The rad art of monomyth
It was perhaps the most cliche excuse of a multi-cast superhero ensemble.
The immensely popular Marvel series of movies titled under the Avengers branding can fall among the weakest examples of modern storytelling.
Keeping in mind the massively hyped Avengers Doomsday around the corner, if we strip away the CGI spectacle and the billion-dollar marketing machinery, what remains is a skeleton of a story that humanity has been telling and retelling since long before the printing press existed.
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The reason it still works, even at its most formulaic, is the same reason it worked on clay tablets and campfires. The shape is ancient. The shape is familiar. The shape is, in the language of scholars, the monomyth or aptly called, the Hero's Journey.
Gilgamesh can be counted as the earliest example of fantasy literature. A ruler seeking the elixir of life, in other words, immortality. Unbeknownst to most of us scrolling through streaming platforms and debating cinematic universes, the tale of Gilgamesh is perhaps the earliest definition of the hero's journey ever committed to human memory.
The ancient king of Mesopotamia, whose story predates Homer by more than a thousand years, is the apparent source of that earliest arc. His quest for immortality became the template from which modern interpretations are derived, wholly or partially. The summation of examples below can set the record straight on the pop culture elements that are, at best, borrowed and, at worst, recycled without acknowledgment.
According to American mythologist Joseph Campbell, who popularized the concept through his landmark 1949 work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, there are three broad stages of the hero's journey: separation, initiation, and return. Campbell spent decades studying world mythology, folklore, and religion, and his conclusion was both humbling and revealing. Every culture, across every continent, had been telling the same story. The names changed. The gods changed. The geography changed. The bones remained the same.
The earliest example containing all three elements in modern pop culture is Seven Samurai, one of the most critically acclaimed feature films of all time, created by Akira Kurosawa in 1954. The film was never simply about swords and farmers and bandits. It was about what pushes ordinary human beings toward extraordinary choices. The oldest samurai, Kambei, excommunicates himself from his order to serve a noble cause, his separation.
The youngest, Katsushiro, is forged by loss and experience at the hands of Kambei, his initiation. And Kikuchiyo, the loudest and most wounded among them, completes a return of the prodigal son, the representative of the farmers themselves, the one who reminds the village of what it is capable of. What Kurosawa understood, instinctively, is that the hero's journey lands hardest when the hero is recognizably flawed. Kikuchiyo is the most human character in the film precisely because he is the least polished. Seven Samurai went on to inspire an entire lineage of cinema, and its DNA can be found in The Magnificent Seven, in A Bug's Life, and in countless ensemble films across the next seven decades.
A direct influence can be found in Star Wars, where George Lucas has never been shy about acknowledging his debt to Kurosawa. Luke Skywalker leaves Tatooine, learns his heritage, and returns to his Jedi roots, a textbook separation, initiation, and return.
What made Star Wars a cultural earthquake in 1977 was the fact that audiences had been primed by ten thousand years of storytelling to respond to exactly this kind of narrative. Lucas understood that the hero's journey is a frequency that human beings are already tuned to receive. Even today, films like Everything Everywhere All at Once and Denis Villeneuve's Dune duology are unmistakably built on the same three-stage framework. The settings are radically different. The emotional core is identical.
Francis Ford Coppola, with help from Mario Puzo, pulled one of the niftiest tales of the hero's journey even before Star Wars by directing The Godfather in 1972. The genius of Coppola's take is that it flipped the monomyth inside out. The return in Michael Corleone's case leads to tragedy. He arrives somewhere darker, and he brings his family in with him.
The wedding scene at the beginning and the door closing on Kay at the end are two of the most heartbreaking bookmarks in all of cinema, precisely because the audience can feel the shape of the hero's journey being corrupted in real time. This darker application has since become a storytelling tradition of its own. Shows like Breaking Bad and Succession have built their entire dramatic architecture on a hero's journey that leads somewhere the audience desperately does not want to go. The separation, initiation, and return are all present. What the character returns as is simply the very thing we feared all along.
Surprisingly, one of the earliest depictions of the hero's journey can be found in one of the oldest scriptures of the Subcontinent, the Ramayana, which is nearly as ancient as Gilgamesh. Ram's quest, born from a promise made to keep his father's word, his years of exile and ordeal, and his return as the victorious scion of the Ikshvaku clan, resonates deeply with Gilgamesh's epic.
Across centuries and continents, the story insists on being told. The Ramayana's influence on South Asian cinema has been vast and largely unspoken. The arc of Ram is embedded in countless Bollywood narratives, from the exiled protagonist who must prove himself to the devoted companion who mirrors his virtues. An audience does not need to name the reference for it to work. They already know it in their bones.
Dhallywood, or the Bangladeshi cinema industry, adopted the monomyth as their own form of telling the tale, starting from the phenomenal Ora Egaro Jon, released following the Liberation War of 1971. The film depicted a ragtag group of everymen sacrificing their ordinary lives and becoming larger than life characters, doing so even before the Star Wars franchise popularized the hero's journey globally. In terms of technical quality, the movie did not achieve the kind of production perfection that its ambitions deserved, largely due to the limitations of its time and the conditions under which it was made.
