THE JOURNEY TO MANHOOD: GEORGE LUCAS' SAGA

OF SACRIFICE AND SALVATION

by

FRAN WONG

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Philosophical Foundations in the Institute for Christian Studies

December, 1991

Supervisor : Dr. Calvin Seerveld INTRODUCTION ...... 1 STAR WARS AND "STAR WARS" ...... 1

PURPOSES: LUCAS' AND MINE ...... 3 Lucas' Purpose in Making Star Wars ...... 3 Has Lucas Achieved his Purpose? ...... 4 My Purpose in Writing This Thesis ...... 8

CHAPTER ONE: THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR STAR WARS...... 8 A FEW POINTS ABOUT THE HISTORY OF F/SF FILM ...... 8

GEORGE LUCAS' SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY TO YOUNG P E O P L E ...... 10

LUCAS' INNOVATIVE MIXING OF GENRES...... 12

CHAPTER TWO: THE THEORIES BEHIND THE PRACTICE IN THIS THESIS..19 THOUGHTS ABOUT HOW FILM WORKS ...... 19

A METHOD OF ANALYSIS: COMMENTARY ON THE USE OF CINEMATIC FEATURES...... 20

SOME OBSERVATIONS ABOUT PSYCHOLOGY AND FILM...... ,22

UNDERSTANDING LUCAS' W O R L D V I E W ...... 25

CHAPTER THREE: THE WORLD OF STAR WARS...... 27 INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF O V E R V I E W ...... ,27

THE EXTERNAL CONFLICT IN THIS WORLD...... 30 Who is fighting with whom? ...... ,31 How does Lucas help us choose sides?, ...... 33 Is there a significant difference between the two sides? ...... 36

HOW MILITARISM AND RELIGION ARE COMBINED: THE WARRIOR MONK...... 38

CHAPTER FOUR: BECOMING A MATURE MAN ...... 42 LUKE'S DESIRE FOR A FATHER ...... 42 Luke's adoptive family of o r i g i n ...... 42 "Some damn fool idealistic crusade" ...... 44 Luke's father figures: the continuing quest,,..47

WHAT IS A FATHERLESS YOUNG MAN TO DO?...... 51 The dysfunctional disguised as the functional..50 The 'denial of feelings' in the dysfunctional family, ...... 52 Attitude toward the body ...... 54 The 'family secret' in the dysfunctional family, ...... 56 Roles in the family system: Luke as Hero ...... 59 "You cannot escape your destiny" ...... 61 Enmeshment: Life as an Appendage of Your Family System ...... 63 “The Song Is Ended But The Melody Lingers On"..67

CHAPTER FIVE: THE FORCE AND LOVE: TWO C O S M O L O G I E S ...... 70 THE FORCE ACCORDING TO THE JEDIS ...... 70

THE FORCE: AN UNNECESSARY HYPOTHESIS?...... 76

DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM...... 81

C O N C L U S I O N ...... 89 "LIVING IN AMERICA" ...... 89

MUTUAL RESCUING: TRUE LOVE? ...... 92

THE FILMGOER'S RESPONSE TO 'MUTUAL RESCUING'... 98

FAMILY REUNION: AN APPROPRIATE ENDING FOR STAR WARS...... 101

A FINAL LOOK AT FANTASY ...... 103

NOTES...... 107 TO I N T R O D U C T I O N ...... 107 TO CHAPTER ONE ...... 109 TO CHAPTER TWO ...... 112 TO CHAPTER T H R E E ...... 117 TO CHAPTER FOUR ...... 122 TO CHAPTER FIVE ...... 127 TO CONCLUSION...... 132

WORKS CONSULTED ...... 138 FILMOGRAPHY...... 138 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 138

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B INTRODUCTION

"What are the stars?" said O'Brien indifferently. "They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out." -- George Orwell, 1984

"If Star Wars is 'about' anything, it is about power --and the source of ultimate power in the film is the Force." -- Dan Rubey

AND "STAR WARS"

is a world created on film by George Lucas and colleagues. But "Star Wars“ is also the nickname of the

Strategic Defense Initiative, a space-based missile defense

system proposed by the Reagan administration in 1983. Although

Lucas was not happy that the name of his film saga became attached to Reagan's plans, we might naturally wonder if there were any good reasons for making this comparison. Are the Star

Wars trilogy and the "Star Wars" military project at all alike?

Jane Caputi notes several examples of similar language in

Lucas' wording concerning the trilogy, and words and phrases con­ nected with the American defense plan• For instance, although the first film was released initially as Star Wars (1977), in

1980, when Empire was released, Lucas renamed it Star Wars: A New

Hope (Episode 4): then in a "Star Wars" speech on March 23, 1983,

Ronald Reagan said, "I have reached a decision which offers hope for our children in the twenty-first century." (emphasis added)

Here is another example Caputi gives:

"It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, stiking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the Evil Galactic

1 (Introductory text in Hope) (emphasis added)

"So in your discussions of the nuclear freese proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride -- the temptation blithely to declare yourself above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil." (Ronald Reagan, March 8, 1983) (emphasis added) ( 497)3

One would almost think Reagan's speechwriter had seen Lucas' trilogy and deliberately incorporated its phraseology into

Reagan's speeches!

Caputi believes the Force in Star Wars is nuclear power1*; I do not agree. Lucas has said that the Force is like God:

I was trying to say in a very simple way, knowing that the film was made for a young audience, that there is a God and there is both a good side and a bad side. You have a choice between them, but the world works better if you're on the good side. It's just that simple." (Clarke 1983 57)

Even though Caputi's definition of the Force is wrong -- it does not fit the films, I do find culturally critical analyses such as hers helpful in discerning what is implicit in contem­ porary popular films. Ian Jarvie, speaking of meaning in films s a y s :

For far too long, movies were dismissed as social pap -- mere popular entertainment. By titling [my] book Movies as Social Criticism I indicate my dissent from this summary dismissal. Popular movies are a rich source of ideas.about, information concernlng.1__and. criticism of, society....Popular movies were made for money and entertainment. [But] this does not mean they will not reward careful sociological analysis. (emphasis added) (ix)

Jarvie's underlined comment also applies to implicit

2 meanings, social commentary embedded in films, with or without the filmmaker's knowledge. The people who categorized Hope in particular, and sometimes all three films, as mere entertainment and pure escapisms, need to consider more carefully what is going on in the trilogy. For instance, Vincent Canby in reviewing Hope said it "made absolutely no meaningful comment on contemporary concerns such as nuclear war, overpopulation, depersonalization and sex." (Canby6, quoted in Caputi 495) I contend, on the contrary, that the trilogy contains messages, dealing with some of those very subjects, namely (nuclear) war, depersonalization and sex, if by the last item Canby means the relationship between men and women.7

PURPOSES: LUCAS' AND MINE

Lucas' Purpose in making Star Wars

"Star Wars was made because George Lucas wanted to see it; he didn't realize that 100 million other people would want to see it too." -- Dale Pollock

Lucas was only in his twenties when he directed American

Graffiti (1973), his first commercially successful movie. Making it was partly an exercise in nostalgia for him, a chance to mourn the passing of his youth. At the same time he welcomed change:

Life is a constant transition and you have to accept that fact...The future may be completely strange and different and scary but that's the way it should be. I thought that was one of the biggest challenges facing teenagers. I got to do what I wanted to do by not being frightened away by the future and the unknown, and I figured that was a good message to get across. Star Wars says the same thing in terms of technology, space flight and opening up the world. (Sheff 242)

3 In Graffiti Lucas had set out to challenge young people to

rid themselves of their fears "of the future and of the unknown.

Now he wanted to continue to give them courage:

I was conscious about doing a modern fairy tale. Star Wars came out of one of the reactions to American Graffiti. After the movie came out, I got hundreds of cards and letters from preteenagers and young teenagers saying different versions of 'Gosh, I didn't know that everybody has a tough time being a teenager.' The kids were saying, "The problems I'm having are all the same problems the guys in the movies were having, and I guess they had those ten years ago." (Sheff 242)

Lucas wanted to make a modern fairy tale for young people

with a message of hope about growing up successfully. As he

began to write the story, he also did research in the fields of

fairy tales, mythology, and social psychology. He was looking for a way to blend modern technology with the traditional story elements that were attractive and meaningful to children. "I was trying to get fairy tales, myths and religion down to a distilled state, studying the pure form to see how and why it worked." (Pollock 134)

If Lucas could create a story with characters who faced

challenges common to everyone, young filmgoers would identify with what happened to the people in the story. In effect, the characters would become role models for the filmgoers:

"There's a whole generation growing up without any kind of fairy tales," Lucas says. "And kids need fairy tales -- it's an important thing for society to have for kids." Lucas wanted to return to more traditional values that held a special appeal for our rootless society. He needed a timeless fable that could demonstrate, not pontificate on, the differences between right and wrong, good and evil, responsibility and shiftlessness. (Pollock 139) Now that the first trilogy of his projected nine-film saga is complete, we can ask, "Is Lucas accomplishing his goal?" In particular, what is it, that Lucas is teaching young people about how to reach adulthood in such a way that they will learn to deal with their fears in the process?

My contention is that Star Wars is successful as a modern fairy tale, but that, if its central message is, "Don't be afraid of the unknown" as Lucas says, then this message is confused and c o n f u s i n g .

A young person's fears about the journey to adulthood would be only partly allayed by what happens in Luke's life. Judging by the mentoring of a young man on his way to manhood that Luke's surrogate fathers give him, we could say Lucas approves of two debatable approaches to the task of helping a young man grow up:

1) militarism -- a society's taking arms to preserve its way of life, and encouraging its young people to see fighting as a necessary and important activity, and 2) parental or authority figures manipulating young people into actions the older people consider important, even at the risk of the young person's life,

Star Wars is saying more to young people than meets the eye.

The message is not just that they should not be "frightened away by the future and the unknown... in terms of technology, space flight and opening up the world." (Lucas, above, in Sheff 242)

Rather, the message is complex, with several levels of meaning and considerable ambiguity about its interpretation.

Star Wars has an explicit and an implicit basis, and it is

5 the implicit basis, or cosmology, that gives the story its power, especially when it is reinforced by strong filmic features.

Under the explicit cosmology of the Force in Star Wars lies the implicit 'goodness and love', or humanist (or 'minimally Chris­ tian' ) cosmology -- unacknowledged verbally (in the dialogue), but necessary for making sense of the main characters' behaviour.

That this should be the situation is not surprising since the

Western world has been strongly influenced by Judaeo-Christian culture, and Lucas is a citizen of the Western world. Members of our society bank on this cosmology, whether they accept it themselves or not. Lucas, of course, is aware of this fact, and thus is able to depend on the filmgoers' cultural awareness at crucial points in the films.

I want to show that the message Lucas is giving young people in Star Wars has distortions built into it deriving from several sources. I will examine three of the main ones.

The first source of distortion, discussed in Chapter Three, is the presentation of military activity as good and right with no questions asked. The characters in Hope take it for granted that a young roan like Luke would want to be a fighter, simply by virute of being young and male. Becoming a heroic warrior is presented as a desirable goal for young people: this is how to b e h a v e .

The second source of distortion, discussed in Chapter Four, is the presentation of dysfunctional behaviour, learned in one's

6 family of origin, as admirable and therefore to be commended as a model for young people: this is the way to relate.

The third source of distortion, discussed in Chapter Five, is the presentation of the way of the Force as a valid spiritual option for young people: this is what to believe.

Although these three sources of distortion are intercon­ nected, I am arbitrarily separating them in individual chapters to clarify the nature of each one. In the Conclusion I will draw them together again to comment on their relationship.

To summarize, in this thesis I am arguing 1) that in Star

Wars Lucas presents a) militarism; b) dysfunctionalism in the family; and c) belief in a cross between pantheism (the cosmology of the Force) presented directly, and humanism or 'minimal

Christianity' presented indirectly; as approaches he would recommend to young people in their struggle towards maturity. I am also arguing 2) that the interplay between the two cosmologies

(in c) above), reinforced by the effective use of cinematic features, plus our own loyalty (we have been co-opted by our society) to the structures of our culture - militarism, dysfunc­ tional behaviour in the family, and minimal belief - all these factors are what make the story powerful, and Lucas' message, embedded in it, credible.

Before we explore the relationship of content, cosmologies, and cinematic features further however, we need to see something of the context for the trilogy, the Fantasy/Science Fiction®

(F/SF) film world that Lucas brought Hope into in 1977.

7 CHAPTER ONE THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR STAR WARS

"Speculative fiction in modern times really got born with Walt Disney in his classic animated film, Steamboat Willie, in 1928. Sure it did. I mean: a mouse that can operate a paddle-wheeler?" Harlan Ellison

"[Lucas] was eleven in 1956, when Walt Disney opened the gates of his Magic Kingdom: 'I loved Disneyland. I wandered around, I'd go on the rides and the bumper cars, the steamboats, the shooting gall eries, the jungle rides. I was in heaven.'" George Lucas

A FEW POINTS ABOUT THE HISTORY OF F/SF FILM

"Fantastic cinema has become the most popular area of movie­ making in the world. By the end of 1982, eight of the top twelve money-making films ever released were fantastic: traterrestial (1st), Star Wars fHopel (2nd), l a c k (3rd), i l a a s , (4th), Raiders of the Lost Ark (5th), The Exorcist (7th), Superman (9th) and Close Encounters of the Thli Kind (12th). -- Peter Nicholls

"Nothing could be the same in the science fiction cinema after 1977 -- if only because the moguls saw the glint of pure gold.' -- David Wingrove

Peter Nicholls suggests that fantasy (F)

"is implicit in the very nature of film. [Because almost anything can be done on film] it was no coin­ cidence that professional stage magicians were among the earliest filmmakers." (12)

The first science fiction (SF) film made, very early in the history of filmmaking, was Georges Meliesr A Trip to the Moon

(1902). Melies, a professional illusionist,

realized very early that the camera could succinctly create illusions that could be made cheaply available to large numbers of ordinary people." (Nicholls 12)

To give an overview of the history of F/SF films, I have included Appendix A at the end of this thesis, David Wingrove's

"Chronology of Important [SF] Films" until the end of 1984, which includes some fantasy films as well. In the writings on F/SF, the two categories invariably overlap, but it is worth describing each of them briefly:

Fantasy describes events that can never happen, against a background borrowed from our past, in a poetic or heroic style. Science fiction ie a more realistic kind of fantasy dealing with what may happen as a result of scientific progress in the future; human understanding and control of the universe increases for better or for worse. (Zboch et al 1)

According to the definition above is more science fantasy than science

Science Fantasy...[is] works which deliberately ignore the absolute constraint of science though staying within the other limits of SF.(Croghan 2)

Wingrove points out that, prior to 1968 :

Science Fiction cinema was -- with notable exceptions -- oriented towards projects where the talents of a make-up artist were valuable if not indispensable. The 1950s...were the heyday of the "creature feature." (10)

Then in 1968 several important works in the genre appeared:

these films made large amounts of money so that it was not until

1977 when Star Wars: A New Hope and Steven Spielberg's Close

Encounters of the Third Kind were released and became huge successes, financially and otherwise, that the Hollywood studios decided F/SF was a genre worth paying more attention to, one that should no longer be assumed to consist of only B quality movies.

Both Hope and Encounters had exceptional special effects, even better than those of 2001. For the first time in movie history, people were interested in investing money in special

9 effects companies. Lucas began his own company, Industrial Light

and Magic, to create the special effects for his own movies and

to have research and development constantly going on,

Are the special effects of these films

vulgar, the icing on an otherwise realistic cake? It probably makes more sense to regard special effects as completely fundamental to film, the cake itself. After all, the language and grammar of film is nearly all "special effects", but most of the tricks are now so familiar that we pay them no more attention than people just talking pay to nouns, verbs and adjectives. Montage (juxtaposing different images in quick succes­ sion), cross-cutting, close-ups, panning and tracking shots, zooms and all the rest of the film-maker's vocabulary, were all in their day special effects. Now we take them for granted, but in the earliest days of filmmaking they did not exist; the camera was plumped down in the visual equivalent of the front row of the stalls, and there it stayed. (Nicholls 12)

What Lucas and his colleagues did with special effects in

Hope had never been done before. Even if people did not like the

film's genre or story, they could not deny its innovation.

Now, in the 1990s, fantasy is popular and well accepted by

the public, even when the fantasy, involving either the whole

story or elements of it, is set in our own times, creating a sub­

category which could be called 'contemporary F/SF'.i

GEORGE LUCAS' SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY TO YOUNG PEOPLE

How did Lucas come to make StarWars and what was his

purpose in making it? He says that prior to AmericanGraffiti

[I had worked on] basically negative movies - Apoca- Ivpse FNowl and THXf-11381, both very angry. When I did Graffiti. I discovered that making a positive film is exhilarating. I thought, "Maybe I should make a

10 movie like this for even younger kids." I realized that there are...no modern fairytales. The western... was the last of the modern myths. (Sheff 242)

Comic books and television had been formative influences on

Lucas during childhood:

Lucas had long dreamed of making a space movie that would evoke the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials he watched on TV as a child. He tried to buy the movie rights to Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon books, but discovered that Italian director Federico Fellini had al ready optioned them. Forced to come up with his own story, Lucas decided to research mythology and fairy tales for possible ideas.(Pollock 101)

Lucas says:

I was conscious about doing a modern fairy tale.... It was a conscious attempt at creating new myths.... Star Wars served to challenge the imagination and say, 'For one second take your eyes off your feet and look at the stars.' (Sheff 242-44)

Lucas thinks that only about twenty-five percent of the people creating in the media today are doing so responsibly.

(Sheff 243) He "exhort.[ s ] others in the business to treat their trade with high seriousness because of entertainment's power as a cultural force [and in a speech at his alma mater said]:

Film and visual entertainment are a pervasively important part of our culture, an extremely significant influence on the way our society operates. People in the film industry don't want to accept the respon­ sibility that they had a hand in the way the world is loused up. But, for better church,whichusedtobeall-powerful,hasbeen or worse, the influence ofthe

a m r m d t e f i l m . Films and television tell us the wavwe conductourlives,whatisrightndwrong.It's a m r m d t e f i l m . Films and television tell us the wavwe

11

important that the people who make films have ethics

wise, we're witch doctors." (emphasis added) (Schultze et, al 109-10)2 Lucas' sense of responsibility is admirable, as is his awareness of the impact of film and television on contemporary society- In creating Star Wars he was not only satisfying his own desire to explore the world of myth and fairy tale on film, but also trying to fill a need he saw in both children and adults, a need about which Leonard Scigaj speaks:

Fantasy science fiction frees the imagination by providing metaphorical truths at a high level of generality, to which we attach meaning according to our own personal needs. Even as adults we periodically need to believe that we can, metaphorically speaking, rescue princesses [and princes], destroy Death Stars and raise space vehicles from bogs. (Scigaj 214)

Lucas inadvertently changed Hollywood and the whole attitude towards making movies. After Hope:

Hollywood, which for years had ignored fantasy and adventure, would... be able to think of practically nothing else. fHopel launched the idea of the block­ buster ; E .T .. in 1982, created the obsession with it. (Base and Haslam 53)

LUCAS' INNOVATIVE MIXING OF GENRES

"Worrying about the purity of the genres is like worrying about the purity of the races." -- Joanna Russ

"If fantasy cinema has a saviour, George Lucas is it." -- Peter Nicholls

Lucas knew the F/SF film genre very well. Film serials which played at the theaters every Saturday afternoon in the

1930s and '40s ceased to be made after the advent of television in the mid-1950s. (Salem 14) But at that point the serials began to be shown on Lucas' favorite television show, "Adventure

12 Theater'

"[On it Lucas watched] films with exotic titles such as Flash Gordon Conquersthe Universe. Don Winslow.of the Coast Guard, and others featuring Lash La Rue, Tailspin Tommy, the Spy Smasher, and the Masked Marvel....[He] also devoured cartoons, "Perry Mason“...and watched Westerns like “Have Gun Will Travel," "Gunsmoke,“ and “Maverick.” There were also old movies on TV, hundreds of them, liscensed to television by the film studios in a vain effort to dominate the new medium." (Pollock 17)

So far I have named three genres as having elements in Star

Wars - fairy tale, myth, and F/SF '■

[S]ome of the most popular teen films use elements of as many different genres as possible in order to "maximize" their audience appeal. Thus, a part of the appeal of a movie like FHopel is that it includes elements of a wide range of genres, including adven­ ture , war, western, initiation, romance, sci-fi, fantasy, comedy, techno-thriller, and horror. Never­ theless, few teen films are so expansive in scope, nor do such diverse genres often blend as well as they do in rHopel. Few filmmakers have the creative capacity of George Lucas. (Schultze et al 221)

Of the three films in the trilogy Hope may blend the most genres but at least two of the three make visual allusions to earlier films. For instance, Dan Rubey points out that the scene

in Hope in which Luke finds the charred skeletons of his aunt and uncle in front of his home is taken from John Ford's western The

Searchers (1956) (Rubey 12). I have a vague memory from early childhood of being taken to see an adventure film set in the

Middle East in which the hero was caught in a room where the walls converged, just like those of the garbage compactor in

Hope. Also, in both Hope and Jedi Luke and Leia swing across open space together on a rope like Tarzan and Jane» and in Jedi. 13 in a suitably swashbuckling manner, Luke walks the plank just as

Errol Flynn did in pirate adventure films. (Lancashire)3

In 1970 when Lucas "cemented the deal for Star Wars....[he] described [it] as 'this big sci-fi/space adventure /Flash Gordon thing'." (Pollock 103) But he radically modified the genre:

Lucas went back and looked at the original serials like "Flash Gordon." "I was appalled at how I could have been so enthralled with something so bad.... And I said, 'Holy smokes, if I got this excited about this stuff, it's going to be easy for me to get kids excited about the same thing, only better.'" (Pollock 17)

One of the most obvious changes in the F/SF film genre as

Lucas has developed it is a speeding up of the pace:

A short time ago, in this very galaxy, George Lucas launched a cycle of pure action movies that look as if they're running on fast forward when compared to their predecessors. Thanks to the influence of television, the 30-second and 15-second commercial and, of course, video, the audience today is seeing faster than they saw in the 1950s and '60s. (Horgan 14)

"Lucas' sophisticated visual sense [allows him to] project the movie inside his head and know how many frames each sequence needs to be." (Pollock 54) From the beginning, when he made his first formal film, Look at Life (1965), in an animation class at

University of Southern California:

Lucas established his movie-making style: a fast pace (a new photograph appeared every five frames, or each eighth of a second), a reliance on sound to convey emotion, and a spontaneous style with considerable dramatic impact. (Pollock 56)

While Star Wars has a fast pace, I do not think it fits into

Horgan's description above of films that are "pure action".

14 Speilberg and Lucas' Indiana Jones trilogy comes closer to being

'pure action' with one thing after another happening for the sake

of keeping the story constantly moving-4

The pace of the trilogy does seem to increase as we progress

through it, however. For instance, the sequence in Jedi where

Luke and his friends defeat Jabba proceeds at a breathtaking

speed, just like the initial ten minutes of Raiders of the Lost

Ark (1981), the first Indiana Jones film. But the story of Star

Wars matters too, and the characters, who are simultaneously

stereotyped and individualized, are a great part of its appeal.

Some writers of science fiction literature dismissed Star

Wars as unworthy of the name of 'their' genre>5 one reason being

its "deliberate ignoring of the absolute constraint of science."

(See quote from Croghan, p.9) For instance, it is impossible to hear space ships moving since space is a vacuum6 yet the sounds are in the films.

What is essential to [SF] is that it projects into contexts which are at variance with what is now taken to be basic fact or law. Star Wars is about the distant past rather than the future. It is science fiction because it projects humanlike characters into a civilization with a vastly more advanced technology than ours and into a cosmos not altogether governed by Einsteinian physics. (Smith 5)

The opening words of Hope -- A long time ago in a galaxy far

far away -- "set it up as fantastic rather than futuristic"

(Nicholls 95). Hope is also heroic in style. As a 'Sword and

S o r c e r y ' story it:

deals as does all fantasy with the irrational - the area of myth and the subconscious...,At all times Fantasy has explored its world by using the common

15 matters of its time. This common imagery provides its symbols...20th century Fantasy therefore is illuminated and illustrated by scientific imagery just as the fantastic writers of the 18th century used religious imagery, e.g., mad monks.(Croghan 2)

Schultze et al describe Hope as including elements of many genres. I think that two of them, 'techno-thriller' and

'horror', do not fit -- Lucas intended these films for children?

-- but the rest of the genres do, especially 'war' and 'western'.

The fact that the Star Wars films are partly war movies is clear from the amount of screen time given to large-scale battles, in Hope and Jedi particularly. They are 'fight' movies too, however, films in which hand-to-hand combat is shown many times in close-up shots. Unlike the better kung-fu movies, though, the emphasis is not primarily on the excellence and beauty of the fighting, but on the psychological conflict. This emphasis is made clear by the fact that the fighters often duel verbally as they fight physically (for example, Ben and Vader in

Hope. and Luke and Vader in both Empire and Jedi ) and by the fact that the fights are emotionally charged for both the characters and the filmgoers.

Robert Kolker describes Hope as "prophesying cosmic warfare

...[and] demanding perfect passivity in the face of [its] spectacle." (Kolker 142) Cosmic warfare certainly being depicted on the screen. Just as the earth could be destroyed by nuclear war, so the planets in the Star Wars galaxy are under threat of total annihilation from the Empire's Death Star.

