I don’t think it’s a pointless distraction at all.

But I do think once you start shifting the weight of what it’s trying to do from WHAT it’s saying, to HOW it’s saying it, you free yourself up to allowing that sort of confusion of purpose and muddy storytelling.

If your structure is no longer supporting the weight of your story, you need to change the structure accordingly. The Joseph Campbell stuff was meaningful and helpful in helping Lucas tell the “do the right thing” story. But once it became a story about BEING “Joseph Campbell Stuff,” it got waylaid.

But to clarify: I don’t think its mythological underpinnings are pointless at all - but I do think choosing to look at Star Wars solely as a myth that is mythologizing it’s own mythmaking (which is increasingly what Lucas did, in service to shifting the story’s aim from “Do the right thing” to “Forgive your dad, he loves you.”) is what inevitably leads to Star Wars being disappointing and lost.

It needs to be about more than itself. It can reference itself, it can nod to itself, and it can perpetuate its own mythmaking. But it can’t be ABOUT those things alone. Those things have to be in service to what it IS about.