The Monochromatic Superman of 1955

“Psychologically 

Superman undermines 

The Authority.”

— Frederick Wertham,

Seduction of The Innocent.

“During the years of the Second World War, the superhero concept spread like wildfire, but then died as rapidly and mysteriously as it had begun. Mass popular interest dwindled sharply after 1945, and superhero titles disappeared to be replaced by genre books that tripled the overall sales of the comics business between 1945 and 1954. Horror, Western, humor, romance, and war titles proliferated and made the kind of money that superheroes couldn’t match. With no more heroes left to hold back the tide, the streets of the American popular imagination filled with zombies, junkies, radioactive monsters, and sweating gunmen.

  What had made the superheroes so resonant and then so equally irrelevant? Was it only World War II that gave the supermen their urgent significance? The end of the war tipped Americans into a new age of plenty and paranoia. The United States had everything, but it shared with its enemies a superweapon capable of reducing even the sunniest suburban garden party to a fleshless, howling wasteland. Is it any wonder that gloomy existentialism captured so many imaginations in the 1950s? In the postwar West, having X-ray eyes would henceforth be a horror movie curse.

  We end the Golden Age as it began, with Superman —one of the last survivors of the initial brief expansion and rapid contraction of the DC universe. It had been too much too soon for the superheroes, but although many of them would lie dormant for decades, no potential trademark truly dies. The superheroes, like cockroaches or Terminators, are impossible to kill. 

But in 1954 a sinister scientist straight from the pages of the comics tried to wipe them all out and came close to succeeding.

  As the lights went out on the Golden Age, characters such as Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, who’d achieved a wider recognition thanks to serials and merchandising, survived the cull. Because of their status as backup strips in Adventure Comics, second stringers like Green Arrow and Aquaman weathered the storm—perhaps undeservedly—but the survivors did not always flourish.

  For instance, a popular TV series (1953’s The Adventures of Superman) had cemented Superman’s status as an American icon, but budgetary restrictions meant that its star, the likeable but ultimately troubled George Reeves, was rarely seen in the air. At best, he might jump in through a window at an angle that suggested methods of entry other than flight, possibly involving trampolines. The stories revolved around low-level criminal activity in Metropolis and ended when Superman burst through another flimsy wall to apprehend another gang of bank robbers or spies. Bullets would bounce from his monochrome chest (the series was shot and transmitted before color TV, so Reeves’s costume was actually rendered in grayscale, not red and blue, which wouldn’t have contrasted so well in black and white.)

  Reeves, at nearly forty, was a patrician Superman with a touch of gray around the temples and a physique that suggested middle-aged spread rather than six-pack, but he fit the mold of the fifties establishment figure: fatherly, conservative, and trustworthy. 

The problem with Superman was more obvious in the comic books. By aping the kitchen-sink scale of the Reeves show, Superman’s writers and artists squandered his epic potential on a parade of gangsters, pranksters, and thieves. The character born in a futurist blaze of color and motion had washed up on a black-and-white stage set, grounded by the turgid rules of a real world that kept his wings clipped and his rebel spirit chained. Superman was now locked into a death trap more devious than anything Lex Luthor could have devised. Here was Superman—even Superman—tamed and domesticated in a world where the ceiling, not the sky, was the limit.

  Fifties comics had taken a turn toward the dark, lurid, and horrific. The story of EC Comics, which replaced the popularity of the hero titles and brought about a nationwide moral panic, is a fascinating one and has been covered in depth elsewhere—David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America has a chilling fifteen-page roll call of artists and writers, many young and promising, who never worked again after the comic-book purges of the fifties. But this book is about superheroes, and for superheroes, times were especially tough.

  Imagine the response at a dinner party this evening if you whipped out your rouged nipples and proudly announced a passion for hard-core pedophile pornography. As difficult as it may be to believe today, in 1955 the kind of outrage that would reasonably greet your twisted confession was directed toward artists, writers, editors, and anyone else involved in the business of comic books. Comic books and their creators were painted as cunning corrupters of children, as monstrous artifacts crafted by experts to twist young and impressionable minds in the direction of crime, drug addiction, and perversion.

  At the heart of this attempt to annihilate an art form was an elderly psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham who would throw his considerable weight and expertise behind a sustained hate campaign aimed at comic books. His 1954 best-seller Seduction of the Innocent blamed the comics and their creators for every social ill to afflict America’s children.

  However, it wasn’t just EC’s often tasteless horror stories that fired Dr. Wertham’s rage; almost inexplicably, it was the innocent, floundering superhero titles that really got him foaming. Like any good predator, he could sense their weakness and knew that no articulate voice was likely to speak up as comic books’ advocate. If an “expert” like Wertham said they were pornography, then they were pornography. With little to offend anyone in the content of these comics, Wertham was forced to dig deep into an ever-fertile loam of subtext in order to justify a fevered one-handed attack that was conducted with the same brutish, ignorant disregard for the truth that was said to characterize America’s enemies.

  For example, in Batman’s living arrangements with ward Dick Grayson (Robin) and Alfred the butler, the good doctor was certain that he discerned the “wish-dream of two homosexuals living together.” Perhaps it was the wish-dream of two homosexuals. Only those particular two homosexuals could tell us for certain.

  Yes, it’s all too easy from a knowing adult perspective to infer Bruce Wayne’s epicene qualities. It wouldn’t take much pressure to gently dial up all the familiar elements of a Batman story until the fetishistic homosexual undercurrent implicit in the basic scenario of three generations of men living together in luxury and lawlessness stood revealed in all its black rubber glory. Director Joel Schumacher walked some way down that road in his universally reviled 1997 film Batman and Robin, with George Clooney, Chris O’Donnell, and Michael Gough occupying the central roles. There’s a case to be made for the satanic and even sexually transgressive appeal of Batman to adults: wealthy, literally Plutonian, and of the underworld, Batman inhabits a subterranean secret lair, dresses in badass black leather, enjoys the company of a small boy in tights, and has no steady girlfriend. Perhaps there remains to be written the great gay Batman story where he and Robin, and potentially Alfred too, are going at it like trip hammers between Batmobile cruising scenes, but the hollow specter of Dr. Wertham can take it from me that the young readers of Batman saw only a wish-dream of freedom and high adventure. It is Wertham whose name belongs in the annals of perversity, not Batman’s.

  Unsurprisingly, Wertham’s blue-movie take on Wonder Woman cast her as an outrageous lesbian, representing an island of perverse militant dykes with a taste for ritual bondage and domination. Astonishingly, he seemed almost oblivious to the more candid kinks of his rival pop psychologist Marston’s lifestyle, gnawing instead at the blatant lesbian shout-out in Wonder Woman’s oft-repeated oath, “SUFFERING SAPPHO!” which no doubt conjured predictable images in the good doctor’s strobe-lit imagination.

  But it was Superman—benign Superman—who bore the brunt of Wertham’s hatred. Describing the Man of Steel as a fascistic distortion of truth designed to make children feel inadequate and inclined toward delinquency, he opined obliquely:

  “How can they respect the hard-working mother, father, or teacher who is so pedestrian, trying to teach the common rules of conduct, wanting you to keep your feet on the ground and unable even figuratively speaking to fly through the air? 

Psychologically Superman undermines The Authority and Dignity of the ordinary man and woman in the minds of children.”

  In Wertham’s diagnosis, then, children were too underdeveloped to separate the outlandish fantasy in their comic books from everyday reality, and this made them vulnerable to barely concealed homosexual and antisocial content.

  I tend to believe the reverse is true: that it’s adults who have the most trouble separating fact from fiction. A child knows that real crabs on the beach do not sing or talk like the cartoon crabs in The Little Mermaid. A child can accept all kinds of weird-looking creatures and bizarre occurrences in a story because the child understands that stories have different rules that allow for pretty much anything to happen.

  Adults, on the other hand, struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it’s not real.

  Wertham’s assault made comics the focus of a nationwide hate campaign. Good Americans who had grown up with the inoffensive adventures of Superman and Batman gathered in howling mobs to burn superhero comics in mountainous heaps upon which the colorful, optimistic dream-people were turned to flame and ash, smoke and soot. (Within ten years, packs of goons just like these would be hurling Beatles albums on similar bonfires with equal brainless fervor.)

  In 1954 congressional hearings left horror publisher EC Comics wounded beyond repair. Purged of outlaw content, the remaining publishers banded together for survival and drafted a draconian Comics Code that would ensure child-friendly content. In its mean-spirited, machinelike thoroughness, its precise articulation of dos and don’ts, it was almost—to use the language of the day—Soviet in tone. In many ways, born from similar circumstances, the Comics Code mirrored the Hays Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, which aimed to transform the racy, intoxicated Hollywood movies into inoffensive, sexless fairy tales. The Thought Police were marching proudly in the Land of the Free :

  Policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established Authority.

  Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with, walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited.

