The Soul of Star Wars

The Soul of Stars Wars¹

Stars Wars was the Bible of my generation, our Shakespeare, our Simpsons. So when I began getting serious about film criticism,  I was jarred again and agian to read the poor opinion many film critics have of it. Let me head to downstairs and grab one of my favorite books, "Have You Seen...?" by David Thompson:

"For me, [Star Wars] is the line in the sand, the disastrous event, never mind it's high, good, boy-ish attentions"²

To some critics in the late 1970s, Star Wars represented the end of the era of realistic intimate character-driven movies and the beginning of the effects-driven block-buster. Escapism would replace social commentary now that the raging shadows of Vietnam had died down.

It would take me years to realize that Star Wars is in large part a re-working of the 15 minute Flash Gordon  'serial' movies of Lucas' youth. It is a turning back to nostalgia and an escape to the nowhere land of "a time long, long ago, in a galaxy, far, far away" - even typing those words, I can feel a rolling hypnotic spell to them.

Lucas' would usefully point to Kurosawa and Joseph Campbell as influences, but there is an unmistakable theme of nostalgia for an earlier America in Lucas - the whole of 'American Graffiti', Luke as a 'farm-boy' called to war. Later Lucas would be executive producer on another tribute to 'serial' films, the Jungle Adventures of Indian Jones.

As I child I could see none of this, even I let the movie seep into my own being.

Now having read Freudian³, Socialist⁴ and many other critical accounts of the film I have a much more nuanced view,but I will still argue that there is a vital humanistic element within Star Wars. I can smell the humans from the movie -  their work, their youth, their idealism - hundreds of them. Film is the most collaborative art we have - painters, actors, editors, directors, effects, sounds - and this is one of those films where the arts mesh into something far beyond the parts. There is a joy to the end of that film that is similar to the the end of a good semester, a sense of having participated in something larger than yourself, something where people grew and became more open.

In even in my youth I understood the film was the product of many people. I became obsessed with the sound design of Star Wars, and not just John William's score, but the bleeps, boops, whsitles, hisses and thunders, that still amaze me today.  These days I find myself fascinated with the most invisible of arts - editing. Editing is the magic, the trickery, the pacing, the guide of all movies.

The editor for all three Star Wars was Marcia Lucas, George's wife.

In basic terms she was the extroverted, emotional yang to his introverted, intellectual yin. She was also the only person who could stand up to him and question his decisions. She also had the talent and endurance to edit together the films.

Don't take my word, here is fellow nerd Mark Hamill:

"You can see a huge difference in the films that he does now and the films that he did when he was married. I know for a fact that Marcia Lucas was responsible for convincing him to keep that little 'kiss for luck' before Carrie [Fisher] and I swing across the chasm in the first film: 'Oh, I don't like it, people laugh in the previews,' and she said, 'George, they're laughing because it's so sweet and unexpected'-- and her influence was such that if she wanted to keep it, it was in. When the little mouse robot comes up when Harrison and I are delivering Chewbacca to the prison and he roars at it and it screams, sort of, and runs away, George wanted to cut that and Marcia insisted that he keep it."

This quote and a many, many more interesting facts can be found on the webpage:

https://web.archive.org/web/20111028051855/http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com/marcialucas.html

As you can see this page is now only found on Internet Archive - don't let it slip away!

Read it. Read it as a tragic romance, read it as a slice of that era in film-making, read it as the 'secret history of star wars', read it to remind yourself of the real humans behind the hypnotizing spectacles called movies.  Read it to find a major reason why the original Star Wars trilogy has a humanism that surrounds them, penetrates them and binds them together.





-------------------------------------------------Footnotes-----------------------------------------

(1) Last night I watched 'Ghost of the Vampire' (1946) because the book I'm reading 'Recovering 1940s Horror' makes the argument that it a nearly forgotten classic in the genre. The writer for that film was Leigh Brackett. I wanted to know if this was the same author who show's up in Gary Gygax's famous Appendix N. It was - and furthermore she was also a major Hollywood script-writer who produced one of the first drafts of Empire Strikes Back, which is how I came to write this... nerd circles within nerd circles...

(2)  How can I respect a critic who cannot see the soul of Star War? Here is Thompson take on Terminator: "[the final act of Terminator] is one the great narrative passages in modern effects cinema...it is far superior to Titanic" Amen!

(3) Luke must master the tool his father has endowed to him, a sword that magically grows and shrinks. He becomes a man by shooting his white seed into the rotund Death Star's 'exhaust port'. Hands Solo is helpful but ultimately masturbatory and stuck with a male company.

(4) "This act of turning war into aesthetic experience seems connected to the increased use of airplanes in World War II, and to the images of the air war created in both the news media and in films about the war. World War II films tend to move in one of two directions—towards infantry "war is hell" movies that record the blood-and-guts suffering of the war on the ground and occasionally its effect on the civilian population. Or the films move towards air-war, fighter-pilot ones that romanticize war and combat and take place in the more abstract and generalized realm of the sky.

The actual physical detachment from the realities of war on the ground lends itself to the aestheticization of war and to a psychic detachment from what is really going on, which is evident in the treatment of the war in the media."

From a Star War review written in 1978 - the rest can be found at
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC18folder/starWars.html

I read through part of the article and I had never heard of Marcia Griffin (Lucas) before. It helps explain why his movies were so terrible after Return of the Jedi. The scenes that Mark Hamill describes are so subtle but they helped bring a depth to the movie which is something apparently missing from George's other movies.