Psychology, Mythology, and the Survival of Meaning

In Post 1, we established that story is a technology. In this post, we ask a deeper question: what is this technology actually for? Why have human beings, across every culture and every era, without exception, gathered together to listen to people speak about things that did not happen? And what does the answer to this question demand of us as filmmakers?

There is a thought experiment worth beginning with, because it illuminates something that daily familiarity has made invisible.

You are sitting in a darkened room. You are physically safe. You are aware, in some corner of your mind, that you are watching a screen. The people on that screen do not exist. The events depicted never occurred. The grief is invented. The danger is simulated. The love is scripted. You know all of this with absolute certainty.

And yet your heart is hammering. Your eyes are wet. When the protagonist walks into danger, your body tightens. When the lovers are separated, something in your chest actually contracts. You lean forward. You hold your breath. At the climax, you forget where you are.

Now ask yourself the simplest possible question: why?

Nothing that is happening on that screen has any bearing on your survival. No information is being transferred that you will need to navigate your life. You are not learning a practical skill. You are not accumulating material resources. You are, by any strictly rational accounting, doing nothing at all. And you are doing it so intensely that you will remember this hour of nothing for the rest of your life.

This is the great mystery at the heart of cinema. And the filmmaker who does not understand it deeply is working in the dark in a more fundamental sense than they realise.

The Child and the Stork

Alexander Mackendrick, drawing on the anthropological tradition that informed much of his teaching at CalArts, offered a foundational insight into the origin of storytelling that begins not with Homer or Aristotle but in the most ordinary of domestic scenes — a small child asking a question.

Where do babies come from?

The mother who answers with the biological truth — semen, ovum, fertilisation — will find that the answer, however accurate, does not satisfy. The child cannot process it. It raises more questions than it answers, each more bewildering than the last. But the mother who tells the child about the stork, the enormous bird that carries swaddled bundles across the rooftops on clear winter nights, will find that the child accepts this answer completely, even though the child has never seen a stork, even though the story explains nothing that a biologist would recognise as explanation.

Why? Because the stork story is, at the level of the child's comprehension, emotionally and imaginatively coherent. It provides a satisfying account of a profound mystery — one that transforms the unknowable into the imaginable. The story does not have to be literally true. It has to feel true at the level at which the listener is capable of receiving it.

Mackendrick's argument is that this is how storytelling began. Human beings, facing mysteries they could not explain — the movement of the stars, the return of the seasons, the experience of death and the possibility of renewal — created stories to make these mysteries habitable. The stories were not lies designed to deceive. They were imaginative structures designed to make bearable what would otherwise be unbearable. They were, in the language of Claude Lévi-Strauss, a means of resolving contradictions — the contradictions that every community must live inside, the contradictions between how the world is and how we need it to be, between what we can control and what controls us, between the fact of death and the necessity of living as though death were not the final word.

Every myth, every folktale, every legend from every culture that has ever existed is an attempt to do this. And so is every screenplay you will ever write.

The Language of Dreams

Mackendrick pressed this insight further, into territory that would have been familiar to Freud and Jung, though Mackendrick did not always acknowledge the debt explicitly.

He observed that the way stories work is very close to the way dreams work. In a dream, the characters who appear are not always — are perhaps rarely — the specific individuals they appear to be. The figure of your father in a dream may not be your actual father but a personification of authority, or of fear, or of some aspect of your own psyche that you have not yet integrated. The house you wander through may not be any house you have ever lived in but the interior architecture of your own consciousness, its locked rooms and its hidden staircases.

The dream thinks in image and event rather than in abstract proposition. It cannot say directly: I am afraid of growing up, or I feel guilty about what I have become. It must enact these things, stage them as drama, project them onto figures who walk and speak and act. The dream is the unconscious mind doing what storytellers do — transforming what cannot be directly spoken into something that can be experienced.

Carl Jung's contribution to this understanding was the concept of the collective unconscious — the deep layer of the psyche that is not the individual's personal history but the species' accumulated experience, encoded in what Jung called archetypes. The hero who descends into darkness and returns transformed. The shadow — the figure who embodies everything we have refused to acknowledge in ourselves. The great mother, the wise old man, the trickster. These figures recur across every mythology, every folklore, every tradition of storytelling in the world, because they arise not from any particular culture's history but from the shared psychological structure of the human species.

When Arjuna stands at the threshold of the battlefield at Kurukshetra and is paralysed by the impossibility of his situation — knowing that to fulfil his duty he must destroy the people he loves — he is enacting an archetype that will be immediately recognisable to any human being who has ever faced a situation in which every choice is a betrayal of something essential. This is why the Bhagavad Gita has spoken to so many people across so many centuries and cultures, including people who know nothing of the specific circumstances that produced it. The outer garments of the story are specific. The inner structure is universal.

