Why do I love Luke Skywalker?

Transcript

:: 00:07

Welcome to why do I love this? A podcast where I take a deeper dive into why concepts, activities, and ideologies become foundational to the human experience.

:: 00:22

My name is Drew Toynbee. I'm a creative from the UK and I've always had a fascination with the reasons why people are the way they are, what's happened in their lives to make them the person that they are.

:: 00:35

How that person might change?

:: 00:38

In this show, I will be talking to guests about a concept, activity or ideology that is profoundly important to them. Then going away to see what there is in academia and research and philosophy that might explain some of the reasons for their attachment to it.

:: 00:55

But having never made anything like this before, I thought it only fair that I take a bit of a dive into my own psyche before I started diving into other peoples'.

:: 01:08

So this first episode is about something that I love.

:: 01:14

I hope you find it as interesting as I have and that you'll join me as we ask the question;

:: 01:21

Why do I love this?

:: 01:28

I'd like to start by retelling you a quick story that you've heard before.

:: 01:35

We meet our protagonist. They're innocent and naïve.

:: 01:43

Perhaps they're stuck in a rut, listless, unsure where their life is going.

:: 01:50

Then There is a call to adventure and their life and their world changes and grows in cataclysmic ways that they could never have foreseen.

:: 02:05

Under the tutelage of a wise new friend, they venture out into a world that they previously never understood.

:: 02:14

They discover new truths about themselves and the systems that they live in and around.

:: 02:20

They face challenges, enemies, desperate lows.

:: 02:27

But by using their newfound skills, allies and knowledge.

:: 02:31

They beat the odds that are stacked against them.

:: 02:36

They're victorious.

:: 02:39

Once their journey is complete, they could then choose to return to their old life.

:: 02:48

But find that they are so changed.

:: 02:51

That they often won't or.

:: 02:54

Even can't.

:: 02:59

This story appears in fiction for almost as long as the written word has existed, and quite probably in oral tradition before then. The Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Jane Eyre, Superman, The Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, the Northern Lights, beauty and the beast, the 2012 video game journey.

:: 03:19

The Lion King, the matrix, all of these stories follow this pattern to a lesser or greater degree. This pattern called the Monomyth

:: 03:29

is more popularly known as the hero's journey codified by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with 1000 faces.

:: 03:41

A great deal of time and effort has gone into looking at Campbell's work, and there are many arguments that can be made about his assertions and his conclusions and how applicable they truly can be to so many.

:: 03:56

But there is

:: 03:57

one story that it maps onto perfectly.

:: 04:00

It maps perfectly because the stories creator has regularly acknowledged that he used hero with 1000 faces as both inspiration and framework. That creator is George Lucas, and that story is.

:: 04:17

Of course, Star Wars.

:: 04:21

Star Wars began as a scrappy 1977 sci-fi movie written and directed by 1 George Lucas, and over the subsequent 47 years has become a sprawling media empire. A long time ago, in the early 1990s, my journey with Media went like this.

:: 04:41

I watched Thomas the Tank Engine as much as I physically could until my brother was given the original Star Wars trilogy on VHS, and I switched to that.

:: 04:52

I watched those movies constantly over and over again. My tastes did broaden to encompass a great deal of other things. Over the years. Dinosaurs after Jurassic Park, Power Rangers, the Ninja Turtles. But Star Wars was always unquestionably there.

:: 05:13

When I played and imagined that I was existing within the world of Star Wars, there was no question in my mind.

:: 05:21

I was a Jedi, just like Luke Skywalker. I still have a vivid memory of finding an old broken fishing rod with a padded black handle. The rod itself coloured a vivid electric blue.

:: 05:37

That was my first lightsaber. That wasn't a stick.

:: 05:42

I don't remember what happened to it in the end, but the fact that almost 30 years later I can still see the exact surroundings I was in.

:: 05:50

Specifically, an abandoned garage near my friend Joe's house does place it as a core memory for me to use the parlance of the wonderful Pixar movie inside Out.

:: 06:01

Don't Judge Joe's parents too harshly for letting us just be off trespassing into abandoned properties. They are wonderful people and it was the mid 90s.

:: 06:11

My friends at the time enjoyed Star Wars too, but there was something about it that got its hooks in me far more than it seemed to me that it had the rest of them. I'm going to add a fair bit of extra context of what was happening in my life for the rest of the.

:: 06:30

Star Wars milestones that stand out to me as it's the links between the wider context of my life and Star Wars that I want to interrogate.

:: 06:42

I was given the 20th anniversary box set of the original trilogy for my birthday in 1997 by my grandparents on my mum's side. It was the gold and black VHS set less than a year later, my grandpa, who had given me those videos had passed away.

