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Noodle in Charon’s Boat: Separation as Beginning and End in Gorillaz’ The Mountain
- Jason Batt, PhD
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
The Hero’s Journey is often represented as a wheel, with the protagonist moving clockwise through the points. The imagery forces a presumption of motion and order, each point as constant as the clock, always in sequence. Yet, in an era where the Hero’s Journey is being explored from other perspectives, criticized, and reimagined, I offer that it should be deconstructed—and the first aspect worth deconstructing is its scaffolding. Perhaps separation is the end result of the journey, rather than the beginning segment. Perhaps the call occurs after crossing the threshold. For each assertion that the monomyth rolls out in a singular prescribed manner, there are many examples where it doesn’t. King Peter of Narnia would tell us that the call comes after the gateway. If that switch in order is allowed, could there be others? Could separation mark both the start and finish of the Journey?
The Mountain & the mythology
Gorillaz’ latest album, The Mountain, asks that very question. Gorillaz is a mythological arrangement—Janus in its two faces: the public and fictional face composed of four characters (2-D, Murdoc, Noodle, and Russel), and the real artists behind the curtain (Damon Albarn, Jamie Hewlett, Remi Kabaka Jr., and a rotating list of others). The band has its own fictional mythology—even this album has fictional press releases bringing the band to India after fleeing international stardom, equipped with fake passports, “immersed in the rhythms of mystical music-making, navigating the mountainous terrain of this thing called life” (Gorillaz, Press Release).
The Mountain (also written in Devanagari as पर्वत—parvat), and its corresponding short film, The Mountain, The Moon Cave, and the Sad God, explore the separation phase of Campbell’s monomyth with brilliant structural fidelity. They do not lean into conscious imitation of Campbell’s charted circle, but instead find themselves on the path through their authentic exploration and expression of grief. The Call here—a Call to Separation—recognizes with heaviness the end of one stage and the beginning of another.
The Call here—a Call to Separation—recognizes with heaviness the end of one stage and the beginning of another.
The grief at the foundation
Albarn and Hewlett wrote this after navigating the loss of parents, describing the album as “a playlist for a party on the border between this world and whatever happens next” (Albarn, qtd. in Apple Music). The album wasn’t initially conceived as a grief record. Instead, the team began with an artistic expedition into India, looking for new musical influences. In the midst of their journey, grief arrived and rewrote the album.
The Mountain gives the dead their voice. Layered throughout are the posthumous recordings of collaborators and friends: Bobby Womack (d. 2014), Dave Jolicoeur (d. 2023), Dennis Hopper (d. 2010), Proof of D12 (d. 2006), and several others. The album becomes an active party on the threshold of the next world, a séance where the dead speak and reassess the moment of Separation. Hopper’s voice closes “The Mountain” with a repetition: “The mountain, the mountain / All good souls come to rest.” A dead man speaks the album’s title and its promise. This is also the first human voice on the album, and it comes from the other side.
The title track brings the musical influences of India to the forefront. The sonic palette is the threshold—none of the usual electronic elements of the band's history, but a unique blending of classical Indian instrumentation. The opening song becomes an invocation, inviting the listener into the party on the edge and summoning the voices of the dead to serve as guide through the dark places. The Moon Cave then becomes the liminal space between the worlds of the living and the dead, where both are allowed to interact, if even just briefly. Sarod master Ayaan Ali Bangash reflected, "As we immersed ourselves in the music, we could feel an emotional current. It resonated deeply; almost like a silent conversation with something within." The Call doesn't arrive in a language the fictional band would recognize. We often have to leave our own idiom to hear the summons. That displacement of location is a Separation enabling Separation.
Noodle’s hero journey
The film opens with the young Noodle as a wild jungle child, imitating Mowgli, leaping from tree branch to dragon with a red cape. Noodle perfectly represents the Campbell formulation: the hero before the wound, before the call, before the knowing. Like Mowgli, she’s a threshold figure and child of two worlds. She encounters the serpent Vritra and plunges into the waters, only to emerge as an adult. The threshold crossing is unconscious—she’s unaware and yet embraces her moment. The adult Noodle then must stand on the threshold again as she directs her bandmates to climb the Mountain to the Moon Cave.
Noodle is the intentional guide throughout, expressing a confidence that is mythical and mysterious. The music underlies the key beats, its arrangement moving from classical Indian bansuri, sitar, sarod, and tabla into the familiar breathy vocals and declarative rap of Gorillaz.
The wheel of the Hero’s Journey is usually drawn open as a clock face, showing progression from beginning to end. But the world doesn’t work that way. Perhaps it functions more like the Ouroboros, a closed circle with no fixed beginning. Separation, within a reading of The Mountain, is a point where end becomes beginning.
The hand-animated music video ends with the four band members accepting a ride out of the Moon Cave with a boatmaster whose diabolical nature alludes to Charon. Noodle, who began our trek up the mountain, takes the lead and gives a simple goodbye by mouthing “I love you” (although fans debate whether she mouthed “I must go now”). She falls into the waters, and the others follow (Murdoc only reluctantly). As the music trails, the deep darkness of the water is revealed to be the emptiness of outer space, our four members finding themselves falling out of orbit.
The surface reading is death. Yet we also have a mythic reading of moksha, the voluntary liberation and willing surrender of the self that has completed this phase of the cycle. Noodle’s leap is one of peace. Murdoc’s stumbling entry is the most honest moment in the film: he doesn’t choose the plunge, he falls into it. And that, too, is a kind of grace. They aren’t departing the world, they are dissolving the self that inhabited it—caught in the Ouroboros of the Hero’s Journey, a beginning and end tied together with separation.
Separation is both end and beginning
Ultimately, Gorillaz answer the question regarding the fixed nature of the Hero’s Journey by showing why it isn’t fixed. Separation is both beginning and end, and all ends are beginnings, but they are not finality. Campbell presented the Hero’s Journey as beginning with Separation, that departure from known to unknown. The summons, though, can arrive not as invitation but as rupture. The Mountain gives us the far less-joyful Separation: the moment when grief becomes the Call and when we move into the unknown world not because we chose to step over the threshold but because the world we knew was taken from us. The terror of the forced Separation can still be embraced as a new beginning just as it’s an end. What comes at the end of the Journey can open up the doors to the next one.
MythBlast authored by:
Jason D. Batt, Ph.D., is a technological philosopher, mythologist, futurist, artist, and writer specializing in mythologies of space exploration. He co-founded Deep Space Predictive Research Group, Project Lodestar, and the International Society of Mythology. He has authored three novels, edited four fiction anthologies, and his short fiction and scholarly work have appeared in numerous publications. Jason currently serves as Senior Editor for the forthcoming Journal of Mythological Studies, Co-Managing Editor of the Beyond Earth Institute Space Policy Review, and Associate Editor of the Journal of Space Philosophy.
This MythBlast was inspired by the Separation stage of the hero's journey.
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