Finding Joe.

I couldn’t find anything on the telly worth watching last night, so I went on Youtube and found a very interesting film called Finding Joe which I watched all the way through. It was a documentary style film based on the work of somebody I had never heard of before called Joseph Campbell. He was an American professor of literature who worked in the field of comparative religions and mythology. His most famous book was called The Hero With A Thousand Faces (1949) in which he discussed the archetypal hero in world mythology’s which he called the Monomyth. He was saying that all the great stories from various countries around the world were basically telling the same story. The Odyssey, King Arthur & The Knights Of The Round Table, The Legend Of Gilgamesh were all similar. Even in the more modern era tales like Moby Dick or The Wizard Of Oz are the same story of a hero or heroine leaving home, going on a journey, fighting a dragon, and returning home. George Lucas has said that he based Star Wars on the ideas of Joseph Campbell. The term Monomyth Campbell actually borrowed from James Joyce.  Ulysses by Joyce was based  on The Odyssey. The work of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud was also a big influence on Campbell. Purely by chance in 1924 onboard a ship from Europe to America he met and talked with Jiddu Krishnamurti which gave him an interest in Indian wisdom.

The message of the film was that people should go on their own journeys and defeat their own dragons. The dragon in mythology is symbolic of fear. The film said that too many people are just a bundle of conditioned reflexes living in a society that is like mass hypnosis. People just do what they are told and trudge through life for the sake of security. Life should be a call to adventure. One of Campbell’s best-known sayings was ‘Follow your bliss’. That means that people should find out what they really enjoy doing and follow their dreams and do it. Don’t be a tiger living like a sheep. As Nietzsche said,’ The snake that cannot shed it’s skin will perish’. 

There were some famous people in the film talking about how they followed their dreams, such as Mick Fleetwood who said that all he wanted to do as a kid was play the drums, so he did, and became world famous. There was also a skateboarder called Tony Hawks talking about overcoming his fears to do things on a skateboard that nobody had ever done before. These people didn’t set out to be world famous, they did things because they enjoyed it. The message is that if people overcome the fear of the unknown then the universe will open doors where previously there were just walls. There were some great sayings in the film, such as,’ Every – is a + waiting for vertical awareness’. Anyway, I enjoyed the film and I think it is the sort of film they should show to children to inspire them to follow their dreams. If you want to see it, just go on Youtube, search for Finding Joe.