Why 'Star Wars?' - evaluation of Star Wars trilogy

Interview, April, 1997 by Graham Fuller

Released three years before Ronald Reagan was elected president, Star Wars was invoked by him in 1983 as shorthand for the SDI nuclear-defense project - the one that, had it come to fruition, would have zapped all those incoming commie missiles out of the sky. One can imagine Reagan lying in bed at night in the White House, muttering, "May the Force be with us, Nancy." Thus, for a moment, America's dream of global hegemony was collapsed with its favorite myth, the Star Wars myth.

Fourteen years later, Reagan's Cold War imperative seems like a relic of Manifest Destiny, a poison dart launched a long time ago, in a galaxy - a rootin', tootin' Republican galaxy - far, far away. But the myth has proved not only more durable, but eminently renewable. At the time of this writing, Star Wars - rereleased in a digitally enhanced "Special Edition" on January 31 - had dominated the box-office charts for three successive weekends and reclaimed, from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), its status as the most successful film of all time.

Star Wars (1977) and its sequels, The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983), are, of course, much more than movies. They are cultural signifiers of almost quasireligious import, a pop-culture church, if you will, but not one I've ever belonged to. A confession: I've seen George Lucas's trilogy in its entirety only this time round. For years, it had been the feel-good fest I could always afford to miss, and yet it was an obvious black hole in my moviegoing life, a guilty secret. Not that I hadn't, over the years, seen slabs of the three films - nonsequentially, in living rooms, on a video loop in my local Chase Manhattan bank. Going in, finally, I knew my Ewoks from my Wookiees, my C-3POs from my R2-D2s.

Two decades of being battered by Star Wars-iana, though, could not have prepared me for the overarching liteness of the whole trip. Except for long, mystical, and often beautiful passages - particularly those involving the cosmically weary Yoda - in The Empire Strikes Back (the superior "second act"), the saga comes over as a wanly spiritual sci-fi Wizard of Oz utterly devoid of the humor, irony, and basic drama found in, say, the Back to the Future and the Indiana Jones trilogies. Star Wars, especially, is as bloodless and unsensuous as its droids.

If that sounds churlish, or suggests I'm unwilling to be seduced by the sheer spectacle of the Star Wars films, then I admit they make superficially great cinema for the under-elevens. But I'm troubled by their blandness, their unthreateningness.

Famously modeled by Lucas on his readings from Joseph Campbell, the Star Wars mythology is a radically diluted version of Arthurianism that shows every sign of becoming America's very own Grail myth. Its immediate antecedent is J.R.R. Tolkien's literary trilogy The Lord of the Rings (1954-55). You can see the parallels: Luke Skywalker, the initiate, is entrusted with the potentially corrupting power of the Force, as Frodo Baggins is with the Ring; Darth Vader is the Morgul King; Han Solo is Strider; Obi-Wan Kenobi is Gandalf, and so on. But unlike Star Wars, LOTR - culled by Tolkien from Anglo-Saxon and Norse mythologies - is a work of consummate moral and psychological complexity, in which the faceoff between good and evil resonates with ancient truths and - in its specter of impending Armageddon - recent world history. Tolkien's tale inspired a hippie cult in America in the late '60s, but by the time Ralph Bakshi made an animated film of it in 1978, it had been eclipsed by Star Wars, with its futuristic hardware, its simplistic morality plays between the Rebels and the fascistic Empire stiffs, and its pre-E.T. cuddliness.

So, the Force was with us - and how. It simultaneously fed not only a mass desire for intellectually vapid entertainment and a state of inarticulate innocence (C-3PO is switched off when he starts to prattle; R2-D2 can only whir and bleep), but a vast, still growing, and ultimately cynical merchandising empire. Not only that, but, after the halcyon '70s, it ruined Hollywood filmmaking for the next twenty years - and maybe for good.