by Simon Pegg
That’s No Moon, It’s an Understatement
A
s you can probably by tell now, Star Wars had quite a big effect on my life; not just as a child, but by extending its influence beyond that first encounter to so many facets of my adult life.
It has affected my relationships, my education, my intellect, my decisions and made a significant contribution to making me the person I am today. I’m not suggesting this is due to it being some indispensable work of art or the single greatest film ever committed to celluloid. It was, however, for all its superficial inconsequentiality, of seismic importance as a social and cultural event at that particular point in history, as well as being a piece of blisteringly entertaining fun.
People will often cry gross over-intellectualisation when popular culture is critically addressed, as if it is somehow exempt from serious consideration because it is itself ‘non-serious’, just a bit of fun that doesn’t require or deserve dissection. I disagree; every expression of art is a product of its environment and as such will reflect the concerns, preoccupations and neuroses of the time. Mainstream entertainment particularly, by its very nature, has to reflect the dominant modes of thinking in order to qualify as mainstream, and in that respect, mass entertainment is even more fun to pick apart.
The first Star Wars movie is an extraordinary example of this, and its impact was so extensive, it resonates to this day, helped along by a superior sequel and despite the spiralling decline in the quality of subsequent instalments. Now, you’re probably thinking, what the hell? I thought this chapter was going to be a continuation of the previous chapter’s whimsy about a sci-fi blockbuster shaping a little boy’s dreams. Well, that’s absolutely what this chapter is; it’s just slightly more complex than that. Stick with it though, there are far more personal recollections on their way and I promise you the preceding theoretical musings are interesting and fun in equal measure. It’s Star Wars – how can it not be?
First things first, I want to identify why this film had the effect it did, not just on me but also on millions of people over the course of a third of a century. It isn’t the story, which is wilfully classical and familiar; it isn’t the script, which is joyously clunky at times; it isn’t the characters, which are archetypes lifted from stories told many times before; it isn’t the acting, which I think is great particularly from the central players, but it’s only a space opera; it isn’t even the effects, which were groundbreaking and dizzying to behold at the time. It is somehow all of these things combined (crucially) with the timing of its release, the collective American psyche at the time and, in global terms, the tremendous hype that ensued as a result of the US population’s Star Wars hysteria.
If you didn’t already know, or haven’t guessed from my rambling, I studied film for a while. I relished being able to pick apart my favourite films as a student; it was amusing and fascinating all at the same time. Easily dismissed but powerfully persuasive when argued well, film theory seems from the outside like an awful lot of brainpower for something so inconsequential. During my studies, I wrote a thesis entitled ‘Base and Supersucker: A Marxist Overview of Consent in Star Wars and Related Works’. In the most basic terms it was about how when we experience art without critical awareness we consent to the ideas being promoted, either intentionally or unintentionally, by the film-maker. For instance, if you watch a racist comedian and laugh at his jokes, you are consenting to the prejudices inherent within them. Similarly, if you watch a movie which perpetuates conventional ideas about race, gender, etc., you are consenting to them and not affecting change in any way.
A film or TV show might not set out to be political, but its refusal to challenge or upset received modes of thinking makes it so. Here’s a fun example. Towards the end of the Cold War, our obsession with weapons of mass destruction was endemic. The possibility of total annihilation filled us with the vibrations of constant low-level panic. Who among us remembering this period can’t recall waking from a dream similar to the one Sarah Connor has in Terminator 2: Judgment Day? Fire sweeping through our neighbourhoods, houses disintegrating in the wake of a devastating blast wave, ‘people flying apart like leaves’.
We lived in a constant state of concern that our deepest fears might be realised at any moment, signalled by the siren from the beginning of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Two Tribes’ or the television caption in the video to Ultravox’s ‘Dancing With Tears In Our Eyes’. This preoccupation frequently manifested itself culturally; not just in eighties gritpop or bleak, overtly realist dramas like BBC’s Threads or Nicholas Meyer’s The Day After, but also in populist, mainstream entertainment, in which the WMDs were presented figuratively and metaphorically.
