Mythological Content in "Confessions of a Shopaholic"

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Recommended: Archetypical hero analysis

In many movies today there is usually some form of mythological content. The movie doesn’t have to be related to mythology in any way, shape, or form. The movie Confessions of a Shopaholic is a movie that you would not expect to have any mythological content in it, but it does. In Confessions of a Shopaholic there is a definite hero archetype.

This movie has the hero archetype in it because it fulfills all of the phases in Joseph Campbell’s study A Hero with a Thousand Faces. The first phase of Campbell’s study is Departure. Rebecca Bloomwood goes through this phase when she gets all of her credit card bills and realizes that she is in major debt and needs to stop spending so much right away. She gets the call to adventure when she unintentionally gets a job as a column writer for the magazine, Successful Savings, by writing a drunken letter and sending it to the wrong magazine. The only reason Luke Brandon hires her is because of her great comparisons and metaphors for economics grants her critical acclaim, public success, and the admiration of her boss, Luke. After she gets the job Luke ask her to write a column on interest rates, and she does not really know what they are, so she goes to a bookstore and find a book called Money for Dummies. Her best friend, Suze, is at the bookstore with and her, and she finds a book called Control Your Urge to Shop accompanied with a DVD. They go home and watch the movie. She refuses the call when the guy in the movie, Derek E. Barton, asks questions about shopping and she answers no to all of them. The person that gives her supernatural aid is the guy in the movie, Derek E. Barton and Suze. Derek tries to help her stop getting the urge to shop when she watches his movie and Suze helps her...

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...m to get back together. Then it gets even better because she finally has enough money to pay off her debt, so she goes to the bank and gets her all of her money changed into pennies. Then she goes to Derek Smeath’s office and sets all the jars of pennies out and waits for him to come in. When he walks in she says, “There you go; it’s all there.” Then she hands him a quarter because that was the change to her debt, and she is finally debt free.

In conclusion, Confessions of a Shopaholic is a great example of a movie with mythological content. It displays the hero archetype perfectly. This movie has phase 1: departure, phase 2: initiation, and phase 3: departure in it, and it also displays the sub-phases of the three phases quite well, also. This just proves that in almost any move, some form of mythological content can be found even if it seems out of the ordinary.

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