Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey is a universal template that centers the experiences of a protagonist who goes on an adventure, faces challenges, and comes back full circle victorious and fundamentally changed. An excellent example that portrays the key stages of this monomyth structure is George Lucas’s Star Wars: A New Hope. The film follows the narrative of Luke Skywalker, a farm boy with dreams of becoming a Jedi. One day, Luke purchases, from some scavengers, the two droids—R2-D2 and C-3PO—who recently escaped a spacecraft hijacked by Darth Vader and his stormtroopers. While repairing R2-D2, Luke discovers that the droid is storing a request from Princess Leia intended for Obi-Wan Kenobi. Determined to deliver the message, R2-D2 sneaks off, prompting Luke and C-3PO to follow. They soon stumble upon Obi-Wan, who persuades the hesitant Luke to join him on this quest.
Here, we start to approach the fifth step in the hero’s journey, Crossing the First Threshold. This stage is where the hero, led by some ultimate motive, first exits the known/ordinary world and enters the unknown; it is when the adventure and danger really begins. As Joseph Campbell describes it: “With the personifications of his destiny to guide and aid him, the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the ‘threshold guardian’ at the entrance to the zone of magnified power.… popular belief gives him every reason to fear so much as the first step into the unexplored.” This transition could be a physical or a mental one or both. But either way, this shift is usually never easy.
In Star Wars, Crossing the First Threshold happens when Luke makes the decision to leave behind his simple life as a farm boy. In that pivotal scene, Obi-Wan takes Luke, with the droids in tow, to Mos Eisley, a busy spaceport town, to purchase a spacecraft to Alderaan to complete Leia’s request. As they approach the place, they encounter stormtroopers guarding the entrance. Obi-Wan uses his Jedi force mind tricks to bypass their security and get them into the rough cantina filled with numerous shady alien characters. There, they manage to strike a deal, after some negotiation, with a smuggler named Han Solo and his co-pilot, Wookie Chewbacca, to take them aboard the Millennium Falcon, an old but surprisingly good spacecraft, into outer space.
To fully understand how this scene embodies the Crossing the First Threshold step, it is crucial to define the known and unknown boundaries. In the context of Star Wars, Luke’s known world consists of his family’s farmland area, sheltered from the large conflicts and complexities of the unknown galaxy and beyond. Mos Eisley is not only the first place that Luke enters after leaving home as well as the stepping stool to outer space, but it is also the first time he gets a taste of terror from the aggressive, hostile alien creatures in the cantina. The scene depicts Luke’s transition from innocence.
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