In fact, it could probably replace any or all of these things and the culture would benefit.
Magic Mike’s road trip to a Myrtle Beach stripper convention is a story for our time to rival The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Lord of The Rings, and Star Wars. So, if we hold with Campbell’s idea of the heroic monomyth, MMXXL, like all great epics and legends, must map onto the Hero’s Journey. These are the stories of great men doing great things, and Magic Mike XXL is also the story of great men doing great things. Big Dick Richie’s journey to find someone for whom his dick is not too big, and Mike’s quest to accept his calling as a male entertainer, are - at least in my mind - no less noble than Odysseus’ striving to get home or Frodo’s task to bring the ring to Mount Doom and destroy it. The Hero’s Journey to this day underlies a lot of our most famous popular culture: the big, heroic, and usually extremely male stories such as Star Wars (George Lucas talked in numerous interviews about having actively based his trilogy of films on Campbell’s work) and Harry Potter and Moby-Dick and The Odyssey, the grand stories of grand men on grand journeys. The Hero With A Thousand Faces remains as popular with high school English classes as it is with men in Reddit forums who think the fall of Rome is somehow illustrative of why women won’t sleep with them. All hero myths, claimed Campbell, are really the same hero myth, across time and cultures. In 1949, Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a book that popularized the idea of the monomyth, which says that all great stories - the large narratives by which cultures understand their origins and their heroes, from our small everyday lives to way civilizations are founded - map onto the same basic, repetitive plot. As Magic Mike XXL is the greatest journey story of our time, it would then be fair to assume that it must, too, be a retelling of this same myth. But there is a beloved idea that most stories can be distilled down to a few underlying plots, and that maybe all great, important narratives are ultimately each just a retelling of a single myth. Also, technically, Tolstoy may not have said any of this, even the first part it’s one of those quotes so widely attributed to so many different authors by people trying to make generalizations about literature that it might as well be attributed to Marilyn Monroe. Ok, so one of those is actually a secondary plotline of the greatest work of art of the 21st century, Magic Mike XXL. Tolstoy once said there are only three stories in the world: A man goes on a journey, a stranger comes to town, and Big Dick Richie’s dick is too big. This article was adapted from a talk presented at Drunk Education: A Tribute to Magic Mike XXL. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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