Star Wars and the Modern Mythology Battles, Part Two

This essay is a follow-up to Star Wars and the Modern Mythology Battles, Part One

All that being said, my ultimate problem isn’t between whether Disney Star Wars has changed too little, or not enough. My problem is, it presents an essentially solid-state universe, in which advancements from prior episodes don’t actually change much subsequently. This claim wouldn’t make sense with the pre-Disney movies, where the galaxy moved from democracy to tyranny, then back. But Walt’s people irrevocably changed the concept of justice as it applies in Lucas’ mythic galaxy.

Shortly after The Force Awakens debuted, I noted that movie established war as the galaxy’s essential state. Our protagonists can’t stop fighting, because the galaxy ordains them that essential role. Instead of accepting a well-earned appointment to the galaxy’s equivalent of the executive cabinet, Princess Leia returns to fighting the same war that’s dominated her life for at least forty years. Hell, even a military legend like Chesty Puller got to retire after thirty-seven years.

About three months ago, an internet critic calling himself Thor Skywalker noted that the Disney Star Wars works primarily by walking back everything the prior six movies accomplished, returning the characters to square one. I normally disregard self-made critics, because the internet gives every egotistical whiner a megaphone. (Don’t look at me that way.) But this person raises an important point I hadn’t considered: Disney Star Wars fundamentally changes what the prior movies were about.

George Lucas’ original movies contradicted themselves. His original trilogy pitted intrepid, individualist characters against an autocratic government, seeking to re-establish democracy. The prequels seemingly questioned democracy, and focused more on restoring balance to the Force. Either explanation makes sense, and either explanation is supported by the resolution of Episode VI. Sure, the prequels changed character motivations for Obi-Wan and Yoda, and often struggled with continuity. But ultimately, wobbles notwithstanding, they all reached the same destination.



Episode VII undermines everything. It changes the names of the war’s protagonists, and replaces Emperor Palpatine with Supreme Leader Snookie (or whatever), but it structurally declares that the first six movies accomplished nothing. By the end of Episode VIII, the Resistance, which is the Rebellion rebranded for 21st-Century America, is so small, its entire membership can fit inside the Millennium Falcon. Yet we’re promised that, in one more movie, this sub-arc will somehow resolve itself.

George Lucas famously claimed he wrote the original Star Wars script with two books on his desk: Webster’s Dictionary and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. The latter describes the mythological journey heroes in multiple religions and folk traditions undergo. The seemingly ordinary hero leaves home, journeys through the magical realm, and is transformed. But to Campbell, the final stage matters as much as the journey: the mythic hero must ultimately return home.

Most great mythologies spend as much time on the hero’s return as on his [sic] leaving and journey. Jesus must venture into the desert and be tempted, but must also return to carry the message. Sinbad must sail into lands of monsters and terror, but must also return to tell his story. And if Hollywood’s three-act structure gives short shrift to denouements, the idea that Luke Skywalker must return from war, remains at least implicit.

These two films have essentially stolen every accomplishment Lucas created. They destroyed two Death Stars? Ta-da, Starkiller Base! They ended the Sith? Eff you, say the Knights of Ren. Everything that we’d consider an accomplishment has been reversed. The characters cannot return from war. They either keep fighting until mortality catches them, like Princess Leia, or they find ways to retreat from reality, like Han Solo returning to smuggling, or Luke and his self-imposed exile.

In the first part of this essay, I complained that the Disney Star Wars “feels bound by cultural impediments it doesn’t actually have.” This meant the values of what defined “normal” in 1977, specifically White, don’t apply forty years later. Here I expand that meaning to say: the cultural myth that mattered in 1977 isn’t the myth that defines us in 2018. Lucas, writing in Vietnam’s immediate aftermath, needed to reckon with war and identity.

Though military embarrassments in Iraq and Afghanistan haunt America today, the cultural question is: how to govern a shattered, self-destructive coalition of millions? The Disney Star Wars could’ve made a powerful, profitable myth from Han, Leia, and Luke rebuilding a galaxy left polarized and distrustful by the Empire’s retreat. But Disney, the cultural juggernaut that, with its Fox acquisition, could soon control American culture, flees the present. The result isn’t mythology, it’s a time capsule.