TheoFantastique: Carl and Tony, thank you for your willingness to discuss your book. I discovered your work on The History Channel while watching Star Wars – The Legacy Revealed. This program focused largely on the mythic aspects of Star Wars, particularly through the interpretive lenses of Joseph Campbell. Why has so much of the exploration of Star Wars been from the perspective of myth?

Carl Silvio: It all goes back to the publication of Andrew Gordon’s seminal article, “Star Wars: A Myth for Our Time,” in 1978. That essay had a tremendous influence on the future of Star Wars scholarship. George Lucas has also claimed that Joseph Campbell’s conception of the monomyth influenced him in the creation of the Star Wars saga. These two factors are probably the most significant reason why Star Wars and mythology/myth criticism have been so strongly associated with each other.

Tony Vinci: Andrew Gordon published his article, “Star Wars: A Myth for our Time,” in 1978. In it, he argues that Star Wars is more than childish entertainment, as many of his contemporaries contended. In order to validate this claim, he utilizes Campbell’s notion of the monomyth to explicate the significance of the film’s plot and characters by pin-pointing step-by-step how Star Wars follows Campbell’s thesis of The Hero with A Thousand Faces. Ultimately, he attempts to position Star Wars as myth. Add this publication to the fact that Lucas himself has been rather open about his interest in Campbell’s monomyth, and I do not find it that surprising that myth criticism has been such a prevalent mode of analyzing Star Wars. What I do find surprising, is that for almost three decades, it has been the dominant mode of analysis applied to the films, despite the dominance of cultural criticism applied to other speculative fiction texts in those decades.

TheoFantastique: But in the face of mythic perspectives on Star Wars your book takes a very different approach as you look at the significance of cultural studies. Can you describe your book’s approach and why you think it is helpful in understanding the significance of Star Wars?

Tony Vinci: The Star Wars films are laden with cultural representations of race, gender, economics, and spirituality; they fetishize technology and fashion; they use the most cutting edge film-making techniques—yet they are presented as simple pieces of entertainment without much social or political commentary. This paradox of a wildly complex matrix of competing representations delivered as a simple commodity is what makes the franchise such a significant cite for cultural criticism. Our hope was to analyze how the films influence and reflect the cultures that created and view them in hopes that we will understand more clearly how they function as pieces of cultural meaning.

Carl Silvio: We have nothing against myth criticism per se. But the analytical work on Star Wars has been so dominated by it that other critical perspectives have been crowded out. All too often, myth criticism becomes a kind of intellectual cul de sac. Let’s set aside for the moment the question of whether or not the monomyth actually exists independently from the perspective of critics bent on finding it everywhere. How many times can we observe and point out how this or that narrative corresponds and conforms to the monomyth template? Moreover, once such a correspondence has been demonstrated, where does that take us beyond affirming over and over again that the monomyth pattern seems to repeat itself in a wide variety of cultural narratives? For me, it’s just so much more interesting to look at Star Wars from other perspectives, to see it as a rich repository of ideology and cultural values.

TheoFantastique: Let’s talk about some of the specifics explored in the book by its various contributors. Tony, in your chapter you discuss the shift in how individualism is treated in the first trilogy versus the latter trilogy of films. Can you sketch some of what you put forward in your chapter?

Tony Vinci: What makes the original trilogy engaging is how it manifests a clear and stable anti-establishmentarian stance through its depictions of political and spiritual figures; however, the prequels subvert all of this progressivism, turning strong revolutionaries into lapdogs of the parties in power, turning the open spiritual exploration of the force into dogmatic religion, and turning spiritual figures into police officers, economic negotiators, and generals. To me, this reflects a disturbing transformation in the culture that created the films: the radical exploration of the late ‘70s gave way to the neo-conservatism of the early part of the new millennium.

TheoFantastique: Carl, in your chapter you touch on the differing ways in which Star Wars engages global capitalism. What is the thrust of your thesis on this subject?

Carl Silvio: Basically, I examine differences between the two Star Wars trilogies, the original and the prequel, in order suggest a parallel between them and the rise and consolidation of global capitalism. I argue that, as part of our larger cultural imaginary, each trilogy to some extent stages and dramatizes the cultural anxieties and ideological contradictions provoked by this social transformation. To be sure, I’m not arguing that a purely causal or deterministic relationship exists between the economic system and the Star Wars films. To some extent, I’m constructing a deliberate parallel between these two phenomenon in order to highlight certain aspects of each of them.

TheoFantastique: John Lyden has a chapter where he touches on how Star Wars taps into the long tradition of American apocalyptic, particularly an apocalyptic determinism in these films. What similarities and differences do you seen in Star Wars‘s apocalyptic as contrasted with other sci-fi franchises such as the Terminator or The Matrix series, for example?

