Star Wars

Will Brooker

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839021657
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

The release of Star Wars in 1977 marked the start of what would become a colossal global franchise. Star Wars remains the second highest-grossing film in the United States, and George Lucas's six-part narrative has grown into something more: a culture that goes far beyond the films themselves, with tie-in toys, novels, comics, games and DVDs as well as an enthusiastic fan community which creates its own Star Wars fictions. Critical studies of Star Wars have treated it as a cultural phenomenon, or in terms of its special effects, fans and merchandising, or as a film that marked the end of New Hollywood's innovation and the birth of the blockbuster. Will Brooker's illuminating study of the film takes issue with many of these commonly-held ideas about Star Wars. He provides a close analysis of Star Wars as a film, carefully examining its shots, editing, sound design, cinematography and performances. Placing the film in the context of George Lucas's previous work, from his student shorts to his 1970s features, and the diverse influences that shaped his approach, from John Ford to Jean-Luc Godard, Brooker argues that Star Wars is not, as Lucas himself has claimed, a departure from his earlier cinema, but a continuation of his experiments with sound and image. He reveals Lucas's contradictory desires for total order and control, embodied by the Empire, and for the raw energy and creative improvisation of the Rebels. What seemed a simple fairy-tale becomes far more complex when we realise that the director is rooting for both sides; and this tension unsettles the saga as a whole, blurring the boundaries between Empire and Republic, dark side and light side, father and son.
In his foreword to this new edition, Will Brooker discusses is how subsequent films in the series, specifically Rogue One (2016) and The Last Jedi (2017), foregrounded and developed the themes of opposition that are at the heart of Star Wars. He shows how Derridean theories of opposites which become undermined and subverted, and which change places are made more clear with hindsight and provide us with a useful lens for looking back at the 1977 Star Wars.

1 Before Star Wars

Before Star Wars was The Emperor.

In the revised chronology of Lucas’s completed saga of course, Star Wars Episode IV is preceded by The Phantom Menace (1999), Attack of the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005), but in real terms Lucas had made nine short films and three features before 1977, including The Emperor (1967), a celebration of local DJ Bob Hudson.

Lucas’s student films at the University of Southern California, where he was enrolled as an undergraduate from 1964–6, and then as a postgraduate during 1967, included vérité and formalist experiment, animation and conventional action-movie editing, sometimes in the same short project. Look at Life (1965) is a rapid-paced, stop-motion montage of magazine images, cut to a frantic beat. Herbie (1966) offers, in the words of the title card, ‘moments of reflection’¹⁴ that focus on the polished surface of a car at night, shot in cool black and white with a jazz soundtrack. Freiheit (1965) is a vignette about a young man racing for an unidentified border, mown down by a uniformed guard at the last second, while 1:42.08 (1966) tracks a bright yellow racing car around its circuit. The short 6.18.67 (1967) is Lucas’s “desert poem”,¹⁵ a distant observation of another film, J. Lee Thompson’s Mackenna’s Gold (1969) during production, and filmmaker (1968) records Lucas’s experience of working on Coppola’s The Rain People (1969). His 1967 anyone lives in a pretty (how) town, loosely adapting verse by e.e. cummings, animates human beings in a coldly whimsical fable. Finally, the most significant work of Lucas’s early career is THX 1138: 4EB (1967), which combines picture and sound distortion with a science-fiction escape thriller.

These films, despite their variation and diversity, are grouped together in the official history of Lucas’s career – one constructed to an extent by the director himself, but also supported by his friends and colleagues – as his ‘experimental’ period. This history, as repeated across biographies, interviews and behind-the-scenes documentaries, is that Lucas was an experimental film-maker who went radically off-track with the mainstream space opera of Star Wars and has never achieved his frequently stated aim to get back to this earlier, more challenging and alternative mode. It is often implied that this failure represents a loss to cinema of a genuinely original, innovative film-maker, rather than a purveyor of family fantasy, computer-generated imagery (CGI) concoctions and corporate merchandising.

For example, Lucas’s friend and collaborator John Milius spoke in 1998 of the ‘great loss’ that ‘George stopped making movies, and got interested in the sort of stuff that Lucasfilm puts out. Because he was a really dynamic filmmaker.’¹⁶ Similarly, Francis Ford Coppola, Lucas’s one-time mentor, told the BBC’s Omnibus team in 1997 that

George was one of the most talented American film directors of that time, and somehow, with the great success of Star Wars, we were deprived of those films he was going to make, and might have made, and instead we have an enormous industrial marketing complex.

The cut to obese crime lord Jabba the Hutt at this point seems deliberate. Coppola goes on:

I do hope that George Lucas the filmmaker finally emerges … and goes his own way, against perhaps the wishes of George the entrepreneur. No matter how many billions of dollars Star Wars could earn, and no matter how valuable that franchise that they call is [sic] it isn’t worth a tenth of what he’s worth as an artist, and what he’s capable of doing.

Rick McCallum, producer of the Star Wars saga, echoes Coppola: ‘I think once we’ve finished these prequels, [Lucas] will start to do the more interesting experimental films he’s always wanted to do.’

