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| If you haven't seen it, it's worth watching. You may not agree with everything, but there's a lot of grist for the old mill, if you know what I mean and I think you do. |
Girls and high school and a move some four hours away from
my home town, and making new friends and band and jobs, and girls, all pretty
much conspired to keep me from thinking overly much about Star Wars from 1984
to 1988. I wasn’t buying the toys any more, and even though the terrible
animated cartoons were showing on Saturday morning, no one would ever argue
that those were connected to the Star Wars story in a meaningful way. Kid’s
stuff. Easy to skip.
There was, even then, a shared language that formed a kind
of short hand amongst my friends and classmates. We’d all seen the movies. Who
hadn’t? There was always one weird kid who was a Jehovah’s Witness, but other
than that, everyone knew if you said, in class, for instance, “I have a very
bad feeling about this,” you were referencing Star Wars. Right? It may
have been a movie about space, but it wasn’t rocket science.
Other points of reference included Death Star trench fight
chatter; any reference to using The Force; nearly every line of Vader’s
dialogue from Empire Strikes Back, and any reference to the Cantina Scene,
usually levied at someone who was weird-looking, or a situation that was
bizarre and strange. In high school, that could have meant anything. But it was
possible to have a conversation in shorthand, using dialogue from the three
movies. We did it all the time.
“These are not the droids you’re looking for.”
“These are not the droids you’re looking for.”
“I have a very bad feeling about this.”
“You worry about those fighters, I’ll worry about the
tower.”
“The Force will be with you. Always.”
Translation:
“Here’s the pop quiz I’m supposed to pass back to you.”
“Dammit. I’m going to fail this. I haven’t studied.”
“You can copy off of me.”
“You’re a good friend.”
For those of you reading this under the age of 30, the above
conversation was done in person, face-to-face, back when you had to sit next to
the person you wanted to talk to in math class.
Anyway.
In the Pre-Internet world, I’m sure the fan club was
chugging along with monthly newsletters, but aside from that, there were other
fish to fry. Other movies to see. Other things to obsess over. Star Wars became another shared
childhood experience along with Schoolhouse Rock,
the Micronauts, and Disco. Or so we thought.
I don’t recall who in my family was more interested in watching
The Power of Myth when it aired on
PBS in 1988. Probably my mother, who was always very earthy-crunchy, and would
have been certainly interested in what Joseph Campbell had to say. Unfortunately,
those conversations with Bill Moyers are as dry as toast. Fascinating subject
matter, rendered boring as hell by two white guys nattering at one another.
I don’t mean for that to be reductive or dismissive, but at
the time, all I was really interested in hearing was his commentary on Star Wars. See, there was this idea that
had been floated around as Return of the
Jedi ran its course and the documentary From
Star Wars to Jedi: the Making of a Saga first aired (and later hung around
on VHS cassette) at the end of 1983 that maybe, just maybe, Star Wars was about more than just space
ships and monsters and robots and Jedi Knights.
The aforementioned documentary certainly planted the seeds
of greatness, using language and terminology that suggested a deeper connection
with mythology—and in the same documentary, Lucas makes some assertions about
the nature of the story and how writing shifts to meet the needs of the
filmmakers on-set.
The other great influence on this new intellectual
renaissance was curiously absent from the discussions, and that’s the amount of
money annually made on the then-burgeoning Star
Wars merchandising line. I remembered something, post Jedi, as I was taking
the film apart in my head: the Christmas after Empire, the must-have toy was the Yoda puppet and stuffed doll. Everyone
wanted them (okay, Mothers wanted them), and no one had enough. It was the
first time I remember a news story about a toy being on the television. Yoda
was the most popular Kenner
toy that year.
This fact would not have been lost on George Lucas, who had
his finger in every pie, his input on every decision. In fact, in a movie full
of grim truths and harsh realities, narrow escapes and life or death
situations, Yoda’s first meeting with Luke, more or less, is the lightest, most
comical scene in the story. Granted, for me, the important Yoda information all
occurs once he drops the buffoon act and becomes the stern and sober Jedi
master. But Kenner,
Lucas, and the nascent soccer moms of the world all thought he’d make a much
better stuffed plush toy. Nice.
