I went looking for reactions from the few elders I saw in the line. This was the closest I was ever going to get to a complete adult newbie experience of Star Wars. Every one of the elders to whom I spoke shared George James’s confusion over the title: Why are the stars at war? The elders also echoed one of the main complaints that had been leveled against Star Wars in 1977: it went too fast. (Modern audiences, of course, see it as too slow; the ethos of Star Wars helped beget the ethos of MTV.) Some were confused about exactly what each side was fighting for. You can translate “stolen data tapes” into Navajo, but you can’t make it make sense.
Then I learned something spiritual from this group of elders: Manny was right about the Joseph Campbell connection bringing Star Wars full circle. “May the Force be with you,” it turns out, is a nearly literal translation of a Navajo prayer. “The Force,” in their usage, can best be described as a kind of positive, life-filled, extrasensory force field surrounding them. “We call for strength, for protection from negativity,” Thomas Deel, eighty-two, told me via a translator.
Some of the elders glimpsed their belief system in George Lucas’s creation. “Good was trying to conquer evil, and asking for protection in doing so,” summarized Annette Bilgody, an eighty-nine-year-old in the traditional dress of a Diné grandmother. She also offered the highest praise of the evening: “I enjoyed it as much as my granddaughter did.”
She wasn’t alone. In the months to come, Wheeler would take his translated version of the movie on the road, screening it for Native American communities at film festivals around the United States. A DVD of Star Wars in Navajo sold out multiple times at Walmarts around the Southwest. Twentieth Century Fox and Lucasfilm got all the money, but that didn’t matter to Manny. What mattered, he said, was that “the concept is blossoming.” He was hearing one question constantly asked around the Nation: What films should we make in Navajo next? There was even interest in building another movie theater in Window Rock.
As for George James Sr.? He excused himself ten minutes into the movie and never returned. Perhaps, as a veteran of Iwo Jima, he hadn’t wanted to see people blasting each other with weapons modeled on World War II military sidearms. Perhaps, as a Code Talker, he hadn’t relished a story that revolves around an innocent hunted for the crime of carrying a message. But I like to think that, in leaving early, James managed to preserve some of the mystery he had brought to that evening and that he’s still out there at his home in the mountains, wondering about wild birds and the stars at war.
________
* This is a nickname Lucas applied to himself in 2007, after President George W. Bush famously referred to himself as “the Decider.” Responding to a question from Conan O’Brien about fans challenging him, Lucas pointed out that he is another George W. He told the host: “I’m more than the Decider. I am the Creator!”
1.
MARS WARS
Clearly, Star Wars is a grand, galaxy-spanning mythological epic. Except no, wait, it’s a family-sized fairy tale in the land of far, far away. Unless it’s a Samurai story, or possibly a World War II-style action adventure.
Since the first film in 1977, fans and critics have contorted themselves in all sorts of directions explaining the appeal of Star Wars by reference to a dozen different genres. No one is more adept at this than George Lucas, who variously compared it to a Spaghetti Western, Sword and Sorcery, 2001, Lawrence of Arabia, Captain Blood, and the entire James Bond franchise—and that was all before the original movie was even filmed. Navigate past this asteroid field of influences, and what you find at the center of Star Wars is a simple, whimsical subgenre: space fantasy.
Space fantasy is to its parent genre, science fiction, as Luke Skywalker is to Darth Vader. George Lucas came closer to science fiction with his first movie THX 1138, and then abandoned it as too real, too dismal, too unpopular at the box office. Science fiction projects an image of the future through the lens of the present. The focus is on technology and its implications. There is some effort to adhere to the physical laws of the universe. It is fiction about science, whereas space fantasy is, well, fantasy set in space.* Science fiction echoes our world; space fantasy transcends our world. It is nostalgic and romantic, and more freely adventurous, and it takes technology as a mere starting point. It casts aside the laws of physics in favor of fun. “I was afraid science fiction buffs would say things like ‘you know there’s no sound in space,’” Lucas said in 1977. “I just wanted to forget science.” In space, everyone can hear you go pew pew.
