Ah, the “mentor” we keep hearing about–who is this character anyway, and why does he or she pop up in almost every movie, almost always just as the protagonist is deciding on whether or not to take up the challenge presented? Why is this character usually older, a “wise old man” or “wise old woman,” or at any rate more experienced? And why the hell, if he or she knows so much, doesn’t he or she take up the challenge him or herself? And why, you may ask, do I keep saying he or she—is it just nauseating political correctness?

The answers to all these things, as Wise Old Woman Maria Portakalos might have told her daughter Toula in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” goes back to the ancient Greeks—as do most of the rules and roles of dramatic writing. Mentor was an old former warrior in whose care Odysseus put his infant son Telemachos when he went off to fight in Troy.  As Telemachos became a young man and Odysseus made his way home, Athena—the goddess of both war and wisdom—impersonated Mentor in order to help father and son reunite and dispose of the otherwise overwhelming enemy force who had taken over Odysseus’ home in his absence. So Mentor was both male and female, both human and divine. And, because he was too old to fight, or because according to the Greek concept of fate, Athena had to let the human beings work out their own destiny—although with her divine guidance—“Mentor” could not actually do what had to be done. That was up to Odysseus and Telemachos—just as it’s up to your protagonists.

The mentor usually appears when the protagonist is either first presented with—and often reluctant to face—the challenge presented by the antagonist, or else later when the protagonist feels all is nearly lost, and needs a shot of wisdom. The mentor is often a character who has faced a similar, if not the exact same, challenge in the past, has failed, but has lived to pass on wisdom as to how the battle can be won by a better man or woman than he was. The obvious and often referenced mentor example is Obi Wan in “Star Wars,” but look at almost any movie and you’ll find one. In “Stardust,” it’s De Niro’s gay pirate, who urges the hero to be true to himself, even as he himself is unable to “come out” for fear of loss of reputation. In “Dodgeball,” it’s Patches O’Houlihan, the insane, crippled coach. In “When Harry Met Sally,” the mentors are externalized into interviews with old, happily married couples. In “While You Were Sleeping,” it’s Saul, the old Jewish friend of the family who knows the lie Lucy is living but can keep a secret—yet who is clearly single and who, like her, has no other family or true love of his own. In “Knocked Up,” it’s Ben’s dad, who has been a failure as a father and husband, but is happy and knows enough to tell his son to do what makes him happy.  In “Little Miss Sunshine,” it’s the drug-using Grandpa, whose obscene advice to his granddaughter leads to the family’s liberation from the burden of their own misguided expectations for themselves.

There are also false or dark mentors who instruct by counter-example, as with those who created the Treadstone project in the “Bourne” movies, the Oracle sages in “300,” program director Lamar Burgess in “Minority Report” or Darth Vader and Senator Palpatine in the “Star Wars” series. These can be shape-shifters, who seem at first glance to be either overly hostile to our character, only to ally with them in the end (Vader) or who seem allies at first, only to betray them (Burgess).  In “The Da Vinci Code” — whatever you thought of it—there are both types: Sophie’s dad, Jacques Saunière, from whom she’s alienated, and is now dead, but who has left her a series of clues that help her solve the puzzle of the movie and of her own identity, and Robert’s old friend Leigh, a wise old man who seems to the perfect mentor until it turns out he’s actually the villain. And the murderous Silas has his own mentor, Bishop Aringarosa, who is both a genuine mentor to him and yet false or dark because he is on the side of evil and ends up causing Silas’ death.

The crucial point is that the mentor knows the challenges the hero must face, knows enough to help, and yet is not up to the task himself—and may even have been defeated by the same antagonist in the past–meaning that only the protagonist has what it takes, which is why it’s his or her story. And precisely because the protagonist must, in the end, win the day on his own, the mentor often will die before the final battle (Vader, Patches O’Houlihan, Grandpa, Obi Wan, Jacques Saunière, etc.). This is sometimes motivated by having the mentor feel he must step one more time into battle, if only to gain time for the hero, and the death then provides pathos and motivation for the hero to do what needs to be done.  And the character can sometimes be made fresh and unusual by reversing roles: the old man who learns how to live again from having to take care of a child (who is, in fact, the mentor) as in “Kolya,” or who is forced to face the dark reality of the life he’s lead by the death of a young person he thought he was mentoring, but who turned out to be his own mentor, as in “Million Dollar Baby.” And sometimes it is the echo of the dead mentor’s words, or the memory of his actions, that provides the final key to the problem the hero faces.

The mentor is, then, a special and essential character, by origin both male and female, human and divine, representing the internal angel that insists to our hero that he not only can, but must, do what needs to be done in order to put the disturbed world back in order. So now that you see how this character works, go back to your story—and use the Force, Luke!