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Title of thesis: Author(s): Signatures: Faculty (Signature): ____________________________________ Date: _____________________ Faculty (Print): ________________________________________ Date: _____________________ Faculty (Signature): ____________________________________ Date: _____________________ Faculty (Print): ________________________________________ Date: _____________________ Faculty (Signature): ____________________________________ Date: _____________________ 2 of 2 The “Force” of Modern Myth: Religious Pastiche and Ethical Community-Building in the Context of Star Wars by Will Walker Jason Josephson-Storm, Advisor A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Religion WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts 5/22/2017 Walker 2 Table of Contents Introducing This Project . 3 Chapter One: Religious Pastiche in the Ethics of Star Wars Staking a Claim . 9 Star Wars’ Sources . 15 The Constructive Ethics of Star Wars . 41 Chapter Two: Jediism and the Lived Ethical Communities of Star Wars Setting the Stage . 47 The Jedi in Practice . 53 The Constructive Ethics of Jediism . .75 Drawing Conclusions . 77 Works Cited . 85 Acknowledgments . 88 Walker 3 Introducing This Project The story of this thesis is, in a sense, the story of two distinctive Western myths. The first, and probably more familiar, starts in 1917, with sociologist Max Weber’s famous speech Wissenschaft als Beruf or “Science as a Vocation.” As Weber provocatively describes in that address: “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations.”1 In other words, modernity’s defining quality is its “disenchantment;” our lives differ from the lives of the ancients primarily because we have lost some sense of cosmic order or cohesion. Consequently, for Weber,2 and the generation of modernist and post-modernist theorists that have come after him, we’re stuck in the alienating world of contemporary commercialism and capitalism. Where earlier generations had strong mythic narratives, a powerful sense of community, and a coherent system of ethics to live by and die for, modernity has a gaping lacuna – what Jason Josephson-Storm characterizes as the effect of “the rise of instrumental reason, the gradual alienation of humanity from nature, and the production of a bureaucratic and technological life world stripped of mystery and wonder.”3 And that’s where Weber and his ilk leave us – dangling in descriptions of post-enchanted modernity, with no discernible of way forward. The other story starts almost 60 years later, in May of 1973, when a 29 young motor- head and experimental filmmaker named George Lucas wrote the treatment for what was 1 H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, trans. and eds., Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford 2 Of course, Weber’s affiliation with “disenchantment” has not gone un-interrogated, especially in Jason Josephson-Storm’s recent book The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic Modernity and the Birth of the Human Sciences. However, while Weber’s own mythical/mystical history might be more complex than we would initially expect, his primary historical significance is still as the perpetuator of the “disenchantment” narrative. 3 Jason Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 4. Walker 4 then merely called “The Star Wars.”4 Lucas, like Weber before him, was also interested in the mythical past: especially as it was represented in the romantic American and Japanese cinema of his boyhood. However, unlike Weber, he did not see the notion of a modern mythology as intrinsically hopeless. On the contrary, since its inception, Lucas saw the Star Wars saga as having an explicitly ethical and existential function. As he confessed to one biographer: “I wanted to make a kids’ film that would strengthen contemporary mythology and introduce a kind of basic morality.”5 Lucas wanted to create the very meta-narrative that Weber saw missing from the world. In a sense, then, the basic purpose of this project is to connect the problem posed by Weber with the solution posited by Lucas. Rather than accepting “disenchantment” as an inevitable aspect of contemporary experience, we will seek to show the way popular, commercial Star Wars films as enact a certain kind of enchantment – the way they helpfully recreate or re-order our existence. Star Wars, then, is not only an important piece of modern aesthetic culture, but an important piece of contemporary mythology. Its significance is not merely commercial, sociological, or aesthetic, but also ethical and religious: orienting its viewers towards a distinctive way of living or being in the world. Of course, interpreting the Star Wars franchise in light of its religious significance is hardly a novel project. Throughout its three-decade-long history, Star Wars has been the familiar site of criticism and theorization on the behalf of religious studies departments, mythologists, and original practitioners. In a 1999 interview with Bill Moyers, series creator Lucas acknowledged this explicitly: “When the film came out, almost every single religion came out and used Star Wars as an example of their religion, and were able to relate it to 4 Dale Pollock, Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas (Hollywood: Samuel French Trade, 1990), 134. 5 Ibid., 144. Walker 5 young people [that way] . [as] a tool that can be used to make old stories new.”6 The religious interest reached a fever pitch in 1988, with the televised The Power of Myth, a six- part Moyers special with Joseph Campbell, which made use of Star Wars as a version of modern myth. Since then, the religious dimensions of Star Wars have been examined in innumerable scholarly and pseudo-scholarly iterations, including long treatises on the “mythological” dimensions of the films, esoteric guides for how to live out the “Jedi” life, and, most importantly, an entire “invented-religious” movement called “Jediism,” which involves a complex and sophisticated philosophy claiming millions of members world-wide. But despite the noted and notable religious significance of the Star Wars film franchise, very little constructive work has been done to explicate exactly how these films model a coherent set of ethics, or how those ethics might apply to groups of living practitioners. Rather than taking the films or their religious devotees seriously, most academic work has been constrained by strictly sociological concerns, treating the films either as political relics of the early 80s, or bloodless catalysts for contemporary “fan experiences,” and not as substantive and significant religious texts in their own right. The more restricted purpose of this paper, then, is to fill part of this scholarly gap. In particular, we will draw on the tools provided by the study of religion, biblical exegesis, and cinematic studies in order to re-construct a version of the ethical system the Star Wars films attempt to create – a pastiche of religious traditions, pop-cultural conventions, and mythological archetypes, woven together in distinctly cinematic frame. We will then, in a parallel project, attempt to determine the major tenets of the invented religious tradition “Jediism” and trace the real-life ethical applications and implications of the Star Wars films. Finally, by way of a brief conclusion, we will attempt to identify the overlaps and contradictions between the theoretical and applied ethical systems Star Wars constructs, and 6 The Mythology of Star Wars, directed by Pamela Mason Wagner (1999; New York, Films for the Humanities, 2000), DVD, 27:08. Walker 6 make some comment on what that might mean for the study of the religious aspects of Star Wars, and pop-cultural artifacts, more generally. We hope that this paper will serve not only to provide meaningful analysis of the American Star Wars phenomena but model a mode of religious studies that takes elements of the popular zeitgeist and their “true believers” as more than just passing sociological trends. While the scope of this particular investigation might be limited to a “galaxy far, far away,” we hope its spirit and objective might extend beyond the cinematic canon of the seven7 existent Star Wars films and into the realm of “enchantment” more generally.