  Respect for parents, the moral code, and for honorable behavior shall be fostered.

  And so on. Comics that conformed to code standards were published with a little “Approved by the Comics Code Authority” stamp in the top right corner. Comic books that didn’t carry the code were unlikely to be distributed or given space on newsstands and therefore faced extinction, so it was in the interests of publishers to comply. It seemed now that even the form that had conceived the superheroes, the 2-D universe in which they lived, was in peril.

  The Golden Age was over. But the world in which the heroes were dying was a world that needed them like never before. Fifties America was a land of edginess and prowling paranoia hovering as it did on the verge of thermonuclear annihilation. Alone at night, in the midst of unprecedented luxury after a successfully won world war, Americans were more frightened than ever before; there was fear of the Bomb, the Communist, the Homo, the Negro, the Teenager, the Id, the Flying Saucers, the Existential Void. There was the space race, with its launch into the limitless unknown, and Kinsey’s groundbreaking surveys into the sexual habits of Americans, opening the dripping treasure chest of a buttoned-up country’s inner life, revealing a sleep world of polychromatic polymorphous perversity acted out behind a camouflage of pipe-smoking patriarchs and Stepford wives. There were as many different kinds of fear as there were brands of gum.

  And as America turned its gaze inward in search of solutions to its sunlit terrors, it found The Shadow, and the multiheaded thing in the cellar emerged blinking in the light : Survival cultists, split personalities, UFO contactees like George Adamski were all admitted to the discourse, and people were willing to listen. 

The Dharma Bums and the beatniks had begun to crystallize from the margins into A Movement. The queer, the criminal, the deranged, and the inspired emerged like Morlocks from subterranean nightclub cellars spitting poetry. The spread of psychedelics and marijuana through the jazz underground into the arts schools and the emergent culture of rock ’n’ roll hastened the rise of this fringe. The urge to control and tame the American subconscious was now spawning new things to attempt to control, newer and weirder ideas to understand and explain away.

  By the middle of the twentieth century, then, history was happening too fast, at an increasingly heightened pitch, and the tide of futurity seemed unstoppable. Nothing was stable after all. Not the war, not the peace, not the Self. Perhaps only the superheroes could have made sense of an accelerated, mediated world like this, but to a man, to a woman, they were gone, banished beyond the outer dark by their fearful adversaries.

  Soon, though, they would return to soar higher, faster, and farther than ever before. So high, so far, and so fast, in fact, that they had to start up a whole new age just to contain them…..”

 

Lord — These Affairs are Hard on The Heart

“Yes, You Buy Me Many Things.  Thank You.”

The evening before the test, someone recalled “the frogs had gathered in a little pond by the camp and copulated and squawked all night long.” 

Oppenheimer chain smoked nervously and sat quietly reading the French poet Baudelaire:

Seductive twilight, the criminal’s friend Silent like a wolf

The sky is closing down

A dark cloth drawn across an alcove

Where the impatient man changes into a beast of prey

At 5:10, the countdown began at zero minus twenty minutes. 

As loudspeakers ticked off the time at five minute intervals, Oppenheimer wandered in and out of the control bunker, glancing up at the sky. 

At the two minute mark, he was heard to say to himself,

“Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart.” 

Minus one minute... Minus fifty-five seconds...

Ella Oppenheimer was “very delicate,” a friend remembered, with an air of sadness about her. 

Robert was precociously brilliant, and both parents were protective of his uncommon gifts. 

Frail, frequently sick, 

he was attended to by servants, driven everywhere. 

He rarely played with other children.

Priscilla McMillan, writer: 

He wasn’t mischievous. 

He was too brilliant to be just one of the children. 

But his parents treasured him; 

treated him like a little jewel. 

And he just skipped Being a Boy.

“My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that The World

 is full of cruel and bitter things,”

 Oppenheimer said. 

“It gave me no normal, healthy way to be a bastard.” 

Sometime around the age of five, Robert’s grandfather gave him a small collection of minerals. 

“From then on,” he said, 

“I became, in a completely childish way, an ardent mineral collector. 

But it began to be also a bit of a Scientist’s interest, a fascination with crystals.”

Martin Sherwin,

Historian: 

He wrote to the New York Mineralogical Society on a typewriter. 

They were so impressed with what he had to say that, of course, thinking he was an adult, they invited him to give a lecture, and little Robert, at age 10 or 11, shows up at the New York Mineralogical Society, and has to stand on a box in order to see over the lectern to give this lecture. 

That is NOT a normal, 

average childhood.

Narrator: 

Eight years separated Robert from his brother Frank, 

too many for companionship. 

Robert was a loner. 

And at New York’s Ethical Culture school, he inhabited his own rarefied world, more comfortable with his teachers than with the other students, who nicknamed him “Booby” Oppenheimer. 

To protect himself, he relied on his preternatural brilliance and grew aloof and arrogant.

 Priscilla McMillan, writer: He didn’t grow up. He studied a great deal, which shielded him from the world. 

And the emotional side of him didn’t catch up until much later.

Narrator: 

Oppenheimer graduated high school valedictorian 

and then conquered Harvard. 

He studied chemistry, physics, calculus; English and French literature; Western, Chinese and Hindu philosophy; 

He even found time to write stories and poems.

Richard Rhodes, writer: 

He described it as being like The Huns invading Rome, 

by which he meant he was going to swallow up 

Every bit of Culture and Art and Science 

that he could possibly do.

Martin Sherwin, Historian: 

Harvard’s an environment in which 

The Intellectual Life is a rich feast, 

But the Social Life is a desert.

Narrator: 

In all his years at Harvard, 

he never had a date. 

He remained immature, uncertain, 

easily bewildered in social situations. 

One friend remembered 

“bouts of melancholy, 

and deep, deep depressions.” 

"In the days of my almost infinitely prolonged adolescence," he said later, 

“I hardly took an action, hardly did anything that did not arouse in me a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong. 

My feeling about myself was always one of extreme discontent.” 

His doubts about himself came clear in his poems:

The dawn invests our substance

With desire

And the slow light betrays us,

And our wistfulness...

We find ourselves again 

Each in his separate prison 

Ready, hopeless

For negotiation 

With other men.

1966

“Eleven years later, cycle 20 reversed the polarity. By 1966, hair had become longer, clothes were looser and more flamboyant, music became more involved and sophisticated, and the drugs were mind expanders like LSD.

In 1966 The Cosmic Wave entered the comics, to bring with it the gods of Thor, villains like The Anti-Matter Man, and John Broome’s psychedelic Flash stories. 

 

The new heroes were anti-establishment “Freaks” and Mutants.”

Excerpt From

Supergods

Grant Morrison

HUNTER :
Kill The Body and The Head will Die.
Ali-Frazier Fight.
Crazy Shit.

THE ABSOLUTE CREAM OF THE NATIONAL SPORTING PRESS :
A proper end to The '60s.
Ali beaten by a Human Hamburger.

HUNTER :
Both Kennedys murdered by Mutants.

1955

The Hidden Unity is Obi-Wan Kenobi

In 1955, when our planet was bombarded by cycle 19 solar magnetic waves, young people in the West responded like needles in a groove with rock ’n’ roll’s tight jeans, short hair, biker JD aggression, short, fast songs, and widespread use of stimulant drugs like speed and coffee.

Silver Age comic-book punk was embodied by crew-cut Barry Allen in his speed suit. “Chemicals and Lighting” could have been a song or a band. 

The tight suits, establishment men, and emphasis on science and rationality are all typical, as are Stan Lee’s realistic superheroes such as the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man.

Textbook Joseph Campbell.

The way Campbell explained it, 

Young Men need a Secondary Father to finish raising them.

Beyond their Biological Father, they need a surrogate, traditionally a minister or a coach or a military officer.

The floatsam and jetsam of a generation washed up on the beach of last resort.

That's why street gangs are so appealing. 

They send you men out, like Knights on Quests to hone their skills and improve themselves.

And all the TRADITIONAL Mentors -- 

forget it.

Men are presumptive predators. They're leaving Teaching in droves.

Religious Leaders are pariahs.

Sports Coaches are stigmatized as odds-on pedophiles.

Even The Military is sketchy with sexual goings-on.

James Stark :

Suppose you had to do something.

You had to go someplace and do this thing that was...

You know, it was very dangerous.

But it was Matter of Honour.

And you had to prove it.

What would you do?

Well, is there some kind of trick answer?

James Stark :

No, what would you do?

Pinnie :

Well, I wouldn't make a hasty decision.

Tell you what, Jimbo.

Let's get a little light on the subject.

Blood.

Jim, what happened?

What kind of trouble are you in?

James Stark :

The kind I was telling you about.

Now can you answer me?

Pinnie :

Nobody can make a snap decision.

It's one of those things that you...

James Stark :

You can't.

That's all there is to it.

It's something that you... 