The same is true of the greatest cinema. Sholay is wearing Indian clothes. Its inner structure — the bond between two men who have no reason to trust each other except their shared humanity, the cost of asking ordinary people to do extraordinary things, the grief that a community bears for the dead it could not protect — is the clothing that myths have worn since the first storyteller sat in firelight. You do not need to understand Hindi to feel what Sholay is doing. The archetypes are speaking in a language that precedes language.

Aristotle and the Purging of Pity and Terror

The most enduring theory of why we tell stories was offered by Aristotle in a short and frustratingly incomplete text called the Poetics, written around 335 BC and still generating argument among scholars who cannot agree on exactly what Aristotle meant by his most important word.

The word is catharsis.

Aristotle proposed that tragedy — the highest form of drama as he understood it — produces in its audience the emotions of pity and terror, and that this production of pity and terror results in a catharsis of these emotions. The traditional translation of catharsis is purification or purgation — the idea being that the audience leaves the theatre emotionally cleansed, having discharged through the controlled medium of dramatic experience feelings that might otherwise accumulate into something dangerous or destabilising.

Lew Hunter, building directly on this tradition in his teaching at UCLA, insists that emotion is the real gold at the end of the movie rainbow. His argument is not sentimental but structural. The purpose of everything a screenwriter does — every structural decision, every character choice, every scene construction — is to produce a specific emotional experience in the audience at the climax of the film. The catharsis Aristotle described is the destination. Every other element of craft is in service of reaching it.

This is a claim worth pausing over, because it is more radical than it first appears. It says that storytelling is not primarily a cognitive activity — not primarily an exercise in conveying information or argument or even meaning in the abstract sense. It says that storytelling is primarily an emotional activity, and that meaning arrives through emotion rather than instead of it.

Mackendrick put the same idea with characteristic bluntness: cinema hits us at gut level. Its impact is sensory and physical. And he believed, with something approaching conviction, that this capacity of cinema — its ability to produce the experience of pity and terror and their eventual cathartic release — made it one of the most morally serious art forms ever invented. Not despite its emotional directness but because of it.

The filmmaker who treats emotion as the soft, commercially necessary component of their work — the thing they include because audiences demand it — and reserves their real investment for ideas and images and formal innovation, has misunderstood the nature of the medium they are working in. Emotion in cinema is not the decoration on the structure. Emotion is the structure. Emotion is the point.

Campbell and the Monomyth

In 1949, a comparative mythologist named Joseph Campbell published a book called The Hero With a Thousand Faces. It was an act of sustained intellectual audacity — a claim that beneath the apparently infinite diversity of the world's myths and stories, a single deep structure could be discerned. He called this structure the monomyth, or the Hero's Journey.

Campbell's argument, built from a synthesis of world mythology, Jungian psychology, and the anthropological work of figures like Arnold van Gennep and Mircea Eliade, was that the hero's journey is always, in its essential shape, a story of departure, initiation, and return. The hero lives in an ordinary world. A call arrives — an invitation, a challenge, a disruption — that summons them toward the unknown. The hero crosses a threshold into a world of supernatural challenge and trial. They face the ordeal, the supreme test, often in a descent into something like death. They survive and are transformed. They return, bearing some gift or wisdom that will benefit their community.

This pattern, Campbell argued, appears in the myths of ancient Mesopotamia and in the folk tales of indigenous Australians, in the Odyssey and in the Mahabharata, in the Christian Passion narrative and in the Buddhist legend of the Bodhisattva's compassionate renunciation. The specific garments are different in every case. The deep shape is the same.

Lew Hunter, teaching screenwriting at UCLA decades after Campbell's book was published, found that Campbell's framework illuminated something he had always intuited but could not quite articulate. The hero's journey, particularly what Campbell identified as the second stage — the hero accepting the call to adventure — corresponded, Hunter noticed, to a structural moment that appeared in almost every memorable film at roughly the same point in the story. Rick deciding to use the letters of transit in Casablanca. The children deciding to help Elliott get E.T. home. Forrest Gump dedicating himself to Bubba's memory. These moments, at or near the midpoint of the film, are the moment when the protagonist stops being acted upon and begins to act — when they cross from the reactive into the active, from the ordinary world into full commitment to the extraordinary challenge the story has placed before them.

Campbell's framework matters to the screenwriter not as a formula to be mechanically applied but as evidence of something profound about why certain stories endure and others do not. The stories that endure, across cultures and across centuries, are the ones that engage with the deep structures of human psychological development — the stages of departure, ordeal, and return that every human life, in some form or another, must navigate. Birth is a departure. Adolescence is a threshold crossing. Every experience of loss is a descent. Every act of love is, in some sense, a return. The stories that feel most universal are the ones that are, in their deepest architecture, most recognisably human.

Myth as Social Technology

Alongside the psychological understanding of myth runs another tradition of explanation — the sociological one, perhaps best articulated by Claude Lévi-Strauss and his successors.