This great divide in speculative fiction, the possible versus the merely enjoyable, goes back to the fin de siècle rivalry between French science fiction pioneer Jules Verne and his upstart English contemporary, H. G. Wells. Verne was avowedly no scientist, but he wanted to be scientifically plausible. In From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Verne sends his lunar explorers off in a capsule shot out of a giant cannon; he includes pages of precise calculations in a brave attempt to prove that such a thing were possible.* Wells, like Lucas, was always much more interested in the workings of society and the individual than in the mechanics of science. When he got around to writing his own protagonist lunar novel, The First Men in the Moon (1901), Wells had his scientist declare that he’d never heard of Verne’s book. He proceeds to discover an antigravity substance called “Cavorite” that simply floats his capsule, with him and a visiting businessman in it, moonwards. Verne sweated the details so much that his adventures didn’t get to the moon until a sequel novel; Wells wanted to ship his heroes there as fast as possible so they could explore a fanciful lunar civilization he had invented. (This irked Verne to the point that he made a mocking and rather point-missing demand of Wells: I can show you gunpowder; show me the Cavorite!) When Lucas decided to make his version of outer space noisy with laser fire and screeching jets, he was establishing himself in the Wellsian tradition.†
They were at odds over means, but what united Verne and Wells was a crying need to expand the landscape of the human imagination. Myths, as Lucas once observed, are invariably set in “that place just over the hill”—the next frontier, real enough to excite interest but unexplored enough to be mysterious: distant Greek islands in the classical age, the dark forest in medieval fairy tales, the Americas in the wake of Columbus. By the twentieth century, with most of the planet explored, space became the last remaining place just over the hill. And one corner of space in particular fascinated authors and readers, and solidified the lineage that led to Star Wars: Mars.
The Mars craze spread steadily after an Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, famously spotted channels (canali) on the Red Planet in 1877. British and American newspapers, not understanding or caring much about the difference between canali and canals, loved to print large, illustrated, speculative features on Martian civilization, especially after amateur astronomer Percival Lowell wrote a trilogy of “nonfiction” books detailing what that civilization might look like. Writers with no scientific background started to pen novels of Martian exploration. Their methods of reaching the Red Planet varied wildly. In Across the Zodiac (1880), English journalist Percy Greg sends his explorers off in an antigravity rocket called the Astronaut (he coined the term). Gustavus Pope, a Washington, DC, doctor whose previous book had tackled Shakespeare, wrote Journey to Mars in 1894. In it, an American naval lieutenant encounters Martians on a small island near the South Pole; eventually they take him back to their planet in an antigravity “ethervolt car.” (Wells, meanwhile, confounded genres by having his Martian invaders in the 1897 classic War of the Worlds arrive via capsules shot from Martian cannons—Verne in reverse.)
But where Mars first met space fantasy was in a book that is the unlikely great-granddaddy of Star Wars. An English writer and son of a newspaper baron, Edwin Lester Arnold, decided to cast aside spacecraft altogether; in Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905), he takes another fictional US Navy lieutenant and packs him off to Mars on a magical Persian carpet. Arnold’s Mars is surprisingl
y medieval. The people of Hither, indolent and soaked in a strong wine, are beset by the barbarous hordes of Thither. The Hitherites have a slave class, a king, and a beautiful princess. When the princess is taken in tribute to Thither, Jones sets off on a planet-wide journey to free her. He is an oddly unappealing protagonist, prone to long speeches: too smug to be a hero, too upright to be an antihero. He carves “USA” into the side of a mountain during his journey. Arnold seemed torn between adventure story and anti-American satire, and the novel was a flop. Dismayed, he quit writing. (It would not be published in the United States until 1964.)
