Darth Father,
I’m sure that bit about Joseph Campbell was very interesting, but I couldn’t concentrate on it because I was running around making Han Solo finger guns and going “pew pew! Dunnn, dunn, dunn, dunn, DA DUNNNN, khooooooooch-chhhhhhhhhhhh, vrrrrrrshhhhhhhh” (that last one is the sound of Darth Vader breathing and then drawing his lightsaber).
I’m a moderate. I think Star Wars was a great movie to make—one time. We didn’t need nine of them. We definitely don’t need any more George Lucas impersonators printing out bad xerox copies of the thing. It’s like toddlers running around Hollywood with stamps.
You’re right, of course, that stories should reveal archetypes through the unique details of human experience, not stuff the details into the shape of the archetype like clay in a mold. But over time, as we tell story after story, there does emerge a kind of universal outline of the hero’s journey, like one of those images of a face made up from thousands and thousands of little faces.
That’s I think what Campbell was getting at, and what George Lucas was up to in the first trilogy: he was depicting the archetype itself, giving it embodied narrative form. It’s not such a crazy idea—it’s been done before, in books like Pilgrim’s Progress. That’s why we have the whole concept of the everyman, which is basically who Luke is.
To draw a compelling picture of the everyman is a genuine artistic achievement. But it’s a minor one and, by definition, it’s the sign of a dying era in art—not the beginning of a new one. As an inspiration to future artists it’s totally sterile. Star Wars came out at the end of a golden age in movies, and because of that Lucas could look back on what went before and sum up.
It’s funny you brought up Ulysses, because I think Joyce was doing the same thing with the novel: he was exhausting the final reaches of the form’s possibilities. After that came pretentious derivative claptrap, just as Star Wars was followed by clownish sequel trilogies, brain-melting spinoffs, and unwatchable knock-offs. The copycats mistook what was actually a closing bell for a starting gun.
It’s not unheard of for even a great artist to put an end to his particular sub-genre—Eliot speaks of Shakespeare making it impossible to write verse plays in English, and Milton ruining epic poetry forever after. Artistic movements and forms, being human creations, flourish and then die.
But life itself—every human life—is a new image of an inexhaustible being, whose personality can be expressed in an infinity of new ways. Even the patterns we trace through whole eras don’t exhaust him, don’t cover the whole of him, will become sterile and dead if we cling to them like the bozos at Marvel and Disney. But he is always doing a new thing.
I am your son,
Spencer
I came of age in the ‘70’s. Yep, I’m as old as Darth Klavan. Movies were becoming terse, dark, and unwatchable, unless you wanted to be depressed. They lacked any excitement, wonder, or “fun”. Suddenly, there were Star Wars, Rocky, Raiders of the Lost Ark and several new movies which made going to the movies fun again. We watched the original movie many times in its release, but always felt it was a technologically sophisticated comic book. However, in retrospect I believe that one line in the original movie has done more harm than any line in any movie I can think of: “your eyes can deceive you; don’t trust them…reach out with your feelings.” Now we have several generations who all believe that their feelings are the only true arbiter of worth. They have been taught to feel, not think, and as Sowell says, they have been led to confuse feeling with thinking. I can’t think of anything more pernicious, and we have several generations steeped in this twaddle.
For the record, I think the first Star Wars is both fun and destructive. The Force was not supposed to be guidance in this life, it was a Maguffin, the thing which allowed that universe to work.
Finally we find out Spencer is Drew’s son! No relation, indeed!