Pinnie :

You just don't.

We've got to consider all the pros and cons.

James Stark :

I don't have time.

Pinnie :

We'll make time.

I'll get paper and we'll make a list.

And then if we're still stuck... we'll get some advice.

James Stark :

What can you do when you have to be a Man?

Pinnie :

Well...

James Stark :

No, you give me a Direct Answer!

Are you going to keep me from going?

Pinnie :

Did I ever stop you from anything?

You're at a wonderful age.

In ten years, you'll look back on this and wish...

James Stark :

Ten years?

I want an answer now. I need one.

Pinnie :

Listen, Jimbo, I'm just trying to show you how foolish you are.

When you're older, you'll look back at this.... 

and you'll laugh at yourself for thinking that this is so important.

It's not as if you were alone.

This has happened to every boy.

It happened to me when I was your age, maybe a year older.

Ratbag :

What's all the excitement?

I've been working hard getting this house in order...

Pinnie : 

Jim had blood on him.

He just ran out.

Ratbag :

And you didn't stop him?

That's The Edge.

That's The End.

Jim Stark :

Certainly is.

You know something?

I like you.

You know that?

Why do we do this?

You got to do something...

...now, don't you?

JAMES STARK :

Listen... I know a Place. 

Plato told me before. 

It's an old, deserted mansion...up by the planetarium. 

Want to go up there with me? 

You can Trust me, Judy. 

NATALIE WOULD :

Okay. 

•Unbelievable• that Old Biff could've chosen that particular date!

It could mean that that point in time contains some cosmic significance... Almost as though it were the temporal junction point for the ENTIRE space-time continuum...!

....on The Other Hand it could just be an INCREDIBLE coincidence.”

IT’S NEITHER

Old Biff from The Future is from 2015 in a stolen Time Machine he cannot operate, without instructions, or a manual —  he just pressed CTRL + Z on the keypad 3 times until he found somewhere he wanted to go — November 12th 1955.

As a shorthand toward understanding the two maximum states we flip between, Spence suggests we can regard one pole as having a “punk” character, while its opposite may be thought of as “hippie.”

In Spence’s lexicon, at least as I understand it (his own website will set you straight if.   wrong), punk maxima can be identified in a fashion vogue for short hair, tight clothes, short, punchy popular music, aggression, speedy drugs, and materialism. 

He focused on youth culture trends on the basis that young nervous systems registered the magnetic reversals most profoundly and reflected them back in the lineaments of the art and music they made or consumed. So far, so good.

In 1955, when our planet was bombarded by cycle 19 solar magnetic waves, young people in the West responded like needles in a groove with rock ’n’ roll’s tight jeans, short hair, biker JD aggression, short, fast songs, and widespread use of stimulant drugs like speed and coffee.

Silver Age comic-book punk was embodied by crew-cut Barry Allen in his speed suit. “Chemicals and Lighting” could have been a song or a band. 

The tight suits, establishment men, and emphasis on science and rationality are all typical, as are Stan Lee’s realistic superheroes such as the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man.

Ladies and Gentlemen of The Class of 1999

At the prom. Everyone is standing, watching the stage. Xander is miming anticipation. 

Announcer: 

And the award for Sunnydale High's Class Clown for 1999 goes to — Jack Mayhew. 

  The winner puts on a balloon hat and acts silly. 

Xander: 

Please! Anybody can be a prop class clown. 

You know, none of the people who vote for these things are even funny. 

  Buffy is at the punch bowl, ignoring the ruckus. 

The announcer urges Jonathan to the microphone. 

Jonathan: 

We have one more award to give out. 

Is Buffy Summers here tonight? 

Did she, um... 

  The crowd turns and finds her. 

She looks nervous at the attention. 

Jonathan: 

This is actually a new category. 

First time ever. 

I guess there were a lot of write-in ballots, and, um, 

the prom committee asked me to read this. 

"We're not good friends. 

Most of us never found the time to get to know you, 

but that doesn't mean we haven't noticed you. 

We don't talk about it much, but it's no secret that Sunnydale High isn't really like other high schools. 

A lot of weird stuff happens here."

The Chorus :

Zombies! 

Hyena-People! 

Snyder! (laughter) 

"But, whenever there was a problem or something creepy happened, 

you seemed to show up and stop it. 

Most of the people here have been Saved by you, 

or helped by you at one time or another. 

We're proud to say that the Class of '99 has the lowest mortality rate of any graduating class in Sunnydale history. 

(applause from the crowd) 

And we know at least part of that is because of you.  

So the senior class, offers its thanks, and gives you, uh, this —

  Jonathan produces a multicolored, glittering, miniature umbrella with a small metal plaque attached to the shaft. 

It's from all of us, and it has written here : -

' Buffy Summers —

Class Protector ' 

  The crowd breaks into sustained applause and cheering. 

Buffy walks to the stage and takes her award. 

 

  Cut to Buffy, watching the dancers. 

Giles comes up behind her. 

Giles: 

You did Good Work tonight, Buffy. 

Buffy: 

And I got a little toy surprise. 

Giles: 

I had no idea that children en masse could be gracious. 

Buffy: 

Every now and then, people surprise you. 

Giles: (looking past her) 

Every now and then. 

“Iain Spence published Sekhmet Hypothesis: The Signals of the Beginning of a New Identity as a book in 1995, but it wasn’t until two years later that I came across his ideas in an article he’d written for the magazine Towards 2012. As an illuminating way of reconsidering the familiar, I’m particularly fond of the Sekhmet Hypothesis, which never fails to get people talking at parties. As usual, please remember that this is just a framework; a way of ordering information into meaningful patterns in the service of creative lateral thinking, if you like. You may be able to find all kinds of examples to refute this data, but first bear in mind that I’ve used this predictive model to great effect and no small financial reward, and trust me when I say I’m passing it on as a tip, not as a belief system. If this book has made any point clear, I hope it’s that things don’t have to be real to be true. Or vice versa.

Soon you’ll notice how many advertisers and trend makers are aware of this theory and have been applying it to product placement, design, and the seasonal shifts of the rag trade since Spence published it. The more people know about it and react against it, or try to preempt it, the more the effect is likely to dissipate or find different ways to express itself. That may already be happening in the windblown halls of popular culture, although as I write, in 2010, Spence’s broad predictions are accurate still.

Sunspot activity follows a twenty-two-year cyclical pattern, building to a period of furious activity known as the solar maximum, then calming down for the solar minimum. Every eleven years, the solar magnetic field also undergoes a polarity reversal. It’s a little like a huge switch that toggles on or off, or the volume slider on a mixing desk, with loud at one end and silent at the other, and each period is given an identifying number. Cycle 23, for instance, had its maximum in 1999.

Spence suggests that these regular rewirings of the solar magnetic field naturally have an effect on the human nervous system, which leaves its traces most clearly in our cultural record—like a desert wind carving the shape of its passage into the dunes of fashion, art, and music. As a shorthand toward understanding the two maximum states we flip between, Spence suggests we can regard one pole as having a “punk” character, while its opposite may be thought of as “hippie.”

In Spence’s lexicon, at least as I understand it (his own website will set you straight if.   wrong), punk maxima can be identified in a fashion vogue for short hair, tight clothes, short, punchy popular music, aggression, speedy drugs, and materialism. Hippie, as I’m sure you’ll have guessed, is associated with signifiers from the converse end of the spectrum, like long hair, loose or baggy clothes, longer-form popular music, psychedelic or mind-expanding drugs, peace, and a renewed interest in the spiritual or transcendental. He focused on youth culture trends on the basis that young nervous systems registered the magnetic reversals most profoundly and reflected them back in the lineaments of the art and music they made or consumed. So far, so good.

In 1955, when our planet was bombarded by cycle 19 solar magnetic waves, young people in the West responded like needles in a groove with rock ’n’ roll’s tight jeans, short hair, biker JD aggression, short, fast songs, and widespread use of stimulant drugs like speed and coffee.

Silver Age comic-book punk was embodied by crew-cut Barry Allen in his speed suit. “Chemicals and Lighting” could have been a song or a band. 

The tight suits, establishment men, and emphasis on science and rationality are all “wrong), punk maxima can be identified in a fashion vogue for short hair, tight clothes, short, punchy popular music, aggression, speedy drugs, and materialism. Hippie, as I’m sure you’ll have guessed, is associated with signifiers from the converse end of the spectrum, like long hair, loose or baggy clothes, longer-form popular music, psychedelic or mind-expanding drugs, peace, and a renewed interest in the spiritual or transcendental. He focused on youth culture trends on the basis that young nervous systems registered the magnetic reversals most profoundly and reflected them back in the lineaments of the art and music they made or consumed. So far, so good.

In 1955, when our planet was bombarded by cycle 19 solar magnetic waves, young people in the West responded like needles in a groove with rock ’n’ roll’s tight jeans, short hair, biker JD aggression, short, fast songs, and widespread use of stimulant drugs like speed and coffee.

