Lowbrow Literati

Are We All Mythtaken About Star Wars?

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[25 November 2009]

Fans are mistaken about Return of the Jedi and Luke Skywalker (dismissing the Ewoks, and Skywalker is deemed a wuss). Might they also be wrong about the prequel trilogy? And how.

By Monte Williams

It’s not often that I feel self-conscious about my pop culture pursuits. I was happily watching cartoons back when it was not socially acceptable for an adult (nor even a teenager) to do so, and I like a good chick flick now and then, and when Warren Ellis suggested in Transmetropolitan that “TV wrestling is phallocentric soap opera for retards and intellectually lazy intelligent people who get off on cultural slumming,” I may have laughed knowingly and conceded his point without protest, but I still tuned in for that week‘s episode of Monday Night Raw.

Indeed, only one thing embarrasses me: I have become a Star Wars fan.

Consider Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, pretty much unanimously held aloft as the most triumphant entry in the entire Star Wars series. Here you have a movie which admittedly boasts wildly imaginative creatures, vehicles and set designs, but which offers not a single memorable line of dialogue. Oh wait, here‘s one: “I don‘t know where you get your delusions, laser brain.”

“Laser brain”? And this is one of the world’s most celebrated works of science fiction?

A buddy of mine likes to argue that the dialogue in the Star Wars series is intentionally limp and uninspired, the better to reflect the spirit of the pulp serials that inspired the saga in the first place. I don’t want to say that my friend is wrong, necessarily. But his claim is either nonsense because he‘s wrong, or it‘s nonsense because he‘s right. Either option points to a seriously disheartening bout of creative bankruptcy on the part of George Lucas; Star Wars is intended to be the apotheosis of science fiction pulp sagas, and anyone who decides to produce the definitive space opera should also endeavor to imbue it with memorable dialogue. After all, the Indiana Jones movies are no less cheerfully absurd and delightfully over-the-top than Star Wars, but they offer dialogue that dares to make you believe in the story.

It’s difficult to imagine Han Solo, for all his ostensible edginess, saying anything so menacing as what Indy says to taunt Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark: “You want to talk to God? Let’s go see him together. I’ve got nothing better to do.”

That said, the triumph of the dialogue in the Indiana Jones series is that it treats high drama with such frivolous nonchalance. As a teacher and a parent, my most recent favorite example is from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, wherein Indy admonishes Marion to take it easy on her son, Mutt, who should be allowed to drop out of school, by Indy’s reasoning, in order to pursue his own interests. Moments later, Marion reveals that Mutt is Indy’s son, to which Indy indignant replies, “Why isn’t he in school?!”

However, the funniest dialogue from the Indiana Jones series might be from The Last Crusade. Captured by villains who threaten to hunt down his friend Marcus Brody, Indy boasts, “He’s got a two day head start on you, which is more than he needs. Brody’s got friends in every town and village from here to the Sudan, he speaks a dozen languages, knows every local custom. He’ll blend in, disappear, you’ll never see him again. With any luck, he’s got the grail already.”

Soon after, Indiana’s father Henry pleads, “But you said he had a two day head start. That he would blend in, disappear,” to which Indy replies, “Are you kidding? I made all that up. You know Marcus. He once got lost in his own museum.”

The dialogue in the six Star Wars movies, by contrast, is distressingly dull, self-serious and somber.

Roger Ebert wrote something interesting about the underrated Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in May 2008: “The movie isn‘t a throwback to the Saturday serials of the 1930s and 1940s. It‘s what they would have been if they could have been.” (“I admit it: I loved ‘Indy’”, 19 May 2008)

It would obviously be foolish to suggest that any director of a sci-fi or adventure serial from the early 20th century would not have been thrilled beyond measure to have produced anything half as visually arresting as Star Wars. But while Star Wars is, perhaps, like Indiana Jones, what the serials of the ‘40s and ‘50s would like to have been, it is also clearly not all that it could have been.

Still, I found myself unaccountably drawn to the series, and so I revisited first the original trilogy, and then the prequel trilogy. My initial reaction was to concede that perhaps I’d been mistaken about the Star Wars films, which are enchanting despite their shortcomings. My second reaction was to note that everyone else is wrong about the Star Wars films, too.

