Star Wars: The Force Awakens – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Ponders the Attraction of “Universal” Themes

Star Wars burst on the scene in 1977, when I was a senior in High School.  Attuned to very local events – what was going on with my friends and at school – I was out of touch with the national culture in many ways.  I rarely went to the Rock Concerts that came through town and almost never went to the movies.  But somehow I found myself with a group of friends – I can’t for the life of me remember who they were – at a movie theater on the opening weekend of Star Wars.  I remember, vaguely, that one of the members of the group suggested that there was this hot movie playing that we should go to.  I don’t know how I paid for it.  I was working at the time, but never had pocket money, I put everything in the bank and kept it there, saving up for college, I guess.  Despite all this, I found myself in the front row of the movie theater; the front row because the place was sold out and those were the only seats left.

After the opening words scrolled deep into the screen – into infinity – and the first ship thundered onto the screen, I was hooked, but they had me when the second, endlessly vast ship flew overhead.  We were in a new and very different place – one that I was intrigued by and ready to explore – but also one in which – it seems to me these many years later – I already felt at home.  My seatbelt was buckled, and I was along for the ride.

The Reluctant Wife and I frequently return to favorite haunts or prepare favorite dishes again.  While they are inevitably good, there is something about the first time that we eat what will become a favorite that stands out – it is not just that it is good, but that it is novel.  We have tasted nothing like it before – it is as if the world were remade in that moment with new possibilities – and this is a second layer of deliciousness – that there are uncharted waters out there – that we can be surprised.  The second ship brought with it the promise of a very new and different world – or a new and different way of seeing our world.  And the rest of the movie delivered on that promise – though the themes that it played out were anything but novel – indeed some of them were ancient – and yet I was able to be surprised by them.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens had both the feeling of familiarity – there were old friend characters – but also the sense of newness; to mix my science fiction references – the sense of bravely going where no one has gone before.  Only the cantina – on a new planet – with new weird aliens but the same old music – seemed tired.  We went to see it with all hands that were on deck – including the reluctant son who has sworn off movies; but for Star Wars – he has seen all of the episodes at least once and read many of the books – he made an exception.  I think that the movies – for him, for me, and for so many of us – have stirred something deep within us.  That said, the reluctant stepdaughters, who don’t feel the same kind of affection for the franchise, were excited that the action hero was a woman and the romantic lead was an African American. 

This movie, like the 1977 Star Wars, had a little bit – or a lot – for each of us in my family.  That said, the record crowds on the opening weekend were two thirds male.  The previous films may have called out particularly to males.  I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me.  They are, on the surface, a series of buddy films about guys roaming around the universe with guns, fast ships, and swords: the stuff of boy play.  But my experience has been of a deeply psychological set of films – something that my gender biases don’t include as masculine interests.  Of course it is both things.  It is a good action film – the good guys win – and it is also a series of powerful dramas that invite us to think about them – to remember them, to be haunted by them, and to feel that they are related in broader ways to who it is that we are.  Perhaps I am not giving millions of men enough credit – that we may be broadly drawn to both layers – and that we particularly like films that work on both levels.

This movie, also like the original, starts on a planet far from the center of the Universe – and like the planet in that first movie – the planet is a desert planet.  The heroine is, like in the first film and in Harry Potter, and in a host of other coming of age stories, an orphan.  We are invited to identify with this heroine – to notice the ways that her life – like the life of Luke Skywalker before her – is akin to ours.  And we do and it is.  And some psychoanalysts – and I don’t really know what I’m talking about here so forgive me if I am wrong – but some psychoanalysts of the Jungian and perhaps other traditions would suggest that this means that we are dealing with Universal Themes.  Freud, on the other hand, steered us away from Universal Themes – he was interested in the particular associations of this particular person to the manifest content of this  particular dream (or other piece of material) in terms of working to understand what the unconscious or latent meanings might be for him or her.

Well, we now have two divergent set of people’s unconscious to think about.   The first set is the authors’.  Originally George Lucas, whose script was cobbled together from bits and pieces of Greek and Roman stories and from sources that were much less lofty – comic book plotlines and other stuff he had run across.  And he stumbled onto one of the themes that gets as close to a Universal theme as Freud ever got – the oedipal complex/triangle.  And one of the questions is whether this is, indeed, a Universal theme.  I would take the position that this has the appearance of being a Universal theme because each of the viewers, the second set of people, can bring our own associations to the skeleton of the story and flesh it out in ways that allow it to come together for us.  That is, that what is universal is not the story as told – but the story as watched – the story as we experience it and integrate it into our own lived experience.  And when we look at that closely what we see is not one story, but an infinite variety of stories, each thematically related, but none of them identical to the host story.