:: 07:01

The summer of 1999, when episode one The Phantom Menace released, was the first cinema trip that my mum took me and my brother on after my parents had separated and I no longer lived with my dad.

:: 07:17

As episode 2 was coming out around 2002, I was going through the wonderful early teenage years with all of the puberty and the figuring out who you might be as a human being and wondering why none of the girls you like like you back.

:: 07:32

In 2005, when episode three came out, I was 16 years old. I had a job, I had friends at other schools. I decided I wanted to be an actor. I was smoking cigarettes. I had somehow managed to persuade a girl that I might be boyfriend material.

:: 07:49

In short, I thought at the time, haha, that I was all grown up and had everything pretty well figured out.

:: 07:58

I went to see revenge of the Sith on release day with a couple of other particularly nerdy friends who I did drama with, and I remember feeling maybe kind of proudly that Star Wars had ended as my childhood had ended and now I could leave it behind.

:: 08:15

And the fact that my other grandfather, Boompa, as we called him, passed away in that same year only sort of solidified that feeling of the end of childhood. So for a few years, Star Wars and and the journey from young Anakin to his son Luke being a Jedi master faded well into the background.

:: 08:36

It was always still there, but it was performatively nostalgic, maybe even ironic. It was a costume for a stag party or a fun topic of conversation late at night at university when you realised that only the other nerds were still awake and it was safe to talk about it.

:: 08:55

My interest did come back a bit in 2012. I was a big movie fan. I had a crippling addiction to Empire Magazine, and so when Disney bought the rights to the franchise and got to work on making episode 7-8 and nine, that was pretty interesting.

:: 09:08

But it was December 2014, when the first trailer for episode 7 The Force Awakens, released that I was suddenly just fully back in productivity in my office on that day, dropped off a Cliff for a significant period of time as a herd of nerds. I'm obviously including myself in that group, crowded around a computer and just watched it. On repeat. Nine years of detachment just ended.

:: 09:34

As it happens, I was at another particularly tumultuous time in my life. In 2014, I had gone through a traumatic break with my best friends, though I didn't know it at the time. My mental health, which frankly hadn't been great since I was about 10 years old, had begun a very slow slide downwards that wouldn't become entirely apparent for years afterwards.

:: 09:56

I was having to decide between continuing to pursue acting or trying to have a more stable career.

:: 10:03

I remember the morning that tickets released on pre sale in the September of 2015 was the morning after I had proposed to my then girlfriend and one of the many reasons that I knew that was a wise move was because despite a late night with champagne and dinner and she was on her phone at half six in the morning trying to get in the queue to buy them too.

:: 10:23

Just in case I didn't manage to get in and she was not at all bothered about Star Wars.

:: 10:29

The Force Awakens was a big deal on release. It grossed over $2 billion. Whether or not the story is derivative, it is emotionally for me and many others, it hits all the right notes. The Star Wars that we grew up with had become myth and legend within the world of Star Wars itself.

:: 10:50

And the protagonist, Ray, carries the audience on a journey to rediscover our lost heroes. It was a story ultimately driven by finding Luke Skywalker, and as the film progressed, I was just as invested in that outcome as Ray is.

:: 11:07

And when Ray finds him, the movie ends. She stands in front of him, and Luke doesn't say a single word.

:: 11:16

Once again, we then enter another period of waiting, two years for the next movie to come out. Ryan Johnson's the Last Jedi, two full years of theories and discussions in chat rooms with friends about how amazing it was going to be to see Luke Skywalker back in live action at the height of his powers.

:: 11:36

During those two years I left London, I rebuilt my relationship with my best friends, stronger than ever. I cried real, genuine tears driving down the M4 when I found out that Carrie Fisher had died.

:: 11:49

We got married, we got a dog. We called her Carrie. I was working in jobs that I didn't want to be in because that's what I thought I should be doing with my life. I continue to be totally oblivious to my mental health, getting a lot worse.

:: 12:04

Then the Last Jedi came out. Now this episode doesn't exist to relitigate the discussion around the movie, but to some degree I need to a bit.

:: 12:14

I naturally went to a midnight screening of Episode 8 and left bleary eyed around 3:00 in the morning, feeling disappointed. The movie was beautiful to look at, but my hero, my Jedi knight, Luke, was not the hero that I had been waiting so desperately to see.

:: 12:33

He was bitter and angry and lost. He never even holds his own lightsaber outside of Rashomon style flashbacks. I felt completely let down.

:: 12:45

But being the Star Wars fan and more so, the film fan that I was and still am, I realised that I hadn't judged the film on its own merits. Instead, I'd been holding it up against my hope, and maybe it could be argued at that point in my life, my need to see my childhood hero be that hero again.

