The Mything Link

The “Star Wars” saga is one of those rare pop phenomena that can accurately be described as both puerile and profound. It’s silliness was always readily apparent (Wookies! Light sabers! Prissy talking robots! Please!). As for the profundities, they came to light after adults started searching for ways to rationalize how much fun they were having at the matinees with their kids.

Well after the last installment was released in 1983, when Joseph Campbell became a household name and George Lucas began freely discussing archetypes and myths, we found our unassailable excuse: “Star Wars” was ambitious modern-day mythology. That meant it had depth. But after-the-fact rationalizations don’t begin to explain the saga’s staying power or why it means so much to so many people.

For all of “Star Wars’ ” references to moldy legends, and for all the dusty movies and comic books Lucas raided for ideas, the fantasy worked as well as it did because, somehow, it managed to be all about today. That is to say, the time in which it was made.

That was a long, long time ago in pop cultural terms. As fans sprout roots waiting in line for tickets to “Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace,” it seems legitimate to ask whether Lucas’ slowly unfolding fairy tale possibly can speak to us now in the same way that it once did. No one doubts that the prequel to be released Wednesday will be a spectacular financial success. But what is it exactly that fans want from the movie? And how can those expectations possibly be fulfilled?

These are questions science fiction writer Lance Olsen long has been asking himself. He teaches writing and literature at the University of Idaho and finds it remarkable how intensely his students relate to the films. Mention it in class, he says, and they come instantly alive. “Within seconds they’re sharing stories about ‘Star Wars’ dolls--they all know the names--and about ‘Star Wars’ games they all had.

“It’s almost a primary myth they all share,” he says. “I keep thinking nothing can possibly live up to these expectations because the expectations aren’t even based on the movie--they’re based on memories of an experience that was larger than anything that they’ve ever been involved in.”

Advance critical word on “Phantom Menace” is mixed, but how could it not be? Only the second coming could live up to such an avalanche of pre-release publicity and hype. What critics say, though, is beside the point. Not only because fans will see the movie regardless. But also because what reviewers choose to carp on is so inconsequential to the “Star Wars” experience.

Andrew Gordon, an English professor at the University of Florida who was perhaps the first to note Lucas’ debt to Campbell, sees the large numbers of pilgrims camping out in front of movie theaters as much as a month in advance of the opening as reenactments of the mythic cycle. Like Luke Skywalker in the first movie, like Ulysses in “The Odyssey,” like King Arthur and Moses and Jesus--and like Anakin Skywalker in the prequel--the fans have set out from the safe confines of home to become initiated and to participate in the experience. Some fans have come from Europe to be among the first to witness the spectacle. And like the mythic heroes, they will return home carrying their prize, in this case the movie’s enlightenment.

The early criticism of “Phantom Menace” seems oddly familiar. Wooden acting, shallow characterizations, more interested in hardware than emotion. But critics said all this about the first film in the series too, and it still moved millions of people.

The new prequel also has been criticized for recapitulating themes and plot points from the first “Star Wars” movie. But the redundancies are deliberate and might even be defended as necessary. In basing the stories on age-old archetypes, Lucas tapped into myths that have been repeated countless times in every culture.

Together they constitute what mythology expert Campbell called the “monomyth.” Repetition is what fans expect and want. What child ever tired of “Little Red Riding Hood” after one hearing?

Playing to Kids and Academics

The first “Star Wars” movie wore its mythology lightly--it slowly unfolded over the course of the trilogy. Hans Solo’s smirking irreverence and his bickering with the wisecracking Princess Leia brought a sense of fun.

The prequel reaches in opposing directions. The casting of cherubic Jake Lloyd as the 9-year-old child who will become Darth Vader and the prominence of a cartoonish sidekick suggests that Lucas is aiming squarely at the kiddies, but with the more overt treatment of archetypes, he’s also playing to the academics who have touted his saga from the beginning as serious modern-day mythology.

