STAR WARS:EPISODE IV - A NEW HOPE
Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Alec Guiness. Dir. George Lucas, 20th Century Fox, 1977Over the 18 months since starting this blog, I've avoided writing about STAR WARS. That fandom has become so toxic and unpleasant it has grown difficult to write about the film or the franchise without touching off controversy and often inane debate. It felt like maybe it just wasn't worth the potential heartache, but it's an enormously influential film in my life and, after watching it again the other day - I believe I've seen it over 1,000 times but have no idea the actual number - I decided I'm tired of not talking about what I love on a blog dedicated to just that.
I'm not pointing fingers when I say the fandom has grown toxic. I am pleased to say I had nothing to do with running Kelly Tran offline, nor will you find me in any of those tiresome threads where clueless white guys complain about diversity in George Lucas's galaxy. On the other hand, I thought seeing the movie on May 6, 1977, opening weekend, gave me some sort of propietary claim, as if seeing it then somehow made my opinion more valid than most. I am recovering from those delusions, today, and shake my head at how I allowed my ego to fuse with the film until a criticism of it equated to a personal attack on me.
Thing is, this blog is meant to be as much memoir as movie-writing. I'm no Roger Ebert, and the idea of writing a traditional review of movies 50+ years old strikes me as absurd. I loathe the presentism of that kind of review - people applying their contemporary standards to a different era is a kind of obscenity, though I've ended up being guilty of it at times, too. What film could be more of an invitation to personal reflection than the one which blew my nine year-old mind & changed the way Hollywood made & marketed movies?
Star Wars was one of the first major-studio films to rely on TV advertising. Growing up, I can remember seeing commercials for a Spanish-Italian giallo, Blue Eye of the Broken Doll, released in the States as HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN, THE EXORCIST, and maybe the occasional Disney title, but it wasn't common practice until JAWS and STAR WARS. My first inkling the movie existed came from one of those ad spots, but it didn't impress my nine year-old self. In fact, I recall thinking TV spots for a '77 Jan Michael Vincent scifi picture called DAMNATION ALLEY looked more impressive (hey guys! cute kid!) than Lucas's film.
My next awareness of the picture killed my doubts. My parents subscribed to TIME magazine, which put SW on its cover in - I think - the week of its release and its glossy color photos did for me what the commercial failed to, filling me with wonder. Next thing I know, it's May 6, 1977 and I'm sitting in a sold-out movie theater with my brother, the venue so crowded we had to sit apart from our parents. The lights dim. The screen illuminates. The opening fanfare of John Williams's score thunders out of the Dolby sound system and my life as a moviegoer changes irrevocably as Darth Vader's star destroyer glides down from the top of the screen.
I admit, I teared up a moment remembering that, but it's not a unique experience. Millions of Americans shared the experience with me in theaters across the country, that weekend and over that long-ago summer. And fall. And winter and spring. SW was the first film I recall to remain in first-run in Cincinnati for a full year. Even JAWS hadn't enjoyed that level of success. I would see it twice more on the big screen, in November on my birthday and again when it played the second-run house in my neighborhood. When it eventually showed up on Movie Channel in '83 it ran as the featured film every night of its first week and I managed to watch it most of those nights. It was one of my first go-to movies - the pictures I'll watch anytime they run on cable - along with JAWS and THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES.
STAR WARS taught me about film. Certainly it showed me how much was possible, what an ambitious and talented director can do with a camera, how story can be infectious, and how movies can be addictive, but it also taught me lessons George Lucas never intended. Chief among them that a movie can be great but not good.
EPISODE IV is a great film, regardless of its naysayers. Some movies achieve legendary status for the right reasons. SW belongs in that group. It changed how generations understood film, and made that change nothing but big fun. None of which makes it good, per se. It's the difference between story & plot. Plot accounts for the narrative progression of a film. Story is the macro - the music, lighting, effects, thematic elements, the entire motion picture is story. SW tells a great, epic, often fun story, but its plot is tissue thin and riddled with continuity problems, self-contradiction, stock characters, and tropes galore. As its harsher critics observed in '77, STAR WARS was a Western in space, a B-Western at that, more akin to an Audie Murphy programmer than a John Ford meditation on the loss of community & family.
