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Star Wars as Pulp Sci-Fi
mikelove writes "Salon has an article arguing that Star Wars owes its origins to pulp science fiction and not Joseph Campbell-esque mythology. Finally SOMEONE is realizing this... Also makes the suggestion that Lucas/Kasdan didn't really write The Empire Strikes Back, which makes a certain amount of sense when you compare it to Lucas' other screenplays."
Star Wars was just a rewritten Japanese film about a Samuari. The movie was titled Hidden Fortress
Thank god for the Japanese, or we might have Howard the Duck part V.
Campbell's ability to generate whirlwinds of cross-cultural references makes his chatter sound tremendously erudite [...] but once the dust settles it's hard to grasp the point of it all.
Dare I say it, this Steven Hart fellow looks to be using the Lucas/Star Wars aspect as a cheap hook to gain a wider audience for his anti-Campbell viewpoints.
And as thousands of /.ers bang on Salon's servers, you gotta admit -- it worked.
> I don't see why someone wouldn't have already claimed that lucas didn't write ESB.
Perhaps because...
1. Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan are credited for the screenplay and Lucas is not? So to the public, there was no controversy as to who wrote it.
2. Leigh Brackett died after writing the initial screenplay, before the movie was made, so she wasn't around to contest claims made by Lucas and Kasdan.
3. Lucas and Kasdan wrote ROTJ. The weakest film of the original three.
4. Lucas wrote Phantom Menace. The worst of the four. Brackett's mysterious pseudo-spiritual Force from ESB becomes something you might get in your breakfast cereal in TPM. "Wheaties: Now fortified with midichlorians!"
Lucas didn't start making grandiose claims about myth-making until he had a hundred million dollars in his pocket. At that point, you spout whatever claptrap you like and the adoring public eats it up.
Later on, TPM woke up the adoring public, causing them to re-evaluate their earlier adulation. "Hey, Lucas isn't as great as I thought he was!"
Remember, Lucas borrowed from all the sci-fi of the day and a TEAM of artists created the Star Wars look and feel. Lucas is no visionary.
Star Wars, love it to death, really isn't even pulp sci-fi, it's a trite story with sci-fi trappings that could just as easily been a fantasy, or a western or whatever. It just happens to have a sci-fi-ish skin. Technically sci-fantasy even, since the science aspect isn't even considered. But I still love it, love the sci-fi skin, love how campy it is even. Hell I even love Episode one, well, sort of at least.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
He has a point.
Before I go off on a rant, the article makes some valid points -- people have taken the Lucas/Campbell association way too far.
But then, the whole point of Campbell's research wasn't something you would go dig into and then use in the first place anyway; the point was that there were certain archetypal myths that people have always enjoyed. Lucas didn't need to have been familiar with Campbell's work or ancient Greek legends to have done something that agrees with Campbell's research! In a sense, as someone who'd studied a half-century of cinema (focusing on the good ones), he couldn't help himself but to follow it, subconciously.
Let's not replace one form of idiocy with another when we backlash against the first kind, k?
one of the main points of the article is that mr. lucas falls into that category.
As his career, its understandable that Lucas take entertainment seriously. The real point of the article is that everyone else takes Lucas too seriously.
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The real writer is well known. The real writer is nothing much either. Episodes V and VI were to large extent written by Thymoty Zan and fixed by a slew of other people for production. In all cases they have drawn heavily on earlier pulp fiction and the first books in the Dune series. Actually, T.Z. is pulp fiction as well so...
Personally, I think T.Z's fiction sucks eggz but this is a matter of taste so I digress.
This topic has largely been discussed in an interview with David Brin on this subject a few years ago on Slashdot. Sorry, no URL, find it yourself.
