Emma Peel Sessions 51 – In our hour of triumph?

So this was originally meant to be a part of the every-movie-I-watch-in-february post but it ballooned way past any sane kind fit for the format. Here’s kind of a preamble to writing about Star Wars, but really writing about George Lucas, as this month I sat down and watched the laserdisc copies of Lucas’ 3 original directorial works, with the direct intention of watching the only high quality versions of the films that Lucas didn’t mess with. Which is totally an awkward approach but I think the only sane way to really assess Lucas as a director rather than a person, which I don’t think is something that happens any more. Here’s the thing, this was meant to be an introduction to me writing about American Graffiti, Star Wars, and my personal favorite THX-1138. That is not what this is – I am clearly conflicted about Lucas, I am clearly conflicted about Star Wars as a cultural position as well as the post-prequel anger, and really just had difficulty getting down to “what Star Wars means to me”, even though I don’t concretely know what it means to me. So I think this is entirely about reconciling George Lucas and his work and how that affects me. I still plan on writing about those 3 movies in the monthly post, but they will not be written like this is.
Things I know about Star Wars: I know that Brian De Palma helped rewrite the opening crawl. That there were originally going to be 11 sequels, designed to be bashed out cheaply and pay for Lucas’ own studio that he could share with his buddies. There is an excised opening sequence where Darth Vader singlehandedly takes down an entire starship through the vacuum of space, culminating in a motherfucker lightsaber battle with Luke Skywalker’s father. I know that it was a disaster until Marcia Lucas re-edited it. I know that when Howard Chaykin saw the film stills of the movie when he was assigned to adapt into a comic, he thought it was going to tank horribly and ended up basing all his work on Ralph McQuarrie’s concept paintings. I know that the film premiered at a comic convention with a fucking Chaykin poster he drew without ever seeing the film. I know that Lucas went somewhat crazy while writing the original, fairly gargantuan script and started shaving his head in ritualistic samurai style, that Jedi is a pidgin version of jidaigeki, that Lucas showed the thing to his friends and Steven Spielberg’s wife laughed uncontrollably at the original edit. That Lucas intimated hiring David Cronenberg to direct Empire Strikes Back and when he refused underhandedly hired his cinematographer. That he tried the same thing with David Lynch for Return of the Jedi and was heartbroken when Lynch told him he never “got” the whole Wookie thing. That he originally cut all the emotional core out of Empire Strikes back until Kurtz, Kasdan, and Kershner had a mini-mutiny on him. That it was originally called “Revenge of the Jedi” and ended way darker with Solo dying in the opening ten minutes and Luke abandoning Leia that copied the ending of the Searchers, and Lucas mercinarily rewrote it to monetize it as he was going through the worst part of his divorce. That entire sequences in all of his movies are stolen from Kurosawa, something which Lucas felt massively guilty about. That Lucas had panic attacks almost every day while they shot in Tunisia. That Lucas didn’t base the film on Joseph Campbell so much as cobble elements from a dozen trash sources and then sell it on those Hero With A Thousand Faces concepts. Star Wars is like Jaws or Casablanca, a movie that was made through a series of disasters and failures – it’s an accident that it got made at all. Lucas’ vision never fully made it to the screen and THAT’S why it is a true work of art.

