Star Wars on Trial

by David Brin

  Wait a minute. Charly? Marooned?

  If those last two titles seem unfamiliar: good. Because this brings up a very important point.

  III. THE THREE Rs OF SCIENCE FICTION

  One of the problems we encounter when trying seriously to assess the impact of Star Wars on science fiction in films is one of definition: just what is science fiction?" Is Dr. Strangelove science fiction? Certainly it was made by the brilliant Stanley Kubrick, whose next two films were the sci-fi masterpieces 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, respectively. Without question, nuclear Armageddon and its aftermath has been the subject of a ton of overtly sci-fi movies, from any number of low-budget 1950s atomic mutant horror shows to Mel Gibson's krovvy-splattered Road Warrior series. But is Dr. Strangelove sci-fi?

  And if so, does that mean Fail-Safe is as well? For that matter, what about the 1962 version of The Manchurian Candidate? The 2004 remake, with its plot switch to mind control via implanted computer chips, clearly was science fiction and was marketed as such. But what of the original, in which unwilling subjects' minds were controlled using drugs and implanted memories, not unlike the methods used in Total Recall? How about the 1968 social-upheaval fantasy Wild in the Streets? Or the early James Bond films Dr. No and Thunderball?17

  You see, the problem we face when discussing anything involving genre fiction is that the membrane between "genre" and "mainstream" is constantly shifting and extraordinarily permeable. If a piece of genre fiction reaches a wide enough audience, then by definition, it becomes mainstream. In science fiction, especially, this shifting boundary is a daily problem for practitioners in the field. Things that were once sci-fi-computers, spaceships, lasers, genetic engineering, test-tube babies, cars that know where they're going and talk back to you, killer viruses that erupt from nowhere and threaten millions-can very quickly become tomorrow's news, or worse, yesterday's history.

  In the case of Marooned, then, we had a major-studio, major-budget, major-star-powered sci-fi thriller about a disaster in space, that was based on a novel by established SF pro Martin Caidin and had the bad luck to precede the real-world drama of Apollo 13 by a mere six months. In the case of Charly, on the other hand, we had a movie based on the Science Fiction Hall of Fame story "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes. It's the heartbreaking tale of a retarded man who undergoes an experimental medical procedure to increase his intelligence and becomes a genius, only to realize that the experiment has been a tragic failure and he will just as quickly revert to his original mind. The title role earned Cliff Robertson an Oscar for Best Actor, but today, only obsessive fans and critics recognize Charly as being science fiction.

  This suggests that the reason why so many people seem to think there was a sci-fi drought in the years before Star Wars is not that serious, major-studio SF films were not being made; they were. Rather, it appears that despite all educational efforts to the contrary, the majority of the population still suffers from SAMMS: the Saturday Afternoon Monster Matinee Syndrome. Science fiction in film is equated with The Brain from Planet Arous, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and old Flash Gordon serials, not because these are truly representative samples of what was being made, but because these were the only films that were both old enough and cheap enough to be shown on the local UHF station during non-prime-time hours.

  Thus, we discover another principle: in the world of motion pictures, more so than in any other human activity, perception always trumps the truth. In this case, a widespread perception has developed that all other arguments are just pedantic nonsense and pathetic cries for respectability, and that real science fiction is defined solely by presence of the Three Rs: rocket ships, robots and rayguns.

  IV. GROKKING THE ZEITGEST OF THE 1970s

  To understand the astonishing impact of Star Wars, then, it's necessary to cast a wider net. We not only need to survey the other films that were being released at about the same time, both inside the genre and out in the mainstream, we need to develop at least a su perficial understanding of what was going on out there in the larger popular culture.18

  In television, for example, Star Trek and Lost in Space-both quintessential "Three Rs" shows-had long since been canceled, but they lived on in reruns, and Gene Roddenberry was stumping around the country trying to raise the money to shoot his Star Trek movie. New sci-fi TV series were not entirely absent from the major networksPlanet of the Apes, Logan's Run, The Questor Tapes, Genesis II and Man From Atlantis all had their shot at prime time-but most of these series are, thankfully, forgotten now.