Visually, the films glory in explosions, particularly big

16 ones, which are to be perceived as bad if caused by the Empire and good if the Rebels have caused them. But the fact that both groups are proficient at setting off explosions, both are equally

'trigger-happy', is not addressed. Rather we are meant to enjoy the spectacle of destruction passively. As much physical fighting as possible, individual and collective, is an important part of the exciting pace and implicit message.

Star Wars, especially Hope, is also a western. The loner or individualist, for instance, is a stock character in westerns:

American movies present an endless series of lean strangers riding into town from who-knows-where. The celebration of the individual is the backbone of our mythologies, the promise inherent in most of our laws and attitudes. (Sayles 16)

In Star Wars Han is the loner, the man who apparently has no strings attached, the 'knight errant'.

Gregory Benford, an SF writer, says of the western and SF:

In American literature, the frontier is represented by the West. Robert Heinlein, [another SF writer], uses a version of the Western frontier, and in many ways the Western mythos has largely dominated American SF. (McCaffery 19)

In an analysis of Casablanca (1942) Krin and Glen Gabbard discuss a convention often found in the western -- the official hero (in Casablanca. Laszlo) versus the outlaw hero (in Casabl ari- c a , R i c k ):

[The] official hero...stands for the civilizing values of home and community, and [ the] outlaw hero... stands for ad hoc individualism. Although these mytholgical types at first appear to be at odds, they share a common purpose by the end, just as they do in films as generically dissimilar as Angels with Dirtv Faces.

(Gabbard and Gabbard 13)

17 Luke, of course, is the official hero, and Han (and later,

Lando) the outlaw hero.

S ..t.ar , „M.ara-lX.H..Q.E,.e.] was the first in a cycle of "disguised Westerns" that has achieved extraordinary popularity by reviving the outlaw hero/official hero plot. Since then, BeverlyHills Co p I and II, To p Gun, Earobo III, and Lethal Weapon I and II have recycled the same basic myth with enormous success. (Gabbard and Gabbard 16)

It is interesting that all the other movies the Gabbards name with two hero plots are 'fight' movies, in some cases, cop/buddy action thrillers, intended for young people and adults.

This suggests that Hope is, among other things, an almost blood­ less >8 and therefore, in terms of the true nature of violence, an unrealistic, action/fight movie for children and young people.

Now we turn from historical evaluation of the trilogy to a brief consideration of the theoretical frameworks I am using to examine it. What are the assumptions behind my standpoint on

18 CHAPTER TWO THEORIES BEHIND THE PRACTICE IN THIS THESIS

"I'm beginning to realize that movies are like operas. There's so much that's multi-layered in the sense that you have picture, story, music, costumes... so many things to appreciate and think about. If painting is two-dimensional, then movies are almost four-dimensional. When they work, they can really clunk you over the head and be powerful." -- Steve Martin

"Whether we like it or not, it is the movies that mold, more than any other single force, the opinions, the tastes, the language, the dress, the behaviour, and even the physical appearance of a public comprising more than 60 percent of the population of the earth." -- Erwin Panofsky, 1934

THOUGHTS ABOUT HOW FILM WORKS

In thinking about a work of art, we assume that the artist creates it from his or her subjective point of view, a viewpoint that has a profound effect on the relationship between apparently objective reality,i and the art work. The artist or filmmaker

The question then arises, how do filmgoers see and hear films? The relationship of the filmgoer to the screen, has been described by various metaphors, first thought of by individuals then developed by others till whole schools of thought were built around them: the screen is a frame --Eisenstein and Arnheim, a window -- Bazin, sometimes a frame and sometimes a window --

Mitry, or the screen is a mirror -- more recent psychoanalytical- ly-oriented theorists. (Andrew 12-13)

But let us suppose that the screen, or, to be more specific, a film is like a pair of glasses with a built-in hearing aid*3

Then, in watching and listening to it, filmgoers would see and

19 hear as the filmmaker did. Or, making the metaphor less mechani­ cal, what if, temporarily (at least for the duration of the film), we had the filmmaker's visual and aural perspective on the world? In other words, we would possess the filmmaker's eyes and ears. If this were so, if we could have the filmaker's subjec­ tive point of view and hearing, we would then know the world of the film as the filmmaker did when he or she created it.

Discussing perception in films, Dudley Andrew suggests that

Psychologically, cinema does indeed affect us as a natural phenomenon. Viewers employ their eyes and ears to apprehend visual and aural forms corresponding to things, beings, and situations in the world. The full machinery of cinema, the cinema as an invention of popular science, ensures that we can see anew, see more, but also see in the same wav. Most important, this naturalness suggests an attitude for spectators that involves curiosity and alertness within a "hori­ zon" of familiarity. In no other art form are these natural attitudes toward the art material so present. (emphasis in original) (Andrew 19)

In the world of a film the "visual and aural forms cor­ responding to things, beings, and situations in the world” have, of course, been chosen by the filmmaker. Lucas, then, as the

'auteur'4 of Star Wars, created its world for us by imaging it on the screen visually and aurally.

A METHOD OF ANALYSIS: DISCUSSION OF THE USE OF CINEMATIC FEATURES

"Filmmaking is knowing how to communicate visually." -- George Lucas

Historically, cinema as a field of study became part of the humanities rather than the fine arts.

Had film theory grown up in music or art departments, there might have been far more attention given to the

20 properties of the medium, more experiments done in the classroom on editing rhythms, colour, film syntax, and so on. (Andrew 8)

A number of film theorists, however, are working on film's

'grammar's and in my analysis of Star Wars I too am highlighting

the properties of the film medium, the kind of cinematic feature

Andrew is referring to. The most striking ones in the trilogy -

the fast pace of parts of the story achieved by editing, and the

mixing of genres -- I have referred to already.

Other cinematic features are a) narrative or plot devices;

b) the composition of scenes through the visual image or shot;

c ) mise-en-scene; d) special effects; e) sound; f) structural

devices like repeated visual or aural images, metaphor, symbol,

allegory, and visual, aural, and plot-based allusions to other

films; and g) montage or editing.6 By paying attention to the purpose of Lucas' use of filmic devices such as these, we can gain a clearer idea of what he is trying to convey to filmgoers.

Film's malleability as a medium, its unique capacity to create almost any effect on-screen, was a large part of what attracted Lucas to film in the first place. While studying film at university, Lucas developed his editing skills because he was weak at writing. He did not enjoy scriptwriting and shooting

films as much as editing which, he discovered, was the final way

to control what filmgoers saw. Steven Spielberg says of him,

George makes his visuals come to life with montage. That makes him unique in our generation, since most of us do it instead with composition and camera placement. (Pollock 54)

Spielberg's opinion notwithstanding, Lucas does have a strong sense of composition both in relation to the overall

structure of his films and to individual shots. Just as repeti­

tion is an important structural device in music, particularly in

drama, opera and films, where main characters often have an

associated motif, so it is important in the visual aspects of

film for underlining the connection between two scenes in an

individual film, or two or more different but related films.

Lucas often creates parallels between scenes to reinforce

what he wants to convey. Whether filmgoers are aware of these

patterns or not, they are nevertheless influenced by them. His

technique of using symmetry in the construction of the trilogy,

works to give filmgoers a sense of completion or resolution,

especially when the symmetry is underlined by music and other

film ic devices.7

In this thesis I am drawing out the implications* of some of

Lucas' parallels: chapters 3 to 5 discuss how Lucas uses them and

other cinematic features to emphasize his views on war, the

family, and religion. And to discern the nature of the material

Lucas emphasizes, I am using a particular psychological under-

standing of the family, and also examining the cosmologies or

worldviews explicit and implicit in the trilogy. A brief

explanation of each of these approaches follows.

SOME OBSERVATIONS ABOUT PSYCHOLOGY AND FILM

"Movies have become the great storehouse for the images that populate the unconscious, the chosen territory of psychoanalytic psychiatry." -- Krin and Glen Gabbard

22 Film theory has been strongly influenced by the general cultural climate, especially since about 1960. Because of this

it is appropriate for film theorists to learn from the other master critiques of culture, from linguistics, psychoanalysis, ideological analysis, and critical phil osophy. (Andrew 12)

Until the 1960s there were very few interpretations of films based on psychology. But psychoanalytically-oriented film scholars, some of them practicing psychoanalysts, writing prodigious amounts and conferring together, have changed this situation, especially in the last twenty years or so.8

Various psychoanalytically based methodologies are useful for discussing the characters in Star Wars, their relationships with each other, and the development and resolution of themes in the trilogy. For instance, Star Wars can be viewed from a

Jungian archetypal perspective, or as 'Oedipus in Space', using a

Freudian viewpoint. Andrew Gordon does the latter in his three articles on the trilogy, (See Bibliography) and finds Jedi disappointing because it does not follow the usual pattern for- resolving an Oedipal conflict. Or the trilogy can be looked at as the journey of a hero: Lucas' mentor-in-print,9 Joseph Camp­ bell, familiar with both Freud and Jung's thought, uses their ideas, in combination with world mythology, to describe the monomyth of the hero, the apparently universal story of initia­ tion , descent to the underworld, and re-birth.

New knowledge about the impact of the family as a system on the lives of its individual members (the first research was done

35 years ago io) is another psychological tool for understanding

23 [In family therapy] the family rather than the indivi­ dual is in psychotherapy, on the assumption that neurosis is the product of disturbed relationships between family members.11

Family therapy...has brought new insights into the field of literature and the arts. In this, the impact of the new whole-family psychology could be compared to the advent of psychoanalysis as a metatheory outside the consulting room, which led to a major reappraisal in, for example, the fields of history, biography and literary criticism.... The next stage is the outward movement of ideas and concepts first developed within the practice of family therapy, a movement which leads out into the work of other disciplines, and then beyond that into the understanding of human behaviour at large. (Thompson and Kahn 146)

According to the family systems model, each member of the

Skywalker family plays a part in the whole system, profoundly affecting the other members as together they maintain the family system constructed by the adults, primarily Anakin and his wife

(who is unnamed). Family systems theory holds that all of us have been profoundly affected, and continue throughout our lives to be affected by our families of origin. Therefore, a person desiring help cannot be looked at in isolation. The context for that person's life, or the whole family, must be taken into account in order to assess the situation and reflect on possibi­ lities for change. 12 Whether he has ever heard of family systems theory or not, Lucas, by virtue of being a family member, knows experientially, as we all do, how a family works.

Just because we have this knowledge does not mean we find it easy to accept a theory such as family systems, however. Because families demand of their members complete allegiance to their

24 view of reality, most of us, not surprisingly, are resistant to the insights of this approach to understanding ourselves and our interactions with our families, especially since it takes for granted that every family member has responsibility for the nature of a family, especially the parents.*3 Thus, Lucas being as typical a family member as anyone else, we should not be sur­ prised to see both healthy and unhealthy (or functional and dysfunctional) behaviour mixed together in the trilogy, as if dysfunctional were as worthy of praise as functional behaviour.

UNDERSTANDING LUCAS' WORLDVIEW

"I am simply trying to struggle through life, trying to do God's bidding." -- George Lucas

"There's a reason this film FHopel is so popular. It's not that I'm giving out propaganda nobody wants to hear." — George Lucas

In addition to showing how Lucas has shaped his story by the effective use of certain filmic features to highlight the intricacies of the family drama, this thesis also examines Lucas' philosophical position vis a vis the world, on the assumption that a work of art presents the perpective of the artist who created it,i4

Lucas' personal sense of purpose, and his controlling vision for his saga gave him the persistence to create it when he had little external s u p p o r t , especially for making the first, film:

Lucas wanted to instill in children a belief in a supreme being -- not a religious god, but a universal deity that he named the Force, a cosmic energy source that incorporates and consumes all living things.... To

25 Lucas, the Force means looking into yourself, recogniz­ ing your potential, and the obstacles that stand in your way. He had undergone just this kind of intro­ spection following his car accident -- it was his religious conversion, and he wanted to share it with everyone. (Pollock 139-40)

In other words, from the beginning Lucas had a message to

convey through the story, and decisions about how the story would

look and sound on the screen were affected by this message:

The message of Star Wars is religious: God isn't dead, he's there if you want him to be. "The laws really are in yourself," Lucas is fond of saying; the Force dwells within. The major theme in Star Wars, as in every Lucas film, is the acceptance of personal responsi­ bility , "the fact that you can't run away from your fate." What Lucas seems to be saying is that we can't run away from our calling or mission in life but have a duty to do what is expected of us. Hard work, self- sacrifice , friendship, loyalty, and a commitment to a higher purpose: these are the tenets of Lucas' faith, (Pollock 139-40)

Lucas believes the Sixties had a tremendous impact upon

North American society, one which we have not finished feeling

the effects of. (Sheff 244) As a 'child of the Sixties', Lucas

is presenting one part of its mindset in the themes of Star Wars:

the battle between good and evil; the ability of a free-spirited, unsophisticated society to win ultimate victory over a high-tech dictatorship; the power of an individual to prevail against all odds, if only he has faith in himself. (Clarke 1983 52)

Lucas is telling young people that, as long as they choose good rather than evil, they can do anything they set their minds

t o . Since 'The s k y 's the limit ! ', they can all become s k y w a l k e r s , 1 5

26 CHAPTER THREE THE WORLD OF STAR WARS

INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF OVERVIEW

What is the world of Star Wars like? It is a mythic world.

The images on the screen before us suggest it belongs to a time both before and after ours historically. The costuming has a medieval quality1» and the authoritarianism of the members of the

Empire, and, to a lesser degree, of the Jedi, seems to belong to feudalism. Yoda looks a little like a very elderly Oriental (his karate-style robe helps to convey this impression); the costumes of the Imperial officers are similar to those of Japanese officers during World War II2; the religion of the Force has features of Eastern mysticism; and the tricks the Jedi do are like those performed by the adepts in Easterns. The technology of the humans and various other species, however, (excluding the simple but very effective military technology of the Ewoks), is more advanced than ours, both on the various planets and satel­ lites , and in space. Visually, then, Star Wars has elements from the East and the West, and is both our past and our future.

Star Wars is also a world preoccupied with fighting. Scene after scene depicts events such as strategizing, spying, chases, fight training, torture, imprisonment, fights between humans and ferocious beasts, hand-to-hand combat, battles on land and in space, and explosions. Conflict, individual and collective, is the main activity in this world.

For instance, after the receding text at the beginning of

Hor>e which tells us about Star Wars' central conflict, we see and

27 hear it for ourselves. The initial shots on the screen show the size contrast between the huge Imperial ship and the much smaller

Federation (or Rebel) ship3 it has captured. Next, shots of the interior show us the forced boarding of Leia's consular ship by

Vader and his troops, and the contrast in size between Vader and

Leia, as well as many other details, help us to see immediately who we are intended to perceive as the 'underdogs'.*

Since it is mainly the men in this world who engage in physical combat, Star Wars shows us many more men on-screen than women.5 The men are interested in such questions as 'What does it mean to be a man?' 'How do I become a successful one?', and the films are preoccupied with finding the answers. So Star Wars is also a world which is concerned with the struggle involved in becoming a man.

The background music reinforces the largely male militarism of Star Wars. The two main themes John Williams wrote to represent the good and bad characters are martial-sounding marches. "Star Wars (Main Theme)" in G major is the piece of music most closely associated with the heroes, especially Luke ; it is also used in minor keys at a slower pace during scenes of tension or fighting. "The Imperial March (Darth Vader's Theme)" in G minor is played assertively every time Vader appears, including at his funeral, where it is repeated more quietly with simpler orchestration. "Vader's March" also represents the

Empire and the dark side of the Force. (See Appendix B for piano version samples of the music.)

28 The world of Star Wars is also a place where the Force is the supreme underlying principle. It is an impersonal energy

field that encompasses literally everything, and has both a good and a dark side. Thus, this is a world in which the central struggle is between good and evil within the one Force.

So that we, the filmgoers, will have a clear picture of who

is cooperating with whom, the major characters indicate their allegiance to either the good or the dark side of the Force quickly. Ben is the first one to speak of the Force. He explains what it is to Luke, then demonstrates how it works as he, Luke, and the droids enter Mos Eisley. He undertakes to train Luke in the ways of its good side, which turn out to be both a martial arts discipline, enabling one to become a Jedi knight, and a particular understanding of the nature of reality.

Because the Force is invisible, it is manifested only indirectly in the characters' words, actions and attitudes.

Words or events relating to the Force occur intermittently throughout the trilogy, as sound or sight images which must be interpreted. The closest we come to a character who incarnates the good side of the Force, is Ben in Hope. Yoda in Empire, and

Luke in Jedi, For the first two films Ben and Yoda"s opposite seems to be Vader; then, as we progress through Jedi. the Emperor takes on the role of the incarnation of the dark side.6

The good side of the Force has its own music, "May The Force

Be With You" in C minor, which, together with the "Star Wars

Theme", provides the background music for the scenes with Luke in

29 them. But the Force Theme is used whether the activities he is

involved in have anything to do with the Force or not,'»’

The emphasis on fighting throughout the trilogy causes the

Force to come to represent the cosmic struggle between good and

evil. It is like a huge projection of the war the humans and

their allies are having with their enemies. But in film, a very

visually-oriented medium, it is difficult to make an immense

invisible energy field credible. Thus, the filmic elements in

Star Wars must carry the weight of evidence for the existence of

the Force. In particular, characterization, acting and plot gain

in importance because they convey not just the nature of the

people in the story and the kind of story it is, but also the

bel iefs of those characters.

In summary, the efforts of various characters in Star Wars

to become a man occurs in the context of the cosmic opposition

between good and evil. The actual work the characters are

engaged in, then, is the ongoing struggle to become a good man, not just morally good but whole, a man of integrity. This is the

goal Luke, Han, Lando, and Vader have achieved by the end.

How these four male characters become men of integrity is

the subject matter of the trilogy. What the means for achieving

this goal are, and whether those means are credible and convinc­

ing , are the topics of the rest of this chapter and the ones that

follow i t .

30 THE EXTERNAL CONFLICT IN THIS WORLD

"Life is trouble.“ -- Zorba the Greek "In this world you will have trouble." -- Jesus "I loved the war. It was a big deal when I was growing up. It was on all the coffee tables in the form of books, and on TV with things like 'Victory at Sea.' I was inundated with these war things." -- George Lucas

Mho..is fighting with whom?

"This whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and horor." -- Fredric Jameson

"When the rich fight, the poor die." -- Jean Paul Sartre

The external conflict in the trilogy occurs between two groups with opposing views. Those still loyal to the Old

Republic or Federation have formed a Rebel Alliance because of the oppression of the Galactic Empire. They want to be able to

live their lives without the threat of others controlling them

through weapons of mass destruction and terror, like the Death

Star. Those who rule the Empire have no compunction about

threatening the annhilation of a whole planet in order to exert c o n t r o l ,

The one value the two groups have in common, however, is their willingness to use violence to achieve their ends. The

Rebels may not blow planets up, but they have no hesitation about blowing up huge Imperial battle stations like the Death Star, in self-defense, of course. The trilogy shows explosion after

31 explosion, and the ones dwelt on the most lovingly are caused by the Rebels.

For instance, the explosion of the Death Star at the end of

Hope looks like a sparkling snowfall. It is pretty -- bright pieces of white light falling gently. First we hear the sound of the explosion, then music -- a rising four-note chord, the top note held, then tinkly descending phrases. The shot lasts about ten seconds, much longer than others in this part of the film.

Emotionally, this explosion is the high point of Hope. All the events in Luke's life, particularly those we have seen on­ screen, have built towards this moment which is not allowed to pass without reactions from the four major male characters in the film. Immediately after the explosion, there are five brief shots: Han, excited about Luke's success, saying, "Great shot kid! That was one in a million."; Luke, his eyes closed in relief, his lips moving, perhaps in prayer, and Ben's voice saying to him, "Remember, the Force will be with you -- always";

Vader's ship spinning through space; Vader upside-down inside his ship,8 then gradually stabilizing it; and Vader's ship flying away from us.

The shots are brief because the pace of the montage is remarkable. From the shot of Luke in his ship with Ben saying,

"Use the Force, Luke” to the shot of the rebel ships returning to their base after the Death Star has exploded, in approximately two minutes and eight seconds, there are 72 separate shots, on the average almost two (1.7) shots per second!

32 We are clearly intended to admire the Rebels as much because of their flying and fighting skills as because they are the

'underdog good guys'. Watching them perform well in difficult circumstances is part of the thrill of the film.

H o m does.Lucas help us choose sides?

From the beginning of Hope Lucas leaves us in no doubt about who ha wants us to root for. Besides the fact that Leia's ship is boarded violently by Imperial troops, the way both major and minor characters are presented during the initial sequence of shots helps us to identify with the underdogs. For instance, the droids R2 and 3P0 are breakable simply by virtue of being machines, 3P0 is very anxious, and the interchanges between them are humorous; Leia also looks vulnerable because of her size and her white clothes. As well, we see the faces of several indivi­ dual Rebel soldiers who look strained and tense as they crouch in the passageway with guns at the ready, waiting for the enemy to break into their captured ship and attack them.

When the Empire' s Storm troopers do arrive, their faces are. not visible. These soldiers are anonymous, each body fully encased in a spacesuit of white armour.9 And when Darth Vader, their commander, appears, his face too is covered by a mask, black and skull-like in shape with reddish eyes, and his heavy breathing, electronically modified voice, and aggressive be­ haviour all inspire fear.

Throughout the trilogy this difference in presentation is consistent. The Rebel pilots, for example, whom we would not

33 necessarily expect to come to know individually, are each given

screen time so that we can differentiate one from the other.

Just before the attack on the Death Star, these pilots report in

to their leaders one by one so that there is a brief shot of each

man, and, though they are facing the possibility of death, there

is a cheerfulness and cameraderie among them. We occasionally

see close-ups of individual Imperial officers too; but they look

formal -- going about their duties, or scornful -- mocking a

person or idea, or fearful -- waiting for Vader's wrath to

descend upon them.

Thus from the beginning Lucas establishes opposite atmo­

spheres in the scenes showing each group: the Rebels have a

"We're all in this together and every one of us counts" attitude, whereas it is pointless for officers of the Empire to establish personal loyalties since the person superior to them in rank may be killed any time for not obeying Vader.

This difference in mood between the two groups is based on their attitudes towards the importance of individual human lives.

Although we are not shown or told why this is so, the Rebels value every person, whereas those who belong to the Empire are just that -- belongings, people who are someone else's possession or slaves. Rather than an alliance or community, the Empire is an impersonal military system which considers its members dispensable: its Stormtroopers are drones or cannon fodder, and

if an officer fails to accomplish the task required of him, another one immediately takes over his function. In the Empire,

34 with its emphasis upon perfection in performance, the price for failure is death.

This rule applies all the way to the top in the Empire.

Even when you have not failed, you can be replaced: in Empire

Vader tells Luke he can destroy the Emperor, and invites him to rule the galaxy together with him; then later, in Jedi with Vader present, the Emperor invites Luke to kill Vader and join him in ruling the universe. The rule in the Empire is "Eat or be e a t e n " . 10

We have a hint of the sadism in the rulers of the Empire in

Governor Tarkin's decision to destroy Alderaan. Tarkin's ostensible purpose is to test the. functioning of the Death Star.

But he also wants to torment, Leia by forcing her to watch the total destruction of her home planet, and, presumably, of her family and friends, because, even after she apparently gives him the information he wants -- the location of the Rebels' base he orders his men to proceed with the destuction anyway.

This explosion is the first major one in the trilogy, and, like the blowing up of the Death Star later, it is built up to by tension-creating shots beforehand of Tarkin being sarcastically polite and formal towards Leia, of Leia protesting, "No, Alderaan is peaceful" and looking horrified, and of Imperial soldiers preparing to fire. The shot of the explosion lasts only about three seconds, perhaps emphasising how quickly a whole planet can be destroyed. If we judge only by the lengths of the explosions,

Lucas is more interested in dwelling on a successful military

35 exploit (the exploding of the Death Star) than a horrific deed of

destruction (the blowing up of Alderaan).

Caputi thinks Alderaan seen from space with its blue water

and soft green continents is

a very graphic depiction of what a planet like the earth would look like being annihilated by a beam weapon. I suggest that, on some level, most viewers get the message that Alderaan equals earth. It looks just like the earth and frankly it is the only thing in the movie that does; moreover, it is linked with the only woman in the movie. Here we arrive precisely at the deep conjunction between Star Wars fHopei, the movie, and "Star Wars", the technomilitary extravagan­ za . The shared naming is completely logical for each visualizes/portends the complete destruction of the earth. (Caputi 519)

Visually, we are seeing the conquering of the new West -- space,

a concept emphasized by words used at the beginning of televi­

sion 's "Star Trek" series, "Space, the final frontier .

Tarkin and Leia's verbal sparring highlights the different attitudes of the two sides:

Tarkin: No star system will dare oppose the Empire now. Le ia: The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers. Tarkin: Not after we demonstrate the power of this s t a t i o n .

The Empire wants to control, exploit and destroy peoples and worlds, whereas the Rebels apparently want to support and enable those peoples and worlds to remain free.