Tony Vinci: I see Star Wars as being a bit different than the others in that what makes it apocalyptically deterministic is the fact of the prequels. Despite the Emperor’s declaration that he “foresees” the future, the original trilogy doesn’t explore that terrain too much, but the moment you have a prequel, the audience knows what is going to happen to this universe and its primary characters. Think Orson Welles’ Othello or Citizen Kane. We begin knowing the end, and all that comes after will never alter the outcome. Though, in the case of Star Wars, what we know is to come is redemption and victory. The other franchises you mention, especially Terminator, seem to work at creating a real sense of doom for the entire world, whereas in Star Wars, the deterministic mood is focused mostly around the Anakin/Vader character or a world that we know is going to be saved. Though, I believe this is ultimately overshadowed by the politics of the prequels, that they darken irreversibly the “triumphs” at the end of Return of the Jedi because we have now seen the old republic, its frailties and hollowness. Surely the New Republic will have many of the same issues.

TheoFantastique: For me one of the more interesting chapters was by Dan North titled “Kill Binks: Why the World Hated Its First Digital Actor.” CGI actors are now fairly common, and of course Avatar may have helped take digital actors to new heights. Why did so many people hate the digital Jar Jar Binks?

Tony Vinci: There are some serious flaws in the prequels. I think Jar Jar became a scapegoat for all of the other issues that people had with the films but couldn’t necessarily articulate. Beyond that, and the obvious, I think North nails it by arguing that we have anxieties about what watching a digital actor means, and that we projected those onto a character that is not only annoying and potentially racially offensive but represents some difficult questions about what it means to be human.

Carl Silvio: North does a great job of arguing that much of the hatred directed at the Binks character had less to do with its overall silliness and more to do with a deeper anxiety felt by the audience regarding the replacement of live actors with digital ones and the pervasiveness of CGI technology in Lucas’s film making in general. I find his argument to be pretty convincing. Ultimately, I don’t think that the CGI technology is the problem, or at least it’s not why so many long time Star Wars fans rejected the films. It’s more a matter of how Lucas used the technology to alter the franchise in ways that fans found troubling. The whole “Han shot first” controversy is a good example of how Lucas used digital technology to perform a kind of cultural vandalism on his own creation. Jar Jar Binks’s status as a virtual, digital actor allows him to become an emblem that represents all the ways that Lucas has used the CGI technology in ways that upset his fans.

TheoFantastique: Carl and Tony, thank you again for making time to discuss your book. I hope it helps others explore the significance of Star Wars as a cultural artifact.

Apparently something of a controversy has arisen as a result of The Legend of Cain, not because of the film itself, but because of the idea that the biblical Cain may be the source of the vampire in folklore. One aspect of the controversy comes from Christians who are up in arms over the idea that the Bible has anything to do with vampires. After his analysis, in his conclusion Laycock writes:

As for the accusations of sacrilege, perhaps we should look at the link between vampires and Cain not as a revision of a biblical story, but a testament to this story’s enduring effect on the Western imagination.

The accusation of sacrilege is interesting. It’s not as if there has not been a fantastic element associated with the early chapters of Genesis. For example, in popular Protestant fundamentalism and evangelicalism there is a belief that the “Nephilim” mentioned in an obscure reference in Genesis 6 are a race of giants produced through a sexual union between human woman and demons. It is difficult to see why this is more palatable than the idea that Cain became a vampire, but perhaps its because this fantastic idea is connected to a figure Protestants often equate with the sinister and the esoteric, and for them this is a connection being made by outsiders rather than one they see within their own religious tradition.

At any rate, I agree with Laycock in this assessment, and hope that Christians will be more cautions before alleging sacrilege in this latest instance of friction with the fantastic in popular culture.

Related posts:

“Joseph Laycock: Vampires Today”

“Joseph Laycock: Vampires and Eclipse”

I am working my way through my growing stack of reading relating to the fantastic, and this weekend I read a few chapters in The Philosophy of Horror, edited by Thomas Fahy (The University Press of Kentucky, 2010). There are several interesting chapters in this volume, but one that caught my attention this weekend was by Jessica O’Hara titled “Making Their Presence Known: TV’s Ghost-Hunter Phenomenon in a ‘Post-’ World.” In the chapter O’Hara considers why the numerous ghost-hunting “reality shows” are so very popular in our post-9/11 world and a postmodern skepticism toward meta-narratives. As the author develops her case she makes an interesting connection between ghost-hunter programs and home-improvement programs. I understand why the reader might be skeptical, but consider an excerpt where O’Hara notes the parallels:

In any case, the home-improvement show trend is massive, and ghost-hunter programming can certainly be seen as an extension of the genre. Consider the home-improvement and ghost-hunter’s shows’ common elements: clients call in experts to solve a problem with their home; the said problem compromises the clients’ ability to enjoy the home as a sanctuary; the team applies its expertise and solves the problem. The only difference is that instead of moving a cooking island, adding granite countertops, and replacing tacky linoleum with earth-toned tile, ghost-hunting shows work on getting rid of the spirit hanging by the refrigerator. Indeed, Ghost Hunters directly imitates the conventions of the home-improvement genre, including the up-tempo music, the infighting among team members, and the dramatic “reveal” to the clients, whose reaction of being pleased or not pleased draws upon the narrative struck of shows like Trading Spaces or While You Were Out.

