We came for Star Wars. We found something much bigger. Inside the Lucas Museum: Star Wars, Narrative Art, and the Power of Myth
Unobtainium Podcast
Hosts Dr. Amy Mainzer and Adam Sigel take a guided tour through the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. They explore how Georg
Key takeaways
- Only about 7% of the museum's collection is strictly dedicated to Star Wars props and machines.
- George Lucas was heavily influenced by Joseph Campbell's 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces' when developing his films.
Main topics
- Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
- Star Wars mythology
Notable quotes
And those two elements create a society.
Conclusion
The episode highlights how modern cinematic myths serve as powerful to
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:00) So we're at the Museum of Modern Art in Tatooine. Yes, excellent. I Speaker 3 (0:04) love how everything will have a reference to Star Wars. That's Speaker 2 (0:08) right. It really does feel like you're in the museum on Tatooine. Speaker 3 (0:11) It does. And everything also still has a little bit of a Death Star quality to it. Those Speaker 2 (0:16) elevators are definitely giving me Death Star. These are Speaker 3 (0:18) definitely Death Star, yeah. Speaker 2 (0:19) That's Death Star Macy's, like Macy's on a Death Star. That's right. Speaker 3 (0:23) Well, you have to get a quick gift. Right. Speaker 2 (0:25) Oh, the Death Star gift shop. The Speaker 3 (0:27) Death Star gift shop. 100%. Speaker 2 (0:30) I would go to the Death Star gift shop. Totally. What do you think they have on the t-shirts there? Something like Speaker 3 (0:34) Death Speaker 2 (0:36) Star? Speaker 3 (0:36) My dad went to the Death Star and all he came back was this lousy t-shirt. Speaker 2 (0:39) Yeah. Speaker 2 (0:45) Hi, I'm Amy, UCLA Planetary Scientist, with my co-host Adam, Speaker 3 (0:50) a writer and producer. Speaker 2 (0:51) Today, we're going to visit the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, and we're going to talk about Joseph Campbell, the power of myth, and all things Star Wars. Speaker 1 (0:59) This is a big celebration for us because it's taken so long to get here, but it's something that I felt very, very strongly about in terms of honoring illustrators, artists, I think. who illustrate stories that are already written. And most of those stories are myths. They're not real. But the illustrations make them real. And in the beginning, especially for the few thousand years, that was the only way you could tell a story was with pictures. Because a picture is very powerful. And the stories are very powerful. And you combine them together. And those two elements create a society. Hi, I'm Adam. Speaker 2 (1:49) I'm Amy. And Speaker 3 (1:51) this is Unobtainium. Speaker 2 (1:52) And you just heard George Lucas and his wife, Melody Hobson, talking about the opening of their new museum. Speaker 3 (1:59) Which has just opened in Los Angeles. Speaker 2 (2:02) And of course, being huge Star Wars nerds, we had to go. Speaker 3 (2:06) Yes, we did. Speaker 2 (2:07) Which was Speaker 3 (2:08) really interesting. It was a really cool experience, right? Speaker 2 (2:11) Yeah, it was not what I was completely expecting, I have to tell you. It was so different in a lot of ways. Speaker 3 (2:15) In what ways? Speaker 2 (2:16) Well, only about 7 % of the collection there is actually strictly devoted to Star Wars itself. Right, Speaker 3 (2:22) the props and the machines. Yeah, the art, Speaker 2 (2:24) all that stuff. But the rest of it is what Lucas is calling narrative art. Yeah. And so it's a much broader theme. And Speaker 3 (2:32) it's actually somewhat controversial. There is a bit of a controversy going, which Lucas welcomes. He seems to be, he knows he's stepping into it. He's provocative. Speaker 2 (2:40) He's trying to say that basically narrative art is the art of storytelling. And sometimes that's what you might even call commercial art. Speaker 3 (2:48) He calls it a visual art that tells a story, captures a moment in narrative, or expresses the essential myths, beliefs, and values that unite a society. Speaker 2 (2:57) Right. And so the way the museum's artworks are presented is that what we would call more classical artwork is kind of presented in the same forum and in the same way with things that might be, you know, like a comic book cover or, you know, a movie poster, things like that. Speaker 3 (3:12) Lucas works like a lot of people in Hollywood. It isn't... You know, spoiler, it isn't just one person making a movie. It's