Subj: [thingist] In Defense of George Lucas
Date: 5/22/2002 11:14:28 PM Central Daylight Time
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All: I'm running Sterling's crit of the new Star Wars film in the next
ed of the TT Newsletter however I'll also be adding my own view. Here's
a peek. best, – B.


In Defense of George Lucas

With the release of "Episode II, Attack of the Clones" we are now
half-way through Lucas' epic "Star Wars" film-cycle. I am not going to
attempt to review that film here. Suffice it to say it consists of
interminable plot explication connecting some more and less interesting
special effects. While filmically "literate", since Lucas' stated aim
is to make movies for 12 year olds there is no reward for the
cinematically acculturated viewer. Even if one recognizes the
significance of a particular angle or cut, a character will appear to
explain what one's just seen anyway. The overall effect is a bit like
watching a pantomime performance which someone has sub-titled. It is
difficult to tell whether the script is that much closer to illiteracy
than it was with the last film or merely that none (or almost none) of
the actors know how to play in this, the modern era's version of "light
opera", the veteran character actors tended to handle it correctly but
there are too few of them.

Also, though there are live actors (or what purport to be such) the
entire film is digitally shot, produced, and edited, in one sense making
it the world's largest animation. Ultimately the film's "appropriate"
medium will be DVD where a software switch will enable the viewer to
determine which of several cuts they wish to see. This trend has
started already. This is only fitting since just as "Lord of the Rings"
was the synthetic Myth of England (or more accurately, "Britannia"), the
"Star Wars" cycle is indeed the Myth of America. Technically, for a
while yet at least, America is still pluralistic. I am not particularly
interested here in pointing out this or that element & slaving them to
any particular political ideology and/or worldview, instead my point is
that taken as a body, the cycle's relationship to the Western Hegemony's
body-politic and its role as *allegory* has ever been, and still
remains, fungible.

And it is here, in the realm of Allegory, that I would rather praise
Lucas than bury him. At first, as elucidated in the original three
films (which we are now supposed to re to as "Episodes IV, V, and VI"),
The Force was presented as a mystical, somehow gnostic
quantity/quality. Yet in the time which passed between the initial
trilogy and the release of "Episode I, The Phantom Menace", Lucas became
uncomfortably aware of the rise of the Religious Right. And so, with
that film (Ep1) he changed the stated explanation for The Force and
instead gave it an empirically quantifiable scientific grounding (or
what passes for such in para-Hollywood). Likewise, with the latest
film, he does something very, very good… almost noble. He bravely
discards the WWII paradigm which has attended US cinema for the past 60
years – that being the notion that there is powerful evil afoot in the
world and people of conscience must militarize to oppose it. Instead
Lucas gives us a new idea and this new film is to one way of thinking
nothing more than a vehicle for its promulgation.

This new concept is that for there to be war there must be evil people
on *both* *sides*. While one could argue that this itself plays into a
larger imagining of Keynsian Market Force (which loves military
procurement, but despises war itself) I would prefer to take Lucas at
his word, that he's doing these things for the world's 12 year olds, and
in that context the message of "Episode II, Attack of the Clones" is
truly wonderful. Before our eyes, step by byzantine step, we see how a
virtuous republic is supplanted by an evil empire. We see how war is
manufactured to serve a narrow disempowering political agenda. We see
how buffoonery, adolescent impulses, and the unregarded, unexplored
recesses of selfhood can all be turned to evil and used to foment
tyranny. So let the others say what kind of garbage Lucas has turned
out this time, my voice will not be among them.

Blackhawk
May, 2002.

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