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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
Beneath all the pseudo-mythic Joseph Campbell hogwash, the roots of George Lucas' empire lie not in "The Odyssey" but in classic and pulp 20th century sci-fi.
Apr 10, 2002 | Another "Star Wars" movie, "Episode Two: Attack of the Clones," is about to hit the cineplexes. As with all cosmological phenomena, certain strange and even frightening things are likely to happen as the event horizon draws near.
Hardcore fans will prepare for opening night by polishing their toy light sabers and getting their Darth Vader costumes taken out an inch or so. Fast-food joints and toy stores will fill up with merchandise bearing the faces of alien creatures. And some gullible middlebrow -- most likely Bill Moyers -- will once again recite the pseudo-religious doctrine that attributes the phenomenal success of the series to producer-director George Lucas' skill at tapping underground streams of ancient legends, using Joseph Campbell's work in comparative mythology as his dowsing rod.
Lucas himself was mum about any Campbell influence when the original Star Wars opened -- "The word for this movie is fun," he told Time in 1977 -- but he began name-dropping the retired Sarah Lawrence academic (who died in 1987) as the movie became a pop culture milestone. Feature writers took him at his word, unwilling to believe that a mere science-fiction flick could be so popular unless some deeper meaning was at work. Campbell, happy to have his work associated with the most successful film series of all time, returned the favor by praising Lucas' use of mythological motifs, though he had trouble keeping straight exactly which motifs were being used. The relationship built until the men have become as closely linked in the public mind as Chang and Eng.
Web surfers who click on the Joseph Campbell Mythology Center at Castlebooks.com can pony up $7.50 for thinly argued articles like "Star Wars and the Mythic Quest" and "Boba Fett: Archetypal Warrior." (Frugal space voyagers will want the "Obi-Wan and Boba Fett Combo 2 Pak," a steal at $10.) "Joseph Campbell: The Power of Myth," a television miniseries built around Moyers' adoring interviews with the great man himself, was taped at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch in San Rafael, Calif., and the finished episodes offered plenty of "Star Wars" film clips along with the photos of Grecian urns and Hindu deities.
Three years ago, when Lucas was about to revive the series with "The Phantom Menace," Time magazine sent Moyers to talk with Lucas about "the true theology of 'Star Wars.'" Their dialogue, duly transcribed for the April 26, 1999, issue, reads like the minutes of the College of Cardinals on laughing gas. Trouble is, nobody's laughing.
"With 'Star Wars' I consciously set about to re-create myths and the classic mythological motifs," Lucas says. "I wanted to use those motifs to deal with issues that exist today." For sheer pomposity, this is hard to beat, but Moyers does his best. "One explanation for the popularity of 'Star Wars' when it appeared," he says, "is that by the end of the 1970s, the hunger for spiritual experience was no longer being satisfied sufficiently by the traditional vessels of faith." So that's why everybody lined up in 1977; they wanted a spiritual experience, along with really cool laser explosions.
Moyers isn't the only institution in thrall to this proto-cult. A few months before the release of "The Phantom Menace," the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum turned itself into a virtual annex of Lucasfilm by hosting "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth," a promotional tie-in disguised as an examination of how Campbell's ideas are used in the series. Even the normally sensible film critic Roger Ebert is part of the Greek chorus. "It was not by accident that George Lucas worked with Joseph Campbell, an expert on the world's basic myths, in fashioning a screenplay that owes much to man's oldest stories," Ebert intones in his "Great Movies" feature on "Star Wars." Thus is Campbell, who from his own accounts didn't even meet Lucas face-to-face until the 1980s, virtually elevated to the position of co-screenwriter.
Like many of mankind's oldest legends, this notion offers multiple levels of absurdity. First, if knowledge of "man's oldest stories" underlies the popularity of "Star Wars," then why is Lucas' non-"Star Wars" résumé so dismal? Apart from conceiving the "Indiana Jones" films, which owe their box-office impact to the kinetic genius of director Steven Spielberg, Lucas has produced an unbroken series of flops. Anyone here remember "Howard the Duck"? Or "Tucker: The Man and His Dream"? "Radioland Murders," anybody? And let us not forget "Willow," which is a virtual textbook of Campbell's mix 'n' match approach to mythology.
Second, and more damningly, the real roots of "Star Wars" are obvious to anyone not blinded by snobbery or the need for self-inflation. They lie not in "The Odyssey" or the "Upanishads," but 20th century science-fiction magazines such as Astounding, Amazing Stories and Galaxy. The "true theology" of "Star Wars" was written not by Virgil or Homer, but Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, E.E. "Doc" Smith and a host of other S.F. writers.
