The Phantom Menace: Repetition, Variation, Integration

Film Criticism, Spring, 2000 by Anne Lancashire

Hype, merchandizing, special effects: should film critics pay serious attention, in any non-marketing or non-technological ways, to the much-touted movie event of summer 1999, George Lucas's The Phantom Menace, which many reviewers have essentially summarized as great special effects in a convoluted plot, with uninteresting characters and a couple of excellent action sequences? The film has been, of course, in part a victim of the extraordinary success of the first Star Wars trilogy: A New Hope, 1977; The Empire Strikes Back, 1980; Return of the Jedi, 1983. Public anticipation of this fourth installment in the planned 6- or 9-film epic saga(1) ran so high, and advance media and internet attention was accordingly so lavish, that at least some public and critical disappointment was almost inevitable. And marketing overkill also created a backlash; many media commentators had difficulty finding the movie beneath the shelves of Star Wars toys and a plethora of other commercial tie-ins.(2)

Beneath, however, all the hype and the merchandizing lies a film fully deserving of serious critical attention: for The Phantom Menace is a film different from any other released since 1983's Return of the Jedi. In the Star Wars series, George Lucas is creating something unique in twentieth-century popular film: not a series of narratively-independent sequels and prequels (the normal mode in movie sequelization), focused on film genre conventions and/or on specific actors/roles, nor an old-fashioned serial with (merely) narratively interlocking episodes, but an epic mythological saga--full of exotic locales and monsters, like the sagas of old--consisting of at least six mutually-dependent parts interrelated in an intricately-designed narrative, mythological, and metaphoric whole. The Phantom Menace, as the fourth installment in the Star Wars saga, is not a film intended to stand alone, or simply as a regular sequel (or prequel) or a serial episode; and to read it in any of those ways (as most reviewers have done) is inappropriate in terms of its design and purpose. The film is very much, though chronologically the first episode in the Star Wars story, the beginning of a second trilogy and the fourth-made part of an epic sextet, with patterns of plot and structure, cinematic allusions, and visual imagery acquiring meaning above all from its interrelationships both with the three prior films (episodes 4-6) and with at least two more (episodes 2-3) yet to come. Building backwards as well as forwards, each Star Wars episode also revises in retrospect our readings of some aspects of the earlier films. The Star Wars films have thus together become a unique spectatorial experience for Star Wars-knowledgeable popular audiences, who, despite lukewarm and sometimes hostile media reviews, have placed The Phantom Menace far at the top of the 1999 film box office.(3) Hype, action, and special effects alone do not create such popular success. How, then, does an integrated Star Wars reading of The Phantom Menace work?

The original Star Wars trilogy is based on what mythologer Joseph Campbell has called the cultural monomyth of the hero: in cultures around the world, a leader or potential leader who is called upon a quest ("departure"), goes through a series of ordeals or trials culminating in a near-death or actual-death experience ("initiation"), and then is symbolically or literally resurrected to go forward in triumph to a victorious conclusion both for himself and for his people ("return").(4) The myth is more importantly metaphoric than literal, and often allegorical in method; the hero's physical experiences (e.g., taming a monster) stand for emotional and psychological experiences (e.g., controlling general or specific emotions). Star Wars 4-6 attracted a massive popular following for its combination of this mythology--in which the hero is all of us, expressing what Campbell (see especially Hero 17-19) has described as the dreamwork of the culture, our conscious and unconscious aspirations and fears--with familiar characters both archetypal and everyday (e.g., the young boy yearning to leave home for a life of adventure), imaginatively creative and thematically rich visuals (e.g., the skull-like Death Star, representing death and fear of death, in Return of the Jedi), dazzling special effects wholly innovative for their time, and narrative focus on what is of elemental, emotional, and psychological importance to people from all cultures through all time: growing up human, above all in relation to one's family and friends, from youth (A New Hope) through adolescence (The Empire Strikes Back) to maturity (Return of the Jedi). The overall message of the first Star Wars trilogy--that life's ordeals, and even death itself as fearful, can be overcome through human growth towards mature and compassionate love and self-sacrifice (as seen clearly at Return of the Jedi's climax, when the death-dealing Emperor is defeated by Luke's refusal to fight his father and by the self-sacrifice Luke's father then makes for his son)--is in part the message of some of the world's most successful religions. The enemy--the dark side, the Emperor, the Death Star--lies within, more significantly than without, as demonstrated in the magic tree-cave sequence of The Empire Strikes Back, where the adolescent Luke discovers that his dreaded enemy is his own dark side, his emotions of fear, anger, and hatred, and in the allegorical Rancor monster (spiteful anger) the maturing Luke must defeat in Return of the Jedi in order to become able to save his friends and himself.(15) Lucas presents this message with a late-twentieth-century spin not only technological and futuristic ("in a galaxy far far away") but also nostalgic ("a long time ago"). He brings the human past, present, and future together, and works with a wide variety of cinematic allusions, mythic and literary sources, and stunning special effects to deepen the thematic and emotional experiences created for the audience by his storyline, which is also entertaining, often comic, and richly inventive in visual details.(6)