"We have seen the enemy and it is us." -- Pogo

In other ways, however, the difference on-screen between the

36 two sides is not always clear. The military is indispensable to each, violence to achieve their ends acceptable, and they share

a machine ambience,...a basically inhuman atmosphere -- hard-edged, dry, and metallic. Technology initially seems menacing in images like the enormous battleship, or the Death Star, or Darth Vader's face mask, but every frame of the film celebrates machines and the speed and power they seem to promise, and the special effects create a technological kick for the audience. (Rubey 9)

The regimentation of the Empire's soldiers is matched by the military precision and Fascist echoes of the final scene in

Hope.11 and the battle scenes throughout the trilogy romanticize w a r :

rHope1 is the first war movie of a new age of elec­ tronic combat, a prediction of what war will feel like for combatants completely encapsulated in technology (Rubey 10)

Not only in Vietnam, but much more recently, in the 1991

Gulf War (called by some the "Eighth Crusade"12), the 'Blue Mach­ ine ', the U.S. Air Force, fought a 'clean' war in the air, untouched by the havoc it was wreaking on the ground. Pilots spoke of the high they experienced in 'dropping their payload':

Totally cut off from the effects of what they were doing by the speed and accuracy of their machines, the pilots viewed their bombing runs as aesthetic experi­ ences , as exciting and exhilarating moments in their lives -- the experience that [Hopei recreates through its use of special effects. (Rubey 10)

In Hope Luke succeeds in blowing up the Death Star because he listens to Ben who tells him to trust the Force, rather than his ship's computer, for finding the target. As he obeys, four factors come into play: Luke's developed skill as a pilot and

37 marksman, Ben's mentoring and fathering of him, the good side of the Force's guidance of Luke as he aims, and Han's help as he disperses the enemy fighters who are firing at Luke.

The third factor, the Force's influence, is the one that is emphasized the most, however, by shots of Luke looking puzzled until he realizes what Ben is telling him to do, and by the change in the background music from the Battle Theme to the Force

Theme. Luke "releases the missile instinctively, in a fantasy of bionic fusion with his ship made possible by the Force" (Rubey

10), and thus experiences (and we along with him) great excite­ ment and satisfaction, the high point of his life so far.

HOW MILITARISM AND RELIGION ARE COMBINED: THE WARRIOR MONK

But not only is hitting the target an exhilarating exper­ ience . It is also a vindication of the efficacy of the Force.

In Hope the Force is both Luke's co-pilot, and Vader's means of intimidating Imperial officers, and sensing things about other people. Except for saying "May the Force be with you", however, the other Rebels do not pay much attention to religion when it comes to fighting. Nor do the Imperial officers: they rely on their "technological wonder", as Vader calls the Death Star. The two sides are similar in this way. For most of the soldiers, if the Force has any value it is as a servant of technology.

But to Luke and Vader the Force is important: it 'is strong' in each of them (nature), Ben has trained both of them in its ways (nurture), and they have thus become more whole people:

38 Star Wars fit into, or perhaps reignited, the romanti- cization of the military in American films.... The idea has again taken hold that the military is good for you. ...The subtext in these romanticizations has less to do with the army as a necessary mechanism to keep the peace or make war than it does with the disorganization of personality that the hero or heroine -- and, by extension, the contemporary audience -- experiences. You can put the pieces back together again in the armed services, you can find your hidden strengths, you can discover the Force within you. (Jacobson 10)

The U.S. Army is very interested in the concept of people finding the Force within them, not for the sake of the people but to make them better fighters. It. has the

bizarre goal of developing the "warrior monk." This soldier would possess a combination of normal and paranormal fighting capabilities. He could implant thoughts into the minds of enemy soldiers to create confusion, detonate enemy weaponry through telepathy, or anticipate enemy movement through precognition. The warrior monk could jam computer equipment, induce physical illness or even death in an unseen enemy, all with the power of the mind. He could levitate, walk through walls, leave his body at will, and perform acts of psychic healing. (Watring 29-30)

Both Ben and Luke 'implant thoughts into the minds of enemy soldi ers to create confusion'; both Luke and Vader 'anticipate enemy movement through precognition' as they sense each other's presence; and Vader can 'induce physical illness or even death in an enemy' (although not an unseen one) as depicted in his tormenting and killing of fellow officers. Star Wars is showing us the very kind of soldier the U.S. Army wishes it could develop through human performance enhancement programs.13

As we watch Luke grow during the course of the trilogy, we are seeing the training of a warrior monk:

39 He is pure, asexual and heroic. He is also alone. He forms no strong friendships. He is unworldly always wearing the same drab clothing. He is also immortal. He may be wounded and is by Vader but his limb is replaced. He overcomes every danger and we know that even if he dies, he will not really die but will live on as other members of his caste do. (Kuiper 79-80)

Luke becomes an ascetic who

unconciously hopes that, by rigorous ascetic discipline and military drill, he can recreate himself as a "man of steel". totally unaffected by any dissipating emotions.(emphasis added)(Gabbard and Gabbard 1990 22)

In our world the man of steel is another fantasy character,

Superman. He is also an ascetic (or used to be before Hollywood

modernized him), although Luke's clothing, which, by Jedi. looks

like a priest's, emphasizes his asceticism in a way that Super­ man's costume does not.

But in his fight with Vader in Empire Luke discovers that

"the asceticizing of the body into a military machine" (Corilon

24) does not help if you are up against a stronger more ex­ perienced opponent who is also able to cause bodily harm by means of the Force. By the end of the trilogy, other than doing Jedi mind tricks and making his lightsaber come to him when it is out of reach, Luke is far more focused on reaching out in love than on using the Force. He still fights in the Emperor's Throne Room but only in defense of Leia, and once he sees how fighting is making him as destructive as Vader once was, he stops and

switches to personal pacifism.

But the damage has already been done. We, the filmgoers, have been attracted to Luke and Vader (the two characters little

40 boys pretend to be when they are playing) but not for their peacefulness. Since they are the key representatives of the two sides in the story's conflict, if they both believe in the value of becoming a warrior (Jedi) as a religious experience, who are we to quarrel?

The point of the emphasis on military activities in the trilogy seems to be to show men finding some sense of purpose in life. In the world of Star Wars, as in our world, many people suffer and die to allow this kind of fulfillment for a few.

41 CHAPTER FOUR BECOMING A MATURE MAN LUKE'S DESIRE FOR A FATHER

Luke's Adoptive Family of Origin

Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, Luke's adoptive parents, have the

Western world's traditional division of roles in their marriage:

Owen makes decisions and gets things done -- we first see him

with Luke buying new droids for his farm, and Beru takes care of

people's basic needs and tunes in to their feelings -- she cooks,

and she speaks to Owen about Luke's desire to leave the farm,

Owen is a worrier. He does not smile once during the few

brief scenes he appears in, nor does he want to listen to Beru's

opinions about how he should treat Luke, He is task-oriented,

driven, with an agenda for Luke that does not include Luke's

feelings and desires, Owen believes that what Luke should and

should not do is his decision, not Luke's, and not even Owen and

Beru's, Owen, the traditional authoritarian husband and father,

does not seem very happy about either role.

It is clear from Owen and Luke's discussion at suppertime

that Owen believes he has a right to exploit Luke as a worker,

and that it will not be easy for Luke to leave home. There are close-ups of all three characters with the camera lingering on the silent Beru, suggesting that she can feel what Luke wants and

is sympathetic to him.

Instead of an atmosphere conducive to enjoyment of each other's company and good digestion during the meal, with easy communication, relaxation and laughter, there is tension. Owen

42 will not give Luke any information about either Obi Wan Kenobi or his father. Luke's questions simply trigger the 'No talk' rule of a dysfunctional family.i

Beru asks Luke where he is going as he leaves, and, just as she finishes speaking and before he replies in frustration "Looks like I'm going nowhere", the music of the "Star Wars Theme" enters for the first time in the film. With its quick pace and

'upbeat' melody line, it suggests hope, the new hope of the title, which is here associated with the feminine represented by

Be ru. The question she asks Luke, "Where are you going?", functions at both the literal and the figurative level ; it implies that he is. going ( away from home, not just from the table), whether Owen likes it or not, and that he has the freedom to choose where he will go. The "Star Wars Theme" also suggests the vigour and idealism of youth, qualities which will enable

Luke to handle adventure once he finds it.

After Luke is gone, Beru smiles at Owen and warns him he will not be able to keep Luke on the farm indefinitely because

"he has too much of his father in him." Owen responds, "That's what I'm afraid of." Beru, with her skill at discerning what is going on in another person, has seen the truth about Luke. Owen sees it too, but represses it, hoping he can forestall the inevi­ table day when Luke leaves home and possibly follows in his f a t h e r 's f o o t s t e p s .

The next brief scene shows Luke outside his underground home, watching the two suns of Tatooine set. The "Force Theme"

43 begins, the music rises, and we realize the suns are setting on

Luke's childhood; he is about to enter a new phase of his life.

The mealtime disagreement about the course Luke's life should take was not just a 'generation gap' conflict, since Beru sympathizes with Luke, and Ben encourages him to leave Tatooine.

Rather it was a 'maintain the status quo' versus 'seek adventure' conflict, with the conservative character losing decisively.

The Empire has a hand in this loss too, in its disposing of

Owen and Beru later so that Luke never does have to find a resolution to the conflict with his uncle. Luke's desert planet is not just barren and sterile: in both Hope and Jedi he says that if the re is a bright center to the universe, then Tatooine is the place furthest from it. It is also a place of conflict -- the argument with Owen, and of evil -- the murder of Owen and

Beru by the Empire.

These early scenes follow a pattern that continues through­ out the trilogy: "No crisis; no change'. The crisis of losing his home is what precipitates Luke into adventure, rather than, with the guidance of his adoptive parents, going through a mature process of setting priorities, making life decisions, and then following through on them.

"SomeDamn Fool Idealistic Crusade"

Never having known his own father, Luke is hungry for any information he can get about him. But in his fear that Luke, like his father, will go off on an adventure from which he may never return, and in his preoccupation with farming on the

44 hostile surface of Tatooine, Owen is not able to give Luke the fathering he needs. Thus Ben is an answer to Luke's longings, especially since he knew Luke's father and will talk about him.

We have been prepared for Ben's first appearance by two contrasting attitudes towards him: Leia's plea to him for help in her hologrammed message, and Owen's reference to him as "a wizard" and "a crazy old man",

Our first impression of him on-screen is aural -- he howls to frighten the sandpeople away from Luke's landspeeder, then visual -- he wears a robe with a hood rather like a monk's. He is gentle with both Luke, who is slowly reviving after a bang on the head, and R2 who is frightened and hiding. Somehow he knew

Luke and the droids were in his part of the wilderness and so he came looking for them. Also he knows Luke's name without being told it, and the language R2 'speaks.' His strange behaviour initially, plus his intuitive abilities, mark him as a wizard.

The film's music gives us a hint about Ben's character too.

As he speaks to R2, the Force theme enters briefly in the back­ ground, beginning to identify him as one of the 'good guys' connected with the new phase of Luke's life. It then returns more strongly when Luke says the name 'Obi Wan Kenobi. Ben's mildly ironic humour about himself also endears him to us during the exchange about whether Obi Wan is dead or not.

His care for Luke, R2 and C3P0, even when they did not ask for help, marks him as a nurturer: a 'good' man can nurture. We see that Leia was probably right in trying to reach him to ask

45 for help because he is a rescuer. In fact, he seems to be the very surrogate father Luke needs. But in psychological termin­ ology, a Rescuer (capital letter to indicate a role a person can assume) rescues because he or she wants to feel needed by a

Viet im (another possible role).2 Thus we must see more of Ben before we can properly evaluate his character.

In the next long expository scene Ben does many fatherly things for Luke, not the least of which is simply to give of his time and himself. He corrects faulty information Luke has about his father and provides additional positive information so that

Luke now has two new role models -- Ben and his own father, both of whom were Jedi knights; he gives Luke his father's light- saber,3 a gift Owen would not allow him to receive; he answers

Luke's questions about how his father died; he tells Luke about the Force; and, after they have seen Leia's hologram message, he invites Luke to learn the ways of the Force and come with him to

Alderaan to help Leia and the Rebels in their fight against the

Empire. And then, just as Owen had feared, Ben does invite Luke to go on a "damn fool idealistic crusade."

Music -- notably the "Force Theme" entering at appropriate times and rising in volume as the scene ends with Luke wanting to, but not daring to, go with Ben -- reinforces the attraction for Luke of going off on an adventure to rescue a beautiful young woman. And Alec Guiness' subtle acting skills help make the invitation convincing: he plays Ben as persuasive but not overpowering, fully confident that Luke will choose to go with

46 him, Ben is a complete contrast to Owen who had nervously asserted his authority over Luke to prevent him from leaving the farm. It is no surprise to us, then, when, after the death of his adoptive parents, Luke announces that he wants to go with

Ben, and that he wants to "learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi knight like my father."

Luke's Father Figures : The Continuing Quest In Empire Yoda becomes another surrogate father for Luke.

And in Jedi. for a very short time until his death, Darth Vader openly acts in a fatherly way towards Luke -- at the cost of his own life. There is a recurring pattern in the trilogy of Luke's having a father figure, then losing him through death: by the end of Star Wars. Owen, Ben, Yoda and Vader have all had this role, then died. Ben's 'manifestations' after death, and the trinity that appears at the end of Jedi. visible only to Luke, suggest, however, that the last three are still available to Luke through the F o r c e .

Of the four 'fathers' Ben seems to be the most fatherly because of his gentle manner and helpfulness although he may simply be the best at keeping his motives hidden; and Yoda seems to be the second most fatherly. In Hope, when he talks to Luke for the last time in person, Ben calls him and Han 'boys,' and gives Luke his blessing: "The Force will be with you -- always."

Then, during the battle with the Death Star, he constantly en­ courages Luke with comments about the Force, and tutors him in using it rather than his targeting computer to fire the proton

47 torpedo into the thermal exhaust port.

In another post-death manifestation Ben 'appears'4 on

Dagobah to discuss with Luke and Yoda whether Luke should complete his Jedi training or try to rescue his friends. The

"Force Theme" enters in the background, connecting Luke, Ben,

Yoda and the Force through music. At the end of Hope Luke experienced Ben's voice as comforting. But this time Ben tells him that if he interrupts his training for the sake of going to help his friends, he, Ben, will not 'be there' for him: "If you choose to face Vader, you will do it alone. I cannot interfere."

Luke cannot understand why preparing to face Vader and the

Emperor could possibly be more important than rescuing Han and

Leia. The score seems to affirm his decision to leave: as Luke responds with a calm, "I understand" to Ben's warning or threat, the "Star Wars Theme" enters, the "Force Theme" follows, then the noise of the engines of Luke's departing ship gradually drowns out the music.

Ben does not tell Luke why he cannot interfere; he simply warns him that he cannot. So far Ben has been able to material­ ize , or at least speak, wherever and whenever he wants to. Yet he does not do either when Luke calls him as he hangs upside down on the weather vane at the bottom of Cloud City•5

There are structural reasons why this is so, of course. If

Hope is Luke's initiation, Empire is his descent into hell, and

Jedl is his return, or resurrection. When the story is looked at symbolically like this, it is impossible for Luke to have Ben

48 help him as he hangs in misery: this is his time of suffering, of

crucifixion, which he must face alone. Like Jesus on the cross,

he has to experience separation from his father.

But we need more than the structure of the trilogy as an

explanation for Ben's inability, or perhaps unwillingness, to

help Luke.6 We are faced with many questions around Ben and

Yoda's agenda for Luke, the central one being, why do they manipulate and 'guilt-trip' him about confronting his father?

For instance, just before he dies, Yoda assures Luke that his training is done, that he knows everything he needs to know

to become a Jedi. When Luke says, "Then I am a Jedi?", Yoda

shakes his head:

Ohhh. Not yet. One thing remains: Vader. You must confront Vader. Then, only then, a Jedi you will be. And confront him you will.

As with Ben's words, so here: there seems to be complusion.

Yoda as an authority figure in Luke's life is telling him what he must do, or, even if we call this discerning the future, he is

telling him what he will do. Either way Luke is compelled to

obey because of the amount of control over his life he has given

the Jedi master. Also Yoda is connecting the confrontation with

a goal Luke wants to achieve -- becoming like Ben and Yoda and,

in particular, like Vader before his fall, by learning to be a

Jedi. These are the three males he has chosen to model himself

o n .

But now that Luke knows who Vader is, confronting him is a

different matter from what it would have been before he had that

49 knowledge. This is his father from whom, the last time he faced him, he received a significant wound. Although Yoda says his

Jedi training is finished, in light of his previous experience

Luke does not feel as confident about the outcome as Yoda, By implication Yoda suggests that, whereas Luke was not ready for the burden of facing his father in their earlier encounter, he is ready now. After Yoda's death, however, Luke says dejectedly : "I can't do it, R2." Immediately, Ben speaks to comfort him : "Yoda will always be with you", then appears 'in person' to give his reason for not telling Luke that Vader was his father. One of

Ben's motives for appearing, however, is to persuade Luke to confront Vader. To Luke's protest that there is still good in

Vader, Ben says:

Ben : He's more machine now than man. Twisted and evil. Luke : I can't do it, Ben. Ben : You cannot escape your destiny. You must face Darth Vader again. Luke : I can't kill my own father. Ben : Then the Emperor has already won. You were our only h o p e .

Luke is not only depressed because Yoda has just died. He is also overwhelmed by the thought of killing his own father, and, probably at a level lower than consciousness, he is dis­ turbed by the fact that both Ben and Yoda have encouraged him to do it. He realizes that 'confront' is a euphemism for 'kill'.

Even though he knows from experience how ruthless Vader can be, Luke has only just found his father, and is not prepared to condemn him, let alone kill him. He wants to believe Vader is redeemable, to re-discover Anakin Skywalker in him. He wants to

50 be a Jedi but not at the cost of killing his real father to

satisfy his surrogate fathers, much as he may respect them and

feel beholden to them for love and training. They have given him

no evidence that the Empire's rule will end if Vader dies. Vader

is only the Emperor's second-in-command, and the Emperor could,

presumably, carry on quite well without him.

In a desperate effort to find someone else to 'do the job', Luke tells Ben that Yoda spoke of another, only to have Ben tell

him he has a sister. This information is no help to him in his

dilemma, though, since Leia is obviously less well-prepared for a

confrontation with their father than he is: she has not had Jedi

training. There seems to be no way out of what his mentors call

his 'destiny', but that destiny puts him in the untenable position of being asked to commit patricide.7

The Dysfunctionalasthe DisguisedTheFunctionalWHAT IS A FATHERLESS YOUNG MAN TO DO?

What are our options if we have not been parented well? We

can spend our lives looking for the ideal parent substitute, we

can rescue our parent(s), or we can recognize what happened and

set about 're-parenting' ourselves. Luke apparently chooses the

third of these options, but in reality acts on the first two.

His willingness to learn from Ben and Yoda is sourced in his need for the affirmation good fathering would have given him, and his need to be like his father. These needs are legitimate --

for better or worse, parents and parental figures are role-models

51 for children -- but the models do not have Luke's best interests

in mind. Not just Vader, but Ben and Yoda too, want to exploit

him, to use him for their purposes, although the latter two have

their agenda so well hidden in, and justified by, the intra-

galactic conflict that it is not obvious. As I have been

suggesting, however, there are hints along the way that all is

not well, and it is these hints we turn to now.

'The D en i a l .of ..Fe.el.ingB.' in the ..Pgafunctional.family.

One clue to 'something being rotten in the state of Denmark'

is the denial of feelings. From the beginning whenever Luke

tries to ask a question which might introduce a controversail

topic, he is 'shushed up'. When he wants to ask questions about

his father, a person he would naturally have deep feelings about,

Owen invokes the 'No talk' rule: Owen's attitude is that* strong

feelings are harmful, so it is best to pretend they do not exist.

Family therapist Virginia Satir speaks of The Five Freedoms

that a person in a healthily functioning family has. Freedom number 3 is the one of interest here -- "The freedom to feel what

one feels, rather than what one should feel.“ (Bradshaw The

Luke has little permission to have and know his own feel­

ings . At first, in Hope. Ben seems to encourage Luke to 'feel

his feelings'. As Luke practises with his new light saber, Ben

says, "Let go your conscious self and act on instinct", then pulls the blast shield of Luke's helmet down over his eyes so

52 that he cannot see. As Luke fights 'blind', Ben says "Stretch out with your feelings", and, with his encouragement, Luke does eventually hit the remote. Also, at the end of Hope. as Luke is

flying with the other Rebel pilots against the Death Star, Ben's voice says, "Luke, trust your feelings", and, later, "Use the

Fo rce, Luke. Let go, Luke".

Ben is not really telling Luke to become aware of his

feelings, however, but rather to fight and fly instinctively, 'by the seat of his pants', to 'tune in' to his hunches. As Ben uses the word 'feelings', its meaning is more like 'intuition', 'sixth s e n s e '.9

Leia, on the other hand, does give Luke permission to have feelings. She responds sympathetically to his sadness over the loss of Ben, for instance. With the "Force Theme" playing softly in the background she puts a blanket over his shoulders and assures him, "There wasn't anything you could have done."

Because she, like Beru, is female, Leia is depicted as 'good with emotions'. R2 also makes sympathetic noises at this point and on many other occasions in the story.

In these films women and a 'pet' droid can deal with feelings, whereas the men have difficulty. For instance, Han, symbolically Luke's 'big brother', says nothing directly to Luke concerning his grief about Ben. He does not know how to respond to someone in pain. In the brief scene in the cockpit of the

Falcon as the Rebels are leaving the Death Star, Han does not even use Ben's name: "I hope that old man got that tractor beam out of commission or this is going to be a real short trip."

Once they are safely away, Han's response to Luke's grief is to suggest action as an anodyne. As Luke is mourning, Han invites him to do something *0, namely shoot at the enemy: "C'mon buddy, we're not out of this yet."

Then, in Empire. while Yoda is training Luke, he informs him that some feelings are fine and others are not, and that he is to avoid the dangerous ones because they will pull him over to the dark side of the Force, just as they did Vader:

A Jedi's strength flows from the Force, But beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression - the dark side of the Force are they. When once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you it will, as it did Obi Wan's apprentice.

And in Jedi. when Luke realizes that Leia is his sister, Ben warns him against even his 'good' feelings:

Luke: Leia! Leia's my sister. Ben: Your insight serves you well. Bury your feelings deep down, Luke, They do you credit. But they could be made to serve the Emperor.

Although we see Luke experiencing various feelings -- fear, sadness, elation, anger -- the message given him is 'Don't have any feelings because when you are in the grip of an emotion you may not be completely in control. Passions are dangerous: look what they did to Vader.'

Not only are feelings not to be trusted: the human body is ultimately dismissible. If you cannot 'feel your feelings', then you are clearly not allowed to know that you are a physical creature as well as a psychological and spiritual one. The first

54 hint that, in addition to feelings, the body itself is not to be trusted is Ben's advice when he pulls the blast shield down while

Luke is practising with the remote, "Your eyes can deceive you.

Don't trust them."

While it is true that our senses can deceive us, Ben's advice fits the Platonic conception of the body as a deceiver, a cumbersome nuisance we leave at death, and as belonging to the world of illusions, what Hindus call mava.

The concept of the body's unimportance is reinforced by

Ben's comment as he fights with Vader: “If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine." Then he holds his lightsaber in front of his face, refusing to fight, is struck by Vader's lightsaber, and at the same moment disap­ pears , leaving only his cloak behind. His words and actions both suggest he considers his body, his physical life, unnecessary, but his post-death existence of great significance. He is warning Vader that death will not stop him. Lucas believes that

'You can't put a good man down':

When people die, their life spirit is drained from them and incorporated in a huge energy force in the sky. The Jedi knights are trained to tap into this collec­ tive energy, which gives them the status of magician warriors. (Pollock 140)

Right after Vader has cut him down, to help Luke, and to show that, in some fashion, he is still 'alive' and well, Ben speaks to Luke: “Run, Luke, run!" because, in his confusion and shock over seeing Ben 'killed', Luke is still exchanging fire with the enemy after his companions are safely aboard the Falcon.

55 And since the story is basically told from Luke's point of view,

Hfi. hear Ben's disembodied voice call out, just as Luke does.

The motif of dismissal of the body enters the story again as

Yoda trains Luke. Luke has failed to raise his spaceship from

the swamp by the Force. Yoda points out that the Force is his

ally, then continues:

And a powerful ally it is. Life creates it and makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

With the words "not this crude matter", he pinches Luke's arm as

if to say, 'Not this useless stuff that only causes us trouble

and pain, this flesh we're glad to be rid of when we die."

And then, as if to illustrate that our true state is to be

luminous rather than weighted down by our physical selves, Ben

appears on Dagobah in a shimmering blue light, apparently un­

limited in what he can do now that he is part of the Force.

When Yoda dies, his body also disappears as Ben's did,

except that his fades away gradually instead of disappearing

instantly.11 Both Yoda and Ben dispense with their bodies but

apparently not their former personalities. Ben, in character, communicates with Luke regularly to give him direction. After his death, Yoda does not speak and appear to Luke as Ben does, but he is a member of the pantheon at the end of Jedl.. as is

V a d e r .

Another clue that all is not well is the secret in the

Skywalker family. All the older characters, Owen, Beru, Ben and

56 Yoda, know the secret; but, in spite of opportunity to do so, all of them fail to tell Luke that Darth Vader is his father, After

Yoda has confirmed the truth of Vader's claim, Luke accuses Ben of not telling him. But Ben justifies his behavior by talking about the relativity of truth. He then takes the pressure off himself by pressuring Luke instead.