The Force, the Death Star, the Ark of the Covenant, Project Genesis are all atomic avatars that not only enable us to address our fears in fantastic terms, but also help us formulate a social morality which helps justify the existence of our own nuclear arsenal. These formidable weapons are totally justifiable in the hands of the righteous and the good. The Death Star is a monstrous orb of evil controlled by the largely faceless, militaristic galactic Empire, but it is perfectly acceptable to use that awesome power against the Empire and wipe out its entire population. After all, it blew up Princess Leia’s home planet of Alderaan, just as the Russians could potentially destroy Alaska.
We (the rebels) even employed a little WMD action of our own, using the Force to nail the thermal exhaust port, although in our hands this power is a means of achieving good.
The Project Genesis in the Star Trek movie series is similarly confused. In the hands of the Klingon Empire, another autonomous group of demonstrative military aggressors (China, North Korea, Russia, take your pick), it is a force of death, a destroyer, a means of extinction. In the hands of the righteous federation, however, it is the very opposite: a bringer of life and renewal, a force for good and the creation of a new order. Genesis even looks like a missile, similar in appearance to Cruise or Trident.
It would be easy to dismiss this kind of theorising as a bit tenuous, but these moral dilemmas were tightly wound into our collective subconscious at the time.
I’m not suggesting Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were somehow in the government’s employ and were charged with encouraging the masses to consent to the ongoing stockpiling of nuclear weaponry. I’m simply saying that our deepest thoughts, desires and preoccupations manifest themselves in art, whether we intend them to or not. That’s what art is for; it’s not cerebral, it’s emotional.
So, if you’re still with me, here’s why Star Wars is so popular. Firstly, we have to look at the film in the context of its time. In the mid-seventies America felt like shit. Having participated in a sixteen-year-long war against an indomitable and tenacious guerrilla force (remember that phrase, I’m going to use it again later) and receiving one of the most significant psychological ass-kickings in the history of military engagement, the nation found itself in a deep depression. No longer buoyed by the cocksure self-confidence engendered by the victories in Europe and the Pacific during World War II, it faltered in a malaise of self-doubt and moral confusion.
A growing surge of angry internal dissent inspired an equal and opposite display of entrenched, right-wing, nationalistic rage and the country was gripped by a schism of insecurity and confusion. Notions of good and evil became muddied and unclear as faith in leadership dwindled to an all-time low, in the wake of the Watergate scandal and both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon being accused of abuse of authority under the War Powers Act of 1973.
Away from the war, the progress of the civil rights movement had sharply divided public opinion on matters of race and equal opportunity, and polarised the nation into violent clashes between old and new thinking. The country’s cinematic output was appropriately bleak, reflecting the moroseness and self-hatred that riddled the national psyche. Anti-heroes such as Bonnie and Clyde, Travis Bickle, Popeye Doyle and the Corleones dominated the box office and the public wallowed in a
morass of guilty introspection. There was never a country in more desperate need of a blow job than the United States of America: enter George Lucas.
Born in Modesto, California, on 14 May 1944 (if only it had been May the fourth), George Walton Lucas Jr initially had aspirations to be a racing driver until a near-fatal accident in 1962 led to a change of direction. He became interested in cinema and, significantly, in-camera special effects while studying liberal arts at community college, a passion which steered him towards the avant-garde in his formative film-making years. More interested in non-narrative, associative film-making, Lucas focused on creating abstract works that evoked emotion using sound and vision, cinematic poems that foreshadowed not only his obsession with aesthetics but also, perhaps, his reluctance to work with actual actors. Lucas’s transfer to USC eventually led to his remaking one of his own short films into a feature for cinematic release. THX 1138, a science-fiction story of oppression in a dystopian future and most likely a civil rights metaphor, was a not a success in commercial terms, although it is regarded as a cult classic by some, and Lucas’s next feature could not have been more different.
