Star Wars Exhibition Explores Human Identity 62
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that a new exhibition has opened at the Montreal Science Center that explores human identity through the Star Wars saga and its quirky characters combining the latest scientific research in areas of psychology, neuropsychology, and genetics with some 200 costumes, props, models, and artwork from the Lucasfilm archives to ask the fundamental questions: who we are and how do we become who we are? Visitors to the exhibition will rediscover their favorite Star Wars characters 'in a whole new light' while also developing a better understanding of their own complex identity. 'Since Star Wars takes place in a fantasy world, the characters need to be identifiable so that the audience can connect to them,' says Star Wars creator George Lucas. 'These larger-than-life characters come complete with friends, enemies, values, and beliefs. This exhibition examines how the Star Wars characters are like us, what we may have in common, and what makes up our individual identities.' Each visitor is given a bracelet, which records the decisions they make during the tour and each visitor's decisions combine to create an avatar, which is revealed at the end of the tour. 'When I finally took the tour with the audio guide and bracelet, it was thrilling,' says LucasFilm exhibits manager Kyra Bowling. 'When I saw my hero (avatar) at the end, I felt like a kid again. After I was done I immediately went through a second time and made different decisions so I could end up with a different hero.'"
My finger you pull! (Score:1)
Re:My finger you pull! (Score:5, Funny)
I hope they left Ja Ja out the back
I hope they shot Ja Ja out the back.
Re:My finger you pull! (Score:5, Funny)
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Jar Jar's not human so... wait a minute, NONE of the Star Wars characters are human -- they're all from a galaxy long long ago and far far away. So WTF does Star Wars have to do with human Identity?
You guys are going to make me RTFA, aren't you?
Great, remember to examine girlfriends too! (Score:3, Funny)
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Says 'StarTrekGirl'...
The she-nerds always swing that way.
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Says 'StarTrekGirl'...
The she-nerds always swing that way.
Further proof that women are more mature, intelligent people than men.
Prime example (Score:3)
This exhibition examines how the Star Wars characters are like us, what we may have in common, and what makes up our individual identities.
The prime example is CowboyNeal and Jabba the Hutt.
Luminous beings are we (Score:2)
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Turns out that was just the inane mutterings of an old man. It was actually an internal form of the Venom suit, and there was a blood test for "the force" the whole time. No explanation was given for how we go from measurable, verifiable phenomena to crazy religion in the span of a generation in a galactic civilization....
Please don't give George any more money. He won't spend on good things.
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Propaganda. Sort of how the Taliban went from being supported as freedom fighters to being removed as a repressive, terrorist-supporting regime in an even shorter span of time.
Or how a young woman testifying in front of Congress about how 'birth control pills' are often used for non-contraceptive treatments and should be covered by health insurance because it can often be cost prohibitive to the people who need it most, became a 'slut' and a 'prostitute' in the course of an afternoon for the Republican tal
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Oh give it a rest, douche bag. Do you have to spout anti-Conservative diatribes everywhere? This topic doesn't have a damned thing to do with politics, so just STFU.
Pretty much everything has something to do with politics. Certainly any extended piece of fiction is bound to have politics bound up in it somehow or other, unless it is extaordinarily abstract.
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Who you're gonna believe? A 900-year old warrior monk who rises car-sized objects into air with the power of his mind, trains an apprentice in a few days well enough to actually survive a
Is it me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or do "exhibitions" like this read more into the material than was ever originally there? I really don't think Lucas is deep enough to embed philosophical questions about psychology, neuropsychology, and genetics, or gave two hoots about our "individual identities"...
Its a series of films, people. Not much else.
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Actually it was cowboys and Indians all over again. I thought it was derivative shit when it came out and I still think it is derivative shit. Like most blockbuster movies it has to be the lowest common denominator tosh in order to attract the maximum number of punters over the doorstep into the theaters. Don't get me wrong, it makes entirely suitable entertainment for children and grown ups with insomnia.
