In A Galaxy Far, Far Away - Star Wars' history

Commonweal, May 9, 1997 by Frank McConnell

Lucas's Star Wars'

This year's first Big Cultural Event began twenty years ago. I'm talking, of course, about the release of the Star Wars trilogy, re-released earlier this year to an astonishing box-office reception.

When the first of the films appeared in 1977, it heralded a revolution in the idea of what films could do. Special-effects czar John Dykstra, Merlin to George Lucas's Arthur, had figured out how, even in those relatively chewing-gum and paper-clip days, to use computer technology to generate a world of completely convincing impossibilities. After all, that had been the dream of storytelling since the first Gilgamesh legend was carved on clay, and it had certainly been the obsession--"the idea of total cinema" (Andre Bazin called it that)--of the early, master directors: Griffith (Intolerance), Eisenstein (Ivan the Terrible), and Gance (Napoldon). And here, by Jove, it was. Nobody who wasn't there in '77--sorry, youngsters--can imagine the shock, the delight, the rush of seeing, in the opening shot, the Imperial Starcruiser, pursuing the little Rebel ship, roar majestically into view, finally in its immensity filling the whole screen.

O boy! you thought. It's real; and if it isn't, then to hell with reality anyway. And the very next shot, inside the Rebel ship, was of the two robots, C3PO and R2D2, the Abbott and Costello of the series, burbling (it's the only word) down the hall in panic. Two--three? three-and-a-half?--minutes of footage with not a single human being, and yet with an irresistible alternate world completely established: It had the audacity and genius of the opening of Citizen Kane. And it screwed up, perhaps irrevocably, American film.

Everyone agrees that the trilogy spawned two decades, now, of increasingly mindless and HOO-WAH! movies whose only reason for existence was their elaborate--and largely pointless--special effects. In Star Wars, the effects were there in the service of the very archetypal tale, as had always been the case in the greatest sci-fi movies. Bur by now, the tail has grown enormous and is wagging a quite shrunken dog. Or do you really want to see Terminator again? Or Independence Day? (Only a nebbish rides any given roller coaster more than once.)

But that's okay. The brilliant Frank Kermode once wrote of Paradise Lost that not the least of Milton's achievements was that he suggested a whole new way of writing English verse very badly; this is equivalent to discovering a new sin, and should be greeted with due respect. That side effect does not tarnish, however, the magnificence of Paradise Lost, nor--I'm using "magnificence" in just the same register here--of Star Wars.

In '77, I was shocked by that Imperial Cruiser at the beginning. In '97, I was bemused, before the beginning and after the end-credits, by the audience.

My wife had dragged me--well, bribed me, the coy thing, with Retsina and roasted lamb--to the first matinee on the first day of the first movie trilogy. I'd seen it, dammit! Knew it like the back of my hand. Always referred to it when I taught my course in "The Art of Narrative."

I hadn't gauged, though, the presence of what Lucas created twenty years ago. The Arlington Theater in Santa Barbara is one of the last old, grand, cavernous movie palaces, a Vatican with buttered popcorn in the lobby. And at 4:20 P.M. on this Friday, it was nearly full: full of old dinosaurs like me, older dinosaurs than me, students of mine, and even little kids, whom I don't like and really don't like at the movies. I was expecting loud, smart-aleck comments throughout the film, or, even worse, the decibel hell of a kiddie matinee.

Wrong. From the first words on the screen--all together now--"A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away ..." to, and through, the final credit roll, the crowd was--it's the only word--reverential. They oohed and applauded at the right places, but always quieted down to hear the next line of dialogue; and they all knew the dialogue. If you've ever been inside a revival tent, or to a well-done Mass, or to Wrigley Field, you know the aura: The crowd, watching the ritual scroll before them in all its rigor, becomes more than a crowd, becomes an entity, a "people," not watching but, all together, celebrating the shared event, their shared memory.

It was a liturgy.

And it hit me that, in this period of multiculturalism, "otherness and the rapid pursuit of ever-newer modes of diversity"--much loved by many of my colleagues--Star Wars may be as much of a state religion, a shared mythology, as America has. (And not a bad one at that.)

Sure: That's the stuff of propaganda. But remember what Orwell said: All art is propaganda, though not all propaganda is art (which is why Augustine's Confessions and Hitler's Mein Kampf do and don't belong on the same shelf).

Now Lucas is a storyteller, not a preacher. (Sam Goldwyn on movies: "If you've got a message, call Western Union.") And storytellers, good ones, care only about the story. (I've been trying really to learn that lesson for fifteen years.) What the shaman utters in his trance he utters for himself; it is for the community, his audience, to make sense of it. That's where the priest, or critic, or psychoanalyst--a distinctly secondary gig--comes in.