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The hero returns

Dear readers of Steemit who dream of writing film and television scripts: this series had started months ago, but I had to dedicate myself to write a sitcom for Fox Latina, and I left it in suspense. I want to conclude it with some few more posts, taking advantage of the fact that once again I am going to teach a course on the structure of the film script at the National Film School here in Caracas.

I hope you enjoy. It serves for aspiring screenwriters, for YouTubers, for your articles, your work, even for life.

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The hero comes with everything

In the previous posts, we talked about the death of the hero. It is a symbolic death (although in some films it is also biological), which means that everything in which the hero believed, all the vital tools he used to fight and survive, have stopped working. It is a crisis of existence, it is the dark night of the soul. We have all experienced moments like that. And that is why we identify with the hero who descends into the shadows.

Note the geography of light: the shadows are below, and that is why the heroes "descend" to the dark regions. When a hero merges with the light, we usually say that he "ascends." Moses, Jesus and Muhammad "ascended" to a higher level, merged again with the Creator.
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Think about this when you design your hero's travels. Symbolically, there must be a dark "down" and a bright "up". The bottom can be a basement, a cavern, the sewers of a city from which he must escape. The top is the exit, when the character leaves the basement, when he knocks down the stones that block the exit of the cave, when he opens the hatch and finally feels the sun's rays in his eyes and breathes the disordered architecture.

It can also work the other way around, that the lights are down (where the survivors are) and the darkness up, in a world ravaged by a nuclear catastrophe or by an extraterrestrial invasion.

Very talented authors often play with these categories ad infinitum, in a disconcerting way. What we thought was light, above, turns out to be terrible, which is evil. And the shadows that we thought were enemies end up being benefactors, they, the dark ones, were "the good guys" and we did not know it. If you manage to create an effect like this, your script will be much more effective, much better structured, surprising.

In your movie, what is the one above? What is below? Your hero must descend, his soul must die to change, to transmute into something new, and return to the world to continue his journey and mission.

The new powers

As the hero does not die, but transmutes, when he leaves that cave, that darkness, he comes with a new soul, with new powers.

Frodo, every time he leaves a cave (and there are many in the entire saga of Lord of the Rings!) returns to the world a little braver.

Harry Potter almost die at the hands of the dementors, that is one of the many symbolic deaths that he has in all the chapters of the series. Upon returning to life, he has tasted maximum fear, and is prepared for battle against those forces of darkness, although we know that, in the end, those forces will defeat him, and Harry will die.

With that knowledge, with these new powers, the hero will return with his friends, unrecognizable, reinforced, new, to rid the mother of all battles against the enemies, against the antagonist, the worst of all the bad ones, who pursues him from the beginning of the movie, do not forget that detail.

If your character was shy, after a beating that was given to him by the bad guys at school, who kept him in a coma, he will return bravely from the symbolic death, and together with the nerds of the class he will fight the great battle against the violent bullies, and he will defeat them ominously, he will make them bite the dust.
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If it's a silly, ugly girl (imagine the case of Ugly Betty), after being humiliated, after everyone has made fun of her, that she has cried, that she has drunk, that she has wandered from bar to bar for several nights, after finding herself, after finding the real Betty let's say (that's the point, guys, to find us), suddenly we will see her walking through the campus, through the halls, spectacular, combed, made up and dressed like a mannequin, as a model, leaving the bad girls with their mouths open, astonished, dead of envy.
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Of course, all the handsome boys who had not noticed her before now can not take their eyes off her, and their jealous girlfriends cover their eyes.

This scheme works even for romantic comedies, because the journey of the hero is fundamentally the journey of the soul, the journey of your life.

What will our hero do with his new powers? What will he do with his life? Will he triumph or not succeed?

We'll see that in the next post.

May you have a happy writing and may the Muses accompany you!

Óscar Reyes-Matute
(Samuel Ibn Motot / שמואל אבן מתת)

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What makes a hero?

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