Perhaps surprisingly, Lucas agrees that Star Wars represents a diversion from his previous, ‘experimental’ cinema – although, like the Star Wars films themselves, his retelling of his personal history has undergone revisions during the last three decades. Even in 1974, when his space fantasy was still in production as The Star Wars, Film Quarterly reported that Lucas ‘hopes to do more experimental work in the future’, yet ‘does not feel he is compromising in making more straightforward entertainment movies’.¹⁷ By 1980, with the release of The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas had decided it was time to return to the USC mode of film-making. As he told Rolling Stone:

I loved shooting cinéma vérité and thought I would become a documentary filmmaker. […] I don’t want to be a businessman. My ambition is to make movies, but all by myself, to shoot them, cut them, make stuff I want to, just for my own exploration, to see if I can combine images in a certain way. My movies will go back to the way my first films were …¹⁸

A year later, struggling with the script for what was then Revenge of the Jedi, he confirmed in an interview with Starlog that when he enrolled at USC:

I wanted to be a cameraman … my first films were very abstract – tone poems, visual. […] I decided to go back to graduate school … and did many more movies, but still non-story type films. I was interested in abstract, purely visual films and cinéma-vérité documentaries.¹⁹

However, while acknowledging that his life had taken a surprising path, the George Lucas of 1981 seemed sanguine about having ended up in mainstream, blockbuster film-making.

My goals were to make bizarre abstract movies, and I expected to end up a documentary film-maker and work for a television station or something. I don’t know if I’d have been completely happy at it … I just sort of overshot my target – in a rather major way. […] As corny as it sounds, the power of positive thinking goes a long way.²⁰

At this point, despite the trials of the ongoing production, Star Wars is presented confidently as an achievement beyond Lucas’s expectations; it was not his original goal, but it arrived as a combination of happy accident and ‘positive thinking’.

By 1983, according to Michael Kaminski, ‘the small-town experimental filmmaker had grown into the biggest movie mogul on the planet and the Lucasfilm kingdom occupied his every waking hour’.²¹ In May of that year, Lucas bitterly admitted to Time that

the sacrifice I made for Star Wars may have been greater than I wanted … it’s an interesting choice I made, and now I’m burned out. In fact, I was burned out a couple of years ago, and I’ve been going on momentum ever since. Star Wars has grabbed my life and taken it over against my will. Now I’ve got to get my life back – before it’s too late!

But of course, Lucas failed, once again, to abandon Star Wars and return to his previous, small-scale and alternative mode; instead, he returned to the original trilogy and revamped it with new scenes and CGI effects. In 1997, following the cinematic release of the Special Editions, Lucas was contemplative, expressing doubts about hs his career trajectory but seeing it as the result, for good or bad, of his own artistic choices. ‘Ultimately, my life has taken a very funny twist from where I expected to go …’ he told Omnibus, ‘and I’m not sure why, other than I did what I wanted to do, and I was making the movie I wanted to make.’

Seven years later, Lucas had finished directing the second trilogy of ‘prequels’, and the saga was finally complete. A 2005 Wired feature by Steve Silberman, based on an extensive interview, presents the director once again ‘at a crossroads’, regretting his detour from experimental work and preparing to return to his roots. ‘I like Star Wars,’ Lucas muses, ‘but I certainly never expected it would take over my life.’ Silberman consults former colleagues and mentors, who – like Coppola and McCallum in the 90s – express concern about Lucas’s recent path. Walter Murch, Lucas’s sound designer from the early 1970s, wagers that ‘if George were here and we could wrestle him onto the carpet, he’d say, “Yeah, I’ve gotten into that box, and now I want to get out of that box.”’ Lucas’s former cinematography instructor, Woody Omens, is

proud of George, but I’m worried about him. He was trying to speak a different cinematic language at an early point in his career, and he’s still trying to get to that. If he wanted me to mentor him again 40 years later, I would say, ‘Let go. Do something that explores the non-narrative side of human expression from the perspective of a master and a veteran …’.²²

‘For the past couple of years,’ Silberman reports, Lucas has ‘been telling interviewers that the breakout popularity of American Graffiti in 1973 “derailed” him into the business of mass-market filmmaking and that his career was “sidetracked” by Star Wars’.

Lucas and his contemporaries came of age in the 1960s vowing to explode the complacency of the old Hollywood by abandoning traditional formulas for a new kind of filmmaking based on handheld cinematography and radically expressive use of graphics, animation, and sound. But Lucas veered into commercial moviemaking, turning himself into the most financially successful director in history by marketing the ultimate popcorn fodder.

Now he has returned to the most private place in his universe to reinvent himself. He could spend the rest of his life capitalizing on Star Wars’ legacy. Instead he’s trying to dream up a second chance to be the rebel filmmaker he aspired to become a long time ago.²³

In Silberman’s account, Lucas’s rebellion was first crushed by the Old Hollywood studios – ‘the Empire struck back’ when Warners insisted on making cuts to THX 1138, and Universal threatened not to release American Graffiti – and then subsumed by his ‘inner Vader’, a reading suggested by Lucas’s admission during a 2004 documentary that as the head of a corporation, ‘I have become the very thing that I was trying to avoid. That is Darth Vader … .’

This history of Lucas’s career relies on three interlinked premises: first, that Lucas’s student films were exclusively experimental in their use of cinéma vérité and abstract form; second, that Star Wars consists of ‘popcorn fodder’, offers nothing but unadventurous, mainstream storytelling and represents a significant departure from Lucas’s student films; and third, that the radical shift from the first type of cinema to the second began with American Graffiti.

In the main body of this study, I will demonstrate more fully the continuities between Lucas’s student films and Star Wars. His USC work is, without a doubt, more obviously experimental than the features, but I will show that Lucas’s entire early oeuvre, from 1966 to 1977 – the USC films, the first two features and Star Wars itself – combines conventional, classical Hollywood technique with approaches inspired by French, Japanese and Soviet cinema, vérité documentary, and the formalist avant-garde.

As suggested above, the ‘experimental’ work that Lucas, according to his own testimony as well as those of his friends, supposedly abandoned during the mid-1970s, already exhibits elements of mainstream technique. Freiheit, though it concludes with distorted voiceovers discussing the meaning of freedom and depicts the climactic shooting through a quick-fire montage of still images, is skilfully cut for suspense and employs conventional Hollywood form to draw the viewer immediately into the story: the boy’s sprin...