(This is my first time at delivering a commencement address. It was quite an honor to be invited by Hussian College Los Angeles, an arts school located in a working film and TV studio in downtown Los Angeles. The school has a strong spine of storytelling and Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” and my book “The Writer’s Journey” are part of the curriculum.)
HUSSIAN COLLEGE LOS ANGELES COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS
BY
CHRISTOPHER VOGLER
MAY 7, 2022
Good afternoon, and a good afternoon it is. First, I want to thank Dean of Academic Affairs Brian Walker, Department Chair of General Academics Will Linn, and the rest of the faculty of Hussian College for inviting me to address you today on this almost sacred occasion. I appreciate very much that they gave me ample time to prepare for my solemn duty, because I was able to get a good head start on my procrastinating.
But no matter how much one procrastinates, eventually it’s show time.
We stand here at a very interesting and dynamic place, a boundary between two worlds, a bridge, one of those threshold crossings that the Hero’s Journey talks about, a moment loaded with memories and emotions, a time pregnant with untold possibilities. As soon-to-be graduates, you stand on an arrow of time, able to look back at all that brought you to this point, a backwards look that encompasses your own struggles and joys, but also the march of your ancestors and the artists who came before you, all the way back to Stone Age. And from this high vantage point, you can begin to see a little into the future, and what you will do with the knowledge and experience you have won here through your struggles.
I want to begin by congratulating you, the graduating class of 2022. Congratulations to you for enduring the rigors and demands of this program and opening your hearts to what it has to offer. Congratulations to your professors and staff, for dedicating all their time and energy to bring you to this threshold. Congratulations also to your parents, friends and loved ones who supported you and shared some of the struggles and challenges with you. Job well done all around. So, all of you give each other a well-deserved round of congratulation.
You know, it’s customary in this kind of address to deal out some bits of wisdom or useful guidelines for living, along the lines of the famous speech wrongly attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, that begins: “Wear sunscreen.”
I can’t top that, but my own homespun version would be to pass along a rule of thumb or principle of living that has been useful and has stuck with me. This one fell into my lap when I was fresh out of college and doing a three-year tour in the Air Force as a motion picture production officer, making documentary films for Congress and the Pentagon about the military space program. I had a wonderful mentor there, a grouchy, rather cynical film editor who had been a combat cameraman in the Korean War. He warned me that the scripts I was writing for the top brass were too complicated. He told me about the K.I.S.S. principle, which stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid. That seemed like an abstract principle until my crusty but benign mentor made it concrete for me. “Lieutenant,” he said, “you’ve got make it so even the general can understand it!” So Keep It Simple is a solid rule for your art.
As I passed through film school and then worked my way into the movie business, I accumulated other rules of thumb in the field, along the lines of “Never do the magic the same way twice” which encouraged me to keep trying new, scary things, and “It’s better to be clear than pretty,” which meant that I decided I would try always to make my intentions clear in every scene and every memo, and that clarity was more valuable than being obscure, artistic or mysterious.
I picked things up from mentors along the way, as you will, and as you already have from your professors here.
I got a good nugget from the co-creator of the Marvel Universe Stan Lee, when I was writing treatments for him as he struggled to launch his mythic character The Mighty Thor as a live action film franchise. My treatments were too detailed, I still hadn’t learned the lesson of Keep It Simple Stupid, and when I asked Stan what was wrong, he said with admirable simplicity, “Sell the Sizzle, Not the Bacon.” Of course he meant give studio executives the glittering highlights, create a delicious smell of magic, but don’t get bogged down in details that they can criticize and pull apart. This is good advice for doing pitches and presentations. Sell the sizzle, not the bacon.
I could go on with my catalogue of little life lessons, but the point is, you will discover and invent your own. I encourage you to write them down and collect them, and keep reminding yourself of them every so often.
