“Where then there was darkness, now there is light; but also,
where light was, there now is darkness,” Joseph Campbell writes of
our modern society in The Hero With A Thousand Faces. “The
modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again
the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul.”

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons Whale Rider, a tale of
a lost people who reclaim their purpose and identity, was an
underground hit this summer.

The film, which just wrapped up 12 weeks at the Hi-Pointe
Theatre (an impressive run for a cinema that only screens one film
at a time) was certainly popular for a number of reasons (13
year-old Keisha Castle-Hughes alone is outstanding as Pai, the
heroine).

Yet the story itself, the myth, is what really distinguishes
this work from other arthouse films. In this lost tribe, Westerner
audiences have found a people with whom they can identify, and in
their salvation, hope.

It is a tale of a people who have fallen from their symbiosis
with the world around them and who have also lost faith in
reclaiming the cultural consciousness essential for a reunion.

Yet, it is also a tale of a society that has been washed out and
left barren, stranded and in need of a hero.

“In the beginning, the land fell to great emptiness,” a voice
says as the film opens, reminding that despair has befallen mankind
before. “She was waiting, waiting for something to fill her up,
waiting for a leader. And he came on the back of a whale, out
ancestor, Paikea.”

The story is that Paikea, after whom Pai (Castle-Hughes) is
named, headed west from Hawaiki in a canoe. When the canoe sank, he
called to the gods, who sent him a whale, on whose back he road to
New Zealand and founded a new tribe.

By the present day, only Koro, the last chief, still preserves
the old rituals and values. Distraught, he prays to the gods for
help, yet they do not listen. Then, his granddaughter, Pai, whom he
has forbidden to be the new leader, defies him and prays for
help.

And the gods listen, sending a tribe of whales to the village’s
beach.

The people of the village rekindle their relationship with
nature as they spend all night working to save the whales. When one
dies, the man who was watching over it weeps as if he had lost his
own child.

Yet with morning comes the realization that physical strength
will save neither the whales nor the tribe. Their plight is clear
when a final whale appears that is the size of a small house.

The simple statement, “It was Paikea’s whale,” reminds us of an
extinct worldview, once held by primitive men and held only today
by children and dreamers. It is a mythic view of history–of our
existence not as linear but rather as circular.

After Koro’s prayers fail once again, Pai prays, then mounts the
great whale and miraculously leads it, along with the rest of the
whales, back to the safety of deeper waters. She then plunges into
the depths on the whale’s back, as her ancestor once did.

Koro’s subsequent repentance and the tribe’s revitalization
prove that Pai’s act was not one of revolution, but one of rebirth.
She violated only the modern patriarchy’s rules, while acting to
preserve the culture’s overarching values.

Rebirth is hard to swallow in an age where “change” means little
more than socio-political reform and “faith” tends to cause more
culture division than union.

Modern man’s challenge, Campbell argues, is to realize all
peoples seek to reclaim the same values. In identifying with this
little New Zealand tribe, American moviegoers have taken an
important first step.