That "belly of the whale" business, for example, is supposedly evoked when the hero is swallowed up by a large monster. "This represents the entry into a mystical world where transformations occur, and the eventual escape represents a spiritual rebirth," explains the program to "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth," the exhibition that turned the Smithsonian into a "Star Wars" gift shop.

According to the program, this motif appears twice in "The Empire Strikes Back": first, when Han Solo and Princess Leia unwittingly fly into the gullet of an enormous space slug; later, when Darth Vader is shown chilling out in "an egg-like meditation chamber." But in neither instance does a significant transformation occur: Darth simply resumes his bad-guy duties, while Han and Leia keep on a-fussin' and a-feudin' until they declare their love near the end of the film.

Ur-daddy Joseph Campbell, on the other hand, found the motif in the original "Star Wars," when Luke, Leia, Han and Chewie fall into the Death Star trash compactor, which promptly sets to work squashing them. This is explicated in the most unintentionally hilarious section of the "Power of Myth" interviews. "My favorite scene was when they were in the garbage compactor," Moyers says, "and the walls were closing in, and I thought, 'That's like the belly of the whale that swallowed Jonah.'" Campbell replies that the scene is "a variant of the death and resurrection theme," in which the hero begins to discover his power.

All of this would make sense if Luke used the Force to hold back the crushing walls. But nothing of the sort happens in this scene: Luke and his friends escape only through the timely help of the dithering robot C3PO. Innumerable action-adventure heroes have had to fight their way out of rooms in which the walls or ceiling slowly close in. Campbell is taking a standard cliffhanger plot device -- one as hoary as having a mustachioed villain tie the heroine to a railroad track, or send her trundling toward a sawmill blade -- and trying to pump it full of significance, with predictably flatulent results.

Other links between "Star Wars" and classical mythology tend to evaporate when subjected to a little thought, a chronic problem with so many of Campbell's utterances. Jedi master Obi-Wan Kenobi, for example, is supposed to represent the "wise old sage" who instructs and guides the hero, Luke Skywalker, but Obi-Wan dies midway through the first film and reappears later only as a hologram offering supremely unhelpful advice, such as "Trust your feelings." If the Force already resides within the hero, what need then for sage advice -- especially when Obi-Wan sees no need to advise Luke that he is going off to duel with a villain who is, in fact, his father? That's a bit of information any idiot, let alone a wise old sage, might consider just a wee bit important.

If this is the level of analysis at work, then why should this myth-mongering stop with Lucas? The original "Rocky," released the year before "Star Wars," follows Campbell's mythic template much more closely than "Star Wars": just imagine Burgess Meredith as the wise old sage, Burt Young as the guardian of the threshold and Carl Weathers as Darth Vader. (Pop quiz: Where do the pet turtles fit in?) Campbell's approach can give any adventure story, from "Bulldog Drummond" to "The Perils of Pauline," a place in the pantheon. In fact, his acolytes are hard at work doing just that with such movies as "The Matrix" and "The Wizard of Oz." It adds up to little more than a party game for drunken grad students, or a smoke screen for filmmakers covering their tracks.

Worse yet, it continues the Hollywood practice of ignoring established science fiction works and writers while plundering their ideas. William Gibson's "Neuromancer," which established the science fiction subgenre called cyberpunk, paved the way for "The Matrix" as surely as the Lensmen inspired the Jedi. Philip K. Dick enjoyed a late surge of mainstream credibility, but his intellectually charged, emotionally vivid novels have yet to be properly filmed -- all we have to date are dim genre exercises like "Blade Runner" and "Total Recall." (One hopes the upcoming "Minority Report" will raise the bar a bit.) Steven Soderbergh is set to direct a new adaptation of "Solaris," but odds are he connected to the material via Andrei Tarkovsky's art-house film version rather than Stanislaw Lem's challenging novel.

It's long past time to pack away the togas, put the chariots up on blocks and send the spear carriers home. Let George Lucas spare us any more mystagogic claptrap and come clean about the real sources of his inspiration. His talking-up of Joseph Campbell did wonders for the man's visibility. Lucas can now sprinkle some of that same stardust on a generation of unappreciated creators whose work mapped out the territory he has so profitably colonized. At the very least, he can spare himself a truckload of bad karma. Even Joseph Campbell could get behind that.

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