Foreword to the 2020 Edition
‘Only a Sith deals in absolutes,’ declares Obi-Wan Kenobi as he faces his apprentice-turned-antagonist, Anakin Skywalker, at the climax of Revenge of the Sith (2005). This critically maligned prequel gives us one of the Star Wars saga’s key lines of dialogue, because of the internal contradiction that undermines Obi-Wan’s bold moral statement and makes it ridiculous: in ascribing that way of thinking only to his enemy, he is of course dealing in reductive absolutes himself.
Binary oppositions structure the three trilogies, echoed visually by recurring, rhyming shots of Tatooine’s twin suns: Revenge of the Sith ends with Owen and Beru cradling baby Luke under the same ‘binary sunset’ that he, as a teenager, will gaze at in A New Hope (1977), and the conclusion of the final film, The Rise of Skywalker (2019), shows Rey staring at the same stars.
But those binaries, as this volume demonstrates, are subverted even within the first and supposedly simplest film, as characters pass from one side to the other, their boundary-crossing indicated through details of costume and performance. On a more fundamental level, the official mission of Leia’s rag-tag rebels is to ‘restore the Republic’ – the system of galactic rule which, the prequel movies subsequently revealed, was complacent and incompetent rather than utopian, and directly enabled the rise of the Empire. Again, the heroes’ bold certainty – Leia’s dedication to rebuilding the old order is never questioned – contains an internal contradiction. What will prevent the process from starting again?
As I suggest in the conclusion, ‘corruption, within Lucas’s model, does not appear from outside, but festers within’. Luke, like Anakin before him, has to struggle not only with external opponents but also with the temptations of his own Dark Side. This fundamental internal conflict, then, operates both on the grand level of Republic and Empire, and on the personal level of the protagonists’ competing Light and Dark tendencies. But the most glaringly obvious metaphor, central to the first film and recurring in modified forms throughout the saga, is the Death Star, an unbeatable, impenetrable war machine with a single flaw: a tiny exhaust port which, hit at the right angle, will allow a missile to reach the main reactor and destroy the entire space station.
Though the theories of deconstruction associated with Jacques Derrida are never explicitly mentioned in this volume, they seem perfectly suited to its project. Derrida typically aims to unsettle binary oppositions, with the aim not of simply reversing their position but of revealing their interdependency, and he does so by identifying a contradiction at the heart of his target. The seed of a text’s deconstruction is already present, a hidden bomb waiting to be triggered. Again, the Death Star provides a perfect metaphor, emphasised by the reveal in Rogue One (2016) that the internal weakness was deliberately inserted by engineer Galen Erso, a secret rebel loyalist within the Imperial system: another slippage between the galactic opponents is, therefore, retroactively placed at the very centre of Star Wars. The Empire’s most robust structure was always sabotaged, always unstable right from its moment of construction. Nevertheless, the inherently self-destructive cycle continues, not just with the second, incomplete and vulnerable Death Star in Return of the Jedi (1983), but with Starkiller Base in the first sequel, The Force Awakens (2015), whose weak point – a ‘thermal oscillator’ in this case – is revealed by Finn, a First Order soldier who defects to the Resistance.
Finn’s arc, recalling and inverting Han and Luke’s infiltration of the Death Star, adds a new dimension to the crossing-boundaries dynamic. The sequel trilogy also complicates the conflict between Dark and Light sides through its introduction of a ‘Force dyad’ between Rey and Kylo Ren. The promise of his possible redemption is mirrored by visions of her as a villain, while the suggestion of a new path, aligned neither to one side of the Force nor the other, is signified by Rey’s yellow saber, which transcends the traditional binary between red and blue laser blades.
Yet the broader political aspects of the sequels offer less complexity. The opposing forces are essentially rebranded versions of the Empire and Rebellion, with, it transpires, the same veterans leading them. The First Order is never shown in a position of rebellion against or resistance to the New Republic; when we rejoin the story thirty years after Return of the Jedi, the society Leia fought to restore is already in fragments, and the First Order already an Empire in everything but name, adopting a near-identical aesthetic. For further backstory, we have to look to novels, games and comics, or to the 2019 TV series, The Mandalorian, in which the Empire is splintered into stubborn outposts.
Only one scene, near the centre of Rian Johnson’s inventive and subversive The Last Jedi (2017), points to a more interesting structural ambiguity. In the middle of a mission, Finn – himself a traitor to the First Order – chides independent codebreaker DJ for his cynical opportunism, then tries to reassure himself: ‘At least you’re stealing from the bad guys. And helping the good.’ DJ’s response is a shrugged, indifferent mumble: ‘Good guys ... bad guys ... made-up words.’ Hacking a stolen ship’s data, he muses that the previous owner was an arms dealer. ‘Made his bank selling weapons to the bad guys. Oh!’ he announces, as Finn glares. ‘And the good.’