“The Matrix,” this year’s other big science-fiction movie, plays with archetypes as well, with its own Force-like mysticism and with Keanu Reeves portraying the Chosen One. But, Gordon says, “ ‘Star Wars’ has the whole cast of archetypal characters--the beautiful princess who must be rescued, the wise old man, a variety of ogres and dwarfs, the black knight and all of the figures that come out of myth and fairy tales. . . . I don’t think ‘The Matrix’ is equivalent.”

But the huge popularity of “The Matrix” raises questions about the currency of “Star Wars’ ” look and themes. Science fiction has changed a lot since 1977 or even 1983, when “Return of the Jedi” was released. One change has been visual. In large part because of Lucas and his company, Industrial Light & Magic, special effects are light years ahead of where it was then. “The Matrix” took full advantage of these advances. “Phantom” is equally visually stunning, but it employs its computer wizardry to different effect. In look and tone, “Star Wars” is to “The Matrix” what the pure Anakin Skywalker is to Darth Vader.

A bleak cyberpunk ethos has become dominant in movie science fiction--”The Matrix” is only the most recent example. Since the original “Star Wars,” we’ve had “Blade Runner” as well as the “Terminator” movies and “Total Recall.” These films, along with others such as “Twelve Monkeys,” “Brazil” and “The Fifth Element,” present a dystopian world view.

“Star Wars” is their mirror opposite. Gordon titled a 1978 essay on the film “A Myth for Our Times.” How relevant is that myth today?

As Gordon wrote, “Viewers recognize that ‘Star Wars’ has no direct relation to external reality, but it does relate to our dreams of how we would like reality to be.” In the “Star Wars” saga, good triumphs over evil and peace and harmony prevail.

America was tired of complications in 1977 when the first “Star Wars” movie was released. Vietnam, Watergate and social unrest had rattled our brains. The oil embargo showed us how weak we had become. We’d lost our sense of who we were. George Lucas reminded us. Two years later, we elected Ronald Reagan president and it was Morning in America again.

“Star Wars’ ” message and Reagan’s were one and the same: We are good. We are plucky. And we can’t be beat. The Force was on our side. No wonder Reagan took to calling the Soviet Union “the evil empire,” and “Star Wars” became the nickname of his Strategic Defense Initiative.

“In a lot of ways, ‘Star Wars’ is very subtextually conservative,” writer Olsen says. Gordon agrees: “At its heart it really is a throwback to conservative values, to a black-and-white morality that people found very comforting and reassuring.”

That the Cold War is over doesn’t seem to have phased Lucas. He has found new evils. The new movie shows the initial dispute between the Trade Federation and the peaceful planet of Naboo to be over taxes. And the film is full of critical comments about government bureaucracy and duplicitous, self-serving legislators.

These new elements to the saga root the film in real-world concerns, but the true power of “Star Wars” lies in the way it transcends the here and now. “Star Wars” is a dream--a child’s dream, perhaps--but it touches the unconscious desires of all of us.

Gordon has written of the similarities it shares with “The Wizard of Oz,” “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the “Back to the Future” films--Oedipal dramas about “the ambivalence of the adolescent, who is torn between childhood and adulthood, between needing the parents and hating them, between clinging to the home and desiring to destroy it or escape from it.”

But the important thing about each of these films, he notes, is that they all end with family reunions of sorts. No matter where Luke or Dorothy or Marty might go, no matter how much George Bailey may want to leave Bedford Falls, the movies all affirm that there’s no place like home.

This is a moral we never tire of hearing.

And, interestingly, after all of the bleak cyberpunk books and movies of the last decade, Olsen notes that there has been a backlash. The author of novels such as “Tonguing the Zeitgeist” and “Time Famine,” which seek to push the boundaries of cyberpunk but maintain the vision, he says that one reaction to all of the gloom and doom has been a resurgence of comforting works that are mythologically based fantasies with characters clearly delineated as good or evil.

The backlash, in other words, looks a lot like “Star Wars,” which suggests that Lucas does not have to strain to remain current after all.

*

‘Phantom’ Fashion

* The newest “Star Wars” look is an eye-popping amalgam of cultures. E1