Threes and the Modern Story

The modern epic story has become one of incredible visual and audible force, a technology marvel. Look no further than the last Star Wars movie, “The Force Awakens,” to see the perfected evolution of the ages-old tale.

 

“The internal mechanics of myths may not have changed much over the years, but the technology used to impart them certainly has,” writes The Economist in December.

The Greeks told grand stories through the early epic poems of Homer and Hesiod from the 7th century BC, roughly. Homer’s (Greek) Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s (Roman) Aeneid are The Big Three classics. As in many epic stories of the same form that preceded Homer and Virgil and those that followed them, the hero makes a long journey, faces and defeats adversaries, and returns home transformed by his experience. That’s the basic three-part formula in the story line that’s been repeated for millennia, I described in my first book, Threes.

“In Homer’s day, legends were passed on in the form of dactylic hexameters: modern myth-makers refer computer graphics, special effects, 3D projections, surround sound and internet video distribution,” writes The Economist in its “Leaders” column describing The Disney Company’s rise to the top tier of modern epic storytellers.

The author says Disney starts with tropes, the first of three key elements in its modern storytelling. Tropes are Disney properties that draw on “well-worn devices of mythic structure to give their stories cultural resonance.”

Employing the capacity of its recent acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm, Disney unleashes its technology marvels with such force that Walt would surely turn a smile. Finally Disney’s toys, merchandise and theme parks complete the triad of the modern mythic story as business and cultural powerhouse.

Ultimately, states The Economist, “these modern myths are so compelling because they tap primordial human urges—for refuge, redemption and harmony….Similarly, modern myth-making, reliant though it is on new tools and techniques, is really just pushing the same old buttons in stone-age brains. That is something Walt Disney understood instinctively—and that the company he founded is now exploiting so proficiently.”