  In cinema, major-studio SF films continued to be made, but they were by and large either dystopian and nihilistic things or else barely recognizable as sci-fi, when not both. For example, Michael Crichton's 1971 medical thriller The Andromeda Strain seems restrained now in comparison to the Ebola-inspired films that have come since, not to mention the latest CNN headlines about West Nile and Asian bird flu. Crichton's next film, WestWorld (1973), sent a remorseless killer robot chasing after Richard Benjamin more than a decade earlier than The Terminator (1984), but today it is best known as being the inspiration for a particularly good Simpsons episode. In 1973 we learned that Soylent Green is people-need we say more?-and Woody Allen released Sleeper, but in keeping with the principle that the mainstream always assimilates successful genre films, Sleeper is now considered a comedy, not sci-fi, even though the Three Rs are present in abundance.

  George Lucas took a crack at depressing dystopias in THX 1138 (1971), John Boorman had his turn at the same in Zardoz (1974), and two young guys named John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon made an utterly insane little low-budget movie entitled Dark Star (1974), after which O'Bannon decided his "alien loose and wreaking havoc inside a spaceship" idea needed a more serious treatment, and the result was Alien (1979). A young actor by the name of Don Johnson starred in Harlan Ellison's postapocalyptic nightmare A Boy and His Dog (1975), while Roger Zelazny's postapocalyptic nightmare Damnation Alley (1977) got turned into a Jan-Michael Vincent starring vehicle. In the year 1 BSW (1976) Logan's Run won the Academy Award for Best Special Effects,19 for a story about a dystopian future in which social stability is maintained by the simple expedient of executing everyone who reaches the age of thirty-and this movie was successful and popular enough to be spun off into a TV series!

  Perhaps the defining sci-fi film of the pre-Star Wars 1970s, though, was Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running (1972). Expensively produced, well acted, beautifully photographed-Trumbull went on to work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Blade Runner, among others-Silent Running features a trio of squat robots who are clearly in R2-D2's direct lineage and a painfully overwrought ecological "message" script that's about as subtle as spending ninety minutes getting clubbed over the head with a five-pound organically grown heirloom zucchini. By the time Silent Running grinds down to its final, depressing, hopeless ending, you're left with a very slight feeling of sympathy for the surviving robot, and a profound sense of relief that at least it's over and you won't have to sit through that again.

  And that, in a nutshell, is the lingering legacy of the years immediately before Star Wars: at least they're over, and we won't have to go through that again. In the larger world of mainstream cinema, Hollywood produced a lot of movies that left the audience with that feeling: Five Easy Pieces (1970), Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970), The Harrad Experiment (1973), Last Tango in Paris (1973), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Barry Lyndon (1975), Taxi Driver (1976), The Goodbye Girl (1977)....

  America in the mid-1970s, you see, was deep in the throes of what President Carter termed a "national malaise." We were trying to sober up from our post-Vietnam War hangover, but inflation and fuel prices were rising fast, thermostats and friendly governments were dropping like flies, and the country as a whole was fresh out of heroes. Our astronauts were unemployed: the last three Apollo moon missions were canceled due to lack of funding, and the first space shuttle would not lift off until 1981. Our cowb
oys were discredit ed: in less than twenty years we'd gone from "winning the West" to "exploiting the Native Americans" and from Shane (1953) to Soldier Blue and Little Big Man (both in 1970).

  Our military was even more deeply discredited: in less than a decade John Wayne had gone from the widely praised The Longest Day (1962) to the even more widely damned The Green Berets (1968). Even the police were now villains: Officer Friendly and Sergeant Friday had been replaced by Dirty Harry (1971), a surly, brutal man only slightly better than the criminals he pursued. And when we in desperation finally turned to our political leaders for hope, what we got was President Carter on TV, wearing a sweater he'd borrowed from Mr. Rogers and telling us that we'd better tighten our belts and learn to smile, because things would never be this good again.

