[Transcript]
What does the third Star Wars film also known as Episode 6, the third Lord of the Rings, the Matrix trilogy, and the Lion King have in common?
My name is Shaun McMillan, and this is the Best Class Ever.
The third Star Wars film is titled, “Return of the Jedi.” The third Lord of the Rings is titled, “Return of the King.” The lion king, and even Harry Potter, Naruto, and many other fantasy or science fiction stories center on the chosen one who will fulfill their destiny to restore order to society.
Archetypes
This is such a common theme and goes so far back that we refer to this kind of idea as an archetype. In stories where you have good versus evil, Jesus is the ultimate archetypal hero, and Satan is the ultimate evil archetype. Most protagonists and antagonists, or heroes and villains share some common characteristics. In each of these stories you typically have a fatherly mentor archetype. We refer to this as the wise old man. Dumbledore and Gandolph are nearly the same character fulfilling the same role in Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.
The Absent Royal Father
Another common archetype is the absent patriarch. The young prince or hero is haunted by the ghost of his father, the former king, quite literally in Hamlet and the Lion King. Symba is haunted by the ghost of his father, the former king, Mustafa. This honorable father is often killed by a dark father, some evil uncle or quite literally by Darth Vader which is German for, you guessed it, dark father. Perhaps we relate to this idea due to the fact that evil seems so real and present in our lives, and though we hope and feel that God in His justice watches over everything, in times of darkness which we all go through, God feels strangely absent.
The Devouring Mother
A common archetype among old Disney films is the devouring mother. This is a dark matriarch or evil motherly type who doesn’t want her children to grow up and abandon their comfortable home. We can see this every time there is a witch, an evil queen, or a mother who imprisons their child like Maleficient, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, or Hanzel and Grettel where the witch builds a house made of candy to lure the children in and eat them. For immigrants who raise their children in a foreign country, there is often this tension between the generations. There is a fear among the parents that the children will abandon them, their home, their culture, or their values. Pixar made a really great short film that captures the devouring mother perfectly in the film titled, “Bao,” which is spelled, B-A-O.
So we have the positive and negative father archetype, the positive and negative mother archetype, and now we can discuss the hero, which is like a positive son or daughter archetype. This hero is young, full of potential, and growing quickly like the sun at dawn quickly rising into the sky.
But at some point in the hero’s epic journey the young hero may have to descend into the underworld to save his father from the devil. This idea is so old and so common that we even see it in the ancient mythologies of Egypt. Horus, the Egyptian god symbolized by the all seeing eye descended into the underworld to save his father, Osiris, from the king’s evil brother Seth. This is essentially the same plot as the Lion King, one of the most popular animated films ever produced by Disney.
Jesus also descended into a spiritual prison after his death on the cross to give a second chance to those who died during Noah’s flood according 1 Peter 3:19. We also see this in a scene from Lord of the Rings when Aragorn, the true heir to an ancient throne, goes deep into a haunted mountain to recruit an army of ghosts who betrayed this new king’s ancient ancestor, their king who lived long before during their own generation.
The Savior
Maybe the most common trope is the idea of the chosen one, some young person living in two different worlds destined to fulfill his great potential embedded in their distinguished ancestral line. This savior, the Christ, or Messiah, is the one who can ultimately win the greatest game or competition among men. And not only can he win the game, but he can teach others how to win, how to win often, and to keep winning, even after one is dead! His story and his teachings will live on long after he is gone. These words are often symbolized by a great sword, or an especially crafted weapon handed down from generation to generation.
These stories have been extremely popular for millenia. They date back to before stories were written down, and are still the most popular even today. Why do these stories feel so meaningful? They teach us how to pass from this world to the next.
Dune
Lord of the Rings became famous because of J.R. Tolkien’s fantastic world building. Lord of the Rings wasn’t just a series of novels. It was an entirely different fantastical world you could escape to. Star Wars too is an entire world with its own rules, creatures, and locations.
But before there was Star Wars the most famous science fiction book with elaborate world-building was the book called Dune by Frank Herbert. Dune is about a planet covered in sand but rich in spice. And though there is some technology, this author’s world is far more concerned with ecology, religion, and politics. The first novel was published in 1965, so now looking back, having an ecological theme makes it seem as though it was really ahead of its time, as science fiction often is.
