It's been a long, dangerous journey through the far human reaches of space. The ship Raza docks at a space station with a crew of six vagabonds and one android eager for some down time. In "Dark Matter", a sort of "Firefly"-meets-"Memento" dramedy that debuted last summer on SyFy, that means a trip to the interstellar multiplex.
"Do you want to come?" the teenage gadget wiz Five asks the tough, gloomy space-anarchist Six.
"No thanks."
"But," she steps forward, "it's 'Star Wars XXXVI', remastered in full VR. They say it's a classic."
It's a campy throw-away line, fan service for sci-fi geeks worried about the direction of the genre's most massive franchise under Disney's corporate stewardship. But it raises an interesting question about the relationship between the culture of our era and that of the future.
What have we made that will persist? Unquestionably, there are gorgeous works of art from this century that will make their way into the art history books of the future. But where are our "Illiad"s or "One Thousand and One Nights"— our epic tales retold so often and so widely that their characters and idiomatic universes persist centuries into the global cultural consciousness? As the pop culture bifurcates again and again into a thousand niche genres it's hard to imagine any single story having that kind of staying power.
"Star Wars" seems poised to give lie to that notion.
First of all, the franchise seems to behave like some of humanity's most lasting stories. Back in 1978, with only "A New Hope" to work with, scholars were already commenting on the story's mythic structure. Nearly four decades, seven films, and uncounted books, comics, Christmas specials, and video games later, the case looks even stronger.
Like Moses, Jeremiah, Paul, and Muhammad in the Abrahamitic religious texts, new generations of characters tread new routes through and revitalize familiar narratives. And as with the books of Maccabees, Ruth, and Jesus, entirely new kinds of stories set in the same universe expand our imagination. All the while, Wookieepedia Talmudifies the canon. Star Wars seems to have the storytelling infrastructure in place to persist indefinitelty.
Even more importantly, "Star Wars" idioms and fetish objects have saturated our language. Would more people know what you meant by a lightsaber or a Trojan horse? Pharaoh or Darth Vader? The Force or Djinn? With every child who watched the original trilogy before heading to the theater to see "The Force Awakens", the Lucasian patois projected itself a lifespan farther along the human timeline.
Maybe the spacefaring vagabonds of our far future really will strap on VR suits to experience "Star Wars XXXVI".
That set of wild speculations and assumptions in hand, I approached Sean Hanretta, professor of modern African intellectual and cultural history at Northwestern University, for his take.
Hanretta thinks about how myths survive over time, cultural shifts, and changes in modes of transmission. In order to understand "Star Wars"' potential for longevity, he compares it to the "Sunjata Epic". That's an epic poem that tells the story of Sunjata Keita, founder of the Malian Empire in the Thirteenth Century. The poem passed through oral tellings for hundreds of years, and remained relevant after parts of it were written down. The Homeric "Illiad" and "Odyssey" followed a similar pattern.
Sunjata in the story is the severely disabled son of a king's less-favored wife. A prophecy declares him chosen to lead his people. In exile, he transforms himself into a master hunter, strong as a lion. Eventually, he defeats an evil sorcerer-king attacking Mali. In victory, he's crowned emperor of a new alliance and replaces his cowardly half-brother on the throne.
Sound familiar?
These universal tropes, present in biographies as far-flung as King David's, Queen Esther's, and Darth Vader's, let huge audiences latch on to epic stories. Even as the world changes, these stories' essential elements remain relatable and compelling.
"In a nutshell," Hanretta wrote in an email, "what seems vital about the kinds of myths that persist is that they are simultaneously embedded in large institutional structures or ideologies while also drawing on quasi-universal archetypes that give them great flexibility."
In other words, lasting stories tend to have more than just broadly relatable themes. They become useful to powerful actors who work to make them spread.
Sunjata's story was important to the old Malian empire, which lasted for 300 years. The epic survived for generations in areas where its institutions took root.
"Without the empire," Hanretta wrote, "it's very unlikely that the epic would have existed in enough variants in enough places for enough time to have been able to survive the nearly half a millennium that followed the empire's collapse."
What then of "Star Wars"? Will Disney project its power as widely as the Old Malian Empire? Will the "Star Wars" universe remain important enough for its brand to revisit in a future when the view from the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries looks quaint and archaic?
It's hard to say for certain, but Hanretta has his doubts:
One of the things that allowed both the Homeric epics and the Sunjata epics to take advantage of their flexibility was the rather collaborative (in today's parlance) way they were elaborated upon to build entire "worlds." Different from genres in that they revolved around core characters and events, they were also bigger than, say, the Star Wars world (or the Tolkien world) in that there were literally hundreds of competing versions of the main stories, all well suited to a variety of contexts. What made this possible was a different institutional and commercial focus: rather than "intellectual property" in the strict sense, what was important was performance. Both Ancient Greek and Mande "bards" made their livings off of public and private performances of these myths. This gave them an incentive to use the built-in flexibility (or maybe craft it slowly over time?) to suit new social circumstances. To go back to the analogy of the world religions, this would be where the priesthood etc. would come in.
That is to say, the "Illiad" and "Sunjata Epic" were adaptable. Absent a central authority delineating and dividing canon and non-canon, tellers were free to make the stories their own.
Anyone who's spent time with organized religion will recognize a similar pattern. Rabbis and Imams, for example, have deeply divergent interpretations of Abraham's sacrifice. The Jewish tradition holds that it was the forefather Isaac bound to the rock. In much of Islam, the child is Ishmael, Abraham's first-born son and a prophet. Even within religions there are vast debates over interpretation. Did God make the world out of stuff or from nothing? Was Muhammad the last prophet or will others follow? Was Buddha a god or are there no gods at all?
"Star Wars" admits none of that room for interpretation.
In the early '90s, a science fiction author named Timothy Zahn wrote three follow-up novels to the "Star Wars" original trilogy. Set after the close of "Return of the Jedi", the "Thrawn" trilogy offered fans a look at the sequels that never were. More authors got involved and — under Lucasfilm's supervision — built out the Expanded Universe further in depth and time. New stories filled the gaps between movies and imagined the threats Han, Leia, and Luke's descendants would one day face.
Then, when Disney bought Lucasflim and took over the universe in preparation for "The Force Awakens", they just threw the Expanded Universe out and declared it a collection of non-canon "legends" and started from scratch.
(The podcast Imaginary Worlds released a fascinating episode recently exploring this history in more depth.)
Hanretta argues that Disney's habit of tight control over its intellectual property will limit "Star Wars"' staying power in society.
If our evolving storytelling technology leaves the movie-on-a-screen behind, or if elements of the series lose their relevance, fans might not be able to adapt the universe without Disney's permission. And who knows if the conglomerate will care enough to invest in change by the Twenty-Second or -Third Centuries.
For the characters of "Dark Matter" to care about "Star Wars" on a space station light years from Earth, Disney may have to loosen its bonds of copyright control.
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