A Farewell to Star Wars
A memoir of love and disillusionment on the 40th Anniversary of Star Wars
(Inspired by and dedicated to Kantbot)
Commercial entertainment, like almost all art, draws archetypal power and resonance from the historical store of images and sounds that its makers loot for their creations. Like the hundreds of blurry sculptural copies of Phryne’s buttocks scattered across the museums of Western Civilization, movies imitate earlier works. In particular, post-modern syncretic bricoleurs like Spielberg, Lucas and Tarantino are playfully conscious of their sources of inspiration, one reason why much of their work veers towards pastiche.
Most of the mass commercial audience, especially children, have no inkling of this history when they encounter popular films, although consumers are becoming ever more sophisticated in this regard (see, for example, the wonderful TV Tropes Wiki). Film buffs, by definition, join me in feeling that our enjoyment is enhanced by awareness of the source material, although many, like Tarantino, dig no further than earlier films for inspiration, ignoring the deeper artistic or mythic sources of resonance already recycled by the films they plunder.
However, once a franchise is sustainably established, the fan base (and alas, the creators) enter a self-reflecting universe, where the films increasingly borrow only from each other, with ever-receding referents to the historical or real-life content that fueled the launch of the first installment. Some franchises, like the James Bond films, are suspiciously solipsistic from nearly the beginning (after Goldfinger, the formula crystallized; the Daniel Craig reboot only managed two films before the formula completely reasserted itself).
George Lucas and his creative team conjured Star Wars from a particularly rich tradition that included not only the works of cinema auteurs (Kurosawa, John Ford, Sergio Leone, Michael Curtiz), but also mid-20th Century pulp science fiction, as well as Nordic and British myths as reworked by Wagner and Tolkien, all highly syncretic artworks themselves. Propelled by a vivid yet gritty visual imagination and realized through an unprecedented team-effort blend of traditional (models, stop-motion, matte paintings, blue screen) and then-new digital special effects, the end product was a stunning tour de force of galaxy-building within which familiar Jungian archetypes enacted a story with mythic power as formulated by Joseph Campbell. Too bad about the screenwriting.
Lucas was particularly drawn to the 1930s Flash Gordon film serials (originally, SW was to be a remake, but he couldn’t get the IP rights). Based on a comic strip and radio serial, these black & white shorts were played before feature films, with cliffhanger endings to entice audiences back to the cinema to pay another nickel to see how the story progressed (my father was one of this audience). Flash Gordon was populated by mid-20th Century racist archetypes: Yellow Peril supervillain Emperor Ming and his Dark Action daughter Princess Aura, versus blond hunky Action Hero and his blonde Damsel in Distress (Dale Arden); our hero helped by Mad Scientist Dr Zarkov Hungarian and/or Jewish) and a variety of weirdly costumed Exotic Alien Allies. Despite a low budget, it boasted, for its day, state of the art FX. The whole enterprise recycled Art Deco sets, skimpy costumes (until the Hayes crackdown), props (oh, those ray guns!) and, most effectively, music, from earlier Universal films (including Bride of Frankenstein, The Black Cat, and The Invisible Man), scores that were, in their turn, largely rip-offs of Romantic art music. My own first hearing of Liszt’s Les Preludes was from watching the Flash Gordon serial on TV (I loved it then and still do today).
Back to Star Wars.
In January 2016, I went to see The Force Awakens, based on the seemingly universal positive reviews, delighted (if PC) media buzz and enthusiastic word of mouth from fans. Blinded by the Disney hype blizzard, I naïvely thought I had properly calibrated my expectations (as I did for SPECTRE, which met them more than adequately). I did go in knowing the Big Spoiler, but that turned out to be the least of my problems.
Imagine my distress, when, large popcorn in hand, I found myself annoyed at the flatness of the characters, irritated by the moral obtuseness of the story, and exasperated by the endless, predictable video game explosions. Rather than swept away, I was cold and detached, aggravated, even angry. I found the film bloated, incoherent, shallow — heartless and soulless.
What went wrong?
Start with my mind-set: I am not a fan, but I loved the first two Star Wars movies. I was a graduate student when Star Wars burst into the zeitgeist. I was one of the first three viewers in line for the opening in Madison, WI (two hours early was more than enough to put us in the front of the line!).
I was primed by friends who shared my love of science fiction (including the ’30s Flash Gordon serials and Doc Smith Skylark space operas). Moreover, this couple hung out with Heinlein, Pournelle and Niven at the ’76 MidAmericaCon (before Social Justice invaded the SF World); they were all blown away by the Star Wars preview. The cover article in Time magazine (back when Time was still a popular and respected publication) also set me up, with its discussion of the new computer FX and the mythic dimension in the film. There was remarkably little other publicity (those posters!) or media coverage, and the trailer (voiced by Harrison Ford), as everyone knows, sucked. I already knew my Jung and Joseph Campbell (and Mircea Eleiade) and had enthusiastically applied those lessons to multiple encounters with Wagner’s Ring cycle (and other works) over the previous 10 years.
Despite or because of that build-up, Star Wars blew me away! From the Flash Gordon crawl and spaceship FX across a Dune-like planet, through Princess Leia’s retro-neo-classical getup, Darth Vader’s Scarpia-esque entrance, the tight PoV on the androids (Hobbits in Fritz Lang tin cans), Luke’s double-sunset Destiny (the Skywalker motiv, so like the Walsungs), to Alec Guinness reprising his Marcus Aurelius shtick in a burlap hoodie and Harrison Ford’s skylarking antihero with fuzzy alien sidekick, I was entranced. I felt I had been studying my whole life to appreciate this gesamtkunstwerk!
