Star_Wars_and_the_Dialectics_of_Myth

Abstract This essay contrasts two approaches to the interpretation of wildly popular narratives such as Star Wars. The first is the mythological analysis popularized by Joseph Campbell. Campbell argued that the myths of almost every society are fundamentally similar retellings of a few archetypal stories – in the case of Star Wars, “The Hero’s Journey.” Campbell’s work been appropriated by many filmmakers, including the director of Star Wars, George Lucas, to explain the powerful appeal of the most successful Hollywood films. In the wake of Lucas’s endorsement of Cambell’s ideas, influential screenwriting how-to books such as Chrisopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey: Using Mythic Structures for Writers have shaped how many screenwriters conceive of their craft. The second approach is the ideological analysis pioneered in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. This perspective calls into question Cambell’s and Vogler’s universalizing framework. Instead, for Barthes myths are always about mystifying and naturalizing contingent arrangments of power. The essay will conclude by suggesting ways cultural critics might productively combine the insights of Campbell and Barthes. Introduction tk I: Myth as Spiritual Journey George Lucas has often credited Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the inspiration for Star Wars. Lucas read the book in the early 1970s as he was developing the screenplay, and consciously patterned the film’s narrative and characters around the “monomyth” which Campbell describes as a universal story told by societies around the world. After the success of Star Wars, Lucas and Campbell became friends – fans often describe Campbell as “George’s Yoda.” Campbell helped Lucas craft the arcs of the second and third Star Wars films. Lucas returned the favor in 1987, when he furnished his home and production studio, Skywalker Ranch, for the filming of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, a series of interviews with Bill Moyers. Campbell died before the series made it to air, but when it did in 1988, Campbell posthumously reached a rare height of fame for an American intellectual. Today, there is a thriving Campbell industry, including his many books and videos, the Joseph Campbell Society, and Mythic Journeys, a lavish conference put together in 2004 by the Mythic Imagination Institute, a nonprofit organization largely funded by the Krispy Kreme donut company, whose CEO believes in bringing Campbell’s ideas into the workplace (Byrne). Campbell’s influence on American film has spread far beyond the work of George Lucas. Inspired by The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Power of Myth, a generation of screenwriters has self-consciously modeled their work after Campbell’s monomyth. In 1985 Christopher Vogler, a newly hired story analyst for Disney’s animation division, distributed a memo outlining Campbell’s ideas. Vogler’s memo became a touchstone at Disney and other firms, forming the basis for films such as 1994’s The Lion King, one of the top-grossing films of all time. Vogler subsequently left Disney to become a freelance screenwriting teacher and consultant, and turned his memo into The Writer’s Journey, a step-by-step how-to for applying Campbell’s ideas to screenplays. The book is one of the most successful screenwriting manuals ever published, and Vogler is now one of the most in-demand of screenwriting teachers. Vogler’s influence is so great that today screenplay outlining software programs such as Power Structure give writers the option of organizing their screenplays around Vogler’s 12 steps, as an alternative to the traditional 3 act structure popularized in Syd Field’s canonical screenwriting text, Screenplay. So, what is Campbell’s model, and how well does it fit Star Wars' Campbell argues that all the myths of the globe are versions of one single fundamental story, what he calls “the monomyth.” This “Adventure of the Hero” is divided into three parts: Departure, Initiation, and Return. Each of the parts is subdivided into a series of stages. (Campbell’s version delineates a total of 17 stages; Vogler edits Campbell down to a more tidy 12 steps.) The story is a cycle: the hero leaves his familiar world for a new world of adventure, acquires a “boon” in that other world, then brings that boon back home for the benefit of his own world. Campbell diagrams the structure in this chart: [Insert chart from The Hero with a Thousand Faces 245.] Star Wars is a quintessential Hero’s Adventure. Luke Skywalker leaves his home planet of Tatooine on a quest to rescue Princess Leia. Having rescued the Princess, he returns to destroy the Death Star and ignite the rebel alliance. Going deeper into Campbell’s structure, Star Wars fits tightly into the specific steps outlines in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, as do many other popular films inspired by Campbell and Lucas. The chart below, from the fan website Jitterbug Fantasia (2004), matches up the stages of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey with the plots of both Star Wars and The Matrix: Campbell Star Wars The Matrix I: Departure The call to adventure Princess Leia's message "Follow the white rabbit" Refusal of the call Must help with the harvest Neo won't climb out window Supernatural aid Obi-wan rescues Luke from sandpeople Trinity extracts the "bug" from Neo Crossing the first