LPTs for the generations to live up to their archetypal role

[sbarrera]

(06-25-2021, 06:37 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(06-25-2021, 02:08 PM)sbarrera Wrote: Eric, I wish I had time to watch these videos. It sounds intriguing.

Depending on the time, generations in a film may be opposite in generational archetype from the  characters that they portray. As an example, the original Star Wars has no prominent Lost (then mostly too old) or X actors (then too young) to play Adaptive/Artist roles. 

Obi Wan Kenobi is clearly an Idealist as an austere figure from a rapidly-fading time. He has the moral authority of the Grey Champion. Alec Guinness, a British GI,  who had already had a long and distinguished career in movies, portrayed this character. But note well that Ian Cushing (1913-1994) plays an imperial overlord as Grand Muff Tarkin, the sort of person who lusts for power for its own sake and exercises it brutally. For this I see Axis war criminals Koki Hirota (Prime Minister of Japan during the butchery of Shanghai), Wilhelm Frick (Nazi Minister of the Interior before Himmler, who formulated Nazi legal codes including the Nuremberg Laws), Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel (who turned the Wehrmacht into accomplices of the Nazi New Order of mass murder), and Rodolfo Graziani, butcher of the Italian Empire in Africa. Three of those four died dangling with ropes around their necks, and I am astonished that Graziani did not end up much the same way. 

Idealists can do great harm, too.   

Han Solo (Harrison Ford) is a pecuniary mercenary who ends up on the right side to save his skin. He has burned the Empire a few times too many to avoid being a fugitive. He's good at what he does, and he is the perfect mentor for a pair of still-wet-behind-the-ears Heroes. Harrison Ford in real life is a late-wave Silent, but he plays a rogue who had to go onto the straight-and-narrow just to be useful enough to survive. 

Darth Vader is really two actors: David Prowse (1935-2020) on the screen as the physical actor and James Earl Jones as the voice of the character. Both are Silent, and they play a character arguably the worst possible Nomad/Reactive type: someone whose morals are largely to take revenge on those who have hurt him or get in his way.   

 Luke and Leia are both Boomers (Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher), but they are clearly Hero-like figures in the saga. They may stand for broad principles from the distant past but have no obvious stake in the preservation of a decrepit, moribund pre-Crisis world. 

....OK, just consider two of the most frequent performers in Western movies. John Wayne is a GI who mostly plays Gilded characters; in Western movies, Clint Eastwood is a real-life Silent who mostly plays Gilded figures in any Western movies. Both were fine actors, and most fine actors can portray people very dissimilar to themselves. OK, the Gilded are a strange composite of a generation that started as undeniably Reactive/Nomad but that took on many Civic/Hero traits if on the winning side of the American Civil War. The Lost were never that, and X will never be that.

There's no doubt that Star Wars fits into the generational archetypes very neatly, and the whole Joseph Campbell Hero's Journey.