Against the Monomyth, the Frankenstein of Screenwriting “theory”

Vogler’s (1992) adaptation of Campbell’s (1949) “monomyth” into a template has become one of the most influential—and most destructive—uses of “myth” in contemporary cinema. This paper argues that the mythological turn in screenwriting manuals has impoverished the film narrative, reducing the vast formal possibilities of cinema to a single prescriptive arc. Drawing on Adrian Martin’s (2018) critique of normative screenwriting manuals, David Bordwell’s (1988) exposure of the misapplied morphological models behind them, and Raúl Ruiz’s (1995) rejection of central conflict theory, examines how the (de)sacralization of the “Hero’s Journey” functions as an epistemological closure: by claiming universal authority, the post-Campbellian model delegitimizes alternative narrative forms—from Béla Tarr’s circular, anti-teleological structures to Puiu’s protagonists who deteriorate rather than transform, from the minimalism of Chantal Akerman and Tsai Ming-liang to Reygadas’s spiritual narratives that resist dramatic conflict. The paper draws on three decades of screenwriting teaching at UNATC Bucharest, where an ongoing pedagogical programme—(including the CARA Centre’s recent collaboration with Martin) actively seeks to dismantle the manual orthodoxy and expose students to the plurality of narrative strategies that world cinema has always practiced. The monomyth is not the writer's journey in storytelling, but its dead end.