Plato, Allegory of the Cave, Hero's Journey, The Matrix

       In the film that we attempted to prepare we compared various aspects of The Matrix to the hero’s journey, the allegory of the cave and to Plato and his world of ideas. In the introduction we would have The Matrix numbers in the background with a voice over explaining the comparisons.

       The first section of the film would have been a “draw my life” style clip explaining the various steps of Joseph Campbell’s “The Adventure of the Hero”. This consisted of several sped up clips of me drawing the hero going through the stages of the hero’s journey.  Having explained the hero’s journey we would go on to compare it to two clips. The one in The Matrix by the Wachowski brothers where Neo goes to sacrifice himself for Morpheus, gets killed by agent Smith, is revived by Trinity’s words and realizes that he is the one thus obtaining great power. The next clip is from Thor by Kenneth Branagh where Thor goes to sacrifice himself for the town, is wounded by The Destroyer/Loki, has Jane Foster reassuring him and becoming worthy, thus getting Mjolnir and his power back. These both reflect similar steps of the hero’s journey.

      Then we had the cave clips that we filmed. Those featured us being chained to the wall looking at the shadows and suddenly Kat being free and looking in wonder at the world around her. We then showed a clip of The Matrix when Neo goes sees the real world for the first time after taking the red pill. We also had a clip from the Dark Knight Rises by Christopher Nolan of Bruce Wayne being in the prison, not seeing the reality of his situation. He has to climb out of the prison emerging enlightened and ready to save Gotham as Batman. We also linked this to parts of the hero’s journey.

       Finally we linked all this to Plato by filming a clip with Kat as Plato as he is writing about Socrates. We had a clip from the British show Horrible Histories that did a comedy sketch on Socrates. We connected it to the hero by explaining how some parts of Socrates’ life fit into the steps. Finally we filmed a clip of me as Plato drawing the Allegory of the Cave and explaining it.