[This article originally appeared in Science Fiction Studies 7 (November 1980): 313-18.]
I have argued that the fundamental appeal of Star Wars lies in its deliberately old-fashioned plot, which borrows elements from many genres of American popular fantasy and is unified by the structure of "the monomyth." Star Wars recounts the standard adventures of a mythic hero in terms comprehensible to a contemporary, mass American audience. It is fine popular art, all flashy surface, a blend of stunning, fast-moving visuals and pounding music whose impact is intended to be primarily visceral. In addition, a mythic framework unifies the action, and those deeper levels are there if one cares to look at them.
Empire, the continuation of Lucas' epic saga, reiterates Campbell's mythic round of Departure, Initiation, and Return. The hero, Luke Skywalker, symbolically dies and is reborn on the ice planet of Hoth, then wanders lost in the dark wood of the swamp planet of Dagobah until he is enlightened by the Jedi master, Yoda, who teaches the inscrutable ways of "the Force" (a kind of Zen filtered through the pop psychology of Est). In the climax, Luke is wounded in an apocalyptic battle with archvillain Darth Vader on the Cloud City of Bespin. All three environments are beautifully realized, with a scrupulous attention to color and detail. The Cloud City, with its graceful, lofty chambers flooded with sunshine and shades of roses, its art deco glass -- as well as its dark and menacing inner rooms -- rivals the Emerald City of Oz.
In Empire, however, Lucas and co-scriptwriters Leigh Brackett and Larry Kasdan have deepened and darkened the vision of Star Wars. As Lucas says, Empire is like the second act of a three-act play. As with most second acts, it deals with the problems of the characters...they grow and evolve, and things don't go very well for them. The story doesn't really end; it doesn't have a super-climax. Another difference is in the attitude of the films. In the first one the mood is joyous and triumphant, exciting and funny, all at the same time. The second one is exciting and funny too, but it's also sad; it's more of a tragedy than a triumph.
Empire is a rousing adventure story which is also genuinely disturbing. The heroes are in retreat from beginning to end: they accomplish only minor victories and suffer major defeats, reversing the pattern of the previous film. At the end of Star Wars, Luke believes himself to be following in the path of his deceased father, a noble Jedi knight. Ben Kenobi has passed on to Luke the totem of manhood, Luke's father's lightsaber, and Luke has proved himself worthy by defeating Vader and destroying the Death Star. But at the end of Empire Luke's identity and manhood have been shaken by the loss of his lightsaber and his right hand to Vader and by his discovery that the villain is his long-lost father.
What makes Empire disturbing is not only the mutilation (a symbolic castration) of the hero, but the fact that the concealed Oedipal meanings of the myth are made manifest. We realize now that Luke has been battling all along to kill his own father. The deliberate suggestion of "Death Father" in the name "Darth Vader" becomes transparently clear. The struggle to find his identity inevitably involves a mythic hero in patricide. Luke is the prophesied hero who will kill the King, a sort of clean-cut, cornfed, adolescent Oedipus feared by both Vader and The Emperor.
Gary Kurtz, producer of the series, says of Empire, "It's a story of him [Luke] growing up further...Luke's confrontation with Darth Vader is probably the most important element. Empire is a rites of passage film."2 All myth and fairy tales involve rites of passage, and so does Star Wars. The difference is that Empire stresses the price of independence from the parents, the pain caused by the necessary death of the old self in the course of initiation.
In Empire, the young hero's secure identity is turned topsy-turvy. This upheaval is suggested by numerous episodes in which Luke is literally upside down. First, near the beginning of the film, he is hung by his heels in a frozen cave by a snow monster; second, Yoda instructs Luke to use the Force by having him balance on his hands while levitating objects (Luke keeps losing his balance and toppling over); and finally, near the end of the film, after his defeat by Vader, he is once again upside down, hanging on for his life from the bottom of Cloud City.
