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.
-- JR
----- Original Message -----
*From:* [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
*To:* [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent:* Tuesday, November 01, 2005 17:12
*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 of/ /the 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 /The/ /Cremaster 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.
*Continue Article * <http://www.slate.com/id/2129225/#ContinueArticle>
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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
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