Star Wars: The Ring Theory
July 16, 2015 3:59 PM   Subscribe

Mike Klimo offers a thorough analysis of Star Wars as chiasmus.

More on chiasmus.

Mix Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, and Anne Lancashire, add a bit of Taoism, and a touch of jazz for a new take on the whole saga.
posted by Tevin (39 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
Forgive me if this is a double but I couldn't find it on the Blue.
posted by Tevin at 4:00 PM on July 16, 2015


Chiasmus! My favorite rhetorical figure!
posted by Iridic at 4:05 PM on July 16, 2015 [4 favorites]


(It's a favorite of mine, chiasmus.)
posted by Iridic at 4:06 PM on July 16, 2015 [14 favorites]


I gotta go with anastrophe, myself, just for the name.
posted by thelonius at 4:13 PM on July 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


I was kind of hoping that this would explain that one week after we get done endlessly parsing Star Wars, the phone will ring and it will be George Lucas telling us that he is remastering the series yet again.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:27 PM on July 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


I thought I was well burnt out on anything to do with...those films, but I like this a lot.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 4:35 PM on July 16, 2015


That's Disney Legend(tm) George Lucas.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:46 PM on July 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


This is an impressive construction of things that are pretty to believe.
posted by shmegegge at 4:50 PM on July 16, 2015 [3 favorites]


> I was kind of hoping that this would explain that one week after we get done endlessly parsing Star Wars, the phone will ring and it will be George Lucas telling us that he is remastering the series yet again.

And here's where I'd put an animation of Jar-Jar crawling out of the sarlacc pit a la Sadako, if I had one.

Really, "Star Wars as chiasmus" all sounds great on paper and I don't doubt George Lucas had some kind of vision for the project, but the execution was inexcusably poor. And as irrelevant as some of the Red Letter Media criticisms are to this particular theory, I think they're pretty accurate in terms of what took away from the enjoyability and ran counter to almost the entire audience's expectations.

Still, I appreciate anything that applies a new or interesting critical lens to the series, but holy shit the first link is nine pages long with footnotes and a bibliography.
posted by Johann Georg Faust at 4:51 PM on July 16, 2015 [4 favorites]


So, Menace is supposed to mirror Jedi, but in a grouping of shots in the middle he's back to comparing Menace with Hope again. And with the ending shot's it's also a comparison of Menace with Hope, Clones with Empire, and Sith with Jedi, the last of which is a bad comparison shot. Maybe there's more explained in the later pages, but I'm just not that invested or interested in the prequels to care that much.

I prefer my theories from the Star Wars Minute: the Force does not exist, Luke and Leia are not actually brother and sister, many Imperial officers are rebel sympathizers, Ewoks eat humans, etc. etc.
posted by snwod at 4:55 PM on July 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


I don't like to judge, but I think Mike Klimo has devoted a lot of his life to Star Wars and weed.
posted by Soulfather at 4:56 PM on July 16, 2015 [4 favorites]


I guess I'll buy that he wrote it following some kind of guide book. Lord knows something was constraining him.

But I'll always remember Red Letter Media's shot of fat and happy, barely engaged George Lucas sitting in front of monitors in a green screen studio with a big cup of Starbucks.

(Also: Princess Palindrome)
posted by Trochanter at 4:57 PM on July 16, 2015


When you doubt your powers, you give power to your doubts.

He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions.

When you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you will head off your foes with a balanced attack.
posted by kyrademon at 5:06 PM on July 16, 2015 [20 favorites]


And why am I wearing the watermelon on my feet?
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:08 PM on July 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


Even assuming this is a valid description of the consistent structure of Star Wars (and I'd like to see more examples), the article offers little analysis of how well it actually works.

The Red Letter Media criticisms on the level of plot logic and coherence remain quite valid. At best what this article offers is an explanation of Lucas' failure (his over-investment in larger visual structure led him to fatefully sacrifice basic plotting competence), not an endorsement of his genius.
posted by macross city flaneur at 5:09 PM on July 16, 2015 [6 favorites]


Really, "Star Wars as chiasmus" all sounds great on paper and I don't doubt George Lucas had some kind of vision for the project, but the execution was inexcusably poor.

It's like when you're really high and you have all these great ideas for short stories or paintings or whatever, but when you sober up you're left with nothing but crap.
posted by Nevin at 5:11 PM on July 16, 2015


Funny--I always thought it was a homoioteleuton.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 5:18 PM on July 16, 2015


I mean, heck, it might serve the larger visual or thematic structure for Han Solo to wield a light saber in some scene, but if no effort is made to explain why a character who normally would never use a light saber is now holding one, the audience has a perfect right to ask WTF?

But hey, if it makes some people feel good to think George Lucas made three really disappointing and at times nonsensical movies because he's a secret Campbellian genius, I suppose there are a lot more annoying delusions.
posted by macross city flaneur at 5:19 PM on July 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


Lucas said that the themes in his scripts rhyme. He was trying for a Villanelle but failed.
posted by kandinski at 5:21 PM on July 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


Star Wars is a semiotic square.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 5:27 PM on July 16, 2015


This is some serious industrial-strength pattern-matching being done on some deeply flawed films.