Now, this is a commencement ceremony and I am giving a commencement address, and I never pass up an opportunity to delve into word origins, the origins of the word commencement. I can’t help it, I’m a word nerd; tracing words back to their roots is how I search for deeper layers of meaning, for some idea of what people were trying to describe when they made up the word. In this case, “commence” originally meant to begin something, but with extra emphasis, like really, truly a new beginning of something major. So we are all gathered here to launch you, to initiate you in a big way into a new life with our full support and good wishes. Emphatically.
I am a student of that literary and psychological pattern known as the hero’s journey, you might have heard of it, I don’t think it’s possible to go through this school without hearing about it. I use it to measure and assess every aspect of life, but especially the great turning points, the boundaries between worlds, the thresholds that must be crossed to keep moving through the cycles of life. This is truly a hero’s journey crossing moment, where, armed with knowledge and guidance from your mentors, you are ready to step across a threshold into a new undiscovered country.
Like all thresholds, there is a feeling that this is a moment of death and rebirth, a mix of sadness and joy, the end of one dynamic, challenging phase of your life, and the beginning of another. At one point this school was a new Special World for you. Now, it has become your Ordinary World, a world you have known and mastered, and you will soon be stepping out into another Special World of building your career and fulfilling your life’s purpose. Life will be punctuated by a succession of these moments, entering new Special Worlds and living in them long enough until they become familiar, and then moving on to something new and strange, to fresh challenges that will expand your idea of what you can be.
There is an interesting maternal, feminine thread in this moment of transition, this moment of heroic rebirth. When someone is accepted into a program like this, we say they have “matriculated”, from the word matrix which means a list, a register, or a herd of cows, so at Hussian College you have been listed, registered, and herded together, but matrix also used to mean womb. So you have been incubating in the womb of this school for several years, and you have been living in The Matrix.
And when you leave the school, and that period of inner growth is over, you are entitled to refer to your school forever after as your Alma Mater, your dear mother, your nurturing, nourishing, bountiful mother. So it’s appropriate to honor your academic mother today, and thank her for containing you and feeding your spirit as you formed your professional identity. She and her good name will be your ally as you go out into the world, and you will be able to draw on a network of connection with others who came out of her womb. My wife reminded me that we celebrate Mother’s Day this weekend, so how appropriate is that?
Another word of the day is graduate, or graduate. This one comes from the Latin word gradus which means a step. So you are taking a step today, a giant step, one of the biggest you will ever take. And like the heroes of myth, you are stepping off into the unknown. You will be using technology and story forms that haven’t even been invented yet. You will all be pioneers, explorers and inventors of new media and new ways of telling stories. But I’m confident you won’t forget the best of the old ways, and will find new uses for the good old tools of movies, music and dance, and for the reliable guidance of myths.
You are taking a giant step into the unknown, because you can’t predict where your quest will take you. It seemed to me, as I started my career, that in Hollywood all the arrows of my intention were cork-screwed. I aimed at something and I ended up someplace else, and sometimes it was better. I might even hit the intended target with my corkscrew arrow, but it would get there by a twisting, wandering, unpredictable path, and take far longer than I planned, usually so I could learn some lesson that prepared me better for when I finally reached my goal. I think you will learn to accept this quality about your career path, and even come to enjoy the winding and unpredictable road of a career in entertainment, show business, the arts, or healing the planet, whatever you want to call it.
And I think that is your job description, healer of the planet. You are in line to be a special kind of hero, a culture hero. There are military heroes, scientist heroes, builder and nurturer heroes. But you will be the culture heroes. You are part of something, an ancient cult, a cult of culture, a heritage of people united in intention and belief, that stretches back to the Greeks and beyond. Way, way beyond. You are walking the road of the artist that winds back to the first shamans who danced to make peace with the spirits of nature and painted the great beasts of their world on the walls of their caves, who wore masks and made shadow plays about their gods and heroes by firelight. You are at one with those shamans, carrying on their work of healing their people with music, dance and stories brought at great cost from the worlds of the gods. Shamans are selected, as you have been, by unusual sensitivity or unusual hardship, that shatters them and transforms them into unique transmitters and interpreters of messages from the other world. In those times and right up to the ancient Greeks, all performances were religious, spiritual events. The actors, musicians and dancers gave themselves over to the spirits, gods and elemental forces they were trying to represent and connect with. The theater was a sacred space of transformation, attached to the temple that honored the mysterious god Dionysus, the wild, creative, inspiring god of actors and artists.
