has left for instance in the
yearning traditional pipe music, in the sentimentality of Finbars fathers Irish
Country and Western songs, and in Dannys grandfather telling old tales of
Dublins past and, with the liberty of dementia, speaking directly the films
thematic question:
GRANDPA
Where are we now, Danny? What happened?
214
This brings us to the notion of history and to Roses criticism above of the
use of myths in an ahistorical context. As I said earlier, my concern with this
film and in others was not simply to reference past myths but to create
a structure where a multitude of related mythic allusions can be made.
Further, I wanted to make a cinema that participates in the creation of new
myths-and the myth of Europe is one that looms large here. The Disappearance
of Finbar progresses from a kind of Irish consciousness, as detailed above a
questioning of the status of national and regional histories and cultures to
something larger as Danny forges across Europe trying to find Finbar and
bring him home. At one level I continued to make reference to traditional
legend for instance the dominant theme of the Finnish Kalevala cycle is
suicide, and in Finnish Lapland Finbar is thus lauded as a hero a would-be
suicide who lived to tell his tale; and Kullervo like Finbar is seduced by a
woman with whom he cannot remain (Achte & Lonnqvist, 1975: 98100). But
beyond these literary references I sought to work with newer tropes and
allusions. The deserted dock where Dannys grandfather recounts tales of his
long-dead Swedish sailing mates is contrasted with the anodyne new Stockholm airport, full of polite but bland faces. The flyover in Dublin rhymes with
another metaphor, not mentioned in the source-text a wind-farm in furthest
Lapland, which becomes Finbars new home and reinforces the idea of a panEuropean culture that reaches even to the margins. There is a definite political
edge to these accretions of myth and image: the film is set in a near-future
Europe which is at once a more open place with fewer nation-state boundaries,
and yet at the same time fraught with increasingly harsh divisions around race
and class. Dannys mother is courted by a policeman who seems to have
sinister and far-reaching knowledge of Finbar and unsettles Danny with his
questions. The bland Stockholm airport turns noir when Danny, in an
Immigration queue to ask about Finbar, is watched by serried rows of nervous
African and Asian migrants. And in the original script of the film, when
Danny reaches Stockholm he enters Rinksta, a fictional version of Rinkeby
which is Stockholms ghetto, a place teeming with refugees from all over the
world. The writing and production here threw up an interesting contradiction,
described by Wayne:
Investor pressure led to the dropping of a scene that would have helped
make the link between Finbars disappearance and the films allegory of
political and economic exile which is part of the hidden story of
migration into Europe Danny goes to [Rinksta where] the displaced
are ghettoised on mega-estates, where dozens of exiled nationalities
have come together. A Moroccan asks him whether hes got a campaign
and a poster because all the missing are here. Meanwhile a white racist
is shouting in the market square at the immigrants telling them they
are not really Swedish . . . The investors however found this scene too
blunt, detracting from the magical realist qualities of the film. (Wayne,
2002: 18)
To me there is a false opposition here between the films political intention (as
seen by Wayne and by the films producers) and the producers perceived
preference for what Wayne later calls whimsy (Wayne, 2002: 18). To me, what
215
is termed magical realism is not simply whimsy and is not in opposition to the
realpolitik rather it can be a way of approaching political topics tangentially
and of speaking of them in a different register. Thus the Rinksta scene (which
was filmed but not, for reasons Wayne elaborates, included in the final cut)
would have worked mythically and metaphorically as a kind of Babel where
all the voices of the world articulate their loss and their messages home a
kind of transit-lounge of peoples through which Danny must pass to find
Finbar, to be likened perhaps to the Inmost Cave of Campbells structure. The
political point was being made from a left-field perspective, a magical
perspective. The Moroccan is both real and the creature of myth: his posters
and campaigns are tangible enough but the formulation of his clues to Danny
as to Finbars whereabouts are the stuff of fairy-tale and fable. His function is
to be the voice of babble, of energy, of excess, of chaotic community, in the
context of affluent, organised, white Sweden. To quote Dhaen (1995): 194):
Carlos Fuentes, in an article in which he describes how he came to write
about Mexico the way he does, says that one of the first things he learned
was that There are no privileged centres of culture, race politics. It is
precisely the notion of the ex-centric, in the sense of speaking from the
margin, from a place other than the or a center, that seems to me an
essential feature of that strain of postmodernism we call magical
realism.
