Lucasfilm

Filmmaking, Philosophy, and the Star Wars Universe

Cyrus R.K. Patell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350100626
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

From A New Hope to The Rise of Skywalker and beyond, this book offers the first complete assessment and philosophical exploration of the Star Wars universe. Lucasfilm examines the ways in which these iconic films were shaped by global cultural mythologies and world cinema, as well as philosophical ideas from the fields of aesthetics and political theory, and now serve as a platform for public philosophy. Cyrus R. K. Patell also looks at how this ever-expanding universe of cultural products and enterprises became a global brand and asks: can a corporate entity be considered a "filmmaker and philosopher"? More than any other film franchise, Lucasfilm's Star Wars has become part of the global cultural imagination. The new generation of Lucasfilm artists is full of passionate fans of the Star Wars universe, who have now been given the chance to build on George Lucas's oeuvre. Within these pages, Patell explores what it means for films and their creators to become part of cultural history in this unprecedented way.

1

Filmmaking and Philosophizing

Philosophy and Storytelling

Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017) ends with a coda that dramatizes the power of storytelling. Two downtrodden children who work in the fathier stables on Canto Bight listen with rapt attention as a third tells the story of Luke Skywalker’s climactic encounter with Kylo Ren and the forces of the fascistic First Order, a scene that we have witnessed earlier in the film. The storytelling party is broken up by the cruel stable manager, and one boy—who has earlier in the film aided Resistance heroes Rose and Finn—goes outside into the night. He pulls a broom to his side from against a wall—seemingly by using the Force—brushes some straw and then, as the Force theme begins to play, watches a ship streak in the heavens. He turns his hand to reveal the ring with the Resistance symbol that Rose has given him and, in the film’s final shot, we see him from behind, raising his broom handle as if it were a lightsaber. He’s seemingly inspired by what he has heard. The scene recalls another moment of storytelling that involves the adventures of Luke Skywalker: C-3PO’s recounting of the destruction of the Death Star to the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi (1983) on the eve of the Battle of Endor. This story inspired the Ewoks to fight with the Rebellion against the Empire’s vastly superior destructive technology. The Last Jedi’s conclusion suggests this legacy of heroism can continue, that there are others in the galaxy like this young boy, who have the power to resist oppression, if only they can be inspired to act by hearing the right stories.

Star Wars, it seems, knows something that professional philosophy might have forgotten. In a 2017 article entitled “Philosophy Needs a New Definition,” Costica Bradatan urges philosophers to remember philosophy’s roots in storytelling traditions, arguing that “with every new story we make the world anew. Storytelling pushes the boundaries of what it means to be human: envisions and rehearses new forms of experience, gives firm shape to something that hasn’t existed before, makes the unthought-of suddenly intelligible. Storytelling and philosophy are twins.”¹ That’s been true for more than 2,000 years in the Western philosophical tradition. After all, Plato’s dialogues are stories of conversations between Socrates and his students, in which Socrates himself frequently makes use of stories such as the Republic’s “allegory of the cave” or the invention of writing by the Egyptian god Theuth in the Phaedrus. Aristotle argues that the pursuit of mimesis (imitation) is one of the ways in which human beings are distinct from animals, because mimesis is linked to understanding, which “is extremely pleasant, not just for philosophers but for others too in the same way, despite their limited capacity for it.”² Mimesis is a crucial component of what the Poetics presents as the highest form of storytelling: the tragic drama. Philosophy leads to understanding; mimesis, in a different way, also leads to understanding, perhaps in a way that is more accessible to the nonphilosopher.

It’s possible, of course, that if storytelling and philosophy are twins, to pick up Bradatan’s metaphor, then they are fraternal twins. In his “Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre,” the French neo-Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser uses the term “science” instead of “philosophy,” but his attempt to characterize what art does offers a useful way of thinking about how art might serve as either a supplement to philosophy or even an alternative form of philosophy. Science, Althusser writes, gives us “the conceptual knowledge of the complex mechanisms which eventually produce the ‘lived experience’” portrayed by art, as in the novels of Balzac and Solzhenitsyn that Daspre has mentioned to Althusser, prompting the letter. “The peculiarity of art,” writes Althusser, “is to ‘make us see’ …, ‘make us perceive’, ‘make us feel’ something which alludes to reality.” He then clarifies: “What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of ‘seeing’, ‘perceiving’ and ‘feeling’ (which is not the form of knowing), is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes.” Althusser famously defined “ideology” in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” as “a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”³ In the “Letter,” he argues that

