‘Do you remember your mother?’

Whether you employ the Freudian or the Jungian understanding of the quest, however, there’s an immediate problem in applying it to Star Wars: there are virtually no mothers. There are, in fact, no nuclear families. Luke Skywalker is brought up by adoptive parents who die early on in the first film and go more or less unmourned. Leia is also brought up by adoptive parents she scarcely mentions, even after they have been killed, as she watches, in the destruction of her planet. Neither Luke nor Leia show any curiosity about their biological mother. Towards the end of Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (Richard Marquand, 1983) they have a short conversation about her and Leia evinces a few sense impressions but these are of a woman we now know is her adoptive mother, the Queen of Alderaan. In Episode I: The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, 1999) Anakin Skywalker is the product of a virgin birth who leaves his mother at a very early age to pursue a Jedi training, living with other children at the Jedi Temple with the celibate Masters. Tormented in adulthood by his mother’s absence Anakin goes in search of her, only to arrive in time to witness her death. Padmé’s family are never mentioned and a scene with them was cut from the final edit of Episode II: Attack of the Clones (George Lucas, 2002). Padmé dies as soon as her children are born in Episode III. The film finishes with the only two images of whole families in the cycle and they are brief: the Organas and the Skywalkers cradling their adoptive children. An hour into Episode IV, all these parents will be dead. These two shots, together with three or four brief images of Ewoks cradling infants, are the only occasions upon which parents are seen in intimate relationship with children.

In the three generations of the Skywalker dynasty around which the films revolve, therefore, there is not one single instance of a complete and sustaining family unit. This in itself has been offered as one of the reasons for the films’ success, speaking as they did to a generation of American children affected in the 1970s by a rapid rise in levels of divorce thanks, among other things, to the introduction of no fault divorce laws. But the absence of the mother for whom the Oedipal contest is staged presents a problem for any reading of the films as an expression, in a galactic setting, of the family crisis and/or its archetypal inspiration.

Jung’s later elaboration of the significance of the hero’s quest, however, gives us a useful pointer. He likened the quest to the sun’s diurnal journey, contained in the symbolic realm of the Mother: ‘she contains in her darkness the sun of “masculine” consciousness, which rises as a child out of the nocturnal sea of the unconscious, and like an old man sinks into it again.’ [1] The father complex, then, offers a means to separate from the mother and reach consciousness; but the power of the maternal unconscious underlies all of life and it is to this that man returns in old age. Armed with this perspective we find that, rather than being present only in her absence and as such the trigger for psychopathology, the Mother contains the whole drama of the Star Wars films as a largely unconscious presence. In Episodes IV- VI we constantly find ourselves in the realm of the Mother in the vast stretches of space, in a diverse range of vessels including, of course, the Millennium Falcon, in caves and on planets and moons of primordial heat and cold, forests and swamps and in the horrifying dark moons of the Death Stars. Throughout, the Mother is alternately containing, offering sanctuary, and exposing, destructive, her presence vast, terrifying and impersonal. She is returned to and abandoned repeatedly in Luke’s sojourns on Tatooine, Hoth, Dagobah, the moons of Yavin 4 and Endor and the Falcon. In Episodes I - III the Mother is explicitly acknowledged in the character of Shmi Skywalker and is a more proximate power, acting mysteriously in the disturbing dreams of the adolescent Anakin and Anakin the father-to-be. Episode III also contains the fullest articulation of violence towards and horror of the mother in the collapse of Anakin and Padmé’s relationship under the emotional pressure of her pregnancy and in her subsequent death in childbirth, apparently from a broken heart. But the maternal is also present in the prairies and lakes of Naboo, the aridity of Tatooine and Geonosis, the stormy sea planet of Kamino and perhaps most spectacularly on the volcano planet of Mustafar, where Vader has his dark birth. As the epic has developed, the Mother has perhaps become a more conscious figure; but her most pervasive presence in the movies is subliminal, as though her meaning is too vast and complex to be consciously understood or articulated.

The action of the films is thus contained within the feminine in a way that points directly to archetypal material. As Jung indicated, where we find the unconscious mother (planets, ships, caves, outer space and a figure of dreaming) there also we will find archetypal contents being constellated and crystallised to aid the journey of the individual psyche. The pattern of separation from the Mother for greater consciousness and return to her for inspiration is especially noticeable in Episodes IV-VI; the tensions of this oscillation come closer to the surface in Episodes I-III.

Having found the mother, therefore, what does an archetypal reading of the quest in Star Wars tell us about the quest itself and what insight does it offer into the astonishing response the films have provoked in several generations of movie goers?
[1] C. G. Jung, Answer to Job, p. 98.