The force casts its spell
“YOU’VE taken your first step into a larger world.”
Forty years after seeing Star Wars for the first time, those words from wise old Obi-Wan Kenobi to his young pupil Luke Skywalker are the ones that have stuck with me the most.
(Oh, dear God, did I really just say 40 years? Time flies like the Millennium Falcon, doesn’t it?)
Because seeing George Lucas’ space opera at the formative age of seven genuinely broadened and deepened my view of what was around me, especially when it came to art, culture and other forms of entertainment.
While it was fun to recreate scenes from the movie on the playground (everyone wanted to be Harrison Ford’s roguishly cool Han Solo; no one wanted to be earnest but kinda whiny Luke), the appeal of Star Wars wasn’t limited to what was on the screen.
You see, the whole phenomenon cast such a spell over so many people, young and old, back in 1977 that there was plenty of curiosity about what inspired and motivated Lucas in his creation of it.
And being a dork who liked reading (and who really, really liked Star Wars), I recall devouring any information I could get my hands on — anything that might help me crack the code of Star Wars’ DNA and maybe understand it even more.
It was the best kind of detective work.
And it was the best kind of gateway drug — one that truly expanded my consciousness.
Learning that Lucas had drawn extensively from the work of American writer and teacher Joseph Campbell, particularly Campbell’s book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, in plotting Star Wars? Okay, better check that one out from the library.
Of course, Campbell’s writing was way above the pay grade of a seven-year-old — honestly, it was heavy going when it finally read it properly in my 20s.
But I was able to catch on to his notion of the monomyth, which states that ancient cultures all over the world, unconnected to one another, shared the same story of a hero embarking on a journey, facing many perils and returning home stronger and wiser.
Pretty mind-blowing stuff, especially for a timid kid who considered walking a block and a half to the milk bar for a bag of lollies a pretty epic quest.
Discovering that Lucas was a fan of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, especially his 1958 film The Hidden Fortress? Righto, better keep my eye on the TV guide for that one.
When I finally caught The Hidden Fortress a few years later (on a brand-new TV station that would come to be called SBS), I was a little put off by the lack of light sabres in this tale of ancient Japan.
Still, Kurosawa’s skill as a storyteller and a stylist gripped my young imagination, and prompted me to see as many of his movies as I could, such as the heartbreaking Ikiru, the thrilling Yojimbo and the magnificent Seven Samurai.
So much of what I learned about Star Wars led to another door, and moving through each of those doors led to other rooms — some were a little cramped and not especially interesting to me, but some were as vast as the world itself.
Those first expeditions into the imaginations of other people were, to paraphrase a line from the new Star Wars movie The Last Jedi (it’s good, by the way — go check it out), “the spark that lit the fire”.
They set my imagination ablaze and kept it burning to this day. It’s a debt I’ll never be able to fully repay.