Probably the main emotions I associate with the Star Wars
movies – such a hot thing back when I was 6 years old, not to say ever since,
and fervently so again now the resumption of the series has been announced –
are vague disappointment and anti-climax of the childish kind, a bit like the
taste of flat Coca-Cola? Even by today’s standards few motion pictures have ever
been so aggressively and unremittingly marketed; a process that’s not always compatible
with innocent ideas of escapist fun.
I think that’s why, when I was kindly escorted to see Star
Wars (‘Episode 4’, as we never knew it) at the age of 6 – I was quite puzzled
to find that what was on the screen hardly lived up to what had been going on in
my head, having already seen tie-in comic books, picture books, kiddie-novelisations
and breathless reports on the whole phenom by John Craven’s Newsround and Frank
Bough’s Nationwide. I suppose one learned something there, before one could
give it words, about how the excitement of the human imagination lives on its
own and seeks objects to attach itself to. The main point is, I’m certain I
enjoyed playing with Star War toys (i.e. a great deal) vastly more than
watching Star Wars.
Those, then, are the big twinned disappointments of the Star
Wars thing: its vanguard role in the modern-day science of Selling to Kids, together
with the variable quality of the movies lurking in back. Again, memory is
vulnerable (I was 12 when I saw it) but I find it hard to believe viewers of
any age weren’t groaning through Return of the Jedi (‘Episode 6’), with its pat
resolutions and endless talk and insufferable fur-ball cuteness . With the
second trilogy of movies that came out between 1999 and 2005, pictures I admit I’ve
only glimpsed on small screens, even the diehard fans seemed to break out in
revolts of distress, despondency, rage.
My one clear thought about Star Wars around that time came when
me and a small film crew were scuttling around Denmark making a Channel 4 documentary
on the Danish Dogme 95 film movement, during the production of which I was
constantly being told by sneering US and UK film journalists that this vaunted avant-garde
was just a shallow marketing ploy to sell a slate of low-budget Danish movies. That
critique never looked more kneejerk-insular to me than when our crew stopped
for supper at a motorway McDonalds outside Copenhagen, and with our Happy Meals
we were served, quite irrespective of our wishes, a little set of plastic tat promoting
Star Wars Phantom Menace (‘Episode 1’). There’s marketing and there’s Marketing,
see.
But of course I’m not here to bury Star Wars. I suspect for many viewers, and not just apostates like me, it’s the
indisputable excellence of The Empire Strikes Back (‘Episode 5’) that provides most
of the abiding images of the series. I do recall going to see that one (aged 9 this time) as the
first occasion 'going to the movies' felt both giddily exciting and also a bit painful in
the heart vicinity – rather like how falling in love would shortly come to feel. And one needn’t summon critical
respectability to this, but Pauline Kael’s championing of Empire as the best
American movie of its year (a year that included Raging Bull) was quite telling. What’s good about the picture, as with most good pictures, is its writing (by Lawrence
Kasdan and Leigh Brackett, veteran of the Hawksian western and film noir) and
directing (by Irvin Kershner, who began his career making smaller ‘personal’
films, and nearly turned this one down), and its production design, in the fullest sense.
Pauline Kael was also very big on the
movie’s visual-aural texture – Darth Vader’s armour lit for maximum gleam and
menace, the venerable green-fuzz aura around Yoda, the affecting sounds of Chewbacca’s
deep mournful howl and Luke’s grim whimpers after his sword-hand is lopped off.
Empire was shot by Peter Suschitzy, whose son I knew slightly at university,
and who went on to become David Cronenberg’s preferred DP. The film is properly
dark, hard-edged, a really satisfying pop version of all that mythological
stuff George Lucas professed to love in the creative anthropology of Joseph
Campbell.
And now the Star Wars series is cranking up again, three
more movies resuming the storyline after the events (!?) of Return of the Jedi.
They’ve gone and hired Michael Arndt to write it and, professionally, I accept
that – I wouldn’t have been the man for the job, my screenwriting CV hasn’t got
quite the same lustre as his, I doubt I would have aced the pitch meeting...
However I’m happy to offer Mr Arndt these tips on ‘which way to take it’:
1. Stay dark. Whoever the hero is this time, undermine him, menace
him, keep in mind the limits of heroism, make everything come at a cost, such
that triumph feels like perplexing failure. After all, the seeming point of the
series has been that there are continual reversals of fortune in this war
between The Force and the Dark Side. You need to preserve a sliver of ambiguity
there about which is which.
2. Remember Hitchcock’s maxim: the better the villain, the
stronger the picture. No Darth Vader this time out. But you need someone interestingly
threatening, not called Darth.
3. Keep it mythological. Go Greek, go Shakespeare, go Wagner,
go folktale. But avoid attempts at contemporary resonance (e.g. about the corruption
of great republics and whatnot, when what your story proposes is an ‘evil
empire’ of cosmic proportions.)
4. By all means ‘feed the theme-parks’ with white-knuckle-ride set
piece sequences (which even partially redeemed Return of the Jedi.) But please
think less about feeding the toy stores with opportunities for marketing soft
gonks to pre-schoolers.
5. Kill Han Solo and kill him well, as Harrison Ford has long seemed
to wish – the mere threat of which did so much to distinguish Empire Strikes
Back. Clearly there is potential in ‘Episode 7’ for an Ibsen-like plotline of
the aged warrior summoned out of brooding retirement by the woman from his past
who urges him to take a final but fatal stand.
6. Try and cast older actors with proper voices, who can cope
with the kind of fanciful dialogue these pictures seem to require. Star Wars got so much mileage from Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing. Episode 3,
conversely, took the mystery of how Anakin Skywalker came to be imprisoned in
Darth Vader’s armour then voided it of interest by casting Hayden Christiansen.
(A proportion of these proper actors should be British/Irish but don’t have to
be the biggest British/Irish movie stars of the moment...)
7. These stories require characters, not stereotypes, however
much the audience likes to give the impression they prefer the latter. A big
trick of them, it seems to me, is how to pace a character’s slide from good to
evil, or their ascent in the other direction. Even Billy Dee Williams was briskly
effective in Empire as the unreformed scoundrel who betrays Harrison Ford. (He got turned round very swiftly in Jedi, but I suspect that had a
bit to do with saving Williams from a lot of abuse at fan conventions.)
8. Nothing is written, everything is permitted: didn’t Lucas invent
quite late on the whole wheeze of Darth Vader being Luke’s father? And thank
god for that. Anything twisting of previously given information is forgivable
in the cause of making things less boring.
9. Really you need a family at the centre of things, with tensions
therein, and... but, what am I saying? Over to you, Michael Arndt. Disney, I am
available for Episode 8, probably.
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