:: 13:10

So I went back.

:: 13:12

And I found a profound appreciation for the movie. I found more in Luke than I ever had before, and he had always been my hero.

:: 13:22

Yes, my hero had fallen, but he was no longer a plucky teenage adventurer, an impatient powerful student, or an implacable master.

:: 13:32

More so than in any of the other movies, he was a human being.

:: 13:39

He was a human being who had faltered and failed, who had almost entirely lost himself. But he was still able to come back and live up to what he and those around him had faith that he could be.

:: 13:54

Episode 9, then the rise of Skywalker has some things in it that I like and some things that I don't. I did love the trailers, they were really, really great season. One of the Mandalorian was around that time and that was super charming and great fun. That Helped.

:: 14:13

The rise of Skywalker was the only movie that I had to make time to go out and see in the cinema after my son, my first son, was born in the summer of 2019.

:: 14:25

It was the last movie that I saw in the cinema before COVID.

:: 14:30

Then you know it was lockdowns. Parenthood. We got my son, Archer. A cuddly grow. Good. That's baby Yoda. For those of you who aren't as obsessed as me, and he's only got Grogu because he didn't like the cuddly Chewbacca that I got him first.

:: 14:46

I moved to another company and then.

:: 14:50

Gets a little bit heavier here. I had a full on suicidal depression and anxiety breakdown.

:: 14:59

I basically ceased to function as a human being for a full year.

:: 15:05

I am incredibly fortunate that I have such a wonderful wife and incredible family and friends.

:: 15:11

And the NHS, because without them I wouldn't be doing the work that I'm doing now. I wouldn't be making this show. I frankly, I wouldn't be alive.

:: 15:23

But something else that helped me through was.

:: 15:27

Luke Skywalker.

:: 15:29

And I've never made this clear before. I would have felt stupid saying it, but it's kind of the point of this episode. So here we go. I looked for inspiration in Luke's journey, and I found it.

:: 15:44

Luke had lost his way. He had failed. He had lost all belief in himself. He was full of self loathing and hatred.

:: 15:57

But he found his way back.

:: 16:00

And if he could, then maybe I could too.

:: 16:02

Maybe there was something on the other side of that darkness for me, where the person who had fallen and failed, could just be a part of the person that I wanted to be for my wife, my sons, for my friends, for everyone in my life.

:: 16:22

I think that Yoda says it best in the Last Jedi;

:: 16:28

I can't be what she needs me to be.

:: 16:36

Heeded not my words, did you. Pass on what you have learned. Strength, mastery.

:: 16:40

But weakness, folly, failure also. Yes, failure. Most of all. The greatest teacher failure is.

:: 17:00

Luke. We are what they grow beyond. That is the true burden of all masters.

:: 17:13

So now you know just how important Luke Skywalker as a character is to me as a person.

:: 17:23

How Luke has helped to make me the person that I am.

:: 17:29

But now I want to know why.

:: 17:32

What is it about the iconography of those films and that character that was so appealing to me specifically as a child? Why is one of my most formative memories finding a broken fishing rod that I could better pretend was a lightsaber than a stick? Why and how is Luke so important to me as a character?

:: 17:52

That he was at least partially responsible for getting me through the most profoundly dark period of my entire life.

:: 18:02

Why do I love Luke Skywalker?

:: 18:09

As you might expect, there are myriad pieces out there written by real, proper academics who have looked at Star Wars, its impact on individual people, and society at large, and the reason for that impact. It makes sense to me to look at this Chronologically.

:: 18:29

Trying to see what's appealing about Star Wars to kids, what might have made it stick with me into adulthood, and then looking at what academia has to say about strong bonds with fictional characters.

:: 18:45

Let's talk about Star Wars as a kids movie and kids movies. Plural. Because George Lucas has been very clear from the outset he made these movies for children. Adults can and do enjoy them totally and unironically. But they are for kids.

:: 19:06

A number of places, none that were academically sourced, but across Reddit and various other forums. A lot of people make the point that the iconography of Star Wars, the imagery of World War 2 action pulp movies, the Flash Gordon.

:: 19:26

Science fiction pulp storytelling, imagery of westerns, and the kind of fairy tale aspect of Wizards and Magic and bright shining Swords has a lot to do with what would either have been in the audiences childhood or in a viewers parents childhood. I know that I grew up watching Classic World War 2 movies like Dam Busters, or bridge on the River Kwai with my dad and Star Wars uses an awful lot of that iconography. The the way the spaceships move in space is not how spaceships would actually move in space. It's like they are planes flying through an atmosphere.

