There is no place like home, even when space and time are obstacles

A home is what the main character in a story is looking for, but this key character starts life in a movie with a sense of ‘home’.

Say the main character is all cozy, comfortable, at peace. Eating pizza from the shop just down the road. The pizza was delivered. Life is fine, perhaps apart from the price.

Maybe the lead character is at home in his new job, working in a boy’s home, or is a teacher at a boarding school.

Maybe sport’s heroes, on the game, feel in their element, at peace. Life couldn’t be better. They are blissful.

But something happens that shakes the character’s world. They lose their sense of home, perhaps their name and reputation, which was their’s, which was their ‘home’.

They have lost something and need to regain it. They need to get back sense of home even if they haven’t literally lost their home. Sometimes they may have lost their physical home.

Whatever they have lost, they want to regain that home feeling, the feelings of comfort and peace.

Without that thing or quality they have lost, they have lost their life and need to get it back. I call this getting back home.

There are obstacles to getting what the character wants, even space and time can be obstacles. But the ‘protagonist’ or main character is usually up to it. Think: action movies, westerns.

Examples of home

The Wizard of Oz (1939, USA) is a good example. Dorothy (Judy Garland) says there is no place like home after losing her home, almost literally (at least in her dreams).

2010 (1984, USA) is another example.

The space crew in 2010 have not literally lost their home, but they must leave behind their loved ones at home to find out what happened to a space crew at Jupiter. The future may seem scary without having their loved ones close by, especially in space.

As they are travelling in space, they stumble on a sense of comfort or home, though. Something in the air knows they want it, though, and they happen to stumble upon it.

In life at the movies, wherever characters happen to be, there can be a sense of home, if that is given to the character or regained by the character, even in space.