The biggest problem for me isn’t the prequels or the special editions (which if I’m honest disgust me far more than the prequels), it’s all of this stuff. It’s knowing that George Lucas was once not the emotionally broken solipsist holed up in a huge corporate office on a ranch somewhere, being told yes by swathes of people he doesn’t care about at all.  No it’s that Lucas was once a real filmmaker, who worked in a real community with the other 4 best filmmakers of his time. This was a guy who wanted to make these abstract films and at the same time wanted to make arcane populist science fiction films – Lucas was a nerd in the classical sense in that he wasn’t interested in human interaction so much as ideas. He thought that American Graffiti was the easiest film in the world to make, and made it for money. But he was also an individualistic thinker and an insanely gifted filmmaker. His output – his real body of work not counting producing or secretly codirecting, or eventually standing in front of a bank of monitor in a sea of greenscreen – amounts to 3 films, 2 of which he has drastically changed in an attempt to rewrite history. Not that I have a problem with re-editing or remixing one own work – but when his peers Coppola and Ridley Scott alter their work they make it accessible alongside the new work (and Lucas has nothing on Spielberg’s worse changes made to Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T, if we’re really going to talk about this. Lucas slathes digital gloss onto his films because he see them as visually incomplete – Speilberg who is far and away the more human of the two changes his films in ways that rewrite their entire meaning, moral or otherwise). Lucas should be a great director rather than the figurehead of a fanboy culture that equally despises and deifies him. The problem is that Lucas was the least successful of the Movie Brats until he was the most successful, and rather than continue to struggle to make things, he decided to lay back in the cut and allow his gift to atrophy, until the obstacles that made him hate directing could be removed with technology altogether. Lucas has been hermetically sealed off from ever making anything meaningful again by his own need to separate himself. Lucas’ work identifies to fanboys because his need to create comes from a place of a need to control, and unlike a Kubrick or a Fincher, he’s expressed that not in perfectionism but dissociation. The prequels are disassociated films, they have clearly been made by someone who feels like he’s both playing to an audience and expressing himself but doing neither satisfyingly. It is very clear to see that Lucas feels like he can achieve the idea in his head at inception but can’t seem to understand that in consistently trying to do so he’s moving farther and farther away from the excitement of the idea. Lucas doesn’t seem particularly creatively frustrated a person in interviews – and I think that’s telling. Because you can see the cogs still working with even the most heavy bullshitters – look at James Cameron and tell me that he doesn’t have a serious problem with letting go of a movie – none of them are ever happy with the thing they’ve made, even if they say so. For Lucas, he just seems sad and a little confused that there is a disconnect at all. And when he changes something to be more in line with his idea, he’s confused that anyone would have a problem with that. That’s not what megalomaniacal film directors do, that’s what the kid who writes Star Wars fan fiction and stands at the store in front of you in line and talks about it at length does. The story of George Lucas is the story of the fans of Star Wars, and that’s kind of humbling when you want to criticize the man – I mean, I still am going to because why the fuck not, but – he’s his audience. He’s not talking to the “oh shit Han fucking Solo, man” Kevin Smiths and Patton Oswalts and Tim Bisleys (each of whom spoke directly to me at some point) . He’s not talking to the masses and trying to communicate the personal like Spielberg. He’s not a passionate storyteller like Coppola, he’s not an anarchist like De Palma or a cinephile like Scorsese. He might have one day been all those people, talking to all those people. But now he’s just talking to himself trying to force his own conception of his work in alignment with the way he sees himself. George Lucas doesn’t give a shit about how much you can take apart his movies, even if you do so in mind-numbingly close detail for 3 hours on youtube, basing all your comments on tried and true screenwriting logic. That shit is way beyond irrelevant to him. Lucas has gone arcane in his work, literally decades after doing the same with his life. All of that sits in the back of my mind when I try to watch these movies and it takes precedence, it’s a running commentary in my head branching into arguments – obviously I am conflicted about this shit. I always like to say that in the battle of Star Wars and Star Trek I always was more into Alien, but if we’re going to be honest I grew up watching Star Wars. I know it couldn’t have happened the way I remember because of the year I was born, but I swear to god I remember seeing Return of the Jedi in a movie theater when I was like, 3 or 4 years old. Maybe it was someone’s big tv or something? I don’t know. But I devoured Star Wars, and the sensibility (and really the work of Ralph McQuarrie) had a massive effect on me, and probably had as much effect on me as the movies that I would rather claim as hammering my standards into me before I knew what a director was. Star Wars isn’t the horrible destruction of a million children’s imaginations as the post-prequel op-ed pieces want to paint it as. It’s the first example of massive, comprehensive fantasy world building that reached right into the prepubescent brain and says “this is what you spend hours trying to draw on the kitchen floor”. Whether you put that down to Lucas or the model builders or McQuarrie or even just the fact that the story is so easily grasped and so powerfully universal – or even more likely that it’s a place where starships and rayguns could believably exist without any suspension of disbelief like the previous 70 years of cinema couldn’t manage without. It’s not the wholly conjured worlds of Ridley Scott, it’s far more evocative but also paradoxically more concrete than the clear realism on display in Alien, Blade Runner, and Legend. The first Star Wars is shot alternatingly like a classical hollywood drama, a Kurosawa/Leone epic, and a documentary – the combination of which effectively tricks the mind that what you are watching is whole and complete. It is exactly that feeling created in the viewer, which is almost universally a child, that comes from the same driving urge behind Lucas’ remastering and control issues. The problem is how much it has calcified. My problem on the other hand is I like to think that the more I know the more I understand a work of art. Sometimes that means knowing the author’s life story, or their intentions, sometimes it’s clear that their intentions had nothing to do with the work. With Lucas it’s almost like examining outsider art, where the more you know colors your experience with the work, possibly damaging it. Usually thinking this way comes out of wanting to see how the artist expresses his internal life within the narrative, but with Star Wars – well, Lucas made this series of movies about his father and removed the romantic element entirely once he entered into his divorce. That stuff is there, and there really isn’t much to talk about. So the elements of his life that I see reflected in the work are the things that have destroyed my appreciation of it.

- Sean Witzke, February 2011.