Just one of the gems for reflection found in this book and the probing of horror and popular culture.

Related post:

Phillp Tallon: The Philosophy of Horror

My friend and fellow academic horror explorer, Matt Cardin of The Teeming Brain, recently brought an item to my attention that shows that this area of scholarship is growing. Of all places, The Chronicle of Higher Education featured an article on July 22 titled “Taking a Slash at Horror.” This piece looks at the academic analysis of various genres of film, and suggests that horror is the most popular genre for such exploration. To substantiate this claim the article quotes Bernice Murphy, editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, interviewed here previously. In the middle of the article it includes a listing of several academic books on the subject as examples of this academic study, most of whom will be featured here in interviews over the course of the next few weeks and months.

Readers may wonder why there are so many involved in this area of academic analysis, and the article provides a few suggestions. One has to do with the “video explosion” of the 1970s and 1980s, which, according to the article, “schooled many film scholars of today, who as teenagers haunted video stores brimming with exploitative horror films with salacious, beckoning covers.” This is certainly the case for me and remains so as I build my DVD collection which provides an opportunity for reassessment and analysis of films in the horror genre.

Although this is certainly a niche focus in the blogosophere, I am pleased to see that TheoFantastique is situated within a robust academic subculture that shows no signs of slowing down in the near future.

The trailer for the horror film Devil from Universal Pictures is now available. This supernatural thriller is based upon a story by M. Night Shyamalan as part of a Night Chronicles series. It tells the story of a small group of people trapped in a stalled elevator in a high rise who come to learn through this crisis that one of them is Satan.

Satan has long been a popular theological and pop cultural figure of interest. Two previous posts at TheoFantastique are particularly relevant to this topic and as background to Devil. Readers may recall my previous interview with W. Scott Poole, author of Satan in America: The Devil We Know (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009) where we discussed this topic. Moving from cultural considerations to cinematic, readers may also want to review my discussion of Nicholas Schreck’s book The Satanic Screen: An Illustrated Guide to the Devil in Cinema (Creation Books, 2001).

It will be interesting to see how Satan is presented in this forthcoming film, how it contributes to the pop cultural representations of the Devil, and whether this film does better than many of Shyamalan’s recent films.

The author then develops a list of differences between 1950s fears expressed through alien invasion and monster narratives in contrast with our current preferences for the zombie as the monster of the moment. Among the author’s uncomfortable conclusions we read the following:

What does the Zombie Genre tell us about modern America? For starters, it tells us that there is an overwhelming sense of frustration, that the promises of our parents and grandparents about the potential and future of America were, perhaps, not grounded in reality. That we will never reach the promised land.

It also tells us that our real underlying fears today aren’t of some evil foreign aggressor, even a hidden enemy like Osama Bin Laden, but instead, of the overwhelming and totally enveloping spectre of loneliness, of being alone, without friends and family, surrounded by a world that is alien to you and, for all intents and purposes, objectifies you and sees you as something to “use” or consume. It shows us our disconnect from other.

These films also show us our growing anxiety over lawlessness. The images of failed states saturate the air-waves. Images of cities that have ceased functioning, like Sarajevo, Grozny, Mogadishu, and Haiti after the earthquake, like New Orleans after Katrina and Los Angeles during the riots of 1992. A growing sense, awareness of, and sense of powerlessness in regard to a growing section of society that is anarchic and lawless and ruled by gangs, of growing poverty, a growing Lumpenproletariot and concomitant demise of the middle class. Isolated islands of humane civility taking refuge in a growing and ominous ocean of predatory anarchy.

The reader may not agree with everything the author of this open salon piece puts forward, but it does make for interesting food for thought as our fascination with the zombie (as well as [post]apocalyptic) functions as a mirror for our psychological and social state of affairs.

This critical survey examines the historical and thematic relationships between two of the cinema’s most popular genres: horror and film noir. The influence of 1930s- and 1940s-era horror films on the development of noir is traced and detailed, with analyses of over 100 motion pictures in which noir criminality and mystery meld with supernatural and psychological horror. Included are the films based on popular horror/mystery radio shows (The Whistler, Inner Sanctum), the works of RKO producer Val Lewton (Cat People, The Seventh Victim), and Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological ghost stories. Also discussed are gothic and costume horror noirs set in the 19th century (The Picture of Dorian Gray, Hangover Square); the noir elements of more recent films; and the film noir aspects of the Hannibal Lecter movies and other serial-killer thrillers.

Meehan has addressed noir previously in his book Tech-Noir: The Fusion of Science Fiction and Film Noir (McFarland, 2008), which he discussed here. Horror Noir is due for release in the Fall/Winter of this year.