GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
STAR WARS, director GEORGE LUCAS; cast MARK HAMILL, HARRISON FORD, CARRIE FISHER, PETER CUSHING, ALEC GUINNESS; production TWENTIETH CENTURY-FOX, 1977, 121 MINUTES. Wikipedia, IMDb, Letterboxd.
Read part one of this post. Allow me to talk about the internet for a bit. You’ll see where I’m going with this. Star Wars must be one of the most discussed works of art in human history. It’s hard to find an angle but, in watching 1977’s top-grossing movie the thing that jumped out at me was that this is a movie about a network…
We once thought the internet - which is now the only network but was once just one of the candidates - would liberate us. We were, of course, wrong. The things that we thought were emancipatory and democratic about it - its transparency, the absence of hierarchy and the way it eliminated distance - would ultimately make it easy for capital to assert control. To take it over and subsume it to its needs. The net, which for many of us in the early days seemed to represent a kind of perfected society - open, horizontal, democratic - turns out to have made our ownership by the corporations and the oligarchs easier and more complete. It’s evident now that it literally became the instrument of our control and domination and a neoliberal fever dream.
Network
Star Wars, by which I mean the original 1977 Star Wars, of course, the one we now know as Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, has a network, one that’s a lot like the internet and was, presumably, inspired by it1. It’s a simple, flat, legible network2. It connects people and devices and makes communication possible. It’s what would have been called a ‘dumb’ network, the naive network of the engineers and scientists. Not the malign network of the accelerationists and data harvesters. Not the hateful, impenetrable network of the dark enlightenment.
You’re a modern kid, you’ve lived through the last thirty years, If you watch Star Wars you’ll see the network. It’ll be obvious to you, in a way it probably wasn’t to us, seeing it for the first time, back then. Lucas’s fairytale takes place in a dense, highly-visible information grid: the kind of network - communication and instantaneous exchange of information - that we so take for granted in the present that each of us has two or three network nodes about our persons at all times (you’re reading this on one).
And all the action in Star Wars takes place in the network. The movie is obsessed with movement, transmission and circulation - in and through the network. It’s striking: from scene to scene - and essentially in every scene - messages are smuggled, bodies shuttle secrets across space; information is chased, lost, recovered and weaponised.
The hero with a thousand faces
In the standard Star Wars literature (of which there is a great deal), the film’s narrative energy is supposed to come from the antique ideology of the mythic hero that Lucas had absorbed from Joseph Campbell, or from the one-dimensional black-and-white tough guys of the space frontier he’d seen in the serials when he was a kid. But in fact it flows from the question of whether something - a droid, a plan, a person - can make it through a hostile system intact.
There are actually two distinct networks in Star Wars. I don’t want to get too nerdy here but this story is really a battle between network architectures. The Empire’s network operates through extreme centralisation: hub-and-spoke command, singular instruments of force and a very rigid hierarchy. Its ultimate expression, the Death Star, is not so much a weapon as a systems design error - a monumental, irreplaceable node whose destruction collapses the whole structure (it’s ridiculously vulnerable, let’s face it: the stupidest weapon in history).
The Rebellion’s network, by contrast, is what the geeks would now call a cellular mesh: loosely-coordinated, redundant and tolerant of loss. Authority exists, but it’s distributed; leadership is real but non-total. So victory, when it comes (a bit too easily really, as I said), comes not from moral superiority or toughness but from exploiting a structural vulnerability - a single point of failure in the Imperial network.
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