So, as an example, I think one of the ways that Star Wars works for me is that the relationship between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker resonates with the relationship between my father and me.  But the particulars are not the same at all.  My father was not unknown to me in the way that Darth Vader was to Luke.  He lived in my house – most of the time – growing up.  He was away a lot – as a travelling salesman he was frequently gone at least two and sometimes three nights a week.  What was he doing when he was away?  I imagined that he was with the CIA, working on decoding some terrible secret that would help us all when he did it.  When he came home, he was hard to connect with.  In fact, I don’t think I really connected with him until we were adults – and that was largely the result of my efforts to reach out to him and get to know him.  So he was unknown, but in particular ways that differ significantly from the chasm between Luke and Darth.  But I can make the connection in the same way that I make the connection between the latent and manifest parts of a dream – there is a thematic similarity between what is represented and what I have lived.

You may be saying to yourself, this is all very interesting, but what does it have to do with Star Wars?  And that’s just the point.  It has something to do with Star Wars, it is related to themes in Star Wars.  There are connections between my narrative and the one that George Lucas wrote – and, in the process of watching the film, I think that part of the pleasure of watching is feeling – not thinking about or analyzing or articulating – but feeling that there are connections – that this is a story that is both novel – shockingly so – and familiar in important ways.  Further, I think there is a feeling that the story he is telling will inform how my story – how my coming of age will proceed.  Not that it will be a recipe, or worse, a written manual, but that it will be something much more ephemeral and yet useful – it will be a musical theme, a score, that will help me think about when to amplify my voice – when to let it be quiet – it may even provide some lines – I can’t tell you how many friends I have who have recited lines from favorite movies – and these are clearly lines, or bits of dialogue, that are cool – that are instructive in how to live – how to manage our lives, not as actual orphans, but as people who feel – especially as I felt when I was seeing that first film in High School – estranged from our fathers – I, for instance, felt that my father’s agenda was really at cross purposes with my own.  And while he was not, in fact, incarnated evil – it was nice to see a film where, in black and white, the hero could be concerned about his father while also knowing that his own convictions were valid, and that his direction was the good, right and true one for him.  It was, again in my case, useful both as the fourth, fifth and sixth films (episodes 1, 2, and 3) filled in the back story of how Darth Vader developed as an evil character (actually I didn’t follow this very closely), but more to the point, as I learned more about who my father was and learned about how he became the man that he was.

But how is my reading of the story Universal?  I think that it is actually quite particular.  It differs, for instance, from my son’s story in many ways – one that I assume is also represented in some way in the movie because of his investment in it.  I worked, quite consciously, to have my son’s life be very different from my own.  I went into a profession where I would be home each night.  Then, as a result of divorce, my son is only in my home half of the time.  He and I have dinner together less frequently than my father and I did.  That said, we have a bed time ritual – and other rituals – that allow us to be connected.  I’d like to think that my work to connect with my father has led me to connect with my son in ways that are richer earlier.  But my son still has to find his own way – one that is not mine, but his.

My son’s introduction to Star Wars came early in his life.  When he went off to pre-school at 3, he went into the clutches of a little kid whose father seems to have weened him on Star Wars - long before I was comfortable with my son seeing a film that was so violent and complicated.  At a school that had peaceful conflict resolution as an essential part of its mission, the reluctant son was being assigned by a little brat to play the part of Han Solo, or a Wookie, or a Storm Trooper – and being ordered around about the best way to do that by a kid who was, I think, not developmentally capable to take in all of the stuff in the film, and was acting it out – both by portraying it, but also by bullying my son into “playing” with him.  This was a complicated and difficult period in my son’s development and in his mother and my parenting of him.  During this time, he would insist on taking a dinosaur to school with him each day.  I thought that this was simply a “transitional object” – something familiar from home that helped him feel connected with home when he was far from it.  So, one day when he had forgotten the dinosaur and we discovered that only as I was dropping him off at school and I was already late for work and he insisted that we go home to get his Dino, I gave him an ice scraper and insisted that he keep that with him during the day.  Well, only years later did I learn that his fantasy was that the dinosaur would, if something bad happened, grow to life size and defend him.  The ice scraper would not have been an effective defense tool, no matter how big, because it was inanimate.

