'Willow' and the Farce of Mythmaking

Reminding us that behind every story is strategically-forgotten chaos

Willow, the Lucasfilm contribution to the high fantasy sphere, is almost universally regarded as a healthily beloved genre pleasantry, but one that’s not particularly good unless you really squint with your rose-tinted contact lenses.

And I’m about to give you the mother of all receipts as to why it’s actually a generational masterpiece.

In order to do that, though, we need to talk about myths first. What do we actually intellectualize when we come across words like “mythical” or “mythological?” In all likelihood, we simply regard it as more of the same parlance in the vein of storytelling, canon, fiction, lore, and other such notions.¹

But if we really, properly think about the word “myth,” we understand that it refers to culturally foundational stories that serve to explain how or why something is the way it is. These stories inform the moral and otherwise idealistic spirit of the culture that originated them, and those elements are often applied to stories that come later from within those cultures.

A clearly-defined good and evil² is perhaps the most notable of these elements, and that’s because human beings have never changed. We have always loved things that are clearly and easily defined so as to more comfortably reconcile our emotions around that thing.

And so when we stumble upon something we believe to be ethically factual, we’re compelled to present it as such by building something aspirational around it. A noble story. An inarguable codex of destiny and morality. A towering sheen of greatness. A myth.

The anti-trans crowd’s “think of the children” rhetoric is a fantastic example — it’s easier to justify one’s hatred of trans people when you’ve committed yourself to a self-serving, foundational myth of forced hormone therapy, indoctrination, and pedophilia. That hatred becomes mythologized.

In other words, the myth, as a (sub?)genre of storytelling at large, is our bullshit that styles itself as not-bullshit. Herein lies the genius of Willow, which plays with our notions of myth in a way that I’ve never seen another film do before.³

If you watch Willow straight — meaning with some fixed idea of what a “good” movie/story looks like — it is decidedly mediocre. The plotting and dialogue are narratively senseless and thematically illegible, there’s no tangible character arcs or emotional logic in the story, and the whole film just generally amounts to a hodgepodge of inconsequential genre stylings that only serve to kill an afternoon in the movie theatre in the spring of 1988.

But then, if Willow was “good,” it would only be “good” — another robust, straight-A student of the hero’s journey whose chief merits are largely shared with other “good” fantasy stories, all of which would end up being dwarfed by something like The Lord of the Rings anyway.

This to say, Willow is better than “good,” because rather than trying to be another great fantasy story, it does something completely different — it pulls back the curtain of mythmaking and suggests the more likely proceedings that served as the real-life basis for any given myth.

The proceedings in question? A complete and utter farce⁴ that happened to have a happy ending. Remember, a myth is just real-life bullshit that — through a framework informed by culture-specific morals and storytelling values — is made into not-bullshit. Willow’s adventure will go on have that framework applied to it by the Nelwyn (his village/people), but we audiences see it without that framework, and therefore see it as the farce that it is.

Indeed, the proceedings here are absolutely littered with broad, farcical strokes:

• Willow’s bumbling, on-and-off, almost entirely futile practice at magic that does not in any way correspond to his growth as a character.

• Entire scenes dedicated to Willow and Madmartigan bickering about nothing as their benignly antagonistic friendship ebbs and flows incoherently.

• Madmartigan and Sorsha falling in love unreasonably fast on nothing more than truly ridiculous love potion poetics, to the point of making out while they’re still sort of on opposite sides of a battle at Tir Asleen.⁵

• The Galladoorn army brazenly setting up camp within spitting distance of the Nockmaar stronghold gate, and getting mass-polymorphed into pigs as a result of their obtusely inept battle tactics.

• Raziel and Bavmorda — two elderly sorceresses respectively representing good and evil by way of their powerful magic — resorting to beating the snot out of each other with their bare hands.

Those are but a few of the blatantly daft shenanigans that populate the majority of Willow’s adventure. Very few of the plot beats move any sort of actual storytelling needle, and instead mostly exist to shuffle these characters in and out of each other’s spheres while delivering some gratuitous genre goods.

So how do we know that this isn’t simply bad storytelling? Well, because Willow is very transparent about the distorting nature of the myth right from the get-go.

This is shown via the High Aldwin (Billy Barty), the elderly wizard and the ostensible leader of Willow’s Nelwyn community that we meet near the beginning of the film.

• He creates a bird out of a rock and tells Willow to follow it, only to go “actually, ignore the bird” when it starts flying back towards the Nelwyn village — away from the direction that he wants Willow to go.