In conclusion, in The Disappearance of Finbar I was able to draw on Celtic and
Scandinavian myth, and through other European myths and metaphors
produce something that audiences and critics saw as European. Though I
never make a direct allusion to any myth or mythic character in the screenplay,
its provenance is apparently understood.
There is, somewhere, a folk-tale genesis to our Shane, Home Alone, ET, but
it is lost in slick production, slick marketing, and a cultural distancing
from our folk-tale roots. We are a thin upper branch on a thick tree of
ancient lore. The Europeans are the trunk. The Disappearance of Finbar is a
delightful offshoot. It is tale, saga, myth, magic. (Reid, 1997)
At the same time the film evokes modern Europe, through shots of the transEuropean highway, the sterile culture of video games, the pop video through
which Finbar is finally located and the wind-farm which signifies the final
frontier of the new Europe.
The Disappearance of Finbar is shot through with translated elements of
popular culture while largely rejecting the clear generic markers of the
Hollywood paradigm. (Wayne, 2002: 74)
Dhaen argues that this ability to take given elements such as mythic tropes
and popular references and skew them, as it were, allow them room to
resonate with each other, is what allows texts to speak new meanings in
relation to what was perceived as the dominant culture:
Magical realist writing appropriates the techniques of the centr-al line
then uses them, not realistically to duplicated existing reality, but . . .
216
rather to create an alternate world correcting so-called existing reality. It

is a way of access to the main body of Western literature for authors not
sharing in, or writing from the privileged centres of this literature for
reasons of language, class, race or gender, or it is a means for writers
coming from the privileged centers of literature to dissociate themselves
form their won discourses of power, to speak in behalf of the ex-centric
and un-privileged. (Dhaen, 1995: 195)
Thus I hope I have demonstrated that the monomyth of Campbell, like the
myth of single European culture or sensibility, exists not as a central and
limiting truth but as a historical collection of narratives and images to be
worked with and constantly re-perceived and re-presented from the margins
the ordinary places. Further, in a postmodern culture one might even say
there is in fact no centre (of Europe; of classical or global mythology). The
centre has itself become a myth.
Jumolhari: The Western Hero Meets Dharma and Karma

In The Disappearance of Finbar I was attempting to construct a matrix of
mythic references, and to produce new meaning both by assembling a
diversity of sources and by approaching them from a new cultural perspective
from the peripheries, as it were, of Europe. With a more recent project, I have
encountered other challenges and problematics. Bhutan is a small non-aligned
Buddhist kingdom in the Himalayas which has been culturally isolated since
the 8th century until the last 20 years or so, so that its particular brand of
Mahayana Buddhist religion and culture still pervades secular life to a
remarkable degree (see Croisette, 1996; Pommaret, 2001). However in recent
years, various cultural agencies in Bhutan such as the Ministry of Language
and Culture and the Centre for Bhutan Studies have sought debate as to how
the country should negotiate global culture and media, while maintaining its
unique cultural standpoint. This debate has been taken up by BBS, the
television station, and by Kuensel, the daily newspaper. In this context,
Bhutans fledgling film-makers seek to synthesise their extraordinarily rich
oral and visual (painting) tradition into a cinema which will not only express
their traditional views and stories, but which will engage with the new
values of the MTV generation and help keep their culture dynamic and
progressive. Being invited to co-write with Bhutanese writers and directors
meant having to assess again the cultural standpoint from which I interpolate
myth, and test for myself whether Campbells monomyth of the heros
journey would make sense in this other non-Western culture, both in terms of
its manifest content and in terms of the associated paradigmatic narrative
structure.
Working in partnership with documentarist Dorji Wangchuk, producer
Pema Rinzin and actress Lhaki Dolma, the four of us agreed a simple narrative
which we thought would have appeal for both a Bhutanese and international
audience. The story begins with Ellis, an American IT expert consulting on a
satellite station in Bhutan and hoping to climb Jumolhari, a mountain in the
west of the country, when his work in Bhutan is finished. But climbing this
217
mountain is forbidden on three counts: the Bhutanese government, while they

allow guided trekking, do not permit mountaineering as part of their
environment policy; also in this pantheistic culture, tribal groups like the
Layas consider the mountains to be the home of deities, and say that bad luck
will occur if the deities are provoked. Thirdly, Jumolhari is close to Bhutans
border with China, and since Chinas invasion of Tibet (194951) the
Bhutanese have an extreme fear of Chinese activity near their borders a
fear greatly heightened since the recent completion of the railway from Beijing
to nearby Lhasa in Tibet (ORourke, 2006). Thus the mountain figures as a
complex symbol of Bhutan itself, trying to maintain its independence and
protect its myths and mysteries. Ellis however disregards the restrictions,
deciding that they do apply to himself as a savvy foreigner with no belief in
superstition. He tricks Kencho, his young Bhutanese guide, by saying he only
intends to do a cross-country trek, but at the base of Jumolhari he declares his
intention to climb and his party are helpless to stop him. Storms and
avalanches follow, and Ellis is swept off the mountain and trapped in a kind
of ice-cave praying he will be rescued.