From their position outside the conflict, the arms dealer, like DJ – his nickname stands for ‘don’t join’ – can recognise and benefit from the contradictions. Most of the others caught up in this multi-generational galactic war fail to see that the relationship between the opponents is interdependent, and that each side contains elements of the other. Just as the Empire will continue to build more powerful super-weapons with the trigger for their destruction built in, so will whatever brave new republic grows from the First Order’s ashes inevitably enable its own demise, and the rise of its enemy. Palpatine calls his revivified armada of Star Destroyers the ‘Final Order’, but unless the cycle is successfully deconstructed, the war will never be over: it can’t, surely, or the franchise would end.
Acknowledgments
I have a substantial collection of BFI Film Classics on my bookshelf, their spines arranged in a spectrum of colour, and it is a great privilege to be able to add my own monograph to this prestigious list, alongside the work of authors and scholars I have respected for decades.
My thanks go to those at the BFI and Palgrave who gave me this opportunity: Sarah Watt, who first discussed the proposal, Rebecca Barden, who saw it through, and the anonymous readers who responded both critically – making this a better book than it would have been – and positively, encouraging me towards its completion.
I am grateful to my friends and colleagues in Film and Television at Kingston University: particularly Frank Whately, who supported my research leave in summer 2008, Abbe Fletcher, for sharing her expertise on Brakhage, and Simon Brown, who led the field in my absence.
Above all, as ever and always, thanks to my family.
Star Wars created soldiers. It created psychologists, Christians and artists. It created film-makers. It must also have created film academics. It was certainly the first film I took detailed notes on, in the dark, during a 1980 rescreening at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. I scribbled down dialogue and sketched details like helmet insignia and computer displays; a junior anthropologist snatching field-notes from this rich alien world. The sequel, The Empire Strikes Back (1980), was the first film I considered in terms of its production – realising the negotiation, experiment and physical labour that lay behind the finished image – and after reading Alan Arnold’s making-of account, Once Upon a Galaxy (1980),1 I put those ideas into action on a small scale, filming my own version of the Bespin carbon-freezing chamber using stop-motion Super-8, figurines and indoor fireworks. Finally, Return of the Jedi (1983) was the first film that engaged me in investigative speculation around secondary texts and paratexts, as, aged thirteen and treating the project with at least as much diligence as any homework, I tried to piece together the final episode from pre-production sketches and interviews with crew members.
So, with hindsight, Star Wars made me a film scholar. I can’t be the only one. And yet film scholarship has largely dismissed Star Wars in the thirty-plus years since its release. This book is meant as a first step toward redressing that.
It may seem a surprising claim and an unnecessary effort. Surely there are more than enough books on Star Wars? Yes, there are a lot of books on Star Wars. There is a small library of books on Star Wars, in my house alone. There are histories of the film’s production and reception; encyclopaedias of every alien, droid and planet in the sequels, the prequels, the canonical mythos and its spin-offs; complete scripts illustrated with pre-production paintings; hardcover guides to ship designs, weapons specs and location cutaways; catalogues of posters, toys and collectables. These books reveal the true names of the cantina creatures, the evolution of Darth Vader’s costume and the future of Leia and Han’s children, but needless to say, they are intended for the fan’s bedroom, not the lecture theatre or university library.
Cinema scholarship seems embarrassed by Star Wars – embarrassed that a movie series so popular, successful and influential is also, apparently, so childishly simple – to the extent that it primarily discusses the film in relation to its audiences, special effects, merchandising, ownership or influence on the studio system, rather than in terms of narrative, performance, cinematography, direction or editing. That is, academia rarely engages with Star Wars as a film text, as opposed to a cultural phenomenon; any discussions of its themes, story and character tend to be either patronising or contemptuous.
For instance, major guides and reference works such as Pam Cook and Mieke Bernink’s The Cinema Book,2 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film History,3 Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art,4 John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson’s Oxford Guide to Film Studies5 and Joanne Hollows, Peter Hutchings and Mark Jancovich’s Film Studies Reader6 only mention Star Wars in terms of studios, institutions and technology, rather than film form. Thomas Schatz’s 1993 essay ‘The New Hollywood’ in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins’s Film Theory Goes to the Movies provides a particularly vivid example of this approach: while it gives details of Star Wars’ 1977 and 1978 box office, its reissues, its longevity as a franchise and its influence on cinema sound systems, Schatz dismisses the film’s story and themes as ‘remarkably superficial … character depth and development are scarcely on the narrative agenda’.7
Similarly, Geoff King’s book New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (2002) spares only a brief glance at Star Wars outside the context of special effects, sound and box-office takings: comparing the film to The Searchers (1956) and Taxi Driver (1976), King concludes that, unlike the more complex films it in some ways resembles, it has no ‘moral ambiguity’ and concerns itself only with ‘straightforward, innocent and fresh-faced heroics’.8 This is a common view of Star Wars, and one that my approach will challenge.