Family systems theory, developed gradually over the last thirty to forty years (See Chapter 2), is a useful tool for understanding what is going on among the members of the Skywalker family, including their friends and relatives. This theory says

Families are as sick as their secrets. The secrets are what they are ashamed of. Family secrets can go back for generations. They can be about suicides, homi­ cides , incest, abortions, addictions, public loss of face, financial disaster, etc. All the secrets get acted out. This is the power of toxic shame. (emphasis in original) (Bradshaw Healing 32)

We can suppose (nothing is offered by way of explanation) that Owen and Beru did not tell Luke about his father because they thought the truth would hurt Luke: he might try to find

Vader to verify what they had said, or, worse still, he might imitate Vader by leaving to become a Jedi, and then by choosing evil. They believed they should and could protect him from the hurtful truth, from Vader himself.

Ben and Yoda, it seems, did not tell Luke about his family history because of their plan for him to do battle with Vader eventually. This agenda on their part does not justify their lack of honesty with him, however.

Vader is the only older family member who tells Luke what

57 all the others have kept hidden from him (and from Leia). In their initial personal encounter, at first Vader plays the role of Persecutor to Luke's Victim, hitting Luke with flying objects and cutting off his hand. Then, as often happens in the role playing in a Drama Triangle, Vader switches to the role of supposed Rescuer, offering Luke the position of co-ruler of the galaxy with him. The peer relationship Vader is proposing, however, only counterfeits the friendship that can exist between a parent and adult child, since Vader wants to use Luke. But at least he is fairly open about his intentions:

You can destroy the Emperor. He has foreseen this. It is your destiny. Join me and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son. Come with me. It is the only w a y .

Luke finds out who Vader is in a situation of extreme stress. At first he denies what Vader has just said because naturally he has idealized Anakin Skywalker and does not want to believe the truth about him. He shouts "No" several times, as if to push the truth away from himself: his father is not evil, not

'Dark Father'. In his acting at this point Mark Hamill shows in his facial expressions several stages of the shock and grieving

Luke is rapidly passing through as he takes in this new informa­ tion : denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.i 2 The fact that in the end he accepts the truth also becomes clear when he chooses to fall down the reactor shaft. He would rather sur­ render to the possibility of death than identify with the evilness in his father. Family systems theory says that the family, like all social systems, has basic needs:

a sense of worth, a sense of physical security or productivity, a sense of intimacy and relatedness, a sense of unified structure, a sense of responsibility, a need for challenge and stimulation, a sense of joy and affirmation and a spiritual grounding. A family a l s o .ne e d s — a..mother and father who are committed In a b a s i c a l l y .healthy relationship and who are secure enough, to.parenttheir children without contamination. (emphasis added) (Bradshaw The Family 31)

The parents in the Skywalker family conceived Luke and Leia, then must have separated before the father knew the mother was pregnant, The mother died relatively soon after the twins were born. The father somehow realized he had a son, but did not know he had a daughter till he read Luke's mind as they fought in sZ&dj. • Every family system needs a functional marriage at its center. If the parents' relationship is not working, there is an intimacy vacuum which one of the children will move to fill by playing the role of Surrogate Spouse. Some other roles children play are Super-responsible, Little Parent, Mascot, Saint and

Hero, Scapegoat, and Lost Child. The names of these roles are capitalized to show that they are rigid:

They result from the needs of the system, not from anyone's individual choice. Nature abhors a vacuum. The children automatically work to provide for the system's overt and covert needs. (Bradshaw The Family 32)

In our society, a child who takes the role of Saint and Hero

[will become] a straight "A" student, [become] presi­ dent of the class and [win] honors. This person gives the family a sense of dignity. (Bradshaw The Family 32)

59 Luke plays this role in his family. He is the Rescuer; he works at getting others out of dangerous situations -- Leia in the Death Star, and Han and Leia in Cloud City, or out of a dangerous relationship -- Vader in his thralldom to the Emperor and the dark side of the Force.

' Abandonment.' and ' enmeshment' are key terms in this theory.

'Abandonment' means that in some fashion the child is not taken care of by the parents and ends up taking care of them, "Enmesh- ment is the term used to describe the violation of ego boun­ daries ." (Bradshaw The Family 70)

Both these terms apply to the Skywalker family. Luke and

Leia were 'abandoned' by the departure of their father, their removal from their mother at the time of her death or before, and their separation from each other when they were given to two different sets of parents to raise. Concerning Leia's adoptive parents we know little -- only that they may have died when

Alderaan was blown up. But in Luke's adoptive family we know that Luke took care of his adoptive father Owen's security needs and thus was not able to meet his own need for growth and independence.

Instead, having learned how to rescue, he keeps at it, because it is something he knows how to do well. Bradshaw says:

All the rigid roles set up by family dysfunction are forms of abandonment. To be a family Hero, I had to be strong -- never showing the scared vulnerable part of me. Heroes are not supposed to be scared. The roles are like scripts given out for a play. They prescribe what feelings you can or cannot have. After playing my Hero role for years, I no longer really knew who I was. 60 In recovery I had to learn to be vulnerable. I had to learn...to follow rather than lead. Because the rolss maintain the balance of the system, they exist for the system. The children give up their own reality to take care of the family system -- to keep it whole and balanced.(emphasis added) (Bradshaw Healing 59)

Thus, applying family systems theory to Star Wars. we could say that Luke has already been 'set up' by his earlier life experience to want to fight on the side of the Rebels and help

Leia in Hope. to try to rescue Han and Leia in Empire. and to save his father in Jedi. His life will lack meaning if he does not attempt these tasks. All three films, therefore, show him earnestly and conscientiously setting about these tasks with his youthful strength. Though he appears free to do what he wants once Owen and Beru are dead, he is not free: he gave up some of his own reality long ago to take care of the family system.

Ben first speaks of Luke's 'destiny' in Hope just before he goes to turn off the Death Star's tractor beam: "Your destiny lies along a different path from mine." To illustrate the fatalistic viewpoint of Ben, Yoda, Vader and the Emperor I have underlined words in the next few paragraphs which suggest it.

Ben does not tolerate alternative understandings of the nature, of reality, especially while he is teaching Luke the ways of the Force. When Han says, ”I call it luck" as Luke finally hits the remote, Ben immediately counters with "In my experience there's no such thing as luck." The implication is that events never happen by accident but that everything is planned or

61 master-minded in some way by something or someone.

In Empire. as Ben, Yoda and Luke discuss Luke's future, Ben says about Han and Leia, "Even Yoda cannot see their fate". and, after Luke has left for Cloud City, Ben says, "That boy is our last hope."

Later, as Luke and Vader are fighting, Vader says, "Luke, you can destroy the Emperor. He has foreseen this. It is your destiny." "Come with me. It is the only wav." And, after Luke is rescued, he both 'speaks to' Vader, and 'hears' him saying again: "It is your destiny."

In Jedi, just before his death, Yoda tells Luke, "You must confront Vader." After Yoda's death, Ben says to Luke, "You cannot, escape your destiny. You must face Vader." When Luke gives himself up to Vader he says, "I will not turn -- and you'll be forced to kill me" to which Vader replies, "If that is your destiny." Vader also says about himself, "It is too late for me, my son." Then in the encounter between the Emperor and Luke, the

Emperor is constantly saying things like, "It is unavoidable. It is your destiny. You, like vour father, are now mine!" These words in the dialogue indicate that something other than nature, nurture and free choice is affecting the characters' lives.

The 'organiser of people's lives' is, apparently, the Force.

But there is as much evidence for personal brokenness, caused by- lack of health in intimate relationships, being the shaping factor in people's lives, as there is for an impersonal energy field. Luke feels compelled to rescue; Ben and Yoda sense that

62 need in him (perhaps because they too are Rescuers?) and use it,

hoping their champion can rid the galaxy of its chief terror,

Vader; and Luke and Vader feel drawn to each other, each wanting

to pull the other over to his side of the Force.

E n m ag Jua.ent-i.Life as an Appendage of Your Family System

Dr. Susan Forward says, "The single most dramatic difference

between healthy and toxic [or dysfunctional] family systems is

the amount of freedom that exists for family members to express

themselves as individuals." (174) Members of healthy families have lives of their own. But

Unhealthy families discourage individual expression. Everyone must conform to the thoughts and actions of

begins. In their efforts to be close, they often suffocate one another's individuality. (Emphasis added) (Forward 174)

Frequently in Star Wars. someone 'reads' someone else's mind. Ostensibly, it is the Force that enables one character to sense the thoughts of another: the ability to practise mental telepathy is part of knowing how to use, or simply 'possessing' the Force. But the concept of enmeshment also explains the various instances of this phenomenon, especially since they al1 occur between people who are closely involved with each other.

The only reason for postulating the Force as their cause is that it is described as an energy field which, presumably, could transmit the 'vibrations' that allow the characters to be aware of each other.

63 For instance, throughout Hope Ben senses how Luke is feeling and what he is thinking, even after, (and perhaps especially after) Ben has 'died'. Empire begins the same way > with Ben appearing in a vision to Luke as he lies injured in the snow, telling him what he must do, and therefore, by implication, assuring him that he is not going to die on Hoth. Yoda has watched Luke from afar, and in the tree-cave incident on Dagobah, also knows what is going on with Luke. Of course, some of Ben and Yoda's awareness regarding Luke derives from the wisdom of greater age and experience, but not all of it.

Emotionally involved with both Han and Leia, his 'siblings'

(Leia actually is, of course), Luke has a vision of them in pain and insists on going to rescue them against his surrogate fathers' advice. This event shows that enmeshment has differing levels: Luke is enmeshed with both Ben and Yoda, and Han and

Leia, but responds to the needs of the latter two, probably because those needs seem much more concrete and immediate than the longer range goals of dealing with Vader and rescuing the galaxy from the clutches of the Empire.

In spite of the fact that Vader abuses him physically in

Empire by using the Force to hurl objects at him, Luke feels drawn to him. This 'pulling' occurs not so much while they are fighting as later, after Luke has learned who Vader is, has let himself fall, and has been rescued by Leia who, since she can

'hear' his cry for help, seems to be as enmeshed with him as he is with her. The pulling occurs because Luke has at long last

64 found his father, and the fulfillment of Luke's desire gives

Vader great power over him. At the end of Empire physical injury and distance between them notwithstanding, Vader and Luke 'love' each other. Vader shows his attitude toward Luke in the brief scene in which he orders his men who are going to board the

Falcon to set their weapons for stun. Earlier he showed compas­ sion for Luke (but not Han) in testing the carbon-freezing unit on Han first to make sure it worked before subjecting Luke to it.

As part of the final scene of Empire a series of shots alternating between Vader and Luke, each in their own ship, shows them calling across space, with a slow version of "Vader's March" in the background to underline the strength of their feelings, the emotional pull each one feels:

Vader:(looking out the window of his ship) Luke. Luke: Father. Vader: Son. Come with me. Luke:(thinking out loud) Ben, why didn't you tell me? (looking at the Imperial ship and speaking almost to himself rather than the others in the Falcon's cockpit) It's Vader. Vader: Luke. It is your destiny. Luke:(whispering to himself, and in pain physically and emotionally) Ben, why didn't you tell me?

At this point in the saga Luke has bonded emotionally with his abuser. Not until later, however, does he have the oppor­ tunity to act on the bonding. In Jedi he voluntarily gives himself up to Vader. His action is made to seem reasonable because he claims he can sense the good in Vader, but he is actually choosing to risk death rather than stay away from a person who has exhibited offender's behaviour.

Thus, all the members of the Skywalkers' 'extended family'

65 are enmeshed with each other. In enmeshed families

much of a child's identity and his illusions of safety depend on feeling enmeshed. He develops a need to be a part of other people and to have them be a part of him. He can't stand the thought of being cast out. This need for enmeshment carries right into adult relation­ ships ....Enmeshment creates almost total dependence on approval and validation from outside yourself. Lovers, bosses, friends, even strangers become stand-ins for parents. Adults who were raised in families where there was no permission to be an individual frequently become approval junkies, constantly seeking their next fix. (Forward 175-176)

Luke has had surrogate fathers but apparently his relation­ ships with them have not met his needs. He wants to know whether his own father loves him, and is willing to die to find out.

Luke's relationship with his father is almost one of fealty, like a feudal vassal's towards his lord:

'Love', in our sense of the word, is as absent from the literature of the Dark Ages [sic] as from that of classical antiquity.... The figure of the betrothed is shadowy compared with that of the friend...The deepest of worldly emotions in this period is the love of man for man, the mutual love of warriors who die together fighting against odds, and the affection between vassal and lord.... The feeling is more passionate and less ideal than our patriotism. It rises more easily to heroic prodigality of service, and it also breaks more easily and turns into hatred: hence feudal history is full of great loyalties and great treacheries. (Lewis 9-10)

Vader and the Emperor's willingness to betray each other for the sake of having Luke as an ally is an instance of the 'great treacheries' Lewis speaks of here.

After Yoda and Ben's injunction to Luke that he must confront his father, this goal becomes all-consuming for him.

Luke, however, does not want to kill Vader. Believing on the basis of little evidence -- only Ben's description of Anakin

66 before he became Vader -- that there is still good in his father,

Luke wants to serve him by releasing him from his bondage to

e v i l ,

".The Song Is.Ended But The Melody Lingers On"

Once Vader rescues Luke from the Emperor, Luke's view of

reality has been vindicated. Even though Luke is sad because he

has just 'found' his father, and is immediately losing him, he is

also joyful because Vader has returned to being his true self,

and can now die in peace, reconciled with his son. Even the

names in the script reinforce Vader's conversion: the character

is called Vader till, at his request, Luke removes his mask, and

then he is called Anakin:

Anakin:(very weak) Now -- go, my son. Leave me. Luke : No. You' re coming with me. I can' t. leave you here. I've got to save you. Anakin: You already have. Luke. You were right. You were right about me. Tell your sister -- you were right. (emphasis added)

What could affirm your attempt to save your father more

explicitly than his saying you had succeeded, that you were right

about the good in him, and that you should tell your sister he had said you were right? Luke has apparently achieved in the

rescuing of his father what every child in a dysfunctional family

longs to bring about -- the redemption of a bad parent. As the people made responsible for the parent/child relationship, children believe that if they could just be 'good enough' or try

'hard enough', they could rescue their parents.

But at what price is Vader redeemed? Forward says

No matter how toxic your parents might be, you

67 still have a need to deify them. Even if you under­ stand , on one level that your father was wrong to beat you, you may still believe that he was justified. I.ntell.e.ctual_..nmie.rstanding is n o t .enough to..c .q n v l n c e your emotions that you were not responsible. There are two central doctrines to this faith in godlike parents: 1. "I am bad and my parents are good." 2. “I am weak and my parents are strong." These are powerful beliefs that can long outlive your physical dependence on your parents. These beliefs keep the faith alive; they allow you to avoid facing

(emphasis added) (Forward 17-18)

The price Luke has paid for deifying his father is the negation of his own feelings, of his very self. He has been so busy playing Hero for Ben, Yoda and Vader that he has had no freedom to be Luke, to feel angry about how he was treated by his father figures, or to pay attention to young women his age (other than Leia who turned out to be his sister and therefore not a potential mate)

Because he was abandoned emotionally, Luke's energy has gone

into creating a 'fantasy bond' with his father. Bradshaw says

a child who has been denied the experience of connec­ ting with his own emotions is first consciously and then unconsciously (through the internal identification with the parent) dependent on his parents.... Such a person cannot separate from his parents. He is fantasy bonded with them. He has an illusion (fantasy) of connection, i.e., he really thinks there is a love relationship between himself and his parents. Actually he is fused and enmeshed. This is an entrapment rather than a relationship. (Bradshaw Healing 46)

And it is an entrapment that lasts beyond death: the song m a y be over, but the melody lingers on. We see Luke solemnly cremating his father, the private equivalent in Star Wars of burial with full military honors. Then, at the celebration of

68 the victory, we see him preoccupied with his three fathers, acknowledging the presence of their spirits with the living in a

'communion of the saints' or 'Trinity of the Force' scene.

Presumably Anakin appears to Luke to show him that he is fine, and Ben and Yoda appear as an assurance that all is well and that they are reconciled with Anakin now too. Whatever their reasons for appearing to Luke at this time, they are all, especially Anakin, very important to him, and he could not be happy without knowing they were all right.13 He has to be pulled out of his own little world of just him and them by Leia, who encourages him to join the party.

Hamill's acting of Luke at this point suggests that he is slightly sad. The script says, "Luke seems distracted, alone in their midst, his thoughts elsewhere." Is he grieving the loss of his father? Now that he has proven himself capable of rescuing, he may be expected to assume even more responsibility than before. Is he mourning the end of his supposedly carefree youth?

Although he has two ' b i g brothers', Han and Lando, who are more mature now than when we first met them, he is again without a father for a mentor and a model.

What is a fatherless young man to do?*4

69 CHAPTER FIVE THE FORCE AND LOVE: TWO COSMOLOGIES

THE FORCE ACCORDING TO THE JEDIS

Luke: Is the dark side stronger? Yoda: No! No! Quicker, easier, more seductive. Luke: But how am I to know the good side from the bad? Yoda: You will know. When you are calm, at peace, passive. Mmmmm. A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack. -- The Empire Strikes Back

To recognize that evil in this world is active, powerful, and intelligently malign is not necessarily to question God's final authority nor to deny the unity and ultimate goodness of what God has created. Rather it is to recognise that, as St. Paul put. i t , "Our fight is not against human foes, but against cosmic powers, against the authorities and potentates of this dark world, against the superhuman forces of evil in the heavens." Leanne Payne

In their instruction of Luke, Ben and Yoda teach him that:

1) The Force is an immense energy field encompassing literally everything. 2) The Force can be found everywhere, inside and outside of everything. Theologically speaking, it is totally immanent with no transcendence at all. 3) The Force has two sides, a good one and an evil, or, as it is called in the films, a dark one. People can choose either side, but only the good side is worth choosing. If people choose the dark side they will be destroyed, or, to use Yoda's word about Vader, 'consumed'.

According to Yoda, while neither side of the Force is stronger, the dark side is 'quicker, easier, more seductive.'

The good side is not described by either Ben or Yoda briefly as above. But we can surmise from what they say that the good side has to do with peacefulness, self-discipline, justice, self- defense, knowledge (of what is not specified), sharpening one's inner faculties, caring for others, and willingness to sacrifice one's self. In other words, the good side represents self - development and moral goodness.

70 Lucas explains the Force this way:

When you are born, you have an energy field around you. You could call it an aura. An archaic description would be a halo. It is an idea that has gone all the way through history. When you die, your energy field joins all other energy fields in the universe, and while you're still living that larger energy field is sympathetic to your own energy field.... The Force has two sides. It is not a malevolent or a benevolent thing. It has a bad side to it, involving hate and fear, and it.has.a good side, involving love, charity, fairness. hope.(emphasis added) (Clarke 1980 54)1

Speaking as if the Force existed, Lucas also claims, "The world works better if you're on the good side" (Clarke 1983 57) but offers no explanation as to why this is so. Is he implying that a strong and powerful good lies behind everything, that good

is the basis of reality rather than just one of two sides of the

Force? If not, why should the characters in Star Wars choose good? Why will the world work better for them if they are on the good side? If their world is truly two-sided, it would make as much sense for them to choose evil. And they would probably have an easier time of it since if we look at the antonyms of the words Yoda uses to describe the dark side, we see that the good side is therefore 'slower, harder, less attractive'. Yet we find all the main characters in the trilogy, with the exception of the

Emperor, sooner or later choosing to make their lives difficult by identifying with the good.

For instance, in Empire, while Luke is fighting with Vader,

(when he does not yet know he is his father -- shades of Oedi­ pus!), he relies on his unfinished Jedi training to see him through a battle with a stronger, more experienced opponent. The

71 result of this trust in his skills as a Jedi is that he loses his right hand, accepts defeat and surrenders to the unknown.

Then, even though he knows from experience that he may lose, in Jedi Luke confronts Vader trusting in the goodness he claims he can detect in his father. The two people who seem to care for

Luke most have warned him not to trust Vader: Ben had denied there was any goodness left in him, and Leia, also Vader's child, told him to run away and not confront their father. But Luke chooses to trust a person who, as far as the external evidence is concerned, appears untrustworthy (just as Job chose to trust God when God appeared untrustworthy; the difference is that Vader, at least to some extent, actually is untrustworthy). Ultimately,

Luke appears to be choosing to trust the good side of the Force even though the Force has two sides and therefore is deeply a m b i g u o u s .

The story of Star Wars would lead us to believe that the goodness in Vader (or any of the other characters for that matter) derives from the good side of the Force. When Vader was seduced by the dark side, Ben said, "He ceased to be Anakin

Skywalker and became Darth Vader. When that happened, the good man who was your father was destroyed." (Jedi) An understanding of human nature that is not officially acknowledged lies behind

Ben's statement: evidently, the people in Star Wars must have free will. They are not totally controlled by the Force, or at least not by its good side. (Vader tells Luke he is totally dominated by the dark side, and then ends up making a 'free'

72 choice!) In response to temptation, or seduction as Ben calls it, Vader must have chosen the dark side; otherwise, we are faced with the peculiar phenomenon of the Force fighting itself, the dark side snatching away a person who has chosen, or at least belongs to, the good side. We have to ask, 'Is the Force trust­ worthy? ' It is not a question one normally asks about an energy field.

Because the story attributes morality to the Force, conceiv­ ing of it as having will and the power to direct its own activi­ ties , the story makes the Force a god, or God. (See quote from

Lucas in Introduction, p.2) But, since the Force is pure energy, it is a god with no personhood.

The difficulties are: 1) how can an energy field have morality, let alone two sides to its morality? and 2) how can an energy field have qualities of personhood such as will?

The Force apparently manifests one side of itself in one person and the other side of itself in another person, simultane­ ously . Assuming for the moment that there could be two morally distinctive sides to it, how are the people in the world of Star

Wars to ensure that only the side of the Force they want to interact with, surrounds and fills them? The world is a fairly frightening place if it is possible for evil to invade you against your will •2 Presumably the free will choice of good of the Star Wars' characters prevents this from happening, although why the good side should be privileged over evil within the Force is never made clear in the films.

73 But an even harder question needs to be asked: what is happening morally when the Empire, which uses the dark side, and the Rebels, who use the good side, are in conflict? And what is happening when one character identified with the good side is fighting another character identified with the bad side? Is the

Fo rce actually fighting itself all the way through the trilogy?

These questions of a) free will versus the Force's 'choices' about one's future, or one's 'destiny'; and of b) morality, will, and personhood in an impersonal entity which seems to be nothing more than the sum total of everything there is (pantheism), make the concept of the Force problematic.

As an instance of a), free will versus the Force's predeter­ mining of human actions, in Hope Ben and Luke have the following discussion while Luke is training with the light saber:

Ben: Remember, a Jedi can feel the Force flowing through him. Luke: You mean it controls your actions? Ben: Partially. But it also obeys your commands.

The truth of this paradox has to be taken on faith, since we have no way of knowing when Luke (or any other believer in the

Force) is acting out of his own personal freedom and when he is acting under the Force's direction, except as that is made clear through dialogue. For example, at first Luke's hitting the target at the end of Hope seems to be an occasion when the Force is 'in charge', but, on second thought, we realize this event has been foreshadowed by Luke's experience in killing womp rats on

Tatooine. His skill is as much a factor in his success as is his trust in the Force. If, however, we had not been aware of his 74 practice in shooting at targets because it had not been referred to in the dialogue, then, in the events at the end of Hope. the

Force could have seemed magical, a way of getting exactly what you want when you want it.3

An instance of b), personal qualities in an impersonal entity, is the wish the good characters give each other, "May the

Force be with you". What they mean, but do not say fully, is

"May the good side of the Force be with you". If they did not mean this, the comment would be inappropriate since the good characters do not want the dark side to be with them. And what they are implying is that the Force, or at least its good side, has personality. Otherwise, if it were only a gigantic energy field, i) it would always be 'with', as well as 'in', everyone, so there would be no need to wish that it were; and ii) it would not be able to bless since that is behaviour only an entity with a mind, a will and an ethical sense is capable of.

Most of the characters seem to mean only "Good luck" by the phrase, but Ben, who is officially more 'religious' than the others, says it to Luke as a blessing when they are parting in

Hope: "The Force will be with you -- always". This version of it echoes Jesus' parting words to his disciples in the Ring James version of the Bible (the translation Lucas may have heard in his childhood experience of church)4: "And lo, I am with you alway".

After Yoda's death, Ben says to Luke "Yoda will always be with you ", equating Yoda with the Force, and again, by associa­ tion in the wording, with Jesus and the triune God of Chris­

75 tianity. But according to the cosmology of the Force, everyone and everything is connected by the Force, whether people 'believe in' it or not, and whether they are alive or dead. Therefore, since everybody is continually with everybody else, Ben's affirmation that Yoda is with Luke does not have any real meaning. Even Owen, Beru, Luke's fellow Rebel pilots who were killed, and all the 'bad guys' (for example, Jabba, the Emperor) are with Luke too, but none of them appears to him in spirit form as Ben often does, and Yoda and Anakin do as well at the end.

Ben 'is there' for Luke at the end of Hope: in Empire Ben warns Luke he cannot 'be there' for him if he has to face Vader, and does not come when Luke calls; and near the end of Jedi Ben insists that Luke must go and confront Vader, and makes no offer to help by his presence, nor does Luke ask him to 'be there'.

As a 'representative' of the good side of the Force Ben gradually makes himself more and more scarce to Luke. He and

Yoda teach Luke, promise him the Force, then disappear. In what sense are they, or the Force, always with Luke? Luke's experi­ ence appears to be no different from that of any student who has been influenced by a teacher whom he or she is no longer regular­ ly in contact with. If Yoda, or the good side of the Force, or

Ben, are with Luke, it is hard to know how they are, or what the phrase means.