Silver Age comic-book punk was embodied by crew-cut Barry Allen in his speed suit. “Chemicals and Lighting” could have been a song or a band. The tight suits, establishment men, and emphasis on science and rationality are all typical, as are Stan Lee’s realistic superheroes such as the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man.

Eleven years later, cycle 20 reversed the polarity. By 1966, hair had become longer, clothes were looser and more flamboyant, music became more involved and sophisticated, and the drugs were mind expanders like LSD.

In 1966 the cosmic wave entered the comics, to bring with it the gods of Thor, villains like the Anti-Matter Man, and John Broome’s psychedelic Flash stories. The new heroes were antiestablishment “freaks” and mutants.

Nineteen seventy-seven brought a shift back to punk, as expressed in Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s fifties-influenced clothes and music, bondage and restriction, amphetamine sulfate use, and angry, confrontational politics.

The comics boom of that cycle gave us Judge Dredd, Frank Miller’s gritty noir, Alan Moore’s harsh logical realism.

Nineteen eighty-eight saw ecstasy, or MDMA, as the favored drug, accompanying long-form trance, ambient and dance music, Manchester “baggy” fitness wear as street wear, grunge beards, and a return to long hair. In comic books, this was the time of Deadline, Doom Patrol, Shade, and Sandman.

Spence didn’t get as far as 1999 in his Towards 2012 essay, but he imagined the rise of a “Stormer” generation of what he called “imperial youth.” As it happened, his predictions were more or less accurate. In 1999, we had nu-metal, The Matrix, tight clothes, short hair, No Logo anticorporate demos, the emergence of bondage styles, and the Goth underground moving into the mainstream, a revival of popularity for cocaine, and, more significantly, perhaps, the jittery rise of Red Bull, Starbucks and coffee society. Comics gave us proactive world-changing superheroes and villains in Authority, Marvel Boy, and Wanted.

This book will be published in 2011, when the fruits of the next wave will be hard to avoid. As I write, the word psychedelic is being used so often on TV and in magazines that it’s barely funny. Avatar’s hippy eco-vision of an interconnected natural world and the massive success of Alice in Wonderland (always popular during hippie periods) exemplify this current, as do the vampire heroes who have occupied the imaginative place once taken by sixties Pre-Raphaelite and Edwardian dandies. In comics, the “realism” boom has been quietly left behind like an unfashionable pair of trousers. The new superhero books are becoming more fantastic, colorful, and self-consciously “mythic.”

Spence’s article does not, nor will I, attempt to track the alleged effects of these undeniably real solar magnetic events on non-Western cultures. 

Neither does he extend his argument backward to consider the ways in which the popular arts scene of 1944 could be described in “hippie” terms (LSD, however, was synthesized in 1945), or that of 1933 as “punk” (although perhaps Weimar decadence and the art of George Grosz could build a case there). And so on. I leave that contemplation to skeptics who choose to debunk the idea or to zealots who want to believe it.

Unless Terence McKenna’s “Timewave Zero” theories are correct, and we collapse into an atemporal singularity on December 21, 2012, 2021 will bring the cycle back around to “punk,” and if this seesaw sounds horribly predictable and repetitive, be assured that it will all seem fresh to the young people who take their own inspiration from the solar trade winds.

As for me, I intended to bring my run on JLA to an end along with the century. The Invisibles, too, was scheduled to wrap in 2000, and I planned to re-create myself again to complement the change in the weather. I was almost forty, had never felt better, and wanted to be ready for the harsher spirit I’d decided was on its way in the wake of the Labour election win, the death of the former Princess Diana, and the commencement of cycle 23.

I’d also just met my future wife, Kristan, a stunning, brainy blonde who dressed like Barbarella to go to the pub, worked as a corporate insurance broker, and read Philip K. Dick. It would be another three years before our paths crossed again and we were able to get together, but that die was already cast.

On a trip to Venice, Italy, I bought my first real suit—Donna Karan—and was encouraged to go corporate. Smart tailoring and the jargon of advertising, motivational speaking, instead of fractal-patterned shirts and druggy psychedelia, seemed the way to go in cycle 23. At heart, I’d always been an uptight Presbyterian anyway. I’d never been “able to get back to the radiant world I’d reached in Kathmandu, and I’d begun to “suspect it was because in some way I was already there. I had very little doubt that I’d “wake up” in that place at the moment of death, like a game player looking up from the screen where his avatar lies bleeding, only to realize he’s home and safe and always was.

“The drugs don’t work, they just make you worse,” sang the Verve, and after eight years of experimentation, ruthless self-examination, ego inflation, and ego loss, I had to admit they were probably onto something. The shallow hedonistic spirit of the nineties was too fragile to endure the cold of the vast twin shadows cast backward by an onrushing age of terror. Darker times were on their way, demanding a new clarity and rigor of thought.

I tried to articulate the outlines of the next trend by introducing to the pages of JLA a military-funded superteam called the Ultramarines, whipped up by Uncle Sam to keep the Justice League in check should their internationalist stance ever compromise US military security. By the end of the story, the Ultramarines had split from their paymasters and joined with a group of like-minded DC heroes in a hovering city-sized headquarters named Superbia, there to announce a bold new manifesto for change :

SUPERBIA HEREBY DECLARES INDEPENDENCE FROM ALL NATIONS AND OPENS ITS GATES TO SUPER-CHAMPIONS FROM THE FOUR CORNERS OF THE EARTH. WE INTEND TO SERVE AS A FIRST-STRIKE GLOBAL PEACEKEEPING FORCE. WE WILL KILL IF WE HAVE TO. IF WE HAVE TO, WE’LL LET YOU KNOW. TERRORISTS, DESPOTS, CORRUPT BUSINESSMEN … THE INTERNATIONAL ULTRAMARINE CORPS IS HERE. THERE’S NOWHERE TO HIDE.

As it happened, I’d almost exactly described what the next big development of the superhero concept would look like.

Meanwhile, I prepared myself for the oncoming zeitgeist by listening to Chris Morris’s bleak, brilliant, bad-trippy Blue Jam on Radio 1 every Thursday after John Peel. Oddly enough, I was beginning to find humor in all the things that had once frightened me. The prying eye of Big Brother, the aging process, loneliness, failure, and death were all just punch lines to the joke. I loved to listen over and over again to HAL 9000’s death scene from the soundtrack to 2001 : A Space Odyssey, and when Jarvis Cocker and Pulp released their masterpiece comedown album, This Is Hardcore, its unflinching evocation of middle age, stale waterbeds, and tinny bachelor pad music made me rethink my own lifestyle.

I was about as alien as I’d ever wanted to be, but I’d grown tired of one-night stands, drink, drugs, and the dating game.

It was time to get serious.”

Papa Roach

End of Days

Gabriel Byrne - Rod Steiger - Kevin Pollock

Miriam Margolyes

Nhu8

The Duel of The Fates

Fight Club

Clubbed to Death

Earshot

The Columbine Clues

EgyptAir 990

The Power of Myth

Randal Graves: 

State Your Name and Latest Film.

George Lucas: 

George Lucas, 

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

Randal Graves: 

And, do you think Phantom Menace 

is as good a movie as Empire?

George Lucas: 

Well, certainly, I, uh, think it's the best movie I've made yet.

Randal Graves: 
Permission to Treat This Witness as Hostile. 

Mr. Lucas, How Do You Explain that in Star Wars, 

Obi-Wan tells Luke that when he met His Father 

He was A Great Pilot, 

but in Menace he's just a little boy?

[ He is a great pilot - who is also a little boy. ]

[ He Sees Things Before They Happen. ]

[AND, Because That isn't  What He Says : -- ]

George Lucas: 

Uh, well, my... 

My Kids thought...

Randal Graves: 

And how come Obi-Wan tells Luke 

that Yoda is The Jedi that trained him, 

but in The Movie Liam Neeson trains Obi-Wan?

[ When Force-Orphan Jedi Janissaries are taken away from their families in early infancy, the Younglings receive a standard schooling taught by various Masters within the Jedi Temple in accordance with Socratic Method - Yoda is seen to teach at least one of those classes. ]

[ It takes an entire Temple to raise a Padawan. ]

[AND, Because -- AGAIN --That isn't  What He Says : -- ]

George Lucas: 

Uh, well, The Power of Myth...

Randal Graves: 

Isn't it True you knew this was A Bad Movie, 

that you wrote it over a weekend 

but kept telling people it was done for years?

Lawyer: 

Objection, Your Honour - 

The Pod Race was pretty cool.

In this interview made in 1999 Bill Moyers discusses with George Lucas how Joseph Campbell and his concept of the Monomyth also known as 

The Hero's Journey and other concepts 

from Mythology and Religion shaped the Star Wars saga

BILL MOYERS: 

Nestled into a rolling hillside north of San Francisco, Skywalker Ranch is the command center 

of George Lucas’ filmmaking empire. 