Darth Vader, as Gerald Clarke notes, "is far more menacing in Empire than he was in Star Wars...With Vader dominating, perhaps even more than Lucas intended, The Empire finishes on a less satisfying and more ambiguous note."3 Vader is by now clearly Satanic: once noble but fallen from grace, a betrayer of his former master, a villain who wants to rule the universe and who tempts the hero with promises of infinite power. He strides through the action like a source of demonic energy, as unstoppable as the id. The climactic battle between Luke and Vader is more protracted and brutal than anything in Star Wars. It begins in the hellish, fiery-red carbon-freezing chamber, and leads ever downward, deeper and darker into the bowels of Cloud City, until it reaches the pitch of Gothic nightmare.
In the SF film Forbidden Planet (1956), it is revealed that the invisible creature killing off the Earth colonists on the planet Altair IV is actually a creation of the mind of the mysterious Dr. Morbius. Morbius has stumbled upon the superscience of the Krel (a dead race which once inhabited the planet), thereby increasing the power of his own mind, but also unwittingly unleashing a destructive "Monster from the Id." The mental science of the Krel is equivalent to what Lucas calls "the Force," a power which can be used for either good or evil. Darth Vader, the representative of the dark side of the Force, is Luke's father, but on another level he also represents Luke's own potential for evil, his own "Monster from the Id."
Empire suggests this intimate connection between Luke and Vader. First, Yoda tells Ben that Luke has "much anger in him, like his father." Later, Yoda asks Luke to abandon his weapons and enter a cave which is strong with the dark side of the Force. Luke asks him, "What's in there?" Yoda replies, "Only what you take with you." But Luke disregards the advice and enters the cave armed with his lightsaber. There he encounters and decapitates a vision of Darth Vader, only to see Vader's helmet dissolve to reveal -- Luke's face. What Luke battles in the cave, then, is his own hatred and violence (which cannot be defeated with more hatred), his Darth Vader, his dark side -- in other words, himself. He is not only Luke's father, but also what Luke could become if he gave in to the temptation of the dark side of the Force.
Irvin Kershner, director of Empire, said that in preparing for the film he read everything he could about fairy tales, beginning with Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment.4 Bettelheim claims that fairy tales are a voyage into the unconscious. The monster in such tales represents "the monster a child knows best and is more concerned with: the monster he feels or fears himself to be, and which also sometimes persecutes him." Fairy tales "give these anxieties form and body and also show ways to overcome these monsters."5 The victory in fairy tales is "not over others but over oneself and over villainy (mainly one's own, which is projected as the hero's antagonist)."6 What such stories demonstrate is "the ego's conquering the dark forces of the id."7 In Empire the dark side predominates; having unleashed those forces, Lucas has not yet shown how they may be successfully controlled. That task is left for the conclusion of the trilogy, Return of the Jedi. Our unease over the ambiguous conclusion of Empire is tempered only by the awareness that fairy tales must have happy endings.
One way in which Empire deflects our anxiety over the fate of Luke is by further developing the character of Han Solo and plunging him into more peril. The film is structured by parallel action: while Luke, accompanied by R2D2, undergoes his initiation on Dagobah, Solo, Leia, Chewbacca, and C3PO flee from the Empire's ships through an asteroid belt. The two plot lines converge in the climax on Cloud City.
Thus Empire is an epic with not one but two heroes, who are, in a sense, brother figures. Bettelheim mentions a series of fairy tales which feature the motif of two brothers who undergo separate adventures. The brothers usually stand for "incompatible aspects" of the human personality: "the striving for independence and self-assertion, and the opposite tendency, to remain safely home, tied to the parents."8 Thus Solo acts out Luke's antisocial desires for total independence. Solo is always torn between being for himself and being for the group. At the end of Star Wars, he seems about to leave with his reward money; instead, he returns to rescue Luke. At the beginning of Empire, Solo is once again about to leave to pay off his debt to Jabba; once more, he sticks around to rescue Luke and later Leia.