• He “consults the bones” to determine who’s destined to take Elora to the Daikini crossroads, and then tells Willow that “the bones tell me nothing,” only to loudly announce that “the bones have spoken” when Willow admits that he loves Elora, leading everyone else to believe that these random bones have magical scrying properties (which we know they don’t).

  • He further “consults” these bones to forcibly rope Burglekutt — Willow’s bully/nemesis — into an unwanted adventure solely to punish Burglekutt for being a douchebag.

• After Willow and two other hopefuls fail the test to become the High Aldwin’s apprentice, Willow later admits to the High Aldwin that his original answer was “stupid,” only for the High Aldwin to confirm that Willow would have passed his test if he had gone with that original answer.

  • In other words, in the context of Willow, the “stupid” stuff is also the truest/most correct stuff.

So, right out of the gate, the wise sage-type character in this movie has set a precedent for us. He’s using a mythological veneer of magical commune to give the illusion that there’s prophetic significance⁶ to the stuff that’s happening or is going to happen. But in reality, he’s just making stuff up as he goes and otherwise covering up the fact that this whole ordeal is a bunch of random balderdash.

In other words, the High Aldwin retroactively mythologizes his theatrical pseudo-prognostications so as to make them seem important and significant. In doing so, Willow (and the Nelwyn at large) has something to trust in and be inspired by as he undertakes this adventure, much like how people trust in and are inspired by myths that come from their cultures.

To that point, the Nelwyn of tomorrow will likely go on to pass down the tale of Willow generation-to-generation. This tale — this myth — will, of course, omit all the tomfoolery we audiences know this adventure to be comprised of, and repackage the whole tale as a straight, heroic, foundational odyssey so as to inspire the Nelwyn people.

Folks like the High Aldwin will then push this myth as the truth of what happened, because it looks better — more inspirational — than what actually happened.

And it goes even further than the High Aldwin. This film is called Willow, and yet Warwick Davis — who portrays the eponymous Willow — is the third name on the marquee. This movie knows that Willow’s adventure mostly involves him just kinda being there as he and his friends trip and fall through the events of the film, the events themselves also being things that just kinda happen.

Elsewhere, Queen Bavmorda is told of a prophecy wherein she’s betrayed by her daughter Sorsha, which she writes off as poppycock. Sorsha does switch sides, but there’s nothing significant (narratively or otherwise) about that betrayal, despite her betrayal somehow being important enough to warrant a prophecy. In these two elements (Bavmorda calling the prophecy false, and Sorsha’s betrayal turning out to be utterly trivial in every way that actually matters), the relationship between myths and the hogwash they’re placed upon is evoked yet again.

Furthermore, Bavmorda meets her ultimate demise because she clumsily knocks over a few bowls of mysterious red liquid that cause her to evaporate; a doltish mishap that’s only arguably — and even then, marginally — related to Elora Danan, the infant that was prophesized to spell her doom.

These prophecies, these myths, are only true in the sense of the outcome; the destination of the myth’s journey. The actual stuff that led to these outcomes, however, are far less glamorous — far less worthy of poetic immortalization or prophetic rendering — than the myth would have you believe.

But how exactly do we know that Willow’s adventure is destined for in-universe mythologization (which is key to this reading of Willow that I’m asserting)? Well, consider the three major battles that take place during the events of this movie:

• The initial off-screen battle wherein the Nockmaar army takes the castle of Galladoorn.

• The Galladoorn response to that battle (which is en route to face the Nockmaar army around the same time that Madmartigan and Willow meet for the first time).

• The final confrontation at the Nockmaar stronghold, which is the only one of the three major battles that takes place on-screen, and that Willow and the gang are present for.

Unlike Willow’s quest, we don’t have any immediate reason to believe that these battles are farcical. We understand those first two as proper military campaigns that occur independently of Willow’s adventure, while that last battle is similarly coded as completely straight fantasy combat.⁷

At a glance, it seems like everything leading up to this was just bad storytelling all along, but what does Raziel whisper to Willow prior to this final battle?

“Your children will remember this day.”

That’s right. The legacy of this enormously prolific battle — this entirely straight, epic bookend to the slew of farcical affairs that preceded it — is going to retroactively define Willow’s entire adventure when it’s recounted as a myth, as Raziel not-so-subtly suggests that it will.

