The job of mythology - and it's taken me thirty years to figure this out - is
to show where the magic in life is. The map isn't the destination, and a
mythological story isn't the "truth", but it uses whatever imagery may be
appropriate to hint at where the treasure is hidden. Kindly simple-minded grandparents
would smile condescendingly and yammer about the wonders of the imagination as the source
of magic, but they'd be wrong. The "imagination", as they conceive it, is another form of
television - a distraction to be relied upon after "reality" has spent the day stretching
us like taffy to accomodate its own needs and we need a break simply to
prepare for the next day's pulling. I'm talking about life itself as the
source of all magic, the boundaries of which we haven't begun to fathom. Magic in movies and fairy tales,
with the sparks flying and objects moving at the wave of a hand, is mostly just a metaphor.
But what it's symbolizing is absolutely real.
When the message is truly effective, as Star Wars was for so many people, it
becomes transparent; people get the message, but they're not necessarily
aware of what the message is - and if they were, they'd be likely to deny,
even to themselves, that they'd actually "gotten" it and felt something from
it. Some eyes focus on the mirror, and some focus on the face staring back
from the mirror, and, and some focus on the world surrounding that face that
can't be seen directly because there's this damn mirror in the way.
Everybody knows they're looking at a mirror, but not everybody knows what
it's for.
People got the message with the original Star Wars, but they didn't know
what it meant. Everybody recognized a sense of magic in life as portrayed
by the movie, but most of them thought the magic was in the movie itself, or
in "the movies". (This focus on "the movies" instead of the content of
movies explains the focus on box-office receipts instead of emotional or
artistic triumphs.) Many film careers were born with a first viewing of
Star Wars, and that's fine; but - and don't mistake my meaning here - it's
like reading the Bible and being inspired to go into the printing business.
The big problem is that George Lucas apparently understood least of all what
he was accomplishing. That's understandable; to us Star Wars is a movie to
be enjoyed and a world to be celebrated; to him, it was a huge burden that
demanded every moment of his attention for more than a decade. He's
entitled to a bit of distance.
But what's increasingly clear in all the Star Wars movies is that he's been
trying to teach a lesson he hasn't learned himself. The Jedi hint and ramble
about their strategies and beliefs, but I'd submit that, sidestepping the contractions about
"feelings" (which are considered good and useful in the first two movies and bad and distracting
in the later movies), the lessons of
the Jedi boil down to one thing: get out of your own way; your childish
ego is only an obstacle to the power inside you. Properly understood, that's more than damn good advice.
Learning to sidestep the fears and arrogant mistakes of the ego is the primary task of every actor,
writer, athlete, boxer, soldier, parent...and any human being with a goal to accomplish and an ego to
stand in the way.
George Lucas hasn't learned this lesson; he's learned the opposite. When he
makes films, he's loyal to his ego and its confused fears and distracting
ambitions, not to the film itself. The process should be like giving birth;
instead, he's like Frankenstein, trying to wire together the perfect
creature without interference from the processes of life that brought him
everything he has in the first place. He's made the same mistake that most
of the filmgoers have made - thinking that the original film worked because
it was "campy fun", or because they were spectacular updates of Flash Gordon
serials. He didn't realize that "campy fun" was the language, not the
statement. And he absolutely did not realize that the story was bigger than
*him*. (I can only assume he's not even making the later films for himself,
but for an imagined audience of children that does exist commercially but
doesn't exist in reality. These movies will make money, and
they'll barely be remembered three years from now.)
There's nothing humble or truly solemn about the later movies. The Ewoks (who got cheap laughs out
of what should have been fatal battlefield mistakes, each chuckle like an
explosive charge tied to the bridge supports of the world he'd created), Midochlorians (which tried to
represent the force as something tangible, measurable and merely
physiological) and the fact that Jar Jar was and is in any way taken
seriously as a character - each of those elements and many others were attempts
to apologize for the faith and attention demanded by the first movies. It's as if Lucas is so terrified of
being ridiculed that he absolutely refuses to take his own work seriously;
he draws a spectacular world and uses it as a platform for campy jokes and
empty, flashy tricks. And the more he's criticized for the ridiculous
results, the more ridiculous his work becomes. He makes kiddie movies
defensively, because he's no longer brave enough to make movies for adults; but
he doesn't know how to make kiddie movies. (He clearly thinks he knows what
his audience "wants", but any list of what moviegoers "want" is likely to be
in reality a list of what moviegoers will accept when they're not getting
what they want.)
Personally, I still want to know what the story means. I'm curious what George Lucas
thinks it will mean to "bring balance to the force". It seems like it *should* mean
something, even while we already know how the saga ends and it had nothing
to do with bringing balance to the force. But Episodes I and II are more
than just dissatisfying. They are in themselves an attack on the idea that
a movie can mean anything at all to an audience.
How I would describe Episode II: "Suckquel". Attack of the Yawns. The
original film was widely regarded as "A children's movie that adults could
love", which is really to say it's an elaborate sci-fi metaphor fantasy that
adults could on some level *accept*; episode II is too fucking tedious and
talky and pretentious and confusing-exposition-heavy to be a kid's movie,
and too fucking stupid (Jar-Jar left to represent a nation in the senate?
Does Lucas want *everyone* to walk out in disgust?) and packed full of
self-sabotaging gags to be acceptable to adults on any level save as a
source of ironic Burger-King tie-in figures for the top of the monitor.
What hurt as I watched the movie was that, while Phantom Menace
was a truly bad movie (and I'm suspicious of fans' tendancy to forgive one
movie or another - much of the response I saw at the time of Episode 1 said
"at least it's not as bad as the last one"; now they're saying it again) it
at least had the excuse that it was very, very clearly a kiddie movie that
adults could somehow re-interpret as an adult story and, through suppression
of key elements (like the foot-growing-out-of-the-head just-plain-wrong
virgin-birth bit, or the "accidental" military victory that insulted every
character involved, good and bad, or the midochlorians thing that, yes,
weakened not just the plots and characters of all the movies, but attacks
the very magic the original films so delicately, and unprobably, managed to
portray) take the story seriously. Episode II's story made no sense; it was
very hard to follow; the good guys were both morally and visually hard to
tell from the bad guys; and most of what we know about the story is directly
contradicted in the prequels. (Annekin's kids were split up and put far
apart so Vader wouldn't discover them, right? So why give Luke to Beru and
Owen, who apparently live where Darth Vader grew up? C-3PO was built by Darth
Vader, becomes part of the Alliance, then is sold back to Beru and Lars by
coincidence? A little reincorporation goes a long way; a lot of
reincorporation is a joke on, and a criticism of, the audience.)
Many friends watched this film with an "enjoying it for what it was" attitude,
which I can sortof respect but I absolutely cannot summon up myself.
As the credits rolled - once I got over the
initial shock, after 2+ hours of yawns, that it was supposed to be over,
after going nowhere for so long - I just felt a deep, burning sense of
having been insulted. And not just a name-calling insult, but a
you're-going-to-accept-this, this-is-how-stupid-you-are insult.
George Lucas grew up watching Flash Gordon serials, and in his thirties he
set out to make one, but he couldn't get the rights to the characters. So
he studied mythology and overshot his original goal by a thousand miles.
And unfortunately, he's been working his way backward ever since. Down the
Star Wars staircase.
Stay tuned for "Episode III: In The Basement".
Copyright 2002 Betsy Shebang