When we began the project it was seen as a cultural dialogue, an exchange
of views along East-meets-West lines. Some remnants of that exchange remain
and I quote below for context two expositional scenes where Ellis and his
guide Kencho debate their values in relation to the myths of the mountain. At
this point in the story, Ellis has travelled to the base-camp of Jumolhari with
the guide Kencho and their horsemen. Ellis has not yet revealed his intention
to climb Jumolhari, though Kencho suspects that something is amiss. However
the horsemen discover specialised climbing-gear in Elliss belongings, and
they demand that Kencho confront Ellis as to why he has such gear with him.
66. EXT. CAMPFIRE DAY, LATER
Mist is closing in on the camp and a LIGHT RAIN has started to fall.
Whistling, the Cook prepares food under his covered station. By his side
Kencho, shivering, watches Ellis standing impassive by the sputtering campfire.
KENCHO
You know Ellis that we believe the mountains are
where our deities live?
ELLIS (EVENLY)
Yes.
KENCHO
The goddess of Jumolhari is called Jumo. The tale
goes that she was betrayed by her lover, and that ever
since she is angry at man. So when you misbehave
then the mountain will be angry. This is what the
horsemen fear, and what the yak herders said too.
Its hard to say, do we really believe in the anger of
Jumo? (sighs) I dont know. But we believe that all
218
mountains have a spirit and it is a sign of respect to

not climb them. So we dont climb them.
ELLIS (TONELESSLY)
I know. I understand.
No-one speaks. The only sound is the RAIN falling. Beneath her hood, Kencho
looks up at Jumolhari, now shrouded in mist, and says a moments prayer
under her breath, mustering all the force of her personality. Then speaks out
clearly
KENCHO
So, now you understand do you promise not to
climb?
Ellis doesnt look at her.
ELLIS (EVENLY)
No. Sorry.
There is a heavy SILENCE. Ellis keeps a neutral, bland expression. The Cook
avoids looking at Kencho not wanting to see the hurt in her eyes. Kencho bites
her lip, then HURLS her tin cup of scalding tea at Ellis in frustration. Ellis is so
shocked that he FALLS BACK into the soaking mud. He wipes the tea and rain
from his face. (Jumolhari, 2006)
In a reverse scene minutes later, Ellis explains his own perception of the
mountains significance.
70 INT. KENCHOS TENT NIGHT, LATER
The camp is quiet. Kencho lies in her sleeping-bag, wide awake. Thinking.
Suddenly she hears someone unfastening the tent-flap. She sits bolt upright.
Ellis creeps into the tent and crouches opposite her. Kencho looks at Ellis in
surprise. But when he speaks he doesnt meet her eye, instead he stares into
the darkness.
ELLIS (MEDITATIVE)
For you, I know, there are spirits everywhere. In
every house, tree or river. Everything you do, every
daily gesture, every ritual. In your meals, in your
speech. Everything means something. Do you
understand?
Theres a moments silence. Kencho continues to listen.
ELLIS (CONT.)
But thats not how it is for me, Maybe for most people
in the world. Most people live in a kind of blankness.
They dont know what the hell theyre doing, or why
theyre doing it. They just do it. They mostly dont
dare stop and ask themselves any questions But for
me, the mountain its a challenge, a journey I know
219
I want to take. Its me and the mountain. Where I can

see everything from the highest place, and just once,
even for a few moments, know why I am there.
Kencho says nothing. There is only the sound of their breathing and the gush
of the mountain river outside. Ellis reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out
a wad of bills rupees and dollars which he sets down in the dark on
Kenchos sleeping-bag.
ELLIS (contd)
I hope you wont get into trouble going back. Say hi
to Tashi for me. Hope he gets better soon.
