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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."
A good companion to this article is another Salon Article that ran in 1999 by David Brin. Excellent read on why Star Wars' morality sucks. :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
But I've always felt that the whole nine movie plan was a bit of revisionist history after people didn't get the "Episode IV" joke-cum-homage to old time serials ("...our story so far:"). Maybe I'm just looking for evidence of my own crackpot theory, but the movie is full of stuff like that: irising in and out, deliberately clunky cross screen fades, villains in crazy costumes, hysterical cliffhangers (the compactor scene mentioned in the article for instance)...it's all from those fun old serials. Doesn't lessen the impact of the movies for me, but by the same token, the Campbell/Jung stuff doesn't increase it.
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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.
I don't see any sense at all to describe it as "pulp sci-fi" rather than mythology, because pulp sci-fi is also based on mythology. So are comic books, which I think are the best source for new myths. So are westerns. So is fantasy. Pretty much everything where the protagonist has a quest to defeat evil is based on mythology.
Not everything is mythological. Detective stories, where the protagonists' goal is to restore the status quo, are not mythological. Nor are comedies or romances that are purely personal. However, drama where an external conflict mirrors an internal, personal confict is all myth, almost by definition.
The only question is what Lucas had in mind. This has become obfuscated with time. I have the advantage to be 40 years old, and so I remember what the interviews said. Basically, Lucas' money from THX-1138 was running out, and he didn't want to get a job. So he made Star Wars. He based it on westerns and war movies, particularly the 1930 WWI movie "Hell's Angels."
Then it became popular beyond his wildest dreams. The idea that it would be part of a trilogy of trilogies came later. The "Episode IV" wasn't on until it was re-released. Joseph Campbell picked up on Star Wars as a way of teaching mythology. He could have used any of hundreds of pop culture references, but Star Wars was succesful on an unprecedented level. I'm sure that Lucas had heard of Campbell, but the mythology really is in Star Wars because that's what people do when they make certain kinds of arts.
Nothing that I've read about Campbell in any place other than the masturbatory presses that produce quasi-intellectual asides within E! and People lauds him in any sense for his belief in the World Myth.
His vision was that there was a sort of primal myth, variations on which were the substances of our myth.
He left it open to the god-like powers of the Interpreter-of-Myths (himself in his writings) to cram other myths into his distinctly Western, Judeo-Christianic views. While the "Water-Jar Boy" myth can be made to appear to fit into those characteristics, the actual meaning imparted by it within the group of people who tell it is far removed from Campbell's heavy-handed re-interpretation.
For myths that spring from the Western Classical and are influenced heavily by Judeo-Christianity, his analyses can be held as valid in most permutations of the more popular myths. Though a sufficiently creative interpreter can make them *appear* to, by re-locating them into the Western Sphere of Thought.
A bit dishonest, to say the least, though Campbell himself never seems to have realized this. (Those of his students who emerged beyond the fun-filled days of smoking weed and having deep conversations, however, did. And wrote extensively about it.) This is not to suggest that Campbell's impact is unimportant -- he did a tremendous amount of work in collecting and (occasionally mis-) cataloguing existing myths, and as I mentioned above, his interpretations remain largely valid for a particular subset of mythology.
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!
It is a bit valid, too, for a lot of sci fi -- most of it is heavily influenced by Classical and Christian mythology.
Sorry this post is a bit disjointed, I'm debugging in the other window.
To Summarize: Campbell's system can be made to contain any myth within it; this is due to a flaw in Campbell's system. Star wars can be made to be contained within it. Milking that gave George Lucas some intellectual credibility with the uninformed. It also gave Campbell some recognition (and he did deserve some, make no mistake.), and perpetrated a sort of urban myth about George Lucas toiling by candlelight to reproduce ancient mythologies in space.
Pah.
The examination of Lucas' sources was interesting, but the rest of this article seems to be a bit too vitriolic, and contained absolutely zero in the way of new information or refutation.
He didn't even have the grace to properly explain and debunk Campbell's theories, which I think he should have, because I found his point to wander away from time to time due to a lack of support.
