And you, if you’ve followed my
other blog, are probably fed up with my Orson Welles entries, and believe me, I
have entries on plenty of other topics to deliver. But it’s a sort of sign of
health of my blog-writing process that (subjectively seen) I seem to have a
tough time getting my ducks in a row, when actually (more objectively) the
process is probably about as diligent and timely as it can be under the
circumstances.
Some historical moorings
When it comes to Star Wars, I am not a diehard fan, but
also (as of recently) I knew for years what the whole thing was pretty much
about, so actually, without having seen it, I’ve already “seen this film
partway.” Unlike the director of the current installment, J. J. Abrams, I didn’t see the first installment in 1977,
though I did see the second, The Empire
Strikes Back, in 1980. I did not fall head over heels in love with the
whole shebang when it initially came out (1977-83), but as with so much in pop
culture, I got a sort of “literacy” in it, or “conversant ability” about it,
without following it terribly closely, so I could sort of appreciate it as a
cultural phenomenon without being a fan. (I also saw all three “prequels”
[1999, 2002, 2005] in a several-year period in which I happened to be seeing a
lot of films in the theater, which meant I saw a lot of relative “also-rans.”)
Star Wars—maybe Star Trek
is the same way—is sort of like sports for me; in a most fundamental sense, I
don’t really care that much about mainstream sports—and I think, especially,
that football is pretty barbaric. But in the U.S., sports has a way of being
presented in the media like predigested corn flakes, so as a result you can
have some “abiding understanding” of it while not caring much about it, or even
disliking it to some extent. (For instance, sports reporting on the TV news I
find, generally, a bore, but somehow my brain picks up enough of the basic bits
of info spewed out that, in various contexts, I recognize players’ names
without really following their careers too closely. [End note])
What I remember about the first Star Wars film—which the 2015
installment is said to fairly closely mimic—when it came out is that it was a
big hit, but—to my 15-year-old mind at the time—it seemed to take a left turn
as far as movies about outer space were concerned. I do recall seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) on TV when
it was shown there in spring 1977 (and I remember a certain set of kids at high
school discussing it in a sort of interpreting-the-occult way that wasn’t the kind
of geek fandom that would eventually follow Star
Wars; for 2001, it was more a
kind of literary-critical attitude [think of the “New Criticism”] that
overlapped with a sort of weird mysticism). And in the ’70s there were enough
films with outer-space settings—like Silent
Running (1973?)—that tried to depict space phenomena as real-life as
possible, while also injecting questioning or dystopian themes, that to take a
bluntly fantasy or “space opera” approach to a story then seemed dopey and long
superseded.
When Star Wars came out, I didn’t go to see it—I and my family generally
didn’t go to see films in theaters much that year, or until 1979—but I remember
that some music from it was played in some kind of rotation on WABC, the big
Top 40 radio station in the NYC metro area. This reflected that the film was a
big, big hit.
When Empire came out, I and some friends like Joe Coles were enough apt
to go to movies fairly regularly by that year that several of us trooped off to
see it. Not that we were big Star Wars
geeks; we may have been geeks, but not for that film franchise.
Some basic premises
One key thing about the Star Wars series that some people could
be slow to get—I remember some close associates who didn’t see any of the
series until maybe within the past 15 years, and then they were surprised by
the banality of the dialogue, which missed one big point of the series—is that
it both (1) imitated/patched-together tropes and script approaches of old-time
(1930s) Saturday adventure-movie kitsch and other pulpish, outer-space stuff;
and (2) added to it with its own new brew of storylines, premises, and such. So
to balk at the script banality—it would have been like reacting to a Marx
Brothers or, better, a Three Stooges routine and complaining, “There’s some
slapstick here, isn’t there!”
In the 1970s, the group of
writer/directors who felt they could remake cinema—like Francis Ford Coppola
and, in his way, George Lucas—found themselves bumping into the problem of, no
matter how much innovation you tried to bring to moviemaking, you still were
faced with having to embrace old-time genres that the films had used for
decades. (This sort of issue is discussed in the book by Peter Biskind, Easy
Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs, & Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved
Hollywood [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998], though I haven’t been
able to refer to that book for a couple years or so.)
For his own part, George Lucas
decided—heading away from associating closely and creatively with Francis when,
galvanized by the success and cultural cachet of his Godfather films, the latter started working on Apocalypse Now—to fully go in the direction of making a very
genre-embracing, young-viewer-aimed film that recycled a lot of old tropes, in
a way that, perhaps, dismayed or embarrassed his colleagues who were more about
doing adult-aimed, edgy films. Thus Star
Wars was born. And Lucas seemed to hit on something; the film was a big
enough hit that Empire and The Return of the Jedi (1983) became not
only commercially bankable but almost expected by the film market (not least
because Lucas had promised a plan by which there would be several installments,
anyway).
##
That is my own thumbnail sketch
based on what I knew of the films when I was a budding film critic in the late
1970s and early 1980s. Star Wars fans
could explain, justify, elaborate on, etc., the whole phenomenon—especially as
it grew post-1983—better than I can.
In Part 2, after I have seen the
film (whenever that is), I hope to just give an open-minded review of something
I’ve seen just once in the theater, which means, from me, not the most incisive
review you’ve ever seen.
Before I go, maybe I don’t need
much correction on this: from all the stuff that’s been said about this film in
the media, it seems the marketing points the makers had to check off, for this
film, are:
(1) in place of a ’70s-hunk Luke Skywalker, a new trope for today:
the young female “power waif” (played by Daisy Ridley) in a fantasy story, a
muted-sexuality role model of sorts, which was somewhat heralded by Kristen
Stewart as Bella in the Twilight
films, and brought to full fruition by Jennifer Lawrence in the Hunger Games films and imitated by
Shailene Woodley in those (whatever) fantasy-series films she started working
in;
(2) as an ex-stormtrooper (played by John Boyega) somewhat on a par
with (I think) Han Solo; he is also a Black character who, as befits the desire
to appeal to a wide audience (not least in the non-Black foreign market), comes
from a disciplined background and is a nice-to-us hearty soul; and
(3) the cute robot (BB-8 in this film), in place of R2-D2, to
appeal to the three-year-olds in the audience (and end up in some form under
the Christmas tree).
As I write this, I feel like I’m
being forced to care for something that I might have opted to skip….
##
