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Subject: [agathiyar] The Mythology of Star Wars
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Bill Moyers, a reputed journalist and a host of an interview series
on the American public television channel, interviewed George
Lucas of Star Wars.

The complete conversation between Bill Moyers and George Lucas on the meaning of the Force and the true theology of Star Wars is at:



Some excerpts:

MOYERS: Joseph Campbell said all the great myths have to be regenerated in every generation. You are taking these old stories and putting them into the most modern of idioms, the cinema. Are you conscious of doing that?

LUCAS: With Star Wars I consciously set about to re-create myths and the classic mythological motifs. I wanted to use those motifs to deal with issues that exist today. The more research I did, the more I realized that the issues are the same ones that existed 3,000 years ago. That we haven't come very far emotionally.

MOYERS: The mesmerizing figure in The Phantom Menace to me is Darth Maul. When I saw him, I thought of Lucifer in Paradise Lost or the devil in Dante's Inferno. He's the Evil Other--but with powerful human traits.

LUCAS: Yes, I was trying to find somebody who could compete with Darth Vader, who is now one of the most famous evil characters. So we went back into representations of evil. Not only the Christian, but also Hindu and other religious icons, as well as the monsters in Greek mythology.

MOYERS: What do you make of the fact that so many people have interpreted your work as being profoundly religious?

LUCAS: I don't see Star Wars as profoundly religious. I see Star Wars as taking all the issues that religion represents and trying to distill them down into a more modern and easily accessible construct--that there is a greater mystery out there.

MOYERS: You said you put the Force into Star Wars because you wanted us to think on these things. Some people have traced the notion of the Force to Eastern views of God--particularly Buddhist--as a vast reservoir of energy that is the ground of all of our being. Was that conscious?

LUCAS: I guess it's more specific in Buddhism, but it is a notion that's been around before that. When I wrote the first Star Wars, I had to come up with a whole cosmology: What do people believe in? I had to do something that was relevant, something that imitated a belief system that has been around for thousands of years, and that most people on the planet, one way or another, have some kind of connection to.I didn't want to invent a religion. I wanted to try to explain in a different way the religions that have already existed. I wanted to express it all.

MOYERS: The psychologist Jonathan Young says that whether we say, "I'm trusting my inner voice," or use more traditional language--"I'm trusting the Holy Spirit," as we do in the Christian tradition--somehow we're acknowledging that we're not alone in the universe. Is this what Ben Kenobi urges upon Luke Skywalker when he says, "Trust your feelings"?

LUCAS: Ultimately the Force is the larger mystery of the universe. And to trust your feelings is your way into that.

MOYERS: One scholar has called Star Wars "mysticism for the masses." You've been accused of trivializing religion, promoting religion with no strings attached.

LUCAS: That's why I would hesitate to call the Force God. It's designed primarily to make young people think about the mystery. Not to say, "Here's the answer." It's to say, "Think about this for a second. Is there a God? What does God look like? What does God sound like? What does God feel like? How do we relate to God?" Just getting young people to think at that level is what I've been trying to do in the films. What eventual manifestation that takes place in terms of how they describe their God, what form their faith takes, is not the point of the movie.

MOYERS: In authentic religion, doesn't it take Kierkegaard's leap of faith?

LUCAS: Yes, yes. Definitely. You'll notice Luke uses that quite a bit through the film--not to rely on pure logic, not to rely on the computers, but to rely on faith. That is what that "Use the Force" is, a leap of faith. There are mysteries and powers larger than we are, and you have to trust your feelings in order to access them.

MOYERS: When Darth Vader tempts Luke to come over to the Empire side, offering him all that the Empire has to offer, I am taken back to the story of Satan taking Christ to the mountain and offering him the kingdoms of the world, if only he will turn away from his mission. Was that conscious in your mind?

LUCAS: Yes. That story also has been retold. Buddha was tempted in the same way. It's all through mythology. The gods are constantly tempting. Everybody and everything. So the idea of temptation is one of the things we struggle against, and the temptation obviously is the temptation to go to the dark side. One of the themes throughout the films is that the Sith lords, when they started out thousands of years ago, embraced the dark side. They were greedy and self-centered and they all wanted to take over, so they killed each other. Eventually, there was only one left, and that one took on an apprentice. And for thousands of years, the master would teach the apprentice, the master would die, the apprentice would then teach another apprentice, become the master, and so on. But there could never be any more than two of them, because if there were, they would try to get rid of the leader, which is exactly what Vader was trying to do, and that's exactly what the Emperor was trying to do. The Emperor was trying to get rid of Vader, and Vader was trying to get rid of the Emperor. And that is the antithesis of a symbiotic relationship, in which if you do that, you become cancer, and you eventually kill the host, and everything dies.







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