George Lucas: Conservative?

I've never been much of a Star Wars fan. I've seen bits and pieces of the original three movies, but I don't think I've ever sat through them from beginning to end. And I saw Phantom Menace in the theaters, if only because I was sitting in the theater when the movie played. I don't really remember any of it, and the whole Jar-Jar Binks controversy confused me because, rather than thinking him annoying (as some would have it) or a racist symbol (as others would have it), I just, well, didn't register enough about the character to have formed any opinion of him. (Also see this about Jar-Jar....)

Except for American Graffiti, I haven't been impressed by Lucas.

Inevitably, there are people who try to infer a particular world view on the part of Lucas, by way of interpreting the world he creates on screen. I find this a particularly interesting way of looking at any movie, especially one which creates a fictional world, such as that in the Star Wars franchise. (Consider Blade Runner's world and how that movie's bleak, industrialized world informs Ridley Scott's views.) Now comes the New Yorker's cantankerous and acerbic movie critic, Anthony Lane, reviewing the latest Star Wars movie:

What can you say about a civilization where people zip from one solar system to the next as if they were changing their socks but where a woman fails to register for an ultrasound, and thus to realize that she is carrying twins until she is about to give birth? Mind you, how Padmé got pregnant is anybody’s guess, although I’m prepared to wager that it involved Anakin nipping into a broom closet with a warm glass jar and a copy of Ewok Babes. After all, the Lucasian universe is drained of all reference to bodily functions. Nobody ingests or excretes. Language remains unblue. Smoking and cursing are out of bounds, as is drunkenness, although personally I wouldn’t go near the place without a hip flask. Did Lucas learn nothing from “Alien” and “Blade Runner”—from the suggestion that other times and places might be no less rusted and septic than ours, and that the creation of a disinfected galaxy, where even the storm troopers wear bright-white outfits, looks not so much fantastical as dated? What Lucas has devised, over six movies, is a terrible puritan dream: a morality tale in which both sides are bent on moral cleansing, and where their differences can be assuaged only by a triumphant circus of violence. Judging from the whoops and crowings that greeted the opening credits, this is the only dream we are good for. We get the films we deserve.

Lane also makes an interesting observation about the odd names Lucas invents for his characters. They have none of the allegorical resonance that Tolkien's characters' names have:

Sith. What kind of a word is that? Sith. It sounds to me like the noise that emerges when you block one nostril and blow through the other, but to George Lucas it is a name that trumpets evil. What is proved beyond question by “Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith,” the latest—and, you will be shattered to hear, the last—installment of his sci-fi bonanza, is that Lucas, though his eye may be greedy for sensation, has an ear of purest cloth. All those who concoct imagined worlds must populate and name them, and the resonance of those names is a fairly accurate guide to the mettle of the imagination in question. Tolkien, earthed in Old English, had a head start that led him straight to the flinty perfection of Mordor and Orc. Here, by contrast, are some Lucas inventions: Palpatine. Sidious. Mace Windu. (Isn’t that something you spray on colicky babies?) Bail Organa. And Sith.

Comments

[Phil]

I think Lane is taking things way too seriously. It is archetypal good guys and bad guys set in space. Many like the genre. Why must everything be decontructed for a deeper meaning?