Finally, Robin Wood’s substantial chapter on Star Wars in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan … and Beyond first appeared in 1986, but its arguments against the original trilogy tally closely with those discussed above: that is to say, there has been little advance on them in the last twenty years. For Wood, Star Wars is efficient on a simple level, reconstructing the viewer as a child and providing reactionary, ‘mindless and automatic pleasure’.9 The films are ‘intellectually undemanding’, and invite the viewer to let ‘Uncle George take you by the hand and lead you through Wonderland’.10 Wood, who carelessly spells key characters’ names incorrectly even in his revised edition, finds it impossible to imagine that anyone returns to Star Wars to discover ‘new meanings, new complexities, ambiguities, possibilities of interpretation’11 – although ironically, he offers one of the most insightful readings in existing scholarship of the film’s ambivalent attitude towards fascist iconography and, in turn, its theme that totalitarianism can arise within the forces of ‘good’. My approach will demonstrate that (as Wood in fact suggests himself) further examination of the film does reveal complex ambiguities and internal contradictions.
So there are many popular, fan-oriented books about the close detail of Star Wars, as a saga of six films and an Expanded Universe of spin-offs; and there are academic books that discuss Star Wars as a cultural event, largely in terms of its effects – literally, its special effects, but also its consequences for the studio system, for the blockbuster, for cinema sound, for fandom and merchandising. What I am doing here is different, and can be summed up in four words and a date:
Star Wars: George Lucas (1977).
This book is a study of Star Wars at the point when that was its only title – when it had not been repositioned as ‘Episode IV: A New Hope’. While it also offers an interpretation of the film’s motifs and themes within the broader arc of the six-episode saga, it focuses primarily on Star Wars as a film George Lucas directed in 1977, in the context of the films he had made up to that point, and the films that influenced both Star Wars and his earlier work – not as a game of spot-the-postmodern-pastiche, but as a reconstruction of the cinema that, in some cases subconsciously, shaped Lucas’s approach to direction, performance, lighting, shooting and editing.
As suggested above, my approach will also suggest that Star Wars is not the straightforward, simplistic morality tale and fairy story that it is often described as – and derided as – in academic study. One of the key aspects of my argument is that Star Wars is not, as Lucas himself has claimed, a radical departure from his earlier work, but that it continues the experiments with sound and image that he began as a student at the University of Southern California (USC) and continued through his first two features, THX 1138 (1971) and American Graffiti (1973), and shows the influence of Eisenstein, Norman McLaren, cinéma vérité and Alphaville (1965) as well as Kurosawa, David Lean, the Western and The Dam Busters (1955). It is a film conflicted by Lucas’s need for total ownership and disciplined control of his work – the mode he became accustomed to as a one-man creator of short, avant-garde animations – and his contradictory desire for human warmth, community and improvisation.
Star Wars reveals the clash between Lucas’s pleasure in the exterior, reflective surfaces of objects, and his enjoyment in taking them apart and customising them; his admiration for raw documentary, and his obsession with polished, high production values; his nostalgia for classical Hollywood adventure and his interest in abstract formalism; his aspiration to create a Hawksian or Godardian gang, and his preference for cutting film alone, rather than dealing with other people. In summary, Star Wars is made fundamentally problematic – and fascinating – by the fact that Lucas is invested in, and sympathetic to, the coldly organised aesthetic of the Empire, as well as the raw improvisation of the Rebels.
I draw out these conflicts and contradictions by looking at Star Wars in a way that, astonishingly, has not been attempted before; by studying it closely as a film, in terms of its cuts, compositions, costumes, soundtrack and mise en scène. Ironically, my engagement with Star Wars draws on ideas of auteurism and structural opposition – precisely the approaches that film scholarship employed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Star Wars was just a note on Lucas’s yellow writing pad, to elevate the Western from its status as commercial entertainment to something worthy of serious study (see Jim Kitses’s Horizons West from 1969,12 and Will Wright’s Sixguns & Society: A Structural Study of the Western from 1975).13 Perhaps, then, this book comes thirty years late. But it is a start.