:: 20:10

So much of the imagery of where Luke grows up is like a Western, whether it was shot in Tunisia as opposed to most of the famous Westerns being shot out in the Midwest in California or in Italy, it has that imagery of blowing sand, billowing ponchos and capes and vast emptiness. And there are also the aspects of fairy tales. A really good piece written by Peter Kramer that was published in 2004 makes the point that the movie is framed as a fairy tale. The opening crawl with the A long time ago in a Galaxy far, far away is probably purposefully reminiscent of "Once Upon a time."

:: 20:59

There's also the aspect that for a young kid watching the movie The opening crawl, the yellow text moving up the screen will almost certainly necessitate an older sibling or a parent an adult either reading those words out or explaining what a bunch of them mean, and creating that shared experience. That story, time experience. You've also got a literal Princess.

:: 21:26

And this made a lot of sense to me. Aside from the designs just being iconic and the concept of a lightsaber just being cool. Again, this isn't something that I've been able to find in academia particularly, but the general consensus across Star Wars fandom is that lightsabers are cool... because they're cool.

:: 21:49

There is that noble imagery, that idea of a night with a shining sword standing up against the valley, or a lone samurai standing against a vast army that is deeply, deeply evocative and powerful. Those words by Peter Kramer explaining the idea of those almost subliminal parts of fairy tale that have been included in that early movie make a lot of sense to me.

:: 22:20

So OK. Star Wars grabbed my attention because it may have had things that reminded me about media, that one or both of my parents enjoyed. It was something that I was able to bond with my older brother or my parents over and it contained iconic.

:: 22:40

Depictions of themes and ideas that come up through stories throughout time. Again, we're getting into the area of the heroes journey and I'll come back to that later.

:: 22:53

But what can there be about Luke specifically? What made me as a child decide that Luke was my guy. There is an essay by Howard Sklar of the University of Helsinki, published in 2009, called Believable Fictions on the nature of emotional responses to fictional characters.

:: 23:17

In this essay, Sklar argues that while fictional characters are obviously not literally real readers or viewers or fictional characters can often perceive and respond to them as if they were real people. Due to the imaginative processes either involved in reading or in the suspension of disbelief in watching movies or theatre.

:: 23:45

He posits that the way that readers and viewers come to get to know characters in fiction is in a similar way to how they come to understand people in their real lives. He says that with the exception of close family members who you spend a huge deal of time with, we never actually deeply know a lot about the other people in our lives, and we are constantly writing a back story for them. We are constantly making up details of their lives, even if it's subconscious. He argues that exactly the same thing can happen with fictional characters. So even as a small child, Luke is there at the beginning of episode 4 at the beginning of a New Hope, and he is a cypher. We we know very little about him. He lives with his aunt and uncle, but you don't know where his parents are. You don't know much of what his life entails. May be part of the point of the film. Is that all his life really entails? His working on this farm and we get some idea of what he would like to do. But his motivations for joining the Academy, his needs and his wants are broadly left unsaid at the beginning.

:: 25:07

And Sklar explores the idea that there's a debate in psychology over whether the emotions that people feel in response to fiction are genuine feelings, or whether they're simulated feelings, whether they're a pretence he references pretence or Make believe theory, which was developed by Kendall Walton, which argues that emotions brought on by fiction are like a make believe game for children, where the audience member is imagining those feelings rather than actually experiencing them. But Sklar challenges this with evidence that points to people having emotional responses to fiction that can be real and immersive and much more like the emotions that people experience in real life. One critic of Walton's theory, Noel Carol, argued that we do genuinely feel emotions when we engage with fiction, he notes, and references other academics Keith Oakley and Mitra Guillemain from a 1997 paper that in theatre or film or in a novel.

:: 26:24

We can concentrate on our emotions and reflect upon them in a safe place, away from the ordinary world. This being so, we can come to a better understanding of their relation to our beliefs, desires and. Sklar suggests that sometimes we do come to temporarily believe in the reality of a fiction that we're experiencing, and I can certainly attest that that is often the case for me. I get completely lost in good books or good movies. I forget where I am. I forget anything else that is around me. I get completely sucked into these worlds and so certainly for me, I feel like Sklar’s theories have some weight.

:: 27:19

OK, so it makes sense to me that I, as a person who gets sucked into media when I'm consuming it. Why? If I was constantly engaging with this film with this series of films that are engaging and exciting and draw on?

:: 27:40

All of these structural components that come from all across fiction, through human history, that's that's a good explanation for why I like the movies, they're cool. They've got lots of things that kids find cool. They were made for kids. I found some more stuff in here. That's pretty interesting. The first bit. The first part. I'm going to get into parasocial relationships, which if you have been a consumer of media and social media over the last few years is probably a term that you've heard before. My main touchstone here has been a literature review by Kathleen Gannon of Leslie University that was written in 2018. She goes into parasocial relationships with fictional characters.