Arnold’s idea of a fantasy Mars was rescued five years after he wrote it by an unlikely savior: a thirty-five-year-old manager of pencil sharpener salesmen in Chicago. The pencil guy had a lot of time on his hands, a lot of stationery in the office, and a desire for greatness that wouldn’t quit. He read pulp fiction magazines, and noting that most of their stories were “rot,” he tried his hand at one. Like Arnold’s tale, it is narrated by an American officer who is magically transported to Mars—this time in the blink of an eye, by sheer willpower. No Cavorite, no carpets, just a man “drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space.” Like Jones, the pencil guy’s protagonist meets outlandish humanlike characters and apemen, and fights heroically for the hand of a princess. The pencil guy thought his story childish and ridiculous. He asked for it to be published under a pen name intended to telegraph his sanity: Normal Bean. His real name he thought unsuitable for an author. It was Edgar Rice Burroughs.
The serial that became A Princess of Mars was first published in February 1912 in a monthly pulp magazine called the All-Story. It was a runaway success. Captain John Carter, Burroughs’s larger-than-life hero (and fictional uncle), found a following that Gullivar Jones could only dream of. No confused satire, this; in Burroughs’s book, lines of good and evil are clearly drawn. Carter is less wordy—there’s not a line of dialogue in the first third of the book—and more consistently placed in peril than Jones. From chapter one, when he is attacked by (of all people) Native Americans in Arizona, Carter is beset by spears, swords, rifles, and claws. The lesser gravity of Mars (which Burroughs dubs “Barsoom”) gives Carter just enough of an advantage in strength to help him overcome these considerable odds. He can leap buildings in a single bound. As well as kicking the space fantasy genre into high gear, Carter has a good claim on being the first superhero: he’s the progenitor of both Superman and Luke Skywalker.
Burroughs bought a ranch called Tarzana in present-day LA, quit the pencil job, and churned out three more serialized sequels—plus the story he named for his new home, Tarzan of the Apes—before Princess of Mars even made it to publication in book form. Over the rest of a productive, affluent lifetime, Burroughs would return to Barsoom in eleven more books. Barsoom is a fascinating planet, and unprecedented in its mixing of past and future concepts. It is a dying and largely barbaric world, but an atmosphere factory keeps it breathing. It has military flying machines, radium pistols, telepathy, domed cities, and medicine that makes lifespans a thousand years long, but it also offers plenty of sword play, courtly codes of honor, a medieval bestiary of creatures, and a succession of chieftains carrying lances on their steeds. The exotic desert setting is straight out of One Thousand and One Nights.
Barsoom stories follow a trusty formula. Escapes, rescues, duels, and wars are the main attraction, but in between them Burroughs reveals aspects of this curious world with the confidence of a good travel writer. Territories are clearly delineated. Green Tharks are largely barbaric nomads; the red inhabitants of Helium are rational aristocrats. In his second book, Gods of Mars, we find blond-haired, white-skinned Barsoomians who are evil, decadent murderers, preying on the planet’s inhabitants with the false promise of heaven.
Burroughs was modest and careful to say he was only writing for the money. But that’s an understatement. Read him today, and you can easily get infected by the same powerful, pure, childlike enjoyment that enveloped the author as he wrote. Barsoom offers morally clear heroics with as much mythological depth as you care to invest in its mysteries. The thrill of exploration and the wonderment of a world that is able to cause us to suspend our disbelief are rendered with the same spirit Lucas would later describe in his movies as “effervescent giddiness.” You can find this spirit in the work of artists as diverse as J. R. R. Tolkien and Stan Lee: ideal for the adolescent mindset, yes, but accessible to all and capable of greatness. Arthur Conan Doyle’s epigraph to The Lost World (1912) would explain this principle so well that it would also later grace the press materials for the original Star Wars:
I have wrought my simple plan
If I give one hour of joy
To the boy who’s half a man
Or the man who’s half a boy.
That statement was wrong in one respect: it turned out early on that women and girls liked this stuff too. Dejah Thoris, John Carter’s Barsoomian wife, who has his eggs (how that’s possible, we don’t know, except to reiterate: it’s space fantasy) is hardly an empowered heroine by twenty-first-century standards (Carter has to rescue her from implied rape dozens of times in eleven books). But the eponymous princess of the first book is a scientist, an explorer, a negotiator; her famously bosom-filled portraits by fantasy artist Frank Frazetta in the 1960s turned her into a sexual icon, but they barely did her justice. By the standards of her day, Dejah Thoris was a suffragette. Princess Leia has a long line of antecedents, and they go back to Dejah.
