What is it that makes a given story mythic, and why should that matter?  It’s a question I come back to time and again, and it cropped up this morning in a script doctoring session with a director who’s soon to be shooting his next short, and wants to feel that he’s nailed the script.

I won’t go into the details for reasons of confidentiality, but what it boils down to is getting a key scene right, in which the protagonist is manipulated into doing something by a twisted father figure.  It’s good stuff, with plenty of dramatic juice, but another reader the director had consulted had suggested that the story is too redolent of the work of Shane Meadows. 

Viewed one way at least, there was validity in that perspective.  But only if you overlooked the director’s intention, which was a dark world away from the majority of what Meadows does.  How to establish the distinction in ways that will come across in the finished film?  That’s where we ended up taking a stroll into myth.

The first notion I had was that the scene is a twisted Arthurian legend, only Arthur is corrupt, and his knight is too simple minded to see through the ruses that his king uses him to do his bidding.  That perception worked for us both, especially since it gave us a useful take on other characters in the story as rival knights.

Next up, I took the notion that the senior figure is effectively offering his henchman the Devil’s bargain, and cast the former as Satan and the latter as Adam in the Garden.  Again, just a notion.  But for the actors to be given the concept that they’re playing Arthurian or Biblical archetypes enables them to bring something to the scene that you certainly wouldn’t get in Shane’s work.  Instead, they start to inhabit the same space as characters in Kurosawa say, where they are emblematic of a type as well as being characters in themselves.

The trick with this kind of stuff is not laying it on too thick.  It’s all very well being redolent of Shakespeare if that’s what you’re performing, quite another thing if you’re shoehorning it into a by-the-numbers genre tale.  There’s a balance to be struck between genre-appropriate beats and moments which elevate the whole into something greater than the sum of its parts.  

Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead does this masterfully in the world of the thriller, primal family issues etched into the DNA of the story.  And you’ve got to admire the way George Lucas makes movie magic from mythic ingredients in Star Wars, while maintaining B-movie pace.  Even Blades of Glory has a touch of the epic about it amid the knowing nonsense, that makes the jollity all the more genuine.

Acknowledging the mythic is the ‘how’ of how to make your story universal.  Most audiences couldn’t care less that your aunt and uncle ran a sweet shop and that you want to write a story inspired by your memories of working there.  Bring in elements of first love and an adolescent’s realisation that aunt and uncle lead a life as troubled as mum and dad, and you’re raising a mirror to the experiences of audiences at large, whether or not their experience includes sweet shops, whether or not it was their aunt and uncle that taught them life lessons their parents couldn’t.

It’s that notion of the mirror, the chance to see and feel our own lives reflected in the fiction we choose, that allows prosaic material to be shaped into something archetypal.  And yes, that is another word for cliche at times: there’s a reason some stereotypes have power, and in the quest for novelty it’s too easy to ignore something with mythic resonance.  Novelty has its place, yes, but it’s that mythic quality audiences respond to, and if you can find it in your work, polish it until it becomes a mirror that people can see their own lives in.  They’ll thank you for it.