Inspired by his youth spent racing cars in Modesto and, as his later career might suggest, driven by a desire for commercial recognition and remuneration, Lucas wrote and directed American Graffiti, a massive box-office success, eventually grossing $115 million, and subsequently proving a significant calling card for the young director.
With the success of American Graffiti under his still modest belt, Lucas grasped the opportunity to adapt the manageable mid-section of a space opera he had been developing. Star Wars was a grand reworking of the old RKO serialisations of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers and initially consisted of four trilogies, which fortunately, although sadly not forever, he whittled down to one. After initially finding it hard to get the project off the ground, Lucas eventually got the support he needed from Twentieth Century Fox, and what was to be a bumpy production began at Elstree Studios, England, in late 1975.
The film represented many of Lucas’s preoccupations, combining sophisticated visuals, use of music and sound design, as well as objects travelling at great speed, robots and midgets. It was everything America was crying out for, and on its release could not have been more warmly welcomed by the cinema-going public. Star Wars was and is a simple tale of good vs evil, which shamelessly celebrates the thrusting positivity and optimism of young, white America, clearly defining the boundaries between good and evil so there can be no mistake who are the good guys and who are the bad.
The bad guys are faceless and aggressive or else wear uniforms reminiscent of the Third Reich during World War II (a time when notions of good and evil were seemingly as clear-cut) and represent an enormous technologically advanced superpower, intent on extending its influence across the galaxy. The good guys (and here’s where it starts to get really interesting) are represented by an indomitable and tenacious guerrilla force, who refuse to give way to the superior aggressor, even in the face of insurmountable odds. Sound familiar? This is a theme that continues to leap out from behind Lucas’s creative bush throughout his diminishing returns. Six years later, in Return of the Jedi, one of the three climactic battles takes place in a huge forest between the Empire’s formidable army of laser guns and mechanical chickens and a makeshift army of ill-equipped, relatively primitive jungle fighters, who eventually prevail, despite the bookies heavily favouring the guys with the robo-cocks. The word Ewok even sounds faintly Far Eastern.
Was the mass psychotherapy of Star Wars a cathartic transference into the mind of the enemy? A sort of hypothetical revisionism allowing the audience a little subconscious self-flagellation from the safety of the imaginary moral high ground? Not just for Vietnam but for other dishonourable histories yet to be reconciled, not least the subjugation of the country’s indigenous population, a regret played out again and again in American cinema, most recently in James Cameron’s Avatar.
Was Star Wars the history that America craved? Young, good-looking, enthusiastic and plucky teenagers overthrowing a staid older order, represented largely by British actors (we wrote the book on guilty histories after all) and even subtitled A New Hope, Star Wars: Episode IV (as it eventually and somewhat irritatingly became known) represented a distancing from the ways of the past and a renewal of the positivity and determination that infuses America at its best. This opportunity for self-reassessment and fantastical distraction is a key element in the success of the movie, although it would be unfair to say it is the most important factor – that’s due to the fact that Star Wars is just really fucking great!
The clearly defined role and function of each character (the hero, the princess, the rogue, the wise man, etc.) and the classical development of the story made it easily accessible to a mainstream audience of all ages. Lucas succeeded in infusing familiar themes and situations with a freshness and originality, by way of his epic fantasy recontextualisation. The Star Wars universe was postmodern in a conceptual sense if not a literal one.
A strong feeling of antiquity persists throughout the movie, particularly in the production design, which appears weathered and used. With the exception of the sleek angular Imperial environments, the settings feel lived-in and old, and even in the newer structures, there is a classical simplicity. Science fiction generally dealt either with Earthbound encounters against technologically superior aliens, who usually wanted to eat us, or enslave us, or else with projections of our own future (technologically advanced and expanded beyond Earth into the reaches of space). The Star Wars universe was entirely removed from our own reality, it had nothing to do with us, or our planet, and as such, perhaps, proved a more effective metaphor. Even as a child I thought this was clever as it enabled total escapism to a place unsullied by familiarity.
