Star Wars on Trial

by David Brin

  Chabon goes on to say that those serious and intelligent people are wrong. Because they have strangled entertainment in the literary field, the field has narrowed unpleasantly. He continues:

  The brain is an organ of entertainment, sensitive at any depth and over a wide spectrum. But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve.'o

  Chabon's argument applies to the sf genre. We have gotten the entertainment we deserve, and it is slowly strangling the publishing arm of our great genre. Is current SF writing influenced by Star Wars? No, not nearly enough. We need more grand adventure, more heroes on journeys, more uplifting (if not downright happy) endings. Yes, we can keep the good sentence-by-sentence writing, the good characters and the lovely descriptions the New Wave steered us to. We can even keep the dystopian fiction and the realistic, if difficult-to-read, sf novels, so long as we do them in moderation. They cannot-and should not-be the dominant subgenre on the shelves.

  Are tie-in novels taking shelf space away from SF? Hell, no. The tie-ins, from SW to Trek and beyond, are keeping SF alive. If we, the sf writers and publishers, want more shelf space, we have to earn it. We earn it by telling stories, some of them old faithfuls that the fans like to read, the things that have been published before. We earn it by entertaining. We earn it by creating characters as memorable as Luke and Han and Darth Vader.

  We don't earn it by whining that a movie has encroached on our genre. Barbarians are taking over our little village!

  Well, let me remind you of the things I said in the beginning of this essay. I am a barbarian in villager's clothing. I snuck into the SF Village long ago, but I sneak back out every night for a little forbidden entertainment.

  Open the gates, people. We barbarians aren't here to trash your genre. We love it too. We love it for different reasons. But the village can become a city.

  In fact, it needs to become a city in order to survive. So let us in. We can save the SF genre.

  We're the only ones who can.

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch is a best-selling novelist who has written a Star Wars novel. She's also an award-winning editor and writer, with two Hugos and a World Fantasy Award, as well as many other awards in science fiction, fantasy, romance and mystery Her most recent science fiction novel is Buried Deep. Her next is Paloma, which will appear in October. Under the name Kris Nelscott, she has just published the sixth book in her critically acclaimed Smokey Dalton series, Days of Rage. Her works have appeared in fourteen countries and thirteen languages.

  THE COURTROOM

  DROID JUDGE: Mr. Brin, you may call any of the three Defense witnesses to the stand.

  DAVID BRIN: I'd like to thank these three witnesses for their thoughtful testimony. I have no need to cross-examine.

  Speaking only for myself, I must say that I do not blame Star Wars in any central way for the decline of high-quality literary science fiction. A far bigger culprit would be projects like this one, which, over the last few years, have lured me to spend time that I might otherwise have devoted to my latest novel!

  Indeed, I have little complaint over movie-book tie-ins. I know that some of the authors of Star Wars novelizations have striven hard to insert bits of actual plot logic, going to creative-even heroic-lengths to find logical explanations for fundamentally illogical events. If George Lucas had asked any of this coterie of writers to help with the later scripts, well ... just note that one movie had a pro involved-Leigh Brackett in TESB-and that film remains the favorite of nearly everybody, from highbrow to low.

  Moreover, tie-in novels do encourage reading! They encourage reading of adventure stories in the right part of the bookstore ... though not the right portions of the shelf. For, without any doubt, this is all part of the boom of fantasy and the decline of SF.

  I think there are "forces" at work here that are much darker than Star Wars. Something is pulling us back toward the way of life that we had almost escaped. Toward feudalism and king-worship and kowtowing to priests and gurus. Toward a steady decline in confidence. In each other. In our civilization. In democracy. In science. And in ourselves.

  No, if Star Wars has damaged the power of science fiction as a genre, it is only a small player in a larger trend. For this reason, the Prosecution accepts the case that these fine witnesses presented today. We move for dismissal of this charge.

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: For once I agree with the Prosecution. Dismiss this charge.