:: 28:29

She references a number of other academics, Kokesh and Stena Dory, from 2015 Branch ET al. From 2013. Highlight that parasocial relationships can build more or faster through multiple viewings, and I definitely tick that box.

:: 28:49

And also Ball et al in 2017 points out more when you have familiarity with the character. But in a new form of media.

:: 29:00

And again, maybe not. When I was five or six, but when I got to 8910, these characters from Star Wars started to appear in games around me. I started to read the books. Luke was there, not just in movies, he was everywhere. He was a toy that I played with.

:: 29:20

Caucasian and Sterna Dory point out that audiences can create real, intimate relationships with characters and since as an audience member you can see and learn about a character's entire story and life, or as we saw earlier, anything that we don't learn, we are quite probably filling in for ourselves in a way that makes the most sense. It can almost feel like having a friend that confides in you that shares their experiences with you. So in one way it seems like I love Luke because Luke was there when I was a child, and I have been exposed to that character so much through my life through repetition, through watching those films, through playing the games, through playing with toys, from reading the books, we can get into another interesting concept here of character bonding.

:: 30:19

Character bonding is a a concept in psychology that academics say can give us a way to live vicariously through a character, grow emotionally, or even to process trauma, and one article breaks down that there are three types of fictional characters that people of all ages are likely to bond to. You have villains and antiheroes which never made sense to me, even if a villain or an anti hero can be charismatic and fun that never really appealed to me.

:: 30:55

But then you also have the every person who is a normal or more complex or flawed person than a typical hero or a heroine. They might be forced to be heroic at times, but they may also act irrationally or in detrimental ways or in selfish ways

:: 31:19

And then there are superhuman characters and usually, rather than giving us a way to experience difficult or complex feelings, they are about escapism. They are about representing an innate desire to be without limits.

:: 31:40

And Luke fits into both of those archetypes in the first movie. In his first movie, he's an everyman character more than anything else. He's a teenager who is stuck at home and wants to be out in the world and having adventures, and he goes on the hero's journey and he learns that. Ohh, maybe I'm a little bit magic.

:: 32:02

But then he also grows into this embodiment of self-control and power and confidence and heroism that can be extremely aspirational in a way that I don't think as a young kid I would have aspired to be like Luke, or even particularly identified with with his character. I was, I was six. I wasn't. I didn't have angst about wanting to get out and see the world and feeling stuck. I was perfectly happy in my life... I think. Mostly. But it still makes me think I watch these movies so much. Why not, Han? Why? Why is it Luke and not Han, who is widely accepted to be the more fun, the more charismatic, the more exciting character in a lot of ways. I found another interesting study by Webster and Campbell from 2023, quite a recently published one. Now this was about characters on Game of Thrones they were examining The Big 5 and Dark Triad character traits the Big 5 are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, and the dark triad are narcicism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

:: 33:29

Now, this study had 309 fans of Game of Thrones and the book series, a song of Ice and Fire that were recruited from three subreddits. It was all done online because it took place during COVID.

:: 33:49

Now what these fans had to do was first rate themselves against the Big 5 and the Dark Triad character traits and give themselves scores against them. And then they had to choose one or more characters from Game of Thrones and rate those characters that they knew on those same traits, and what Webster and Campbell found was that for a great deal of the people surveyed, they would choose characters who the subjects judged to have similar character traits as themselves.

:: 34:28

So it shows that people do perceive fictional characters, personalities in the same way that they perceive real people, but it also shows that given the choice, people will choose characters that they perceive to be similar to themselves. This is where I get into the bit that's a little bit uncomfortable?

:: 34:49

I latched onto Luke Skywalker because I thought that the way that he was as a person was maybe how I saw myself and I was watching all three of the films over and over and over and over and over again. And so it does make me wonder like ohh how how much was that Influenced by my feeling that I'm the main character of life, that I'm a hero who is destined to save the Galaxy from the baddies?

:: 35:20

Hopefully it's not because of that. Hopefully there were other aspects that appealed to me when I was a kid, but it's an interesting thought that I gravitated towards that character.

:: 35:33

And I don't feel like it was particularly aspirational. I have no recollection of actively thinking. I want to be seen by other people as I see Luke, I felt like I was just like him, and I don't know that I am in a lot of ways or maybe I am and I don't know and I should talk to a therapist about this.

:: 35:57

I think that is probably as good an explanation as any as to why I chose Luke, I guess I I can't say for sure. Maybe it was just that I liked the design of the X wing fighter and that was Luke's ship and that I thought lightsabers were the coolest thing I had ever seen, and Luke had one. So that's why he was my favourite character.