The conclusion of that interview was:
Lucas is well known for the fact that he cannot stand any greateness but his own. He usually chooses collaborators that do not have a name in the field so that they do not stick near his name on the credits. He is the king of mediocrity. He is continuing this tendency even now. Just think about episode I. Out of all possible Sci Fi writers out there to hire Terry Brooks. After even his fans could not stand him any more because of the endless repetition of look-alike bland characters in look-alike bland books. All characters in Episode I are so T.B. it makes me want to puke. Just look at the so called "queen". Everybody say "shannara" and "magic kingdom for sale" please... Ugh.... yuk... Bleah...
At the same time there are brilliant Space Opera style Sci Fi authors out there. David Brin (Uplift), Yain Banks (Culture), Peter F Hamilton (Night's Down). All of them are capable of taking a topic and developing it into a whole universe for years.
But Lucas is not going to hire them. First it will decrease HIS credit and HIS ego. Second they will be able to draw on the Star Wars audience which he jelously guards as his prime revenue source.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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There's a difference between I Am Serious About Making A Fun, Dumb Movie serious and This Movie Is Not A Dumb Fun Movie But Part Of The Great Tradition Of Epic Storytelling, And I Am A Latter Day Homer serious.
Oh, and the nerve of accusing The Matrix of ripping off Nueromancer and then mentioning Blade Runner in the next sentance! Ridley Scott defined the look of cyberpunk thankyou... and even he was borrowing from others. A bit of Omega Man, a touch of Babel 17, some Felinniesque visuals, with just a sprinkle of A Clockwork Orange for good measure.
It's been said over and over again for nearly three millenia (and probably longer), but the Preacher of Ecclesiastes is still right: There is nothing new under the sun.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
the roots of George Lucas' empire lie not in "The Odyssey" but in classic and pulp 20th century sci-fi.
Is there anything wrong with that? Homer's Odyssey *is* the fantasy pulp of the 8th century BC. Opera was the equivalent of, well, soap operas and even Shakespeare was just popular entertainment. Only much later they have been canonized as "high culture".
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Frankly lots of people have made the connection between star wars and old pulp fiction rags long ago. You can see it just from the titles. And incidentally, from this perspective, episode 2's title makes sense. Just add some exclamation points and imagine them on the covers of Shocking Tales! or something.
The Phantom Menace!
Attack of the Clones!!
?
A New Hope!
The Empire Strikes Back!!
Return of the Jedi!
That said, paying homage to something is not the same as ripping it off. Just because there's a connection doesn't lower the value of the movies(or raise it, for that matter).
hot foreign sheep.
Why can't people admit it - when they saw the original StarWars they loved it because they were kids at the time. Today's kids loved "The Phantom Menace" and will no doubt love "Attack of the Clones" but for those of us who saw the original as kids the magic isn't going to be there because we're not kids any more.
Campbell never advocated any 'world myth,' certainly never any primal myth which supercedes more concrete folk wisdom/religion. I fail to understand where you intuit Campbell's "Judeo-Christian beliefs."
_Hero w/ 1000 Faces_ shows up on a lot of creative writing syllabi, but Campbell's real masterwork is the 4-vol. _Masks of God_, an extensive survey of mythology from cave paintings to James Joyce. His point, made there and elsewhere, isn't that there's one myth--a misunderstanding perpetuated by lazy readers of _1000 Faces_--but *patterns* in the way people come to grips with the world. Jung called them *archetypes* and believed they were hardwired into the brain; Campbell is less certain. Common ground is equally found outside the gray matter: every creature has seen the sun rise in the east and set in the west, seen the moon go through its cycles, the stars glide through predictable paths. That the patterns of life are reflected in the patterns of myth is not due to the superimposition of any "uber-myth," but instead to the commonalities of life on this planet.
It takes Campbell two volumes to get to "Occidental Mythology" because that's where it comes in the timeline. By the time you get there with him, you be hard-pressed to extract any sense of a "Western, Judeo-Christian" view. Quite the opposite. The advent of Zoroastrianism and Christianity are something of disappointment to the writer, a time when the forgiving cycles of the regenerative world circle were forsaken for a doomed and transitory world which must be redeemed by the righteous. And here you do get some sermonizing, the same Campbell offers whenever discussing the west: don't take yourself so seriously.