For one thing, the best movie from the original series is not The Empire Strikes Back; it is Return of the Jedi. Why? There is more at stake in Jedi, if not where the plot is concerned, then certainly within the characterization, which raises another point about which the majority is mistaken: Luke Skywalker is more compelling than Han Solo.

Now clearly, Han Solo has more street cred than Luke Skywalker (and we all know that street cred is all that matters in a children’s space opera), but while he is easily ten times cooler than Luke Skywalker, Han Solo pretty much remains what he is throughout the trilogy; he changes, sure, but from a smug, vainglorious, cocksure pirate of muddy morals to a more selfless and heroic pirate who is otherwise still smug, vainglorious and cocksure. Luke is the only character in the entire trilogy to undergo significant change.

Like so many awkward, confused young men, Luke Skywalker has a capital-L Legacy he feels compelled to defy, and partly as a result, he relies largely on friends and surrogate family members to provide the guidance a father is supposed to offer. Obi-Wan and Yoda serve as mentors for a young, naïve, impressionable Luke, while his father is little but a distant, ominous shadow. Still, and again like so many awkward, confused young men: Luke needs his father.

Meanwhile, the Emperor, a symbolic Grandfather Skywalker of sorts, makes the obligatory space opera references to “evil”, but he places stronger emphasis on something far more commonplace and relatable: anger. Indeed, when is Luke at his weakest? When he triumphs over his father in their final light saber duel; each blow he rains down on his father’s fallen form represents more loss of Luke’s self-control. There’s a reason the Emperor applauds the young man’s victory.

For me, Return of the Jedi calls to mind Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno’s The Incredible Hulk series, for if The Incredible Hulk could be said to boast a single, defining statement, it would be summarized by the first two or three seconds of footage in the opening credits sequence, as ANGER flashes in red, then the camera pulls back to show that what we’re seeing is a warning button in a science lab, which reads DANGER.

This could also be the Return of the Jedi thesis: ANGER = DANGER.

Before succumbing to his fury, Luke pleads with his dad to escape the Emperor with him. Anakin responds, “It’s too late for me, son,” which is exactly the self-pitying copout you would expect from an absent father; “it’s too late for me” sounds like something you might hear from Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, or from real-life pro wrestler Jake “The Snake” Roberts in the Beyond the Mat documentary, wherein we see Jake flee his grown daughter to smoke crack in his hotel room. (Meanwhile, I asked some friends what they thought might have happened had Luke had been successful in his attempt to persuade his father to flee the Death Star with him before their confrontation with the Emperor. My friend Chip‘s answer: “Weird ride home.”)

Luckily, Anakin rescues Luke from the deadly consequences of his own anger when Luke himself proves incapable, leading to the most poignant exchange George Lucas ever penned:

Luke: I’m going to save you.

Anakin: You already have.

I am a very lucky son, for I got to enjoy just such a cathartic moment with my own dad, and in our case we have enjoyed the happy aftermath for 15 years now, rather than the few hurried deathbed moments the Skywalkers are allowed. Is it because my own troubled relationship with my father rebounded in such a wonderful fashion that the closing moments of the Skywalker father/son saga struck me (to my surprise and near-embarrassment) as so touching? (If so, what feelings does the Skywalker conflict and its resolution stir in my friends who are enthusiastic Star Wars fans whose fathers are absent?)

Or is it just that George Lucas paints his father-son drama in such broad, mythic strokes that it cannot help but feel powerful? (I am reminded of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, “Once More With Feeling”, which creator Joss Whedon suggested was a fitting and inevitable episode because the characters in his series were so histrionic that you’d always kind of expected them to break out in song.)

So Luke and Anakin Skywalker save one another; the father saves the son’s life, the son saves the father’s soul. And along the way, both men change and grow. “Vader” learns to love again, and while Luke’s furious denial of his father in The Empire Strikes Back is like a caricature of a typical teenager (“These are not my parents!”), he learns, like so many young adults, to reluctantly accept (and even stubbornly insist) that “there is good” in his father. Really, Luke Skywalker’s arc calls to mind an old quote that is sometimes attributed to Mark Twain: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”

But if fans are mistaken about Return of the Jedi and Luke Skywalker (they dismiss Jedi because of its Ewoks, and Skywalker is often deemed a wuss), might they also be wrong about the prequel trilogy?