I first came here to interview Joseph Campbell, 

a friend and mentor to George Lucas. 

Twelve years later I came back, 

this time to interview the protégé. 

After a 22-year hiatus, George Lucas 

is back in the director’s chair 

with a new episode in his “Star Wars” epic, “The Phantom Menace.” 
I wanted to know why he thought the “Star Wars” saga had grasped such a hold on our collective imaginations. 
Over the course of an afternoon, we talked about myths and movies, Fathers and Sons, fantasy and imagination.

Joseph Campbell said that 
all the great myths, the primitive myths, the great stories, have to be regenerated if they’re going to have any impact, and that you have done that with “Star Wars.” 
Are you conscious of doing that? 

Are you saying, 
‘I am trying to cre — recreate the myths of old? 

Or are you saying, 
‘I just want to make a good action movie?’

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Well, when I did “Star Wars”
I consciously set about to recreate myths and the — and the classic mythological motifs. 

And I wanted to use those motifs to deal with issues that existed today.

 What these films deal with is the fact that we all have Good and Evil inside of us and that we can choose which way we want the balance to go. 

“Star Wars” was made up of many themes. 
It’s not just a single theme. 

One is our relationship to machines, which are fearful but as — also benign and they’re — they’re an extension of the human, not mean in themselves. 

The — the issues of friendship and your obligation to your fellow man and to other people that are around you, that you have control over your destiny, that you — you have a destiny, that you have many paths to walk down and — and you may have a great destiny. 

If you decide not to walk down that path, your life might not be as satisfying as if you wake up and listen to your inner feelings and realize what it is that you have a particular talent for and what contributions you can make to society.

BILL MOYERS: 

One of the appeals of “Star Wars” originally was that it — it satisfied our craving to resolve our ambiguities.

The good guys were Good Guys, the bad guys were Bad Guys. 

[ Not True. ]

You used color to suggest some of this philosophy.

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Yeah. I use color a lot in — in my films. I’m very conscious of — of the design of my films.

Tatooine is — is usually our Home planet 

and there isn’t much there 

except a lot of brown sand. 

A very, very clean place.

Death Star, the Empire, has been 

painted black or white or gray. 

There’s a lot of gray, but it’s colorless. 
The Emperor, I put in a splash of red. 

I mean, red is a — 

an aggressive color.

BILL MOYERS: 

When you were writing, did you have all of this in your mind before you got the pencil to the page, or were you making it up as you…

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Well, some artists — they see 

The Picture whole, you know, completed. 
I see The Picture in a fog. I know sort of what it looks like, I know what’s there and so what I do is I say, 
‘I want something — I want a costume that is very regal, very grand, very different from anything we see, but has a lot of cultural history behind it.’ 

So I don’t want to make something up. 

I want to use something that is from a — 

a living Human Culture. 

And in this particular case, I was looking for an Asian influence for the planet of Naboo, and so I go to the research library and I said, ‘Look allover Asia, even into the Middle East, all the way across into the islands to find me unique and interesting ceremonial costumes.’ 
I kind of had a rough idea of what it was, but not until I actually — we finished with it is it clear. 

It’s not like I’m working from a finished thing. 

I’m working from something where you have a lot of pieces and it’s vague and you try to put it together.

BILL MOYERS: 

Where do these rough ideas come from?

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Now, that I don’t know. 

That’s a mystery.

BILL MOYERS: 

But 25 years ago, when you cast the original plot, you didn’t see these costumes? You didn’t see these characters, did you? That’s all. ..

GEORGE LUCAS: 

No. No. This is something I didn’t really do until I started to sit down and write this script.

I knew the basic story, how Darth Vader 

got to be Darth Vader.

But I didn’t have any details about what anything looked like. 

I knew there would be a — a slave owner. 

I didn’t know that he would actually run a junk shop and be blue and fly around on funny little wings.

BILL MOYERS: 

Are you conscious when you’re doing that of — a little bit of David and Goliath here, a little bit of Buck Rogers there, a little bit of Tarzan or Wizard of Oz here?

GEORGE LUCAS: 

What happens is that no matter how you do it, when you sit down to write something all other influences you’ve had in your life come into play. 

The things that you like, the things that you’ve seen, the things — the observations you’ve made. That’s ultimately what you work with when you’re writing.

 And you — you are influenced by the things that you like. Designs that you like, characters you like, moments that you remember, that you were moved by. It’s — it’s like trying to compose a — a symphony in a way.

BILL MOYERS: 

And do you have any sense of where that comes from in you. 

I mean, your own creative precincts?

GEORGE LUCAS: 

You know, the psychology of developing fantasies is a very interesting and delicate thing. 

I’ve come across people that have no imaginations at all, and it’s a very interesting… .

BILL MOYERS: 

They become journalists.

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Well, it’s — it’s — it — 

I was shocked the first time I came across it. 

And — because I just assumed everybody had an imagination.

And when you — you confront somebody who doesn’t, especially a child, it’s a very interesting and profound thing to me. 

It — an imagination is a — is a trait, you know. 

It’s like anything else. It’s a — it’s a — it’s a talent, or it’s an ability you have to cope. 

Like dreaming.

BILL MOYERS: 

The underwater world, for example, in “The Phantom Menace,” looks as if it’s a dream.

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Uh-huh.

BILL MOYERS: 

Where did that idea come from? 

Out of your own fantasy?

GEORGE LUCAS: 

You know, part of it is where can I go that I haven’t been before? 

And underwater was one of those places I hadn’t been before, but I wanted to create a very special, sophisticated but organic kind of a society down there.

We were using a kind of technology which had to be completely worked out. 

How do these bubbles exist under there?

 Where do they come from? 

What do they use for energy? 

The whole culture has to be designed. 

What do they believe in? 

How do they operate? 

What are the economics of the culture? 

Most of it doesn’t appear in the movie, but

you have to have thought it through, otherwise there’s — something always rings very untrue or phony about what it is that’s going on. 

And one of the things I struggle for is to create a kind of immaculate realism in a totally unreal and fantasy world. 

It’s a science that I can make up. 

But once I make up a rule, then I have to live with it.

BILL MOYERS: 

Such as? The world according to George.

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Well — I mean, one of the rules is that there’s sound in space.

So there’s sound in space. 

I can’t suddenly have spaceships flying around without any sound anymore because I’ve already done it. 

I’ve established that as one of the rules of the — of the — of my galaxy and I have to live with that.

The technology of laser swords, what they can cut through, what they can’t cut through.

In the past, when I originally wanted to do “Star Wars,” I had this idea for this really fantastic world and fantasy world. 

But I realized very quickly that I couldn’t pull it off, that it was just impossible. I could make spaceships fly, and I could make them fly in ways that nobody’d ever done it before, but to get to the next level of creatures and — and — and all these fantasy characters, I couldn’t do it. 

And it really wasn’t until we created sort of digital cinema that I was able to suddenly have my imagination go wild and …

BILL MOYERS: 

And this enables you to do what, digital?

GEORGE LUCAS: 

It — it — it allows me to create sets that I could not have otherwise.

BILL MOYERS: 

Right there on the computer screen?

GEORGE LUCAS: 

They’re on the computer screen. I can create backgrounds. 

And since I have a — a scene that takes place on a landing platform in the middle of a city — well, before digital technology, you just couldn’t shoot a scene like that. 

It was just impossible. 

You couldn’t build a set big enough. 

You couldn’t create that reality. It’s the same thing with characters. Jar Jar or Watto. You couldn’t have a character like that. 

I mean, Watto is a short little blue character that flies around. 

You couldn’t put a man in a suit and accomplish that.

BILL MOYERS: 

The mesmerizing character for me is — is Darth Maul.

When I saw him, I thought of Satan and Lucifer in “Paradise Lost.” I thought of The Devil in “Dante’s Inferno.” I mean, you’ve really — have brought from — it seems to me — from way down in our unconsciousness this image of — of — of Evil, of The Other.

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Well, yeah. We were trying to find somebody who could compete with Darth Vader, who’s one of the most, you know, famous evil characters now. 

And so we went back into representations of Evil.

Not only, the Christian, but also Hindu and Greek mythology and other religious icons and, obviously, then designed our own — our own character out of that.

BILL MOYERS: 

What did you find when you went back there in — in all of these representations? There’s something …

GEORGE LUCAS: 

A lot of — a lot of evil characters have horns. 

It’s very interesting. 

I mean, you’re trying to build a icon of Evil, and you sort of wonder why the same images evoke the same emotions.

BILL MOYERS: 
What emotion do you feel, George, when you look at Darth Maul?

GEORGE LUCAS: 
I think the first thing you’re supposed to react to is Fear. 
You’re supposed to go, ‘Ooh.’ You — you wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley. 