  DROID JUDGE: No, all the testimony on this charge was compelling, including that of Prosecution witness Lou Anders. I'm going to let the charge stand and let the jury decide.

  N THE BEGINNING, there was a spaceship. t

  Then there was another spaceship. A really big one, chasing the first spaceship.

  After that came the real fun. Guys in white armor firing blasters! Comic-relief droids! A beautiful princess with an attitude who kicks butt! A menacing figure in black with the voice of James Earl Jones! A colorful rogue! A wise old teacher who was what everybody wanted their grandfather to be like! A big, hairy Wookiee! Best of all, a typical teenager stuck in the middle of a nowhere place who just knows he's special, and turns out to be so special he's going to save the entire galaxy!

  And the audience saw that it was good.

  Star Wars made a lot of movie viewers happy, made George Lucas a lot of money and made dollar signs pop up in the eyes of movie studio executives everywhere. Perhaps most importantly, the original Star Wars movie (Episode IV: A New Hope) raised the bar for what an SF movie should be. Star Wars wasn't just fun, it wasn't just exciting, it was also a great story, well told and well acted.

  This shouldn't have been a big deal, but it was. One of the unfair things about science fiction is that the field always seems to be judged by the general public based on the lousiest representatives of the genre. And (let's face it) SF has been cursed with some incredibly poor movies. The movie usually cited as the worst movie of any kind of all time is Plan 9 from Outer Space. Plan 9 has about the same relationship to SF that a Twinkie has to actual pastry, but in the minds of the public, SF is all too often the Twinkie of the movie world.

  Star Wars: A New Hope blew that away Then came The Empire Strikes Back with the incomparable Leigh Brackett working the screenplay, and SF movie fans could strut into the local cineplex with their heads held high. Return of the Jedi wasn't up to the standards of its predecessor, but it was plenty good enough.

  So what's the problem? Isn't it a foregone conclusion that the Star Wars series has been good for SF movies?

  No.

  Unfortunately, like a fantastic one-night stand without forethought, Star Wars produced some unwanted consequences. All too soon after the success of A New Hope, the children of Star Wars started appearing in our movie theaters and television screens. And all too often that, to put it mildly, wasn't good.

  In fairness to George Lucas, who did a bang-up job on the first three Star Wars movies, there have been two phases to the saga of SF movies moving to the dark side. The first phase, built around those first three Star Wars movies (which are now the second three movies, but we'll get into that later) could be called the It's Not George's Fault period. The second phase (the What Was George Thinking? period) spread the fault around a bit more.

  In retrospect, the negative fallout from Star Wars: A New Hope could've been predicted. Any movie that generates a good profit also results in a burst of copycat movies seeking to cash in on the first movie's success. Unfortunately (with rare exceptions), the copycats never bother to actually figure out what was really responsible for the first film's triumph. In the strange alternate reality known as Hollywood, spending tens of millions of dollars on a lousy knockoff movie is a lot easier than going to the mental effort of trying to figure out what really made the original so good.

  As movie studios began churning out flicks allegedly inspired by the success of Star Wars, it was obvious that what passed for creative talent in Ho
llywood had actually seen only the first few minutes of the movie. They'd seen the big spaceship. Then they stopped watching, because to Hollywood's collective mind the big spaceship was clearly what had made Star Wars a success.

  The ancient among us will recall that when old-timers like Gene Roddenberry started out doing SF, they came up with an idea for a story, then created some spaceships to match. After Star Wars succeeded so well, and Star Trek became a cult favorite with amazing legs, the movie studios decided to try to copy this success by reversing the process. They'd come up with spaceships and then, if the budget permitted, maybe a few ideas and maybe a story.

  Then again, maybe not.