And how.

The author and his daughter as Luke and Leia, from Disneyland's Star Tours

The author and his daughter as Luke and Leia, from
Disneyland’s Star Tours

First, though, let us all agree on something: the Star Wars prequels are painfully corny and overwrought. But so was the classic trilogy. Since I’d always derided the entire six-film series, I feel no sense of betrayal when viewing the prequels. I lack the powerful emotional attachment that most geeks my age bring to these films, and so just as I can admit that the old Star Wars movies are good despite their glaring flaws, I can admit the same about the prequels.

Especially the most derided of the bunch: Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

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Monte Williams has a Bachelors Degree in Communications. Would you like fries with that?

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Comments

“And there seems to be something of an Asian influence on certain details of both the film‘s aesthetic (Queen Amidala‘s geisha make-up and posturing) and its action (light sabers are used much more cleverly and majestically here than the largely by-the-numbers swashbuckling of the original three films; who can say whether this would have been the case without the influence of samurais movies and Anime.)”
You’ve got to be kidding me.  Lucas was heavily influenced by samurai movies (especially Kurosawa films)  WAY before the prequels.  He’s always said that the Jedi were supossed to be like a future samurai.  A little research might be nice.

Comment by Ezra Agnew — November 25, 2009 @ 7:54 am

“Consider Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, pretty much unanimously held aloft as the most triumphant entry in the entire Star Wars series. Here you have a movie which admittedly boasts wildly imaginative creatures, vehicles and set designs, but which offers not a single memorable line of dialogue.”

While you may be correct that there are not a lot of memorable lines in The Empire Strikes Back, you are forgetting one of the most memorable and misquoted lines of dialog in film, “No, I am your father.”

Comment by Jebathan — November 25, 2009 @ 4:21 pm

To tie in w/ Anakin’s hollow redemption after killing kids/Jedi, etc., is the horrible moment when he admits to murdering men, women, and children Tusken Raiders to Padme in AOTC, and she comforts him as if he skinned his knee. Stupid!

Comment by Michael — November 25, 2009 @ 9:18 pm

Ezra: the samurai influence isn’t as clear in the original trilogy; I say again, it’s kids with sticks anytime someone grabs a light saber. (Less so in Jedi than in New Hope, admittedly.)

Jebathan, you’re spot-on that Empire contains one of the most famous lines of dialogue in film history… but it’s still not especially well-written. I mean, how telling that people misquote it all the time!

Comment by Monte Williams from Asmara, Eritrea, Africa — November 25, 2009 @ 10:25 pm

“Jebathan, you’re spot-on that Empire contains one of the most famous lines of dialogue in film history… but it’s still not especially well-written. I mean, how telling that people misquote it all the time!”

So: “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio” is a poorly written line because people misquote it? I think that the fact that people misquote it is more about the faultiness of human memory than the line itself. Yes, it is a “bland” line when taken out of context, but in the moment, and with James Earl Jones’ phenomenal voice and delivery, it becomes amazing. Also in “Empire” there are so many great lines; check out http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080684/quotes for examples—just about everything Yoda says is a wonderful psuedo-Koan: “No. Try not. Do… or do not. There is no try.” And what about Vader: “He will join us or die, my master.”

I agree that RotJ is often overlooked. I’m not the biggest fan of the Ewoks, but the opening of the movie through the destruction of Jabba’s palace is great. You see the potential of Luke, just how amazing of a Jedi he possibly can be as he stalks through the caves, hooded and dressed in black. And his confrontation with Vader & the Emperor… his revelation to Leia about their relationship… the final space battle—all great. Now, I don’t have a lot of respect for the updated version—the added “music video” in Jabba’s palace is worthless, as is the shot of all the celebrations across the empire (seriously, if EVERYONE hated the emperor so much, shouldn’t the rebellion be a lot bigger?). And replacing Sebastian Shaw as the spirit of Anakin with Hayden Christiansen is just morally wrong.