Fast-forward to Jedi prep, and the idea behind a planet of
Wookies, for some inexplicable reason, no longer appeals to Lucas. But a planet
of Teddy Bears (and he calls them that in the documentary) would make perfect
ecumenical, commercial, and licensing sense. Oh, yeah, and yadda yadda yadda
hand-waving about the service of the story.
If you’ve not watched From Star Wars to Jedi: the Making of a Saga, do so. It’s a great
interview with Lucas, young and lean, without his neck-pouch, and you can see
he’s trying out some revisionist scripting that has now become fairly dogmatic.
It’s obvious. There are language choices involving words like “mythic” and
“hero” and “Good” and “Evil” being applied to the three movies that definitely
implied a much broader interpretation of events in the story.
By the time we get to The
Power of Myth on PBS in the late 1980s, the fix was really in.
I listened eagerly to Campbell’s
explanation of the monomyth, the hero with a thousand faces, and those ideas as
they related to Star Wars. Hero and Princess, Rogue and Mentor. These archetypes
from Jungian Philosophy and Campbell’s reading of myth and story worked, and
they worked well. I’m a senior in high school at the time. I knew about some
things, like symbolism, but I didn’t really believe it, until I saw Moyers and Campbell applying it to Star Wars.
My “Literary Criticism” brain turned on in that instant. And
then it did something I wasn’t expecting. Onscreen, Moyers and Campbell were
talking about key scenes in Star Wars, and Moyers asked Campbell about the scene where they fall into
the trash compacter and are nearly crushed.
“Well, that’s the classic idea of the hero entering the
Dragon’s Den,” said Campbell.
He continued to explain himself, and I sat there, dumbfounded. Um, professor,
wouldn’t a much closer reading of that scene be Jonah and the Whale? I mean, if
this is what we’re doing, and this is how you want to do it, the entering of
the Dragon’s Den happens when the Falcon
is towed into the Death Star. Frankly, the idea of the heroes harrowing hell to
rescue someone is much closer. But Dragon? No. That’s the Rancor scene from Jedi. Not the trash compactor scene from
Star Wars. Was the old man confused?
Why wasn’t Moyers correcting him?
Yes, Joseph Campbell is dead wrong about that one thing.
What else, I wondered, was he wrong about? And let me be very clear, here. I am
not accusing Campbell
of throwing the game, either. I don’t think he was coerced into saying what he
said. Between 1983 and 1988 we heard, those of us who were listening, about
some of the real behind the scenes things going on with the creation of the Star Wars movies. The information was
out there, scattered around for those who wanted to see it. It came from a
variety of other sources, most of the time, from Lucas himself, in the service
of other films, like Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Lucas was certainly aiming for the fences when he envisioned
Star Wars. But initially, he wanted
to remake Flash Gordon. The old
Buster Crabbe serial. Certain elements of Star
Wars (and Empire) now make more
sense, don’t they? Stuff like the presence of light swords in a world of
blasters. Also, Lucas loved the famed Japanese director Akira Kurasawa. It’s
funny how some of the structure of Star
Wars looks an awful lot like the movie, The
Hidden Fortress, isn’t it? More on this later.
Thanks to The Power of
Myth, I started learning more about literary criticism. I started reading
books about lit-crit, paying more attention to things like the Introductions of
books, and most importantly, I started examining these pop cultural artifacts
more closely for evidence of someone else choosing to think creatively.
Sometimes this had unintended consequences. Sometimes this ruined (and still
does) movies and TV shows I’m not supposed to examine critically. But I couldn’t
help myself. I wanted more substance in my soup. I’d gotten a taste for it, and
I found that I liked it.
So, why was George Lucas trying to change the flavor of the
soup that he sold us all on? He was trying to pull off the world’s biggest Jedi
Mind Trick. And some folks were taking the bait.
