The Greatest Irony

George Lucas’s 1977 Star Wars is a great many things.

A childish romp, a sophisticated homage to Hollywood’s long-forgotten serials – Flash Gordon, Buck Rodgers and the like – and a secular fantasy for the United States, one whose easily discernible vision of good versus evil rendered it easy fodder for defense department planners and journalists alike to utilize the film’s name as a moniker for America’s nascent Space Defense Initiative in the 1980s.

Star Wars also cleverly cast aside the somber, post-studio system cynicism that dominated Hollywood and film in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and hearkened back to the swashbuckling films of Errol Flynn, to the long, purposeful stride of larger-than-life John Wayne and to a time when the moviegoer, regardless of age, could watch a fun, thigh-slapper of film and come away from it with the simple enthusiasm of a child just returned from his first circus. As a result, it became one of the most successful films of all-time. Then, it became something more than a film...

When it was released, Star Wars was the independent film of independent films. It had no opening credits, but a strange scroll, for which Lucas was chastised by Hollywood's famous guilds, it had little known actors and an almost paint-by-numbers story. Then there was, as we all know, an endless array of Star Wars merchandise, most of which initially came about partly to help Lucas fund and re-coop the expense of making the film itself, but then stuck around and continues to stick around. Indeed, the film franchise would eventually be sold in 2013 for more than $4 Billion to Disney, largely on account of said merchandise and the potential for more of it. (As a famous aside: Alec Guinness became quite a rich man by foolishly – or so he thought at the time – agreeing to take a cut of the merchandise sales in lieu of his usual fee for acting).

All of the above is a long way of saying that we are all living in the post-Star Wars world, and that whether we like it or not, there is no going back to what came before. Star Wars helped finish off what little was left of the Old Hollywood, which had begun to fall apart in the mid-1960s with the collapse of the studio system, and subsequently helped usher in the New Hollywood of corporations, high finance and marketing. Summer blockbusters, an explosion of science fiction, toy tie-ins and – this more than anything else – a new reliance on advanced special effects, which up to this point in Hollywood’s history had largely been limited because they were not strong enough to carry a picture (actors and scripts did that), are all part of the cinematic world Star Wars created. 

That Lucas intended none of the above is relevant only if we choose to remember how radical a film Star Wars actually was when it was released and how uncertain its place in the American cinema would have been absent Lucas’s compelling vision and his drive to completely fashion an independent film out of the best pieces of myth, iconography, religion and popular culture. Put simply, Star Wars is the most important movie of the past 35 or so years, though I doubt anyone now or then, including Lucas himself, would say so if asked.

Part of the reason for this stems from the fact that outside of its obvious commercial success with audiences, Star Wars has enjoyed little critical fanfare.

Film writer Thomas Schatz dismissed Star Wars as “remarkably superficial”; Robin Wood called it “intellectually undemanding.” Little has changed since these initial pronouncements. Indeed, the arrival of the tortured and overwrought prequels has, if anything, only confirmed the view of many outside the usual fan-base that Star Wars is shallow eye-candy that relies on action and special effects to overcome wooden actors, dull plots and intellectually undemanding themes. Lucas’s aforementioned heavy borrowing to generate the grist of Star Wars material has not helped him on this account, either. 

There are, as my own eyes show me, entire shots lifted from brilliant films, such as The Searchers and Lawrence of Arabia, and from lesser efforts, such as 633 Squadron. There is also the matter of the cantina scene ripped straight from a Western, a character named Han Solo who is the interstellar incarnate of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and the film’s two climaxes, the first of which is essentially a sword-fight, shot almost frame-for-frame like a Kurosawa scene, with the second portraying an attack on a space station that plays out in similar fashion to The Dam Busters.

This is not to say Lucas is not an original, for as I have already suggested, Star Wars was indeed a radical film when it was made, a fact that is lost in time and the film’s subsequent success. Nobody, and this includes most of the cast and crew, understood what Lucas was after in Star Wars and when the first cut of the film was completed, the studio heads were terrified to release it. Talking Robots? A Princess? A villain dressed all in black armor? Spaceships? A furry and howling sidekick? It was all quite out there back then and all something no one knew how to classify...