And I’m not creating a monster. You know, that’s like — I — I didn’t want to create some ugly — you know, this — somebody ripped out their intestines and threw them all over their head — and it’s — you can’t watch it. 
This is something …

BILL MOYERS: 
It’s actually mesmerizing.

GEORGE LUCAS: 
This is something that is more — it works in a different emotional way. It’s not repulsive, it’s just — it’s — it’s something you should be afraid of.

BILL MOYERS: 
Is the emotion you wanted from him different from the emotion you wanted from Darth Vader?

GEORGE LUCAS: 
It’s essentially the same in a different kind of way. 
Darth Vader was a — a composite man. I mean, he was…

half-machine, half-man. 
And that’s where he lost a lot of his humanity is that he — you know, he has mechanical legs.

You know — and he has mechanical arms possibly and he’s hooked up to a breathing machine. So there’s not much, actually, human left in him.

This one is all human. 

And I wanted him to be like an alien, but I wanted him to be human enough that we could identify with — with him, because he’s not a — a — a sort of a monster we can’t identify with. He’s…

BILL MOYERS: 

He’s us.

GEORGE LUCAS: 

…he’s — yeah. 

He’s the evil within us.

BILL MOYERS: 

I’ve had psychotherapists tell me that they use “Star Wars” sometimes to deal with the problems of their child patients. 

And they’ve said that the most popular character among the children is Darth Vader.

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Well, children love power because children are The Powerless. 

And so their fantasies all center on having power. 

And who’s more powerful than Darth Vader, you know? 

And, some, you know, will be attracted to Luke Skywalker because he’s the good guy. 

But ultimately, we all know that Darth Vader’s more powerful than he is.

And as time goes on, you discover that he is more powerful because he’s the — he’s The Ultimate Father who is all powerful.

BILL MOYERS: 

This is where I disagree somewhat with our friend Joseph Campbell who said that 

The Young Man has to slay His Father before he can become an adult himself. 

It seems to me, and I think you’re right on here, that the — that the young man has to identify — has to recognize and acknowledge that he is his father and is not his father.

GEORGE LUCAS: 

You know, Joe used to talk about the — the basic issues that — that — that create the mystery of life. 
Of, you know, birth and death, and I like to always add, you know, your relationship with your parents. 

BILL MOYERS: 

Do you know yet what is going to be the transforming of Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader?

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: 

You already know that?

GEORGE LUCAS: Yeah, I know what that is. And it’s — it’s — it’s sprinkled throughout this episode. I mean, it’s — it’s all of the — the groundwork’s been laid in this episode. 

And the — the film is ultimately about the Dark Side and the light side, and those sides are designed around compassion and greed. 

And we all have those two sides of us and that we have to make sure that those two sides of us are in balance.

BILL MOYERS: 

I think it’s going to be very hard for the audience to accept that this innocent cherub almost of a — of a boy, who’s playing Anakin Skywalker, can ever be capable of the things that we know happen later on. 

And I’m sure you’ll take care of that but, you know, I look at Hitler and wonder what did he look like at eight years old, or Stalin …

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Mm-hmm …

BILL MOYERS: 

… or …

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Well, there are lots of — there’s a lot of people like that. 

I mean, you just — you see them all the time and you — that’s what I wonder. I wonder, how can those people possibly exist? 

How could they live with themselves? How could they — you know, what is it in the human brain that gives us the capacity to be as evil as human beings have been in the past and are right now.

BILL MOYERS: 

Well, you’ve been probing that for a good while now.

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: 

Twenty-five years. Have you come to any conclusions?

GEORGE LUCAS: 

I haven’t. 

BILL MOYERS: 

This movie is very much about a mentor and an apprentice. 

And — and I’m wondering, did you have such a mentor when you were growing up? 

Is this — is this part of — of — the movie — an extension of what happened to you?

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Obviously, my first mentor was my Father, but then you progress with either, you know, people that are more skilled in a particular area than you are. 

In film, Francis Coppola became my mentor and — and taught me how to write screenplays, taught me how to work with actors. 

I was much more of a — a cameraman and a film editor, much more on the technical side of things. 

And, you know, I think my last mentor probably was Joe, who …

BILL MOYERS: 

Joseph Campbell.

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Joe Campbell, who asked a lot of the interesting questions and exposed me to a lot of things that made me very interested in a lot more of the cosmic questions and The Mystery. 

And I’ve been interested in those all my life, but I — I hadn’t focused it the way I had once I got to be good friends with Joe.

BILL MOYERS:

 A professor I know said that he recently asked his freshman class how many of them had seen all three of the trilogy, and everyone in the class raised his hand. 

And he said to me, 
‘I hope Lucas knows he’s mentoring an entire generation of — of — of young Americans.’

GEORGE LUCAS:
 I — I have a philosophy that we all teach, and we all teach every day of our lives. 

And it’s not necessarily what we lecture. 

I’ve discovered kids don’t like lectures at all. 

But it is really the way we live our lives. And what we do with our lives and — and the way we conduct ourselves. 

And once in a while they listen to the lectures. 

So when I make the films, I’m very aware of the fact that I’m teaching on a much larger scale than I would just as a parent or somebody walking through life. 
Because I have this megaphone. 

Anybody in the media has a very large megaphone that they can reach a lot of different people, and so whatever they say, whatever they do, however they conduct themselves, whatever they produce has an influence and is teaching somebody something. 

And I try to be aware of what it is I’m saying.

BILL MOYERS: 
What do you make of the fact that so many people have interpreted “Star Wars” as — as — as being profoundly religious?

GEORGE LUCAS: 
I don’t see “Star Wars” as profoundly religious. 

I see “Star Wars” as — as taking all of the issues that religion represents and trying to distill them down into a — a more modern and more easily accessible construct that people can grab onto to accept the fact that there is a greater mystery out there. 

When I was 10 years old, I asked my mother — I said, 

‘Well, if there’s only one God, why are there so many religions?’ 

And over the years — I’ve been pondering that question ever since. 

And it would seem to me that the conclusion that I’ve come to is that 
All the religions are True - They just see a different part of The Elephant. 

A religion is basically a — a container for Faith. 

Faith is the — the glue that holds us together as a society. 

Faith in our — in our culture, our — our world, our — you know, whatever it is that we’re trying to hang on to is a very important part of, I think, allowing us to — to remain stable. 

Remain balanced.

BILL MOYERS: 
And where does God fit in this concept of the universe? 
In this cosmos that you’ve created? 

Is the Force God?

GEORGE LUCAS: 
I put The Force into the movies in order to try to awaken a certain kind of spirituality in young people. 

More a belief in God than a belief in any particular, you know, religious system. 

I mean, the — the — the — the real question is to ask the question, because if you — if you — having enough interest in the mysteries of life to ask the questions, is — 

Is there a God or is there not a God?

That’s — that’s, for me, the worst thing that can happen. 

You know, if you asked a young person, 
‘Is there a God?’ 

and they say, 

‘I don’t know.' 

‘ You know? 

I think you should have an opinion about that.

BILL MOYERS: 
Do you have an opinion, or are you looking?

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Well, I think there is a God. No question. 

What that God is, or what we know about that God, I’m not sure. 

The one thing I know about life and about the — the nature of the human race is that it — 

The Human Race has always believed it’s known Everything.


Even the cavemen thought they had it all figured out and they knew Everything there was to know about Everything. 

Because that’s what — that’s where mythology came from. 

You know, it’s constructing some kind of — of — of Context for The Unknown. 

So we figured it all out and it was fine. 

I would say that, you know, cavemen had, you know, on a scale — and understood about one, you know? 

Now we’ve made it up to about five. 

The only thing that most people don’t realize is
 the scale goes to A MILLION.

BILL MOYERS: 
The central epic of our culture has — has been the Bible. 

And it’s about Fall, Wandering, Redemption, Return. 

But the Bible no longer occupies that central place in our culture today. More and more people today are — young people, in particular, are turning to the movies for their inspiration, not to organized religion.

GEORGE LUCAS: 
Uh-huh. Well, I hope that doesn’t end up being the — the course that this whole thing takes because I think there’s definitely a place for organized religion and it’s a very important part of the social fabric. 

And I would hate to find ourselves in a completely secular world, where, you know, entertainment was passing for some kind of religious experience.

BILL MOYERS: 
One reason when critics said that “Star Wars” has been so popular with young people, it’s religion without strings attached, that it becomes a very thin base for theology. In fact…

GEORGE LUCAS: 
Well, it is a thin base for theology, that’s why I would hesitate to call the Force God. 
When the film came out, almost every single religion took “Star Wars” and used it as an example of their religion and — and were able to relate it to young people and saying, ‘This is what’ — and relate the stories specifically to the Bible and relate stories to the Koran and, you know, the Torah and things. 

And so it’s like, you know — if it’s a tool that can be used to make old stories be new and relate to younger people, 
that’s what the whole point was.

