Archetypes in Star Wars

One of the most impacting events of the seventies was the filming of the very first Star Wars movie. Eventually, this would turn into an epic six-film saga. Each essential piece of George Lucas’s series was a classic the minute it the big screen. His own films would have potentially the biggest impact on the culture around him he had seen so far. Influenced enormously by iconic scholars such as Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, Lucas created his saga with the idea of archetypes in mind. Almost all of the main characters, and even some minor characters, represent more than just the character themselves. The archetypical themes are palpable by the end of the series. It may have been the creativity behind Star Wars that earned its immense popularity, but it is the archetypes that provide the movie with deeper meanings and themes.

Campbell, one of Lucas’s college professors, and Jung, whom Campbell studied under, arguably had the largest influence on Lucas’s ideas for the characters and themes within these films. Campbell has written books on mythology, symbolism, and archetypes, many of which Lucas had read prior to the making of his saga. Jung came up with the idea of archetypes, defined by himself as “a tendency to form [conscious] representations of a motif - representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern” (58). For example, the idea, story, and cycle behind Odysseus and Luke Skywalker are eerily similar but are two completely different interpretations of a hero set in different time periods and written thousands of years apart. Also influencing Lucas, though, was a plethora of mythic stories and historical events. Among these were the Roman Empire, Hitler’s Germany, and Homer’s epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey. The pod races in The Phantom Menace resemble chariot races in Ancient Rome. Vader’s storm troopers are a clear reference to Hitler’s personal bodyguards, also known as storm troopers (Burns). By using historical...