McDowell records Lucas saying: “The dark side…is like a huge cancer, alive, festering – both a reminder of a moral state and, at the same time, symptom and symbol of a very sick society.” You have a choice between them, but the world works better if you’re on the good side … I wanted it to be a traditional moral study … there is always a lesson to be learned.” Belief does matter in ways that reflect the moral barometer of society and the health of its political institutions.
In an interview with Sally Kline, Lucas said: “I was trying to say, in a simple way, that there is a God and that there is both a good side and a bad side. Lucas and Tolkien understood the power of heroic myth and wove it deftly into their stories.
In his May 11 article Heroes and Anti-Heroes, Eric Patterson provides a wonderfully concise definition of a hero: “A hero is someone who fights against something larger than himself for something larger than himself.” And further, “Heroism is about the moral quality of the action, not the amount of power at one’s disposal.” Whether sourced from fiction, myth, or history, the quality of heroism is defined by courage to do the right thing, despite all temptations and discouragement. Ask those in corruption-riddled countries: can you trust your government and its bureaucracy to serve the people honestly? Many will answer with an emphatic no and wish for a world where the distinction between good and evil was clearly distinct. In our heart of hearts, we realize that belief does matter, from the box office to the Oval Office. One aspect of Christianity, as with other religions, is its casting of humanity’s ultimate struggle between our tendencies towards vice and virtue, something Tolkien and Lucas clearly understood. Both reemphasized the distinction between objective good and evil in an age marked by moral opacity.
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and George Lucas’ Star Wars.
In a secular age, two mythic stories starkly contrast good and evil with an inter-generational appeal: J.R.R.
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