CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study
Globalization indeed gives many benefits in increasing people's access to everything and knowledge for people to be aware of (Fithratullah, 2018). The process of globalization also becomes room for a social movement to expand their involvement in life. The process of globalization includes immense economic growth accessible to everyone without seeing it from a racial background (Fithratullah, 2021). These significant changes change how people behave and raise the new cultural expansion seen through anything. Literature changes over time through globalization, creating Popular Literature that embraces technological changes and the literary industry. This concept becomes the waypoint for people to see the world as a whole (Batcehlor, 2009). We see various literary works such as novels, poems, and movies. Even though there is different variation in literary works, literature still serves one purpose, which is to express the maker's feelings to society through the issues within the results (Latif, 2016). It is known that literature carries a glorious purpose in its making.
Literature also did not forget to use any means to make it entertaining to people so they could understand its meaning as it is the work of emotions and imagination (Wellek & Warren, 1956; Herawati & Fithratullah, 2022). Literature shows this meaning through its content, message in it is texts (Afrianto, 2018). As the world
literature like poems, short stories, and even movies.
As one popular literature, Movies are one of the newest forms of popular literature invented in the late 19th century (Nakatsu & Edirisinghe, 2011). The process of making movies that combine both audio and visual makes movies easy to be understood by society. Therefore, movies serve the same purpose as literary works, which is to convey messages, as well as convey the emotion of the maker through the movie messages or simply through the actors' acts. Not only that, Films can describe fairy tales easier than any other forms of literary works (Kasih, 2018).
There are various ways to analyze literary works, and one of them is through psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a field of study that learns about the human mind. It was seen and studied intensively by Sigmund Freud in the 19th century, which later empowered other scholars to develop a new room of analysis and approach to understand human beings through their psyche (Lapsley & Stey, 2011). Carl Gustav Jung was the man who also developed the idea of the human psyche, which led him to a base thing that makes us humans called archetypes.
Archetypes themselves refer to an unconscious content pattern within ourselves and somehow happen to appear as it is part of the human consciousness. In his approach, he first developed four basic archetypes: the self, the shadow, the anima/animus, and lastly, the persona. This approach later birthed dozens of new archetypal literary criticism. One of them was talking about the heroic myth and
Right now, many Psychoanalysts and even mythologists developed this idea.
Joseph Campbell, a mythologist, came and developed Jung’s archetype theory, where there is a specific pattern in the hero’s story in mythology and literature this time. Hero’s journey is a concept with a structured universal pattern of the hero's journey through achieving specific goals. Those journeys consist of three primary stages or steps, the departure, the initiation, and the return. After Joseph Campbell developed his grand theory, Christopher Vogler came to renew. These stages are somewhat becoming an outline of every myth and even Hollywood blockbusters for heroic movies.
Famous movies we see nowadays are superhero movies, as we see in superman from DC comics and Thor from Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The unique thing about Thor movies is that they are stories inspired by Norse mythology.
There were three Thor movies in MCU, namely Thor (2011), Thor: The Dark World (2013), and Thor: Ragnarok (2017). These movies were interconnected, aligning into one timeline and universe. The main story of Thor is a heroic hero who is trying to stop the wicked plan of his beloved brother to take the king’s throne. The main thing that became one of the issues is how the stories try to create a base pattern of heroic acts that became the base question for this research to cover whether there is a specific heroic journey to this movie. However, this movies only to be seen as entertainment only for society and rarely seen to be explore in deeper way. Therefore, The Hero’s Journey needs to explore more to
uncover the representation of Hero’s Journey that is depicted in Thor Movies.
1.2 Research Questions
According to the background of the research above, the writer defines this question as the following question:
How is Hero’s Journey Represented through Thor movies?
1.3 Research Objectives
Based on the previous research questions, this research is aimed to describe the representation hero’s journey in the main characters of Thor Movies. The Research also used to find the steps that hero often uses to finish their conquest.
1.4 Use of Study
This research will be helpful for people and future researchers. This present study implies two uses, practical and theoretical.
1.4.1 Practical Use
This Research will be helpful for people to increase their literary comprehension, especially about Archetypes in literature. It can give society another level of understanding regarding this knowledge, starting from the meaning of archetypes, how people know character archetypes, and how the literary works depicted it.
This research also makes people believe that understanding literature is not
1.4.2 Theoretical Use
As the research used mainly the psychological criticism approach, the research will be helpful for another scholar to look deeper into the theories to conduct a deeper analysis regarding archetypes. This research is also useful for scholars interested in film studies as the writer also uses theory in film and representation to it.
1.5 Scope of the Study
This study is focused on finding Hero’s Journey representation within the movies.
The Theory was also limited to the representation theory, which made the writer not consider any cinematics and editing aspects of the movies. Therefore, this research intensely focuses on some of Thor movies which are Thor (2011), Thor:
The Dark World (2013), and Thor: Ragnarok (2017). Specificially analyzes the archetype of the Hero’s Journey from the Thor Odinson character.