  Enter: Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Enter: The Black Hole. Movies featuring endless shots panning across big spaceships, until you found yourself checking your watch and wondering if you could hit the restroom, then the snack bar to pick up some more popcorn, and come back to find the big spaceship shot still continuing. In the bad old days, this sort of thing was the filler a movie would gain to pad out a story that wasn't quite long enough. But after Star Wars: A New Hope, too many studios decided that the filler was supposed to take the place of the story. Viewers, dazzled by all of the special effects, weren't supposed to notice that there was a glaring lack of plot, realistic characters and intelligent dialogue in those scenes that didn't feature big spaceships.

  In many ways, the epitome of these movies featuring big spaceships filled with a strange lack of substance was Battlestar Galactica (the 1978 version). (Yes, it appeared on TV, but the pilot was a movie. A movie appearing in the same period of time as Rescue from Gilligan's Island. The bar for high achievement in TV movies was not a lofty one in the late 1970s.)

  The pilot episode, in between shots of big spaceships, actually did have a story of sorts for a while (don't sign peace treaties with homicidal robots), but even in that first movie the story sort of wandered off in the second half with a weird casino world interlude (which did, of course, feature spaceships). Worse was to come, though. After the pilot, the series apparently budgeted all of its funds for more big spaceship shots and decided not to worry about a comprehensible story line. The poor cast was left to wander through plots of weekly episodes which had been ripped off from old movies (such as The Towering Inferno, The Guns of Navarone and even Shane) with little regard for whether or not they made sense in the context of the series.

  The lack of storytelling sense and dependence on special effects was in some ways epitomized by the apparently random decision to kill off the heroic male lead's love interest during the pilot. But that was okay, because they replaced the woman with a robot dog! Who'd want to watch a wife and mother character played by a real woman when they could watch a cute special effect? Because Star Wars had proved that viewers loved special effects, right?

  Then there was the late 1970s incarnation of Buck Rogers, but the less said of that the better. About the only thing that movie and subsequent TV series did share with Star Wars: A New Hope was locking the cast (especially the men) for eternity into the hell of 1970s hair styles. ("Luke, use the hair clippers. ")

  But, as said before, all of this was Not George's Fault. That'd be like blaming the Beatles for "Billy, Don't Be a Hero." Yeah, the Beatles changed the direction of rock and roll music, but the inspiring example of Abbey Road couldn't be blamed for whatever other people decided to do with that direction. The first three Star Wars flicks stood as examples of How To Do It Right no matter how many other films Did It Wrong. George Lucas couldn't be blamed for all the schlockmeister productions trying to cash in on the idea that SF movies could be moneymakers. He couldn't be blamed for producers and directors who thought the special effects were the movie and traditional storytelling things like plot were unnecessary.

  A good single example of the difference between the original three Star Wars movies and the many knockoffs they inspired lies in the female characters. Star Wars: A New Hope had a wonderful female character in the strong, smart and dynamic Princess Leia. What did other movies and TV series do with that? They created lead female characters who were prostitutes (Battlestar) or fashion models who looked great in their skintight outfits (Buck Rogers). Not so much characters as eye candy, an extension of the special effects concept to the leading women in the shows. Even the Star Trek movies maintained this trend, keeping the female characters very much second ary in terms of plot, action and significance. (Quick, name a female character from a Star Trek movie. Uh ... Uhura?)

  It's baffling but (at that time) also Not George's Fault that Hollywood keeps forgetting one of the enduring mysteries of the male mind, namely that tough girls with guns are as sexy as it gets. SF has always had a natural ability to exploit this since it can set stories in other places and times where such female characters are plausible. Who can ever forget Han Solo declaring, "I love you," in Return of the Jedi when Leia flashed her blaster at him? Yeah, baby. This important social dynamic wasn't lost on everybody. When Ripley showed up to start kicking alien butt she was in the same mold as Leia, a smart and tough lady who might not be a superwoman but wasn't going to give up and wasn't going to be beaten.