Now I kinda want to get really stoned and watch all six of them. I never bothered with Clones and Sith because Menace felt so empty at its core. I bet that if I watched them in the order of 2 3 4 5 6, or in the "Machete Order" (4 5 2 3 6), I could come up with equally well-supported thematic resonances between the multiple films that linked them into an overall cycle - in no small part because this is how stories work in general. You foreshadow important events near the end. You make callbacks to important events in the beginning. You state themes multiple times throughout the course of the story. And when you make prequels or sequels, the temptation is strong to tell what is essentially the same story, with a new skin.

Especially when you're talking about budgets of the scale Lucas had on the prequels. It's really hard to convince the people holding the strings of purses that size to back anything new and unproven.

And here is an exercise for the reader: Analyze all six movies from the context of it being one massive instance of the Campbellian Hero's Journey, with Anakin/Vader as the main character. Can we make 1/2 work as "the Departure", 3/4 as "the Initiation", and 5/6 as "the Return", with most of the various sub-points of those sections falling into mostly the order Campbell listed them? I bet we can. We could probably make the whole 'Star Wars' saga work as a fractal of Hero's Journeys: the whole thing is the journey of Vader, with the original three films running Luke's entire journey over the second half of Vader's, and with each individual film having its own smaller Hero's Journey nestled inside those. The article at hand has already laid some groundwork by noting that the whole saga ends where it begins.

And perhaps 9, 10, and 11 will end up letting a future me argue that perhaps both Luke and Vader's Journeys are embedded within the Hero's Journey of C3PO.

Ultimately, I definitely think that analysis like this is very useful for anyone who wants to think about stories. Knowing multiple ways to construct a story gives you the power to use the one that best fits what you want to say.
posted by egypturnash at 6:07 PM on July 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


Ultimately, I definitely think that analysis like this is very useful for anyone who wants to think about stories. Knowing multiple ways to construct a story gives you the power to use the one that best fits what you want to say.

this is really true. I appreciate the Plinkett reviews most when they do the same thing (though they reveal the structural faults rather than pattern matching-- say, with Phantom Menace's lack of central protagonist leading in part to its general aimlessness). detailed autopsy of fiction has great value, much more than fanboy nit picking or simple fawning/dismissal, and anyway it's great fun well beyond the "yeah I can get stoned and concoct theories too" silliness of the enterprise
posted by Kybard at 6:30 PM on July 16, 2015


I am having a strong feeling of tldr. But I did read enough to learn that a chiastic structure is where you craft an intricate sequence of interlocking parts that relate in a structure resembling a rhyming scheme like ABCCBA, and the second part is an inverted reflection of the first in which you attempt to cancel out anything good that was originally created by following it with poorly-crafted dreck.
posted by sfenders at 6:43 PM on July 16, 2015 [1 favorite]




And perhaps 9, 10, and 11 will end up letting a future me argue that perhaps both Luke and Vader's Journeys are embedded within the Hero's Journey of C3PO.


Artoo, more likely. He got to keep his memories.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 6:54 PM on July 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


So full of tldr.

I've always been skeptical of alleged secret meanings ascribed to others' work. First, in a tree-falling-in-the-forest sense, does a secret meaning mean anything? Second, the selection of items for comparison/analysis is an arbitrary cherry-pick. Apart from the obvious parallels that Lucas cops to, the rest is pareidolia. What about the thousands of shots, characters, scenes, themes & lines that don't fit the pattern?
posted by univac at 6:59 PM on July 16, 2015


If I'm bitter about this sort of thing it's because I spent a few years of early adulthood trying to find my way through a Jungian haze of over-meaningfulness.
posted by univac at 7:02 PM on July 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


An interesting approach; I need to unpack it. But even if the ABCC'B'A' approach is what Lucas was intentionally after (and am I parsing the article correctly in that there is also an argument for an ABCA'B'C' structure? I'm finding this dense and hard to parse this evening) as an overall structure, we can identify that structure and still evaluate the success (or failure) of each component part.

To be fair, this article is not attempting to do that, just tease out what might be a grander overarching structure to the films, which I find interesting in terms of the techniques and possibilities of storytelling. Then we can get deeper and see how well the structure is held up by the various component parts. Because it might be an attempt at a grand chiasmus, but if the first half of the cycle is collapsing under its own weight, it becomes difficult to (a) see the intent; (b) keep the audience engaged enough to see the work through.
posted by nubs at 7:30 PM on July 16, 2015


Wait, what? There was a movie called Star Wars? I assumed this was about the Wilco album.
posted by webmutant at 7:35 PM on July 16, 2015


What? No. There was a movie called "A New Hope." There has always been a movie called "A New Hope."
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 8:09 PM on July 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


The only commentary I have left on Star Wars is that recently I was watching a Clone Wars 4-parter - either the incompetent jedi general or the retired clone or a political assassination or yet another prisoner exchange - and I thought to myself "This is the movie that George Lucas thought he was making with the prequel trilogy."

