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 1950 animated Cinderella
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?
If Campbell’s description of the journey begins with the hero’s departure from home; followed by his or her horizontal advance across dangerous and volatile terrain; and, finally upon arriving at an inflection point in time and space, resolves with his or her return; then, Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 film Parasite stages a narrative iteration of the hero’s journey which tracks along a vertical vector, one that follows the hero on a journey of upward mobility and sees the collective as family not as a witness within which the hero’s passage is embedded; but rather, as an active, mobilized narrative force who along with the hero rises up against the bondage of late-stage capitalism towards a state of collective liberation, namely, revolution. That as an outcome is the stated ideal, in any case, described by Marx in his narrative engagement known as dialectical materialism and interpreted by the French Marxist theorist, Louis Althusser, in his ground-breaking work, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. According to Althusser’s heuristic, it is clear that the narrative of dialectical materialism must necessarily or with wishful intent result in a resolution as revolution; this as an outcome hews exactly to the romantic model of Campbell’s articulation of the hero’s journey which anticipates the end of history and the end of narrative in a permanent leveling of class structure. Bong Joon-ho, however, is not so optimistic. Though Parasite has been identified as a dark comedy which as a genre often trades in unexpected resolutions that are bleak and/or bittersweet, I would argue that the film offers a decidedly tragic resolution to class struggle, one in which capitalist modes of production endure precisely because the narrative of liberation has already been co-opted as an ideology to sustain it.
Using Althusser’s interpretation of Marx in On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, this paper will interrogate Parasite per the above and Disney’s 1950 version of Cinderella which also features a narrative of upward mobility in order to 1) establish and describe the parallel demand of the hero’s journey in which the hero must usher his community across difficult thresholds of transformation through ritual action; 2) identify how Campbell’s description of the hero’s journey interlaces specifically with narratives of labor in the capitalist social formation which necessarily involve relations of capitalist exploitation; 3) argue that the promise of revolution as ideology, as an achievable resolution to the journey of the collective, or in Campbell’s parlance ‘return,’ actually obfuscates its true purpose which is to reproduce and perpetuate the capitalist social formation. In doing so I will surface the regressive narrative gestures in Campbell’s reading of the hero’s journey which effects a narrative of liberation only to the extent that the fulfillment of the journey constitutes, in fact, an ‘anti-narrative’ when viewed in the context of late-stage capitalism and the social formation which subtends it.
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