New installment not likely to quiet critical debate about what saga means
05/09/99
By Charles Ealy / The Dallas Morning News
You wouldn't think a movie like Star Wars would cause controversy in the hallowed halls of academia. After all, it was initially intended for kids. But for the last two decades, scholars have carried on an argument that matches, and sometimes exceeds, the passion of those odd adults who dress up in Darth Vader helmets and occasionally pop up on the evening news.
It's not that the scholars think the movie is particularly important artistically. And it's not that the professors are buying into the hype typified by the recent 60 Minutes and Entertainment Weekly pieces previewing Episode I - The Phantom Menace, which opens May 19. Rather, they're trying to understand the cultural significance of the Star Wars saga, and in turn, discover clues about how a story captures the imagination of a society. It's too easy to dismiss Star Wars as unworthy of critical attention, they say. It's quite another matter to attempt to understand its resonance.
Do the Star Wars movies represent a cultural conservatism that encourages viewing the world as good vs. evil - a development that liberal scholars belittle? Are the films tapping into a hunger for meaning in a world that seems devoid of clear answers? Or are the childlike films stifling the intellectual development of an art form and infantilizing the movie-going public's tastes? "Politically, blockbuster movies [like Star Wars] embrace both the right and the left, so there's a wide range of opinion about them," says Peter Biskind, author of the new history of Hollywood in the '60s and '70s, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. "By their very nature, blockbusters can't antagonize any segment of the audience." Scholars, however, can and do revel in antagonizing the public. Yet, even they appear to have reached a tentative consensus on the following:
The Star Wars phenomenon,
which began in 1977, was far more significant than first suspected, helping
set the tone for the Reagan-era view that the Soviet Union was the "evil
empire" and making arguments for building a Star Wars missile defense system
sound more realistic; Critical interpretations differ dramatically because "the characters in Star Wars are basically flat; they have no depth," says Dr. Andrew Gordon, a professor of English at the Unviersity of Florida in Gainesville. "The fact that the characters are flat means that they're like people in a fairy tale. Anyone can identify with them. They're kind of a template."
Dr. Gordon, however, makes it clear that he has his own views. He sees the cultural significance - and the notions of renewal and hope in Star Wars - as a key to the trilogy. "Like soap operas or cliffhanging serials, the Star Wars movies generate the audience desire to see the next episode," he says. "But unlike those episodic forms, which are loosely structured and can be spun out forever, Star Wars has the unifying structure of the monomyth."
What's a monomyth, you might ask?
In the case of Star Wars, "The hero of the monomyth undergoes a rite of passage, is tested and tried as he stands in for the entire culture," Dr. Gordon says, referring to the theories of myth expert Joseph Campbell. "What he brings back from his adventure helps restore the civilization. "It's the presence of the mythic hero, the stages of the hero's journey and the archetypal characters - the wise old man, the beautiful princess, the animal helpers, the gnomes and dwarves, the Black Knight - that accounts for the fundamental appeal of Star Wars."
Dr. Gordon dismisses the notion that high-tech special effects are the most important source of the public's fascination. Star Wars "is a throwback: old-fashioned and reassuringly conservative," he says. "It has a gleaming postmodern surface but a premodern core, like a starship run on steam. "It has a clear-cut theme of good and evil. People respond to that, because life is often messy and lacks a meaningful pattern. People hunger for moral simplicity."
Dr. Gordon acknowledges that Star Wars "coincided with a right-wing turn in America, and that it preceded by a few years the Reagan revolution." And, yes, he says, the simple moral view of the Star Wars world parallels that of the Reagan administration, with the Soviet Union representing the "evil empire," as the former president put it. "But I don't think that was Lucas' intention," Dr. Gordon says. "And I don't think he would be happy with the purposes to which his movies have been put," such as giving Mr. Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative a nickname. "Authors are not necessarily reponsible for the uses to which their work is put," he says. "Can you blame [writer J.D.] Salinger because Catcher in the Rye is a favorite of crazed killers?"
Other scholars say it's not a matter of blaming the artist, and they defend the right of Mr. Lucas to create whatever kind of movie he wishes. But they do argue that the Star Wars saga has to be considered in a cultural context. Sometimes, that context isn't too flattering.
Take the controversial arguments of Clyde Taylor, an English professor at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Writing in the academic journal Screen, Dr. Taylor proposes that "the narrative homologies between Birth of a Nation and Star Wars click beyond the possibility of accident."