THE FORCE: AN UNNECESSARY HYPOTHESIS?

There are many unanswered questions about the Force, and

76 many contradictions concerning its operation. For instance,

judging by what happens to Vader near the end of Jedi. Lucas believes strongly in the efficacy of free will: if a character can switch from one side of the Force to the other, apparently in a moment as Vader does, then free will, not the Force with its moral ambiguity, would appear to be responsible. We are shown

Vader's conversion, but there is no concurrent interpreting of what we are seeing because we have already been given the ter­ minology of the Force with which to think about the event. And according to the Force's terminology, Vader is simply switching from the dark to the good side.

But Vader's conversion happens more gradually, and is more complicated than the interpretation of switching from one side of the Force to the other would suggest. In an earlier scene, where

(after he voluntarily surrenders to Imperial soldiers) Luke talks with Vader, we find Vader speaking from the standpoint of the cosmology of the Force, and Luke from the standpoint of the cosmology of goodness and love as the ultimate values.5 Vader and Luke are at cross-purposes.

Vader says the name 'Anakin Skywalker' no longer has any meaning for him. Luke says it is the name of his "true self" that he has "only forgotten". Luke assures him, "I know there is good in you. The Emperor hasn't driven it from you fully", then invites him to walk away from evil: "Come with me." Vader replies in terms of the power of the dark side, obeying his master, destiny, and the true nature of the Force (we assume he

7? means the dark side of the Force). Because Vader refuses to acknowledge any truth in Luke's view of reality, Luke's parting words to him are, "Then my father is truly dead." Luke does not believe this, however -- witness his behaviour in the Throne Room later -- and probably says it to challenge Vader to ponder Luke's comments in their war of words.

Vader's stated view is based on the two-sidedness of the

Force: people are either good or bad, and there is no mixture.

Once you have succumbed to the dark side you are trapped in it forever. Luke's view seems to derive from the Judeo-Christian understanding of human nature: where there is life, there is hope, so that, even if you chose wrongly in the past, it is possible to change.

Judaism and Christianity teach that humanity was created good, but chose evil. Evil has touched everything; nevertheless, the good remains, affected by evil but not completely destroyed by it. The cause for hope is that God is able to redeem people from evil. Luke apparently has hope regarding his father, a hope deriving from an unstated view of reality apparently something like the Judeo-Christian one just outlined, with its unique understanding of the relationship between good and evil and how it affects humanity.

Believing Jews and Christians speak of God as only good, rather than, like the Force, having a good and an evil side.6

Although opposed by an evil adversary, God is able to defeat this enemy, and Christians believe God has already done so.

78 In other words, in the Judaeo-Christian universe, good is infinitely stronger than evil or, to use another metaphor, good is real or solid, and, by comparison, evil is shadowy and without substance.7 Part of good's strength lies in its capacity to create, whereas evil can only counterfeit. It is not, therefore, a matter of two equally matched powers in an eternal struggle to see who will come out uppermost, like Zoroastrianism and other dualistic belief systems, but of good actually being God, the creator, who loves the creation, especially humanity, enough to confront and deal with the evil which tries to destroy it.

Luke believes Vader is redeemable® and he acts on that belief, even though in the world of Star Wars there is no redeemer. The correctness of Luke's view of his father is confirmed by Anakin saying to Luke before he dies, "You were right about me." In working very hard at rescuing his father

Luke behaves as if he believes in the ultimate power of goodness and l o v e .

The cosmology of the Force is inadequate to explain Luke's faith because he is willing to stake his very life on this belief. Why would Luke choose death rather than evil? In a universe 'ruled' by a Force which, because it is impersonal, presumably has no opinion one way or another about human be­ havior , why bother with the pain involved in choosing good? What unexpressed belief is Luke acting on?

Luke does not make any statements of faith in a compas­ sionate God. But in Empire he demonstrates this kind of faith,

79 surrendering to apparent death, and in Jedi he acts on it again

by refusing to fight anymore, thus making himself vulnerable so

that his father can respond to his love by rescuing him. He

acts as if Vader were a loving god like the God worshipped by

Jews and Christians.

The fact that a character like Vader can be presented as the

arch villain in Hope, have deepened in complexity by the end of

Empire, and repent and be saved by the end of Jedi. shows us the

depth of the characterization in the trilogy. But that very

depth destroys the consistency of Lucas' cosmology, based as it

is on antithetical concepts:

GOOD FORCE BAD FORCE

GOOD EMOTIONS BAD EMOTIONS

GOOD SPIRIT BAD BODY

GOOD/BAD PEOPLE BAD EMPEROR

The last line on this chart is the point at which Lucas

cosmology begins to fall apart. Aside from the Emperor who

presented as only evil, the people in Star Wars are morally

mixed, not always purely good or purely evil. Lucas did not want

to create 'super characters' who could do no wrong, because they

would not be believable. Therefore, in making his characters a

combination of goodness and badness, Lucas began to allow another philosophical position in the back door, one which is given passing acknowledgement in a comment by Lawrence Kasdan:9

"One of the longest conversations Kersh [nickname for Irvin Kershner], George, Gary and I had in our first story conference was on the philosophical background of the EMPIRE story and on the meaning of the Force.

80 Basically, George is for good and against evil, but everyone has his own interpretations of what that means. In. my ....opinion, what emerges about the Force are

But in our meeting we didn't talk about specific religions. Instead, George explained to us what he felt the Force was all about. Once that was es­ tablished, it was easier for me to construct Yoda's dialogue and action around the philosophical structure of the Force as we had discussed it." (emphasis added) (Attias and Smith 98)

What Kasdan calls 'basic Christian thought' is the hidden source of credibility for the cosmology of the Force, except that

I would call this source 'minimal or truncated Christianity' or

'humanism'. If it were not for the values, attitudes and actions deriving from this implicit cosmology, the story would not be believable. Officially, in words, Lucas presents the Force cosmology, but in the non-verbal cinematic unfolding of the story he presents the humanist one.

At the end of Jedi. without naming a god or God, Luke is putting his trust in a god who is love. He simply has this god confused with his father.

DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM

Luke falls in all three films. In Hope he and his friends jump into a garbage compactor; in Empire he lets himself fall down the reactor shaft; and in Jedi he is dropped into the

Rancor's pit.(Lancashire) The scene that follows the first fall is primarily humorous, although danger is emphasized too; the one that follows the third fall is serious -- Luke fights for his life; but the second fall and the scene that follows it are

81 central to the development of Luke's character. The first and third fall draw our attention to the importance of the second by- anticipating and echoing it.

Luke is not the only one who falls, however. In a scene in

Jedi that has strong visual parallels to Luke's fight with Vader and fall down the Cloud City nuclear reactor shaft in Empire.

Luke and Vader fight again, and the Emperor is thrown (rather than falling) down a huge elevator shaft. Here too there is an echo effect: the very similarity between the scenes calls our attention to the differences.

In the first scene Vader is on the offensive, Luke on the defensive, backing away from him along the catwalk. The second scene is the opppoeite: Luke is stronger now, in all senses of the word. Very similar events, but reversed in terms of the characters who cause and react to them, occur during the fight­ ing , with the cutting off of a hand as the climax of the combat in each scene. It is at this point that the two scenes begin to move away from each other because of the difference in the characters: Luke chooses to 'go down the tube', whereas the

Emperor, believing till the end that he is completely dominant over Vader, thinks that nothing can prevent him from killing this young upstart who dared to snub his invitation to join him.

Luke anticipates his fall. We see him looking around beneath him, trying to figure out what the possibilities are. He wants to survive if he can, but if he cannot, dying physically is preferable to dying spiritually, what he believes ruling with

82 Vader would lead to.

In contrast, the Emperor is taken almost completely by surprise. The only hints he has had that Vader may be developing new loyalties are his suggesting they turn Luke into an ally rather than eliminating him, and his disobeying the Emperor's order to remain on the command ship. But, because Vader assures him that Luke will join them or die, and that his feelings are clear, in other words, that he is loyal to the Emperor with no desire to be loyal to his son, the Emperor does not guess that

Vader could choose to protect his son rather than him.

Part of the reason the Emperor is so unsuspecting is that he is focused on achieving revenge: if Luke will not join him, he will not live, the paradox being (as in the earlier offer from

Vader) that, even if Luke were to join him, he would not truly l i v e .

Anger, hatred and jealousy dominate the. Emperor's thinking: he is 'consumed' by the dark side, its 'servant' as much as its

'master'. Because he is cruel, sado-masochistic in fact,10 he does not recognize the power of love. Even though he hears Luke s a y i n g :

"I will not fight you father.... Your thoughts betray you, father. I feel the good in you -- the conflict. You couldn't bring yourself to kill me before, and I don't believe you'11 destroy me now." the Emperor believes Vader's denials (for example, "There is no conflict"), rather than Luke's affirmations. Thus, his indul­ gence of his negative, destructive feelings, plus his psychotic need to be in control of everyone around him have made him blind

83 to any other possibility. If he cannot conceive of it, or is not

experiencing it, or it does not meet his needs, then it simply

does not exist. He is lost in self-absorption and pride;

symbolically, he is like Satan.

The shots of Luke and the Emperor falling, like many in the

trilogy, use matte paintings as the central element of the roise-

en-scene. In Empire the nuclear reactor shaft of Cloud City is

huge, a mile in diameter. Its walls are a soft grey-blue with

small lights in horizontal curved lines around the circumference of the shaft. These small-looking lights are large ports for

landing shuttle-craft which travel in the shaft. All that

filmgoers need be aware of, however, is the vastness of the shaft which has been emphasized by various earlier shots and details --

Luke being blown backwards out the window of the pod by the wind after Vader has caused the window to break, thus changing the balance in air pressure; Luke clinging to the edge of a catwalk, glancing behind him at the huge hole into which he could fall

(our first view of the reactor shaft), and then pulling himself up onto the catwalk; the wind from the draft up through the shaft whipping Luke's hair around; and lastly, Luke falling, a tiny, silent figure with arms stretched up in helplesness, right arm shorter than left because his hand is gone, going down, down, as the music reinforces the action with a descending line. The seeming endlessness of his fall is emphasized for us by the way it is shot from every angle -- the side, above and below, so that we can experience it with him. He is then sucked into an air

84 shaft on the side of the main shaft, which is curved so that, once he comes in contact with its wall, he stops falling as quickly, tumbles instead, and comes to a stop upside down. Just as we begin to have hope he might find the handhold he is looking for, the weight of his body causes an exhaust port to open beneath him. He slides down another shaft where, as he falls out its hatch into outer space, he barely manages to catch with his legs the pipe of a rather insubstantial weather vane extending from the bottom of Cloud City, and there he hangs in misery.

Lucas uses pathetic fallacy to underline Luke's state: behind him is a large bank of threatening blue-black cumulus storm clouds, emphasizing the terror of his situation, and recalling visually the darkness which came over the land when Jesus hung on the cross. Terrified or not, Luke is at least alive, although not for long if no one helps him.

The Emperor's fall occurs much faster because we watch it from above only, unidentified with the Emperor in his fear, but instead pleased to see him destroyed. He cries out in surprise when Vader picks him up» and continues to yell as he falls, the music emphasizing his terror with a high and rising sound which can be heard above the noise he is making. The shaft he goes down is lined with pipes which emphasize the vertical. The script for Jedi describes the shaft as bottomless, but visually the Emperor appears to reach a bottom, and aurally we hear an explosion mixed with horror-movie-style screaming and the sound of the wind screeching through the shaft. Clouds of what appears

85 to be blue smoke come back up the shaft, and the sequence ends

with Luke kneeling beside Vader who lies exhausted beside the

shaft, and the sound of Vader's breathing, slow and asthmatic.

Thus the differing mise-en-scene, sound effects, and music

of these scenes suggest different responses to the characters and

the actions. Luke's fall is 'softer' in keeping with his role as hero, the one we the filmgoers are identified with and want to have survive. His fall is broken -- by the horizontal rows of

lights in the shaft, by his falling into smaller side shafts, by the weather vane on the outside of the final hatch, and by our sympathy for him because he now has only one hand and has just

learned something which, if it is true, is very disturbing. The

Emperor's fall is 'speeded up' by the apparent suddenness with which Vader decides to pick him up and throw him, by the vertical shapes in the shaft which emphasize his descent, by our lack of sympathy for him, and by the finality in the sound and sight

images of his destruction.

These falls can be interpreted in two ways -- by the cosmo­ logy of the Force and by a humanistic worldview. Looking at them from the point of view of the religion of the Force, we might see them like this: Luke, knowing he had some Jedi skills but that there was no guarantee of anything, decided to entrust his life to the good side of the Force. He was rewarded for his faith since the good side caused Leia to be aware of his neediness, and he was rescued. The Emperor, on the other hand, had entrusted himse If to the power of the dark side, believing its strong evil

86 would always protect him, and was unpleasantly surprised to discover that the good side, by using people who had chosen it, could overcome the dark side.

From what Kasdan calls a perspective of 'basic Christian thought' (and what I have called a humanist perspective), the two falls look something like this : Luke, like Jesus (he is a Christ- figure in the story by the end of Empire). chose to die, if necessary, in both the fights with Vader; unlike Jesus, he did not die. But he made himself vulnerable voluntarily. He chose powerlessness. The Emperor, like Satan, fell involuntarily. He was so identified with evil that he had lost his own identity, and needed 'sacrificial victims' (first Vader, then, he hoped,

Luke) to restore his feelings of strength. Because his agenda was power over others, he could not understand how powerlessness could have any effect on anything, and therefore did not recog­ nize it as the threat to him it was.

Luke surrenders to the unknown in a 'leap of faith', and thus eventually comes through the experience safely. It could be said that he embraces 'the feminine'11 within him, that is, he lets go into whatever he might have to face, he relinquishes control of his life. When he is finally inside the Falcon, he and Leia hug each other tightly, and this hug is a symbol of wholeness.12

For Lucas, the Force "embraces passive Oriental philosophies and the Judeo-Christian ethic of responsibility and self-sacri­ fice" (Pollock 140). He says :

87 I wanted to make a kids' film that would strengthen contemporary mythology and introduce a kind of basic morality. Nobody's saying the very basic things; they're dealing in the abstract. Everybody's forget­ ting to tell the kids, "Hey, this is right and this is wrong." (Pollock 144)

Thus the standpoint behind Star Wars includes an Eastern sensibility, with Nature (everything there is) controlling people's destiny, and a Western system of morals bereft of the personal Creator in Judaism and Christianity, the one who gives meaning to the choosing of good and who redeems the creation.

Yet the archetypal Christian symbolism in the trilogy works so that what we actually end up with is a syncretistic blending of a verbalized faith in the Natural moral law, and an unex­ pressed yet acted-upon belief in the need for a redeemer, even if that redeemer is another person, or people, rather than a deity.

88 CONCLUSION

"LIVING IN AMERICA"

"Before Star Wars we didn't believe in anything. Now we believe there is something called a force for good, and you represent it, and could you please come to America and stay with us," -- from a letter to Alec Guiness

"We're Number One and don't you forget it!" — bumper sticker in the U.S.A. after the Persian Gulf War

Like soap operas, movies made for television are targeted to

women viewers. Lucas' trilogy, on the other hand, like many

movies made for theatre release, was targeted to children and

young people.1 In particular, the trilogy appeals to young males

since they are interested in technology, adventure, fighting, and

a question like, "How does a contemporary young North American

male become a man?" Other filmmakers, like Sylvester Stallone

and Arnold Schwarzenegger, have answered that question too, but

Lucas was unique in using F/SF, even though he was somewhat

reluctant to identify with that genre because in 1977 it was not

a 'box office draw'.

In making Star Wars. just as in making American Grafitti..

Lucas was drawing upon his own experience as a young male in

America: becoming preoccupied with machinery -- cars/planes/space

ships, was (and still is) an important coming-of-age activity for many young m e n .2 Being able to operate/repair/own one was a measure of physical, though not necessarily psychological maturity (children are not allowed to drive/fly) and of social

status (the ability to use valued machinery provided oppor­

89 tunities to engage in popular activities -- cruising/fighting).

"Lucas wanted a fantasy that took place in a galaxy... where spaceships looked realistic and were driven like cars," (Base and

Haslam 52) The story may be set "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away", but the favored activities for men, young and old, are strangely familiar. The male need to prove manhood through being involved in activities society labels 'masculine' is the background against which this story is told.

J3. shows us a young man' s search for his identity which he finds by working at becoming a member of the Jedi, the religious and military brotherhood his father had belonged to, and, at the same time, finding his father, then affirming the good in him, or loving him. The story's central concern and relationship is the one between father and son, a popular subject in film in the years since the trilogy was completed, and thus, it would seem, one North Americans are preoccupied with and trying to sort out. Some examples of films based on it are Back

(1985),to future the Top Gun (1986), Ix .Qn- E a g .lfc (1986), Like

Fther, Like Son(1987),Vice LikeFther, Versa (1988), M m . (1988), and

Indiana Jones and the Last crusade (1989).3 JonescrusadeIndianaLasttheand

Many of these films are comedies, but. the love and loyalty between the father and son is frequently a serious theme, even when humor is central to the story. Cultural critic Marsha

Kinder says

Like a pastoral of the eighties, these films address America's economic and moral decline and our current sense of powerlessness by regressing to a personal past. They take us back not to the western frontier (where both the lone killer and the questioning of progress are now politically problematic) but to the onset of puberty where the oedipal conflict begins to be resolved and where we can still affirm faith in the future, The troubling world of politics is displaced onto the domestic worlds of family and business. (Kinder 4)

Film theorist Robert Ray speaks of "the self-perpetuating nature of Classic Hollywood's forms [making] American movies a sociological barometer of the subtlest type." (Ray 28) Begin­ ning as it did in 1977, Star Wars anticipated the preoccupations of America in the 80s. "Lucas' trilogy, which began as an unabashed tribute to intergalactic cameraderie, metamorphoses into a family saga." (Farber and Green 356) After a decade (late

60s to late 70s) of 'buddy movies',4 audiences wanted traditional values concerning the family and other institutions in society reaffirmed:

Amidst the growing complexities and contradictions of the eighties, audiences once again employed the darkness of a movie theater as a way of escape.... Ronald Reagan was in the White House telling Americans to feel good about themselves again. The Gipper was a former actor himself, and he had been formed by the simplistic mythology of the movies: good triumphs over evil, might is right, true love lasts forever. If audiences did not want reality from the President of the United States, they certainly did not want it in their movies. (Base and Haslam 17-18)

In addition to the lighter 'father and son' films I listed earlier, there are also darker films dealing with the same subject, for example, Blue Velvet (1986), The Singing Detective

(1986), and Track 29 (1988). The first group of films sees "the restoration of the patriarchal family as the answer to renewed power, [whereas the second group sees] the family as the site of

91 greatest entrapment." (Kinder 7) Like the people who made the

first group of films, Lucas wants to show us the value and

importance of the patriarchal family. He seems to be unaware of

the level of entrapment, or enmeshment, that can occur in the

f a m i l y .

MUTUAL RESCUING: TRUE LOVE?

"We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them." -- O'Brien (Orwell), 1984

Lucas shows Luke as entrapped in his adoptive family and then, through the deaths of his aunt and uncle, released into new possibilities, what Ben later calls "a larger world" -- the world of Jedi knights and the powers of the Force. But Lucas apparent­

ly does not realize that, as Luke moves towards becoming a Jedi, he is now trapped in a different way. We could say that it is

Luke's desire to find a father, a male mentor, and, after Vader's revelation, his desire to know his father, that seduce him into believing in the religion of the Force, and choosing to become a

Jedi.

At first, Luke believes Vader killed his father; this is

Ben's version of the truth. When he discovers instead that his father and Vader are one, he believes he can rescue his bad parent and turn him into a good parent who will then, in turn, rescue him.

And this mutual rescuing is indeed what happens. The films show young people, in particular, young men, that the route to manhood involves 'saving' their fathers, rather than 'letting go'

92 of t h e m . s The reason the story takes this approach to the

father/son relationship is that the challenge of letting go of the father (and mother too), a healthy and necessary step in human maturation, is presented to Luke as the need to kill his

father -- "You must confront Vader" -- a deed he cannot do because he believes it is wrong.

Vader and Luke are similar in that they each have been wounded by their father or father figure (Vader by Ben, and Luke by Vader) and in that they each have a 'good father' and a 'bad father' (Vader has Ben (good) and the Emperor (bad), and Luke has

Ben and Yoda (good), and Vader prior to his conversion, and the

Emperor (bad)).

Another thing Vader and Luke have in common is that they learn by role-modeling. They both saw Ben, their mentor, choose to die to help others: thus, in Empire. we have Luke deciding to die if necessary, and then, in Jedi, Vader decides the same thing. Presumably Vader has also learned from Luke's rejection of his invitation to bond with him on the dark side of the Force

(the way he and the Emperor had bonded). Luke's choice enables

Vader to imitate his son's role-modeling by breaking his own bond with an evil master/father figure. Thus, even prior to his verbal affirmation to Vader of the goodness in him, through this action Luke begins to influence Vader.

Father and son change their personal world.6 The time they have to experience that new world together, however, is very brief. When Luke surrenders to Vader, for the first time they

93 talk together, and Luke challenges Vader to recognise the

goodness in himself, to acknowledge his past before his conver­

sion to the dark side. Then they go to the Emperor's Throne Room

and, very soon after he has killed the Emperor, Vader is dead.

Luke and Vader's final moments together are a Liebestod, like

stories in the courtly love tradition such as Tristan and Isolde

and R o i e o and Juliet, in that each one has been willing to face

death for the other. Luke continues to risk death by staying

with Vader till the end on the imperiled Death Star, and by

taking his body with him, and, for this brief period of time,

they 'have eyes only for each other':

These male affections ~~ though wholly free from the taint that hangs about 'frienship' in the ancient world ~~ were themselves lover-like; in their intensity, their wilful exclusion of other values, and their uncertainty, they provided an exercise of the spirit not wholly unlike that which later ages have found in 'love'. {Lewis 10)

The difference between this father/son love and courtly love

is that both people do not have to die. Luke remains alive to carry on the Skywalker tradition since there will be union in death later anyway: Vader is part of the pantheon of the 'good' side of the Force at the end, which Luke is able to see while he

is alive, and which he himself will no doubt join some day.

The real unity and intimacy between Luke and his fcither occurs only at the point of death. It is then that they are truly able to love each other because Vader had sacrificed himself for Luke when he needed him, when he was the most vulnerable. It is only as his father lays his life down for him,

94 that is, shows that he truly chooses good, that Luke is able to

be close to him, although, of course, Luke has influenced Vader

to change by reaching out to him. But this resolution of their

relationship is a little like the 'And they lived happily ever

after' ending of a fairy tale where we do not see, for instance,

how a hero and heroine live as husband and wife. In Star Wars.

Luke does not have to work out this new relationship with Vader

because Vader, conveniently, dies.

In Vader's conversion we have an instance of the father's

heart being turned towards his children,? in spite of the fact

that we are not given any reason whv he changes. He saves his

son's life, and sends a message to his daughter through Luke:

'Tell your sister you were right about me.'

The story is very compelling at this point because we all

love such a dramatic reversal, especially when it leads to a

defeating of the villain and rescuing of the hero. Also we all

want to believe mutual rescuing is possibile: we think that if

two half people prop each other up, together they can become a whole person. The lyrics of a great deal of popular music to do with romance are based on the premise that mutual rescuing is not only possible but highly to be admired and desired.

Mutual rescuing works only in popular songs and the movies, however ■■ there two people can be reconciled with no real resolv­

ing of. the issues that divided them in the first place. There a son can be saved by his father from a threat to hie life because, mere minutes before, when they were still estranged, the son

95 risked his life to reach out to his father.

In real life this kind of immediate response is not nearly as likely. Toxic parents, like Vader, assume that "children should sacrifice themselves for their parents" (Forward 168).

Ignoring his own needs, Luke, playing the role of family Hero, obeys Ben and Yoda's command to face his father, but is able to do it in such a way that he affirms rather than destroys Vader.

He thus earns self-sacrificing love from Vader, and, at the end, recognition or praise for his deeds from Ben and Yoda, shown by their appearing to him,

Luke and the members of his family show us at a physical or literal level, what goes on psychologically, emotionally and spiritually in a dysfunctional family. Just as the Force has two sides, so a dysfunctional family dichotomizes events and people: they are either good ox bad, with no in-between position. What

Luke does is somehow manage to shift Vader in his mind from 'all bad', as Ben in particular had characterized him, to 'at least partly good', as Luke has come to see him.8 Then Luke sets out to prove he is right about his father.

Luke's behaviour would be more credible if the world of Star

Wars had an advocate or redeemer, who had modeled self-sacrifice for Luke, and who would 'speak for' the reality of Vader's repentance, Ben does model self-sacrifice, but he admits imper­ fection -- "I thought that I could instruct [Vader] just as well as Yoda, I was wrong." He also models manipulation, practising it upon Luke with regard to Vader. As well, we can see that Ben

96 advocates an "any means to the end" policy: he assumes Vader is no longer human and therefore he (and Yoda) are justified in sending Luke to confront (read 'kill') him. In light of these actions and attitudes, then, how adequate is Ben as a role-model, let alone as a redeemer figure?

Luke and Vader both know Vader's conversion was real -- Luke because he was rescued, and Vader because he did the rescuing, and then admitted as he died that Luke was right, that there had always been good in him even when he seemed completely evil.

