Rites of Passage

This genre is more of a post-Freudian phenomenon, although examples of it dot the ages. It is literally a “life passage” from one age to another, and only when the hero can embrace his or her own warts will he or she be saved. ROP stories contain a “life problem” – from puberty to midlife to death, these are the universal passages; a “wrong way” to attack the problem and a solution that involves acceptance of the hard truth the hero has been fighting; and the knowledge that it is not the world that must change, but the hero. ROP examples: The 400 Blows, 28 Days, 10, Kramer vs. Kramer, Ordinary People, Nine, Napoleon Dynamite, Lost in Translation, Up in the Air, Brooklyn