A country that had just emerged from a brutal war cannot be expected to have pristine film equipment or unbroken infrastructure. And yet built in the context of that war-torn and newly born country, it is undeniably one of the most iconic depictions of the monomyth to emerge from this part of the world. The story of ordinary people choosing something larger than themselves is what the hero's journey has always been about at its quietest and most essential level. That tradition, started in the smoke and grief of 1971, did not stay frozen there. It grew. It evolved.
Rehana Maryam Noor (2021), directed by Abdullah Mohammad Saad, became the first Bangladeshi film selected in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, and what makes it remarkable in the context of the hero's journey is how completely it strips the framework of its spectacle. There are no battles here, no swords, no mentor figures dispensing wisdom in dramatic lighting. The separation is entirely interior.
Rehana, a 37-year-old assistant professor at a medical college, simply refuses to make the silent agreement that most people in her position make, the agreement to look away, to protect themselves, to survive inside a corrupt institution by never rattling its walls. Her refusal is the call to adventure. The initiation comes not through a supernatural ordeal but through the escalating cost of her own conviction, as she risks her career, her reputation, and her daughter's stability to pursue justice for a student who does not even want to be saved.
What Saad understands about the monomyth that many filmmakers miss is that the return does not have to be a homecoming. It can be a restoration. Rehana returns to her own name, her full identity, in the film's final shot. In a country where women are so often asked to shrink, that is as triumphant a return as any.
Hawa (2022), directed by Mejbaur Rahman Sumon and Bangladesh's official entry to the 95th Academy Awards, is perhaps the most mythologically instinctive film the industry has produced in recent memory, because it does not seem to know it is staging a hero's journey at all. The fishermen who sail into the Bay of Bengal in pursuit of a catch are not heroes by any classical definition. Chaan Majhi, the captain, is dubious and self-serving. His crew is ordinary, superstitious, and human. The separation happens without ceremony, the moment the land disappears from view and the trawler becomes its own isolated world.
The mysterious woman they find mid-sea, Gulti, is the ordeal, the supernatural threshold that forces every man aboard to confront what he is actually made of, and the film's genius is that most of them fail that confrontation entirely. Where the classical monomyth promises transformation, Hawa delivers reckoning. The sea gives and the sea takes back. Chaan Majhi is a far more interesting figure than a conventional hero precisely because the hero's journey, in his hands, reveals a man who was offered the chance to be better and chose otherwise.
Surongo (2023), directed by Raihan Rafi and loosely inspired by a real 2014 bank vault robbery in Kishoreganj, is the most viscerally Campbellian of the recent Bangladeshi releases, and also the one that argues most honestly about what actually initiates people in the real world. Masud, a simple electrician, is separated from his ordinary life not by a call to adventure but by betrayal, which is a distinction worth examining. Campbell's classical hero often chooses to leave. Masud is pushed out by circumstance, by a loveless marriage and a dismantled home, and the hero's journey absorbs that variation without complaint because the framework has always been about what a person becomes when the familiar world collapses, regardless of why it collapsed.
His initiation arrives through desperation and physical labor, the literal act of digging a tunnel through earth, a descent into the underworld rendered in mud and silence rather than fire and mythology. The return is the uncomfortable mirror of who Masud chose to become when the world offered him no other door. In placing that arc inside a working-class Bangladeshi body, inside recognizable grief and financial humiliation, Rafi did something the classical monomyth rarely does. He made the hero's fall feel entirely earned.
What is striking about all three of these recent Bangladeshi films is how differently they have absorbed the same ancient framework. Rehana Maryam Noor bends the hero's journey into feminist moral drama. Hawa wraps it in folklore and saltwater horror. Surongo runs it through crime and class and betrayal. And yet underneath each one, Campbell's three stages are doing exactly what they have always done since the days of Gilgamesh, holding the story up, giving it weight, giving it shape, making the audience feel something they cannot quite name but have been recognizing for ten thousand years. Dhallywood, it turns out, did not merely borrow the monomyth. It has been quietly fluent in it all along.
The hero's journey is now one of the most essential parts of storytelling, especially in modern Hollywood and Bollywood. Ranging from The Lord of the Rings franchise to Pan's Labyrinth, from Satya to Made in China, even the most rudimentary depiction of the narrative style sets a film apart from its contemporaries. Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth in particular stands as a testament to how the monomyth can be wielded with extraordinary emotional precision, using the framework as a canvas rather than a crutch.
In the streaming era, the hero's journey has found new homes and new forms. Series like Arcane on Netflix and Shogun on FX demonstrate that the three-stage arc translates across episodes, across seasons, across cultures, without losing any of its grip on the human imagination. Even video games have absorbed the structure deeply, with titles like The Last of Us and Elden Ring building entire emotional universes around the same bones that Gilgamesh and Ram and Kikuchiyo and Chaan Majhi and Masud were all built from.
Its impact on literature, both old and new, is however a story for another day. A very long day.
