Lesson #6 Yin and Yang Film Genres
Updated: Jul 15, 2019
Before I give you some more theory, let me tell you that when I decided to write a blog about Intuitive Screenwriting, I also decided to write about it intuitively, and I never anticipated I would discover anything new in storytelling. But surprisingly now you are witnessing some new discoveries about archetypes in real time and I can tell you only this: The Intuitive Screenwriting wheel is full of polarities but also full of new surprises.
Let me start with polarities. Do you remember why polarities are so important? This time I will use some quotes from The Writers Journey, in which Christopher Vogler wrote a whole section on polarity:
“A persistent feature of the Hero's Journey is that its stories tend to be polarized like two essential forces of nature, electricity, and magnetism. Like them, stories create energy or exert force through polarities that organize the elements present into opposing camps with contrasting properties and orientations. Polarity is an essential principle of storytelling, governed by a few simple rules but capable of generating infinite conflict, complexity, and audience involvement.”
“As soon as you choose a single thought or character to unite your story, you have automatically generated its polar opposite.”
“When a situation is extremely polarized, when the two sides have been driven out to their most extreme positions, there is a tendency for the polarity to reverse itself. According to the ancient Chinese philosophy of the I Ching, the doctrine of changes, things are always in the process of flowing into their opposites.”
“Sometimes the two big ideas or life-ways that have been polarized throughout a story will seek resolution by converting into something else, a third way that resolves the contradiction between the two elements.”
“Polarity is a meta-pattern, a system that operates at all levels in stories, from large-scale clashes of cultures to intimate human relationships, all the way down to polarities within individuals.”
All of this: duality, movement, a tendency for the polarity to reverse itself and find resolution are extremely important for our genres, as well, so let’s go back to them.
After last week’s post about genres, I said to myself, ‘Ok, obviously the polarities on the wheel work and they work because I put the wheel together by considering all levels of categorization in astrology, but still, why does it work?
What are the exact qualities of those polarities?
And I finally realized that all of those oppositions on my wheel are actually sextiles in the classic zodiac wheel.
In astrology, a sextile is an astrological aspect that is made when two planets or other celestial bodies are 60 degrees apart.
So, what does that mean for us? I wanted to know if I am missing something since there are 12 sextiles and I wrote about 6 genres? And this is what I discovered:
The Zodiac signs that form a sextile are in the same yin/yang polarity, also known as masculine and feminine. They are NOT in the same element or modality (cardinal, fixed, mutable). For us, this is Ego, Soul, and Self.
The masculine archetypes are Warrior, Fool, Creator, Orphan, Explorer, and Magician.
The feminine archetypes are Lover, Caregiver, Sage, Destroyer, Ruler, and Innocent.
And what I discovered next about sextiles I really like:
Sextiles seem to have some common traits in a major sphere of life, but those traits have to be activated since the energies between sextiles don’t flow automatically. Astrologers say that once those energies are triggered, they carry a huge potential for freedom in themselves.
As we know, feature films are always a combination of two storylines, and what the wheel suggests is that these storylines are actually not entirely opposing or opposite. If they were entirely opposing, they would not even “recognize” each other. They need to work well together when triggered – in order to be able to lead each other to “enlightenment.” They have to speak the same language and here this language is having the same yin/yang polarity. At the same time, they carry different archetypal qualities and this is where they have to work through their differences, if they want to grow together.
So, this is my conclusion: Film or Film Genre is a Polarity in a Sextile way.
And this is how we can use this notion to read our genre puzzle:
ONE.
From every Defining Archetype (element) I can go to the Opposing archetype (element) as long as it has a different psychological quality associated with itself.
For example, the EGO-archetype can transform into the SELF-archetype and SOUL-archetype, but not into another EGO-archetype. See the wheel to visualize what am I talking about, it is actually quite easy.
TWO.
If we take ONE into consideration, we have 12 archetypal genres, more precisely, six but every genre has a second variation of itself.
The defining quality uses its opposing quality to transform itself.
We can group genres two by two… Two in the Warrior family, two in the Explorer family, two in the Creator family, two in the Lover, two in the Sage and two in the Ruler.
THREE.
We have six masculine genres and six feminine genres. And it’s important to understand that the masculine archetypes only work with masculine, and the feminine archetypes only with the feminine. This is the sextile quality that connects them.
FOUR.
If we want to have all possible combinations of the psychological change within genres, it is essential to understand that the direction from one archetype to another has to be prec