BILL MOYERS: 
We downloaded something from your Web site the other day and there you were talking about how you wanted the Jedi to be more than just fighters. 
You wanted them to be “spiritual,” but you didn’t say what you meant by that?

GEORGE LUCAS: 
Well, I — I guess they’re like ultimate father figures or negotiators. 
And — and at this point in time they are — they’re sent out to negotiate a — a deal.

GEORGE LUCAS: 
They help to put forth answers where people are in the middle of a dispute.

They’re aren’t an aggressive force at all. 
They try to — conflict resolution, I guess, is what you might — 

Intergalactic Therapists.

BILL MOYERS: Have you been influenced by Buddhism, because “Star Wars” came along just about the time there was this growing interest in America in Eastern religions, and I — and I notice in “The Phantom Menace,” the new Episode One, that they discover this slave child who has a — an aura about him. And it reminded me of — how the Buddhists go out to look for the next Dalai Lama.

GEORGE LUCAS: Mm-hmm. Well, there’s a — again, a mixture of all kinds of — of mythology and religious beliefs that have been amalgamated into the movie, and I’ve tried to take the ideas that seem to cut across the most cultures, because I’m fascinated by that and I think that’s one of the things that I really got from Joe Campbell, was that — what he was trying to do is find the common threads through the various mythology, through the — the religions.

BILL MOYERS: One of the comparisons that came to mind just when I was re-watching the series recently is when Darth Vader tempts Luke to come over to the Empire by offering him all that the Empire has to-offer, I was taken back in my own youth to the story of Satan taking Christ to the mountain and offering him the kingdoms of the world if only he would tum away from his mission.

GEORGE LUCAS: Right.

BILL MOYERS: Was that conscience in your mind?

GEORGE LUCAS: Well, yeah. I mean, that — that story also has been retold; the temptation. I mean, Buddha was tempted in the same way. It’s all through mythology. I didn’t want to invent a religion. I wanted to try to explain in a different way the religions that have already existed.

BILL MOYERS: You’re creating a new myth.

GEORGE LUCAS: Well, and I — I — I’m telling an old myth in a new way. I’m just taking the — the — the core myth and I’m localizing it. As it turns out, I’m localizing it for the planet. But I guess I’m localizing it for the end of the — of the millennium more than I am for any particular place. This is the — the — you know, this is — this is — again, part of the globalization of the world we live in. The average human being has much more awareness of the other cultures that exist — co-exist with them on this planet, and that certain things go across cultures, and entertainment is one of them. And film and the stories that I tell cut across all cultures, are seen all around the world.

BILL MOYERS: So what lessons do you think they’re taking away from watching “Star Wars” in — in Italy and Malaysia and South America?

GEORGE LUCAS: One of the main themes in the film is having organisms realize that they must live together and they must live together for mutual advantage. Not just humans, but all living things and everything in the galaxy is part of a — a greater whole.

(Excerpt from “Star Wars”)

BILL MOYERS: How do you explain the power of film to get inside us?

GEORGE LUCAS: Well, I think film is a very modern art form. It — it takes all of the — you know, all of the aspects, the senses, really, of other art forms, be it painting, music, literature, you know, drama, theater, and puts them into one — one art form.

BILL MOYERS: There’s something that happens in a darkened theater when the right moment occurs.

GEORGE LUCAS: You know, when you’ve seen a picture, it connects with you in a particular kind of way. A good novel operates — again, you have this little voice going on and you’re saying, you know, ‘This has something to do with me in my life.’ Art is a — is a very human thing because it — it relates, I think, to the issues of beauty, and not just visual beauty but intellectual beauty. Why — what is beauty and what does beauty trigger in our brain? And why do we — why do certain colors and things mean certain things to us, and certain sounds? Certain chords make us feel happy or sad. And how — you know, how is it when you take all these things together and recreate reality in a way that you can evoke sadness or crying, or laughter, or, you know, it’s a — it’s a very interesting human experiment. And I’m fascinated by it every day. I mean, I’m just completely amazed at how the thing works. I don’t — you know, I know quite a bit about it, but I know I know very little about it.

(Excerpt from “Star Wars”)

BILL MOYERS: I found an unforgettable part of it being that emphasis of Kenobi on intuition, on, you know, urging Luke Skywalker to feel what he sees, to depend on this second sight, this insight which is a very powerful Buddhist notion.

(Excerpt from “Star Wars”) Bill Moyers

BILL MOYERS: Why is it so important to you, as it is in your films, to listen to your inner feelings?

GEORGE LUCAS: It’s an issue of quieting your mind so you can listen to yourself. And as Joe would say, ‘Follow your bliss.’ It’s — to follow your talent is — is one way to put it. That’s the way I see it. I went — when — you know, the hardest thing to do when you’re young is to figure out what it is you’re gonna do. And you’ll never know what it is you’re gonna do. But if you follow the things that you enjoy — I’m not sure anybody really enjoys making money. They may enjoy what they do after they’ve made it, but they don’t enjoy the process. If you can find something that you actually enjoy the process, then you found your bliss.

BILL MOYERS: When did you know what it was for you?

GEORGE LUCAS: When I discovered movies.

BILL MOYERS: Which was?

GEORGE LUCAS: But I — which was when I was in college, where I could be in a psychology class or be in a anthropology class. Suddenly I loved being in school, I loved learning this stuff. I was either going to go to one college where I was going to be basically an anthropology major, I was going to go to another college and be an art student, and then I ended up going to another college and being a film student. But I truly believe that no matter which of those routes I’d have taken, because I was interested in all those things, I would have ended up right back where I am now. Because I certainly had no intention of making theatrical films when I went into the film business. I loved making documentary films and I loved making sort of avant-garde non-story films. And here I found myself — and I hated writing. So now I found myself writing. I find myself running three companies, which is the last thing in the world I wanted to do. I enjoy it, but I’ve walked down a path — I’ve just — I followed the things that I thought inside were the things I should be doing.

BILL MOYERS: You make it sound so easy. You’re so relaxed and so laid back. But was there a struggle?

GEORGE LUCAS: Well, I didn’t — I — there wasn’t really a — a struggle because I think when you stumble — it’s like falling in love. You know, when you — and — and falling in love is tricky. Because sometimes you can — you can be infatuated with that somebody or you can be sexually aroused by somebody, but that isn’t falling in love. And you sort of have to move away those momentary things that come and go within, you know, days or hours, and try to say, ‘This is the real thing.’ When you fall in love, you pretty much know it. And when I fell in love with movies, I definitely knew it.

BILL MOYERS: How did you know it?

GEORGE LUCAS: I was just in a place where I was very happy. When you get into something that you like and you say, ‘This is great,’ you know. ‘This is something that I want to do,’ you just — it — it takes a lot of strength to stick with it because a lot of the times it’s not what society deems as a worthy thing to do. And not what a — your parents particularly want you to do. You know, my father wanted me to go into the stationery business and run an office equipment store.

BILL MOYERS: Was that a struggle not to do …

GEORGE LUCAS: That — it wasn’t a struggle because I knew immediately that that wasn’t — that wasn’t what I wanted.

BILL MOYERS: Is that what he did? Run a stationery store?

GEORGE LUCAS: Yeah. And he was — you know, he built it up for me and for me to take over, and he was pretty much devastated when I refused to get involved in it.

BILL MOYERS: What’d he say?

GEORGE LUCAS: Well — he said, ‘Well, you’ll come back and, you know, you’ll — you’ll see that making your way in the world isn’t that easy, and … ‘

BILL MOYERS: How did you tell him?

GEORGE LUCAS: Well, I basically got — it was probably the biggest disagreement we ever got into, and I got really mad at him and just basically said, ‘You know, I’ll never work at a job where I have to do the same thing over and over again every day.’ And he just didn’t want to hear that. And I knew that that wasn’t my — you know, he said, ‘You know, there’s a lot of — you know, it’s a good job, it’s a good business, you can make a lot of money, you’ll be successful.’ And I said, ‘I don’t want that. I just don’t want to do it.’ You know, he worked very hard to be able to give this to me, and so for me to refuse it was a big deal. And he thought that I would go off and starve to death as some kind of artist somewhere living in a garret.

BILL MOYERS: Is he still living?

GEORGE LUCAS: 
No. No, he — he died a number of years ago. But he did — he died after I did “Star Wars,” so he — he was very proud of me at the end and he — you know, I did the only thing you have to do in the end. You only have to accomplish one thing in life, and that is to make your parents proud of you. If you’re healthy and you can take care of yourself and you’re a good person — I mean, you contribute to society and not take away, that’s all your parents want in the end.

BILL MOYERS:
 I’m not a psychologist, I’m just a journalist, but it does seem to me that the scenes of Luke and his father — there’s something of George Lucas in there. Some memory trace there.