The triumphant, noble spirit of this battle — together with the phenomenon of recency bias — is going to paint over everything that came before. The Nelwyn of tomorrow, with Willow as their paragon of heroism, will never know that Willow’s quest was actually one of loose nonsense that he haphazardly yet somehow victoriously tumbled his way through.

This nonsense, of course, would make for a completely mediocre, incoherent, and underwhelming story, and that’s all Willow would be if it styled itself as a story.

But it doesn’t; it styles itself as the actual truth that will inspire Willow’s story — the silly adventure that will go on to be monolithically mythologized, forever an aspirational pillar in the codex of the Nelwyn, and perhaps the wider world.

To put this another way, I will channel my friend and colleague — the sublimely erudite Jonathan Wright — who attributed the phrase “storytelling when it lights a fire in the hearts of men” to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (the book) in this piece he wrote. This piece, being something I can only describe as thoroughly Tolkien-coded in its passion, intelligence, and capacity for inspiration. I implore you all to read it.

Anyway, this novel is, of course, a direct result of Tolkien’s Middle-earth mythology, which we understand to be foundational to Western storytelling impulses and points of view. It is this mythology that gave birth to the myth of The Lord of the Rings — the grandiose, pathos-rich narrative grounded in sturdy arcs of human emotion and expertly-elicited themes of freedom, friendship, and duty.

The brilliance of Willow, then, is that it removes the myth from this equation. The mythological tale of Willow, when it is told by the Nelwyn of tomorrow, will similarly aim to light a fire in the hearts of men, but it will only be able to do so because it’s been mythologized. Without that mythologization, Willow’s adventure is a deeply silly and emotionally insignificant one.

Maybe Frodo’s was, too, but we’ll never know, because we were only there for the mythologized account of his adventure. Meanwhile, we got to see Willow’s adventure in the flesh, as it really happened.

All of this, and not once is the material treated cynically or boorishly by any of the creatives involved. Willow, despite its deconstructive flirtations, does not think itself to be above its fantasy identity, nor does it play itself any smarter than any given piece of genre fiction. Indeed, each and every one of its plot beats are played as straight and as honest as the diegetic context calls for.

Val Kilmer and Warwick Davis don’t try and sell this movie as more than it is, because that’s the job of the myth.

In simply being a screwy genre moodboard, Willow wears its love for fantasy on its sleeve while simultaneously showing reverence for the fantastical phenomenon of myth — fantasy, of course, harbouring a deeper relationship to myths and mythology than any other genre.

Am I reading too deep into this? Perhaps, but why would I resign myself — and, by extension, my readers — to the verdict of “it’s bad”when I so clearly see an opportunity to use Willow to decolonize our notions of film critique and storytelling?

And let’s not forget, by the way, that this is a George Lucas movie.⁸ This is the guy who side-eyed Alfred Hitchcock and said “Well, actually, the audience can care about the MacGuffin.” This man never gave a flying farrik about what movies “should be”; he forever and always championed what they could be.

What I’ve written here, dear readers, is what Willow can be, and therefore what Willow is; a generational masterpiece with a sprawling, cheeky, honest, revolutionary love for the genre that it belongs to and for those who cherish it. In George we trust.

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1. And that’s allowed. There’s nothing incorrect about using those words in that way — the intent of your language, after all, can only ever be one half of the resulting expression, the other half being filled by the reader’s interpretations/extrapolation.

2. We know them to be clearly-defined because myths, having been conceptualized in ancient times, were therefore not beholden to the more deconstructive, psychological attitudes of modern and post-modern thought.

3. I concede that drawing parallels with The Princess Bride is entirely fair game, but I would nevertheless argue that Willow’s game is one that it’s playing solo.

4. In this case, “farce” isn’t referring to the comedy subgenre, but simply to outrageous antics. I do not, however, think it’s unreasonable to read Willow as a literary farce, either.

5. The actors who played these characters, Val Kilmer and Joanne Whalley, married shortly after the filming of Willow, by the way.

6. Or, alternatively, narrative significance.

7. Sans the separate-enough confrontation that Willow, Raziel, and Sorsha have with Bavmorda, which is absolutely farcical. Importantly, that confrontation is secluded, while the diegetic bulk of that battle is loud, public, and populated with many combatants.

8. It may have been directed by Ron Howard and written by Bob Dolman, but George Lucas ideated the story of Willow, served as an executive producer, and was heavily involved in the screenplay process. Make no mistake — this is George’s movie.