John Gardner once said that all of storytelling can be summarized by two “master plots.” Either a stranger comes into town or a hero takes a journey. The second of these, the hero’s journey, is a story structure that easily lends itself to getting all gussied up with all manner of characters, settings, and themes. But nothing epitomizes the hero’s journey story archetype quite like the original Star Wars trilogy.
Joseph Campbell, a mentor and profound influence on George Lucas, wrote extensively about the transcendent, mythical quality of the hero’s journey. Humanity has been telling, repurposing, and retelling this storyline for as long as we’ve been telling stories. Gilgamesh, Moses, Odysseus, Don Quixote, Frodo Baggins. These great stories (among many others) each provide an original iteration of the same-old hero’s journey.
This story structure is a myth in the truest sense of the word: it speaks to and stirs up something inside of us regardless of our time or place. It pokes at a deep seated truth that we all recognize.
The Cave of Evil
In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke knows he’ll need training before he can actualize his potential. He’s a whiney little baby all through Episode IV, and in Empire, he finally comes into his own. His maturity, or lack thereof, comes to a boil while Yoda trains him on Dagobah — specifically when his mettle is tested in the cave of the Dark Side.
This scene is unbelievably dense, but there are a few particularly important elements.
First, Yoda tells Luke that the cave is a “domain of evil.” Yet, when Luke asks what is in there, Yoda says, “only what you take with you.”
So, of course, Luke grabs his weapons, and when Yoda tries to correct his inclination toward brash violence, Luke just gives that “you dumb frog” glare and then proceeds to fasten it onto his waist anyway. His weapon is what he is choosing to take with him into the cave.
Once he enters the cave, Darth Vader appears with the sound of an ignited light saber. Only, it isn’t Vader who has drawn his weapon — it’s Luke. Vader defensively arms himself, and they exchange a few swings before Luke, with startling ease, cuts off Vader’s head.
Yet when the head falls to the ground and the helmet breaks open, Luke sees that he has actually beheaded himself.
Luke’s ineptitude is even further actualized later on when he abandons his training only to fall right into Vader’s trap. This indictment of Luke’s arrogance is what dials up the drama and the tension around whether or not he will succumb to the Dark Side’s pull.
The Hero’s Journey and Our Own
The cave scene falls right inside that explosive “abyss” position on the chart above. Here, Luke begins a process of deconstruction. He doesn’t understand it as it unfolds, but this is where Luke’s self-assuredness begins to collapse. This downward movement is completed by the revelation that Vader is his father, but that famous line is really only an explicit phrasing of what Luke had already seen in the cave: that darkness isn’t an external thing to defeat but is inside of himself too.
This is arguably the most important part of the hero’s journey.
There’s certainly something romantic about going out, slaying the evil, and returning victorious, but that simplistic kind of story lacks real teeth. When it’s that easy, the victory is cheap and forgettable. But when the process is painstaking and requires the hero to be entirely deconstructed and reconfigured — that kind of story speaks a universal human language.
I Know I Don’t Know
I had a class in my last semester of college where ,on the first day, we all had to give an impromptu speech on how we knew we were called to do ministry. Incidentally I have never felt “called” to do ministry, so my speech was probably beneath that professor’s expectations. The rest of the semester was on our “calling” and how we, as Bible majors, will spend the rest of our lives answering God’s call by preparing sermons, meeting with elders, and paying taxes as a church employee. The presumption was that this sense of “calling” or purpose was some sort of explicitly stated mandate that we were acting on with confidence.
I think that’s a terribly two-dimensional and unrealistic approach to vocation or purpose.
Granted, the “call to adventure” is a vital part of the hero’s journey. It’s unhelpful and even ungrounded, however, to reduce a “call” to a singular, cinematic event where our path and goal is laid out before us with crystalized exposition. Whether we realize it or not, having that expectation makes a statement about how we believe that God, fate, or the universe works.
Such concrete, impassible language doesn’t give space for ourselves to be continuously molded by our temporal reality. These stories of journey and transformation resonate with us because they are true and, on some level, we live them ourselves. We connect with Luke Skywalker because we too have experienced our own deconstruction and reassembly. We too have suffered crisis and defeat and have been forced to change our plans.
But truthfully, most people haven’t and won’t experience a dramatic, destabilizing event like Luke Skywalker, Frodo Baggins, or Saul of Tarsus. Reducing our “calling” or our “journey” to an entirely predictable sequence effectively edges out any place for a contemplative inner-life. When we avoid the assumption that we have already discerned the calling of our lives, we open ourselves up to active direction.
Conversely, when we step forward with our weapon belt fastened around our waist, we run the risk of only defeating ourselves in a self-assured grab at a cheap victory.
Once Luke makes peace with the unraveling of himself, he is able to repurpose the threads into something better. Instead of striking death blows at his enemy in Return of the Jedi, Luke, having learned that he is his own enemy, transforms Darth Vader back into the good-at-heart Jedi he once was. Because he is willing to be completely disintegrated and rebuilt, he’s able to actually overcome the Empire. Luke’s openness to a kind of death and resurrection makes the victory at the end of Luke’s journey looks profoundly different than he imagined at the start.
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