The Secret to Star Wars’ Success
Star Wars’ success has baffled people. Many say its popularity is due to its special effects. Others claim it’s because its characters are relatable. And still others maintain that Star Wars’ fast action and dramatic plot caused it to be a box-office hit. I’m inclined to think that all, not just one, of those elements played a role in its success. But many have overlooked the fundamental ingredient that connects all of Star Wars’ virtues: its mythological underpinnings.
The creator of SW, George Lucas, made a lot of good choices when putting together his first movie. But his very best decision — indeed, the choice that made the difference between a hit and a flop — was to inject the common patterns he saw in world myths. Lucas shares in an interview that he “did research to try to distill everything down into motifs that would be universal”.[1] A major contributor to his research was educator, Joseph Campbell, a scholar who spent his life exploring the origins of myths and world religions.
“When Lucas was writing the script of Star Wars, he was heavily interested in Joseph Campbell,”[2] said Leo Braudy, a professor at the University of Southern California. “What Joseph Campbell was interested in was to see the connections between myths, the myths of different cultures, to try to find out what were the threads that tied all these very disparate cultures together.”[3]
In the 80s, journalist Bill Moyers interviewed Campbell a few years before the mythologist’s death. Their discussion about myth and its role in Star Wars was recorded in the documentary, The Power of Myth (1988). “Lucas and Campbell had become good friends after the filmmaker, acknowledging a debt to Campbell’s work, invited the scholar to view the Star Wars trilogy. Campbell reveled in the ancient themes and motifs of mythology unfolding on the wide screen in powerful contemporary images. On this particular visit, having again exulted over the perils and heroics of Luke Skywalker, Joe [Campbell] grew animated as he talked about how Lucas ‘has put the newest and most powerful spin’ to the classic story of the hero.”[4]
J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, had also “long feasted on ancient myths”[5], and he “believed in the inherent truth of mythology.”[6] Tolkien was up late one night discussing myth when one of his friends said that myths were “lies breathed through silver.”[7] Of course Tolkien disagreed. He corrected his friend by saying that “Just as speech is invention about objects and ideas . . . so myth is invention about truth.”[8]
Why We Need Myths to Function
The way I see it, myths are devices that connect us to reality; myths allow our logical minds to work by making invisible things, like concepts or ideas, more meaningful. Myths work much like metaphors. Take, for example, the concept, argument. In everyday language, this idea is reflected by the metaphor, argument is war:
Your claims are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument.
His criticisms were right on target.
I demolished his argument.[9]
And so on.
Our physical experiences make invisible ideas and concepts intelligible. Reason uses the imagination just as the roadrunner uses the ground: without imagination, reason wouldn’t have enough traction to employ logic. In the same way, we would have a very difficult time grasping the world around us without myth. Myths help us make sense of reality.
The 2009 comedy, Fanboys, includes one of my favorite metaphorical applications of Star Wars. The film is about the adventure of a few SW fans trying to break into George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch. Its story takes place in the late 90s, before the release of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. One of these “fanboys” is terminally ill and is expected to die before Episode I’s 1999 release. Their goal, therefore, is to help their dying friend watch the new SW movie before he passes away. During their road trip, these friends encourage each other by metaphorically applying Star Wars to their lives:
Hutch: “You gotta find your Death Star.”
Eric: “Okay, I’ll bite.”
Hutch: “Greatest deed Luke Skywalker ever did was take down the Death Star, right? As far as I’m concerned, that’s what everybody needs. You need that one bad-ass thing that lets you live on forever, you know.”[10]
By letting go of self, and by exercising courage, these friends eventually “take down” their Death Star. Their application of Star Wars to their lives has a touching (and humorous!) effect.
The Applicability of Myths
A sign of a good myth is its ability to mirror the real world in a pleasing way. The Lord of the Rings is a good example of a successful modern myth. To Tolkien’s frustration, many people assumed that LOTR’s was an intentional statement about religion or politics:
As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical. . . . I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.[11]
Tolkien wanted to create an attractive fairy tale, not an allegory teaching people moral lessons.
Though Tolkien and Lucas hadn’t set out to moralize, their stories are not without valuable lessons. The reason that both Star Wars and LOTR are so appealing is because they echo myths that have slowly developed over hundreds or thousands of years. Many of these old myths grew out of humanity’s experiences with the realities of existence: birth, adolescence, adulthood, love and marriage, parenthood, war, death, rebirth, and so forth.
The mythologist, Joseph Campbell, also recognized this life-revealing applicability of myths:
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about, and that’s what these clues [myths] help us to find within ourselves.[12]
Truth is the Key to Originality
A wise man once said that if we want to create something original, we have to be willing to convey the same old truths in ways that people around us will respond to. Even at the risk of being cliché, originality is anchored in countlessly retold truths.
The newest SW movie, The Force Awakens, involves many of the same myths as the previous SW movies, and they are brought to the screen in a wonderfully fresh way. (But I will leave further comments about Episode VII for another blog.) The writers of Star Wars’ next installments — Episodes VIII and IX — would be wise to do some mythological research of their own. In my opinion, Star Wars wouldn’t have been, and will no longer be, a success without an intentional and creative injection of classic myths.
According to news reporter, Bill Moyers, Lucas did his best to inject myth into his original Star Wars movie:
George [Lucas] is nothing if not a good reporter. And when he sets out to do his work, he starts reporting from the best sources he can gather. He brought Campbell into the process of looking at his work on Star Wars and saying ‘Is this right? Am I getting it down? Is this the right emphasis? Is this the right character?’ Joseph Campbell said to me that the best student he ever had was George Lucas.[13]
Though I don’t agree with everything that Campbell teaches, I think he’s correct to think that good myths are both attractive and valuable. And I agree that, as he suggests, myths can have positive effects on society:
Our society today is not giving us adequate mythic instruction of this kind, and so young people are finding it difficult to get their act together. . . . Myths inspire the realization of the possibility of your perfection, the fullness of your strength, and the bringing of solar light into the world. Slaying monsters is slaying the dark things. Myths grab you somewhere down inside. As a boy, you go at it one way, as I did reading my Indian stories. Later on, myths tell you more, and more, and still more. I think that anyone who has ever dealt seriously with religious or mythic ideas will tell you that we learn them as a child on one level, but then many different levels are revealed. Myths are infinite in their revelation.[14]
Myths reveal truths about existence. The truths that myths reveal to us existed before the birth of Homo sapiens, and they will continue to exist after we are all gone. In other words, a mythological work of art is not merely a figment of an artist’s imagination. Genuine myths reveal things objectively true about the universe. As Campbell argues, people do not determine these truths:
There’s an old romantic idea in German, das Volk dichtet, which says that the ideas and poetry of the traditional cultures come out of the folk. They do not. They come out of an elite experience, the experience of people particularly gifted, whose ears are open to the song of the universe. These people speak to the folk, and there is an answer from the folk, which is then received as an interaction. But the first impulse in the shaping of a folk tradition comes from above, not from below.[15]
© 2016, Daniel Asperheim
[1] Empire of Dreams: The Story of the ‘Star Wars’ Trilogy (2004 documentary).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, ed. Betty Sue Flowers (New York: Anchor Books, 1988).
[5] Walter Hooper, in the Preface of On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 4.
[10] Fanboys (2009 comedy) .
[11] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, “Forward to the Second Edition” (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004).
[12] Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, 4.
[13] Empire of Dreams (2004 documentary).
[14] Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, 175 & 183.
[15] Ibid., 107.
