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May the fourth be with you.
No, we’re not going to geek out on Star Wars movie minutiae this “Star Wars Day,” though if you don’t know about it, here’s an explanation: Fans of the movie franchise have long deemed May 4 as special, thanks to a bad play on words. The big movie tag line is “May the force be with you,” and any punster can pick up on the similarity to “May the fourth.”
We ignore here debates about things like the science of lightsabers, the original movie gaffe of completing the Kessel Run run in 12 parsecs (belatedly fixed in the move Solo: A Star Wars Story), or the irritation level of Jar Jar Binks in sequels designed to be prequels that unnaturally made the first film into “Episode IV.” But there is something profoundly universal about the Star Wars story that feels particularly relevant these days.
For starters, the original movie and following two sequels became iconic pop-culture examples of a tale almost literally as old as time, dubbed “the hero’s journey” by the great mythology expert Joseph Campbell. In his seminal book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” Campbell outlined the adventure and personal transformation of the hero that cuts across cultures and time.
Put succinctly, humans have a stunning sameness in their myths and legends when it comes to how an individual faces a major threat by shredding his/her own ego and beliefs to understand what must be done. We won’t go deeper into it, other than to suggest reading Campbell’s works, or at least reading interpretations of it. But it is timeless proof of how similar we are, regardless of differences.
The link between Star Wars and Campbell is pretty much irrefutable: The movie’s creator, George Lucas, admitted it, reportedly calling Campbell “My Yoda.”
Star Wars had a second complex layer of human universality: Lucas drew inspiration from Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa — specifically, Kurosawa’s samurai movies Yojimbo and The Hidden Fortress. Kurosawa, in turn had brilliantly melded the samurai lore of his own country with the classic American Western myth — so much so that while considered one of the greatest directors of all time, he was often denigrated in his homeland for not being Japanese enough in storytelling.
A third universal: our deep, millennia-old fascination with outer space as it relates to our inner selves, manifested in things like astrology, forging stars mentally into constellations, and the boundless use of space travel in fiction to explore what it means to be human.
But the real value of hearkening back to Star Wars right now is in that whole “Force” thing. It was presented initially as energy permeating everything, a power beyond our mortal shells. As Yoda put it in The Empire Strikes Back: “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.”
It became, to the chagrin of many older fans, something coldly clinical in the prequel trilogy when Lucas decided a person’s control of “the force” was determined by measurable levels of some microscopic organism called “Midi-chlorian,” but now we’re geeking.
The force is a variation on the “We are more” nature of being human, the ability to see — and act upon — connections that are not plainly visible. From holding a door open for a stranger to signing up as an organ donor to giving an elderly neighbor a ride to the COVID-19 vaccination appointment, we are stronger when bound by the force of community, of family, of nation, and of humanity.
In that vein, may the force indeed be with you.
– Times Leader