The other major piece of radicalism in Star Wars is its inherent conservatism, which is also another of its ironies. Lucas chose to make an epic science fiction film that was fantastically different from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or Franklin J. Schnaffner’s The Planet of the Apes, the other two high-budget science fiction films that garnered mainstream attention. Lucas intentionally eschewed Kubrick’s cold intellectualism and Schnaffer’s hip political sensibility and chose instead to make a movie that recalled myths from Ancient Troy to King Arthur. At its heart, Star Wars is a hero quest, with a protagonist who is chosen by destiny (Luke) and guided by an old sage (Obi-Wan Kenobi) to first confront and then overcome evil (Darth Vader and the Empire). Lucas set his film to a soaring John Williams score that echoes Wagner and created powerful visual contrasts – the colorless Vader and Storm Troopers and the rag-tag Rebels in their orange jump suits – that ensured audiences saw and felt the difference between good and evil on the screen as much as they understood it. Add the equally simple and powerful themes of maturation, of leaving home, of finding and sacrificing for one’s friends of committing one’s self to something outside the self and you have a palpable mixture of emotion that should have assuaged some of the concerns studio executives felt about the film’s content.

At the same time, it has become impossible to separate Lucas the filmmaker from Lucas the businessman and entrepreneur, a fact even his close friends acknowledged by the early 1980s, when the Lucas Empire had become large enough that many began to openly question the man’s priorities. Francis Ford Coppola, John Milieus and Stephen Spielberg, all of whom were Lucas’s contemporaries at film school at the University of Southern California, all speak highly of Lucas and his talent, both then and now. Coppola, who made at least three of the greatest American films in the latter half of the 20th century, has even called Lucas “one of the most talented directors of that time," but like the others, there is a limit to what he will stomach from his old friend's various conversions.

For example, Coppola has said Star Wars does not show one-tenth of what Lucas is capable of as artist. Lucas, Coppola believes, chose the “industrial marketing complex" instead of art. This is a creative collapse that Lucas himself occasionally acknowledged back in the 1980s, when his empire was much smaller than it is today and he was still uncertain of its ultimate direction. Star Wars, he once griped in between installments, “took over his life,” and in doing so, he became precisely what he hated when he struck out on his own as an independent filmmaker: A corporate CEO. “What I was trying to do was stay independent,” he said in 2005, when it was clear he had given up on this desire. “I’m not happy with the fact corporations have taken over the film industry. But now I find myself the head of a corporation. So there’s a certain irony there.”

Indeed, there is Mr. Lucas.

I would venture farther that such a moment of self-awareness, which now have become almost unheard of as Lucas more and more speaks like the media-savvy fight promoter, is even more ironic when one realizes that the corporate takeover Lucas appears troubled by occurred precisely because of the great commercial success of Star Wars. That is, in order to capitalize the increasingly expensive special effects moviegoers demanded after becoming accustomed to adventures like Star Wars, it became necessary for filmmakers to secure tremendous amounts of funding. In most cases the necessary amounts could only be had through the kind of merchandising Lucas pioneered, which more and more was reliant upon corporate partnerships and a new sort of Hollywood money-man who cared not a whit for the artistic value of their financial ventures. Return on investment, and not just return, but staggering Star Wars-like levels of return became the new expected norm.

For all his aloofness and lack of acknowledgement for what he hath wrought, Lucas remains something of a sympathetic character, if for nothing else than for the sensation one has in reading some of his comments that at one time Lucas genuinely believed he would make other films after the Star Wars trilogy concluded and that those films would be more in line with his earlier, more expressive work. Instead, as we are all well aware, Lucas went on to help invent Indiana Jones, yet another fantastically successful amalgamation of Old Hollywood tropes, and tinkered and then re-tinkered with his original three Star Wars films. Lucas then found – or more likely, invented – reasons to make three additional Star Wars films, none of which approached his initial effort in terms of impact or quality, though all made their creator staggering amounts of money.

With each new Star Wars film, with each new scene of perfectly sculpted Computer-Generated-Imagery (CGI), which is to say with each new piece of rubbery unreality that a director who once boasted of hating actors has been able to utilize, we are one step farther away from the magic of Hollywood’s Golden Age and one more step within contemporary Hollywood’s age of visually shallow wonder, for it impossible to imagine nowadays a major film without the kind of staggering budget and without the kind of staggering effects Star Wars requires to capture its audience. (This is especially the case with the prequels, bereft of emotion as they are. Would there be any reason to watch them at all if they were not visually stunning? Lucas has indeed rid himself of actors in those films). And while some of this might be good for the child in all of us, I cannot help but feel like something else has been sacrificed, something that George Lucas of 1977 might have appreciated about classic film, which he borrowed from so successfully. It is a shame then, that he is both the creator and the destroyer of worlds he loves and that we all must both thank him for all the joy his 1977 vision has given to us even as we all suffer from what that vision so crudely discarded and replaced.

Revenge without Responsibility

First, a confession.

