Hmmm... I have to disagree. I really
dislike this kind of high-school level arty analysis -- the fact
that it is being taught at the college level is disturbing. The STAR WARS series
was George Lucas's conscious and deliberate attempt to recreate for the modern
era the FLASH GORDON and other serials he enjoyed so much in his youth -- he has
said this from the beginning. To try and turn them into something more
is just silly. People should appreciate the films for the simple but enjoyable
heroic fantasy fare they are, rather than try to convince others that they are
fraught with some deeper meaning and great social import. They are not. Yes,
Lucas drew upon ancient character archetypes and touched upon human dilemmas
that go back to the Shakespeare and ever further, all the way back to classic
Greek mythology. So what? So did Ed Wood and Roger Corman and every other story
teller who ever lived.
Subject: [MOPO] Great Article On The STAR
WARS Cycle
Star Wars:
Episodes I-VI The greatest postmodern
art film ever. By Aidan Wasley Posted Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2005, at 3:21 PM ET
With the release of Episode III Revenge ofthe Sith on
DVD today, George Lucas' audience can finally see all six Star Wars
films back-to-back, as a single text. This is how Lucas himself regards the
series, often joking that, including his 1973 hit American Graffiti,
he has made only three movies in his career. One of the surprises in store
after a marathon viewing is how much of the young Lucas, the self-conscious
avant-gardist of THX1138, is actually visible onscreen, peeking out
from behind the endless sequences of digitally enhanced space battles and
ritualized light-saber duels. Looking at these familiar films with fresh eyes,
unfiltered by the lens of nostalgia and sentiment—and it was, admittedly, a
resonant moment this summer to watch the final episode with my father, who had
taken me to see the original film in 1977 when I was 8—we start to see just
how deeply weird they really are. Three decades on, the kids who grew up
playing with Luke Skywalker action figures and carrying Princess Leia
lunchboxes may be startled to discover that Star Wars is really just
one big elephantine postmodern art film.
Star Wars, at its secret, spiky intellectual heart, has more in
common with films like Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books or even
Matthew Barney's TheCremaster Cycle than with the countless
cartoon blockbusters it spawned. Greenaway and Barney take the construction of
their own work as a principal artistic subject, and Lucas does, too. "This
poem is concerned with language on a very plain level," one of John Ashbery's
works begins. Star Wars, we might say, is concerned with
plot on a very plain level. Everything about the films, from the
opening text crawls to the out-of-order production of the two trilogies,
foregrounds the question of plot. As an audience, we grapple with not just the
intricate clockwork of a complex and interwoven narrative, but, in postmodern
fashion, with the fundamental mechanics of storytelling itself.
As Star Wars works to make us aware of its own narrative
structure, other odd things about the films start to come into focus. Most
significantly, we start to notice that the films are an elaborate meditation
on the dialectic between chance and order. They all depend upon absurd
coincidence to propel the story forward. Just what are the odds, in just one
of near-infinite examples, that of all the planets in that galaxy far, far
away, the droids should end up back on Tatooine, in the home of the son of the
sweet (if annoying) boy who had built C-3PO decades before? Throughout all six
films there are scenes of crucial serendipity. Such dependence on unlikely
coincidence isn't unique to Star Wars. As literary critics have long
pointed out, the arbitrary yoking together of events in the service of
storytelling is one of the fundamental characteristics of all narrative. R2-D2
needs to hook up with Luke on Tatooine, just as Prospero's enemies
need to wash up on the shores of his island, and Elizabeth Bennett
needs to marry Mr. Darcy, for the narrative requirements of those
stories to be fulfilled. The audience's willing surrender to narrative
coincidence is demanded by the story's need to conclude itself.
But Lucas takes this self-consciousness about narrative artifice a step
further: He makes explicit his theoretical interest in the mechanics of plot.
As viewers, we take pleasure in the implausible events that must happen for
the narrative contraption to snap shut in a satisfying way. But the characters
come to understand that there is another agent, external to themselves, that
is dictating the action. Within the films' fiction, that force is called …
er, "the Force." It's the Force that makes Anakin win the pod race so that he
can get off Tatooine and become a Jedi and set all the other events in all of
the other films in motion. We learn that Anakin's birth, fall, redemption, and
death are required to "bring balance to the Force" and, not coincidentally, to
give the story its dramatic shape. The Force is, in other words, a metaphor
for, or figuration of, the demands of narrative. The Force is the power of
plot.
