Letter #47: Why "Star Wars" is a Bad Movie

Well, It is

Dear Insufferable,

Really, I think palimpsest is a great word. It was not until you got to palimpsestic that I cut you out of the will.

We seem to keep returning to this point, don’t we? This troublesome gap between matter and meaning, the space between God’s finger and Adam’s.

Recently, on one of the Daily Wire’s Backstage shows, provocateur Matt Walsh mischievously declared that Star Wars is a bad movie. He seemed startled when I agreed with him and, okay, I exaggerated for effect. It’s an entertaining extravaganza, sure. And it certainly achieved the telos of a Hollywood film by minting skadillions of somolians.

But it marks the beginning of American cinema’s decline, not only because it elevated spectacle above human experience, but because it elevated myth above story, and story is by far the higher art.

The plot was based on the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell. He believed a monomythic “Hero’s Journey” served as a template for all adventure tales. Today, because of Star Wars, you can walk into a film producer’s office and find a chart on his wall tracing the journey’s steps. Between that and the vaunted “three act structure,” he can tell you the page number on which certain events must occur in your screenplay.

This is the opposite of how good stories are made.

Mythic patterns are narrative impositions on experience. They are creations of man’s meaning-making mind. They’re important because they show us that our lives are collaborations between consciousness and external reality. By imposing archetypal order on random events, they reflect our shared nature back to us. Understood rightly, they can reveal a joyful and fulfilling path through the tragedy of life.

But if that were all, we could tell the story once and be done with it. Instead, the myth recreates itself uniquely in each one of us. Each individual character becomes its own path to sorrow or enlightenment.

James Joyce’s masterwork Ulysses is a difficult but brilliant dramatization of this tension between archetype and individual. A normal day in Dublin among commonplace men reiterates the story of Homer’s Odyssey. A trip to the bathroom, a conversation, lunch — the ordinary becomes epic, and the epic becomes deeply personal.

In my book The Truth and Beauty, I make the argument that Jesus, as the logos made flesh — a “true myth,” as C. S. Lewis put it — uniquely resolves the disunity of matter and meaning. But through him, each of us must discover our own version of that resolution. If we rely too much on myth — on “religion” — we become small-minded and judgmental, expecting ourselves and others to fit into a rigid, inhuman mold. But if we deny our shared, interior patterns entirely, we end up celebrating every freakish deformity of human creaturedom, making social life, and indeed moral life, impossible.

The invisible logos is written on the blank pages of our unlived lives. But it’s only through each unique journey that the palimpsest comes to light.

 Yer Dad.