Star Wars and Mythological Canon
The time has come for Incidental Mythology to talk about Star Wars. When we talk about contemporary mythology, it’s hard to not mention Star Wars – its this ever present force of storytelling that’s dominated the last forty-five years of pop culture. And speaking of storytelling, there is something really fascinating about the way the story is put together and communicated to it’s audience. So today I wanted to spend some time talking about Star Wars, and more importantly what Star Wars canon looks like, how it’s defined, and what we know about the idea of canonisation.
There’s a lot of Star Wars content out there, and it’s only growing the more Disney produces Star Wars content. There’s not just the films and new television shows, but also a whole host of books on subject matters pertaining to canon characters, but also characters we’ve not really heard of in the movies or television shows. They expand on parts of the world history that are only mentioned in passing, giving a rich feel to the universe they exist in.
So when someone is newly embarking into the world of Star Wars, what’s canon? The continuity within the various Star Wars media is not exactly consistent and firm – it’s all kinda wiggly and ever-shifting. And when we change from a George Lucas film to a cartoon Clone Wars episode to a book by E.K. Johnston, elements and aspects of the story may change. There are inconsistencies, even between movies, so what’s a Star Wars fan to do? How does this all work?
The Star Wars universe is based on the idea that the entirety of its history is crafted by many different authors all contributing different aspects of the “historical” events. Like our own history, it’s being crafted and told from a variety of different perspectives and not necessarily all linearly tied together into one cohesive idea. It’s hard to find a full history of the world that isn’t in some way biased or ethnocentric, for example. But we can find a couple different books all about World War II from several different perspectives. And then we may struggle to find something to fill in particular voids until the next main event. Some primary historical figures may not necessarily meet other figures, even though their actions are being impacted by each other. And yes, I realise I’m talking about history so far and not mythology. But as I’ve made clear on this website before, history is in many ways a form of mythology. But Star Wars doesn’t necessarily make mythology simply through its similarity to history.
I should take a moment here, though, to mention that I will not be talking about Joseph Campbell’s hero’s monomyth. For people not knowledgeable about it, Campbell wrote a book about how he believed all hero myths to be structured the same. His book The Hero with a Thousand Faces was immensely popular and heavily influenced the creation of a lot of pop culture stories, including George Lucas and Star Wars. I’m not going to get into my own thoughts on Campbell, though you can probably glean a little of that in my myth course when I take some time to talk about it. But essentially, there’s a lot more to mythology than the simple structure of what events occur and in which order, even if Campbell was right.
The complicated thing when it comes to talking about Star Wars is it’s innate binary nature of the story. Star Wars famously paints its narratives in clear black and white, with the good vs evil nature as inherently just that – very good pitted against very evil. There’s really no wiggle room when it comes to this. I mean, one of the evil character’s name is Dark Sidious – they very heavily paint how we’re supposed to feel about that character. The Jedi are portrayed as the good figures, with the Sith as the evil. The Force has a light side and a dark side. Everything is very binary and final. Even before the Empire, the
But on closer inspections, things are not always so clearly defined in these firm boundaries. The Clone Wars, for example, was run by Palpatine/Darth Sideous, meaning that both sides of the war were inherently bad. Not to mention that the Clone army was basically just raising slaves simply to die, which seems a bit morally questionable. Even the line between Jedi and Sith is not exactly all that clear. The famous line of “Only Sith deal in absolutes” is a pretty good example of the murky boundary between the two worlds.
In fact, some in the Star Wars universe have rejected the idea of a pure light and dark side of the Force entirely. There are some Gray Jedi, so named for the blurring of dark and light. These Jedi see an ambivalence to the Force, and do not necessarily adhere to the Jedi Code nor the Sith Code, but choose to base their relationship with the Force on their own terms and experiences. Ahsoka Tano and Jolee Bindo are two examples of these Gray Jedi.
Therefore, there’s really no one event or action or even Force that can cannot have different understandings and different relationships to the story. We hear one aspect of what exactly the Force is like from Jedi in the movies, but in some of the books we get a different perspective.
The mythology of the Star Wars universe is not in its structure or strong canonical foundation – not least because there’s not really much of a strong canonical structure. It’s mythology is in it’s flexibility, the fluid nature of it’s notion of canon. What is canonical, what is important to the narrative of the history of a galaxy far away from our own and in the distant past, is up to us – the storyteller, the audience, the people who read the mythologies and come to understand them. They allow for us to manipulate, alter, and change the world based on our own understandings, reflecting the nature of the world as one which is also in flux.
It's kinda like reading a book on Persian mythology, or Greek mythology, or even Welsh mythology. We may have a book which compiles the history of these various mythological figures, but inevitably things will be missing. Stories will simply be aluded to but not present. Maybe there will be jumps from one event to the other, or two different versions of the same story but told in vastly different ways. This is because canon in these traditional worlds of mythology is not necessarily the strict and defined – it’s fluid.
Star Wars allows individual writers and artists to have their own take on the world they find themselves loving and sharing. And this isn’t necessarily what makes it a strong canonised narrative, but what makes it a mythology.