JAMES TOEWS
Phantom hope

It finally arrived. In 1999, The Phantom Menace came to town, and a passionately enthusiastic crowd was waiting for this newest of the Star Wars movies.

Even before its arrival, The Phantom Menace promised to be the most profitable movie ever made, with projected sales from the movie and merchandise counted in the billions of dollars.

What makes the Star Wars movies so popular? When asked this question in a TV interview, George Lucas observed, “We live in cynical, sarcastic times. Much of the entertainment industry reflects this. . . . The Star Wars story is about good conquering evil, about light winning over darkness. It is a happy, clean, naive story. It is about heroes who live up to their expectations. In the dark climate of our times, it is a story that our society craves.”

George Lucas is not only a brilliant filmmaker; he is also a shrewd social analyst. We do indeed live in a time when sarcasm and cynicism mark much of what is done in the name of entertainment. It was not always so. Much of what we know as classical art was unabashedly romantic and idealistic. Where did that idealism originate? It originated in the firm belief that the universe is a place of design and order, the work of a loving Creator.

Somewhere along the way, that belief was abandoned. God was considered unnecessary – a myth created by the ancients to drive away the terrors of long cold nights. In the early years of life without God, there was an exhilaration of the kind that often accompanies newly found freedom. Had clinging to ancient myths kept mankind from reaching the stars? Could it be that without belief in God weighing him down, man could become Superman?

In the last few decades, however, the exhilaration of life without divine meaning has begun to fade. Without a Creator, the universe really is a lonely, hopeless place.

Society is again searching for something to believe in. It is refreshing to see heroism and idealism making a revival. It is only too bad that the revival is only in stories that even their authors consider naive. The idealism of The Phantom Menace is a phantom hope.