E-Mail This Article to a Friend Myth over matter How George Lucas reached for the stars BY JEFFREY GANTZ

A LONG TIME ago in a galaxy far, far away" — from Star Wars’s opening moment, George Lucas made it clear he wasn’t interested in making ordinary movies. No Casablanca for him; no Citizen Kane or The Searchers or L’avventura or Persona. Not even Jaws. The ordinary mechanics of film — plot, dialogue, characterization, camera movement, montage — he left to ordinary filmmakers. Instead, he drew on mythic archetypes in an attempt to encompass the farthest reaches of time, space, and the box office. Twenty-eight years later, the six Star Wars films and the billions of dollars they’ve generated attest to his success.

Lucas’s cinematic models would have been Fritz Lang’s 1926 Metropolis and Universal’s Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials. From the former, with its dizzyingly detailed cityscape, its dizzyingly confused plot, its father-son rivalry, and its good-and-evil Marias, he would have learned that lame intertitles and wooden acting don’t matter if you can put on screen ideas that have resonated for millennia. Universal’s two series provided the prototype for a story that could be stretched over multiple installments; Lucas’s episodes simply lasted two hours instead of 20 minutes. Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers also assured him that a plot that shuttles characters from Tatooine to Dagobah to Bespin to Naboo to Geonosis to Coruscant would suffice, and Ray Middleton’s Ming the Merciless was his reminder that though evil may not be stronger than good, it is always more certain of its purpose.

Western mythology gave Lucas ample material for his vulnerable — and always male — heroes. Like Oedipus, Luke Skywalker faces off against his father and kills him. Like Oedipus, Anakin Skywalker marries a woman old enough to be his mother. (This would register with greater force on screen if Hayden Christenson weren’t seven weeks older than Natalie Portman.) Like the Norse hero Sigmund (whom Wagner turned into Siegmund), Luke is attracted to his twin sister without knowing who she is. Like Odysseus and Aeneas (and Faust, Hamlet, Superman, James Bond, etc.), Anakin and Luke risk love in their quest for self-knowledge.

Where Lucas broke the mold of Western mythology — and 20th-century cinema — was by stranding his heroes in a terrifying version of outer space. Star Trek is a cozy story of exploration; Star Wars is one long battle, with no end in sight. There’s no Federation to call on, no Shire to come home to, no comforting Hogwarts, no bankrolling M and Moneypenny. The first Star Wars movie (a/k/a Episode IV: A New Hope) was like a Hardy Boys adventure, with Luke and Han Solo, as Frank and Joe, making the destruction of the Death Star look easy and impressing the pretty girl in the bargain. Luke’s victory in Return of the Jedi extracts a considerably higher price. In Revenge of the Sith, there’ll be no victory at all: Anakin will go over to the Dark Side and an Empire will replace the Republic. The films as they’re numbered, from The Phantom Menace to Return of the Jedi, adhere to standard mythic-heroic (and Hollywood) formula, with the villains fomenting unrest that leads to chaos before the heroes restore order. But the films as Lucas made them, from A New Hope to Revenge of the Sith, move in the opposite direction, with nightmarish technological monsters and clones proliferating beyond any hope of human control. The later installments mount a visual and aural assault unlike anything in The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. This is a universe that defies viewers to make sense out of it; worse, it suggests there’s no sense to be made. Certainly not by love, as embodied by the increasingly unconvincing Anakin and Padmé. No wonder that Obi-Wan Kenobi seems closer to the doomed gods of Norse myth than to the omnipotent deities of Olympus. Or that the only Star Wars heroes who look to have a chance in this galaxy are Yoda and R2-D2.

Still, where there’s a Dark Side, there must be a Light. In a century that was becoming increasingly alienated from myth and even religion, Lucas went back to one of the oldest archetypes, the opposition of day and night. As individual humans, his packets of light (20th-century physics would call them quanta) were insignificant, but bound together, as the whole of humanity (quantum’s wave), they became the Force, a Light that no Darkness could comprehend. It was an idea that could make people feel at home a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, or in a movie theater watching Star Wars.

Jeffrey Gantz can be reached at jgantz[a]phx.com