I grew up watching Disney’s 1954 film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea on a video cassette – do people still remember those? – and I must have replayed the film a couple of dozen times. I was, in other words, something of a fan, though it would take me years to realize I had a proclivity to drift toward sea stories and even longer to realize why this was. (It is because they are, as one critic writing about Patrick O’Brian’s series of novels wrote, likely the only genre in which all of the great themes – man vs. man, man vs. himself and man vs. nature – can occur in one story).

Returning to old ground smacks of nostalgia, and more times than not, the journeys end very different than we imagine when we begin them. I have wanted to watch 20,000 Leagues again for years, but I never seemed to get around to it, and part of my distraction, I suppose, was intentional, in that I was in no great hurry to ruin my memories of what up until that point could be a considered a “childhood favorite” of mine.  Is there not some part of us all that wants the integrity of Santa Claus to remain just as it was before we learned the truth and it fled forever? Fortunately, in this case, the cinematic return ended well: 20,000 Leagues remains a solid sea story, one with interesting characters and more than enough ideas to keep an adult entertained.

As for the special effects?

Well, they have not aged poorly. Indeed, I suspect they have aged much better than many of the insipid, CGI-infused creations we are currently subjected to at the theater. I suspect the effects matter less in something like 20,000 Leagues because the characters matters more, and when Kirk Douglas faces off against the giant squid in the sequence forever enshrined in the Disney theme park ride, we care about him and James Mason’s Captain Nemo a great deal more than do about whether the tentacles of the beast flail realistically enough. If you want a touchstone for a comparison to see what I mean, try and recall how unimpressive the similar sequence is in the Johnny Depp Pirates series. One cannot imagine that scene, that film – indeed, that film series – firing the imaginations of young children five years from now, let alone sixty years from now, as the above-mentioned depiction from Jules Verne’s timeless novel has.

However, the fiber that holds this film together all these year later is the matter in between the sea monsters and underwater sequences. As I already suggested, the performances of Douglas and Mason, to say nothing of Peter Lorre and the lesser known Peter Lukas, are something to behold. Between the four, the audience is afforded glimpses at human archetypes as the group wrestles with the mysterious Captain Nemo’s competing shades of subtle brilliance and melancholic revenge.

The backstory, which should be familiar to all, is Nemo’s rage towards unnamed nations that ship arms that fueled what passes in the film as a loose kind of economic imperialisms. The details of Nemo’s angst are never made fully clear, but this lack of filling in the blank works in the film’s favor. Free from political commentary, Nemo and his lust for revenge that take center stage, while Douglas, Lorre and Lukas look on and puzzle over what to make of it with their very different levels of intelligence, personalities and ideological inclinations (or lack thereof in the case of Lorre – a coward – and Douglas – a brave but politically unconcerned sailor).

At odds with the violence, Nemo and his crew live in almost complete harmony with sea, taking what they want from it in food and supplies, as they cruise across the world – largely under the waves – in Nemo’s own monster, a metal-clad submarine that is virtually unstoppable in the age of wood and sail. The Nautilus only rises to replenish supplies or whenever it must become the embodiment of Nemo’s rage and plunge headlong into a ship, sinking it by opening up its timbers upon contact. There is something demented and childish in this. One man’s nightmare of revenge is visited on the world through an instrument he uses to literal bash against things until they are no more. How different is this than the senseless child, who full of anger, will repeatedly hit his head against something? Not much.

Like many Mason characters, Nemo (Latin for “no one”) is classy and cultured. He has an extensive library, an impressive mind and a first-rate accent. But as the movie makes plain, his revenge ensnares the guilty and the innocent alike. The ship Nemo sinks with Douglas and company aboard was sent to discover Nemo and stop the killing, not carry war materials to abuse an unnamed population, and it is unlikely that Lorre and Lukas are the first civilians blameless in the wars Nemo believes he is stopping that end up in the water because the Nautilus encountered their vessel and sunk it with no remorse for the bodies left in the water.

What we have here then is revenge without responsibility, an oddity when one considers Nemo is railing against men who fund and arm wars without accepting responsibility the havoc and death they cause. It is possible, I suppose, that Nemo began nobly, but that his rage eventually consumed him and he ceased to be selective about whom he lashed out against in his submarine. In the Verne novel, Nemo is far more sinister and obviously mad. That he is not in the film is likely on account that this is, above all else, an adventure picture for children and sheer amounts of dastardliness can only be depicted so much.     