Lévi-Strauss proposed that myths are a community's way of resolving — or, more precisely, of living with — the contradictions that define its social existence. Every society is structured around contradictions it cannot fully resolve: the contradiction between nature and culture, between the individual and the collective, between life and death, between the way things are and the way they ought to be. Myth does not resolve these contradictions. It stages them, dramatises them, holds them in tension in a way that makes them bearable. By making the contradiction into a story — by giving it characters, sequence, and outcome — the community creates a shared emotional experience that acknowledges the contradiction without being destroyed by it.

Mackendrick references this tradition directly, citing the sociologist Will Wright's argument that all stories are one means by which societies explain themselves to themselves. This is a remarkable claim, and its implications for the contemporary screenwriter are serious. If stories are the instrument by which a society understands its own nature — its values, its conflicts, its unresolved tensions — then the storyteller is not an entertainer operating at the margins of social life. The storyteller is one of the central figures in any culture's project of self-understanding.

Think about what Deewar was doing in India in 1975. It was not simply telling the story of two brothers on opposite sides of the law. It was staging a contradiction that the newly independent nation was living inside — the contradiction between the dharma of the state and the dharma of the family, between the demands of the law and the obligations of loyalty, between the world that independent India had promised to build and the world that most of its citizens were actually inhabiting. The film's extraordinary emotional power came not from the cleverness of its plot but from the depth of the contradiction it was willing to hold without premature resolution. Both brothers are right. Both brothers are lost. The film does not tell you which allegiance is correct. It gives you the full weight of both, and it lets you sit in that weight, and it trusts you to understand what that weight means.

This is what storytelling at its highest is doing. It is not providing answers. It is staging questions so precisely that the audience can feel, for the duration of the film, exactly what is at stake in being human.

What the Brain Is Doing

The neuroscience of narrative is a relatively young field, but its discoveries have confirmed with empirical precision what artists and philosophers had been arguing for centuries through intuition and observation alone.

The first and most important of these discoveries involves the phenomenon of narrative transportation — the psychological state in which a person becomes so absorbed in a story that their attention is completely withdrawn from the immediate environment and redirected into the world of the narrative. Brain imaging studies have shown that when someone is transported into a story in this way, the neural activity produced by reading or watching about an experience is substantially similar to the neural activity produced by actually having that experience. The brain does not fully distinguish between living through something and reading about someone else living through it — which is why great literature and great cinema can feel, in memory, like experiences we actually had rather than stories we encountered.

The discovery of mirror neurons — neurons that fire both when a subject performs an action and when they observe someone else performing the same action — has given some biological basis to this finding. We are neurologically wired for empathy. We are built to experience, at least partially, what the people around us are experiencing. Cinema, with its close-up of the human face in extremis, its soundtrack designed to bypass rational processing and hit the emotional centres of the brain directly, is perhaps the most powerful activator of this empathic system that the human species has ever invented.

The neuroscientist Paul Zak has studied the role of oxytocin — the hormone associated with bonding, trust, and empathy — in narrative engagement. His research suggests that well-told stories cause the brain to release oxytocin, which increases empathy and the willingness to cooperate with others. Stories, his work suggests, are literally a mechanism for building the social bonds that make civilised life possible. The storyteller is not just an entertainer. The storyteller is an engineer of social cohesion.

This is not a claim that art should be instrumentalised for social purposes. It is a description of what art naturally does when it is working at its highest capacity. The filmmaker who understands this understands why the quality of their work matters beyond their own career concerns. The stories you tell are actively shaping the emotional and social capacities of the people who watch them. That is not a metaphor. It is a neurological fact.

The Indian Understanding — Katha as Sacred Act

The Western traditions we have been examining — Greek philosophy, Jungian psychology, structuralist anthropology — understand storytelling as either a therapeutic, a psychological, or a sociological phenomenon. They are all, in their different ways, functional explanations. They explain what storytelling does.

The Indian tradition, at its deepest level, asks a different question. It asks what storytelling is.

The Sanskrit word katha means story or narrative, but its resonances are far richer than the English translation suggests. In the Indian philosophical tradition, katha is not merely a sequence of events or a vehicle for meaning. Katha is a mode of spiritual encounter. The Bhagavata Purana, one of the most significant texts in the Hindu devotional tradition, presents itself not as a doctrinal exposition but as a story — and it insists, repeatedly, that the act of hearing this story with full attention is itself a transformative spiritual practice. The listener does not simply receive information from the katha. The listener is changed by the encounter.

This understanding of storytelling as transformative encounter — as something that happens to the listener rather than simply being consumed by them — runs through the entire Indian tradition of narrative art. The puranas, the itihasa, the katha-sarit-sagara, the folk narratives of every region — all of them carry within them this implicit claim: that to hear a story told well is to undergo a form of experience that the ordinary world cannot provide.

The Natyashastra, Bharata Muni's two-thousand-year-old treatise on the performing arts, formalises this understanding in the theory of rasa — the essential emotional flavour that a dramatic performance distils from ordinary experience and offers to the audience in a purified, concentrated form. The rasa is not the emotion the character feels. The rasa is the emotion the