Unfortunately, Lucas seemed to forget this when creating his prequels, gleefully including sly winks to decidedly Earthly concepts, such as the evils of smoking cigarettes and smart-mouthed sports commentators. The computer-generated, dramatically weightless robot armies of the trade federation constantly use the phrase ‘roger, roger’ as an affirmation, which is old-fashioned US Air Force speak, taken from the Able Baker phonetic alphabet. Couldn’t he think of something more otherworldly? All that money was spent trying to create a galaxy far, far away and the risible dialogue keeps bringing us down to Earth with a bump. Even Captain Scarlet and Thunderbirds had their own call signs in S.I.G. and F.A.B. and I never cared a jot that I could see their strings.
This was just one of the multitude of niggles that hampered my determination to enjoy The Phantom Menace in 1999, having flown to New York especially to see it. I dimly recall the British playwright Howard Barker speaking of the supreme discomfort we experience when embarrassed by the people we respect. This was most certainly the case at the AMC Lowes cinema on 34th Street as the demolition of my childhood obsession unfolded before my eyes. I should have noticed the signs as I pretended to like the needless augmentations of the original films when they were re-released as ‘special editions’ in 1997.
If I’m totally honest, I should have accepted that things were going awry when I pretended not to hear Chewbacca yelling like Tarzan as he and a couple of space bears swung from a vine on a mission to hijack an electric chicken in Return of the Jedi. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20 and back in 1977, way before I required glasses, my jaw slackened in anticipation of the film everyone was talking about and the curious legend proclaiming a distant time and location faded on to the screen. I was hooked even before the three neat paragraphs of expositional text receded into infinity, setting up the first dizzying scene.
The opening sequence of Star Wars must surely be one of the most effective in the history of modern cinema. John Williams’s iconic march settles into a dreamy reflection of the spacescape. A single moon hangs in the starry, silent depths of space over a sandy-coloured planet. The score sweeps and gathers into urgency as a large ship passes overhead, establishing a brief standard for the size o
f interplanetary cruisers, but as the music swells to percussive insistence another ship rumbles into view, profoundly dwarfing the first. Its mammoth hulk widens into a seemingly never-ending triangle of awesome military might as it fires red energy bolts at the hapless, now tiny, blockade runner, which in response sends back an ineffectual volley of soft green laser blasts.
There is a wonderful economy of storytelling, which grips the audience from the outset, even before we meet any of the characters. It is entirely a bonus that the visuals are so extraordinary and this is key to the success of this first film. If the context were removed, an appealing and easy-to-follow story would still exist. Lucas then superimposes a rich and complex fantasy environment over this story, enabling us to experience classic tropes in a new context. We have seen the relationships and even the situations before in other films (Lucas himself once referred to Star Wars as his ‘Searchers in space’). But the roles usually divided up among ethnic supporting actors in war films and westerns are allocated to genuinely alien characters and robots. He adopts a narrative device used by Akira Kurosawa in his 1958 film The Hidden Fortress to present the story from the point of view of the lowliest of characters. This is a clever means of easing us into the environment at the first social level, allowing us to look up to the protagonist Luke Skywalker, even at his lowliest phase as a whiny farmhand and before the classic narrative device of ‘the call to action’ which elevates him to hero status.
In Kurosawa’s film, these characters are two peasants called Tahei and Matakishi who befriend the protagonist, General Rokurota Makabe. In Star Wars, the job goes to C-3PO and R2-D2, a couple of affected robots whose actions facilitate the entire plot. We certainly hadn’t seen this before. Hal 9000 was a bit camp but he was most likely bi, particularly when compared to C-3PO, a bot who wouldn’t look twice at an artificial girl, even Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner or that chick out of Metropolis with the metal tits.