Re: The prequels—I actually dislike “Phantom Menace” even more now than I did when I saw it (twice on opening day)—when I actually sorta liked it. I find it difficult to sit through any of them, really. The main problem with all of them is that they just lack the sense of fun and adventure that the original ones had. The OT were pulp, they were corny and cheesy, full of fantasy and cliched ideas, but they were FUN. With the prequels, it’s almost as if Lucas took his place in pop culture history too seriously and decided that he was going to make another 3 “classic” movies. “Phantom Menace” was him throwing out all the special effects chops and rehashing set pieces from the original films. AotC was like watching someone else play a not particularly exciting video game, and RotS was just a little dull. And just like with Darth Maul, Lucas introduces a potentially cool antagonist in General Grievous, and then kills him off after 5 minutes of screen time (speaking of which, why the hell would a robot have a cough, and why would you put his heart OUT IN THE OPEN?! PUT SOME BODY ARMOR ON THAT MOFO!). In 20, 30, 40, 50 years, there will still be people who love the OT, and young children will still be captivated by its magic. The prequels will not fair anywhere near as well. The acting was wooden in all the films, but at least in the OT you felt like they were having fun with it. God love him, Ewan McGregor was the only person who really gave a damn about his role—everyone else was phoning it in.

In any case, the best commentary on the prequels comes from Patton Oswalt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDCjIjsZp_Y

Comment by Ryan — November 26, 2009 @ 1:53 am

When Episode II came out I too said “At least it’s better than I”.  But in retrospect, no, II in fact was the worst entry.

As a fan of the originals a lot of my rage admittedly came from the lack of faithfulness to continuity, both in events and character personality.  First the fact that in the first three the Jedi’s were a long-forgotten ancient religion, not a group that policed the universe twenty years ago.  But the biggest sin had to be saying ‘The force’ was actually due to organisms in one’s bloodstream, which destroyed most of it’s coolness.  And then that crap at the end where Padme died of ‘disappointment’.  As opposed to, you know, some actual way human beings die.

But you do have a point.  If you judge the prequels as a standalone trilogy that had nothing to do with the originals, they do come off a bit better.  Not to the point I’d call them good movies, but not gut-wrenchingly awful either.  Whereas in the original trilogy the dialog was geared mostly to teenagers but also accessible to young kids and adults, in the prequel trilogy the writing was more geared toward younger kids.  Jar Jar, the random unnecessary and very hacky comic relief roles of R2 and C3P0, the far fetched action sequences, the winning battles by accident, and the pod racing.  Not that the original trilogy wasn’t marketed the hell out of, but in the prequels there were parts where you could tell a scene was put in just for a specific product to be sold.

The visuals were beautiful, which is the main ‘good thing’ you can say about the prequels.  But they based the writing around having more technology.  Thinking, we don’t need to be clever, we just have to have a lot of cool visual stuff happening on screen.  Lord Of The Rings was even more beautiful, made just as much use of CGI technology, and they were more clever in how they wrote them.

And then there’s the forementioned issue that it would have been nice if Padme had died for a *reason*.

So yes, they aren’t as bad as Star Wars fans say they are, but if you ignore the retconning, the characters from the original who have no business being there (C3P0, Chewie, Boba Fett) and disregard for continuity with the original, they’re still pretty mediocre.

Comment by Chris — November 26, 2009 @ 6:44 pm

It’s hard to take this writer seriously when he writes “Empire…offers not a single memorable line of dialogue.”  The Buddhism influenced dialogue of Yoda alone lay in stark contrast to the writers artful choice of “laser brain” as the lone example of the writing in Empire.

Why marginalize one work of art to make your point about another? Much like when critics make the case that the Beatles Revolver is better than Sgt. Pepper, they feel they must first bash one work before they make their point.  It’s the easy out.

Comment by nl from usa — November 27, 2009 @ 10:44 pm

“I love you.”
“I know.”

‘Nuff said.

Comment by James Murphy from Chicago — November 27, 2009 @ 11:10 pm

Not a memorable line…

“The Emperor does not share your optimistic appraisalof the situation.”