a lot of people. And Lucas, in a way, and I think that quote kind of makes the point, he's giving credit to all the illustrators. who he worked with, the concept artist, who helped him envision the world of Star Wars. Speaker 2 (3:34) The book illustrators, people who, yeah, he had works there from the illustrator from The Wizard of Oz, for example. Right. And, of course, a ton of pulpy sci-fi covers. And Speaker 3 (3:44) I think that's the point. So the controversy is that in, and there's different points of view on this, but that... In fine art institutions, they don't really necessarily showcase the work of illustrators, the work of more commercial artists in this regard. Yeah, Speaker 2 (4:01) and Lucas is saying these commercial artists are the ones we interact with every day in our day-to-day lives. We look at advertisements, we look at movie posters, we look at book covers. You know, in other words, we're not always in a fine art museum looking at a Degas or something like that. Right, Speaker 3 (4:16) or Speaker 2 (4:16) they Speaker 3 (4:16) call it the people's art. And it's very much this whole high art, low art discussion. That's actually, to be fair, fine art institutions have been doing it for a long time. Speaker 2 (4:25) Yep. What counts is fine art, right? What counts is Speaker 3 (4:28) exactly. Andy Warhol was talking a lot about this. And obviously. Different artists and people who work in the art world have different opinions on it. Lucas is very much on the outside of that group. And one of the interesting things about the museum was that it didn't get accepted initially. Speaker 2 (4:46) Well, Lucas himself says he kind of had a hard time finding a home for it. Yes. Which city would it go to? Speaker 3 (4:52) Initially it was San Francisco. They turned it down eventually. Speaker 2 (4:57) Also Speaker 3 (4:57) eventually turned it down. and then it found its home in Los Angeles, which in a way is a perfect place for it. Speaker 2 (5:03) I think it's very fitting that it's here in Los Angeles because, I mean, first of all, you know, USC, this is George Lucas' alma mater, but also, uh, it's the sort of the home of the movie industry here. One of the other interesting things I learned about when we visited the museum was basically that Lucas was hugely influenced by a number of different thinkers, but in particular, one guy really stands out, and that's... Joseph Campbell. That Speaker 3 (5:25) guy, Joseph Campbell. Who Speaker 2 (5:28) was he? Do you want to tell us? Okay, Speaker 3 (5:30) so I discovered Joseph Campbell from Star Wars, from George Lucas. Joseph Campbell was a professor of literature from Sarah Lawrence. He came to fame and probably most famous for his comparative study of mythology and religion. Speaker 2 (5:46) So he was basically an expert in... all the world's mythologies. He really seemed to just expand this huge amount of different cultures. Speaker 3 (5:54) He is, in turn, very much influenced by the work of Carl Jung, who talked about these sort of common archetypes, okay? We can go into a longer, another podcast about Carl Jung, but what that is to say is there is a similarity in the mythologies around the world. Speaker 2 (6:11) Right, and all these different cultures, no matter how different they are... all seem to come back to these sort of common themes in their mythologies. Speaker 3 (6:19) Yes. What Joseph Campbell was talking about is that the way we come to understand ourselves, the way we come to understand our lives, is through these mythologies. Well, Speaker 2 (6:30) it kind of makes sense if you think about it, right? Because, I mean, we all have certain common experiences as a human being, right? We're all trying to figure out, why are we here? where is here anyway? Yes, exactly. And where are we going to go? And where are we Speaker 3 (6:42) going to go? And also, myths have this great power. In fact, there's a series called The Power of Myth, which is an incredible... Speaker 2 (6:49) Fantastic show, yeah. Incredible Speaker 3 (6:51) show from, I think, the 90s or late 80s. It... speaks to the fact that myths are really how we come to understand our values. We talk about it in science fiction. Like, we always say that science fiction allows you to understand science or technology to sort of see how we think about it, to emotionally connect to it. Speaker 2 (7:11) Right. So are you saying that myths surround us and bind us together? Speaker 3 (7:17) I think Lucas is saying that. But yeah, Speaker 2 (7:19) that's it. That's Speaker 3 (7:21) really Speaker 2 (7:21) the thing. So