threshold Escaping Tatooine Agents capture Neo The belly of the whale Trash compactor Torture room II: Initiation The road of trials lightsaber practice Sparring with Morpheus The meeting with the goddess Princess Leia Trinity Temptation away from the true path Luke is tempted by the Dark Side Cypher (the failed messiah) is tempted by the world of comfortable illusions Atonement with the Father Darth and Luke reconcile Neo rescues and comes to agree (that he's The One) with his father-figure, Morpheus Apotheosis (becoming god-like) Luke becomes a Jedi Neo becomes The One The ultimate boon Death Star destroyed Humanity's salvation now within reach III: Return Refusal of the return "Luke, come on!" Luke wants to stay to avenge Obi-Wan Neo fights agent instead of running The magic flight Millennium Falcon "Jacking in" Rescue from without Han saves Luke from Darth Trinity saves Neo from agents Crossing the return threshold Millennium Falcon destroys pursuing TIE fighters Neo fights agent Smith Master of the two worlds Victory ceremony Neo's declares victory over machines in final phone call Freedom to live Rebellion is victorious over Empire Humans are victorious over machines Common Mythic Elements Two Worlds (mundane and special) Planetside vs. The Death Star Reality vs. The Matrix The Mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi Morpheus The Oracle Yoda The Oracle The Prophecy Luke will overthrow the Emperor Morpheus will find (and Trinity will fall for) "The One" Failed Hero Biggs In an early version of the script, Morpheus once believed that Cypher was "The One" Wearing Enemy's Skin Luke and Han wear stormtrooper outfits Neo jumps into agent's skin Shapeshifter (the Hero isn't sure if he can trust this character) Han Solo Cypher Animal familiar R2-D2 The Sentinels and "bug" are the only metaphorical animals, and Neo hasn't befriended one (yet') Chasing a lone animal into the enchanted wood (and the animal gets away) The Millennium Falcon follows a lone TIE fighter into range of the Death Star Neo "follows the white rabbit" to the nightclub where he meets Trinity So, what makes Campbell’s model so appealing to writers, and apparently so effective with audiences' Campbell boiled down his worldview in The Power of Myth to a single catchy phrase: “Follow your bliss.” The hero’s journey, he argued, is the story of an individual who pursues the adventure of self-discovery, facing challenges and dangers along the quest. Not all of us will fight light-saber duels or rescue princesses in our own lives. But we all face the challenges of finding meaning and purpose in our lives. Campbell argued that every life is a hero’s journey, starting with the heroic adventure of just being born: leaving the comfort and familiarity of the womb to cross the threshold into a daunting new world outside. Stories of heroes’ journeys, then, according to Campbell, Lucas, Vogler, and their many followers, are inspiring allegories of personal spiritual struggle and growth. A second, related reason for the appeal of Campbell’s vision is its universalism. It suggests that deep down, all societies tell versions of the same story, because we all share the same needs and desires. As Campbell writes in The Hero’s Journey, There are of course differences between the numerous mythologies and religions of mankind, but this is a book about the similarities; and once these are understood the differences will be found to be much less great than is popularly (and politically) supposed. My hope is that a comparative elucidation my contribute to the perhaps not-quite-desperate cause of those forces that are working in the present world for unification, not in the name of some ecclesiastical or political empire, but in the sense of human mutual understanding. As we are told in the Vedas, “Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names” (Campbell tk. Cited in Gill). This universalism, though, is a core problem for Campbell’s critics, who are many. Although Campbell is by far the most famous American interpreter of myths, he is generally not well-regarded by contemporary anthropologists, classicists, and other academic mythologists. Most argue that his urge to universalize distorts the differences and complexities of the stories he examines. His method in The Hero with a Thousand Faces is to cherry-pick individual elements from a wide range of storytelling traditions to fit each step of his monomyth, without addressing counterexamples that don’t conform as neatly. Even the stories he does use he uses selectively, borrowing pieces for a specific step then dropping the rest of the story in subsequent chapters when it doesn’t fit as well. In fact, you could argue that Star Wars and its self-consciously Campbellian descendants, such as The Lion King and The Matrix, are the only stories to faithfully adhere to every stage of the monomyth, since they were designed in its image. Everything before the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a less tidy fit. Campbell’s universalism has consequences. In shoehorning the cultures of the world into a single model, Campbell recast global culture around the worldview of a 20th Century white American man. The Hero’s Journey, according to Campbell, valorizes individualism. It prioritizes personal fulfillment over social change. Campbell, in fact, dismissed the notion that the purpose of art was to make the world a better place. In The Power of Myth, he told Moyers, “The world is great