Burroughs published his last Barsoom stories in 1943, and the last in a similar Venus series in 1942, eight years before he died. By then, the genre was variously known as space fantasy, space opera, planetary romance, and sword-and-planet, and had been taken over by Burroughs’s many successors. Most memorable was his fellow Angelino Leigh Brackett, later known as the queen of space opera. She burst out of nowhere in 1940, at age twenty-five, selling an astonishing streak of twenty-six stories to pulp magazines in four years. All were set in what became known as the Brackett solar system. Her conception of each planet was fairly derivative—her Mars and Venus looked a lot like Burroughs’s—but where Brackett excelled was in describing the interplanetary conflict between them. The scope had expanded, from Mars wars to solar wars. Brackett’s scope was expanding too, and she started working on Hollywood screenplays such as The Big Sleep. She was unable to bring her two careers together until 1978, when she was named the writer of the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back.
Brackett’s husband, Edmond Hamilton, would also contribute to Star Wars, albeit in a more nebulous fashion. His 1933 story in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, “Kaldar, Planet of Antares,” contains this groundbreaking description of a weapon wielded by its hero—a saber made of light:
The sword seemed at first glance a simple long rapier of metal. But he found that when his grip tightened on the hilt it pressed a catch which released a terrific force stored in the hilt into the blade, making it shine with light. When anything was touched by this shining blade, he found, the force of the blade annihilated it instantly.
He learned that the weapon was called a lightsword.
Hamilton’s story was reprinted in paperback in 1965, eight years before a young filmmaker named George Lucas would begin to devour every pulp science fiction story he could get his hands on.
Alongside Burroughs, the pulp magazines that published Hamilton, Brackett, and their ilk were, in many ways, the other grandparents of Star Wars. Two of the most important stories in the prehistory of the franchise both appeared in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories. The cover showed a man with a jetpack. He was the star of “Skylark of Space,” a story written by E. E. “Doc” Smith, a food chemist who wrote fiction as a hobby when he wasn’t trying to engineer the perfect doughnut. Smith had Burroughs’s fizzing enthusiasm plus the desire to go farther in space. His heroes pilot a spaceship powered by “element X”—Cavorite on steroids—which shoots them out of the solar system and into
the stars for the first time in fictional history. They bounce from planet to planet as if out for a day trip in a jalopy; a planet-wide war causes them less trouble than the double wedding and medal ceremony that follows. All the speed, romance and humor of Star Wars are in “Skylark.” Smith would go on to write the Lensman stories—tales of mystical interstellar knights that would influence Lucas’s concept of the Jedi. Smith expanded the scope of conflict to our entire galaxy.
That issue of Amazing Stories was even more important for another story, “Armageddon 2419 AD.” The name of its hero, who is accidentally gassed to sleep in the twentieth century and wakes up in the twenty-fifth, was Anthony Rogers. He wasn’t given his now-legendary nickname until his creator, the newspaper columnist Philip Nowlan, approached a national comic strip syndicate about doing a regular strip based on the character. Well, said the syndicate, “Anthony Rogers” sounded too stiff for the funny pages. How about something a bit more cowboy-like—say, Buck?
Buck Rogers is, essentially, John Carter in the future: a plucky, heroic fish out of water. But simply being five centuries old grants him no superpowers. And that provides an opening for his version of Dejah Thoris, Wilma Deering. Wilma is a soldier, like all American women of the twenty-fifth century, in which North America has been invaded by Mongol hordes. She is more intelligent and adept than Buck. In one early strip, she is shown fashioning a radio from a pile of electronic parts, to Buck’s amazement. Captured and forced to wear a dress by the Mongol emperor, she exclaims, “What is this, a musical comedy?” What a difference suffrage had made.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 3