"The historical setting is a futuristic version of post-Civil War Reconstruction. Princess Leia is divinely inspiring, pure white Victorian womanhood, Lillian Gish reincarnated, the symbolic pawn that must be rescued and protected from Darth Vader and his evil designs," Dr. Taylor writes. "Darth Vader (dark invader?) is the upstart commander of 'black' political forces, threatening a weakened, but spiritual, refined, and honour-bound version of the 'South.' . . . [R2-D2 and C-3P0] take the place of those sassy, back-talking darky house servants, of equally mechanical loyalty to their betters."
Dr. Taylor also expresses dismay about the "racist undertones of the light/good versus dark/evil" social fantasy, supported by the feudal notion that "the Force can only be transmitted by blood, a notion that is noted as 'very unAmerican' by Pauline Kael," the former New Yorker critic.
All of this is important, Dr. Taylor argues, because it shows that North American popular culture is obsessed with recycling what he sees as a "master narrative." He acknowledges that Mr. Lucas may argue that he was controlling or even subverting U.S. political culture by making Star Wars, but Dr. Taylor adds that the 1977 movie was successful because it tapped into "a moment when the utopian lustre of the American dream was dulled; not lost, but more vibrant as nostalgia than prospect." In essence, Dr. Taylor writes, Star Wars tapped into the public's sense of needing an evil adversary, just as Birth of a Nation exploited racial anxieties, and just as Ronald Reagan offered grandfatherly reassurance in the face of worries about the United States' future.
Mr. Biskind, the author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, strikes a middle ground between Dr. Gordon (Star Wars as mythologically cool) and Dr. Taylor (Star Wars as ideologically corrupt). Mr. Biskind calls himself a fan of the Star Wars saga, but he regrets that the films heralded the end of the morally ambiguous, personal and intellectually complex films of the late '60s and early '70s.
"You always have to view films in context, in certain historical periods," he says. "Films can't help but carry social and historical baggage. It's an integral part of viewing movies. And in the case of Star Wars, there's a lot of baggage."
Mr. Lucas and fellow blockbuster director Steven Spielberg helped create a moral vision - and a vision of childhood - that changed radically as we entered the Reagan era, Mr. Biskind says. "One vehicle for this change, however unwitting, were Lucas's and Spielberg's films. By attacking irony, critical thinking, self-consciousness, by pitting heart against head, they did their share in helping to reduce an entire culture to childishness, and in so doing helped prepare the ground for the growth of the right. The kids prevailed, but the ideals they stood for had been drained of content."
Defenders of Star Wars say it offers our culture a reassuring mythic tale, Mr. Biskind says. But he also thinks we can't ignore the timing of Star Wars - coming after a wave of U.S. self-doubt. "It was in reaction to our growing awareness of European-like complexity in the '70s, where people were more ambiguous and there were no simple narratives. Star Wars was definitely a reaction to that, and Lucas says specifically that people were tired of that and longed for pre-Vietnam myths. "Lucas wanted to restore notions of good and evil, the idea of heroes and villans," he says. "Vietnam had complicated those notions, but Lucas wanted to revive them."
Mr. Biskind says this trend can be seen as good or bad, depending upon your political perspective - and upon your views about culture and art. "One problem for films and U.S. culture was that Star Wars made so much money that it created a bloodlust," he says. "The studios lost interest in the more complicated films of [Martin] Scorsese and [Francis Ford] Coppola.
"Star Wars legitimized comic-book movies, where the endings are happy. It took serial formulas, B-movie formulas of the 1930s, and used modern technology to pump up those formulas and reinvent them. I call it the gentrification of the B movie. . . . It paved the way for the blockbuster syndrome of the '80s."
Mr. Biskind notes that Mr. Lucas has a good defense of such criticism. "He says that movies like Star Wars subsidize movies that don't make money. It's the trickle-down theory, and there is some truth to that. Only a handful of studio movies make money, and those that do help subsidize the others. But what's going to happen in many cases with The Phantom Menace is that eight of the 10 multiplex screens will have it, and there won't be any independent films showing at all." Mr. Biskind says he doesn't expect The Phantom Menace to stray much from the Star Wars formula. Mr. Lucas "has reasserted the pleasures of straightforward, unironic storytelling, along with accessible two-dimensional characters whose adventures end happily," Mr. Biskind says. Star Wars tells people that it's OK to become wrapped up in a movie again, that it's fine "to yell and scream and really roll with it." Or, as Mr. Lucas himself says, "I'm very much a visual filmmaker, and very much of a filmmaker who is going for emotions over ideas."
For better or worse, that's the message of Star Wars - and its implications for our culture.