In a world with no redeemer, people have to have 'faith' in each other -- in spite of the evidence! In the Hebrew Bible Job makes a paradoxical statement of faith about God, "Though he slay me yet I will trust in him." (Job 13:15) Luke puts his faith in his father as if he were an all-good god, like the God whose goodness Job stakes his life on. Job's statement describes a position similar to Luke' s as he throws his 1 ight.saber away in the Emperor's Throne Room. He has to take the risk of not defending himself, of being vulnerable, to give his father the opportunity either to abuse him again (and perhaps kill him), or show his love for him.

Unlike a parent in a dysfunctional family who 'loves' self at the expense of child, Vader chooses to love both his son and himself. Since this is not the way dysfunctional families work, his behaviour, while convincing in some ways (Lucas has given us brief glimpses of Vader's feelings about Luke), is not true-to- life -- parents change abusive behaviour towards a child because

97 they decide to stop being abusive, not because the child loves them so much that they are transformed, wanting to love the child in return, out of sheer gratitude,

THE FILMGOER'S RESPONSE TO 'MUTUAL RESCUING'

Amazed, however, by the radical change in Vader, a change many of us secretly long to bring about in our own parents, or in our memories of them, we, the filmgoers, do not notice the inconsistency. Instead, we are impressed:

It is an incredible moment, as if Turnus had joined Aeneas, Rodomonte killed Agramante, or Satan repented. Though literature has many falls into sin, it has few ascents to goodness -- except in romantic epic, where it is always possible for a pagan to become a Chris­ tian .... Though not expressed in Christian terms, Jedi opts for the same ideas as do these Christian epics r Orlando, Gerusalemmel: that human beings have free will and that no one is completely evil. In other words, even Darth Vader can be saved. (Sammons 363)

As members of this society with its frequent lack of true intimacy between the generations, we so want to see a healthy father/son (or parent/child) relationship modeled, in fantasy if not in real life, that we will take whatever brief on-screen moments we can get.

Prior to Vader's conversion, he and Ben appear to be opposites -- Ben, good, and Vader, bad. But when we examine them more carefully, we find that assessment superficial.

With ambiguous motivation,9 Ben, in effect, says to Luke,

'You father is no longer a human being. Kill him so that the galaxy can be rid of this evilness.' When Luke says, "I can't

98 kill my own father", Ben tries to induce guilt: "Then the Emperor has already won. You were our only hope," Vader, on the other hand, acts rather than speaking: he gets rid of the evil Emperor and saves Luke's life,

Ben and Vader are something like the two sons in the parable

Jesus told when his authority was challenged:

There was a man who had two sons. He went to the first and said, "Son, go and work today in the vine­ yard . " "I will not," he answered, but later he changed his mind and went. Then the father went to the other son and said the same thing. He answered, "I will, sir," but he did not go. Which of the two did what his father wanted?1° (Matt. 21:28-31)

Ben is like the son who says he will work but does not.

Ostensibly, he is commited to good, and therefore would not try to cover up a mistake by condemning someone he had hurt: he would have hope for change, especially when another Jedi claimed to be able to sense conflict and a desire to return to the good side in the supposed villain, But, instead, Ben prefers to continue playing Persecutor to Vader's Victim, and prefers not to listen to Luke as Rescuer. Vader is like the son who says he will not work, but does. He chose evil after his conflict with Ben, but then he chose good again.

Jesus' parable illustrates obedience or responsiveness to

God. Ben and Vader only need to manifest goodness in themselves, since identifying with the good side of the Force does not seem to require the same level of commitment as responding to a God

(characterised as a father) who calls people.

99 But Vader goes a step further. He gives up his life, and,

in so doing, acknowledges his grief over his twenty or so misspent years. Like the thief on the cross beside Jesus who

said, "Remember me when you come into your kingdom" (Luke 23:42),

Vader is repentant, but since there is no deity in the story to

confess his sins to, he tells his children, in effect asking for

their forgiveness.

Of the three who appear in 'Force heaven' at the end of

Jedi, Vader most deserves to be there because he has exhibited his faith through his works, and Ben least deserves to be there because, inflexible in his attitude toward Vader, he has tried to persuade Luke to adopt his own negative view and act on it. He

is like the people Jesus says will be left outside his kingdom:

Many will say to me on that day, "Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?" And Jesus will reply to them, "I never knew you. Away from me you evildoers!" (Matt.7:22-23)

This assessment, of course, judges Ben, Yoda and Vader from a Christ ian perspective: "By their fruits you shall know them."

(Matt.7:15) But from the standpoint of the Force's cosmology, with no deity to judge motives and see what is in people's hearts, the criteria for judgement seem to be minimal. Stating that you are identified with the good side is apparently all that

is required. And since all three characters have done this, by word or action or both, then they would all seem to deserve to be

in 'Force Heaven', unless someone with the right to judge them by different standards should enter the story.

100 Force Heaven, or wherever it is that Ben, Yoda and Vader are when they are not appearing to Luke, is another indication of the

implicit cosmology of 'basic Christian thought' behind Star Wars because its very existence implies its opposite, a 'Force Hell'.

This would be a 'place' where the Emperor and others who have chosen evil, are, since it would seem wrong to see them as part of the pantheon of 'redeemed good guys'.

FAMILY REUNION: AN APPROPRIATE ENDING FOR STAR WARS

Lucas was strongly criticized for the ending of the trilogy, but, even if it involved sentimentality, he wanted to draw filmgoers into this scene of 'a new hope' -- "The King is dead.

Long live the King!"11 We are encouraged to share the good feelings at the party through the music, humor and happiness of the characters who are celebrating an important victory, Lucas wants to show us that everyone good is there, all those who worked hard in some way, or contributed to things turning out well -- the human, animal and mechanical, the living and the dead, the whole extended Skywalker family.12

The ending not only fits the storyline. It also fits Lucas' overall design for the trilogy. To reinforce the theme of the love there can be in a community and family, all three films end with a group scene. Hope has the awards ceremony where Leia,

Luke, Han and the droids look at each other, then Luke and Han turn around so that, together with Leia, they face the audience at the ceremony, and also face us, the filmgoers. Empire shows

101 Luke, Leia and the droids together, looking out the window of

their spaceship, with their backs to us in several shots includ­

ing the penultimate one, withdrawn a little into their own world

as befits this 'darker' film. Then in Jedi. right at the end,

everyone faces front again. The second last shot is the pan­

theon , present at the party, watching Luke and the others like

guardian spirits, and celebrating with them. The final shot is

of the main 'good guys' looking out of the frame at us.

For some filmgoers it was already unpleasant enough when

Luke and Vader looked into each other's eyes with love, without

these additional moments of Luke in silent communication with the

ghostly trio, and then all the 'good characters' making eye

contact with us. There is a taboo against deliberate staring in

our culture, so that, even when it is characters in a film, we do

not like to interrupt an intimate moment. People who are

embarrassed by emotion feel awkward, and people who want to

maintain the fantasy till the very end are forced to recognize

that this is a story because the characters themselves are

acknowledging it.13

None of the final scenes in the trilogy has any dialogue. Or even if the characters do speak, we cannot hear them, although we can hear sounds characters such as R2 and Chewie make. There is music in every one of the scenes, but the resolution of the stories comes in images, not words. Lucas wants the pictures, the visual aspect of his work, plus the background music, to create the final impression.

102 A FINAL LOOK AT FANTASY

"The cinema is at once an instrument of complete exactitude and a great poetical spellbinder: a mirror of truth, and a dreamer of dreams and a worker of miracles. -- Jean Cassou

Chapter Two's metaphors for the screen -- window, frame, mirror, glasses -- show that, historically, film theorists have also privileged sight over sound. As attested by his friends and colleagues, Lucas' special gift is 'thinking visually',14 Like

Shakespeare's derivative plots, Lucas' Star Wars story is from a variety of sources. His originality, therefore, lies not in his story, but at least in part, in his clever use of the visual, particularly in support of his theme of the best way to achieve manhood and save the galaxy from tyranny.

In this thesis we have examined many of the images of values in our society that Lucas has included in his vision of the journey toward adulthood. Our culture considers some of these values suitable for men to hold -- physical training; fighting; constant activity; being in control of oneself; obeying authority figures; enjoying the company and support of others, in particu­ lar, other men; loving a parent to the point of death. Some other values we see Luke espousing in the trilogy our culture considers less appropriate for men -- losing control of a situation; believing in spiritual realities; giving oneself up in battle; and surrendering to the unknown.

Lucas has affirmed the questioned as well as the accepted values so that filmgoers in this society are challenged to consider anew what the journey to manhood entails. His intention

103 from the beginning was to create a modern fairy tale or adventure story that would give filmgoers both moral values and something to believe in. He has also, intentionally or not, shown us how he believes one grows up, what he thinks human maturity is.

Lucas certainly did his homework in the fields of folklore, fairy tales, fantasy, science fiction, mythology, anthropology and social psychology.*5 He cannot be accused of being a "witch doctor". (See quote in Chapter One, p.11) Or can he?

Because Lucas has created a 'complete' world in Star Wars. like Tolkien's in Lord of the Rings, the cosmology that underlies that world is important to it and is bound to have an impact on the imaginations of filmgoers. And since many who see the films are young, if they do not know how to figure out and evaluate the assumptions behind the trilogy's cosmology, they will probably be affected by Lucas' views about the nature of reality.

Lucas is offering what young people want -- a perspective on the world that provides meaning yet allows for mystery. Fantasy is as old as the human race because people have always been bemused by stories about the unusual and unexplained. Irvin

Kershner, director of Empire and a Zen Buddhist, speaks of this i n t e r e s t :

These films...have many of the elements of the medieval morality play.... A morality play is at its best when it has mystery, when it's not clearcut or simplistic. There must be elements of ambiguity....Empire deals with making difficult decisions, decisions which have to do with patriotism, with friendship, with value judgments. It will speak to kids very strongly, though I don't think they'11 consciously know what it's saying because it has so strong an element of fantasy. In Empire we're dealing with legend, myth, and magic --

104 forces that are ineffable and indefinable. There's more to this story than meets the eye. There's more to life, to energy, to matter than we realize. (Arnold 17 and 1 1 1 )

This human longing for mystery and meaning explains why fantasy has always been a popular art form. And now, with the invention of film, fantasy has become a staple of cinema, perhaps more popular in this new medium than it ever was in literature:

What makes the Fantastic function so perfectly in the cinema is the coincidence of [highly suitable] tech­ nological propensities ^ and the nearly religious need

makes us at home with the idea that our lives are crossed by possibilities we seldom attend to. It makes us at once anxious and grateful; more important, it tells us to consider our lives as smaller than the mysterious powers that surround us, so that we may survive such powers or participate in their ultimate

vaguely supernatural is at ones .satisfying and._-dsMl.iz:. tating, for it enervates any impulse we might .have to shape our destiny. After all, the Fantastic .shows us

(emphasis added) ' (Andrew 114)

Ambiguity there certainly is in Star Wars, as we struggle to understand the connections between the Force and the good and evil in the world of the Force. But Dudley Andrew sees the function of fantasy for filrogoers very differently from the way

Lucas conceives of it. Andrew believes fantasy reveals to us that the universe is predestined so that, while we can enjoy it, we must also fear it. Lucas, on the other hand, believes fantasy should show us that the universe is 'wide open', the possibili­ ties limitless, and we should not be afraid. (See Introduction)

In this attitude Lucas is similar to Luke who, when he was

105 discussing Jedi training with Yoda, said, "I'm not afraid", to which Yoda replied ominously, "You will be; you will be!"

But Lucas' practice is more complex than his theory, and he does show us Luke feeling afraid, especially in Empire where he begins to become aware of his 'shadow', and of his ambivalence towards the authority of the father figures in his life -- Vader,

Yoda and Ben. This period of fear, pain and difficulty in Luke's life is a stage on his journey that he must pass through in order to achieve his goal of finding and saving his father, and ridding the galaxy of evil.

Lucas is showing us that without sacrifice there can be no salvation. True heroism is loving sacrificially.16 And while the one sacrificing him or her self, may not look forward to the experience, he or she suffers it gladly for the sake of those who are l o v e d .

Lucas has depicted more than the journey to manhood. He is giving us a glimpse of the reality at the heart of the universe

-- the cost, and yet the deep joy, of sacrificial love.

106 HQIES. INTRODUCTION

1 Lucas' long range plan is to make nine films (three trilo­ gies) of which we presently have the middle three, episodes four, five and six. In this thesis I use 'Hope' to refer to episode four of the trilogy, Star Wars: A New Hope (1977); 'Empire' to refer to episode five, The.Empire Strikes Back (1980); and 'Jedi' to refer to episode six, The Return of the Jedi (1983) . By referring to the first film as Hope (instead of StarWars as it is still commonly called) I am conforming to what I understand to be Luc a s ' intention - to reserve the name StarWars for referring to the whole middle trilogy, and, if they are eventually made, all three trilogies.

Novelisations of the three films exist, the first one, Star Wars, by Lucas himself, but these books have lengthier dialogue than the films, and, generally, have much material that the films do not include. I have, therefore, not referred to them, nor to the scripts of the first two films for dialogue, because of the inaccuracies they all contain regarding the dialogue in the films. Instead, I have quoted dialogue directly from the films. The script of the third film, found in The Art of Star.H.a.rs: Return of the Jedi (1983), I have used since the dialogue in it is the same as in the film, and its descriptions of settings, and its dialogue and acting directions are also accurate. 2 The nickname "Star Wars" was first given to the Strategic Defense Initiative plan by its critics, Then, once the media used the name, it stuck. (Caputi 496)

3 In Caputi's article there are three more sets of comparisons with some of their wording similar. (497-98)

4 "Translating from film symbol to social reality, the precise contemporary analog of the Force is nuclear power, and iA New Hopei is manifestly a film about nuclear war." (emphasis in original) (Caputi 496)

5 Both the general public and critics thought the films were only entertainment and escapism. For instance, here is Ursula Le Guin, a renowned F/SF writer, dismissing Hope. partly because of its ending scene which is reminiscent of a scene in Leni Riefenstahl's film of the 1936 Olympics , Tr iunrnh of the Wi 1.1 : "Having dragged Dorothy and Tot.o and that lot around the cosmos a bit, Lucas cast about for another surefire golden oldie and came up with Adolf Hitler. Anyhow, what the hell is nostalgia doing in a science- fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his marvelous toys and crawled back into a nice

107 safe hideyhole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Huck Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend. If there's a message there, I don't think I want to hear it.” (Le Guin 246)

6 Vincent Canby, "Not Since 'Flash Gordon Conquers the UniverseNew York Times, 5 June 1977, sec.2, p.15, col. 1.

7 Time and length constraints have prevented me from discus­ sing the following matters in the trilogy: sexism (the mar­ ginalization of females), racism and 'species-ism'. I have addressed depersonalization in Chapter Three -- the anonymity of the Empire's soldiers, and the casual imaging of nuclear war as we watch the destruction of Alderaan by a beam weapon. It is also interesting that nuclear power is depicted as a source (the main one?) of energy in Star Wars: for example, the two Death Stars and Cloud City are all powered by nuclear reactors.

8 Fantasy science fiction might better be called 'science ficti on fantasy', with 'fantasy' as the noun and 'science f ict ion' as the adjective, since fantasy is the older and larger category. Fantasy has been around as long as the human race has, whereas "science fiction is a phenomenon of 20th century western culture, i.e., industrialised and with a developed communication system." (Croghan 16) Perhaps what order one puts the words 'science fiction' and 'fantasy' in, does not matter, however, as there is much over­ lapping between the two categories. A third category, 'horror', (also a genre in its own right), sometimes overlaps the first two

108 CHAPTER ONE THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR

1 A sampling of mostly contemporary F, but also some F/SF films since 1982 follows to supplement Appendix A: Steven Spielberg's contemporary F film, E.T.: The Extra Ter­ restrial (1982), continued the trend Hope had begun in 1977. It was the biggest money-maker in film history. Jim Henson and Frank Oz's The Dark Crystal (1983) used Muppets (Yoda had puppeteer Frank Os's voice) to tell a timeless fairy story/F. Ic.ejm.an. (1984) and Starman ( 1984) were contemporary SF films, and Ghostbusters (1984) was a contemporary F film. Cocoon (1985) and Cocoon: the Return (1988), both depicting wish-fulfillment regarding immortality, were F/SF for adults. All three Back to the Future movies, (1985, 1989 and 1990), were as much F as SF, Hello Again (1987) was light comedy/F about resurrection. George Lucas' Willow ( 1988) was another adventure F which did not succeed at the box office the way Star Wars did. Parenthood (1989), (1989), and Field of Dreams (1989) all had fantastic elements. Edward Scissorhands (1990) was a contemporary F , well-received by teenagers. And Ghost (1990) is another recent contemporary F, very popular with young and middle-aged p e o p l e .

2 This quotation is an excerpt from a speech Lucas gave "at a ground-breaking ceremony for a $14 million cinema-television school at the University of Southern California" (Schultze e.t a 1 109). The speech was "quoted by Aljean Harmetz in 'U.S.C. Breaks Ground For a Film-TV School,' New York Times, 25 Nov, 1981, p .C~ 16. " (Schultze. et al 110)

3 I was a student in Professor Anne Lancashire's course, "Literary Traditions and Contemporary Popular Film", at the University of Toronto in 1988-89. As much as possible (i.e., as I was able to remember) I have acknowledged material from her course (by putting her name in a bracket after my paraphrase).

4 "fRaiders of the Lost Ark, the first film in the Indiana Jones trilogy] is an object lesson in pacing and editing, piling incident upon incident with superb precision so that the audience positively gasps at the snowball effect, which continues just long enough to go beyond excitement into wit. The film works so well because it goes very close to being over-the-top but carries off its balancing act and never sinks into spoof. It is literal­ ly breathtaking." (Nicholls 98)

5 Here, for instance, is F/SF writer Ursula Le Guin's opinion: "Star Wars FHopel, which rather ostentatiously pretends not to have a message, may be even tricksier [than Close Encounters of the Third Kindi...,There are gorgeous moments in [Hopei, espe­ cially on the desert planet (before everybody gets into uniform): the little desert people, the caravan, the behemoth, the town, B.2D2 lost, and so on. Through the impasto of self-indulgence and

109 the comic-book compulsion to move-move-move, there breaks a childlike, radical, precise gesture of the imagination: and you glimpse what a science-fiction movie might be like, when they get around to making one....Why do you spoil it, asking questions? everybody snarls at me. Well, because both movies fHope and Encounters 1 come on as science fiction, or as "sci fi," anyhow; and I was brought up to believe that science fiction, whatever its shortcomings in the way of character, catharsis, and grammar, was supposed to try to be intellectually coherent: to have an idea and to follow it through. Neither of these movies would know an idea if they fell over it (which, of course, given their subject matter, they frequently do). fHopel is all action and Close Encounters is all emotion, and both are basically mindless." (Le Guin 246-47)

6 "The FTL [faster-than-light] drive that so delighted the audiences of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back simply doesn't carry the same critical thrust as the FTL drives that appear in written SF. As a number of SF writers noted when Star Wars first came out, perhaps the largest fantasy element in the films was the sound of the spaceships roaring across what was presumably hard vacuum....Fifteen years ago, the Australian SF critic John Foyster wrote: 'The best science fiction does not contradict what's known to be known.' When it does, at too great a degree, it becomes something else. Science fantasy, perhaps." (McCaffery 82)

7 Does Hope have elements of the techno-thriller? It has futuristic technology which is 'on-screen' a great deal of the time, but more attention is paid to items and matters we connect with an age unconcerned with technological development. For instance, Luke inherits his father's lightsaber, a technological marvel no doubt, but Ben emphasizes its aesthetic aspects: "an elegant weapon from a more civilized age." And at the end, as suspense about whether anyone will be able to hit the target is building, Luke listens to Ben's voice, trusts him and his own limited experience with the Force, and turns off his computer, so that the attack technology of his X-wing fighter is not function­ ing . The story is still a thriller in that Vader is stalking Luke, but that tension is resolved quickly when Han re-appears. Does Hope have elements of the horror genre? Vader is disturbing with his all-black masked presentation, his heavy breathing, and his abuse of physical strength and the Force to achieve power over others; the exploding of a whole planet, Alderaan, is horrific (although I suspect the significance of this event goes right past most filmgoers, perhaps because facing the possibility of nuclear war for so many years has numbed us to images of death such as this); and the scene in the cantina could scare a child who might perceive the various aliens as frighten­ ing , and be upset by the bloody arm. But these details are nothing compared to the content of other horror films regularly shown in theaters and readily available to young children through

110 video rental.

8 The re is only one time that the audience sees blood in Hope -- when Ben cuts the arm off the belligerent man in the cantina. Otherwise there is not a drop. The Stormtroopers apparently either do not bleed when they are shot, or they bleed inside their armor.

Ill CHAPTER TWO THEORIES BEHIND THE PRACTICE IN THIS THESIS

1 I qualify the word 'reality' with the modifiers 'apparently objective' to acknowledge that there is considerable debate within 'mainstream' (see note #8, Ch.2, p.114) film theory about the concept of reality: "This operation of criticising the concepts of traditional theory begins with a rewriting of the names of those concepts. For instance, instead of a study of cinematic realism we now have a critique of realism via a study of 'representation' and 'verisimilitude,' terms much less value­ laden and much more open to the investigator." (Andrew 15)

2 It takes many people to make a film. But for purposes of simplicity I speak of one person, sometimes the screenwriter, often the director, who holds the overall conception in his/her head as a model or vision for what the finished film will be. (Compare Chapter 2, note #4, on Lucas as 'auteur'.) I have tried to use words to describe film and its various aspects, and the people involved with the film industry, very carefully in this thesis. For instance, the word 'vision' in the paragraph above is problematic because it privileges sight over s o u n d . Even though I believe film is primarily a visual medium, I recognize that a whole person goes to a film, and I do not want to privilege one sensory faculty over another. I have, there­ fore, called the people who attend films 'filmgoers' rather than 'viewers' or 'spectators' (both of which privilege sight-), or 'the audience' (which privileges sound). Claudia Gorbman in her book Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Indiana U. Press: Bloomington, 1987) also suggests the use of the phrase 'point of experience' rather than 'point, of view' because the latter privileges the visual, and says, "If we must summarize music-image and music-narrative relationships in two words or less, mutual implication is more accurate.... The notions of parallel and counterpoint erroneously assume that the image is autonomous. Further, it is debatable that information conveyed by disparate media can justifiably be called the same or dif­ ferent." (emphasis in original) (15)

3 I am indebted to my mentor in the writing of this thesis, Cal Seerveld, for suggesting the image of a pair of glasses. (He, in turn, was inspired by John Calvin's comparison of the Bible to a pair of glasses through which we see God and God's creatures.) I have included a hearing aid as part of this imaginary pair of glasses because sound (dialogue, non-verbal sounds of charac­ ters, sound effects, and background music) is integral to film. Several sources have referred to film theory's new interest in sound since a conference on it in 1978 (Stephen Heath and Teresa de Lauretis, eds., Technology and Ideology, New York: Macmillan, 1980, includes reprints of papers delivered at the conference; and Rick Altman, ed., "Cinema Sounds," Yale French Studies, no.

112 60 (Spring 1980), is a study of the soundtrack in film.) Dudley Andrew says, "Currently the semiotic aspects of film technology are becoming more and more the locus for a theory of the image, including the 'sound image' which is receiving special attention." (16)

4 As a student at DSC in the 1960s: "Lucas quickly became a believer in the director as the major creative force behind a film: 'It is a director's medium, there's no getting around that. The writer provides a very important element, but the final product is ultimately left in the hands of the director.' Lucas admired certain directors [e.g., Jean-Luc Goddard] for their vision, an individual style that dominated the contributions made by the writer, cast, editor, and technical crew. His years at use coincided with the advent of the French auteur theory, which credits the director with the ultimate authorship of a film.” (Pollock 46) From the beginning of his work on the trilogy Lucas saw to it that he retained control of Star Wars. He was not going to simply write it, then give it to other people to direct (and own -- see Pollock for an account of his struggles with Twentieth Century Fox over control of Hope). He did not enjoy directing Hope. however, (See Pollock 161-164) and therefore handed the job of directing the next two films in the trilogy over to Irvin Kershner (Empire), and Richard Marquand (Jedl), who knew their work was to bring Lucas' vision to life.

5 Some representative scholars are John Carroll, Noel Burch, David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson. (Andrew 8-9).

6 The following few paragraphs further define and give examples of some of the cinematic features listed in Chapter 2. Examples of a) narrative or plot devices are: double (and even triple - see the ending of Jedi) plots, point of view, foreshadowing, flashbacks, pathetic fallacy, suspense, surprise, dramatic irony, inner thought and action and dreams. (For a discussion of many of these devices see Joy Gould Boyum's Double Exposure: Fiction into Film. New American Library: New York, 1985) . Elaborating on b) the composition of scenes, we can say that: visual images, or shots, make up scenes which together compose the film. "The photographic properties of a shot are those qualities of the film image that are found in any photo­ graph , plus the speed at which the scene is filmed. These would bv the image....[As well as photographic properties] the frame of the movie image forms its border and contains the aise-en-scene." (emphasis in original) (Corrigan 61 and 64) The elements of c ) mise-en-scene, "all those properties of a cinematic image that exist independently of camera position, camera movement, and editing" (Corrigan 50), are: settings and sets, the style or quality of the acting, costumes, lighting.

