Lucas's 'Star Wars' Great movie making, great stories, great liturgy-our media critic takes off
McConnell, Frank
Frank McConnell IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY Lucas's 'Star Wars' This year's first Big Cultural Event began twenty years ago. I'm talking, of course, about the release of the Star Wars trilogy,...
...movies whose only reason for existence was their elaborate-and largely pointless- special effects...
...My wife had dragged me-well, bribed me, the coy thing, with Retsina and roasted lamb-to the first matinee on the first day of the first movie trilogy...
...But by now, the tail has grown enormous and is wagging a quite shrunken dog...
...Wrong...
...Jung knew (so did Homer), that Shadow is always the Father, both as what made us and what we fear to become: in this case, Darth Vader ("Dark Father...
...If you've ever been inside a revival tent, or to a well-done Mass, or to Wrigley Field, you know the aura: The crowd, watching the ritual scroll before them in all its rigor, becomes more than a crowd, becomes an entity, a "people," not watching but, all together, celebrating the shared event, their shared memory...
...Or Independence Day...
...But remember what Orwell said: All art is propaganda, though not all propaganda is art (which is why Augustine's Confessions and Hitler's Mein Kampf do and don't belong on the same shelf...
...That's where the priest, or critic, or psychoanalyst-a distinctly secondary gig-comes in...
...What the shaman utters in his trance he utters for himself...
...I'm talking, of course, about the release of the Star Wars trilogy, re-released earlier this year to an astonishing box-office reception...
...I'd seen it, dammit...
...But we are dead at heart if we don't keep hoping it can be...
...They oohed and applauded at the right places, but always quieted down to hear the next line of dialogue...
...Now Lucas is a storyteller, not a preacher...
...And the very next shot, inside the Rebel ship, was of the two robots, C3PO and R2D2, the Abbott and Costello of the series, burbling (it's the only word) down the hall in panic...
...you thought...
...And storytellers, good ones, care only about the story...
...The Arlington Theater in Santa Barbara is one of the last old, grand, cavernous movie palaces, a Vatican with buttered popcorn in the lobby...
...And not a bad one at that...
...Everyone agrees that the trilogy spawned two decades, now, of increasingly mindless and hoo-wah...
...But we all went to the revival ("revival" in both senses of the word), and we all glowed again in the sense that we could aspire to a dignity-and a happiness-beyond the current shabby state of affairs...
...In '97,1 was bemused, before the beginning and after the end-credits, by the audience...
...and if it isn't, then to hell with reality anyway...
...And, maybe even more importantly, because the film came out at a time when we needed it: 1977, three years after Watergate...
...And at 4:20 p.m...
...And Lucas got lucky that way...
...I hadn't gauged, though, the presence of what Lucas created twenty years ago...
...It was a liturgy...
...Skywalker...
...It's real...
...Claude Levi-Strauss, the father of structuralist anthropology, once wrote that he was not interested in the stories men told, but in the stories that told themselves through men...
...In '77,1 was shocked by that Imperial Cruiser at the beginning...
...Sure: That's the stuff of propaganda...
...The brilliant Frank Kermode once wrote of Paradise Lost that not the least of Milton's achievements was that he suggested a whole new way of writing English verse very badly...
...In Star Wars, the effects were there in the service of the very archetypal tale, as had always been the case in the greatest sci-fi movies...
...Special-effects czar John Dykstra, Merlin to George Lucas's Arthur, had figured out how, even in those relatively chewing-gum and paper-clip days, to use computer technology to generate a world of completely convincing impossibilities...
...And, as C.G...
...Only a nebbish rides any given roller coaster more than once...
...O boy...
...The Force is not with us...
...You can even track it, trust me, in Gilga-mesh...
...In discovering his true identity, he must learn to reconcile his masculine and feminine sides-swashbuckling Han Solo and unattainable Princess Leia-and, most crucially, accept and redeem his own shadow self, himself when he is at his worst...
...After all, that had been the dream of storytelling since the first Gilgamesh legend was carved on clay, and it had certainly been the obsession-"the idea of total cinema" (Andre Bazin called it that)- of the early, master directors: Griffith (Intolerance), Eisenstein (Ivan the Terrible), and Gance (Napoleon...
...this is equivalent to discovering a new sin, and should be greeted with due respect...
...Because Luke, of course, is you and me and everybody else who sees the film...
...It may be the oldest story in the world...
...three-and-a-half?-minutes of footage with not a single human being, and yet with an irresistible alternate world completely established: It had the audacity and genius of the opening of Citizen Kane...
...Sam Goldwyn on movies: "If you've got a message, call Western Union...
...The quite lovely thing, though, is that sense is made...
...But that's okay...
...It is, really, only the story of Luke (or is that Lucas...
...Or do you really want to see Terminator again...
...and they all knew the dialogue...
...Always referred to it when I taught my course in "The Art of Narrative...
...And it screwed up, perhaps irrevocably, American film...
...And it hit me that, in this period of multiculturalism, "otherness and the rapid pursuit of ever-newer modes of diversity"-much loved by many of my colleagues-Star Wars may be as much of a state religion, a shared mythology, as America has...
...it is for the community, his audience, to make sense of it...
...Knew it like the back of my hand...
...But it's infinitely fresh...
...I've been trying really to learn that lesson for fifteen years...
...That side effect does not tarnish, however, the magnificence of Paradise Lost, nor-I'm using "magnificence" in just the same register here-of Star Wars...
...on this Friday, it was nearly full: full of old dinosaurs like me, older dinosaurs than me, students of mine, and even little kids, whom I don't like and really don't like at the movies...
...When the first of the films appeared in 1977, it heralded a revolution in the idea of what films could do...
...Two-three...
...Nobody who wasn't there in '77-sorry, youngsters-can imagine the shock, the delight, the rush of seeing, in the opening shot, the Imperial Starcruiser, pursuing the little Rebel ship, roar majestically into view, finally in its immensity filling the whole screen...
...And here, by Jove, it was...
...to, and through, the final credit roll, the crowd was-it's the only word-reverential...
...Essentially, the trilogy's story is the story of the integration of a personality, of an initiation: of growing up...
...That's perhaps the melancholy urgency of all myth: to show us, in the image of our aspirations, the reflection of our failure to achieve them...
...And now, twenty years later, Darth still appears in control in D.C., alienating us from our own best selves...
...From the first words on the screen-all together now-"A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...
...I was expecting loud, smart-aleck comments throughout the film, or, even worse, the decibel hell of a kiddie matinee...
Vol. 124 • May 1997 • No. 9