The comparisons to Ahab here are easy to reach for, but viewing it from our perch some 60 odd years later I propose that we can indulge in the reality that this film appeared amid the height of the Cold War, an age in which atomic submarines began plumbing the depths of the world’s oceans, playing a game of cat-and-mouse not unlike what is on-screen here. Indeed, within a few years of the film’s release, those same submarines grew larger and started carrying a cargo of nuclear weapons that are far deadlier than anything Nemo imagined and real submarine named U.S.S. Nautilus sailed under the North Pole to prove a submarine could slip close enough to annihilate the Soviet Union if called upon to do so. The world, as they say, was never the same.

We glimpse some of this in Nemo’s decision to scuttle his submarine at the end of the picture. Nemo does so because humanity is not yet ready for the technology he unleashed in his machine (it is suggested his submarine is in fact nuclear-powered). This, the film’s almost solitary political pronouncement, could not have been lost on discerning audiences in the cold winter of the mid-1950s. What we are to make of this today, I am not sure. That the verdict on humanity is still out? That such machines should be only in the hands of capable people? Or that responsibility has shown itself, in some form, in the fact that we have not succumb to baser emotions and annihilated one another, even though we now have the means to do so? I suppose we each all have our answers, but at the same time I am fairly confident that we can all agree with one of the film’s other messages: That power in the hands of the irresponsible tends to destroy everything in its path – and then, eventually, the irresponsible destroy themselves.

"Tasteless, Odorless Crud"

Typically, science fiction is poorly written pulp, prone to fits of juvenilia based on curious beings from beyond, ray guns and intergalactic damsels in need of rescuing. But in the late 1940s and early 1950s, science fiction literature began to change. Writers such as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein started producing novels and stories that pushed the genre’s boyish traditions into the hitherto largely unexplored realms of moral philosophy, politics and theology.

It took science fiction films a few years to catch up with the novels, but when they did, some fantastic – albeit somewhat clumsy and obvious – pictures began to appear that dealt with serious subject matters. Soylent Green is a prime example of this kind of issue-conscious filmmaking.

The 1973 picture starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson remains interesting and relevant, largely because it is a fine example of how well science fiction can work when filmmakers care more about ideas than special effects. Devoid of oversized robots, light sabers and starships, the audience is forced to focus on the simple discomforts inherent in an overcrowded and crumbling New York in 2022. Heston and Robinson are policemen and roommates who spend most of their day fretting about keeping their jobs and the rest of it trying to secure their part of the world’s dwindling food and water.

For kicks, the aging Robinson (appearing here in his last film) rides a stationary bicycle that generates power for their cramped apartment.

Outside, people lay down to sleep wherever they can find a flat surface and everyone seems to work for the state or subsist on its welfare. Nobody treats anyone else with anything like humanity, and as Robinson complains, “nobody seems to care about anything” and “nothing works … not really.” The resignation everyone displays in the film toward this dystopian world is both overpowering and disheartening. Rather than fight for any kind of change, it is easier to try and get what you can. Even Heston, the policeman, is corrupt, and he jumps at the chance early on to loot a murder victim’s home for food and luxuries.

As for the aforementioned food shortage, handouts come in the form of Soy-based food substitutes served up from the limited farmland beyond the city’s ruined urban landscape. Soylent Green, the newest eco-friendly substitute, is supposedly made from plankton. Robinson remembers when “food was food” and people did not have to eat “tasteless, odorless crud” designed by what he calls scientific magicians, but nobody else seems to.

I have written before about the difficulty of approaching classic films with a fresh palate. Soylent Green is a perfect example of just how impossible this can be sometimes, as most of us, in some form or another, have seen or heard about the ending of the film, wherein an enraged Heston – and so many of his roles do end in outrage – yells out the terrible discovery the picture builds toward. Only, as a result of our previous exposure, the truth is not really terrible or shocking.  

That it takes cannibalism -- a timeless taboo -- to unsettle Heston is in some ways far more revealing about what is happening in the world this picture has created. Heston is prepared to accept just about everything else the audience finds disturbing. Indeed, at some points, such as the riot, he is an active participant in what repulses us. But humans as food? That's out of bounds.

Fortunately, our foreknowledge of this -- the film's hidden truth -- is useful. Knowing the secret allows us the luxury of watching the picture with a heightened sense of disquiet, and as a result, scenes such as the one where a food riot occurs take on added meaning. And while there is some truth in the notion that Soylent Green is a “movie based on an ending,” there is also enough happening on screen here to warrant continued attention from audiences.

We live in an apathetic age full of processed food. That we have some distance to go before we reach the world of Soylent Green is scant comfort when one considers how prophetic parts of this picture still seem. It is a warning, albeit a crude one, and we should all take note.