:: 36:26

Now I quickly want to go back to Kathleen Gannon and her looking into parasocial relationships with fictional characters, because I think there is something else in there that explains the insane backlash against the Last Jedi. In her paper, Gannon points out in a study by Branch et al from 2013 that when a parasocial relationship is built over time, the audience might believe that they can predict the behaviour of the character and this could account for people that watch the same piece of media repeatedly and can quote every line as they watch it. That's me, I can tell you what imagery is up on screen in Star Wars, from listening to the music, but Gannon goes on to say;

:: 37:17

Also, when new content is released, the audience will try to guess what the character is going to do next in their story arc.

:: 37:27

And that seems normal. People do that normally. Normal human beings, not just crazy people like me, do that with TV shows that they're watching. When you get a good cliffhanger and you're trying to figure out what's going to happen next, that's what that is. But I'm very sure that I'm not alone in the feelings that I developed for Luke Skywalker.

:: 37:47

And the reason I'm confident in saying that is because of the absolutely bananas backlash that the Last Jedi got when it was released. As I mentioned at the top of this episode, I was disappointed by Luke. And by the way, Luke acted in that film because I had spent years of my life imagining what he would do next. I didn't have the full context of the story. Episode 7 ends and we have no idea why Luke had exiled himself, what his reasons were, what was happening in the wider story. But I made-up answers to those questions and I made-up what Luke would do afterwards, and I was completely wrong and I'm really grateful that I took the time to revisit the movie and come to terms with it and accept the story as presented and come to find real depth and beauty in that story.

:: 38:45

However, I think that Gannon has it there, so, so many people spent such a long time building this narrative of what their Luke would do next in this situation. And so all of this negativity and all of this Awful, awful hate that the creatives behind the film got, I think, is just explained by people who have this kind of schism between the Luke they created and the Luke that they got. I would be really fascinated to know if the reaction would have been the same If episode seven and eight were one movie. It might have still been the same, but I wonder if the reaction would have been less intense.

Anyway, my hope with this show is that I will be able to actually talk to experts in related fields about these projects rather than just researching and reading, and I managed to find an expert for this episode.

:: 39:55

My name is Ben Rogers. I'm an assistant professor of management and organisation at Boston College here in Massachusetts.

:: 40:02

Ben had recently completed a very, very interesting study into the heroes journey.

:: 40:11

And I think it has some interesting kernels in there that maybe explain how identifying with Luke helped to save my life.

:: 40:21

So I primarily study how we find our lives and our work, how we find meaning in them and how we can find them meaningful. So a lot of my work is focused on the career space given I'm in the Business School, but I also do a lot of research on the ways in which we find our lives meaningful, how work fits within that, and I specifically take a narrative lens to This.

:: 40:43

We know from a lot of research that one of the primary ways in which people find meaning in their lives or kind of make meaning is through stories. The stories we tell about ourselves, the stories we hear about others, and so that is my typical lens with my research.

:: 40:58

Where did the idea for this study come from? What was the impetus for you to be involved in this?

:: 41:04

I just as part of my research programme, I I I've been circling around, you know, what are the ways in which we can help people to find their lives, to be more meaningful. And you know, there's just general sort of moral reasons why I think that's good. But there's also a lot of evidence that shows that, you know, people who find their lives more meaningful and their jobs more meaningful that that leads to them to have better well-being and perform better. And all these host of benefits. So that's like the overall like goal of the research that I do and I had been considering ways in which you know stories play into this and going back to, you know, when I was a teen, I had, I learned about this idea of the heroes journey, which we'll get into. But this, like, sort of story structure that seems to be really impactful. And I was aware that there was this sort of template that screenwriters used to write better stories or to write, you know, more impactful, particularly Hollywood blockbuster.

:: 42:03

And I was speaking with my co-author Kurt Grey, who's a psychologist at UNC, and he had a similar background of of knowing about the heroes journey and templates. And we kind of realised that maybe we could use this tip or this advice that was often given the screenwriters of, like, if you want to write a compelling story, use the hero's journey. like I wonder if that would work for those stories we tell about our own lives. What if people trying to slot their own experiences into that framework? Might that be helpful?

:: 42:32

How did you go about conducting this study?