Balzac and Solzhenitsyn give us a “view” of the ideology to which their work alludes and with which it is constantly fed, a view which presupposes a retreat, an internal distantiation from the very ideology from which their novels emerged. They make us “perceive” (but not know) in some sense from the inside, by an internal distance, the very ideology in which they are held. (italics in original)⁴

In other words, because both ideology and art are mimetic—they both create representations of reality—Althusser suggests that art somehow manages to create a disjunction between itself and the ideology from which it springs that the reader or viewer can experience (“see,” “perceive,” “feel”).

Coming from a rather different philosophical tradition, Martha Nussbaum argues not only that novels can be said to do philosophical work, but also that literary texts have a particular contribution to make to philosophical discourse, precisely because they do not take the form of argumentation commonly associated with philosophical discourse. Nussbaum suggests that

there may be some views of the world and how one should live in it—views, especially, that emphasize the world’s surprising variety, its complexity and mysteriousness, its flawed and imperfect beauty—that cannot be fully and adequately stated in the language of conventional philosophical prose, a style remarkably flat and lacking in wonder—but only in a language and in forms themselves more complex, more allusive, more attentive to particulars.

Moreover, for Nussbaum, there is something about the way that storytelling can make use of the unexpected that might help readers to grasp ideas more effectively than through “the expositional structure conventional to philosophy, which sets out to establish something and then does so, without surprise, without incident.” Narrative can take a “form that itself implies that life contains significant surprises” and helps us to understand “that our task, as agents, is to live as good characters in a good story do, caring about what happens, resourcefully confronting each new thing.”⁵ There is something that happens in the tragic drama, for example, when it makes use of what Aristotle calls “reversal” and “recognition,” that enables both the characters in a drama and the viewers of the drama to confront truth in a way that eludes philosophical argumentation. Perhaps that confrontation lies at the heart of the experience of katharsis that Aristotle describes so enigmatically.

The philosopher Thomas Wartenberg wonders whether a similar claim might be made for film as philosophical discourse. Raising the examples of three very different films—“Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 art film masterpiece, Rashomon; Ridley Scott’s 1982 science-fiction classic, Blade Runner; and Woody Allen’s 1989 tour de force, Crimes and Misdemeanors”—Wartenberg notes that all three films “pose philosophical questions and even take stabs at answering them,” which leads him to ask the general question: “To what extent are films capable of actually doing philosophy?”⁶ Wartenberg presents two possible answers, which he believes constitute the ends of a spectrum: “One option is to make the strong claim that films are capable of actually doing philosophy in something like the sense we think of the classical texts of the Western tradition—such as Plato’s Republic and Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy—doing philosophy.” Such a view is aligned with Nussbaum’s view of the novel and with the kind of analysis she performs of Satyajit Ray’s adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s novel The Home and the World.⁷ At the opposite end of the spectrum is the view that while “some films do have a relationship to philosophy,” it is not “anything like that exhibited by the founding texts of the Western tradition. Here, the contention might be that film is a medium that is very adept at popularizing philosophical issues but lacks the capacity to actually produce original philosophy itself.”⁸

Wartenberg himself defends what he calls “a moderate form of one of them: that films can do philosophy.” This view is predicated on the idea that not only is it “quite natural to think of films as sometimes addressing philosophical issues,” but also that an important way of thinking about what the term “philosophy” means is to see it as “the name given to the most basic issues that concern us as human beings.”⁹ Thinking about Nussbaum’s claims for the novel, Wartenberg argues that “a fiction film [sic] can address a philosophical issue in as interesting a manner as a great novel,” though he stresses that “one reason for this is that films are capable of giving philosophical ideas a liveliness and vivacity that some may find lacking in the written texts of the tradition.”¹⁰ Stephen Mulhall also argues that “that films can be seen to engage in systematic and sophisticated thinking about their themes and about themselves—that films can philosophize.”¹¹ Thinking about the films that constitute the Alien quadrilogy begun by Ridley Scott, Mulhall writes:

I do not look to these films as handy or popular illustrations of views and arguments properly developed by philosophers; I see them rather as themselves reflecting on and evaluating such views and arguments, as thinking seriously and systematically about them in just the ways that philosophers do. Such films are not philosophy’s raw material, nor a source for its ornamentation; they are philosophical exercises, philosophy in action—film as philosophizing.¹²

Film, in other words, doesn’t simply dramatize philosophical ideas and debates, though that’s one of the things it can do: it can also, through the cinematic equivalent of the formal resources of language and structure that Nussbaum identifies, persuade its viewers to adopt a position toward ideas and debates.