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I think the advantage of Star Wars is that it contains pretty much every stereotype and cliché, making it easier to demonstrate the psychology pseudo-science.
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I thought it was derivative shit when it came out and I still think it is derivative shit.
Every new book, movie, song, painting, is "derivative shit". Art is like engeneering and science, in that everything new comes from what has come before.
Romeo and Juliet has been rewritten thousands of times and will be rewritten thousands of more times..
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I thought it was derivative shit when it came out and I still think it is derivative shit.
Every new book, movie, song, painting, is "derivative shit". Art is like engeneering and science, in that everything new comes from what has come before.
Romeo and Juliet has been rewritten thousands of times and will be rewritten thousands of more times..
Yes, but there are still great derivative works and absolutely shitty derivative works.
Romeo and Juliet and the Star Wars series are not artistically equal just because they are both derivatives.
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Re:Is it me... (Score:4, Interesting)
Star Wars is directly influenced by the work of Joseph Campbell
That's just a bunch of horseshit Lucas made up years later (the man reedits his own history almost as much as he reedits his movies). The only mythology in Star Wars is cobbed from the Authurian legend (the boy king hidden away, the wizard Merlin, the Sword in the stone, etc.). And I suspect even that was taken third-hand from the Kurosawa films that Lucas studied at USC.
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link?
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We'll, I can't prove a negative, so why don't you give me a link to any interview before the mid-80's where Lucas even mentioned Joseph Campbell?
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In broad structuralist terms, you could say that the Odyssey, Great Expectations and Uwe Boll's Alone in the Dark are similar, but that tells you precisely nothing about how good they are.
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Ooooh, directly influenced. As in "if we stick his name on it, it gives our work more cache than its crappy quality deserves."
And even if that were true, Campbell's own original ideas are clever soundbites without much substance. Most of his actual contribution has probably in getting people to look at the original myths again, where scores of Hollywood screenwriters, devoid of their own ideas, have copied plots and personalities from.
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Besides, Han shooting first makes him a really excellent anti-hero who eventually becomes a real hero. Han shooting last makes for a pretty boring and rather trite "hero in disguise". A deep, intellectual thinker would have gone with the first Han, but Lucas went with the second.
That's the sad thing: He's still an anti-hero who eventually becomes a hero. He's still a smuggler who cares only about wealth and saving his skin who is more than happy to solve his problems with a blaster. It's not like the changed shot establishes that he's unwilling to shoot first out of a sense of honor, just that he didn't in this case.
So instead, it just takes the edge off his character by not establishing that he definitely is willing to shoot first, makes him seem slow on the uptake, and establi
Extended universe (Score:2)
do "exhibitions" like this read more into the material than was ever originally there?
Yes, and that's partly why Star Wars is still so popular. There's always more stuff because it's still growing, and that is because people are allowed to add to the universe (mostly through books, computer games and the Clone Wars series).
I really don't think Lucas is deep enough to embed philosophical questions about psychology, neuropsychology, and genetics, or gave two hoots about
Agreed, but he also doesn't mind people building on, making fun of, and in other ways keeping the Star Wars universe popular.
I guess this is where we could start a discussion on the benefits(?)/limitations of copyright.
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"Exploration of human identity"? Ugh. (Score:4, Interesting)
I am so sick of "the exploration of human identity" being the only question worth pursuing when discussing works of art. It seems like the only thing we expect of art is that it help us answer the question of what it means to be human, and it's not like anyone can articulate a straight answer to that question, except in that the art itself is its own irreducible answer. It's a "tree falls in the forest" kind of question: its main purpose is to make the person asking it look smart; no answer is required.
Sci-fi fandom is especially guilty of pushing this sort of treacle. But let's be honest here: human identity issues are not the most interesting aspect of Star Wars, and Star Wars is not a very interesting subject for the exploration of human identity. If you want to talk about what it means to be human, talk about District 9 and Source Code, just to pick two recent examples. And if you want to talk about Star Wars, let's talk about whether our own lives are all just sequels to our parents' stories.