GEORGE LUCAS: 
Oh, yeah. No matter how you write, you write from your own emotions and your own feelings. There’s two sides to the redeemer motif that I’ve got in the “Star Wars” films, which is that ultimately Vader is redeemed by his children. 
And — and especially having children. 
I believe that. I believe that you are redeemed by your children. 
And — because that’s what life is all about, is procreating and raising children. 
And it should bring the best of you out.

BILL MOYERS: 
Are you going to be prepared for that moment when your daughter says-~your older daughter is about to go off already and — and say, ‘This is the way I want to go, Dad.’

GEORGE LUCAS: 
I think there is a point where, even though you love your children a great deal, you must let go, which is actually what “The Phantom Menace” is about.

BILL MOYERS: “The Phantom Menace” is about letting go?

GEORGE LUCAS: It’s about letting go.

BILL MOYERS: In what sense?

GEORGE LUCAS: In the sense that you have this young boy, who’s 10 years old, who has to leave his mother and go off on his own and the mother has to let him go because otherwise he would be a slave the rest of his life.

(Excerpt from “The Phantom Menace”)

GEORGE LUCAS: At some point you do have to become an independent person. And it’s about learning to let go of your — your needs, so to speak, and — and think of the needs of others.

BILL MOYERS: So “Star Wars” is — yes, it’s about cosmic, galactic, epic struggles, but it’s at heart about a family. The large myth set in a local family.

GEORGE LUCAS: Well, in most — most myths center around characters and — and a hero, and it’s — it’s about how you — how you conduct yourself as you go through the hero’s journey, which everyone goes through. It’s especially relevant when you go through this transition phase. Most societies it’s when you’re 13 or 14. In our society it’s sort of 18 to 22, somewhere in there, that you must let go of your past and must, you know, embrace your future and — and in your own self, by yourself, figure out what it is — what — what path you’re going to go down.

BILL MOYERS: Is it fair or accurate to say in effect that “Star Wars” is — is your own spiritual quest?

GEORGE LUCAS: Well, I would say there’s part of that. I’d say part of what I do when I write is ponder a lot of these issues. I have ever since I can remember, and, obviously, some of the conclusions I’ve come to are, you know — I — I use in the films.

BILL MOYERS: Yes. Well, some critics scoff at this whole notion of a deeper layer of meaning to what they call ‘kids’ stuff.’ But I come down on your side, on Joe Campbell’s side, when he says, ‘Kids’ stuff is the stuff dreams are made of. ‘

GEORGE LUCAS: Yeah, it’s much harder to — to actually write for kids than it is to write for adults.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

GEORGE LUCAS: Well, because they’re — they’re more — they’re more susceptible to anything that doesn’t ring true, and the~-~on one level, they will sort of accept — they don’t have constraints so they can open their minds up and they’re not, you know, locked into a particular dogma. And at the other side, if something doesn’t make sense to them, they’re much more critical of it. They also don’t like to think of things as being right and wrong. It’s — it’s too difficult for them to rationalize their own behavior in that kind of a world.

BILL MOYERS: So when you write, do you see your audience and do — do you see a 13-year-old boy?

GEORGE LUCAS: I don’t — I — I see my audience and my audience is me, you know? I make these films for myself more than I make them for anybody else. I mean, I’m lucky that the things I believe in, and the things that I enjoy and the things that entertain me entertain a large population. Sometimes they don’t. I mean, I’ve made a bunch of movies that nobody’s liked so that doesn’t always hold true. But I certainly wasn’t out to become successful, it — it happened.

BILL MOYERS: You are financing your own movies.

GEORGE LUCAS: I’m financing my own movies and it allows me the freedom to have my own — my own vision be accurately portrayed on the screen, and I will, you know, be successful or unsuccessful based on how people relate to that vision. But I don’t have a lot of other people coming and telling me really what to do. So I have” bought my freedom, but I’ve also bought the freedom for everybody that works for me because I think the core issues that I’m dealing with are — if they were valid 2,000 years ago, they’ve got to still be valid today, even though they’re not in fashion.

BILL MOYERS: Why are they out of fashion?

GEORGE LUCAS: Because I think it’s harder — you know, the world we live in is more complex, and — and I think that a lot of those moralities have gotten to be grayed to the point where they don’t exist anymore. But those issues are still there in most people’s minds.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

GEORGE LUCAS: The importance of, say, friendship and loyalty. You know, and most people look at that and say, ‘How corny.’ But, you know, the — the issues of friendship and loyalty are — are very, very important to the way we live our lives. But it’s not common knowledge among young people. You know, they’re still learning. They’re still picking up ideas. They’re still using these ideas to shape the way they’re gonna conduct their life. And you need to tell the same story over and over again every generation so that generation gets it. And I think we’ve gone for a few generations where a lot of the sort of more basic stories have fallen by the wayside.

BILL MOYERS: And what do stories do for us in that sense? What do myths …

GEORGE LUCAS: They try to show us our place. Myths help you to have your own hero’s journey, find your individuality, find your place in the world, but hopefully remind you that you’re part of a whole, and that you must also be part of the community, and — and think of the welfare of the community above the welfare of yourself.

BILL MOYERS: 

I hear so many young people today talk about a world that’s emptied of heroism, where there are no noble things to do. 

What do you say to them?

GEORGE LUCAS: 

I mean, everybody becomes — everybody has the choice of Being a Hero or Not Being a Hero every day of their lives. 

 

And you can either Help Somebody, 

you can Be Compassionate toward People, 

or you can Treat Some People with Dignity or Not. 

 

And — and 

One Way, You Become a Hero, and The Other Way, 

you know, 

You’re Part of The Problem. 

 

And it’s — it’s not a grand thing. 

 

You know, you don’t have to get into a giant laser sword fight and blow up three spaceships to become A Hero. 

 

I mean, it’s a very small thing that happens every day of your life.

BILL MOYERS: 

Essentially, isn’t “Star Wars” about transformation?

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Well, it is about transformation. And — and ultimately it’ll be about transformation of how young Anakin Skywalker became evil and then was redeemed by His Son. 

But it’s also about transformation of how his son came to — 

to Find The Call. 

Luke works intuitively through most of the movie until he gets to the very end.

(Excerpt from “Star Wars”)

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Everything up to that point is very intuitive. 

He goes back and forth with his emotions about fighting his father or not fighting his father.

(Excerpt from “Star Wars”)

GEORGE LUCAS: Finally he comes to that decision to say, ‘No, this is — this is what I have to do. I have to simply throw my weapon down.’ And it’s only that way that he’s able to redeem his father, which ultimately is the issue. It’s not as apparent in the first three movies, but when you see the movies I haven’t made yet, that — the issue of how do we get Darth Vader back is really the central issue. How do we get him back to that little boy that he was in the first movie? That good person who loved and was generous and kind?

BILL MOYERS: Ultimately …

GEORGE LUCAS: And had a good heart.

BILL MOYERS: Had a good heart. Ultimately, doesn’t it take, particularly in religion, a — a leap of faith? What — Kierkegaard’s leap of faith?

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Yes. Yes. Definitely. And that’s — that’s — you’ll notice Luke uses that quite a bit through the films. Not to rely on his senses, not to rely on — on the computers, not to — but to rely on faith. That is what ‘Use The Force’ is, is a leap of faith. That there are mysteries and powers larger than we are, and that you have to trust your feelings in order to — to access these things.

BILL MOYERS: 

Your friend Joseph Campbell called it 

‘the perfect eye to see with.’

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Mm-hmm.

BILL MOYERS: 

How do you develop that eye?

GEORGE LUCAS: 

Well, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know whether I have that eye. But…

BILL MOYERS: 

Oh, you do. People — your colleagues tell me you’re always making quick decisions, good or bad. 

You’re making intuitive decisions very quickly.

TRY NOT.

DO.

OR DO NOT.

THERE IS NO "Try".

GEORGE LUCAS: 

I’m making intuitive decisions because I — I’m — I — I can see the picture in my head even though it’s foggy …

(Excerpt from “Star Wars”)

GEORGE LUCAS: 

… and I know instantly whether this fits in there or doesn’t.

BILL MOYERS: 

Do you have to work to keep nurturing your imagination, to keep feeding that interior pool from which these ideas and images …

GEORGE LUCAS: 

I’ve — I’ve never had a problem with that. I mean, my imagination runs wild. It’s — it’s — you know, people say, ‘Well, you’re gonna run out of stories, you gonna … ‘ I — I don’t think I’ll ever run — I have more stories than I can possibly do in my lifetime. And more — and I’m interested in more things to do than I can possibly do in my lifetime. And I’m now beginning to confront the fact that the — the amount of time I’ve got is less and less, that I — more and more things are going to have to go by the wayside, and I’m going to have to focus more on the things that really are meaningful to me, you know, ’cause even if I have 30 or 40 years left, it’s not enough.

This transcript was entered on July 31, 2015, 2015.