I will argue below that Lucasfilm’s Star Wars saga does just that: it dramatizes debates about the nature of individual identity, freedom, fate, and the ordering of the ideal society that are typically regarded as philosophical topics, but it does so in a way that uses the persuasive mechanisms of film to frame the debates around these issues. But because the persuasiveness of these mechanisms depends in part on a set of socially determined factors, they are not going to be equally persuasive to all members of the saga’s audience.

What distinguishes the Star Wars saga from other films is that Lucasfilm has engineered it to transcend the medium of film and consciously transformed it into a platform for various kinds of philosophical thinking.

Film and Persuasion

The persuasive mechanisms of film are not those of analytic philosophy, which relies heavily on a logic of argumentation that is rational and teleological. Although film can make use of teleological thinking when it tells a story from beginning to end, the logic through which it “persuades” is associative rather than teleological, which enables it to work through emotion as well as reason. In Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (2009), Carl Plantinga argues that “any satisfactory account of film reception and its implications for ideology, rhetoric, ethics, or aesthetics had better be able to take film-elicited affect and emotion into account.” For Plantinga, “the viewing of a narrative film is not merely an intellectual or cognitive exercise, but one colored by affect and emotion.” The effects of the emotions conjured by a film are, Plantinga suggests, both short term and, at least potentially, long term: “In the short term, the function of emotion and affect is to make film viewing powerful, rather than merely an intellectual exercise. In the long term, such experiences may burn themselves into the memories of audiences and may become templates for thinking and behavior.” A real-world example of the experience that Plantinga describes can be found in the Twitter thread of the actress Mary Chieffo, who played a major role as the Klingon Chancellor L’Rell in the first two seasons of the television series Star Trek: Discovery (2017–2018). After watching The Rise of Skywalker three times, she posted (on Christmas Day):

I have loved watching this trilogy. Even when I am frustrated with creative choices made, they push me to examine why they frustrate me. At its best, art forces us to look at ourselves and decide how we can be better. … I want to be better. I want to go deeper. Rewatching Star Wars this past week has reminded me of who I want to be and the kind of art I want to put out into the world. For that, I am forever grateful.¹³

Plantinga’s work is part of a trend within the field of film studies to think more about “how … emotions at the movies are used for rhetorical or persuasive ends,” and he reminds us that “Aristotle found the elicitation of emotion to be one of the key strategies of persuasive discourse.”¹⁴ Plantinga calls his approach to film “cognitive-perceptual,” because he seeks “to draw attention to its recognition not only of conscious cognitive processes in affective experience, but also to preconscious cognition and automatic, ‘cognitively impenetrable’ processes.”¹⁵ Robert Sinnerbrink suggests, however, that theorists like Plantinga, despite their interest in “the interplay of cognitive, emotional and generic factors,” tend to overstress “the role of character, action and narrative content in their analyses of affective and emotional engagement with film.” Sinnerbrink argues that “it is not just character action and narrative content that elicits emotion, but the entire repertoire of cinematic-aesthetic devices (lighting, composition, montage, rhythm, tempo, colour, texture, gesture, performance, music and sound). Emotion is elicited and communicated aesthetically as well as cognitively.” Citing the work of Greg Smith, Sinnerbrink proposes that we pay greater attention to the ways in which films create “mood,” which “cues the background affective dispositions that enable us to experience emotional engagement with characters in the narrative.”¹⁶ In other words, these “cinematic-aesthetic devices” are part of film’s mechanism of persuasion, and they work in large part by generating emotional responses. In the case of Star Wars, we might point to a number of devices that work in this way: the “lived-in” feel of the films’ universe due to the use of practical special effects; the cyclical patterns of the narrative, which Lucas described in a documentary on the making of the Phantom Menace as being “like poetry,” in which “every stanza kind of rhymes with the last one”;¹⁷ the recurrence of the line “I have a bad feeling about this”; and, perhaps above all, the music of John Williams.

Plantinga tells us that “one of the principle motivations for the viewing of movies” is to experience emotion, but he reminds us that the value of this experience can be “both intrins...