John Heron Project

[If this post seems a bit familiar, don't panic. It's because it's a fairly substantial rewrite of an essay I wrote back in 2004. Anyway. The original Star Wars is now thirty years old. It's time to dig this one up again.]

When you get older, your tastes change. As an undergraduate student, I loved Barbarella, in an ironic, cheesy kitsch sort of a way. Some time in the least ten years, I realised that, like fictional generational spokesman Dave Erdman, I could no longer enjoy it. It was crap. And I had better things to do with my time.

And Gladiator. Seven years ago, I saw Gladiator in the cinema and loved it. Me and Zen Dave embarrassed our partners by walking out of the multiplex chanting “to-GA! To-GA! To-GA!” we were so enthused.

I’m not proud of that.

Saw it again the other day. Great heavens, it’s a piece of crap. What was I thinking? But that’s another post. I’m just using that as an exemplar to bring us gently onto Star Wars.

Yes. Star Wars. Because I loved the Star Wars films as a kid - who didn’t? - and now… now I can’t bear them.

I must have watched at least one of the original Star Wars films every year from the age of six right through to my final year of university, when I saw the remastered editions in the cinema. And I loved them. I bought toys. I still have a VHS video of the first one.

I didn’t see them again for seven years. Then, in 2004, I watched them again. I had to. I was writing a book on Star Wars for Scripture Union, and I needed to be familiar with the material.

And suddenly, I felt cheated.

because the films I remembered seeing as a kid and as an undergrad student were good. But someone had taken those films I remembered seeing and replaced them with… crap. Total, unmitigated crap. I couldn’t believe how appalling they were. The experience is scientifically documented, of course. The Ministry of Defence call it the Ulysses 31 effect, or they would do if they’d actually done a study and I wasn’t making it up.

I’ll let that sink in for a second. After all, of all the movies that people love, the original Star Wars trilogy is a Generation X sacred cow, an unapproachable example of the perfect film. You are simply not allowed not to like Star Wars. It’s like seeing them and admitting you like them is like this liminal point in pop culture.

To which, I say “bollocks”.

So why are they so bad, I don’t hear you ask? If you’re still bothering to read, let me tell you. Because I’m going to anyway. You can always go read something else.

The Structure.
Every stupid three-act action movie blockbuster (and for which film was the term coined?) ever made since about 1980 uses the structure set by Star Wars. It’s tried and tested, and it’s manipulative and lame. It’s supposed to facilitate storytelling, but you know what? It’s a straitjacket. I don’t know if the stories about George Lucas using a graph to chart action are true or not, but I believe it. It’s calculated to stifle story at the expense of plot development.

The Dialogue.
Only Harrison Ford and Peter Cushing make the dialogue in the Star Wars Trilogy sound even the slightest bit convincing. Harrison Ford managed it because at the time he was a talented young actor who wasn’t prepared to screw up any film he was in, not having reached the point where he could just be Harrison-Ford-the-Movie-Star. Peter Cushing did it because he’d had a long, long experience of being the best thing in trashy movies with appalling dialogue. Legendarily, Harrison Ford is supposed to have said to George Lucas, “You can write this shit, George, but you can’t speak it.” It’s telling that the best line in the trilogy, the single nearest point the three films get to a half-genuine emotional moment, namely Han Solo’s “I know,” at the end of the second film, is actually an ad-lib.

The Performances.
Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher are planks. Alec Guinness faxes his performance in, in the first movie (or he would have done, had faxes been commonly domestically available in 1977). By Return of the Jedi, you can practically see him wincing as he delivers those excruciating lines. In the first movie, Mark Hamill gives a fairly convincing performance as a clueless and naïve farmboy, but by Jedi, the illusion has slipped and he’s just wooden (one could draw parallels with Keanu Reeves in the Matrix movies).

The Ewoks.
That is all.

C-3PO.
How come he’s supposed to be endearing and yet Jar-Jar Binks is annoying? C-3PO makes me want to take a blowtorch to his camp English stereotype arse and turn him into an ornamental flower pot.

The Jedi.
The Jedi religion is a pile of contradictory crap.

Says the Christian.

Right. Now you’ve got the irony out of your system, bear with me and I’ll explain. Luke, Yoda and Obi-Wan are supposed to be these paragons of virtue, right? And yet you’ve got this religion of Zen non-aggression which supports extreme violence and blowing things up and killing thousands of people and stuff (”use the Force, Luke!”)

It’s a peace-loving religion whose practitioners carry as a sign of honour cool, glowy and mainly lethal laser swords.

It’s like the Matrix again: trappings of Zen Buddhism, only without the hard bits (vis-a-vis the part about not killing people). And then there’s Yoda: tortuous pseudo-cute grammar apart, does Yoda once give anything that approaches good advice? Bollocks he does. It’s all “excitement… adventure… a Jedi craves not these things” and “try? There is no try. There is only do… or do not”. I mean, you can get that on daytime TV. And don’t get me started on the drooling, slack-jawed, supposedly “post-ironic” morons who wrote “Jedi” under “religion” on their census forms. Just don’t.

