The road to 1977's Star Wars is a long and winding one and we begin it with a quick look at two "literary" sources for the show which transformed pop culture in its time and still does to this day. It's not secret that George Lucas was a serious minded, up-and-coming movie maker and the one story (maybe the only story) he wanted to tell was one which all of us live in some respect, the transformation of the child into an adult and what that means for how we interact with the big wide world. One of the works which was buzzing in the 70's was a work by Joseph Campbell called The Hero With A Thousand Faces.
It's a distillation of significant research by Campbell which describes what he calls the "Monomyth", or as it's sometimes called "The Hero Cycle". As most everyone already knows the saga of a hero in myth and in modern narrative is pretty much the same when reduced to its base elements -- a protagonist must journey towards a goal and while doing so will undergo changes which will make the achievement of the ultimate goal either successful or not. The "hero" will often get help from various sources, often magical ones and the choices made all along the path are critical to the success or failure. It's the story of a quest or the story of one's life if we cast our imaginations broadly enough. Being pretty much of the same generation as Lucas, I too fell under the spell of this book and find most of it to be quite serviceable in trying to explain stories. Some quibble with its details and consider it simplistic, but it hits the right level of buzz for me. You can readily see how such a story of heroic questing informs the storytelling of George Lucas and as the week unfolds I'll be taking a gander at his films before Star Wars.
At the same time another pop culture item was raining down on one and all and that was the delightfully zany ideas of Erich Von Dankien who postulated in Chariots of the Gods that mankind's culture was, at least in part, a result of the influence and tinkering of aliens from well beyond the perimeters of this world. Aliens who came to Earth for ultimately unknown reasons, but who left their mark on ancient civilizations to the extent that their coming was captured in the iconography of the that culture. The gods were not "gods" they were just advanced alien people who through use of technology beyond perhaps even our imaginations transformed and perhaps even created life on Earth.
It's a frolic of a theory and back in the day I admit to being enthralled by its romantic recasting of ancient history. Like much such stuff, it had the elegance of a one-size-fits-all solution to many a mystery. Eventually I fell away because of the way that those who have followed on after Von Daniken seem to ascribe nearly all aspects of human life to interference from space and give ancient peoples little or no credit for their significant accomplishments.
Takes this notion of a time long, long ago when in the depths of space civilizations grew and prospered and bond it with the idea of a hero coming into his own before our eyes and you have the template for a pretty rousing science fiction yarn. George Lucas thought so too.
More tomorrow.
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