Hercules

Hercules is the protagonist of Disney's 1997 animated film, a loose and cheerfully unfaithful treatment of the Greek myth. He is born a god, the son of Zeus and Hera, and is abducted as an infant by Pain and Panic on Hades' orders and fed a potion that makes him mortal - though they are interrupted before he finishes it, so he keeps his strength. He is raised on a farm by Amphitryon and Alcmene, and grows up enormously strong, socially disastrous, and unable to control any of it.

The film's real subject is announced early: he does not fit anywhere and does not know why, and the song about going the distance is about wanting to find the place where he belongs rather than about wanting to be famous.

What happens in Disney's Hercules?

He learns that he is Zeus's son and that he can regain his godhood by becoming a true hero, and goes to be trained by Philoctetes, a satyr who has trained heroes before and been disappointed every time. He becomes a spectacular success in Thebes - the film's best sequence is a montage of merchandising, endorsements and action figures - and is then told by his father that public glory is not what makes a hero, which he does not understand at all. He is manipulated by Megara, who is bound to Hades, and gives up his strength for twenty-four hours to protect her. He wins anyway, is offered a place on Olympus, and turns it down to stay mortal with Meg. The film's last note is that the thing that finally makes him a god - a willingness to give his life for someone else - is also the thing that makes him decline to be one.

Hercules is dominant Se in a body that will not cooperate. The film's early comedy is entirely about a boy who cannot calibrate physical force - a market stall demolished by a thrown discus, a column brought down by leaning on it - and his eventual competence is the same faculty trained rather than replaced. He is not a tactician. He is a person who is extraordinarily good at the physical present once he learns where his own edges are.

The auxiliary Fi is why the celebrity phase reads as hollow rather than as a triumph. He gets everything - fame, wealth, adoration, a statue - and it does not touch the thing he actually wants, which is a private and unarticulated question about where he belongs. Fi does not accept an external verdict as a substitute for an internal one, and no amount of Thebes cheering resolves it.

Why does Hercules give up being a god?

Because the tertiary Te finally has the answer and the inferior Ni finally supplies the picture. He spends the film pursuing an objective handed to him by his father - become a true hero, regain Olympus - and executes it with enormous energy and no understanding. The moment he dives into the Styx for Meg he is not pursuing anything; he is doing the only thing he can bear to do, and it turns out to be the criterion. Given the reward at last, he can now see what life on Olympus would actually be, and it is not the one he wants.

ISFP is sometimes suggested because of the sincerity and the strength of the personal attachment. But he is relentlessly outward - performing, competing, playing to crowds, energised by the arena - and the film's whole middle act depends on a young man who enjoys being cheered rather more than he later admits.

ESFJ is occasionally proposed because of the eagerness to be accepted. The difference is where the standard sits. Hercules gets the acceptance in enormous quantity and finds it does not answer the question, which is what happens when the criterion is internal rather than social.