A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away ... The famous introit to Star Wars has been ushering visitors into an exhibition of the movie series—or of its mythic components, so the organisers are given to claim—at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum over the past summer. As that claim suggests, the exhibition presents itself as more than mere fandom: it has a ‘Concept’. The average literate who is not a specialist in textual analysis or cultural studies is likely to enjoy the concept for a while, but it all becomes a bit relentless and by the end a dead tone prevails. Why is it worthwhile, you wonder, for Lucasfilm and the Powerhouse to have mounted the show, and what will fans of the series, or the more casual museum-goer, take away from it? 

The concept is grounded in director George Lucas’s abiding interest in the nature of myth, and in his deployment of the central characters and events of Star Wars as archetypes of heroic legends in which good struggles with evil. A germinal source of the concept is Joseph Campbell’s celebrated study of 1948, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Part of the exhibition comprises a half-hour video in which Lucas recalls his youthful encounter with Campbell’s book, interspersed with cuts to the making of the first suite of films twenty or so years ago. Lucas explains that his opus contains (though not, initially, by design, he says) some of the common episodes in Western mythology, beginning with a hero called to adventure. The hero subsequently outwits his guardians; finds a wise guide, a magical talisman and some hero-partners; and commences the great struggle in which he finds revelation, acknowledging his own dark aspect and rising above it. There’s a princess-rescue in there, of course, surrounded by sundry dragons and other monstrous critters; and sufficient adventure, sacrifice and betrayal along the way to stir, inspire and wring the heart. Or those are the responses that the films can elicit. The articulation of this concept in the exhibition, however, tends to the banal.