:: 42:35

So Kurt Grey, that had done a little bit of initial work on this. We kind of had come to this idea independently of each other and then we realised we had the shared space. So he had he had done a little bit of work in terms of like we want to study the hero's journey. So Joseph Campbell was this mythologist who kind of discovered or or put it together that all of these stories in modern day going back to, you know, thousands of years prior, think like Gilgamesh, the Iliad, all these stories. They all followed this template and so he was a mythologist and he wrote this book hero with 1000 faces and in which he kind of laid out this theory and and showed, you know, the the template and his template is 17 steps. So he said that most stories are most very enduring stories follow this 17 step process. And you know the specifics vary, but like they all have these same sort of 17 plot points, and if you're not very familiar with psychological science, having 17 elements of something would be really unwieldy. It would be hard for us to kind of ask people about all of those items, and like some of the things kind of coalesce around each other. So the first step was figuring out like, how do we kind of take this really broad set of steps that are also a little bit like dated in some respects?

:: 43:54

So how do we update this for the modern day, but then also combine it into a few elements? What we found were seven key elements of this story, a protagonist, so like the central hero, a moment of shift. So kind of the first step into either a magical world or a change of experience. Quest, so that they're on some sort of overall mission that they're seeking to do. They have allies along the way with them. It can be won several. Then with those allies, they face some sort of challenge, and that can be, you know, difficult circumstances and nemesis of some sort. Then by facing those challenges and going through that, they transform in some fundamental way depending on the story, they may gain magical powers. They may just gain personal insight about themselves. But then the final part of it is they take what they've learned. They take this transformation and they return back to their home community to benefit others with their newfound powers or insight. So once we had those elements and we developed what we call the heroes journey Scale, which is a 21 Item questionnaire where people are able to take it and answer various questions that kind of get at to what extent does their do they think their life matches a hero's journey? And then you're able to see, you know, if someone has a really high score on this scale, that means they see their life as really similar to Hero's journey. If the score is really low, they're like maybe my life is not that similar to hero.

:: 45:16

And what we did is we took that scale and then we looked at how does that relate to various things and in particular, we looked at meaning in life was the main focus. And what we found was across a range of different samples, a range of different participants, people who perceived their own life to be more similar to a hero's journey story. They thought their lives were more meaningful.

:: 45:38

Wow.

:: 45:40

And what was really cool is we showed that it people who naturally told their life story as a hero's journey. They also happen to rate their lives as more meaningful and all that stuff.

:: 45:50

So some of the people that were part of the study were were applying that framework to them, to their own lives sub effectively subconsciously.

:: 46:01

Yeah, exactly. That's that's the is. The way you construct the story in your head that is going to be how it then comes out when you're asked to tell it spontaneously. It's one of those things that.

:: 46:03

Incredible.

:: 46:13

It feels as an academic you stumble upon these things rarely where you're like ohh like this relationship is real and it it's there I can get into the basics of science of when we can control for other things that we thought explain it. But the relationship kind of held across all of these circumstances.

:: 46:28

Was there an aspect of this where people who didn't necessarily frame their life in that way... Was there a framework to encourage them to try that and see if it changed their outlook or would that be like a future step?

:: 46:42

Yeah, we we did. And that was one of my main goals cause I I set up front, you know, one of my goals is not just to study these things, but to figure out, you know, how do we actually help people to find more meaning in their lives. So given that, like, there seemed to be this relationship, yeah. Our next step was; Can we have, can we ask anyone? Can we help anyone tell their life story as a hero's journey? And then, you know, hopefully have these benefits. So the the last set of studies in the paper we developed what we call like the restoring intervention. So we had sort of a guided series of questions, reflection questions where we went element by element and ask people to reflect on how aspects of their lives might match up to a hero's journey, and we weren't telling them you're writing a hero's journey. We were just saying, you know, we're helping you write a life story. Here's some questions how to do it. And a couple of examples of that. So like for shift, we asked, you know, what change of setting or novel experience prompted your journey to become who you are today because you know, if you might ask a random person like have you had a important moment of shift in your life, they might go. No, I don't think so. But if you ask them to go, you know, there's this. People often have these types of experiences. Have you ever had it reflect on that? And so they write, you know, a series of short paragraphs. And then at the end, we'd say we'd show them what they had just written was, which was essentially a short little heroes Journey made-up of their own life experiences, and we'd ask them, you know, reflecting on this story, describe how you might see yourself as a hero on a journey. So we brought it all back together. And what we found was people who engaged in this restoring intervention. They showed all of the same benefits of more meaning in life, more resilience, all these, you know.

:: 48:25

Things that we are really excited about, you know, compared to a control condition of people kind of doing just like a neutral self reflection. So we were able to show that it wasn't just people who maybe were already living really heroic lives who were experiencing these benefits, but anyone could sort of benefit by taking their life experiences, slotting them into the hero's journey template, and then going like, oh, wow, I'm living a more heroic life than maybe I realised.

:: 48:52

Because people often struggle to kind of like accept that, like, yeah, maybe you're not, you know, holding a lightsaber and fighting people. But you do have these elements of the hero's journey in your own life. If you just kind of take a Step back and reflect on it.

