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"Why Are You Here, Rey from Nowhere?": The Hero's Journey, Island Storytelling, and the Gendered Roles of Heroes in the Star Wars Saga
Abstract:
<p>The first "Star Wars" film came out in 1977 and was the third feature film written and directed by George Lucas. Lucas’s style formed as an amalgamation of every cinematic influence he’d ever had: Westerns, Saturday matinee serials, Akira Kurosawa samurai movies, and more. The connective tissue that held all of this aesthetic together was Lucas’s story structure adapted from Joseph Campbell’s work on “The Hero with A Thousand Faces” which outlined the “The Hero’s Journey” as well as the “monomyth.” The young hero for Lucas’s trilogy of films was “Luke Skywalker.” In 2012, Disney purchased the Lucasfilm production company and the rights to Star Wars from Lucas and began production of new films. The newest protagonist of these films would be a teenage girl named “Rey.”</p><p>In this paper, I analyze the structure of the “Hero’s Journey” as it relates to these two protagonists as well as to the corporate media realities of franchise filmmaking. I examine the gendered roles of “Heroes” in genre storytelling and explore the call for a “Heroine’s Journey” in narrative fiction. I ground this on-screen/off-screen conversation to the island planet that Rey and Luke meet on: known as Ahch-To on-screen, doubled by the Irish island Skellig Michael for filming. By geographically grounding this work of film and literary analysis, we begin to see the shape of the hero’s arc form a cyclical pattern that mirrors both the natural cycles of the island as well as the cultural cycles of returns to franchise storytelling.</p>
Keywords: Media, Film, Pop Culture, Islands, Ireland
Authors:
Jake Rowlett, San Diego State University & University of California Santa Barbara; Submitting Author / Primary Presenter
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"Why Are You Here, Rey from Nowhere?": The Hero's Journey, Island Storytelling, and the Gendered Roles of Heroes in the Star Wars Saga
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In-Person Paper Abstract