just the way it is. And you are not going to fix it up. Nobody has ever made it any better.” And while the hero may have 1000 faces, few of them appear to be male; Campbell rarely asks how a woman’s journey might differ from a man’s. Campbell’s monomyth also has little room for destabilizing archetypes such as The Trickster. Campbell himself makes for a less than ideal Yoda. Despite the embrace of Campbell’s ideas by hippies, New Agers, and other bohemians, Campbell himself was a strident political conservative. An article by Brendan Gill (1989) in The New York Review of Books shortly after Campbell’s death also outed the scholar as an anti-Semite and casual racist who bemoaned the admission of African-American students to his school, Sarah Lawrence College, and failed any students who engaged in political activism while taking his classes. (See Orr et al 1989.) Even many of Campbell’s defenders in subsequent letters to the magazine were forced to acknowledge what Huston Smith delicately called Campbell’s “shadow.” [add more here'] II. Myth as Ideology If Joseph Campbell offers one vision of myth, a second is suggested by Roland Barthes classic work of cultural analysis, Mythologies. To Barthes, myth is ideology: culture which hides the underpinnings of power. The purpose of the critic is demystification: to explore how myth distorts our understanding of the world. Drawing on this model of myth as ideological mystification, along with the world of the structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Robert Ray in A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 examines the myths underlying classic Hollywood films. He argues that myth functions as an “imaginary resolution of intractable social conflicts” (tk, check quote). Thus, myths allow for the “denial of choice” which represses the realities of conflicts over inequalities of class, race and gender. Ray also identifies several other specific aspects to the “thematic paradigm” of classic Hollywood: a focus on individuals which turns social problems into personal melodrama, and a reliance on the “reluctant hero” story, in which the protagonist is slowly won over from a rebel stance to the role of hero. Ray notes in this story the frequent splitting of the hero role into two characters: the “official hero” and the “outlaw hero,” or what literary critic Leslie Fiedler calls “the good good boy” (like Tom Sawyer) and “the bad good boy” (Huck Finn). The official hero is typically the “moral center” the film, the one judged right and virtuous by the values of the film. But the outlaw hero is the “interest center” of the film – the more exciting, compelling character. Mythic reconciliation occurs when the official hero and the outlaw hero join forces for the common good. Ray pinpoints “The Culmination of Classical Hollywood” in Casablanca, a classic reluctant hero story. Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart, is the bitter, cynical outlaw hero. Laszlo, the resistance leader, is the official hero. Laszlo is the moral center of the movie, the film’s most righteous character. But Rick is the interest center, the most compelling character. The climax of the film comes when Rick is finally persuaded to join forces with Laszlo and help him escape Casablanca. If Star Wars fits Campbell’s monomyth smoothly, in some ways it fits Ray’s Casablanca model even more snugly. Luke Skywalker is the official hero, the moral center of the film. But Han Solo is the outlaw hero, the interest center of the film. One could argue that the climax of the film comes when Han, who had appeared to have chosen money over helping the rebel alliance, swoops in on the Millennium Falcon at the last moment to pick off Darth Vader’s Tie Fighter and clear the way for Luke to destroy the Death Star. The reluctant hero has finally saved the day. (Star Wars resembles Casablanca in many other ways, as well, most prominently in the Cantina scene, which is an intergalactic homage to the limnal space of Rick’s cosmopolitan nightclub.) Ray’s analysis demonstrates how Campbell’s monomyth shortchanges the role of the reluctant hero in classical Hollywood storytelling. (Campbell admitted that he was never much of a moviegoer.) In Campbell’s model, reluctance is an early stage soon overcome. Luke’s refusal of the call comes when he’s kept home to help with the harvest, but he’s quickly pulled into adventure when the Storm Troopers destroy his home and kill his family. This model, however, assumes that the official hero, Luke, is the film’s only hero, and that Han is just a sidekick. The subsequent careers of Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford, however, attest to the relative charisma of their Star Wars characters. Luke may be the moral center of the story, but Han is the interest center. Star Wars is as much his story as Luke’s. The American development of a dual hero model suggests one example of how a society may veer from Campbell’s monomyth. In response to an ideology of individualism which mistrusts official power, American storytellers invented a new kind of rebel hero, one who could serve society while remaining apart from it. This angle on the monomyth – that it is not a universal paradigm, but rather a structure that may be reworked and remodeled in different cultural contexts – opens up a way to view not just how cultures differ from each other, but also how individual retellings of myth within a single culture clash. We can examine each