Finally Kencho speaks, almost a whisper.
KENCHO
Tashi is perfectly healthy.
ELLIS
What? (realising) So why? Why did you come?
Kencho speaks so low that Ellis hardly hears her.
KENCHO
I didnt think he could stop you from doing
something stupid. (beat) I thought I could.
Kencho turns away from Ellis and lies down again. There is nothing Ellis can
say. He awkwardly gets up and stumbles out into the blackened night.
(Jumolhari, 2006)
This strategy pitting the values of one against the other in a kind of evenhanded debate took us so far, but seemed limiting in its formality and
reliance on the stated, articulated views of the characters. However by this
stage, certain concepts relating to Bhutanese Buddhism that figured in
research material we discussed, began to have an effect on the narrative
structure itself. These were concepts around time principally about cyclical
or non-linear time structures; around subjectivity; the dream; and the
Bhutanese take on the look or point-of-view, a topic much discussed in film
theory (see Bordwell, 1985).
So far Elliss story had been a kind of moralistic quest story, suggesting both
classical three-act structure, and Campbell and Voglers 12 steps of the heros
journey. Ellis has his hamartia or tragic flaw (his stubbornness); his irreversible
inciting incident (his decision to betray his guide and climb) which will lead
him into the second act of rising and falling action literally in Elliss case as
he ascends the mountain and meets his end-of-Act 2 climax when the storm
and avalanche occur. In Campbellian terms, Ellis has responded to the Call (of
the mountain), is about to face the Road of Trials in search of his Elixir (to see
everything from the highest place, and just once, even for a few moments,
know why I am there); and he will soon quite literally enter his Inmost Cave
the ice cave. However the notion of the hero as self-willing subject, in control
220
of his/her destiny, began to appear inappropriate as our group debated the

notion of karma, whereby it is not simply the final, decisive and cataclysmic
action of the hero which might have effects and consequences, but rather that
every small movement or action, whether he is aware of it or not, has
consequences for himself or others that cannot be gainsaid or avoided.
According to Buddhist principles, Elliss actions are part of a wheel of
cause-and-effect, and the pattern of his journey, the arc of his story, will be
dictated partly by merit or demerit he may have obtained through previous
deeds, and partly by the animist spirits that surround him. Even modern
Bhutanese hold these animist beliefs, which come from Bon, a religion on
which its Tibetan-influenced, Mahayana Buddhism is founded.
Happiness in phenomenal things depends on (the lords of) the soil.
Fertile fields and god harvests . . .
Although half (of such effects) is ordained by previous action,
The other half comes from the lords of the soil. (anon, quoted in
Samuel, 1993: 179)
Thus while Ellis makes his linear journey and climbs the mountain, his actions
are observed from another perspective or point-of-view of whom? On this
the Bhutanese writers were very clear while minor spirits will act as guides
or portents (each character has a leitmotif of a guardian animal), the overriding participant in Elliss story is Jumo, the guardian deity of the mountain
Jumolhari. Thus the story develops a kind of split point-of-view, so that
descriptions and shots of Ellis in the landscape are not the neutral wide-shots
of the objective narrating camera, but have an implied subjectivity from
another position.2 Thus we developed the idea that the linear narrative of
Elliss quest was enveloped, as it were, by a more complex temporal and pointof-view narrative structure where Elliss past and future deeds, and the deeds
of others, are perceived as part of the storys cause-and-effect, and are
interpolated by Jumo, the organising spirit, the dispenser of karma.
As well as complicating the tenses and time structure of our story, this
development suggested the need for a device to ultimately bring Ellis and
Jumo in whom he does not believe, and whom he cannot see into dramatic
contact with each other. As Dwyer (2006) has argued, film-makers from
Buddhist and Hindu religions do not shy away, as Judeo-Christian and, more
especially, Islamic faiths generally do, from representing deities cinematically;
and in local Bhutanese films such as Chorten Kora (2005) we see actual deities
on-screen (Clayton, 2007b). However for the non-Bhutanese audience we had
to consider Elliss and through his, our own secularism, and likely inability
to suspend disbelief at such a meeting. Our solution was to remove Ellis, as it
were, to another level of the narrative, from which he dreams about his
mountain adventure and subsequent meeting with the goddess. Elliss story
thus begins and ends in a small Bhutanese hospital after his accident, when his
memories and dreams of the event become inflected by fantastical ideas, so
that the ultimate meeting with the goddess is in a more appropriate register.
