Conclusions

Three versions of the quest, then. In the first to be made, played out over Episodes IV-VI, Luke oscillates between identification with and separation from the Mother as he matures. He is aided by manifestations of the Spirit and the Father as well as by Anima. His personal father complex provides the route via which the Shadow can enter the psychic drama, ultimately to be withdrawn as a projection when the ego takes on dark psychic contents as its own. The scattered persons of the psyche are finally reunited in a restoration of peace and order, albeit at the cost of guilt and the fear of punishment attaching to the erotic relationship with Anima.

In the second trio of films to be made, Anakin takes the opposite choice, rebelling not against the domination of the Shadow and the disunity of the psyche but against the very order and stability Luke will seek/has sought to restore. He chooses to go further than Luke and to satisfy his desire for Anima. It is his mother complex that gives the Shadow a foothold in Anakin’s story and he confuses the Mother with Anima to the extent that they become indistinguishable. The Mother’s threat to punish by her absence becomes clearer as Anakin pursues his destiny with greater determination and fear of this punishment drives the choices that take him to the Dark Side and confuse the goal of his quest. In the end he sacrifices Anima in a misguided attempt to save her and/or the Mother, resulting in his possession by the Shadow. Anakin is perhaps braver than Luke in pursuing his quest, and he pays a high price for his bravery.

Over the cycle of six movies the full journey of Anakin/Vader permits, more than the two discrete stories, a role for failure and destructiveness. Without Anakin’s turn to the Dark Side Luke’s journey is impossible. With a full range of hope, loss, fury, talent, ambition, failure and sin included in his story Anakin has the most developed experience and possibility. It is this that enables him to hurl the Emperor out of the narrative and whose action, through his transgressive relationship with Anima, literally produces the personalities that will save him. This is the most complex, poignant and nuanced of the three quests that overlap through the Star Wars films, but even so it is only a qualified success. Anakin’s quest is completed not at the point of his greatest maturity and maximum power, not at the apogee of the sun’s arc, but at the point of his death.

When taken together the six films, rather than offering a narrative of quest and resolution, are dominated rather by the archetypal theme of the male psyche’s troubled striving for consciousness when the possibility of success is perpetually threatened by the withholding, absent, jealous Mother and the consequent guilt attached to the inevitable romance with Anima – a romance, thanks to the maternal transference, imbued with a disquieting incestuous quality. By the end of this journey we have pursued with Lucas, the certainties of A New Hope have disappeared. It’s no longer possible to distinguish the heroes from the villains; as the opening text of Episode III explains, ‘there are heroes on both sides.’ And Lucas’s direction in the last section of Revenge of the Sith makes clear that Vader is ‘born’ as Luke is born; there can be no psychic Shadow without the ego to experience it, but perhaps even more disturbingly, what future is there for the ego without the Shadow/ Perhaps this accounts for the curious flatness of the final sequence of Return of the Jedi where we see Luke alone between the duo of Han and Leia on the one hand the trio of ghostly Jedi Masters on the other. It is hard to imagine Luke’s future after the close of the movie.

Lucas’s professional life spent working through the quest myth, a progress on which film goers have accompanied him, draws attention not only to the tensions to which the male psyche is subject in making its life journey; it shows us our own possession by the archetypal heroic quest. The quest is a product of the collective unconscious that impresses itself upon us when we need it, a tool that gives us perspective on our own experience. Seeing through the archetype of quest we see our own longing for progress, triumph, movement. But we also see how, as we draw close to those goals, we begin to realise that they are not the solution we had hoped for our inner need. In Episodes IV-VI Luke does not question whether the status of Jedi knight is a worthy goal for his life’s work; by the end of Episode III we understand why Anakin has begun to doubt that it can ever be (good) enough. Jung’s adherence to the quest myth is expressed in his theories of individuation and the journey to consciousness, and belief in the progress of the soul towards transcendence. More prosaically, Lucas’s is cast in terms of the Jedi. In this way his films remind us of the troubling nature of our own notions of success and failure, the moral complexity of following our personal destinies

In purely psychodynamic terms, Star Wars is an expression of the classic family drama and the (sexual) guilt it engenders in the western male. In cultural terms it expresses the anxiety of a nationhood formed by experience of civil war as well as of a society longing, after the shocks of Watergate and Vietnam, for return to the simplicity of right and wrong. Psychosocially, it provided a framework for the feelings and responses of a one of the first generations to grow up with widespread divorce; or, with a longer perspective, the impact of the separation for the father from the domestic sphere by industrial capitalism, making him a distant, unknown and terrifying figure who enters from another world. An archetypal reading of the films does not disrupt any of these other meanings; rather it amplifies them, providing a perspective by which Star Wars is not ‘ really about’ George Lucas’s early life, or the Oedipal crisis, or the hero’s quest, or the American civil War, or Vietnam, or divorce, or capitalism; rather, all these phenomena are expressions of pre existent archetypal energies. This does more than free interpretation of texts from particular ‘truths’ whether personal, historical or psychoanalytic: it demonstrates what Jung meant by a collective unconscious, an unconscious that dreams us.