Simply grafting Ben’s theme onto this much larger texture would not have worked as well. Lucas’ suggestion stripped Luke of his theme and gave him an identity crisis. Williams’s solution went one step further, pitting Luke between the film’s two opposing soundworlds: the ensemble space of the greater galaxy and the gestural one of Tatooine. The score traverses the film’s disparate narrative realms in time and space, not only with melody but equally well through orchestral texture, all within the context of a single shot or sequence. “You’ve Taken a Step Into a Larger World”: Timbre, Texture, and Joseph Campbell Aspects of these two opposing soundworlds map onto concepts put forward by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Lucas read the book while writing the script for Star Wars and used Campbell’s ideas to refine the Star Wars mythology. In the book, Campbell posits that classical mythological narratives frequently share a “motif” or fundamental structure that he calls a “monomyth” or a “Hero’s Journey.” The hero of a monomyth is made to cross between two worlds: the “Known” or “Ordinary” world and the “Unknown” or “Special” world. Lucas said: “in reading The Hero With A Thousand Faces I began to realize that my first draft of Star Wars was following classical motifs;”74 Lucas was especially drawn to the threshold between the known and unknown: I said, “Where is the frontier today?” Well, I can stand in my front yard and look up into the sky and say, “I wonder what’s out there.” And that is what I think is the basis of all mythology in terms of the man standing, looking at the horizon, saying, “I wonder what’s out there, what’s over the hill.” And then saying, “I’ll make up a story about what’s out there, what’s over the hill.”75
74
Stephen Larsen, A Fire in the Mind : The Life of Joseph Campbell, 1st ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 155.
75
Ibid., 156.
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