  There. That was the prevailing spirit of the 1970s. That was what was in our hearts and minds when we plunked down our five bucks and walked into the movie theater. And then some pale blue letters appeared on the screen: A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away ....

  And the first brassy fanfares of John Williams's unabashedly triumphal score erupted from the speakers....

  And 121 minutes later, the first waves of baby-boomer teenagers came marching out of those theaters, giddy from a megadose of the Three Rs, humming the Star Wars themeZ° and ready to enlist in the Rebellion and join the fight against the evil Empire, if only someone would tell us just where exactly the evil Empire was.21

  V. LIFE IN THE YEAR 28 ASW

  Twenty-eight years later, it remains almost impossible to overstate the impact of the original Star Wars. No, George Lucas did not single-handedly rescue and revitalize cinematic science fiction. As I've shown, Hollywood never stopped making big-budget sci-fi films, and many of the films that appeared in the years immediately after Star Wars-Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Capricorn One (1978), Battlestar Galactica (1978), Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979), Alien (1979), Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), Flash Gordon (1980)-were in development long before Star Wars ever opened. It takes quite a while to make and distribute a major motion picture, or even a cheap one: Roger Corman, the King of the LowBudget Quickies, was not able to get his Star Wars coattail-grabber, Battle Beyond the Stars, into release before 1980.

  But once again, we're straying into the no-man's-land between perception and truth, and the point is not worth arguing over. There was an enormous boom in both film and print science fiction in the decade after Star Wars, and while some of us might think that the writing just possibly had something to do with it, if others want to credit the Star Wars coattail-effect, so be it. To dispute this point now is to overlook Lucas's one great, single and hopefully lasting accomplishment. In making Star Wars, George Lucas did just what he claims he set out to do:

  He reintroduced the hero.

  Consider that for a moment. In an industry dominated by a follow-the-leader mentality, at a time when scripts were full of cynical, violent and foulmouthed antiheroes and Linda Lovelace movies were playing in first-run theaters, George Lucas gave us Luke Skywalker: a pure, honest, good-natured and unalloyed hero. He gave us a stouthearted lad who was loyal to his friends and uncompromising to his enemies; who, when faced with the choice between good and evil, chose good; and who, in the final scene, did not utter a pithy epigram as he finished off his greatest enemy, but actually tried to save him.

  That is Lucas's great contribution. Luke Skywalker's cinematic progeny live on, not in the big-budget splat-'em-ups or the later Star Wars episodes," but in the movies like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. Movies with kindly hearts. Movies with heroes. And for that one accomplishment alone-even if that were his only accomplishment-I am willing to forgive George Lucas for everything he's done ever since, including Howard the Duck.

  P.S. But all the same, Han did shoot first.

  Bruce Bethke works, writes, and when time permits, lives, in the frozen northern reaches of Minnesota. In some circles he is best known for his 1980 short story, "Cyberpunk." In others, he is better known for his Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, Headcrash. What very few people in either circle have known until recently is that he actually works in supercomputer software development, and all of his best science fiction gets turned into design specifications for future products.

  Bethke can be contacted via his Web site, http://www.BruceBethke. com.

  THE COURTROOM

  DROID JUDGE: Mr. Brin, your witness.

  DAVID BRIN: The Prosecution will gladly stipulate the honorable Mr. Bethke's central point, that the original Star Wars movie, later called Episode IV A New Hope, was revolutionary in that it stimulated ebullience, wonder and joy, where SF filmmaking had been obsessed with the dark and depressing.

  So? We are not here to look at Episode IV all by itself. Indeed, a key Prosecution contention has been that the joyful, can-do spirit of Episodes IV and V was gradually eroded and betrayed, as time went on, until a dreary sense of utter fatalism took over. One that eats away at us, even now.