I know this line so well, that I can even say it from memory in Japanese from having watched the Japanese version 8 years ago:
“kotae ha omae no sono rakanteki genjou ninshiki ni gorippuku da.”

Comment by Iain from London — November 30, 2009 @ 9:43 am

Ryan, you’d have fared better had you stuck with Yoda; “He will join us or die, my master” proves my point, not yours.

As for the prequels lacking the sense of fun, I see what you mean to some extent. However, the kids I know like the prequels as much as the originals.


James Murphy, you dismiss my claim that the dialogue is lacking by quoting Han Solo replying to Leia’s “I love you” with “I know.” My point is that the films are poorly written; Harrison Ford ad-libbed his reply; the script calls for him to say “I love you, too.”


Meanwhile, I am stunned that no one has busted me for not realizing that Return of the Jedi was not written by George Lucas…

Comment by Monte Williams from Asmara, Eritrea, Africa — November 30, 2009 @ 11:37 pm

I second the comments that the Japanese influence is VERY heavy in the original trilogy.  To the point of A New Hope basically being Kurosawa’s “The Hidden Fortress…IN SPACE!”  Where the fights are concerned, Vader and Obi-Wan’s “kids with sticks” is in fact far more reminiscent of actual samurai dueling (for an example of a truly minimalist sword fight, see Kurosawa again, in “The Seven Samurai”.)  The leaping and dodging from Darth Maul is more reminiscent of ninjitsu, which the samurai swordsmen would consider a highly dishonorable way of fighting.  (Probably because true ninja “cheat” as the point is to live and kill your opponent, not to make a point about honor.)

I have to agree about CGI—a recent example is J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek reboot.  Having just watched the DVD and the special features, I realised that their conscious decision NOT to remove light flares, and to shoot absolutely everything they possibly could on real sets and then use CGI to fill in the gaps.  He tooks this so far as sometimes using CHILD body doubles to create scale.  I confess to actually enjoying the film more than heavy-duty fare like “The Lord of the Rings” (which also did a nice, if more obvious, job with the CGI) and the Star Wars prequels, and in retrospect a lot of that was because this FELT gritty, not glossy, and oddly more in tune with the original Star Wars and Indiana Jones films than their more recent entries in their franchises.  I believed Kirk, Spock, et al were walking around a real physical place, not a big green screen.  (I’m not hugely opposed to green screen CGI, and heck, HBO even used it in non-SF settings—you could have fooled me in “John Adams” that the Boston wharf scenes were actually filmed on the same farm where they filmed “Peacefield.”)

Comment by Jennifer from Michigan — December 1, 2009 @ 10:32 am

“Captain, being held by you isn’t quite enough to get me excited!”

“Sorry sweetheart, I haven’t got time for anything else.”

Tell me, what isn’t memorable about that?

Comment by Shannon from Spokane, WA — December 1, 2009 @ 2:59 pm

I wanted to like your article, but in the end it is just a personal rant pretending to have a point. You jump from dialog to CGI to a breakdown of why you don’t like each prequel. What is your point, because I sure as heck can’t find it?

I have always contended that George writes a good story but can’t write decent dialog to save his life, with the exception of ANH.  George didn’t write ESB’s screenplay, Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan did and that is why I can recite practically all of Yoda’s speeches and relish every jab of the lightsaber and tongue during Luke and Vader’s fight.  ROTJ’s screenplay was written by Lawrence Kasdan and George.

Oh and by the way, Qui-Gon spells his name JINN!!

Comment by Padme — December 2, 2009 @ 1:52 pm

You can make all the absurd intectual arguments you want about RoJ, but, sorry, its just not that good.  Re-building the death star with a very similar design flaw.  Even as a young kid, that totally ruined it for me.  The way Boba Fett dies is just lame as well.  And the ending was so generic and predictable.  Han Solo is given nothing to do.  The sudden change of heart for Vader is just stupid.
The prequils are all bad.  Sadly, I think Phatom is the best - due to Darth Mall and Liam Neilson.

Comment by JC39 from Texas — December 2, 2009 @ 7:25 pm

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