Working with the idea of Elliss dream of Jumo led to a further exchange
between myself and my co-writers, around our different understanding of
221
dream material. In the Bhutanese Buddhist cosmology, with its belief in

reincarnation and its emphasis on pantheism, dreams are not products of the
individual psyche but rather direct communication from the divine. Faure
(2004: 151) comments:
The Freudian interpretation tends to reduce dreaming to an unconscious
monologue. The ancients knew that there are different kinds of
dreams, some of which imply either vertical communication with higher
spheres or horizontal communication with other human beings. In
Buddhism . . . revelations are often mediated by dreams or visions.
Picking up from our earlier debate around subjectivity and point-of-view, we
established that in the climactic dream meeting with the deity Jumo, Ellis is
more object than subject: the dreamer in Buddhism is seen by the dream (the
being from Faures higher sphere who seeks to communicate), and not vice
versa. It is her gaze, not his, that controls the cameras look. Further, in
Buddhist cosmology, the dream world is considered to be more significant
than the everyday world or samsara. This allows us to play further in the script
with what is real and what is not; and in doing so comment indirectly on the
nature of cinema as a form, echoing analogies made in Bhutanese monk and
film-maker Khyentse Norbus meditative essay Life as Cinema (2003).
In summary, Bhutanese ideas around narrative cause-and-effect, and the
notion of points of view beyond that of the individual hero, seemed to me
to offer important challenges to both the classical and the monomyth model
of mythic storytelling. While this was a source of great excitement to me
creatively, what was most inspiring to the Bhutanese was beginning to
understand the potential of cinema language in expressing their complex
and abstract systems of subjectivity. Norbu, their most renowned film-maker,
has since Travellers and Magicians (2003) continued to worked with dream
narrative, and a local critic has made reference to the productive interface of
cinema, myth and religious thought:
No wonder cinema halls and Buddhist monasteries have the same butter
smell that of popcorn and butter-lamp. (Gyeltsen, 2006)
Conclusion
I hope I have been able to illustrate by these two case histories a number of
points from a practitioners perspective. Firstly, that using myth in screenwriting and film-making is not, and need not be, the ahistorical transposing of
old story material into Hollywood paradigms; secondly, that mythic material
itself becomes continually new by being reused in different contexts and
alongside other sources. Thirdly, my view would be that the work of both
McKee and the classical structure advocates, and Campbell and the
exponents of the universal heros journey, have in some sense limited the
creative possibilities of working with myths, not by constraining their manifest
content, but by limiting their form of address in the context of prescribing
narrative structure, and assuming moreover that our associated film grammar,
based on fairly rigid notions of shot, cut, point-of-view and cinematic space,
222
covers all voices, all universes, all points of view. Burgeoning new world
cinemas such as those of Bhutan and of, for instance, Iran, Korea and Thailand,
bring to the table not just new stories but new ways of telling them, which
challenge our preconceptions as viewers and practitioners. There are openings
not just for cultural differences of content, but for new aesthetic strategies
which allow cinema to re-evaluate its role as teller of myth and tale.
Note on screen texts

The Disappearance of Finbar is available on DVD from a wide number of sites
including www.amazon.co.uk. Jumolhari is in production development. The
screenplay was publicly performed at Fusion Cultures: Memory, Migration,
(Re)-Mediation, a Conference held at the University of Greenwich, December
2006.
Correspondence
Any correspondence should be directed to Sue Clayton, c/o Media Arts,
Arts Building, RHUL Egham Hill, Egham, Surrey TW20 OEX, UK (sue.
clayton@rhul.ac.uk).
Notes
1.
2.
Campbell and Lucas met after a lecture of Campbells in San Francisco in 1983,
after which they met on a number of occasions. Campbell describes viewing
Lucass Star Wars trilogy at a screening arranged by the director, and his pleasure
at the way his mythological paradigms had been worked into the films: What I
saw was things that had been in my books but rendered in terms of the modern
problem, which is man and machine (Campbell, 1990: 181182).
This is a technique not very familiar to American or European cinema, though its
was used to great effect in Thomas Vinterbergs Festen (1998), where the houseparty for hero Christinas father is sometimes seen neutrally, sometimes through a
subjectivity which we finally identify as the ghost of his dead twin sister, whom
their father drove to suicide.
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Clayton, S. (2007a) Visual and performative elements in screen adaptation. Journal of
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