It was much more than a Western, of course. Lucas claims he always intended it as a fairy tale, a series of films whose target demographic was 9 year-olds. I think that claim at least a little ludicrous - he didn't draw heavily from DUNE and the novels of Isaac Asimov to attract kids my age. We didn't know from DUNE. Some kids my age back then may have read Asimov's LUCKY STARR series for young readers, but they weren't reading FOUNDATION & I, ROBOT. It's clear to me Lucas cast a wide net, relying on adult science fiction fans to be the power base, then threw those fans to the wolves once toy sales showed him his biggest audience was little kids. Of course, Lucas also says the first six movies were designed to be an extended piece of music, whatever that means. The films function as whatever Lucas needs/wants in the moment, and much of his musing reads/sounds like a series of massive rationalizations designed to play down fan disappointment and critical brickbats over cardboard characters speaking wooden dialogue.
Still, I won't critique its cast much. Some fans enjoy singling out actors like Hammill - and especially Hayden Christiansen as Anakin in the prequels - but I don't fault his performance. I fault Lucas's screenplay and legendary talent for eliciting the worst possible reading of mediocre-at-best lines. Watching it these days, I'm repeatedly struck by how strong Fisher's performance is and how poorly rewarded she was for it, both by Hollywood and the film's producers. Fisher, herself, remained incensed most of her life that the feisty, fierce Princess Leia of the first two films is reduced to a mute piece of cheesecake in the first reel of RETURN OF THE JEDI, and I share her frustration. Lucas took a great, strong, smart, funny character and reduced her to caricature and there just isn't a good explanation as to why.
Though he had appeared in AMERICAN GRAFFITI for Lucas, Harrison Ford supported himself as a carpenter at the time of his casting, and had begun to consider giving up on acting. George Lucas changed that, introducing us to one of the few great movie stars of the last 40-odd years. Ford's a treat in Star Wars, which remains one of his more edgy roles - he shot first, after all.
My biggest problem with the franchise as a whole is its creator. Lucas's continually changing story of what he intended, for whom he intended it, his complete inability to understand - or care - about good acting, and his arrogance in adding all the superfluous, distracting digital effects to the first three movies makes me crazier than a barrel of toxic fans. He owned the movies, not Fox, and it was his prerogative to make those changes, but the way he turned a deaf ear to the people who made those three movies so profitable and himself a multimillionaire never sat right with me. Still doesn't. They're OUR movies, too, and I think we're all now learning that, however little that meant to Lucas, it means even less to Disney & JJ Abrams.
I've said nothing so far about Darth Vader, and that isn't going to change. He was perhaps the first movie villain to be as much a rockstar as Luke or Han or Leia, a villian we at first loved to hate and, over time, hated to love. He's the most interesting and complex character in the franchise. One of the reasons I prefer the oft-maligned ROGUE ONE to the sequels is we got Vader back. The moment he appeared, I started pumping my fist and bellowing like a 'Bama fan at Homecoming. Good thing I was at home, not the multiplex. Darth Vader deserves an essay of his own. A long one. Longer than I'm prepared for now.
STAR WARS continues to teach me, but its lessons lately are hard, and often sad. One of few films which can transport me back in time to my childhood & adolescence as fully as it does, when I watch it these days that feeling keeps stuttering and falling short. Some of that is overkill, surely, but it's also that I remember how hopeful I was then, how optimistic and full of my own dreams of being a writer/director, and how little hope and optimism I feel today. My dreams never turned into detailed plans. Living in my imagination was easier than taking risks. At 55, I'm a college washout with few marketable skills. I'm unemployable, dependent on trusts established by my hardworking parents to live, medicating my mental illness with weed because a $100 ounce is still cheaper than the out-of-pocket for my meds. I run a half-ass movie blog that couldn't pay for itself if it had to. Never got married, never had kids, and am treated as an existential threat by most people in my small southern city. The temptation to retreat into nostalgia is strong, and not hard to understand, but nostalgia is a tissue of sadness & lies, and I value my passports to the past less than even a few years ago. I'll be rewatching each of the first six films as I write them up over the next few days, and then it may be time to put away childish things again. When fun movies aren't fun anymore it's time to watch something else.
That's my plan. I'm going to write SOMEthing about each of the first six films - I'm looking forward to writing about the wrongly-maligned prequel trilogy - but I may leave the sequels alone. It's almost impossible to say anything about the Disney era without inspiring all manner of toxic rage and senseless debate. I enjoy a good argument, but the arguments inspired by the Abrams trilogy aren't good ones. They're just the over-entitled and too-often misogynist bellowing of boorish men my age. God help us if an SW movie ever introduces an openly gay or trans character. The bellowers will burn down the internet.
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