113 (Corrigan 50-60). The humorous action (sometimes included for comic relief in a tense moment, but often just a throwaway) that Star Warsis full o f , is a facet of the element 'a c ting' within the mise-en-scene. "In theory, sound can be used and edited with as much com­ plexity and intelligence as [sight] images can." (Corrigan 77) The elements of e) sound are: diegetic sound including dialogue, music (from a source within the narrative), and sound effects; and non-diegetic sound which in Star Wars is the background music. Examples of the use of dialogue to help create parallels or symmetry are: single lines repeated through a film or the whole trilogy (for example, "I have a bad feeling about this"), and quotes in the dialogue from other films (for example, "Trust me", originally from Casablanca (1942)). Cinematic feature g), montage, involves such elements as: editing pace or rhythm, continuity or invisible editing, and continuity devices. (Corrigan 68-76) For instance, in Star War Lucas makes frequent use between scenes of various versions of one continuity device, the wipe. If we move a step back behind 'cinematic features', we find the concepts of visual and aural literacy. People need to learn how to see and hear film well in order either to make good films or to appreciate the ones they go to. In his book A Primer of Visual Literacy(MIT Press : C a m b r i d g e , 1973), Donis A . Dondis says, "To understand visual media, to express ideas in visual terminology, it will be necessary to study the components of visual intelligence, the basic elements, the syntactical struc­ tures , the perceptual mechanisms, the techniques, the styles and systems. By studying them, we can control them as man [sic] has learned to understand, control and use language. Then, and only then, will we achieve visual literacy." (181)

7 In her three articles on Star Wars, particularly in the third one, "Return of the Jedi: Once More with Feeling", Anne Lancashire thoroughly and effectively delineates many of the structural and thematic parallels in the trilogy.

8 In this thesis I am not using the approach to film of many European (and, by now, quite a few North American) film theor­ ists , what someone has referred to as the 'paradoxes of pas­ sionate Parisian philosophers'. David Bordwell says, "This version [of Grand Theory] treats cinema study as an instance of the study of the 'human subject, employing tenets based upon Saussurean semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusserian Marxism, and Barthesian textual theory. I shall therefore call this version. . .SLAB theory.... the mainstream position within film theory at present." (385) Summarizing the history of film theory, Dudley Andrew says, “Film was a major recipient of...attention throughout Europe, a logical focus for the energetic disciplines of semiotics, psychoanalysis, and ideological analysis." (6 ) Learning these disciplines (each of which subsumes a number of others) thorough-

114 ly enough to use them as means for 'doing' film theory would involve several years of work at the PhD level. I have gained much from reading writers like D . Andrew, K. and G . Gabbard, K . Thompson, D. Bordwell, and R. Ray, all of whom know the work of the theorists of the mainstream position, but, for the most part, do not use that approach to film. I too have not found it necessary or helpful to use those concepts of the mainstream position, or SLAB theory, that I am familiar with, to analyze Lucas' trilogy cinematically.

9 While he was struggling to write the story of Star Wars. Lucas found Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces helpful for suggesting an overall structure for his story.

10 "Knowledge about families has to come from many directions, and the new discipline of family therapy did not draw upon group dynamics and group psychotherapy alone, important as these were. It has also taken theoretical concepts and inspiration from many other sources, often seeking out theory after first establishing practice. These sources include systems and communications theory, encounter methods, family casework, sociology and

. " (emphasis added) (Thompson and Kahn 139)

11 David Statt , Harper and Row: London, 1981. Page 50.

12 Family systems theory intrigues me because of its »holistic approach to people. Because it recognizes all a person's familial and other significant relationships as being influen­ tial , it reminds me of the images of interconnectedness and oneness throughout Judeo-Christian literature, beginning with the negative -- Cain's question (which God treated as rhetorical) "Am I my brother's keeper?", moving through the painful growth towards unity of the 'children of Israel', eventually coming to Jesus' images of his followers as branches of a grapevine and sheep in a flock, and Paul's image of the church as a body with many parts, all equally important. My observations of my own life and the lives of others lead me to believe family systems theory has much truth to it.

13 Thompson and Kahn address this issue of denial: "Traditional psychiatry aimed to find distinguishing characteristics of mental disorder which would differentiate the insane from the sane. Then psychodynamic psychology emerged to question this distinc­ tion , looking for universal processes which all humanity shared, and no longer finding a difference in kind between the mentally disturbed and the presumed normal. This attempt was felt as a threat by many who, preferred to have the distinctions preserved. At a family level, we now have a similar process. The assumptions of psychodynamic. thinking are now being applied to

115 the family, and therefore to all families. They are not likely to be universally welcomed either, for there are many who would prefer to maintain a distinction between their own families and those other ones that they see depicted on the stage or read about in newspapers. With family therapy has come recognition that severe family disturbance is a consequence of processes which are themselves universal, but which more fortunate families are able, in part, to transcend." (201)

14 Any piece of work reveals something about its creator. Thus, this seems the appropriate point at which to acknowledge that I am a Christian by conviction and experience, and therefore I look at Lucas' work from that perspective.

15 Is Lucas' attitude toward life, as suggested here, " a technological update of the old 'melodramatic', 'middle-class' bootstrap humanism of Benjamin Franklin and Horatio Alger? Hence, the enormous well of historical American consciousness Lucas taps into." (Cal Seerveld, personal communication) The Gabbards seem to think the answer to this question is 'yes'. Using the ideas of Michael Wood CAmerica at the Movies. Basic Books: New York, 1975) and Robert Ray (A Certain Tendency

1985), Krin and G1 en Gabbard (1987) summarize Wood's and Ray's thesis thus: "America's most popular films frequently avoid answering the most troubling questions by displacing them into melodrama, where solutions are found more easily. Drawing upon the work of Charles Eckert (1974) ["The anatomy of a proletarian film: Warner's Marked Woman." Film Quarterly 27:10-24], who has compared this displacement to Freud's account of displacement in the dream work, Ray finds reconciliation to be the most important psychological element in classical Hollywood's 'thematic para­ digm, ' Because melodrama throws a film's center of gravity onto the decisions of a single individual, American movies reinforce the often paradoxical belief that the answer -- and, ultimately, the solution -- to just about anything lies within ourselves." (4-5)

116 CHAPTER THREE THE WORLD OF

1 To show the loving care given to creating atmosphere in Star Wars. here is a description of the costume of Boba Fett, the bounty hunter who through Vader captures Han Solo for Jabba: "For all its built-in gadgetry (holsters for laser guns, digital switches, a shoulder pack incorporating a rocket [which is used at the beginning of Jedi1, the costume has a period swagger about it reminiscent of something out of Richard II.,.,fItl has armored breastplates, knee pads, and a codpiece, features which are straight out of the Middle Ages, The character, like the costume, is a composite. Although Fett is a galactic bounty hunter, his leather ammunition belt and spiked boots are reminiscent of the Old West. There's also a dark hint of that period in the scalps that hang from his right shoulder. His 'saddle' Is a beat-up spacecraft, but his kind have been around for a long, long time in Westerns." (Arnold 67)

2 Merv Sohan, a friend of my family, pointed this out. Even the use of the words 'Emperor' and 'Imperial' suggest Japan during World War II, While I am expressing gratitude, in addition to Merv, I want to thank both my daughter and son for their valuable and amusing commentary on the films as we spent hours watching them together, and my good friend, Marie Fitz­ gerald, for her indispensable help in thinking about what is going on in the trilogy. Many friends supported me while I wrote this thesis.

3 Dan Rubey discusses this cinematic feature in some detail: "The general visual pattern [of Hopei involves contrasts between overwhelming large images and vulnerably small ones. In the opening shot, for example, a tiny space ship is pursued by another ship of enormous size which slowly enters the screen from the right top corner, moves into the center of the screen, and finally fills it entirely, engulfing the smaller ship. This visual dichotomy of small and large reinforces the dichotomy of good-young-less powerful versus evil-older-more powerful which organizes the plot, and it helps the audience participate emotionally in the vulnerability of Luke and the Princess." (9)

4 The Empire's assault against Leia's ship, and Leia's torture with the mind probe, both image invasion, or rape.

5 Besides Leia, there are very few female characters, this fact suggesting that she is the 'token' female character in an otherwise all-male story. The other women are Luke's Aunt B e r u , Mon Mothma, the leader of the Rebel Alliance, and Oola the dancer. Others in scenes in the cantina in Mos Eisley (Hope) and in Jabba the Butt's throne room (Jedi) are background characters only, (just as minor male characters are), and remain anonymous. Mon Mothma is in her 40s or 50s; wears loose flowing robes; has a second name made up of the syllables 'Moth', from 'mother',

117 and 'ma', a short form for 'mother'; and expresses grief for the Rebel spies killed in the line of duty: "Many Bothans died to bring us this information." She is a nurturing political figure. Oola is from the same place as Bib Fortuna, Jabba's adviser. As Leia is later, she is dressed in a skimpy costume. When she rejects Jabba's advances, he quickly dispenses with her, by feeding her to one of his pet monsters. Thus she is presented as seductive, although not of her own will, then she is destroyed. Leia appears as both madonna-like and seductive - virginal in white at the beginning of Star Wars. and maternal towards Luke as he mourns Ben's death, and as he recovers from injury at the beginning and end of Empire •. later she is seductive in the clothing Jabba makes her wear as his reluctant harem girl' She also appears as simply an attractive young woman - in Cloud City and in the Ewok village, and as a fighter in Jedi - first, Boushh, the Bounty Hunter, then part of the Rebel Strike team dressed in army camouflage clothing. Because she is the main female in the story, on-screen much of the time, there is a little opportunity for her to develop as an 'ordinary person' rather than just a stereotype. A fair amount of the time, however, she is simply 'one of the guys'.

6 To speak of the Force, let alone either of its so-called sides, incarnating itself in a person is to use a term from a Christian understanding of reality. Strictly speaking, the Force incarnates itself in everyone and everything, since it is the energy field surrounding, and including all things. Therefore it is problematic to speak of it as having two distinct sides, each one manifesting itself in different people. How could people in the Star Wars world ensure that only the side of the Force they wanted to interact with, surrounded and filled them? To attribute morality to the Force -- a good side and a dark side -- is to attribute personhood and will and power to direct its activities to it. It is to make it a god, perhaps even the God of Western culture. C. S. Lewis speaks about the relationship between what he calls the Life-Force, and God: "I [have] mentioned only the Materialist view and the Religious view. But to be complete I ought to mention the In- between view called Life-Force philosophy, or Creative Evolution, or Emergent Evolution. The wittiest expositions of it come in the works of Bernard Shaw, but the most profound ones in those of Bergson. People who hold this view say that the small variations by which life on this planet 'evolved' from the lowest forms to Man [sic] were not due to chance but to the 'striving' or 'purposiveness' of a Life-Force, When people say this we roust ask them whether by Life-Force they mean something with a mind or not. If they do, then 'a mind bringing life into existence and leading it to perfection' is really a God, and their view is thus identical with the Religious. If they do not, then what is the sense in saying that something without a mind 'strives' or has 'purposes'? This seems to me fatal to their view. One reason

118 why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the. whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life- Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen? (C . S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. Collins: London, 1952. 33-34. )

7 The first time we hear the Force theme is in the brief scene following Luke's discussion with Owen about going to the Academy. Luke is feeling sad because he wants to learn better piloting skills and join the Rebel Alliance, but Owen insists that he stay home to help him with the farm work. As Luke looks at the two suns of his planet, Tatooine, the Force theme swells in the background. It is as if the Force is connected with nature -- the setting suns, and as if it is 'calling' to Luke before he consciously knows about it.

8 Vader has been 'knocked for a loop' by Luke, not just physi­ cally , but psychologically: he says, "The Force is strong in this one." This is the first indication that Vader is shaken by his son; that is, he is surprised to find himself affected by him.

9 It is possible the Empire's forces, the Stormtroopers, are not human: "Violence [in these films] has a tempered make- believe quality since most of those 'killed' are android w a r ­ riors . agents of the dark side. Rarely are men shown dying, and even then, it is usually the bad guys who fall victim to their leader, Darth Vader." (emphasis added) (Singer 28) As evidence against, this view I provide the following points: 1) Stormtroopers speak spontaneously to their superiors (C3P0, who is. a droid, does too, but he is one of the main characters and his anthropomorphization is deliberate for the purpose of humour). 2) Stormtroopers take aim and fire at the Rebels with laser blasters; we are not shown any other droids with this ability. (Interestingly, the stormtroopers are appar­ ently terrible gunfighters. None of the main characters ever gets hit till almost the end of the trilogy when Leia is wounded in the arm.) 3) In Hope Luke and Han knock two stormtroopers unconscious, and remove, and then don, their white armoured spacesuits themselves as a disguise, in order to move about the Death Star freely. Presumably the white armour would not be removable if the Stormtroopers were droids.

119 As evidence for this view, I offer these points: 1) We never see the face of a Stormtrooper; none of them ever takes his helmet off. 2) Stormtroopers are hit by Rebels' blaster laser beams, but while there is then a hole in the armour, there is no blood, there are no 'death agonies'. Perhaps Lucas has kept the Stormtroopers'' identity - human or droid - ambiguous deliberately so that filmgoers will not feel too upset when these beings are used as 'cannon fodder' in scene after scene.

10 "Eat or be eaten" is also the rule in C . S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters, but the 'place' where it applies is hell. 'Eating' or 'consuming' can be an image for 'having power over another being'. This is certainly the principle on which the Empire w o r k s .

11 In Empire and Jedi the only kind of regimentation of the Rebel troops we see is individual pilots reporting back to leaders during battles, and briefings of the troops. These shots and scenes do not show military regimentation; if anything, the Rebels are relaxed and caring in their relationships with each other. But this is the relaxation of a group of people who trust each other, and does not negate the fact that a hierarchical system is still functioning, and that people are finding their sense of identity in being part of the 'military machine' (for example, see the air battle in Jedi), the purpose of which is to destroy the enemy, Anne Lancashire has an interesting theory about the final scene in Hope that she discusses briefly in all three of her articles (1981 48; 1982 11; 1984 56). She thinks Lucas con­ structed this scene as he did to suggest "through a visual allusion, a potential darkness to military heroism however good the cause." (1981 48) Her interpretation of this scene seems to suggest that Lucas does not believe in the just war theory, but I think the inclusion and highlighting of many miltary scenes in the trilogy as a whole suggest that he does espouse this theory. Pacifism, the antithesis of the just war theory, stands against war of any kind on the basis of a 'means to a good end' argument: "This refusal [to use violence] is not a withdrawal from society. It is rather a major negative intervention within the process of social change, a refusal to use unworthy means even for what seems to be a worthy end." (John H. Yoder The Politics of Jesus Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 1972, 158) Luke practices pacifism at the end of Jedi but only indivi­ dually. Neither he nor anyone else in the trilogy ever speaks against, the idea of resolving conflicts by physical fighting. On the contrary, from the beginning (e.g., in Hope. Ben and Luke's first discussion at Ben's home) the characters take it for granted that fighting is the only way to free the galaxy from t y r a n n y .

12 "Many Muslims viewed the Allied military action as the

120 'Eighth Crusade'." (J. Dudley Woodberry , "Can Muslims Be Evangel­ ized?" in Eauipping the Saints 5.3 (Summer 1991):21-22 and 25)

13 The quotation about the warrior monk is from Richard Watring's review of E n h a n c i n g .Human .Performance; Issues. Theories and Techniques, a book from the National Research Council (NRC) in the U.S. Watring says, "The U.S. Army has been experimenting with typical New Age training techniques for years. But only recently did the Army Research Institute commission the NRC to conduct a study.... The results are not at all favorable to the New Age cause.... The Army assumed these programs would deliver certain behaviors: fearlessness, cunning, courage, one-shot effectiveness [eg, Luke's hitting the target on the Death Star at first try in Hope], fatigue reversal, and nighttime fighting capability. But there is no evidence that performance enhance­ ment programs can accomplish these ends. The characteristics the Army wished to cultivate may be more a function of a soldier's 'will' than skills acquired or strengthened through training." (emphasis added) (28-29)

121 CHAPTER FOUR BECOMING A MATURE MAN

1 A dysfunctional family 'keeps the peace' at any cost; its members will not discuss potentially conflict-producing subjects. Bradshaw says, "We are to share a collective denial and a cultural no-talk rule. This 'no-talk' rule is rooted in the rules which govern parenting. Children are to speak when spoken to; children are to be seen and not heard; children are to obey all adults (any adult) without question. To question is an act of disobedience. And so the rules are carried by the obedient child in all the. adults who are raising families. The hidden child in every adult continues to obey so that the rules are carried multigenerationally, and the 'sins of the fathers are visited on the children to the third and fourth generation.' The crisis is far worse than we realize because one of the rules coin-prising the sacred rules is that we can't question any of the rules. We are not supposed to talk about the rules. This would dishonor our parents." (The Family 4)

2 Transactional Analysis, a school of thought and practice in psychology begun by Dr. Eric Berne, analyzes the transactions between two, or among three or more people in terms of the ego states functioning as the transaction occurs. It was popularized by two books, Berne's Games People Play and Thomas Harris' I'm 0.K .. You're 0.K .. Transactional Analysis (TA for short) includes a concept called The Drama Triangle. "Drama in life, as in the theater, is based on 'switches,' and these switches have been neatly summarized by Stephen Karpman in a simple diagram he calls 'The Drama Triangle'" (Eric Berne M.D. What Do You Sav After You Say Hello?: The Psychology of Human Destiny Bantam (Grove Press): New York, 1972, 186):

"Each hero in a drama or in life (the protagonist) starts off in one of the three main roles: Rescuer, Persecutor, or Victim, with the other principal player (the antagonist) in one of the other roles. When the crisis occurs, the two players move around the triangle, thus switching roles. One of the commonest switches occurs in divorces. During the marriage, for example, the husband is the persecutor and the wife plays the part of the

122 victim. Once the divorce complaint is filed, these roles are reversed: the wife becomes the persecutor, and the husband the victim, while his lawyer and her lawyer play the part of competing rescuers, In fact, all struggles in life are struggles to move around the triangle in accordance with the demands of the script.... Fairy tales, treated as dramas, show exactly this feature. Little Red Riding Hood, for example, is a victim of the persecuting wolf until the hunter rescues her, when she suddenly becomes the persecutor, putting stones in the belly of the now victimized wolf." (Hello. 186-87.)

3 Myths, legends and fairy tales often show the passing on of a significant weapon from the older to the younger generation (generally, of men). Arthur's winning of Excalibur is a case in point except that he had to work a lot harder to get the sword than Luke does to receive his father's lightsaber.

4 Once he has died, no other character makes reference to Ben so that we do not have a word in the films (i.e., sanctioned by Lucas) to use to refer to the dead but occasionally reappearing K e n o b i . The novelizations and f ilmscripts use 'spirit', '¥181011' and 'ghost,', but Ben is not frightening. Rather, the pleasant shimmering blue light around him and his usual gentle manner make him seem the same as when he was alive. Presumably, as he warned Vader, Ben has 'merged' with the Force and is now so powerful that he can 'choose' (if that is the appropriate word for someone who has let their 'energy field' be absorbed by a much larger one) to manifest himself as he used to look, at any time or in any place. Ben seems to appear of his own volition, but each of the times he does, Luke needs him. Yoda also hears Ben speaking and sees him, so for purposes of the story we seem meant to believe that the 'spirit' of Ben is an 'objective reality' and not a figment of Luke's imagination.

5 The agony and precariousness of Luke's situation is emphasized through the mise-en-scene. The weather vane he manages to grab as he falls is only small pieces of metal, not at all secure, shuddering in the wind which also whips his hair and c l o t h i n g . The tension is gradually relieved as we realize from the expression on Leia's face and her orders to Lando and Ohewie that she has heard Luke, and we see the Falcon changing direction and returning to Cloud City against soft attractive yellow clouds. But this help arrives only after Luke has already died symbolically, and it comes not from Ben, his 'father figure', whom he calls first, but from his 'mother figure', Leia.

6 Is there a punitive aspect to Ben's warning and behaviour? That is, could he come if he wanted to, but will not because he disapproves of Luke's decision?

123 Mike Wong, my son, speculates about this: "Ben can turn up on any planet he wants to. But he won't come when Luke calls him at the end of Empire, unlike the Father (God) who will answer whenever you call him, In Star Wars you have to perform well!" There is an apparent inconsistency here: offers of everpre­ sent help -- “The Force - or Yoda - will be with you always", and then a refusal to come when Luke is in a crisis. Other explana­ tions are possible, of course. Vader and Ben have already confronted each other, and perhaps in the F o r c e 's 'spiritual economy', they cannot do so again. Vader won physically that time, won the battle, but Ben won spiritually, a victory he announced to Vader while they were fighting: "You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."

7 If Vader had killed Luke, that killing would have been 'filicide.', which is the murdering of one's own child, or the parent who does it. Lucas never had any intention of having his saga end with either patricide or filicide.

8 Luke is actually being thwarted in all five freedoms by his elders. The other four are: 1. The freedom to see and hear (perceive) what is here and now, rather than what was, will be or should be. 2. The freedom to think what one thinks, rather than what one should think. 4. The freedom to want (desire) and to choose what .one wants, rather than what one should want. 5. And the freedom to imagine one's own self-actualization, rather than playing a rigid role or always playing it safe, (Bradshaw The Family 49)

9 This is how Tom Cruise's character, 'Maverick', flies in Top Gun. Like Luke, he flies very well, by instinct, and supposedly through heredity. His father was also an excellent pilot but, while flying, disappeared under circumstances which have never been explained. Maverick lives in his father's shadow in the sense that he wants to vindicate him by flying well enough to win the Navy's top award for fighter pilots. Maverick is also a rebel who does not always do what his officers tell him. But he is forgiven because he flies so well and because he knows how to 'carry off' the macho posturing essential in a story like this. Ben's advice to Luke is similar to Yoda's when Luke asks a question during the Jedi training on Dagobah and Yoda answers, "There is no why," They are both giving a "Don't think" message.

10 Activity can be an addictive escape from feeling one's feelings, as potent as any drug. Bradshaw believes that "Addiction touches the lives of moat of the people in our culture.,.An addiction is any pathological relationship with anv mood-altering experience that has life- damaging consequences.... Any activity can distract and therefore

124 mood alter. Work addiction and religious addiction are major addictions in our country." (The Family 96-97)

11 In The Dark Crystal (1983), a fantasy film directed by Jim Henson (creator of the Muppets and of Yoda) and Frank Oz (the voice for Yoda) the same phenomenon occurs. There are two interconnected groups of creatures who rule in this world, the Skeksis who are evil and the Mystics who are good. When a Mystic dies in the presence of a gelfling, the most humanoid of the creatures in this world, a very similar scene to the death of Yoda in Luke's presence, the Mystic's body too fades out of sight very gradually, much to the grief of the gelfling.

12 Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross first delineated these five stages in her book On.Death and Dying (Macmillan: N.Y., 1969) as a result of her work with dying patients. They have since been recognized as being applicable to any traumatic situation. Whether Luke goes through all five steps, and in what order, is not important. The point is that he is in shock having just ex­ perienced two major traumas -- having his right hand cut off, and being told by Vader, his worst enemy, that he is his father.

13 Not being able to be happy unless someone else is, is called co-dependency and is not healthy psychologically. But that is the state Luke is in. Co-dependency and enmeshment can be used as synonyms. The opening lines from an old popular song s u m ­ marize co-dependency well: I want to be happy But I c a n 't be happy Till I make you happy too.

14 In our world, the sooner a fatherless young man acknowledges the truth of his situation to himself, the better. He can then begin to find out how to love himself as he was not loved in childhood. Christians believe God parents them, and can 're- parent ' them, giving them the love their own parents were not able to: "Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me." (Ps.27:10) But in the world of Star Wars what Luke needed to do was stop idolizing his surrogate fathers; dis-identify with them; not want to be a 'chip off the old block', an inheritor of patriar­ chal values; and question Ben and Yoda's evaluation of people and situations. This option is not even offered, however. Instead, we are intended to see Luke's mental/emotional/psychological 'merging' with the pantheon as admirable behavior. The appropri­ ate song for Luke to sing at the end as well as the beginning of the trilogy is "My heart belongs to Daddy". Luke's 'beloved departed' appear to him to show him what he has accomplished: not only has he rescued his father; he has suc­ ceeded in reuniting him with his former teachers, friend(s -- we do not know whether Vader and Yoda ever met in life), and fellow Jedi. In an interesting reversal of the Christian understanding

125 that at the final resurrection the living will coroe to the dead who have already risen, throughout Star Wars (Ben) and here (Ben, Yoda, and Vader) we have the dead presenting themselves to the l i v i n g . What more could a son want? Now Luke has both his father and his surrogate fathers observing (and protecting?) his life and work. This is the 'old boys' network' on the job, perhaps 'ancestor worship', with the emphasis on 'ancestor' rather than ' worship'. An interesting sidelight on father/son relationships and ghosts is the attitude of Patrick Swazye, the male lead in the recent popular contemporary fantasy movie Ghost. who, when asked to play a ghost, insisted "that he be a physical presence rather than an immobile shadow." (Yakir 26) That is, he did not want to be surrounded by a shimmering blue light, and, once dead, he looked and behaved exactly as he had when alive earlier in the s t o r y . Swayze stresses his belief in metaphysics: "I have a great deal of faith in faith; if you believe something strongly enough, it becomes true for you. I'd like to believe that my father is right here with me in this room and that he's my guardian angel, that there's life after death - because if there isn't, why are we here? I don't, believe that just flesh and bones can contain - from the point of view of physics - this very real recorded energy inside us. Whether it's true or not, I think we need to believe it. Ghost expresses all that," (Yakir 26)

126 CHAPTER FIVE THE FORCE AND LOVE: TWO COSMOLOGIES

1 Lucas goes on to say, "If you use [the Force] well, you can see the future and the past. You can sort of read minds and you can levitate and use that whole netherworld of psychic energy," (Clarke 1980 54) This sounds like the U.S. Army's vision for the 'warrior monk' discussed in Chapter Three. In the films the Force is. involved in the 'whole netherworld of psychic energy' but not in ways roost people would want to emulate. Besides being everywhere at once, its main 'activities' are 1),moving objects - lightsabers, stones, etc.; 2) brainwash­ ing people - Ben and Luke's 'Jedi mind tricks'; 3) ESP-type communication, or what I have called 'enmeshment'(Chapter Four); and 4) physical violence against others - Vader's chokings and killings of Imperial officers. The first activity is neutral, then each succeeding one becomes progressively more negative. If the implication of Lucas' words, "if you use it well", is "if you use the good side for good", Lucas is not totally consistent in working out his presentation of the Force because we see both good and bad characters discerning the future and 'mind-reading' (although we see only good ones causing rocks, robots and space ships to levitate.)