version of a myth, not for how it conforms to an ideal monomyth, but exactly for how it differs – how it rings changes off existing patterns as it responds to new social conflicts. This perspective, for example, would highlight the role of Princess Leia as not just another damsel in distress, but as a feminist update of the archetype – an assertive woman who refuses to be a passive victim, responding to Luke’s rescue effort by taking command of their escape from the Death Star. A Campbellian reading would highlight only Leia’s adherence to the monomyth, in line with Campbell’s model of myth as a source of social stability. This feminist reading, on the other hand, would see myth as a site of social struggle, where old stories are reworked in new ways. III: A Happy Ending' I began work on this study conceiving it as an attempt to make Barthes speak to Campbell – to use Barthes’ ideas to disabuse Campbellians of the notion that myth is apolitical and ahistorical. As I’ve worked more deeply on the project, though, I’ve grown more drawn to a second goal: to make Campbell speak to Barthes – to bring questions of personal development and spirituality into the dialogues of cultural studies. Cultural studies as it is practiced today takes up the project outlined by Mythologies: demystification. We’ve become very skilled at deconstructing the ideological assumptions behind movies, TV shows, and the rest of our culture. But what’s harder to offer are alternatives – options for moving beyond a hermeneutics of suspicion to new models – new myths, if necessary. Campbell, by contrast, offers hope, along with practical advice eagerly soaked up by culture workers everywhere. Compared to Campbell’s monomyth, what can cultural studies offer' How can we make ourselves useful to a group which should be a key target audience of our work: creators' As I mentioned above, Campbell’s famous line, “Follow your bliss,” has been interpreted by many critics on the left as a justification for selfishness. As Gill writes in that 1989 New York Review of Books takedown, . . . what is this condition of bliss, as Campbell has defined it' If it is only to do whatever makes one happy, then it sanctions selfishness on a colossal scale – a scale that has become deplorably familiar to us in the Reagan and post-Reagan years. It is a selfishness that is the unspoken (the studiously unrecognized') rationale of that contemporary army of Wall Street yuppies, of junk-bond dealers, of takeover lawyers who have come to be among the most conspicuous members of our society. Have they not all been following their bliss' But Gill willfully misinterprets Campbell. For Campbell, the key is discovering what one’s real, authentic desires are, underneath the social pressures to value more money, a bigger house, a better job, and so on. Now, the idea of “real, authentic desires” is unfashionably essentialist in cultural studies today. It presumes there’s a “true self” which exists outside of social construction. But this language of authenticity is powerful and resonant, because it speaks to the anomie underlying contemporary American life, and offers a way to envision something more meaningful and true. This seems to me an essentialism worth preserving – not the colonizing universalism of Campbell’s monomyth, but the more basic universalism which values the specificity of every soul. Fredric Jameson in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” describes popular culture as a continual dialectic between utopian glimpses of a better world, and the reification which blocks and rechannels those hopes into conventional, nonthreatening desires. Jameson, as a good Marxist, identified utopia as a collective desire for a life beyond capitalism. But we can also, drawing on Campbell, think about individual utopianism: a personal fantasy to break free from social constraints and normative values, and follow your bliss. This personal utopianism, too, is smothered by reification, redirected by ideology back into a desire to, say, buy more Star Wars collectibles. But it’s kept alive by the power of the story. Cultural studies, it seems to me, should learn from Campbell to embrace that personal utopianism as well as collective utopianism. Because if we all truly followed our bliss, the Empire would surely crumble. [expand conclusion'] Stuff to add: - Freud vs. Jung – argument for CS moving from F to J - James Hillman' - Jenkins, Brooker on SW fandom' - Brin on SW elitism' - fantasy vs. SF' - specific citations of anthro critics of Campbell' Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. tk. Byrne, Mary. “Mythology and Krispy Kreme.” The Atlanta Journal Constitution. 17 April 2004. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. tk Campbell, Joseph and Bill Moyers. Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. tk. Gill, Brendan. “The Faces of Joseph Campbell.” The New York Review of Books 36.14. 28 September 1989. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/3906. Jameson, Fredric. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” tk. Orr, Carol Wallace et al. “Joseph Campbell: An Exchange.” The New York Review of Books 36.17. 9 November 1989. http://www.nybooks.com/3846. Ray, Robert. A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980. tk. “Star Wars Origins – Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey.” Jitterbug Fantasia. http://www.jitterbug.com/origins/myth.html. Vogler, Christopher. The Writer’s Journey. tk