George Lucas’s Last Great Epic Is an Art Museum

What’s your story? The story that you live by, that your cells are geared to, even or especially when you’re not thinking about it? Do we create our own meaning, or should we be trying to discover the meaning that created us? Is it the tractor beams of heavenly love that hold us here, like God’s guy ropes, or are we adrift? When George Lucas, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, began writing the screenplay for Star Wars , he had a copy of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces clamped, so to speak, between his teeth.

For Campbell, a professor with a popular touch, life was nothing more or less than a summons to greatness.

Across cultures, and across the history of the human imagination, he had discerned it, “the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story”: the hero’s journey.

Departure, initiation, return.

Living is a heroic business, Campbell insisted.

Stacked with trials, sure, and frightful reversals, but with the grail floating always ahead of us, calling us onward.

Use the Force, Luke.

Let go! And now Lucas has built a temple to story.

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which opens this month in Exposition Park , just south of downtown Los Angeles, is a swooping, brain-beggaring, super-sexy, twin-bodied leviathan of a megastructure, white as the gown of Princess Leia, half spaceship, half cetacean, all curves, Shangri-la for skateboarders if they could ever get inside.

Co-founded by Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, it hoists itself into twinkling California emptiness on an 11-acre site (formerly two parking lots) next to the Natural History Museum and the L.A.

Memorial Coliseum.

Walking toward it, you think: Jesus.

Eighth wonder? Squillion-dollar folly? Architectural embodiment of some impulse from spiritus mundi ? Entering it, you stop thinking altogether.

As I passed from the dreamy light of the covered forecourt, a single lens-like portal in its ceiling (for maximum diffraction of heavenly tractor beams), and into the space-gobbling atrium, I was conscious only of a delighted vertigo.