Over the course of the many insightful conversations generated by the recent post on Star Wars: The Last Jedi—sincerest thanks to all who shared their time and thoughts—the subject of artistic influence was discussed: what role it played in the creation of some of Gen X’s most cherished movie franchises of yore, and what part, if any, it has in our now-institutionalized praxis of remaking those films wholesale—of “turning Hollywood into a glorified fan-fiction factory where filmmakers get to make their own versions of their childhood favorites.”
Because where is the line drawn, exactly, between inspiration and imitation? If the narrative arts are a continuum in which every new entry owes, to a certain extent, a creative debt to a cinematic or literary antecedent, is originality even a thing?
If so, what is it, then? How is one to construe it concretely, beyond simply “knowing it when we see it”? And, as such, is there a way for us as artists to codify, or at very least comprehend, the concept of originality as something more than an ill-defined abstraction to perhaps consciously strive for it in our own work?
THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND INFLUENCES
Since it was Star Wars that provoked those questions, let me start with this: George Lucas is one of my eminent creative influences. When I was in high school in the early nineties, during that long respite between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, when Star Wars was more or less placed by its creator in carbon-freezing, I became aware that the same mind had conceived two of my favorite franchises, and went to great lengths to study Lucas’ career: how he learned the art of storytelling, where his ideas came from, how he managed to innovate the way in which blockbusters were created and marketed.
“Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” mastermind George Lucas, my first creative idol
In order to more fully appreciate what Lucas created in 1977 when he made Star Wars—a work of fiction so thrilling and inspired it seemed to emerge fully realized from his singular imagination—it behooves us to consider the varied influences he drew from. The 1936 Flash Gordon film serial Lucas watched as a child provided the inciting animus—a grand-scale space opera told as a series of high-adventure cliffhangers. (It also later informed the movie’s visual vocabulary, with its reliance on old-fashioned cinematic techniques like opening crawls and optical wipes.)
In a case of east meets west, Joseph Campbell’s study of comparative mythology The Hero with a Thousand Faces provided a general mythic and archetypal blueprint to endow Lucas’ sprawling alien-world fantasy with psychological familiarity, while Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress served as a direct model for the plot he eventually settled on (after at least three start-from-scratch rewrites). Lucas ultimately patterned the series’ three-part narrative arc after Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings cycle (which later directly influenced his high-fantasy franchise-nonstarter Willow), because, prior to Star Wars, closed-ended “trilogies” weren’t really a thing in commercial cinema.
In addition to his cinematic and literary interests, Lucas is also a passionate scholar of world history (as evidenced by Indiana Jones, particularly the television series), and a direct line can be drawn from the X-wing assault on the Death Star to the aerial dogfights of World War II, to say nothing of the saga’s allusions to the Roman Republic, Nazi Germany, and the Vietnam War. As for where the Force and lightsabers and the twin suns of Tatooine came from… who knows? The sheer number of disparate interests that met, mated, and reproduced within the confines of Lucas’ brain can never be fully accounted for, even by the man himself.
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