"New rubbish dialogue reaches me every day, and none of it makes my character clear or even bearable."
-- Alec Guinness, writing from the set of the original Star Wars
I finally saw Star Wars: Episode VII -- The Force Awakens.
I liked it a lot better than I liked the prequels, probably better than any Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back. It's corny, it's derivative and it is essentially fan service, a valentine to the culture it was created to exploit. I'm glad it made a lot of people happy, because there is real value in that. I worry about what it means when a product like this occupies so much space in our lives, when it blots out the sun like a looming Death Star.
A Star Wars movie is an event around which a lot of people coalesce, but people also come together in the wake of natural disasters and terrorist attacks, and no one suggests those are good for us. Star Wars movies are just movies, just light and noise, but they have somehow attained an unassailable place in our culture. As I'm writing this I'm acutely aware of the probable backlash -- the inevitable accusations of trolling and contrarianism that follow any attempt to parse the unearned popularity of what is essentially a good-natured, winking hunk of junk.
I like Star Wars, but I don't really care about it. Part of that may be that I wasn't exposed to it as a child. I saw the first movie when I was 18, a few months after its opening, shortly after I'd returned from nearly a year abroad. I had heard a lot of buzz about it and when I saw the film at a weekday afternoon matinee, I had to wait in a fairly long line to buy a ticket. The theater was probably about three-quarters full. My reaction to the first film was about the same as my reaction to the most recent one. It was OK. I liked it in a mild way, mainly because it seemed to embrace its own overtness, because it made hokiness its house style.
But I don't know why anyone would want to dive deeply into the universe George Lucas created. Star Wars seemed purposefully superficial, a throwback to the cheap Westerns and serial cliffhangers Lucas consumed in his youth. It is a simple story, a space opera imbued with a cheery B-movie ethos and characters so broadly drawn as to be archetypes: the Callow Youth Called to Adventure, the Brave Princess, the Wizard, etc.
Harrison Ford's Han Solo is Dashiell Hammett's amoral Continental Op or Sam Spade in Flash Gordon drag, leavened with the obligatory golden heart. R2-D2 and C-3PO make an android Laurel and Hardy, Martin and Lewis, Lucy and Ricky. Lucas took bits and pieces of Joseph Campbell, C.S. Lewis and old Westerns and set out to create a sprawling pop mythology. He succeeded.
Still, there are things about the original Star Wars that bother me. As a one-off, the movie might seem like a little miracle -- a fresh take on nostalgia not too different in tone from last year's delightful Turbo Kid. But stretched out over nearly 40 years, a hard crust of cynicism is apparent just beneath the sugar-dusted surface. Over time, a lot of what might have been mistaken for ingenuous goofiness reveals itself as cloying fake innocence -- as pure business plan.
The truth is the first Star Wars isn't a great film. The performances are barely passable. (As a director, Lucas was famous for not being very good with actors.) The dialogue is often ludicrous, character development is minimal and, while some of the special effects are startling, others look like what they are -- guys in masks. (Greedo, the bounty hunter Han Solo dispatches inside the cantina, is a particularly dreadful example.) Star Wars is a live-action comic book and is vulnerable to the same criticisms comic books are -- chiefly that there are more productive ways for people to spend their time.
I understand those criticisms miss the point because most people who see Star Wars like it. It's an engaging and entertaining movie, one that compels the audience to "believe" the fantasy they're watching for as long as the house lights stay down. The test of whether a movie works is not whether a film buff or critic can see around the sides of it to call out its flaws. The test is how it is received by moviegoers. I don't know why so many people have invested so much in this chronicle of the Skywalker family, why they find the movies and the ancillary products so nourishing and useful. I only know that the films can't be judged the way most other movies are.
A REMIX, NOT A REMAKE
A lot of people have noticed how J.J. Abrams' The Force Awakens echoes the original film in its themes and character arcs, how it has returned some of the grime and the grittiness that was erased in the prequels. Maybe it's less a remake than a remix, with old characters returning to bless their successors, who seem destined to follow more or less the same paths as the old tropes.