2 Evil invades two characters against their will (i.e., they did not appear to do anything to invite it) in Ghostbusters (1984), a contemporary F film. In a frightening scene Dana, a musician, is suddenly possessed by Zool, a demon, because she lives in 'Spook Central', an apartment building constructed by a Dr. Sandor to be a receptor for occult energies. Thus the image of involuntary possession is in popular films, probably with much greater frequency than I am aware of since I am not familiar with the horror film genre. Lucas, however, does not seem to have- thought of my question about making sure only the side of the Force you want to interact with surrounds and fills you. Actually, if the Force is literally everywhere, it seems to me the people in the Star Wars world have little real choice about this. Both sides of the Force (if it really does have two) are going to be 'in' them, whether they like it or not.

3 "Lucas' concept of the Force was heavily influenced by Carlos Castaneda's Tales of Power, an account of a Mexican Indian sorcerer, Don Juan, who uses the phrase 'life force'." (Pollock 140) Both Lucas and Kershner (the director of Empire) read each of Castaneda's novels as they were published. For more informa­ tion about the sources for the. Force, read Sciga j ' s article. (See bibliography. ) In Hope the rebels do get 'exactly what they want when they want it' because the Death Star is 'magically' blown up just in time, before it blows up the Rebel base. But Han is involved in its successful destruction, The timing of Han's helping Luke by preventing Vader from shooting him down is crucial: a few more seconds and Han would have been too late.

127 Within the story, we have to imagine a) that for a reason we are not told -- concern for Luke? attraction to Leia? more loyalty to the Rebel cause than he had so far been willing to show? -- Han changed his mind and decided to fight with the Rebels after all; and b) that he made this decision; flew back; located Luke's ship with Vader's ship and its two support ships hot on its tail; then aimed, fired at, and destroyed one of the support ships causing Vader to stop pursuing Luke just before he was going to fire at him, and all this just in the nick of time! In our world people would explain such an event in one of a number of ways -- 1. good luck (for the Rebels, that is); 2. serendipity; 3, synchronicity; 4. Fate; 5. Providence; 6. God's intervention; 7, the will of Allah; etc. Within the Star Wars world I believe we are to assume that the good side of the Force prompted Han without his being aware of it, and that, through the Force, he was more connected with Luke and Leia and the others by this time than he recognized, (How the Force 'connects' people -- other than making them all part of the same gigantic energy field and therefore all, 'good and bad guys', equally connected -- is never made clear.)

4 "An important factor in Lucas' world-view is his religious upbringing. His parents were Methodists, and he attended Sunday School regularly as a child. However, he loathed what he called the Methodists' 'self-serving piety,' preferring the German Lutheran services of the Lucases' housekeeper. George seemed attracted more to ritual than to content. He once said: 'I think church is a much better experience than Sunday School because it gets into what religion is all about; the ceremony provides some­ thing essential for people'." (Pollock 21 quoted in Nichols 9) As for Lucas' present convictions he says, "I have strong feelings about God and the nature of life, but I'm not devoted to one particular faith." (Arnold 190)

5 The cosmology of goodness and love is humanism: we ought to be good, and we ought to love ourselves and each other because that will be the best thing for humanity. Luke believes that (human) love can overcome evil. Why he holds this belief we are not told. We simply know that the Rebels as a group have more reverence for human life than the Imperial leaders do. (They also have more loyalty to others because of that reverence or love for their fellow human beings. There is a place for individuals in the world of the Rebels -- each one is an iden­ tifiable person, and yet. they can act together too.) One possible, reason Luke believes love will conquer evil is that Ben demonstrated self-sacrifice, an act that enabled Luke and the others to escape the. evil which threatened to destroy them. In what is almost a practice or rehearsal for his decision in Jedi regarding Vader, Luke decides to sacrifice himself, if necessary, when Han and Leia are in danger in Cloud City. And finally, he chooses to love his enemy, whatever the consequences. (Vader does too, of course,) Because of his fantasy bond with

128 Vader, Luke may unconsciously be hoping that Vader will protect him, and perhaps die for his sake, as Ben had done earlier. He has been the recipient of sacrificial love once already so that he may be expecting to receive that kind of love again. In this scene in Jedi where Vader and Luke speak at cross­ purposes we see the two cosmologies Lucas keeps mixed together for most of the trilogy, separated out from each other. Ulti­ mately, (by the end of Jedi) the cosmology of 'love overcomes evil' has won out over the impersonal cosmology of the Force.

6 "If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course,if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will. Confronted with cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, 'If you could only see it from the divine point, of view, you would realise that this also is God.' The Christian replies, 'Don't talk damned, nonsense.' For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world -- that, space and time, heat and cold, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God 'made up out of His [sic] head' as a man [sic] makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and God insists, and insists very loudly, on putting them right again." (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Collins: London, 1952. Page 41.)

7 C. S. Lewis who uses this metaphor -- good as solid and evil as shadowy -- in his dream-vision The Great Divorce, says in it that he got the idea from a science fiction story he was reading.

8 Luke never uses the word 'redeemable', but he does use the word 'good' with the same intention. He seems to believe that all he has to do is keep reminding Vader of his former goodness (rather like 'positive nagging'), and he will reform and return to i t . Treating Vader as if he were a real person and speaking from a Judeo-Christian perspective, we could say that Vader redeemable, but he will not be redeemed because Luke loves him. If that were possible, people who loved other people would be busy redeeming them (or Rescuing) whenever they felt like it, whether the person wanted to be redeemed or not.

9 Lawrence Kasdan was writer of Empire with Leigh Brackett (who died after completing the first draft of the script) from a story by Lucas, and writer of Jedi with Lucas. The quotation is Kasdan's description of a discussion he had with Lucas, Gary Kurtz, producer of Hope and Empire, and Irvin Kershner, director

10 In Jedi the Emperor's loyalties appear to fluctuate w i l d y .

129 One moment he is tormenting Luke verbally, and the next he is pleased that Luke is winning in his fight with Vader. It would seem that he does not care who wins and is his second-in-command as long as he gets to see a good fight. He also tells Luke to strike him down with his lightsaber, pointing out that he is defenseless. In actuality, he is trying to tempt Luke to give in to his anger and hatred ('the dark side') because the further Luke moves in that direction, the more control the Emperor can gain over h i m . In his article "Return of the Jedi: The End of the Myth" (see bibliography), Andrew Gordon even suggests a homosexual undertone or quality to the Emperor's approach to Luke. This interpretation would fit in with the Emperor's sado-masochism since homosexual partnerships sometimes have elements of power over/powerlessness (or Persecutor/Victim) in them. (Heterosexual relationships can be equally unhealthy psychologically, of course. It is just that if a homosexual relationship parodies a heterosexual one, it may have clear roles, based on sexual stereotyping: one person postures as the dominant, 'masculine', 'power over' partner, and the other as the submissive, 'femin­ ine', 'powerless' partner.)

11 Jung speaks of the masculine (the animus) and the feminine (the anima) within every person, whether male or female. He developed this concept as he examined the writings and imagery of the mediaeval alchemists, and also because of his own experience, personal and professional. The difficulty 1 have with this usage of the words 'mas­ culine ' and 'feminine' is that their meaning (both denotative and connotative) is too closely connected with the meaning of 'male' and 'female', the words used to signify a person's gender. Thus people in the Western world think that if you are masculine (re^ad 'male'), you will be active, strong, decisive, rational, etc., and if you are feminine (read 'female'), you will be passive, weak, indecisive, emotional, etc., and they look askance, when a particular person does not clearly fit one of these two cultural stereotypes. The reality is that there is no necessciry connection between gender and personality. Thus, for instance, physically a roan could look very male (as opposed to female) and yet be more 'feminine' than 'masculine' in his personality. It would be good if we could create new words to replace 'masculine' and 'feminine', ones that would not have the connota­ tions built in that only certain ways of behaving are appropriate to each gender. But doing so would take much effort over a long period of time since the old stereotypes for the meanings of 'masculine' and 'feminine' are hoary with age and universally accepted (c .f ., 'yin' and 'yang' in Chinese culture). Also culture and language are symbiotically related so that people's attitudes would have to change for the language to change.

130 12 In fairy tales there are often a sister and a brother who, archetypally speaking, symbolize 'the feminine' and 'the mas­ culine' principles. Their joining together in some way (co­ operation or a hug), symbolizes a coming to wholeness. Since the story focuses primarily on Luke, the hug he and Leia give each other and their whole relationship of tender care (particularly Leia' s for Luke), symbolize Luke's coining to greater wholeness, having accepted 'the feminine' within himself. There is also greater integration for Leia as the other half of this equation. Although she and Luke do not yet officially know they are brother and sister, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill play their roles in such a way as to suggest that at some level they sense the true nature of their relationship. Both Luke arid Leia have learned through their respective ordeals in Cloud City, and it is almost as if both transfer their learning to the other in the quiet moments they have together at the end of Empire. Their intimate relationship (Lucas made them twins to help account for their closeness) also provides filmgoers with a sense of closure at the end of Empire because we know that Luke is not alone: he has Leia to comfort him, and it foreshadows the close relationship between Luke and Vader by the end of Jedi. Clearly no one wants to be by him or her self in this Skywalker family.

131 CONCLUSION

1 S t a r .Wars was also marketed to young people. "Lucas had to...woo the science-fiction crowd -- it was his hard-core audience. He personally paid for Kurtz fHope's producer] and publicity supervisor Charles Lippincott to travel the circuit of sci-fi conventions, passing out thousands of buttons and bumper stickers and showing a carefully selected group of slides. Lucas remembers, 'It had an effect, because there was a whole world of fanatics out there who were crazy to see this movie six months before it came out,.'" (Pollock 183) Ashley Boone, in charge of advertising for Hope. bought time on local TV stations, in college newspapers, even on the cable TV systems in college dormitories. 'By the time this film opened, six million kids knew where it was playing,' Boone says." (Pollock 184)

2 Learning how to drive and shoot are, of course, values for young males in many cultures, in particular for young men in some sub-cultures within North America, another indication that it is as much his own times as the future/past that Lucas is depicting in these films.

3 Another recent film which includes the father/son theme, albeit connected with a secondary character and made somewhat, humorous, is Princess Bride (1987). In it, a dueller wants to get revenge, on the six-fingered man who killed his father.

4 'Buddy movies'are films in which the main characters are male friends who go through adventures together. Some examples are Midnight Cowbc KM, M*A*S*H. and "Women were relegated to weak supporting roles or else dropped from sight entirely....The male duos who dominated the screen during this period were almost invariably devoid of family connections. Who were the mothers and fathers of Butch Cassidy, Ratso Rizzo, or Captain America? These characters seemed to be free-floating vagabonds of unknown origin, cut off from parents and siblings. The bonds they struck up with one another were an emotional recompense for the family ties missing from their lives." (Farber and Green 350) Han is the 'vagabond of unknown origin' in Star Wars. and Luke and Han are the male duo. In their books, R. Ray, and K. and G, Gabbard (see bibliography) have interesting discussions of this concept of male duos under the heading 'official hero' and 'outlaw hero' (see Chapter 2 of this thesis). Knowing the nature of the character he was playing, Harrison Ford "wanted Han to do something different in Jedi. and that was to die. 'I thought it would give the myth some body. Han Solo really had no place to go. He's got no papa, he's got no mama, he's got no story. But that was the one thing I was unable to convince George of.'" (Clarke. 1983 53)

132 Star Wars was for children: how could one of the heroes die? Also, part of Lucas' purpose in making it was to show a community being created on the basis of the relationships in a family (the Skywalkers). By the end of Jedi Han has a new family by friend­ ship and is probably going to join it by marriage too. Aside from his own merits, as Leia's husband and Luke's brother-in-law he will be a fairly important person in the new society Luke will undoubtedly become the leader of, and a very important person in the Skywalker clan. Farber and Green point out that the "impulse to substitute male cameraderie for heterosexual romance and family responsibil­ ity is not without precedent in American culture. Critic Leslie Fiedler has identified it as a salient -- perhaps the salient phenomenon of our literature.... The tendency had long been evident in American films as well, but it was balanced by an equally profound interest in family relationships. Down through the years, some of the. most unforgettable scenes in American cinema have been primal familial encounters." (350) Lucas has the best of all worlds in Star Wars: male camerad­ erie galore and a heterosexual romance, plus the climactic scene of his trilogy is a 'primal family encounter',

5 Speaking against making an idol of one's family (ie, one s inheritance by blood ties), Jesus talked about the cost of being his disciple: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his fa their and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters -- yes, even his own life -- he cannot be my disciple." (Luke 14:26) Lucas is recommending the opposite of this: greater involve­ ment with one's family of origin, or a communal substitute for it, for purposes of salvation -- one's own, that of one's parent(s) , and in some fashion, that of the. community.

6 At the end of Jedi the Rebels have to depend on each other for success: Lando and his cohorts cannot attack the Death Star till Han and Leia and the Strike Team have destroyed its deflec­ tor shield. But Luke is responsible only to himself (and his former mentors, Ben and Yoda) in his attempt to 'win his father back to the good side': the Emperor, and whoever else is in the Death Star, will be killed as soon as it is blown up by Lando and his team. Thus, Luke and Vader in their mutual rescuing of each other are not 'saving their world' but only themselves: this is

In her course "Literary Traditions and Contemporary Popular Film" Anne Lancashire suggested "What must aa do to be saved?" was the central question of Star Wars. She was contrasting Star Wars. Jedi in particular, with Pilgrim's Progress where the question asked is "What must 1 do to be saved?" Bunyan, however, took this question from Acts 16:30 where the Phillipian jailer's conversion is not just individual but familial (see Acts 16:31-34 where the jailer's family is men­ tioned as participating in events four times, once in each v e r s e ),

133 Luke and Vader cannot 'save' others, the rest of their family or their world, for instance. What would it mean for them to do so? What is this 'saving' that is going on? It is clear that Vader's action is to save Luke's life physically. But what kind of 'saving' of Vader is Luke doing? Was it important for him to be brought back to the 'good side' for his own sake so that he could die content and go to 'Force heaven', or for Luke's so that Luke could be vindicated in his beliefs about his father? Is either Luke or Vader trying to 'save' Vader's reputation and if so, with whom? There are many unanswered questions around this relationship.

7 Although Lucas does not say anywhere that he had the following scriptural material in mind when he wrote Star Wars. the similarity is interesting: The angel who tells Zechariah about the son, John, that he and Elizabeth will have in their old age says: "And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous -- to make ready a people prepared for the Lord, (emphasis added) (Luke 1:17) This promise is a restating of one in the Hebrew Bible: "See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts Q.f.the..fathers to. or else I will come and strike the land with a curse, (emphasis added) (Malachi 4:5,8)

8 Needing to see Vader as good, Luke creates a 'fantasy bond' with him. Bradshaw says that in his book The Fantaev Bond. Robert Firestone "elaborates on Freud's work.... The fantasy bond is the core defense in all human psychological systems, ranging from those of psychot.ics to fully-functioning individuals. [It] is the illusion of connectedness we create with our major caretaker whenever our emotional needs are not adequately met. [It] is like a mirage in the desert that enables one to survive. Since no mother, father or other parenting person is perfect, all humans develop this fantasy bond to some degree. In fact, growing up and leaving home involves the overcoming of this illusion of connection and protection.... Most of all, it means giving up our parents in their illusory and idealized form. The more emotionally deprived a person has been, the stronger his [sic] fantasy bond. And paradoxical as it sounds, t h e .more a person has been abandoned,.the.more he tends.to ciing means to idealize the way they raised you." (Bradshaw The Family 10)

9 After observing that the Force was very strong in Vader, Ben took it upon himself to teach him how to become a Jedi, instead of sending him to Yoda for training. When Vader began to be seduced by 'the dark side', Ben and Vader fought with each other

134 Apparently Ben was trying to prevent Vader from choosing evil, but, during their fight, Vader was badly hurt, (I believe he fell into hot lava according to a novelization of one of the film- scripts). Vader managed to survive only by becoming a 'bionic man', dependent on life-support machinery. These events are the background to Ben's telling Luke in Jedi that he must confront Vader. Ben confesses to Luke that he was wrong in trying to train Vader himself, but claims that Vader is more machine now than man, implying that it is, therefore, all right to kill him. In light of all this, we can conjecture that Ben feels responsible for unleashing Vader upon the world of Star Wars. and that, if Ben is Luke's surrogate father, Luke is also his sur­ rogate son, the new 'good' son he can send to destroy the old ' bad' one. Ben's motivation in wanting Vader eliminated is ambiguous because we do not know whether he wants him killed to save the galaxy from the evil Vader is inflicting upon it, or to wipe out his own mistake.

10 After the chief priests and elders of the people had answered Jesus' question, Jesus, making the application of the parable explicit for them, said, "I tell you the truth, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John [the Baptist] came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did. And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him." (Matt.21:31b-32) Vader is like the tax collectors and prostitutes, a reject, an outcast, whereas Ben is like the chief priests and elders in that Luke tells him there is still good in Vader and he will not believe him. In Star Wars. however, both Vader and Ben get into the equivalent in Star Wars of the kingdom of God, 'Force heaven'. (The implication of Jesus' words is that, of their own choice. the chief priests and elders will not enter the kingdom of G o d . )

11 The question when one leader succeeds another is always, 'Will the new one be better or worse than the old one?' There are two unresolved matters: Luke's enmeshment with Vader (and many others), an enmeshment not healed but reinforced by his rescuing of his father and his father's rescuing of him; and the Rebels' firm belief in the 'just war' theory (militarism is fine as long as it. is for a good cause). What kind of leadership will Luke and his friends give when they have not solved many of their own problems?

12 The whole Skywalker family is there, except for Luke and Leia's mother. Leia has vague memories -- their mother was 'kind but sad'. 'Kind' suggests she should be in 'Force heaven', part of the pantheon of the good side, but she is totally forgotten. There are difficulties, of course. We would have had to have seen her in a flashback (there are none in the whole

135 trilogy), or a picture (are there photographs in this world?), in order to recognize her in the final scene. But Lucas has just not thought to include her. This is a men's story, 'the old boys' network', patriarchy, the passing on of a heritage through the male line. Even Leia is in the story partly as the token female, so it is not surprising her mother is excluded. Vader, in effect, is both father and mother to his children who, figuratively, are 'sprung full-grown from Zeus' f o r e h e a d .

13 The Cardinal in The Mission (1986) turns at the end of the film and looks right at the (camera) filmgoers as if to involve us in the decision he has made, to implicate us in human guilt, and say, "And would you have done anything different in my place?" Whether this acknowledgement of the presence of the filmgoers happens in a serious film, as here, or in a comedy, as in Jedi, it has considerable impact because of the rarity with which it occurs.

14 The conceptual artist for Star Wars. Ralph McQuarrie, says, "George [Lucas] had ideas about how his picture fHopel should look. In fact, I think the look of the picture was more inter­ esting to him than the plot. The look of the great vistas, the alien lands, the structures, the spaceships, the robots, the costumes, and accessories was of fundamental interest to him." (Arnold 51)

15 The information about the fields Lucas read in comes from Clarke (1980) 54, Arnold 188 and 190, and Pollock 134'. Lucas says, "Through anthropology I had gotten interested in folkl ore and mythology and in their role as an anchor for societies....! was trying to design a modern fairy tale. I wanted it to have a strong moral basis designed to teach young people and give them a perspective; I wanted to give them a fantasy life they could act out and use, as traditional fairy tales have been used by society for thousands of years. It started with the idea of good and evil, which is found in roost fairy tales." (Arnold 188 and 190)

16 If it is true that there can be no salvation without sacri­ fice, and that real heroism involves loving sacrificially, then according to the doctrines of Christianity there is a true hero at the center of the universe (and of human history): "The Christian can see with the believer in myths that the male is destined by his maleness for bloody sacrifice. From the animal victims of the Old Testament to the heroic tales of all societies (Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Odysseus), the destiny of the male is to be wounded or slain. In confronting death, the hero (everymale) enters an alien world and brings back a wisdom which enables him to be the King, the mature man. In this descent into death, he is wounded.... The fulfillment of this myth is the Lamb who stands as One who is slain....[Jesus] confronted Death

136 itself, and conquered it....Every myth of a dying god, of the warrior hero who faces monsters, of the king who dies to save his people, is fulfilled....There is really, in history and in eternity, a God-Hero." (from "The Warrior Mystique", a review by Leon J. Podles, of Iron John: A Book about Men by Robert Bly, in Crisis magazine; reprinted in Leanne Payne's Pastoral Care H i n i s.tr.ies Newsletter, Fall, 1991.) "[Christians] serve the Hero who crushed the serpent with his heel...[and who said to his followers], 'I give vou power to tread on serpents and scorpions without suffering harm.' Paul adds, 'The God of Peace shall shortly bruise Satan under vour feet.' And Jesus said of the church that 'The gates of Hell will not prevail against it.'" (footnote on page 185 in Marguerite

Good. Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 1987; originally from R . Love­ lace 's "The occult revival in historical perspective" in Demon Possession. ed. J . W . Montgomery, Bethany Fellowship: Minne­ apolis , 1976 . )

137 (Episode IV) (197?)

Writer/director: George Lucas. Producer: Gary Kurtz. Music: John Will iams. CAST. Luke Skywalker: Mark Hamill; Han Solo: Harrison Ford; Princess Leia Organa: Carrie Fisher; Ben (Obi-Wan) Kenobi: Alec Guiness; See-Threepio (C-3P0): Anthony Daniels; Artoo-Detoo (R2-D2): Kenny Baker; Chewbacca: Peter Mayhew; Lord Darth Vader: David Prowse; the voice of Darth Vader: James Earl Jones; and others. Color. 121 minutes.

Director: Irvin Kershner. Executive Producer: George Lucas. Producer: Gary Kurtz. Screenplay: Leigh Brackett, Lawrence Kasdan (from a story by George Lucas). Music: John Williams. CAST. Same as for Star Wars FHopel. plus Yoda: Frank O z ; Lando Calrisssian: Billy Dee Williams; Boba Fett: Jeremy Bulloch; and o t h e r s . Color. 124 minutes.

Director: Richard Marquand. Executive Producer: George Lucas. Producer: Howard Kazanj ian. Screenplay: Lawrence Kasdan and George Lucas (from a story by Lucas). Music: John Williams. CAST. Same as for first two films, plus Anakin Skywalker: Sebastian Shaw; the Emperor: Ian McDiarmid; and o there. Color. 133 minutes.

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143 Chronology of Important Films

1926 Metropo 'is 1974 The Can That Ate Paris 1929 By Rocket To The Aloon Dark Star TheStepford Wives 1931 Frankenstein 1975 Rollerball 1933 The Invisible Man 1976 Logan's Run 1936 Things To Come The Alan Wso Fell To Earth Flash Gordon (Serial) 1977 Capricorn One 1939 Buck Rogers (Serial) Close Encounters O f The Third Kind 1950 Destination Ahum Demon Seed 1951 The Da) The Earth Stood Still Star Wars Wien Worlds Collide 1978 Battlestar Galactica 1953 War O f The Worlds Invasion O f The Body Snatchers 1954 The Creature From The Black Lagoon Superman: TheAlovie Godzilla, King OfTheAlonsters 1979 Alien Them! The Black Hole 1955 This IsLndEarth Deathwatch M ad Max 1956 Forbidden Planet Quintet Invasion O f The Body Snalchers Stalker 1957 The C’trse O f Frankenstein Star T re k - The Motion Picture The Incredible Shrinking Alan 1980 Altered States 1958 I Marri -d A Monster From Outer The Empire Strikes Back Space; Saturn 3 1960 The Time Machine Scanners 1961 The Day The Earth Caught Fire 1981 M ad Max II 1962 Dr No Outland 1963 Children O f The Damned Time Bandits I%-| /h Sl/tlllfrinrt' IW2 Android llii’ Meat Filter I'MiS ll/dtitt>illr IlL le I, liiiiner 1966 Fahrenheit -/.*> I H i. The lixtni-'lerm triul Fantastic I Hyage Fi refox 1967 Barbare'tla The Thing 7 he Power Tron 1968 Charly Videodrome Planet O f The Apes 1983 Brainstorm 2001: A Space Odyssey K ndl 1970 The Andromeda Strain Return o f the Jedi TU X I U S Spacehunter:/Idventures In The Forbidden Zone 1971 A Clockwork Orange Superman III Silent Running War Games Solaris 1984 Dreamscape 1972 Slaughterhouse Five Dune 1973 The Final Programme Firestarter Phase IV Ghostbusters Westmorla The Last Starfighter Zardoz 1984 - Star Trek III