As part of the great community of artists and visionaries who have been entertaining and enlightening their people for thousands of years, you have an almost sacred duty.
And that mission, I have come to believe, is nothing less than to heal the planet. Heaven knows, it needs healing. The world is sick, obviously, but it has always been sick and it has always needed the healing that only the arts can bring. To heal the planet, I think, is to master the art of controlling vibrations. Science and mysticism agree that everything is vibrating. Everything we can see, hear, taste and touch is vibrating, the air, the atoms, the earth itself, your own body. Even the audience is vibrating.
Your job, as I see it, is to improve the vibrational rate of the world, and of the audience, by helping people become more conscious through your arts. Raise the vibrational rate, tune it up, refine it, help your audiences discover themselves and connect with the world around them.
How do you change this field of vibration? It starts with what’s right in front of you, literally what’s within reach, what you can see right here. Clean up your desktop. Sweep the floor of the studio. Write one true sentence. Create a dance move that no one’s ever seen before. Compose a shot that reveals a truth about the human heart. Say a kind word. All these little actions, performed with positive intention, can ripple out, radiating and spreading their influence until the world indeed is transformed.
When I worked for the studios, and I had to report on the scripts I had read, and argue for the ones that I passionately believed should be made into movies, I realized that I would often point at the chakras of my own body, the invisible centers of energy that are vibrating up and down our spines. I would say, “This story really got me here—“ pointing at my throat – “it choked me up” and “It got me right in the gut,” – the root chakra. I realized something in the story had reached into my body and actually changed the way I vibrated in those invisible centers. You and your stories and creations have the power to do that. So your job is to learn how to play the instruments of human feelings, how to reach into those chakras and intensify and purify their vibrations, to guide your audiences to higher consciousness, to greater awareness of themselves and their potential, to greater appreciation of other people and ways of life, to greater respect for our mother the Earth.
I want to leave you with a little story that contains the most universal piece of advice, the most all-purpose guidance system for any career. Once, my wife and I were on a pilgrimage, an artistic quest. We were traveling in Maine and had heard that it was possible to visit the studio of the great landscape painter Winslow Homer, on a peninsula called Prout’s Neck. We admire his paintings and really wanted to see where he had worked, a shrine to one of our artistic gods. But we got lost and couldn’t find it. My wife said “No problem, just get out and ask someone for directions.” Well, you know, men hate to ask for directions. But I obeyed, and looked around for someone to ask, but the only sign of a human anywhere was a worn pair of boots sticking out from under an old car, where an old man was working on one of those wheeled creeper things. I reluctantly approached and asked the boots, “Could you tell me how to get to Winslow Homer’s house?” The man slowly slid out from under the car and looked up at me. And no, he didn’t say “You can’t get theah from heah.” Instead, in that same Maine accent, he said “Just keep goin’ ‘til you get theah.” Well, of course he was right, there was only one road on this peninsula, and if I kept going on it, I must inevitably reach my destination. We kept going ‘til we got there, and enjoyed our visit to the artist’s shrine, but I realized that old gentleman had given me a tremendous gift with that phrase, a piece of advice that covers all situations and points the way past all obstacles, so I pass it on to you. Just keep going ‘til you get there. You may not even know where you are going. But don’t worry about that. Just keep going, one foot in front of the other. Keep marching. Trust the shining, time-worn path of the artist that you are walking on. Trust your stories, trust your instincts and experience, trust the vibrating organs of your body, trust your passionate artistic heart. And with that, I give you my blessing and send you forth with your mission to tell your stories and heal your world, because the world needs your stories, and the world needs you.
Thank you.
Christopher Vogler
May 7, 2022