It's still fundamentally a children's show in a way that other, more mature children's shows like Steven Universe and Adventure Time manage to transcend but it flirts with all of the depth and subtlety that Lucas was aiming at. Sympathetic characters in the resistance! Clones are complex individuals! Jedi order are hypocrites about fighting all the time!

Anyway the show's on netflix.
posted by sandswipe at 9:00 PM on July 16, 2015


By page 7 he gets really into Daoism and draws a yin-yang in the center of his diagram and starts interpreting cloud formations. đź‘Ś

Although based on what Lucas has said I think at least most of the visual correspondences are probably intentional, and I can believe he deliberately used something like this ring structure, at least when making the prequels. It would explain why they have such weird pacing.
posted by vogon_poet at 9:21 PM on July 16, 2015


Robocop was a FAR more convincing example of chiastic structure, and that article gives a much better one page summary of the whole thing.

Good storytellers, or indeed prodigies of any craft, may intuitively use rules and fundamentals that they themselves might not be fully aware of. It just "feels" right. So whether or not Lucas was completely aware of what he was doing is really tangential to whether the stories conform to a chiastic structure or not, and having this kind of structure also has no bearing on whether it's actually a good story or a bad story.

My favourite example of chiastic structure, true or not, is the creation story in the Bible.

Day 0 - God is restless

Day 1 - Separates Light from Dark
Day 2 - Separate Sea from Sky
Day 3 - Separate Land from Sea *

Day 4 - Fill Light and Dark
Day 5 - Fill Sea and Sky
Day 6 - Fill Land **

Day 7 - God is resting

* plants appear around Day 3 but apparently they don't count? probably an interesting angle of the culture at the time.
** would be nice to say "fill Land and xxx" but the Sea was already filled in the previous day
posted by xdvesper at 9:27 PM on July 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


How George Lucas used an ancient technique called “ring composition” to reach a level of storytelling sophistication in his six-part saga that is unprecedented in cinema history.

AAAHHAHAAHAHHHAAcoughkoffsplutter

BWAAAAHHHAAAHAAA

I fucking love Star Wars. But the idea that Star Wars is some rich, Campbellite / Jungian mythological tapestry up there with the Iliad and it was made that way by design rather than through navel-gazing undergrad cinema hindsight and Lucas' self-indulgent hand waving is just horseshit. "Hurr durr I'm a real storyteller, something something King Arthur.' Sure you are, Jar Jar.

Douglas provides seven rules for identifying ring compositions. She’s quick to point out, however, “they are not rules in the sense of there being something hard and fast about them.

My, that's convenient. "Here's a bunch of shit that fits, probably by coincidence, or ham-fisted self-congratulatory back-patting, insider-winking and 'guess who ELSE is related?!' wankery. And here's a bunch of shit that doesn't fit at all, but that's OK, because these aren't rules, man."

I mean, I could say Jedi mirrors ANH, because Death Star. Or Jedi mirrors Empire because father and son meet yet again, on different terms, and OMG HE LIKE CUT OFF HIS DAD'S HAND THIS TIME IT'S LIKE A MIRROR DUDE. Or Jedi mirrors Empire, because both see a 'thawing' of Han's mercenary streak at the start of the film. I could come up with these handy coincidences (or unimaginative similes) all day. It's not hard when you're talking about the same handful of characters in what turns out to be a universe the size of the inside of a gumball...toy...ball container thingy.

Throw in first drafts of Lucas' scripts, which bear no resemblance whatsoever to the final product, at any point of the original trilogy - and the fact that the whole 'I am your father' thing was a twist Lucas came up with after the first draft of Empire, rather than something he'd planned all along - and this little house of cards collapses.

I mean, the central fucking premise of this supposed cycle - that this is a story about father and son, about temptation, revenge and redemption - was a last-minute post hoc conceit, for Christ's sake; one squeezed to death by 'and guess who your sister is? Go on, guess. Oooh, Opidu...Oedis...that Greek guy, but with your sister instead of your mom!'. How can anybody believe that any of the rest of it was planned, except in the 'I'm so clever I made this scene look like that scene also 1138 yet again motherfuckers' sense?
posted by obiwanwasabi at 10:12 PM on July 16, 2015 [4 favorites]


(This is a good post. I'm grar-ing about linked article, not the post, which was totally worth posting. Ignore this wizard, he's just a crazy old man.)
posted by obiwanwasabi at 10:14 PM on July 16, 2015


kyrademon: "When you doubt your powers, you give power to your doubts.

He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions.

When you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you will head off your foes with a balanced attack.
"

You're TERRRRIBLY mysterious, Captain Conundrum.
posted by Samizdata at 12:51 AM on July 17, 2015


Intentional or not, Kyrademon's comment implies a universe where The Emperor survived and became the The Sphinx, because, hoods.
posted by otherchaz at 6:21 AM on July 17, 2015 [2 favorites]




Hitchcock can pull off something like turning the audience's sympathies from the victim to the murderer and switching protagonists halfway through a movie.

You, Mr. Lucas, are no Hitchcock.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:07 AM on July 17, 2015


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