Roubando o fogo dos deuses: como Hollywood reconquistou sua hegemonia com a jornada do herói em Star Wars

Abstract

This dissertation aims to develop the trajectory of the hero's journey from its origin with Star Wars in 1977, and throughout the other eight films of the space saga created by George Lucas, which resulted in three trilogies. The specific objective is to identify the use of this formula that was employed in the first produced trilogy (Episodes IV, V and VI) and then gradually de-characterized in the other two trilogies (Episodes I, II, III, VII, VIII and IX). This project falls within the "Aesthetics and Technologies of Audiovisual Media" research line of the Master's program in Communication and Languages at UTP, due to its interest in studying how the success of Star Wars was used by the Hollywood system through an aggressive marketing. Furthermore, "Hollywoodization" is a mass phenomenon, relating to the study of the globalization of the narrative formula, which are pertinent topics within the research area. When we study the works of Vladimir Propp (1997) and Joseph Campbell (1992), we realize that there is a strong relationship between religions, mythology, fairy tales, and folklore. They simultaneously represent the various phases of the same story; Roland Barthes argues that myth is consumed innocently simply because the vast majority of people do not see that there is a semiological system behind the myth and therefore absorb it inductively. The French philosopher Guy Debord (1997) presents our society as spectacularizing in the sense that never before in our history has there been such an alienating submission to the empire of the media as now. According to him, the professionals of spectacle invade borders, conquer all existing domains, and consciously and systematically organize the empire of modern passivity. The analysis of the historical roots of the folktale through the readings of Vladimir Propp (1997), who researched the common origins of folk legends; Mikhail Bakhtin (2002), who studied the manifestations of popular culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; and Peter Burke (1998), who in a way continued Bakhtin's studies by studying popular culture in the modern age, in addition to the research of Marshall McLuhan (2002), which shows how mass media profoundly affect the 7 physical and mental life of man, and that of Umberto Eco (1993), which discusses the role of man in the face of new technologies and the way he relates to them, to art, and to his narrative heritage, are relevant to the theme of this research. Finally, Carl Jung’s (2002) theory of the collective unconscious demonstrated that we instinctively react to a series of symbols that are common to all peoples and that we fail to perceive that, despite all our rationalization and technological efficiency, we remain possessed by forces beyond our control. This research is based on reading and studying the main works in the field, drawing from a significant bibliography, in order to find the necessary foundation for the development of the proposal, as well as analyzing the narrative structure of the films that make up the three Star Wars trilogies to prove the use of the hero's journey in the original trilogy and how this changed in the subsequent trilogies.