Star Wars: A Myth for Our Time

Abstract

Star Wars, George Lucas' lavish space opera, is truly a fantasy for our times, this generation's Wizard of Oz. Nevertheless, whereas Lucas' film has been almost universally praised for its costuming, sets, technical perfection, and wondrous special effects, its plot has been largely dismissed as corny or hokey, strictly kids' stuff. "The film's story is bad pulp, and so are the characters of hero Luke and heroine Leia," says Richard Corliss.1 "I kept looking for an 'edge,' to peer around the corny, solemn comic-book strophes," writes Stanley Kauffmann.2 And Molly Haskell sums up the critics' objections: "Star Wars is childish, even for a cartoon. "3 Well, if Star Wars is childish, then so are The Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the Rings. Like Tolkien's Middle Earth series, Star Wars is a modern fairy tale, a pastiche which reworks a multitude of old stories, and yet creates a complete and self-sufficient world of its own, one populated with intentionally flat, archetypal characters: reluctant young hero, warrior-wizard, brave and beautiful princess, and monstrous black villain. I would argue that the movie's fundamental appeal to both young and old lies precisely in its deliberately old-fashioned plot, which has its roots deep in American popular fantasy, and, deeper yet, in the epic structure of what Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces calls "the monomyth." In an era in which Americans have lost heroes in whom to believe, Lucas has created a myth for our times, fashioned out of bits and pieces of twentieth-century American popular mythologyold movies, science fiction, television, and comic books- but held together at its most basic level by the standard pattern of the adventures of a mythic hero. Star Wars is a masterpiece of synthesis, a triumph of American ingenuity and resourcefulness, demonstrating how the old may be made new again: Lucas has raided the junkyards of our popular culture and rigged a working myth out of scrap. Like the hotrods in his previous film, American Graffiti, Star Wars is an amalgam of pieces of mass culture customized and supercharged and run flat out. This essay will therefore have two parts: first, a look at the elements Lucas has lifed openly and lovingly from various popular culture genres; and second, an analysis of how this pastiche is unified by the underlying structure of the "monomyth." George Lucas, who both wrote and directed, admits that his original models were the Flash Gordon movie serials and Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series of books. "I wanted to make an action movie- a movie in outer space like Flash Gordon used to be. ... I wanted to make a movie about an old man and a kid. . . . I also wanted the old man to be like a warrior. I wanted a princess, too, but I didn't want her to be a passive damsel in distress."5 In other words, he wanted to return to the sense of wonder and adventure that movies had given him as a child, but to update it for modern tastes and to take advantage of all the technological and cinematic innovations of the past thirty years since Flash Gordon. Thus, just like American Graffiti, Star Wars is simultaneously innovative and conservative, backward-glancing and nostalgic. Graffiti takes a worn-out genre (the teenage beach party movies) and reanimates it; Star Wars gives new life to the space fantasy. "I didn't want to make a 2001, " says Lucas. "I wanted to make a space fantasy that was more in the genre of Edgar Rice Burroughs; that whole other end of space fantasy that was there before science took it over in the Fifties. Once the atomic bomb came. . . . they forgot the fairy tales and the dragons and Tolkien and all the real heroes."6 Both Graffiti and Star Wars express a yearning for prelapsarian eras: the former for the pre-Vietnam era and the latter for innocence of the time before the Bomb. While lamenting the dearth of classic adventure films and the consequent lack of a healthy fantasy life for contemporary youth, Lucas told an interviewer, "I had also done a study on . …