-l
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?
Hm, I was pretty sure it was Flash Gordon (ooold sci-fi show) that the first Star Wars came from. You have Ming (Darth Vader), you have OB1-kenobi, you have Luke skywalker, you have OB1 going into the evil fortress and shutting down the defence shield from within... I forget if the Force was there or not.
Someone who has Flash Gordon memorized in their head, please post a better reply.
BTW, it is still appropriate to say that the work is related to Jospeph Campbell's, just as it would be appropriate to say that it was related to, say, Jung. That's because Joseph Campbell and Jung lay claim to wiiide territory and deep waters- pretty much anything in the realm of Myth, which includes Star Wars.
What is it about Salon and this gigantic anti-Star Wars bent? David Brin's article from a couple years ago was seething with resentment -- he was clearly REALLY annoyed that Star Wars, which is space opera (not hard SF) was so insanely popular. "True SF is the only way to salvation, not this populist trash! Curse Lucas for his success!" He went off on a rant about how Lucas's morality was going to destroy Western civilization or something.
Now we've got another guy ranting about Star Wars's faults.
Hey, dickhead -- it's a MOVIE. Sit back and enjoy it -- it's not worth having an embolism over.
Incidentally, Lucas and Kasdan DIDN'T write ESB -- but this is not news. Kasdan and Leigh Brackett did. Lucas had the story credit, but Kasdan and Brackett were the WRITERS. Who's claiming that Lucas co-wrote ESB?
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"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
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.
I believe Steven Spielburg once said that there are only 4 movie plots:
Man vs. Man
Man vs. Nature
Nature vs. Nature
Dog vs. Vampire
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.
True is this. Unimportant word order is to the Jedi. Through the Force, all syntax is made unambiguous.
Sorry. It's all metal bikini. Got it? Nothing but metal bikini. Lucas' best work. He should just make 2 more movies with actresses in metal bikinis. Just keep the man away from the script.
I read the original screenplay, long before Star Wars came out, edited the manuscript of the novelization of Star Wars. I know the novelizer personally, and knew the publisher, Judy-Lynn del Rey, very well (worked for her for 11 years then took over the Del Rey imprint when she had a stroke). In the period from 1976 (when the ghost-written first novel appeared) through 1980, no one ever mentioned a Campbell connection in the publisher's office nor did they mention any other element that might have contributed to Star Wars than pulp science fiction, Saturday morning movie serials (e.g., Wasn't it in Don Winslow of the Navy? where the evil Japanese were always trying to squash people in rooms with walls that moved?), and elements that had appeared earlier in less successful sf films (R2D2, for instance, was very like Huey, Dewey and Louie -- I think they were -- in Cool Running). And, for several reasons, the publisher was distraught when Leigh Brackett died: (1) Brackett was a personal friend, (2) "That's the end of Star Wars". What Judy-Lynn meant was: "there's no inspiration left to be found in the project other than Leigh's."
The Salon story seems to me, an old fan of science fiction, a founding editor of Del Rey Books, and its editor in chief for more than ten years, quite nicely done. There are many who could tell the story in more detail, I'm sure, but they didn't choose to write. And what was written has, to me, the ring of truth.
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>
> All this discussion is just pushing Campbell's thesis. Whether Lucas consciously or unconsciously meant his characters to fall in line with the monomyth is an entirely different question.
>
> _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ also has a great deal of monomythic elements to it, but Joss Whedon has admitted himself that he hasn't read _Hero with a Thousand Faces_.
So does _Pac Man_. Inky, the dark one, Blinky, the red one, aggressive with passion, Pinky - as in Pinky and the Brain - the fast genius who's the greatest threat, and Clyde, for comic relief. All set up in a backdrop of the ideology of mass consumption iconified by yellow, the color of cowardice - we're too scared to confront our desire to consume until we energize and empower ourselves (the energy pills), after which time we can turn the tables on our ghostly enemies and devour them.
It's like astrology. Make your "monomyth" broad enough to include anything, and anything will fit the pattern.