  Consider The Phantom Menace. Can you point to a single heroic act, by any Jedi or those poor, slaughtered Gungans that even remotely makes a difference or makes anything better? Palpatine's plan was to use the crisis to get appointed Chancellor, and then be seen coming to the rescue. This plan was accomplished, and he grins while the surviving heroes foolishly celebrate a totally unvictory. Bummer!

  The Prosecution accepts Mr. Bethke's point about Episode IV But isn't it only half a point. What about today? What has Star Wars done for us lately?

  BRUCE BETHKE: An excellent question. This is why I believe it's essential to talk about Star Wars as two series, set in the same universe, but separated by sixteen years. In the original 1977-1983 series we were plunging into an unknown universe, with each new scene revealing a new wonder or a new thrill, and at the end of the series the future of every character still living was still wide open. In the later 1999-2005 series we were returning to a known universe, and to the stories of characters whose fates were already long since decided, so of course these episodes are saturated with dreary fatalism. We know how it all ends. There is little room for surprise or unexpected character development, as the characters' futures are closed. The story of Anakin's rise and fall unfolds with exactly the same sense of slow and awful inexorability as a slow-motion car crash on an icy road. All that's left to do is to marvel at the scenery while it happens and try to enjoy the ride. (Er, I just remembered that you live in California. Does this metaphor make sense to you?)

  In a peculiar way, I believe Lucas was a victim of his own early success, and the later trilogy is in some strange sense a 1980s period piece. I think he felt trapped by the story lines he'd already ended, the situations he'd already explained and the wonders he'd already put on-screen, and this sense of being trapped shows up, however subconsciously, in the story he wrote. I'm sure there were things he didn't think of when he made those early films, that he thought of and would have found really cool to use in the later films, but he couldn't, because they would have contradicted his own established orthodoxy. For example, in a universe where clones are apparently cheaper and have fewer rights than droids, and the man-to-machine interface is seamless-witness the Skywalker boys' repeated resurrections from the spare parts bin-it's surprising that clones aren't routinely vivisected and turned into integrated weapons systems or truly mechanized warriors, a la General Grievous.

  There must have been a lot of ideas like this that occurred to Lucas while he was making the later series, and he must have found it enormously frustrating to be unable to use them.

  So, to answer the question of what Star Wars has done for us lately:

  1. As I said in the main body of my testimony, it restored the cinematic fortunes of the unalloyed hero. To give us Luke Skywalker in an age of rampant antiheroes, and to give us a film in the 1970s that lacked the seemingly obligatory profanity and nude scenes, was a move of great courage. I do believe that the success of Star Wars is what made films like the Lord
of the Rings movies, The Chronicles of Narnia and the Harry Potter series possible.

  (To truly appreciate what a departure the original three movies were, just imagine what they would have been like if they'd been made by Sam Peckinpah or Martin Scorsese.)

  2. It made it much easier for subsequent SF films to get the green light for production and the budget needed to do the special effects right. One need only compare the Academy Award-winning special effects in Logan's Run (1976) to anything made after 1980 to appreciate the difference. So for example, while the success of Star Wars did not make Star Trek: The Motion Picture possible, it quite likely had a strong effect on the amount of time and money that Paramount was willing to put into effects in postproduction, and it probably had a very profound effect on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which is the movie that really launched the rebirth of the Star Trek franchise. In fact, in my mind's ear I can almost hear some Paramount studio executive saying to Roddenberry, "Gene, baby, loved the first movie, but for the next one, you really need to blow up some spaceships. And are you sure you can't have Kirk and Khan get into a big laser sword fight at the end?"

  3. It raised the bar and provided the impetus for major and continuing advances in special effects technology, especially in the areas of CGI and SPMD programming models. I realize this is a two-edged sword and that in my other testimony I criticize the later movies for overuse of CGI, but speaking now on a purely personal level, as someone who has a circuit board from S/N 108 hanging on the wall above my desk, I think that this was a truly great thing.