If the Force is Plot, then what is the difference between the Light and
Dark Sides of the Force? As Qui-Gon tells the young Obi-Wan, "Feel, don't
think. Trust your instincts." Obi-Wan instructs Luke that the Force "binds the
Galaxy together," and Yoda teaches him that the Force manifests its power most
strongly "when you are calm, at peace, passive." Luke puts this doctrine of
existential surrender most famously into practice when he turns off his
targeting computer and "uses the Force" to blow away the Death Star. The Light
Side of Plot, then, seems to involve the willing submission to chance, to
imagination, to inspiration—a formula familiar from epic narrative, where
poets like Homer announce their surrender to the possession of "the Muse" in
the service of a story beyond themselves.
The Dark Side, on the other hand, is all about conscious control,
structure, order, and design. Emperor Palpatine, the embodiment of the Dark
Side, taunts the despairing Luke in Return of the Jedi, "Everything
that has transpired has done so according to my design," and we are led to
understand in Sith that it was Palpatine himself who set the entire
plot in motion by manipulating the Force toward Anakin's virgin birth.
Palpatine is the emblem of the artist as clockmaker or puppet master, the
omniscient manipulator of his hapless characters for the purposes of a
satisfying narrative payoff. At the end of Jedi, in a scene out of
Pirandello or one of Ashbery's own plays, the characters assert their autonomy
and kill their author.
Every text depends on the balance between inspiration and authorial
control, and Lucas makes that tension the principal subject of his film.
Lucas, like every author, is Luke to his own Palpatine—both the surrenderer
to chance (as in Harrison Ford's memorably ad-libbed "I know" in response to
the scripted "I love you" from Leia), and the rigorous, arranging schemer (as
epitomized in the films' elaborate special effects). Anakin is the
tension-filled creative midpoint between the two: "the balance of the Force."
And if we want to critique Lucas' own text, we might do so using the
theoretical terms he himself has set up and suggest that the parts that are
least successful are the moments when the artistic balance tips too far toward
either the Light or the Dark Sides. For instance, the much-deplored dependence
on computer animation in the prequels, which opened up spectacular vistas at
the expense of feeling and characterization, can be seen as Lucas tilting
dangerously toward the Dark Side. There's no place for serendipity in a
pixilated galaxy, since every digital detail must be planned and plotted and
programmed. And similarly, Jar Jar Binks, the films' most notorious misstep
and an explicit signifier of bumbling whimsy, looks like an error of
unbearable Lightness.
Characteristic of these films' dizzying self-reflexivity, Lucas even seems
to acknowledge these stumbles toward excess within the structure of the films
themselves. It's Jar Jar's chance collision with Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan in the
jungles of Naboo that inflicts his continued presence on the screen for the
rest of The Phantom Menace. But by Clones, his role is
reduced to that of a deferential stooge of the nefarious Palpatine, and in
Sith he gets only a single line of dialogue, suggesting a certain
balancing out of Jar Jar's irritating disturbance in the Force. More
important, we are made to see how Jar Jar's apparently coincidental meeting
with the Jedi needed to happen, since it is his misguided vote that
allows Palpatine to take control of the Senate, leading to the death of the
Republic. The clown becomes the villain, and balance is restored.
Likewise, in Clones there's a fascinating instance of cinematic
self-consciousness that speaks to Lucas' awareness of the imaginative costs of
all-digital filmmaking. Amid a riotous and panoramic battle-scene on a desert
planet, the film frame suddenly starts to shudder as it zooms in on a close-up
of a clone-filled combat vehicle. As viewers, we recognize the jerky camera
movement as that of a hand-held camera, familiar to us from news footage and
war movies, and the shot gives a kinetic, you-are-there edge to the chaotic
scene. Until, that is, we realize that the entire scene exists only in a
computer hard-drive, that there is no hand-held camera, and that Lucas is
using a computer program to mimic the authentic touch of the unsteady human
hand. It's a startling moment, where the film calls our attention to its own
technological artifice. Lucas is firmly committed to digital cinema, but in
this single shot we see him acknowledge, perhaps a little sheepishly, his
technology's erasure of a fortuitous or exciting human accident.
Lucas now says that he's finished with popular filmmaking and wants to
return to the experimentalism of his early career: "I love doing Star
Wars, and it's a fun adventure for me, but I'm ready to explore some of
the things I was interested in exploring when I was in my late 20s." As
Obi-Wan would tell him, the Master's nostalgia for his artsy youth is
misplaced. That Force has been with him, always.
Aidan Wasley teaches at the
University of Georgia, in Athens, Ga.
freeman fisher 8601 west knoll drive #7 west hollywood,
ca 90069
Visit the MoPo Mailing List Web Site at www.filmfan.com
