The Man Who Sold the World (Or Star Wars Episode III: The Empire Strikes Out)

In the weeks now since Star Wars Episode III was released, the invectives leveled against its progenitor, George Lucas, have reached proportions more epic than anything that’s come out of the brain trust at Skywalker Ranch. The British daily The Guardian called Lucas less a director and more a “chief executive-cum-potentate in charge of a vastly profitable franchise empire in which striking back is not an option,” whose corporate avatar, Industrial Light and Magic, contains “no magic, little light [and] an awful lot of heavy industry.” An ‘alt’ American paper, The Observer, suggested assessing films of negative aesthetic merit in terms of “Lucases” - as in, ‘Dude, Where’s my Car? got three Lucases in the Chicago Tribune’. The Salon review, marked by its usual sass, was entitled “Same old Sith” and the film summarized as the work of “an occasionally clever but mostly simple-minded auteur-wannabe”. But perhaps it was the dreaded New Yorker (which, it should be noted in fairness, is responsible for more conversions to the Dark Side than Palpatine ever was) who went furthest in criticism qua witticism. Anthony Lane calls the Bard of Endor a “rootless soul” with “a near fascistic rage for order” who has created:

“an art of flawless and irredeemable vulgarity. All movies bear a tint of it, in varying degrees, but it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which actions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which style is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ironic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed. It is a vision at once gargantuan and murderously limited, and the profits that await it are unfit for contemplation. I keep thinking of the rueful Obi-Wan Kenobi, as he surveys the holographic evidence of Anakin’s betrayal. “I can’t watch anymore,” he says. Wise words, Obi-Wan, and I shall carry them in my heart.”

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that most critics with a failed-novel on their shoulders and a circulation of over 10,000 are prone to the occasional hyperbolic judgment. But rarely is such lavish and luxuriant venom heaped upon a film that makes no pretensions to Oscar-worthiness. Surely, this literary-lashing, this critical-cornholing, can’t be warranted, not by Our Man George. Can it?

The short answer, children, is yes. Yes it can.

Star Wars Episode III sucked. It sucked essentially - sucked at the root of its very being, and sucked by and large because of an obscenely wealthy, beard-and-pompadour-sporting pestilence known as George Locust - er - Lucas. Lucas, then, is worthy of revile. Still, I won’t offer much of a critique of the film itself - that has been done, with all the subtlety and restraint of a blowjob from a vacuum cleaner. Besides, I actually hold certain of its elements beyond reproach; protected, as it were, from a death of suckitude stretched indefinitely in space and time at the event-horizon of suckiness that is this Lucasian suckfest of a Black-Hole-suck-suck.

Yoda, for one. Yoda can do no wrong for me, not since he watched Luke’s X-wing lift-off from Degoba, squinting sagely and replying to Obi-Wan’s portentous claim that “that boy is our only hope” with “No, there is another.” Anthony Lane is so perturbed by our little-green-friend’s cadence that he begs us to “break [him] a fucking give”. True, Yoda’s inversions may be contrived and irrelevant, but they are fucking YODA’s inversions. Besides, Lane’s review shares column space with New Yorker cartoons. He should know all about contrived and irrelevant.

Two. Natalie Portman. The poor girl is as beautiful as she is useless in this role. I mean, we know she can act. Just look at her wonderful performance as the Madonna-Whore in Closer; and her in some ways even more impressive turn as the Atlas to Zack Braff’s globular ego in Garden State. The problem is that Herr Lucas writes romance like he would a car stereo installation manual, and he has forcefully ejaculated such unspeakable tripe past the lips of Amidala that - could I prove paternity - I would bring him up on charges of rape.

Needless to say, most if not everything else in the movie sucks. Or if it doesn’t itself suck, it is so bathed in Lucas’s putridity that one can’t stand in its presence for long before one’s stomach turns and one’s eyes water.

Still, Lucas’s real crime has nothing to do with the film itself, but rather its audience. I saw Revenge of the Sith a week after opening, at a 10PM showing in Oxford (a highly disreputable time to see a movie in England) and the house was packed. A line had formed outside the small theatre 45 minutes before the 45 minutes of commercials before the 45 minutes of trailers before the movie. When John Williams’ anthem and STAR WARS finally leapt to screen, a great applause went up: the sound of an anxious hope that an under-the-desk hand job - begun in 1977 in the spirit of innocence and exploration and gas shortage - was finally to reach its climax after seven-odd years of cinematic blue-balls. When it quickly became apparent that this wasn’t to be, we ragtag band of geeks, dorks and dungeon-masters turned to the one weapon losers have wielded since time immemorial in the face of romantic (Romantic?) jilting: self-important, sneering mockery.

In short, we laughed. And we laughed not just at 3PO’s obliviousness or R2’s irascibility, not just at Palpatine’s coiffure or Mace Windu’s purple light saber; nor even did we draw the line at snickering over Hayden Christensen’s bitchy rejoinder to Ewan MacGregor’s warning of the Sith lords’ evil (“Not from my point of view! From my point of view the Jedi are evil!”). No, friends, I am sad to say that we laughed at the Man in Black himself. When Vader, freshly be-suited and strapped into a Kafkaesque device of wrought steel, is deceived by the Emperor into believing that he has killed the woman he loves, he tears free of his restraints, shakes two black-gloved fists in the air and vociferates the kind of “NOOOOOOOOOO!” that can only issue from the darker regions of James Earl Jones’ soul.

And we chortled with all the righteous irony of Janine Garafalo at a straight bar. We laughed at Darth-motherfucking-Vader. And why? Because some dude in this dumb ass movie was totally ripping off Star Wars, and didn’t he realize how fucking kitsch that was?

In the short time it took Luke and Lea to be born, something distinctively American died. That bright-eyed, naïve earnestness; that seriousness about kidding ourselves; that starving for a mythos which was as fun and facile as it was sacred and indispensable. In a word, that unselfconsciousness. That - can I even say it without you cringing in this age of I Love the 80s and Best Week Ever?…..that innocence.

Somewhere in the vast conceptual gulf between the Ewoks and Jar Jar Binks, Star Wars became what Jean Baudrillard (known in some circles simply as ‘French Theorist #163’) calls a simulacrum - a cultural copy of a copy whose original has long since gone the way of the sitcom. Worse yet, it became a simulacrum of itself. A kind of hyper-movie (or hyper-franchise) whose logic and aesthetics we had already chewed up, spoofed, and spit out into the dust bin of irony-for-its-own-sake. In short, even if the prequels had sucked half as much as they actually did, they were destined to be subjected to the bored and disaffected nihilism of an X-generation of maladroit malcontents who wear bowling shirts with other people’s names on them. In the greatest cultural perversion in recent history, Star Wars has become Space Balls. And Space Balls - if you ask the average video store clerk worth his salt in vapid cynicism - has become Citizen Cane.

None of this, of course, is to exonerate Herr Lucas, whose Leviathan ILM was practically at the helm of Hollywood’s perfection of the vacuous summer blockbuster. But if you ask me, his soul is cleaner than yours or mine. After all, he’s got your ten bucks, and he carries it with a perfectly straight face all the way to the bank. You and I, on the other hand, are left in this Recycled Land of Thin-Candy-Shelled Men, wondering why it is we can’t help but smirk every time we hear the name “Grand Moff Tarkin”.