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The Hero's Journey
The hero's journey! Some of you may already be acquainted with Joseph Campbell's work, but if you're not, the hero's journey is - to put it simply - a story telling structure. And, the most notable story that followed the structure is no less than Star Wars!!
Let's take a quick look!
By the way, George Lucas was a fine admirer of Joseph Campbell and has always admitted to have borrowed at least some elements of the Hero's Journey's structure. There has already been a lot of articles written about Star Wars and the Hero's Journey, so I'll try to go quickly into what could add value to the world knowledge bank.
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So here's a quick summary of the Hero's Journey's structure. At the beginning of the story, the hero is not yet a hero but just an ordinary person, child or adult.
But then, something happens. It's called the "call to adventure". This is when the ordinary character has to make the decision to take the adventure. A lot of courage is needed there because the ordinary self will go through "death and re-birth".
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This is the start of the journey. And along the way, the hero will meet many people: a mentor, threshold guardians, tricksters and the shadow among others. And all of these people share a common thing: they're all archetypes - characters with personality traits the collective unconscious is already familiar with, characters that we can predict.
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But for the hero, the journey won't be easy as his goal is to become an adult. In this sense, the hero's journey is a metaphor to represent how an immature person becomes mature. The main character doesn't have to be a child but can also be an immature adult who needs to face challenges in order to be re-actualized or to re-strengthen their self-esteem. For wounded characters, whether spiritually, physically or emotionally, the adventure allows them to go through what could be considered as a rite of passage or initiation that allows them to recover from their wounds and to re-discover their full potential and hopefully also be rewarded.
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At the end of the adventure, the ordinary character has become a hero who can go back to his original ordinary world after having transformed their inner self.
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The Hero's Journey is a generic structure that Campbell identified from researching old myths and legends that has been applied in many stories. You can see below how the different elements of the Harry Potter and Star Wars stories can be exchanged.
What is striking in Star Wars is the resemblance with medieval myths and collective imagery.
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Why use a light saber when one could use a laser gun? It'd be much more efficient! But it'd be a waste of pleasure as the light saber is not only a highly sophisticated technological tool, it's also a disguised medieval iron sword. And swords have this romantic value that shotguns don't really have. They have a historical value. Swords will remind you of King Arthur's legends, Excalibur, the Knights of the Round Table... Elements that are now grounded in our collective unconscious and in, what Jung calls, archetypes.
In fact, Star Wars is full of elements borrowed from other myths and legends from which our collective psyche can refer to. For example, can't you see how similar Luke Skywalker and Peter Pan's costumes are?
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Doesn't Han Solo look like a cowboy? (the belt and the jacket)
Don't the buildings sticking out of the jungle remind you of Mayan ruins?
Doesn't the settlement on Luke Skywalker's planet look like a Sub-Saharan city? And don't the buildings remind you of mosques?
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Stars Wars is full of references that are very familiar to our imagination. This creates a sense of truth, a sense of realism, because what we see in Star Wars, what is supposed to have happened a very long time ago in a very, very distant galaxy is much closer to our psyche than what it what we may think.
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