The darkness of the Neo's basement apartment sunk in to every crevice on every shelf and every stack of dusty CDs. The light from his computer screen cast a greenish sci-fi hue upon his sleeping eyes. His pale face rested against a dusty white keyboard, and large puffy headphones encapsulated most of his head. The screen turned black and Neo's eyes shifted beneath his eyelids. Wake up, Neo... His eyes snapped open. He lifted his clamy stubble-covered face from his lanky arms and gazed up into the computer screen. Plain white letters against a plain black background read, "Wake up, Neo..." MS-DOS? he thought, his pale green eyes squinting from beneath their sleepy vail.
"What?" he uttered to himself, pulling the headphones from his head.
The screen responded, "The Matrix has you..."
"What the hell?"
"Follow the white rabbit," Neo's head began to spin. "Knock knock, Neo..."
A fist pounded against his chipped wooden door. He sprang back, his lingering state of cognitive dissonance looming over him and weighing down his body.
I chose to write this passage using The Matrix because it's one of the few movies that doesn't obviously and cheesily use mythic structure in its storytelling - at least in the case of the first movie. And even when the story's structure shows through, it doesn't seem to be so unattractive, just because the tone of the whole thing is so different from that of other movies that follow the mythic storytelling pattern. I also think it teaches us how tone and the details can really make a story believable and interesting, especially when it's a plotted story.
And I found it intriguing that all parts of the mythic structure are satisfied within this story, even though it's only the first part of a multiple-part story.
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