There are a few wrinkles, which might manifest themselves as spoilers were I to discuss them in depth, but essentially it's the same plot as the original, a closed loop that draws on the admittedly rich Star Wars world. It's a movie designed to re-introduce us to this world, to soothe us with familiar characters and situations. It's a table-setter for what's to come -- and if what's to come is new and surprising, then maybe it's a necessary and welcome prologue.
Or is it?
A lot of Star Wars fans strike me as bright, creative people who love the films -- the universe -- despite recognizing the problems with subscribing to what is essentially a marketing program designed to draw away discretionary income. Disney bought the franchise from Lucas because it believes in the series' potential to continue to make money for decades. Disney understands that it's the sort of infinitely renewable PG adventure story that parents might enthusiastically share with their kids. Maybe every generation will require its own Luke, its own Rey, its own action figures and video games. That's obviously what the corporate dream factory hopes.
We all know that movies are essentially business ventures, that the point of them is to sell tickets and popcorn, and sometimes toys and T-shirts and points of view. So let's not begrudge the Star Wars franchise its success except to note that it's become a huge, unavoidable black hole that sucks away all sorts of attention. As one theater manager told me, "Last year, there were four or five strong movies out there over the holidays. But this Christmas, it's been all Star Wars."
And that's my problem with Star Wars, the way the success of the franchise compels people like me to pay attention to the film. The Force Awakens is a nice movie, but it's really a movie for kids. That doesn't mean adults can't or shouldn't enjoy it, only that it isn't the sort of movie that -- absent the hype and the deep interest by so many people -- I'd feel especially inspired to write a lot about. It's a phenomenon. It's like the Mickey Mouse Club or the Davy Crockett fad. Only it's not a fad. It's an inescapable part of the culture.
KILLING THE MOVIES
Last year, before I saw the new movie -- before anyone had seen the new movie -- I compared the impact of Star Wars with that of The Beatles. I still think that's fair, but having seen the new film, I wonder how and why that is, and what has happened to us. Most of my ambivalence about Star Wars has nothing to do with the stories the movies tell but with the way the original film helped (it was abetted by Jaws) kill off the last golden age of American film.
Most of the movies I love were released from the late 1960s to mid-'70s -- interesting, character-driven movies for grown-ups that were populated by complex characters. I'm thinking of Bonnie & Clyde, The Conversation, the Godfather movies, Shampoo, Nashville, The French Connection, MAS*H, Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Chinatown, Klute, Taxi Driver, Coming Home, Apocalypse Now and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Not all were masterpieces, perhaps, but they were vital and arresting and ambitious and designed to be more than just popular entertainment. Some people might perceive some as dour and depressing, but they were aimed at a general audience. Before Star Wars, there were movies that compelled with grace and beauty, movies where the characters were not plastic pawns or symbols but evocations of human nature that approached the level of the best literature and drama.
After Star Wars, after George Lucas showed the world a movie was capable of infiltrating the American psyche so deeply that it could seem to be part of our national heritage and that great gobs of unthought-of money could be made by the entrepreneur who aimed high enough and stuck closely to the formula, the rules changed. Star Wars raised the stakes and made it dangerous to take risks.
Movies sacrificed character for action beats every 10 minutes; all complexity was bled out. Hollywood lost faith in the audience and turned to making silly, childish things. Movies became events -- the passive equivalent of theme-park thrill rides -- and merchandising opportunities.
I don't think Lucas did this in cold blood. For all his failures as a filmmaker, he's an artist of serious intent. He did the best he could. It's not really his fault that Star Wars is easier for most people to like than Chinatown. The problem isn't that we pay so much attention to Lucas' derivative mythology, it's that we pay so little to works of art that pose more difficult questions about how we are to live in the world.
It's not that I didn't like The Force Awakens. It's just that there's nothing about the movie that makes me wonder about anything other than what may be going on in the fantasy universe. While understanding how engaging and diverting it can be to lose yourself in another world, I understand I have to live in this one. I've no desire to be sucked into this black hole.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
blooddirtangels.com
Style on 01/10/2016