he talked about that in his opening discussion about the museum. He talked about the power and importance of mythology. to connect us together so that we do have this common framework of values. Speaker 3 (7:32) You looked at all these ancient societies. Now, this is before globalism, before we had global media and all that sort Speaker 2 (7:37) of stuff. So each society within Speaker 3 (7:39) independently... Speaker 2 (7:39) ...developed their own stories. Well, what I think is so interesting about this is if we think about it from a kind of a cosmic perspective here a little bit, one of the most important questions about whether life exists on other planets is whether life can coexist with itself first. Yeah. In other words... Can societies with advanced technology more than capable of wiping itself out, can they figure out how to coexist peacefully for long periods of time? Right? And so that speaks to the question of, do we have common values that allow us to stand the test of time? And Speaker 3 (8:12) how do we emotionally connect to that? And that's what myths allow us to do. So there's this concept called the monomyth, right? Well, this is Joseph Campbell. This is Joseph Campbell's... idea and it's basically the structured version of Carl Jung's archetypes and it's in a book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Speaker 2 (8:31) Yeah this is Joseph Campbell's seminal work right? Yeah it's pretty much what his magnum opus is. And Speaker 3 (8:36) it's what Lucas read when he was writing Star Wars. Speaker 2 (8:38) Yeah so so Lucas has a really interesting quote that he says which is basically you know Star Wars kind of got a little out of control it sounds like. Speaker 3 (8:47) He said literally he goes he written many drafts And then he stumbles across the hero with a thousand faces. And that's when he realized. this is the story of my movie. Speaker 2 (8:58) Yeah. When I was an undergrad at Stanford, Stanford had a rare books collection. And I don't know what prompted it, but one day, being a huge Star Wars nerd, I was looking through the rare books collection just to see what they had. And I saw that they had a copy of an original screenplay of Star Wars. Right. The original version. The original version of it. So I asked, could I just go check it out and look at it in the book collection room? And they said, sure. And they let me put on some white gloves. And I got to look at it. And sure enough, it was crazy. It was hundreds and hundreds of pages. All these characters are all kind of in there, you know, recognizable in some ways, but the names are all jumbled. The places are jumbled. And Speaker 3 (9:36) the archetypes, though that's again, the influence from Campbell and Young is that in... that original version, he hadn't fully understood these different sort of models of characters. The Obi-Wan... The hero. Speaker 2 (9:50) The Speaker 3 (9:50) hero is Luke, right? The hero Speaker 2 (9:51) that's Luke. And then, of course, we have the trickster, Han Solo. Obi-Wan Kenobi, the wise man. The Speaker 3 (9:57) mentor. The Speaker 2 (9:58) mentor, yeah. Speaker 3 (9:59) The advisor. And Darth Vader is the shadow, the darkness within the us that is projecting. The Speaker 2 (10:04) thing that you're afraid of becoming. Yes, right. Speaker 3 (10:07) And Princess Leia, sort of a special case, right? Yeah. Some people talk about her in the archetype as the goddess, although it Speaker 2 (10:16) doesn't quite fit Speaker 3 (10:16) that. On the other Speaker 2 (10:17) hand, for me personally, when I read Star Wars, I never really wanted to be Princess Leia. I always wanted to be Han Solo because he seemed like he had a lot more fun. You know what I mean? Right. Speaker 3 (10:26) Well, and he was the shapeshifter. Yeah. So let's talk about this Speaker 2 (10:29) hero's journey that Joseph Campbell came up with because this was his life's work. Right, was to look across all these different cultures to study their mythologies. Yeah, Speaker 1 (10:40) and Speaker 3 (10:40) this is like, kind of 101 film school. Speaker 2 (10:43) Yeah, so this is basically scientist goes to film school. It's scientist goes to Speaker 3 (10:46) film school. Okay, and this isn't to say that every movie or every story is told this way. Because Joseph Campbell, in his work, would talk about there are many different types of myths. They do different things, right? And they're also changing. They are changing over time, and I think we get back to that. It's important. But the main sort of monomyth idea is the departure of the hero who travels to an