  Unfortunately, all of that was about to change, in the form of the second Star Wars trilogy, which is now the first Star Wars trilogy even though it's the second. (Right here you see part of the problem. Placing films in proper order shouldn't sound like a time travel paradox.) Little did those awaiting the new trilogy realize that The Phantom Menace didn't refer to the Sith, but rather to what the film itself was going to do to Star Wars as a shining example of good SF and good movies.

  The ugly truth was that George Lucas had painted himself into a corner with the first/now-second trilogy. An evil galactic empire with scads of star destroyers and hordes of stormtroopers (plus, not one, but two Death Stars) had been defeated by one (count 'em, one) Jedi helped by his oh-my-gawd-I-kissed-my-brother sister, a tribe of cute, merchandisable aliens, one big Wookiee, that lovable rogue, another lovable rogue (this one ethnic), and various other humans and aliens wearing the Star Wars equivalent of red shirts. In a series of films on the downfall of the Republic, how could Lucas possibly explain how the bad guys had triumphed in the first place over a whole mess of Jedi with mind-powers and lightsabers (even if one of those Jedi did sound like Grover)?

  That was the basic problem posed by The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. Good writers could've come up with some plausible and exciting explanations for all that in a Fall of Rome-type epic spanning the three films. Instead, Lucas chose to solve it by a story arc that actually had been predicted by none other than Mel Brooks in a single short phrase years before. In Brooks's SF movie parody Spaceballs, there's a scene where the villainous Dark Helmet has just tricked the hero, and gleefully declares that evil is certain to triumph because "good is stupid."

  For reasons known only to him, George Lucas took "good is stupid" and ran with it. Even worse, Lucas decided to expand the concept to include "good can't act good" and "good has lousy dialogue." Just to make it abundantly clear that stupid was the theme for the new trilogy, Lucas introduced the character of jar jar Binks. In a remarkable advance since the days of the original Star Wars trilogy, and thanks to the wonders of the latest digital technology, a filmmaker was finally able to bring to life other worlds, fleets of spaceships, alien creatures and the walking/talking personification of stupidity.

  As might be expected, this overall concept had some negative effects on the films. When wooden acting and cliched dialogue don't hold the audience's interest, and when everybody watching knows the bad guys are going to win, that leaves only two things to hold the audience's interest. One is the age-old game personified by Mystery Science Theater 3000: finding so-bad-it's-sort-of-funny things to comment on ("What the hell is a midichlorian?" "Just steal the damned thing like Han Solo would've done!" "Whoa, nice abs on the princess! "). The other is (you guessed it) special effects.

  In a throwback to the days of Captain Video or R
adar Men from the Moon, the latest three Star Wars movies became about the special effects. The stories were lame, with characters who often seemed to be wandering through, barely interacting with each other. The Jedi powers were rendered as both awesome and ineffectual so as to prevent those powers from actually influencing events. ("The girl we thought was a handmaiden is actually the princess! I wonder why my mind-reading powers didn't pick that up!" or "Drat, yet another alien species my mind-control powers don't work on!") How did the incredibly wise and powerful Jedi triumph in The Phantom Menace? By accident. When the cute little Anakin flew through a special effects spectacular space battle and just happened to sail through a protective shield that keeps out weapons but not enemy spaceships and just happened to pull the trigger that destroyed the robot con trols conveniently left in the most exposed possible location. Not exactly "use the Force, Luke."

  But, hey, look at those giant underwater creature special effects. Why are the Jedi in a submarine in the first place, anyway, when it doesn't really have anything to do with the story? Oh, yeah, so the film could stick in those giant underwater creature special effects.

  I could go on with the next two films but it'd be a depressing litany of similar stupidity and special effects-driven plots. I suppose in one way the The Phantom Menace, Attach of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith trilogy did succeed as a story. When evil is certain to triumph in the third film, one thing that helps keep the viewer looking forward to that ending is constantly demonstrated idiocy by the good guys. If somebody's too dumb to win, watching them lose does generate a certain perverse satisfaction. (It's possible to argue that this represents a triumph of the dark side of the movie viewer.)