But I get it. You just want to capitalize on a mass-market intellectual property to drive attendance at your science museum. Well, you can do it without the pompous psychobabble.
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I am so sick of "the exploration of human identity" being the only question worth pursuing when discussing works of art. It seems like the only thing we expect of art is that it help us answer the question of what it means to be human, and it's not like anyone can articulate a straight answer to that question, except in that the art itself is its own irreducible answer.
Isn't that the entire point of art, that we see into it what we want to see into it, and it reflects that vision back to us? Sometimes it's clear what the artist intended; other times, not so much. I don't think that "art is its own irreducible answer." More like it's an opportunity for us to peer more deeply into things we might normally take for granted, or only see one way. That's the true beauty of art, and what makes it more democratic than people might think. One family might buy a mass-market print o
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Really? A lot of SciFi is about fun and adventure. A lot is about technological possibilities. Some of it may be about "identity", but not in the moronic philosophical sense in which most classical literature deals with the topic.
If anybody is "especially guilty", it is pompous high literature and its academic devotees, the kind of people who traditionally are offended by SciFi.
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My point is that sci-fi has so *many* different Big Ideas, it's annoying that its serious reviewers and fans tend to focus only on the human identity question. I think they do so to emulate and prove themselves to pompous high literature devotees, who don't ask about other big ideas because their own genre has so little else to offer.
What can we learn from Star Wards in this regard? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously? Star Wars is an expensive Space Opera, stocked full of shallow stereotyped characters. I wouldn't be my first port of a call in an analysis of human identity,
"ask the fundamental questions: who we are and how do we become who we are"
We are what we do, and we become who we are by taking responsibility for what we do. We do not get to go back in time, re-write history and change events because we got them wrong the first time.
What can we learn from Star Wards in this regard? Nothing. Hans shot first.
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Now I'm depressed (Score:1)
Identifiable Characters? (Score:5, Insightful)
'Since Star Wars takes place in a fantasy world, the characters need to be identifiable so that the audience can connect to them,' says Star Wars creator George Lucas.
Dear Mr. Lucas,
Please tell this to whomever wrote and directed episodes 1, 2, 3. A lack of identifiable characters the audience can connect with was one of the biggest problems. Please refer that guy to Plinkett's reviews [redlettermedia.com] and this guy [youtube.com], who point this out, quite clearly.
In fact, you might consider firing that "director/writer" guy you've got, and finding talents like you did when you hired Lawrence Kasdan, Leigh Brackett and Irvin Kershner to write and direct Empire Strikes Back. Their story still holds up many years after the special effects have become dated. Lawrence Kasdan is still alive. Maybe he knows some good people. Maybe they could do a re-imagining of 1, 2, 3 that would actually be watchable.
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They should seriously bring Plinkett in as a consultant if they ever do anything with the Star Wars franchise again. His reviews were about 100 times more entertaining than the prequel trilogy and extremely insightful to boot.
His reviews of the TNG-cast Star Trek films were pretty good as well, but the Episode 1 review remains the best review of a film I've ever seen.
The Four Temperaments (Score:2)
If it gets kids into science.... (Score:2)
Sometimes you have to sweeten science with some sugar to engage children / the general public. Perhaps the exhibition teaches some really good science about genetics, personalities, psychology, etc, I am not sure. But it looks like they are using Star Wars as a way to engage the public. Perhaps we have to critically analyse what is being purported to being taught: is this education or entertainment? Maybe next year they will teach the same subject but use The Simpsons / Hello Kitty / other popular cultural
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Jabba, you're a wonderful human being. (Score:2)
I've seen them try to make these connections before. Meh.
crappy art (Score:2)
Most of art and literature deals with "exploring human identity". Star Wars has to be one of the crappiest examples of that and gives SciFi a bad name.