Messiah stories
But my favorite aspect of Dune is its religious, political, and philosophical conflicts. In this fictional world there is an ancient religion led by Machiavellian witches who conspire through royal marriages to foster the birth of a Messiah who unites these worlds. The planet, Dune, also has a Muslim style religion among its natives who also have prophecies of a coming Messiah or what Muslims might would refer to as a Caliphate. And the lead character, the chosen one, is able to unite all of these warring factions. He is both son of the current ruling king, son to a witch of the ancient religious faction, and over the course of the story, able to unite with and earn the respect of the natives.
It’s not a reach to call this a Messiah story, because the second book in the series is literally titled, Messiah. The story also adapts the conflicting virtues of Plato and Shakespeare by representing each of these virtues with the young leader’s different mentors. He is trained by a doctor who represents the strengths and weaknesses of being dutifully loyal, by a swordsman who shows the strengths and weaknesses of mastering himself through skill, by a warrior poet is humble and amiable, by his mother who shows the strengths and weaknesses of a woman’s intuition, and by a mentat who represents the strengths and weakness of thinking rationally or the trapping of having a high IQ. And his father is wise, but absent most of the film as he falls prey to the political machinations of his corrupt counterparts.
Jihad
This young leader has all of these strengths, and can even see prophetically into the future, but how will he resolve the conflict of predestination as he can clearly see that a jihad is coming. Will he be able to prevent the religious war from coming, or will his actions bring them about?
Ender’s Game
If you like this type of science fiction Messiah story then I would also like to introduce my personal favorite, Ender’s Game. Ender’s Game is a novel and film about training children to lead a war against a coming alien invasion. The military realizes that children make much better admirals than adults. This becomes obvious when you see just how good these kids are at wargames. And so they develop a space academy and recruit the world’s smartest children by forcing every kid on earth to take an IQ test. But really they are just looking for one great ingenious leader, the chosen one, who is aggressive enough to engage in war, but compassionate enough to empathize with his enemy.
As a game design teacher who teaches students through wargames, you can see why Ender’s Game would appeal to me. It shows just how much potential there is in using games to train children to become world leaders. I could talk for days about how much I love Ender’s Game, but I don’t want to spoil it for you, and there is a pretty good film featuring Harrison Ford, Ben Kingsley, Viola Davis, and Asa Butterfield. So I’ll let you watch the film and find out for yourself.
So Much More to the Book Series
The film is really fun to watch but there is so much more to the books. Adapting the story into a 90 minute film forced the producers to cut some of my favorite aspects of Ender’s world.
For instance, the movie makes no mention of how his brother and sister manage to take over the world back on earth while he is out fighting aliens, and there is also no mention of how he does eventually go on to write books that are later adapted as holy scripture, or how his classmates go on to lead their various nations into world war 3. I mean you can only fit so much into a film unless you make it extraordinarily long, aka Lord of the Rings, or stretch one book into three different films, aka The Hobbit.
The second book in the series that the author wrote, called Speaker for the Dead, went on to win just as many awards as the first book. And Ender’s game ended up inspiring not just one but two different series of novels, the second one known as the Shadow series which I like even more than the original series. Ok, enough ranting. Let’s get back to Dune.
Dune Film Adaptations
The reason you’ve probably never heard of Dune is because it was made into a film before some of us were even born. There were almost no computer generated effects at the time, and the writing had no subtlety at all. I don’t mind watching old films if they are written well, but this movie was impossible for me to watch.
But all of that will change in October of this year when the new Dune film is released. This version is directed by Dennis Villanueve who directed Blade Runner 2049 and Arrival, two really well done Science Fiction films which we can also talk about in a later lesson. This new version of Dune will also feature Timothy Chalomet, the same actor who played King Henry V in the Netflix film we spoke about in an earlier episode called “The King.”
New Dune Trailer
It’s hard to know for certain whether a film will live up to its own hype before it comes out, even if the trailer looks promising, cough cough Batman Vs Superman, but I have to say, the trailer for the new Dune looks really promising. The challenge with something like Dune, is you can get lost in all of the weird fantastical world building from the technology, to the gigantic sand worms, and the epic religious archetypes. But Dennis Villanueve was successfully able to handle the world of Blade Runner and he proved that he can focus on theme and story with far more constrained science fiction as he did with Arrival. So I am confident that he can handle this material.
In the next lesson we will take a look at how some of the classics of the past relate to science fiction stories about the future, and try to understand the relationship between aliens and angels. To see more of my recent film and book recommendations, to watch the new Dune Trailer, or the trailer to Ender’s game, simply pay us a visit at www.BestClassEver.org.
