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.
I’m developing a response to the first (fourth) Star Wars movie - for part two of this post. I mean it’s hard: is there anything that hasn’t been said? I’m thinking something about the network - distributed and self-organising vs. centralised and monolithic. I might try and work in the anti-human Silicon Valley accelerationists here while I’m at it. What do you think? Can we read this Star Wars as belonging to a kind of edenic, pre-Internet Internet? Before capital, computation, and cybernetics fully converged and arrived at the inhuman conclusion we live with today?
It’s always a struggle to get started when you’re writing about a movie you don’t like much. And I don’t like this one much. In fact, I didn’t like it when it came out. I was 14 and obviously already considered myself to be a bit old for Star Wars (not too cool, though, definitely not too cool). I imagine it must have seemed too much like the various adventure serials I’d seen at the Saturday Morning Pictures over the years (I’m a lifetime member of the ABC Minors). I was frankly scornful. So were my friends. We weren’t film buffs or even very interested in cinema. We just thought Star Wars looked dumb. In fact I don’t know who was going to see this film, back then. Was it you?
David Thomson, in his big book of all the films, calls the 1977 Star Wars (the one we’ve learnt to call Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope) - “…the line in the sand, the disastrous event…” Ouch, right? In fact he wasn’t particularly dismissive of the movie, just kind of resigned to the permanent changes we would see it bring about in cinema. Movies, from here on, he said, would no longer be discrete, grown-up entertainments or works of art that we could all argue about - like novels - but baggy properties, shallow merchandising platforms (in economic terms, the Star Wars story is more about merchandise sales than about rentals and ticket sales). The era of the franchise had begun - from here on it’s all world-building. The dissection of the human soul will continue but only in the arthouse.
Pauline Kael, a famously inconsistent critic, in her New Yorker column, said:
There’s no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the only attempt at beauty is in the double sunset. It’s enjoyable on its own terms, but it’s exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus. An hour into it, children say that they’re ready to see it all over again; that’s because it’s an assemblage of spare parts—it has no emotional grip.
She recognises the shift Star Wars represents too: that cinema’s infantile phase is here: “The excitement of those who call it the film of the year goes way past nostalgia to the feeling that now is the time to return to childhood.”
Everyone who was alive to cinema in 1977 was in mourning from here on. Thomson and Kael and and all the others could see that the movies were about to take a wrong turn. The tragedy of the next fifty years of American cinema had begun.
I’m exaggerating, of course, cinema (even Hollywood cinema) would keep us thinking and talking, even as it churned out Indiana Jones and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Take the last year: full of thoughtful movies - Bugonia, Eddington, Weapons, One Battle after Another. Can we think of these challenging movies as some kind of new New Hollywood, triggered by a new social crisis?
I should say that many who saw Star Wars when it came out didn’t consider for a moment that it might represent the end of cinema or anything so grand and if you’d told them that such a clumsy, badly-told story could possibly do anything of the sort they’d just have laughed at you. Case in point: Terry Curtis Fox’s superb review in Film Comment, under the deathless headline Star Drek.
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