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“Tango with the Rango”: Dancing with Identity on the Seeker’s Path
- Scott Neumeister, PhD
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take.
Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion
The MythBlast series has so far focused on the Fool, the Lover, and the Trickster in film. Now for the month of April, we turn and engage the Seeker archetype, the last in the Archetypes of Innocence. I have chosen a movie that has elements of all three preceding archetypes yet squarely emphasizes the Seeker–Gore Verbinski’s Rango, released in 2011. This animated pastiche of the Western genre humorously illustrates the core issue for the Seeker: pursuing something external that will ultimately bring inner meaning and enlightenment. I would like to more carefully unfold how the film’s protagonist-Seeker actually portrays how this progression of the last few months’ archetypes works in each of our lives.
“Who am I? I could be anyone”
Our unnamed protagonist (voiced by Johnny Depp) reveals himself in the film setup as an actor asking himself this very question. He is actually a chameleon, riding alone inside an aquarium-as-stage in the back of a station wagon and playing a scene by himself with various props. After asking the above question about his identity, he imagines that he can be any role he wants: a voyaging sea captain, a rogue anthropologist, or a Don Juan-like lover. But the solo performer realizes he needs both real “costars” and some kind of inciting event to shake things up. Suddenly, his glass “proscenium” flies out the back window of the car onto the desert highway. As he immediately gets thirsty in the desert heat, finding water for survival becomes his overt quest. But underlying this are the deeper, archetypal goals of a solidified social role, connection with others, and somehow making a difference in the world.
The chameleon’s entry into the desert town of Dirt fulfills both of the most basic story beginnings that John Gardner famously recommended to budding authors: “a trip or the arrival of a stranger” (203). Of course, everyone in town asks the stranger, “Who are you?” In a place where toughness and courage are the societal norm, the chameleon transforms the name Durango into Rango and constructs a rugged gunslinger personality, bolstered by fabricated stories and Western cliches. Through his grand performance and sheer accident, “Rango” rises to become a hero and figurehead for the town. Rango then is on the “trip” to self-discovery and himself is the stranger in town as well as a stranger to who he really is.
What are the chameleon’s real colors?
Rango’s immediate need for both physical and social survival represents the needs each of us has coming into this world. We, like him, must rely on the tribe we’re surrounded with–most often the family situation, but also extending to the community. To have our survival needs met, we must blend in, chameleon-like, so that we are accepted and cared for. With the addition of the Seeker, the trajectory of the previous month’s archetypes form a progression, a sequence. We all start out as newborn Fools, only gaining wisdom by living. We need the nurture of Lovers around us to provide what we require and to be the objects of our love. And we play the Trickster in two modes: by “acting” in ways that are calculated to bring us the love we need (the Jungian persona), and by masking the qualities that our tribe deems unacceptable (the shadow). Like Rango, we have many potential “roles” before us, our encounters with others and with life shape the character of our “performance.”
“Who am I? I could be anyone”
Of course, the problem with the Fool desperately seeking Love and leaning into their Trickster is that both naivete and an oversized ego tend to build houses of cards. Rango’s tall tales of who he is fosters his acceptance and ultimately his being named sheriff, but soon a reckoning must come. When the lie is exposed, he shamefully walks away from the friends he so desperately wants to save. And once again, that question arises that started the movie: “Who am I?” This crisis now stems from having a persona wholly influenced by the collective, conditioned to follow what’s expected, versus the expression of what’s unique to the individual. In The Power of Myth, Campbell speaks of the ideal “that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else’s” (186).
Moving from innocence to experience
The remainder of the movie explores how Rango can tap into his “ordinariness” (versus his Western gunslinger persona) to face the town’s foes and not be THE hero but to galvanize its residents into what JCF director John Bucher has called “A Call to Collective Adventure.” He is inspired to step away from the typical hero role that’s expected of him (what Campbell has called “the primary mask”) and become a leader operating through influence versus raw force and intimidation. The deep joy of the film unfolds as Rango, as Campbell notes in Transformations of Myth Through Time, “begins to find his own path, and the drag, you might say, of the primary mask is gradually thrown off” (26).
Each of us may have varying degrees of the Fool, the Lover, the Trickster, or the Seeker active within. They both accompany and drive us along the path we are on. We at the JCF have grouped the nature of these four into the “archetypes of innocence,” and perhaps an even better term for them might be “archetypes of development.” Through their interplay and the working out of them in relation to the world, we are constantly answering the question “Who am I?” When that question pushes us to explore the safety beyond our own glass enclosures, the Seeker can powerfully activate to reach further externally to experience deeper meaning within. And as you will see for the remainder of this month, the Seeker’s path will develop from innocence into experience.
MythBlast authored by:
Scott Neumeister, Phd is a literary scholar, author, TEDx speaker, mythic pathfinder and Editor of the MythBlast series from Tampa, Florida, where he earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of South Florida in 2018. His specialization in multiethnic American literature and mythology comes after careers as an information technology systems engineer and a teacher of English and mythology at the middle school and college levels. Scott coauthored Let Love Lead: On a Course to Freedom with Gary L. Lemons and Susie Hoeller, and he has served as a facilitator for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Myth and Meaning book club at Literati.
This MythBlast was inspired by Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine and the archetype of The Seeker.
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"You are that mystery which you are seeking to know. But it’s not the you that you fancy. It’s not the aspect that your friends are enjoying, that thing in the phenomenal world that is moving around. It is that ground of being that was there, will be there, is what you are to refer to."
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