Introduction: Freud, Jung, Lucas and the Hero
With the release of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (George Lucas, 2005), George Lucas’s thirty year exploration of the quest myth is, apparently, complete. So anxious was he to capture the quintessence of the myth in the first film Episode IV: A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977) that he involved Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces[1], in the writing of the screenplay. Campbell later remarked that George Lucas was the best student he ever had.
What Lucas may not have foreseen, but nonetheless has done a good deal to bring about, is his ascension to the role of the hero at the heart of the Star Wars myth. His vision and inspiration, actual and putative, are now central to a mythic complex incorporating profit, technology, fandom and the development of much of the popular cinema that has followed. As the films were made, and in particular with the decision to go back in the fictional chronology of the Star Wars universe to focus on the character of Darth Vader in Episodes I-III, the hero and the quest became more complex; just as in life Lucas’s journey to dominate the corporatised movie industry he once deplored has evidenced the ironies and ambiguities of personal destiny.
The initial and continuing success of Star Wars has often been explained as the response of a cinema-going public that in the late 1970s longed for heroes. In the beginning the world of Star Wars was one in which good triumphs over evil and the two can easily be distinguished. But the final instalment in the saga is an orgy of violence, darkness and betrayal. The boyish hero becomes a figure of monstrous evil; the princess dies in childbirth; the Jedi, representatives of all that is good and honourable, have been slaughtered. This enormous release of emotional energy and closure of the narrative at its darkest moment uncovers an ambivalence about the quest and its consequences that would have been hard to imagine when the story ended with dancing Ewoks under Endor’s newly liberated sky. In what follows I explore the particular texture of the archetypal heroic quest pursued in these films and to draw out in particular the collection of motifs and anxieties that have constellated around the Mother and the Anima.
[1] J. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
With the release of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (George Lucas, 2005), George Lucas’s thirty year exploration of the quest myth is, apparently, complete. So anxious was he to capture the quintessence of the myth in the first film Episode IV: A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977) that he involved Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces[1], in the writing of the screenplay. Campbell later remarked that George Lucas was the best student he ever had.
What Lucas may not have foreseen, but nonetheless has done a good deal to bring about, is his ascension to the role of the hero at the heart of the Star Wars myth. His vision and inspiration, actual and putative, are now central to a mythic complex incorporating profit, technology, fandom and the development of much of the popular cinema that has followed. As the films were made, and in particular with the decision to go back in the fictional chronology of the Star Wars universe to focus on the character of Darth Vader in Episodes I-III, the hero and the quest became more complex; just as in life Lucas’s journey to dominate the corporatised movie industry he once deplored has evidenced the ironies and ambiguities of personal destiny.
The initial and continuing success of Star Wars has often been explained as the response of a cinema-going public that in the late 1970s longed for heroes. In the beginning the world of Star Wars was one in which good triumphs over evil and the two can easily be distinguished. But the final instalment in the saga is an orgy of violence, darkness and betrayal. The boyish hero becomes a figure of monstrous evil; the princess dies in childbirth; the Jedi, representatives of all that is good and honourable, have been slaughtered. This enormous release of emotional energy and closure of the narrative at its darkest moment uncovers an ambivalence about the quest and its consequences that would have been hard to imagine when the story ended with dancing Ewoks under Endor’s newly liberated sky. In what follows I explore the particular texture of the archetypal heroic quest pursued in these films and to draw out in particular the collection of motifs and anxieties that have constellated around the Mother and the Anima.
[1] J. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
posted by Ask my Animus at 11:29 AM
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