Similarly, while Luke appears asexual, and seems to regard Leia as a mother figure, Solo woos her passionately. (One notices in Empire the red lights flashing in the background whenever Solo and Leia confront each other.)
Throughout Empire, Solo suffers on Luke's behalf. First, he risks his life when he rescues Luke on the ice planet. Next, he performs the job that Luke should be doing by protecting Leia in the escape from the Imperial assault. While Luke gets safely away to Dagobah, Solo is pursued by Imperial ships. Finally, Solo is tortured and subjected to a kind of living death in the carbon-freezing chamber. He is used by Vader as bait to entrap Luke; Vader even puts Solo into hibernation merely to test the process intended to be used on Luke. As a brother hero, Solo expresses some of Luke's repressed tendencies and suffers the punishment for these tendencies.
Empire, like all myths or fairy tales, deals with primal anxieties. In their parallel adventures, Luke and Solo are both faced with a basic, fairy-tale danger: the fear of being eaten alive. First, Luke is hung like a side of beef in a frozen-food locker by the ice creature, who one presumes is saving him as a snack. Next, Solo slits the belly of a dead beast of burden and shoves Luke inside to preserve him from the cold. (This is perhaps not so much being eaten as returning to the womb; right after this episode, Luke is healed by submersion in a bath resembling amniotic fluid.) Later, R2D2, who as Luke's faithful companion is an extension of Luke, is swallowed and comically spit out by a swamp creature; evidently the serpent finds him unpalatable. Meanwhile, Solo and his group take refuge by flying the Millenium Falcon into a cave on an asteroid. But the cave proves to be alive, and they escape at the last moment from the rapidly closing jaws and monstrous teeth of a gigantic space slug. Finally, the chamber in which Vader meditates on board his ship resembles an enormous jaw with clenching metal teeth. Both Ben and Yoda warn Luke that the dark side can "consume" you if you are not careful.
Empire also plays on an anxiety related to the fear of being eaten: the fear of being dismembered. C3PO is dismantled into a heap of junk metal by Stormtroopers and only partially reassembled by Chewbacca. Luke decapitates his hallucination in the cave, and, in the climax of the film, loses his right hand to Vader's lightsaber. However, in each case the fear of dismemberment is allayed: both R2D2 and C3PO lost parts in the first film and had them replaced, and the plight of the disassembled C3PO in Empire starts out pathetic but turns comic. Luke at the end becomes part machine, outfitted with a bionic hand indistinguishable from the original.
Aside from the fears of being eaten or mutilated, Empire also exploits the fear of suffocation. Darth Vader still suffers from what sounds like a severe case of asthma. As in Star Wars, the punishment he usually inflicts is strangulation. And even Chewbacca tries to strangle Lando Calrissian after Lando has betrayed them.
Last of all, the film plays on the fear of falling. Luke crashlands twice, and later he overcomes Vader's Faustian temptation by plunging into an abyss, an endless fall which he miraculously survives.
It is possible that all these seemingly disparate fears -- of being swallowed or dismembered, of suffocating or falling -- are related on a deeper level to a more primal anxiety. Empire is a rite of passage film, and initiation rituals are intended to serve as a passage to manhood by symbolically tempting and defying castration (that is the purpose of the circumcision rites of primitive tribes).9 According to standard psychoanalytic theory, "anxiety over being eaten...may be a disguise for castration anxiety."10 And "sometimes a manifest fear of suffocation covers a repressed idea of castration."11 Furthermore, falling from a high place, connoting the danger of being killed, certainly represents punishment, probably most often punishment for wishes of killing; however, the sensation of falling itself simultaneously represents the sensations of sexual excitement which, having been blocked in their natural course, have acquired a painful and frightening character.12
In other words, given the overt Oedipal conflict in Empire, which climaxes with the hero's being mutilated when he attempts to kill his own father, it is not surprising that there should be a multiplication of frightening episodes intended to arouse and allay fears of emasculation. No wonder Han Solo's ship repeatedly fails to go into warp drive at crucial moments; it suffers a kind of mechanical impotence.