More than anything there was the music. If Star Wars was George Lucas’ pastiche of the SF and movies he loved, John Williams’ score was a perfect pastiche of the neo-Romantic and early modern music I loved (Liszt, Wagner, Mahler; Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bartok; Korngold, Steiner, Hermann) a leitmotivic idiom for the ultimate space opera. The soundtrack albums were the only tie-in merchandise I bought, and I played the LPs to death. I was too poor and too old to buy the toys (grownups didn’t do that in the ‘70s — just kids) and was blissfully unaware of the nascent fan universe, despite intimations picked up from my MidAmCon friends (first time I heard the term FIWOL — Fandom is a Way of Life).
In the three years before The Empire Strikes Back, my life changed utterly. I moved back to Chicago and lived through my own soap opera: new domicile, new school, reconfigured relationships, first real job. I’m still married to the man I saw ESB with (one of the MidAmCon couple); for us the film was a culmination of our love of neo-Romantic music, Jungian archetypes, science fiction and each other — we were Han and Leia flying through the asteroid field! I still consider it the best of all the Star Wars films, with a bittersweet tragic note that was bathetically overplayed in TFA and an appropriately Flash Gordon cliffhanger ending.
After Empire, Lucas, with Spielberg, went off to raid tinfoil-hat archeology. By Return of the Jedi, we were living in Berkeley, with new jobs and an increasingly psychedelic outlook. We still attended opening day, but after the Jabba sequence’s homage to Flash Gordon (scantily clad women, trapdoor, underground arena, stop-motion monster and all) and the Skywalker sibling revelation (which we, as Ring aficionados, had anticipated two films ago), it was clear that the franchise was losing its edge, even before the appearance of the Ewoks. The plot seams were showing (another Death Star to destroy?) and the politics had moved fashionably left (Ewoks as Viet Cong?). Although it was still a satisfying cinematic experience, it was clear that Star Wars and we were drifting apart.
In the meanwhile, Lucas’s filmmaking became ever more self-referential in Willow (which I rather liked, its PC still sweetly positive) and self-indulgent in Howard the Duck. The vein of archetypal magic had run out, leaving Lucas reworking the tailings. Watching the Prequel trilogy was more a duty than a pleasure — my husband gave up after Phantom Menace, and I only finished the trio because of friends who were fans. Lucas was bogged down by success, his projected triple trilogy petering out into solipsism. The archetypes that made the paper-thin characters resonate in the first films were now paint-by-number, the naïve politics and unintentional racist stereotypes (not just Jar-Jar) far more embarrassing than Flash Gordon’s innocent pre-WWII bigotry.
By 2005, Star Wars and I were thoroughly estranged. I had tried to read a few of the EU novelizations and found them mostly drek, although I did enjoy the Mos Eisley short stories retelling the sequence from the points of view of every minor character. I never got into the toys (the merchandising that made Lucas rich), nor the video games when they came along, despite thrilled reviews by my gamer acquaintances. My only ongoing contact was through my factotum/handyman — ex film FX guy, gamer, big fan (smoked pot with Mark Hamill at the ’76 Con!) — who relayed all the behind-the-scenes gossip, faithfully went to opening nights, and played the games with continued enthusiasm.
Fast forward to Christmas, 2015. On the road, I read the Economist’s year-end cover article on Disney and Star Wars. That should have clued me in that I was not going to see a movie, a work of art, much less a gesamtkunstwerk, but rather a two-hour advertisement for the game, the toys, the amusement park attractions, the tie-in novelization and encyclopedia (how Tolkien), the official pet costumes! There are compelling reasons Disney, the ultimate devourer of public domain folk sources for regurgitation as fiercely copyright-protected mass entertainment, is the villain in my solar system future history.
So, Episode 7: The Force Awakens: The wording change in the opening crawl from “freedom” to “justice” was…disturbing. The direct visual quote of a spaceship sailing across a desert planet — only a bigger ship and a bigger planet, obviously composed for 3D — set the direction: this was a remake of the first two movies with a bigger budget, SJW casting and PC script, plus more explosions, state of the art FX and 3D. Just one example: the destruction of Alderaan, shocking and moving in ANH, was amplified into a multi-planet, multi-system holocaust, but completely missing the shock and awfulness. The heroes were SJ game tokens; set pieces were recycled from the earlier movies with bigger sets, sleeker effects and more explosions.
And the pace! I’d seen JJ Abrams work before (Star Trek), but this was too fast — no transitions, no character development, no time to breathe, every scene ending with a chase and explosions. Perhaps, as an old school reader and listener, rather than a gamer or film junkie, the gamification of science fiction and action movies has left me stranded among the less hurried pleasures of the past.
Finally, the nostalgia was not my nostalgia. Han and Leia were older too, but their love had not weathered the years as well as ours. The target audience is younger, Gen Xers who saw the original Star Wars trilogy when they were kids rather than adults, or Millennials for whom the prequel trilogy was their entrée to the Star Wars universe. People with shorter attention spans than mine. People who buy games and collect toys as a matter of course. People who brought years of Star Wars immersion, but little knowledge of the sources that inspired Lucas in the first place.
After my disillusionment, I went looking for the negative reviews, which had been there all along, hiding in plain sight in blogs and comments, obscured by the Disney PR blitzkrieg. These pointed out many other reasons to hate the film, but none that addressed my experience. I did go see TFA again, in IMAX, and enjoyed it more (3D helped). But, like a long lost lover, I’m afraid Star Wars and I have parted ways forever.
With the Disney acquisition, the Star Wars enterprise, once a fresh, experimental venture of geek culture into the mainstream, has transmogrified into an enormous mass-market money machine, lumbering along like an Imperial Walker.
I hate Mickey Mouse!
