The Mandalorian, the new Star Wars space western by Jon Favreau and George Lucas protégé Dave Filoni now streaming on Disney Plus, feels like vintage Star Wars. It does so despite, or perhaps as a result of, its creators’ decision to eschew the consciously “retro” approach of recent sequel films, such as The Force Awakens and The Rise of Skywalker, and to instead draw directly on the very genres, ideas, and filmmakers that captured Lucas’s imagination all those years ago. The score, by Ludwig Goransson, sounds like Ennio Morricone with Eastern instruments, evoking a cross between the lone rider and the samurai. But even more crucially, the series taps into what was behind the visuals of the original films. The Mandalorian is the portrait of a believer, grounded in his creed and rituals, in a chaotic environment where this path could lead to his persecution.
The show stars Pedro Pascal as an unnamed Mandalorian bounty hunter, “the” Mandalorian, as far as anyone knows, called “Mando” by most. He’s extremely skilled as a combatant, and his helmet is immediately recognizable. But this helmet is not just a piece of armor but also a religious head-covering that cannot be removed in front of others. It turns out that he is one of a group of Mandalorians in hiding, all of whom seek to “walk the Way of the Mandalore.” And when a bounty contract leads to a result — the possibility of harm to a child — that is unacceptable to his religious and moral code, he breaks the rules of his guild to follow the “Higher Law.” This causes an immediate and violent backlash that requires the clan to come out of hiding to help defend the hero and the child. He apologizes for forcing his people to reveal themselves, which will require them to seek a new sanctuary, but the apology is unnecessary. “This is the Way,” his fellow Mandalorian replies. Morality and the sacred order must be upheld, even at personal cost.
Mando’s actions put him in the role of surrogate father to the child, which in itself sets up a homage to the legendary Japanese comic, film, and TV series Lone Wolf and Cub, which follows a wandering samurai and his baby son. Lone Wolf and Cub was contemporaneous with Star Wars, rather than an influence on it, but it drew from the same well of Japanese jidaigeki (period drama) that George Lucas did.
Lucas has spoken about the experience of watching Akira Kurosawa’s jidaigeki films about samurai and feudal Japan — including classics such as The Hidden Fortress, The Seven Samurai, and Yojimbo — without any background in Japanese history, culture, or religion. He had to learn that world experientially. He sought to replicate this dynamic in Star Wars, taking a “show, not tell” approach to introducing his galaxy, even when it came to the universe’s metaphysics. This is the feeling captured by The Mandalorian from the outset. We observe the Mandalorian religion in action long before it is laid out, when Mando and army veteran Cara Dune (played by Gina Carano) explain: “Mandalorian isn’t a race. It’s a creed.”
Star Wars features fervent believers (“may the Force be with you”), amused skeptics (“I’ve never seen anything to make me believe there’s one all-powerful Force controlling everything”), and those actively hostile to faith (“your sad devotion to that ancient religion”). Lucas chose to show this diversity rather than to take too explicit a stance. He knows that the Force is real, but he leaves it up to the viewer to learn this for himself.
Critics often cite Star Wars’s debt to the mythologist Joseph Campbell, particularly his notion of “the hero’s journey” contained in his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Often overlooked is Campbell’s belief that all myths and religions emerged from a primordial monotheism, written into the universe and all that reside in it. And religion doesn’t simply consist of “faith.” It also consists of training and initiation to take the young boy into manhood, grounded in rituals that help him transcend his lower self and understand his place in the world. This pattern could be found in every traditional society, and there is much to be said about the problems generated by its absence today.
As Cambridge theologian Timothy Winter explained in a 2016 lecture, the hero “grows into a role of sacred warriorhood. And that’s present in all of the Chinese, the Indian, the Islamic [legends]. It’s a universal legend, as [Campbell] saw it, of humanity. And [Lucas] used this essentially sacred story, with its quasi-static hippy-ish dimension of ‘the Force be with you,’ as a way of retelling for modern audiences [this] really ancient story.”
Winter’s analysis echoes the words of Lucas himself, who explained in the 1999 Phantom Menace Scrapbook,
I’ve been a Star Wars fan all my life. But I’ve only just picked up on how well the series reflects the observation of the eighth century Baghdadi poet Abu al Atahiya that “in every thing there is a sign that indicates that He is One.”
Star Wars is a didactic text dressed up as a B-movie. And this is an aspect of the mythos that the writers of The Mandalorian take very seriously. Lucas advised Favreau, “We enjoy the stories as adults, but really, storytelling is about imparting the wisdom of the previous generations on to the children.” We’ve come to sneer at morality plays today, finding the notion of spiritual or moral instruction through entertainment patronizing. Yet for just about every culture, narrative and moral education work as a pair. The Mandalorian has been out for just a few weeks, but by way of Japan and America, it taps into this much older, universal tradition. This is the Way.
Jibran Khan is a freelance writer and researcher. From 2017 to 2019, he was the Thomas L. Rhodes fellow at the National Review Institute.
