Star Wars: A Myth for Our Time

Abstract

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. film's story is bad pulp, and so are characters of hero Luke and heroine Leia, says Richard Corliss.1 kept looking for an 'edge,' to peer around corny, solemn comic-book strophes, writes Stanley Kauffmann.2 And Molly Haskell sums up critics' objections: Star Wars is childish, even for a cartoon. 3 Well, if Wars is childish, then so are The Wizard of Oz and The Lord of Rings. Like Tolkien's Middle Earth series, 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 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 epic structure of what Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces calls the 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 standard pattern of adventures of a mythic hero. Wars is a masterpiece of synthesis, a triumph of American ingenuity and resourcefulness, demonstrating how old may be made new again: Lucas has raided junkyards of our popular culture and rigged a working myth out of scrap. Like hotrods in his previous film, American Graffiti, 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 elements Lucas has lifed openly and lovingly from various popular culture genres; and second, an analysis of how this pastiche is unified by underlying structure of monomyth. George Lucas, who both wrote and directed, admits that his original models were Flash Gordon movie serials and Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series of books. 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 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 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 technological and cinematic innovations of past thirty years since Flash Gordon. Thus, just like American Graffiti, Wars is simultaneously innovative and conservative, backward-glancing and nostalgic. Graffiti takes a worn-out genre (the teenage beach party movies) and reanimates it; Wars gives new life to space fantasy. didn't want to make a 2001, says Lucas. wanted to make a space fantasy that was more in genre of Edgar Rice Burroughs; that whole other end of space fantasy that was there before science took it over in Fifties. Once atomic bomb came. . . . they forgot fairy tales and dragons and Tolkien and all real heroes.6 Both Graffiti and Wars express a yearning for prelapsarian eras: former for pre-Vietnam era and latter for innocence of time before Bomb. While lamenting dearth of classic adventure films and consequent lack of a healthy fantasy life for contemporary youth, Lucas told an interviewer, had also done a study on . …