:: 49:07

Wow, that's... I'm I'm slightly lost for words which is, which is terrible for audio format, but were you able to get into why this might be the case?

:: 49:22

The reason we thought this would work was sort of twofold. So one is whether people know the term hero's journey or not, or are familiar with, you know, Hollywood blockbusters, you know, in terms of how they have similar plot structures, a lot of time, that doesn't matter, but they people are very familiar with this like plot structure because it's just, it's in so many stories. It's in so many movies, like you're just exposed to it in life. So one reason we thought this would work was there's some theory and some research about when you tell your life story in a way that is very coherent and very interpretable to others like that feels good. Like you go like. "Oh, I've seen a story like this. Like, I know I kind of understand the plot, even if, like, it's new". So we thought that just by sort of it being similar in structure that might be helpful because the story would just seem more coherent. Often our lives are kind of all over the place. But if you happen to sort of see your life in this like Nice little plot structure, you're able to more easily see how meaningful your life is. The second one that I think is a little more interesting, or at least speaks to my sort of love of stories a little more, it's the idea that it's not like a coincidence that this the hero's journey is a long standing structure and sort of has existed over time. A lot of research kind of looks at the reason it's so enduring. The reason people love these types of stories is because it really captures a lot of values and beliefs about like what a hero is and what, like a meaningful life.

:: 50:57

So things like facing challenges and not, you know, backing down from transforming and improving yourself over time, having allies, having people who support, giving back at the end, these are all very like noble values that more or less across different cultures and across time have generally held as just a valuable thing. And so the idea that the the hero's journeys, this narrative that connects all of these really important human values, and that's why it's endured so long. So the idea, and why we thought it would help meaning in life is if your story has a lot of these elements, that means it connects to a lot of values that a lot of people hold of the importance of others. The importance of growing and changing and giving back.

:: 51:42

And we tested it in a few different ways. My favourite study that we ran was we took essentially that hero's journey intervention that I described, the restoring one. And we tested a couple alternate versions. In one. We took those same prompts, but then we randomised them. So instead of it being like a nice, like chronological story that made sense, It just kind of was in random order and we didn't have people like connected at the end.

:: 52:06

And you'd think that, you know, if they're still reflecting on these positive things, maybe that would help their life feel more meaningful anyways. And it helped a little bit. But our intervention actually helped meaningfully more than the randomised version, which kind of speaks to the idea that the coherence and the way that this story connects is really important.

:: 52:25

We also had one where we just had people reflect on, you know, how might you be a hero without kind of going through the individual elements and that also was not as effective as our our intervention. So we showed in different ways that it's both this like coherence, the way the story kind of connects together in a logical order and emphasising these values, these elements that are really important just like being human being that are captured in the story, both of those contribute to why the hero's journey seems to increase meaning in life.

:: 53:02

That is just a short section of the incredible conversation that I was able to have with Ben and I'm really, really grateful that he took the time to talk to me about it.

:: 53:17

I feel a bit emotional listening back to it here in the edit.

:: 53:23

Having people scientifically, quantifiably be able to say that this hero's journey, this structure that has appeared in stories and in cultures throughout history, can have that profound an impact on one's life when it's applied to your own story.

:: 53:55

I think that goes a good part of the distance to answering the question "Why do I love Luke Skywalker?"

:: 54:04

It was a perfect storm of the movies being appealing to young kids, me watching them over and over and over and over again. Me perhaps either idolising or identifying with Luke. And finally, in a far more profound way than I ever expected to have come across in a silly podcast I've been thinking about making for a while, The fact that Luke for me embodied this journey that has aspects that have been important to human beings across all cultures for the entire time that we have been able to share stories.

:: 55:05

So that was episode one of why do I love this

:: 55:11

Huge thank you to Ben Rogers for his incredible warmth, insight and generosity. Thank you to Mark Asquith and the folks over at Captivate who provide hosting for all of my podcasts. Thank you to George Lucas and Mark Hamill for giving me Luke Skywalker.

:: 55:28

And finally, thank you to you for listening.

:: 55:33

If you enjoyed the show, please consider giving it a review on your podcast app of Choice or recommended to a friend if you think that they'll get a kick out of it.

:: 55:42

I really do want to know what people think of the show and the format so you can find my social media links in the show notes do drop me a line.

:: 55:51

There's also a link to a guest booking form. If you have a concept, object, activity or ideology that means the world to you and you'd like to talk to me about it, fill in the form.

:: 56:05

This show and the music in it were written, performed and edited by me, Drew Toynbee, and the show has been produced with the help of Expanded Universe.

:: 56:16

See you next time.