He's also wont to stress that mythmaking isn't a conscious process; nobody sits down and dreams up a religion--and that's my personal beef about this whole Campbell/Lucas 69. Lucas treats Campbell's scholarship like a paint-by-numbers kit, or a cake mix: a dash of virgin-birth, splash of transformation, et voila. It happens all the time in those creative writing classes, but only Lucas had the press agents to make it stick. You always hurt the ones you love.
But that's an old old story, now in'nit.
I agree that many of the "Star Wars"/myth correspondences are pretty streched. However, the Salon writer stretches things just as thin. Tatooine as Dune? Why, because they are both deserts? Common, why don't you compare it to Lawerence of Arabi The skeleton in the desert like a sandworm? Sure, only a completely different shape.
His comparisons to the Lensman series are better, though the disdain in which he apparently holds it would seem to mitigate against his conclusion that Lucas should credit the pulps.
Anyway, the point being that of course Star Wars fits his vision -- everything does. It's one of those annoying little self-enclosed bits of ignorance. All pulp science fiction fits it, too. Of course, it's all up to who is doing the interpreting!
And this is exactly what makes mythology so powerful. Look, you can analyze the cannon of every traditional or popular story in the world, and they essentially break down into 7 to 12 types, depending on who you ask and how fine a sieve you run them through. Why do we find adventure stories interesting? Because of a deeply-rooted (I would venture to say pre/sub coscious) affinity for adventure. Same goes for romance, mystery, comedy, etc.
I've seen some amazing foreign language comedy that almost made me piss my pants without understanding a word. There are certain things that speak to people more or less universally.
These basic tropes of culture (not just entertainment... this is where values really do come from) bear out certain commonalities between disparate peoples. The details, the styles, the appearances, these things change from time to time, from civilization to civilization. Of course anyone seeking to observe this will be prejudiced by her/his origin culture, but that doesn't make the investigation invalid. It's just heisenberg's uncertainty principle operating on the social and metaphysical level.
Campbell's system can be made to contain any myth within it; this is due to a flaw in Campbell's system.
You might also argue that this is the strength of Campbell's work.
The great Pulp stories, the great westerns and crime novels, they are the most mythic of all: they just tend to be rush jobs with poor attention to detail and not a lot of staying power. Of course Star Wars draws from the same sources. or at least the first film does... my contention is that Lucas struck gold once and then turned from prospecting to strip-mining in short order.
The difference between Star Wars and Pulp is the level of detail, craft, and emotion that is invested in it. Star Wars (the movie, not the franchise) looks dated today because of the 70s hair cuts, but other than that the story is still iconic in its power.
You must understand that this forum is not the best place to discuss such things. Many people here love Star Wars for the tech-whizbang factor, droids, lightsabers, x-wings... all the things self-respecting geeks are into. That's why they stay fanatical. But what I think you and I are addressing is a much deeper and more substantive issue.
When the first movie broke in '77, the people who freaked out about it were from all walks of life. It touched a chord, not by being above average SF, but by presenting something that people could believe in. This was my experience seeing it as a child, and it's backed up by the stories my mother told me about seeing it in the theaters. Contrary to everyday life in the Regan era, here was a representation of simple, humble values that triumph over avaristic megalomania. Growing up in an agnostic household, I was one of the many who looked to mythic stories such as Star Wars and the work of Tolkien to hand down a basic set of morals and values, and since I think I turned out ok, I have to be greatful to some extent to these authors and filmmakers.
But my gratitude has limits. Since striking gold with the first film, Lucas has been more and more aggressively humping the fantasy for every dollar it's worth. I think the perfect representation of Lucas's change can be found in the Phantom Menace, during an Exchange between Young Obi-Won and the Computer-Generated Flying Junk Salesman. Obi-Won has been trying to use his Jedi Mind Tricks(tm), and the CG character says, "haha, the force doesn't work on me. Only Money."