The Approach to Good and Evil.
Actually, this is a serious point, and the heart of what gets me about Star Wars. In Star Wars, The Good Guys are good, because they just are. The Bad Guys are bad, just because they are. And they laugh evilly.

The Bad Guys are mostly British, too (another pernicious Hollywood tradition. Don’t know who started that one, but it really pisses me off. I bet it was Star Wars, though).

OK. Let’s try that again: why are the Rebel Alliance, our favourite bunch of Small Government Good Ole Boys goodies? Because they say so. They shoot and kill and blow things up just as much as the bad guys do, only it’s OK, because they’re the Good Guys. Because they say so. And the Princess wears white. So they must be.

And the Bad Guys are Bad, because they’ve “given themselves over to the Dark Side”. Yeah! We’re Evil, because we’ve given ourselves over to anger and hate and the Dark Side of the Force. So we’re Evil. Also, our minions have masks that faintly resemble skulls. Moo-hoo-ha-ha-ha.

Oh, please. That’s the lamest set-up for a baddie ever. What’s really terrifying is that the most powerful nation in the world has a president who thinks that this is somehow realistic (he said so outright in an interview with the BBC back in September 2004, along with the part about how everyone wants to be in a Western democracy really). It’s not even good pulp fiction, let alone a political philosophy.

Compare the thirties pulps which Lucas claimed to have been inspired by, where the bad guys at least make some pretence of thinking they’re right and the good guys are often morally suspect - Robert E Howard’s Conan, for example, is a thief, a pirate and, it’s implied, a sometime rapist. But Luke Skywalker, accidental incestuous desires apart, is whiter-than-white. Han Solo was good all along, really. He was just pretending to be a scoundrel, a fact underlined by the controversial scene in the remastered version of Star Wars where Han shoots the alien bounty hunter Greedo. In the original, Han shoots first. In the remastered version, it’s been doctored so Greedo starts it. Because Han’s the goodie, you see. Goodies don’t do stuff like that.

Baddies blow planets up. And goodies… also blow planets up, only they’re artificial planets full of soldiers and stuff. So obviously that’s OK.

Daniel Berrigan, a hero of mine, writing for the Student Christian Movement in 1977, had the right of it when he said:

I think the joke of Star Wars is so cruel because for all the gimmicks - intergalactic distances, light-speeds, laser guns - there really isn’t any difference between here and then, them and us, ancestor and progeny, good guys and evil. The film is… a most sombre and cynical exercise in Necessity; a guided tour of the Kingdom of Necessity. This is how things will be, a simple extrapolation for the way things are; at both ends, an unexorcised curse.

I wish I could quote the whole article. He wasn’t the only voice who wrote about Star Wars in less than glowing terms back then - fantasy author Ursula K LeGuin springs to mind - but somehow over the last thirty years, the dissenters have been silenced. Star Wars has taken this unimpeachable place as The Greatest Film Ever Made.

Its influence is pernicious, pervasive, going beyond simple science fiction movies and into the whole structure of the popular arts. It’s everywhere, and you are not allowed not to like it.

And speaking of philosophy, how about that?
Joseph Campbell. Blah, blah blah, George Lucas wants to make a Modern Myth, so he cribs his plot from the Stupid Man’s Carl Jung, who likes to make things simple and crassly generalises about mythology to a really quite offensive degree.

And this is the thing. You may know that while I don’t mind people trying to be clever, on the other hand people thinking they’re clever while being stupid, people who have the utter conviction of being geniuses while being pretty much subliterate… they enrage me.

And that’s what’s all over the Star Wars films - that same arrogance. They reek of it.

They think they’re significant.

And the thing is, they are. Vastly. But they’re significant in this awful, plague-like way, in this stupid, black-and-white moronic pop-culture morass where every film has three acts, a happy ending and the bad guy dies at the end. The same way that the D* V**** C*** is significant, in fact.

The Ewoks.
Have I mentioned the Ewoks? Beetchewawa.

They’re just not thought through, plot wise.
So the Rebels only have One Base. Yeah, right. So when the Galactic Emperor dies, everyone’s happy and has a party? Oh, yeah, no civil war, democracy restored… yeah, that works.

At the end of the Return of the Jedi Special Edition, there’s a scene where they topple over the statue of the Emperor and party all around it. Remind you of anything? I don’t know if there’s a connection. Probably not. But the film I saw was so similar. And the expectations were the same. And we know how that one worked out.

So that’s your lot. And I haven’t even brought up the question of the independent contractors on the Death Star.

Please note that I’m not trying to beat on the Star Wars trilogy for not being realistic. That would be stupid. I love trash fiction, me. Well, I used to. Well, OK, I do. I still love Doctor Who, for example.

No, I’m beating on the Star Wars movies for not being convincing, and for being emotionally untrue, for being a pernicious influence on our culture… and for being genuinely, objectively bad films.

And yeah, you’re going to disagree. And yeah, I’m out of step with more or less the rest of the English-speaking world.

But I’m right. And you know it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 4:17 pm and is filed under America, Faith, Film and TV, Reviews and Comment, Vitriol, genre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.