Another possible psychological explanation for the arousal of primal anxieties in the film is that they represent the fear of being abandoned by the mother, which may coexist with castration anxiety. There is nothing startling about such an interpretation. As Empire director Irvin Kershner says, "I feel that a film for children has to have certain qualities that children fear -- like the fear of abandonment, the fear of being totally alone, the fear that maybe your parents aren't your parents. All kinds of basic fears: that's the root stock that feeds all fairy tales."13 Throughout most of the film, Luke is abandoned by Leia, who has served as a mother figure to him. She is away being romanced by another man. Significantly, when he is hanging on in despair to the bottom of Cloud City after he has been wounded by Vader, he cries out for help to Ben and Leia, his substitute parents. Although the Millenium Falcon has already left without him, Leia telepathically hears Luke's cry and forces Lando to return and rescue him.
If we look further at the psychological meaning behind the various perils encountered in the movie, we find that "the longing to be rejoined with an object ot which one had yielded one's omnipotence...is unconsciously thought of as a kind of being eaten by a larger, more powerful object; it depends on individual circumstances whether this idea is met with positive longing or with anxiety."14 That is, the fear of being eaten alive can be connected to the longing to return to the womb, as in the episode where Luke is stuffed into the belly of a beast.
Bettelheim points out that fairy tales serve as psychological reassurance for their hearer. Because a child fears many of his own fantasies, "learning that others have the same or similar fantasies makes us feel that we are a part of humanity, and allays our fear that having such destructive ideas has put us beyond the common pale."15 The comforting appeal of fairy tales is amplified by the widescreen, shared experience of a film like Star Wars. "Attendance at Star Wars is largely a group phenomenon; few care to see it alone," Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz says. "Our plots might play well on TV but you just can't give a TV audience that 'theatre experience'; the group environment and the widescreen and soundtrack effects. That's one of the reasons that people went to see Star Wars so many times. They wanted that experience. One seven-year-old wrote me saying he liked 'living with these people in the theatre for two hours.' He wanted to do it over and over again. You can't do that on television."16
Just as children love to hear their favorite fairy tales recited over and over again, so audiences both young and old returned repeatedly to Star Wars for the reassurance of group indulgence in shared, widescreen fantasy.
Empire, like Star Wars, deals with the primal anxieties raised by standard mythic and fairy-tale material. Both films overcome anxiety to some extent by distancing the fantasied in a world long ago and far away, by using prototypical characters, by comic relief, and by offering the implicit fairy-tale reassurance that everything will come right in the end. Nevertheless, Empire is by no means as rassuring a spectacle as Star Wars, because it brings those anxieties nearer to the surface (where they may become too close for comfort) without satisfactorily resolving them. For that reason, although it is in many ways a more accomplished film, it was not as beloved by audiences as was Star Wars.
Works Cited
1."An Afterword from George Lucas," Mediascene Prevue 41,2 (July/August 1980): 47.
2. Ed Naha, "The Making of an Empire," Future Life, No. 20 (August 1980), p. 69.
3. Gerald Clarke, review of The Empire Strikes Back, Time 19 May 1980, p. 68.
4. Steranko, "Exclusive Interview with Director Irvin Kershner," Mediascene Prevue 41,2 (July/August 1980): 33.
5. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (NY, 1977), p.120.
6. Ibid., pp. 127-28.
7. Ibid., p. 121.
8. Ibid., pp. 90 and 91.
9. See Bruno Bettelheim,Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male, Revised Edition (NY, 1962).
10. Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (NY,1945), p. 200.
11. Ibid., p. 250.
12. Ibid., p. 197.
13. Steranko,"Interview with Irvin Kershner," p. 31.
14. Fenichel (see n. 10), p. 64.
15. Bettelheim,Uses of Enchantment, p. 122.
16. Naha,"Making of an Empire," p.70.