That about says it all.
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It should be the Matrix. Ok David Brin was kind of on target but at least some of the things he said can be argued against: the Rebel Alliance seemed to be an alliance of all races and beings in a republic (sadly the movie is a little too much *Zap* *Boom* *Bang* to focus on this). And at least they were only attacking known military installations (the Death Star, the Star Destroyers, etc) instead of blindly razing citizens (ala some terrorist folk we know).
But now the Matrix. Damn... ok, maybe it is JUST because so many people gush about it... but what about the morality of this movie?
Morpheus points out explicitly that they are killing people even if the Matrix is virtual. That even though these nameless Redshirts and slobs are just doing what they're told because they are a part of a group hallucination it is ok to murder them en mass in extremely violent and callous ways why...?
Because we are righteous? We are doing the best thing? We are destroying the evil dictators (in the most round about way possible)?
Tell me, did Trinity and Neo have to go through the bottom floor? Did they have to kill 30 or 40 guys? Especially when they end up grabbing a Bell Huey anyway? "Who cares! They're nameless spear-chuckers! In the end their sacrifice won't be in vain!" Sounds a little: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."
And then what about the evil tyrannical machines (beyond the FUD ludditism of the movie)? They specifically said that human beings couldn't live in a utopia so they made the Matrix the way it was.
"So?" the leather-clad hippies retort. "Where was our choice in the matter?"
What. Like the same choice you gave those SWAT guys? And the fact that the Agents possess normal humans doesn't stop Neo from blowing all them fuckers away. "Yeah! Coool!!! Bla-dow!!!" Yep, no ethical quandries here!
"But they eat people!!" Oh Jeezus. And like, when it's all over, people can just do whatever the hell they want? Anyone here get their food, house, and shelter for free? Anyone out there going to live forever that I don't know of?
And when they win: Earth is a barren wasteland with no sun and no way to support the billions of freshly freed humans (well those that survive the blazing machineguns of the "Freedom Fighters"). "Gee, thank you!" They'll all say. "This is much better!"
The only moral of the entire movie is this: Man is paranoid and reactionary. When he is not in control of his own destiny (no matter how self-destructive) he will violently lash out, blindly ignoring the consequences.
What is music when you despise all sound?
I read somewhere a long time ago (I think it was an issue of Wizard: The Guide to Comics) that the attraction a reader had (They were tackling this same topic in the letters section) to Star Wars was the obviousness and absurdity of the entire series.
The villian is dressed in black and wears this grotesque head gear and has a rasping respirator with a deep sinister voice, so you know w/o a doubt that this guys a total bastard.
The Jedi wear their robes and such and have a strong belief in a mythical "Force" that symoblizies a spiritual existence that relates them to peaceful Monks not so far off from those of today and their ages old predecessors.
Then there are the aspects borrowed from ages old stories of good versus evil that have been around for years that are painted so obviously throughout the first 3 movies it's a nice escape from epics painted in subterfuge and guessing games. You know who's who, what's what and you get to sit and watch them kick the shit out of each other.
These guys are just pissed that Lucas (and I by no means praise George like a deity) put all these bits and pieces together and it became more popular than its predecessors.
Perhaps it was gleaned from other works but why should Lucas give credit to anyone? As far as I know the story of good vs. evil has been around in various forms long before even humans (Predator/Prey).
Quit bitching and just deal with the fact that it is what it is, you either like it or you don't. I do.
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Campbell wasn't about scientific reductionism. He was a fan of mythology, and he studied it with zeal. --And as is natural for anybody with a creative mind, he saw grand patterns emerging in the material. He took pleasure in exploring and illustrating those patterns for others. It's ridiculous to think that somebody could get upset or bothered by any aspect of his work. And it's downright hillarious that anybody would approach with anything resembling a stuffy accademic high-brow attitude.
"Follow Your Bliss"
When you understand that, you'll understand Campbell. Until then, I recommend you seek some quiet time.
-Fantastic Lad