Perhaps a few years from now, my son and I will be able to talk about how he relates in his life to the themes from the current film.  Right now, we are able to access what we like about the characters and situations, and what we find funny and delightful, and he is able to tell me that this is his favorite of all the Star Wars films thus far.  And we may be better able to articulate why that is the case when the final two installments of the series come out.  This segment leaves lots of unanswered questions.  That may be why the Reluctant Son likes it so much.  It is, at this moment, open.  Why did the character who is on the dark side go there?  How will the relationships between the players develop?  The reluctant son is at a stage in life where these are questions in the tapestry of his own life, with the players he is engaged with, are very open.

The appeal here is, perhaps most clearly, individual rather than universal.  The idea is that this film, with its various ambiguous elements may, like a Rorschach, be a representation of aspects of each of our world view.  Or it may conform to us and who we are.  The film both tells a complete story and it leaves many unanswered bits.  Perhaps this is part of the serial nature of it – again perhaps like the Harry Potter books and movies – we have a meal to chew on – and when we next sit down at this table – it will be a different – novel meal, but in a familiar restaurant.  That said, the resolution will inevitably be disappointing.  It will not be our resolution, but the resolution of the director.  And we will have to stitch that to the resolution, our own resolution that we want to achieve, with a thread that will be strained.  At this point, it is the movie that is strained.  There are things that don’t make sense, and we are free to fill them in based on our own narrative.

My own pleasure with this particular movie seems, at this moment, to be more on the surface.  I enjoyed the film a great deal, but was somewhat disappointed.  I remember when the second film (episode 5) came out, I was deeply disappointed in it – I remember stridently denouncing it – something that was out of character for me at the time.  My criticism was that it was just carrying things along – not resolving them – it was an intermediate film – a way of making money – and my indignation suggested that something holy had been defiled.  This film, the seventh (also, finally, episode seven – they now line up), is one that I am not as invested in.  My disappointment is not in the film itself – it is a fine, good and entertaining film – but that it is no longer a franchise that is speaking to me in the ways that it once did.

There was recently an interview with Bob Dylan in the AARP newsletter, and Bob Dylan had chosen to be interviewed by the AARP music critic, whom Dylan knew from the critic’s days with Rolling Stone, because the critic interviewed Dylan as a musician and songwriter – not as some kind of guru.  This film is directed by a guy who, like me, was taken by the films when they first came out.  Unlike me, he studied them – watching them over and over.  He has now been entrusted with a sacred text and I think he is doing a good job of articulating it.  I also think that my developmental arc – while still resonating with the issues of that galaxy far, far away and long, long ago – is no longer embroiled in working out the elements of this story – at least not in the same way I once was.  And that feels sad.  If I am more mature than I was, or just an old fart, there is something about the failure of this film to be experienced by me as more than a film – as an event – as something monumental – as something important to me and to culture - that leaves me feeling a bit hollow – not as if the film didn’t live up to my expectations, but that I have failed to do that.

At least that is what I thought last night.  As I reflected though, and as I thought about the direction that my thoughts took in terms of how the film might be related to the reluctant son’s life, I realized that one of the central themes that I have not talked about is one that is about the Oedipal triangle from the perspective of the father, not the son.  Well, maybe I am hoping (given how things turn out in the movie) that things will go well in my relationship with my son – in other words, I am trying to ward off one of those themes – not recognizing how that theme might serve as a cautionary tale – because it is too scary to think about how badly things might go if they really do go off the rails.  And the movie, then, allows me to be exposed to that – and to retain that as an unconscious fear – in the same way that a good dream can represent things that we need to work on while keeping certain aspects hidden in plain sight which are too scary to confront more directly.  

The films then touch on Universal themes in so far as, at different moments in our developmental arcs, we connect with those themes in our own particular way.  The films, to this point, have been more popular with men – that may change as a woman protagonist steps forward.  Not that women haven’t been drawn to this franchise, they have been, just as they have been drawn to Harry Potter.  It may also be the case that we are moving towards being able to identify across gender lines with heroes.  But it seems also to be the case, that, at least for me, at least for this moment, my developmental interests are focused elsewhere.  Another way of saying this is that Universal themes are not static – on a cultural or an individual level.  We will discover the Oedipal conflict in our own ways – as individuals and as cultures.  And we will identify at times from the perspective of the child and at times as the parent.  Parents, and our attachment and conflict with them, and children, once we have had them, and our attachment and conflict with them, and the ways that we work through that will be important, both across millennia and across the arc of our individual lives.  And this film, which contains big and important themes, is not hitting me where I live right now – not in the way that the first three (episodes 4-6) did.  But I will certainly be looking forward to episode eight. We’ll see if, by then, I am back on the oedipal track… or able to let the scarier elements affect me more.

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