The Seen And The Unseen: "Star Wars"
One offers thoughts about a film like Star Wars at one's own peril. There are twin dangers here. The first is that it's a film – a universe, an ethos, an existence – much beloved, and the danger of running afoul of the admiring centurions who guard the realm is great. The second is the sheer amount of mental and cultural space it occupies: the edifice of thought that has been built up around it is so massive that to write about it feels akin to throwing a handful of sand into a heavy wind. One almost feels as though Star Wars is not so much a movie (or even a franchise) anymore, so much as...something else.
However, it's also the case that one of the curses of being human is that we have no other choice but to think, and no other choice but to yap about those thoughts with other humans. So...
The Star Wars phenomenon is fascinating to me in part because it seems to have helped bring a certain idea into being. This is the claim, much in the air these days, that our massive-scale adventure movies (and our superhero movies in particular) are our new myths.
People are extremely fond of this argument, but no matter how many times I see it articulated, I can't get over the feeling that it's an idea that just doesn't do much work. I can't manage to grasp how it helps us understand these films, or why they're being made, or how best to try to come to terms with what they mean; it's probably the case that this inability on my part is what made me want to attempt to put down my thoughts.
In any case, my sense is that when people say that these films are the new myths, what they are really saying is something along the lines of the following.
1. I really like superhero movies / the Star Wars franchise / [insert other adventure franchises here] and want to argue that they're important because I'm annoyed by snobby people belittling them.
2. The morality plays that feature frequently in these movies are familiar to me in a way that is redolent of my formative years and thus helped shape my worldview, or at least seem to be a powerful reflection of that worldview, which makes these movies important.
3. These movies are a significant place to go if you want to see the way our contemporary American culture conceives of, and works out, certain large-scale questions of ethics and sociality, which means that they're important.
This is all well and good and interesting. If we take myths to mean something along the lines of the stories we tell about the foundations of our cultures or human existence itself, though, then we're not talking about myths when we talk about these kinds of movies.
Rather, we're talking about fairy tales (or maybe a kind of contemporaneously-lensed folklore) of the sort ranging from the stories of the Brothers Grimm to certain works of Mark Twain and Washington Irving to the mid-century cartoon productions of the Disney conglomeration. Superpower adventure movies seem to me, that is, to be stories that use the fantastic to try to relate to the conundrums of everyday life, rather than myths in any real sense of the word.
What does this have to do with Star Wars?
Well, it’s clear that movie created a story, a sensibility, a world, a set of ideas and beliefs – the language isn't quite right here, can't quite manage to capture either the force of these things or their intangibility – that had tremendous emotional appeal for innumerable viewers. And this effect was so powerful that (in a way that directly prepared us for our current superhero cycle) it inspired people to search for the biggest words they could find to describe it. And because "religion" has too many connotations that don't fit, and "immersive entertainment franchise" is both too commercial and too pedestrian, they settled on "myth."
This is understandable. There is indeed something of mythos in the film, something that feels larger than life, and older than it, something that might almost serve to tell us where we came from ("A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...") and why we are here. And despite my quibbling about the nature of myths versus fairy tales, the bit of sand I'd like to throw into the gale isn't really focused on that. It's an attempt to move from that to the fact that I think the general ideas about where this powerful effect comes from in Star Wars are lacking.
A good deal of the effect – perhaps the majority of it – in the film, I'd like to argue, does not come from its ideas. It comes from the intense filmmaking accomplishment of what appears on the screen.
It's not the unseen that powers the film, but the seen.
For once in this journal I will forego a summary of the film, much as I enjoy writing them. If you have not seen Star Wars, my advice is to stop reading and go watch it, as the latter will benefit your appreciation of cinema far more than the former.
Suffice to be said that there's a young, innocent (and perhaps somewhat whiny) fellow named Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) who discovers that he's not just some random farm kid on a backwater planet at all but actually an inheritor of the ability to access the universe's most foundational power, called The Force. This discovery takes him on a journey across the galaxy in the company of all manner of rogues, gentlefolk and kindly helpers, and then finally into a confrontation with a black-clad chap named Darth Vader (played by David Prowse and voiced by James Earl Jones), who has been seduced into accessing what's known as the dark side of The Force and is (almost) unrepentantly evil. Luke wins this confrontation, helping score a great victory for the interplanetary rebellion against the imperial legions Vader represents, and then there are some sequels.
At stake in the film is not simply a stark battle between the forces of light and darkness. There's also a level of metaphysical assertion.
The Force, we are told by Luke's mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) is "an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together." That this is an idea distinctly tied to the American historical moment that produced it – the 1970s, with its post-flower power new-age sensibility – is one of the most fascinating things about the film (and franchise). It also speaks to the way cultural moments leave their imprint on history. One does not, for example, imagine that a story written at the height of the Depression, or during the Mexican-American War, or in 2020 for that matter, would come up with the same sort of metaphysical architecture, those moments being less available to a vision of the world united by groovy vibes.
On top of this, Star Wars also manages to create an immense feeling of historical placement. There is the extraordinarily cheeky announcement at the start of the film that this is not the first in a series at all, but the fourth episode of it. (This was added for a theatrical re-release some four years after its initial run; as we will see, George Lucas' habit of re-editing his work is not separate from the matter at hand, but central to it.)
There's also the fact that we are thrust into the story in medias res: the Rebellion has already stolen the plans that will allow them to defeat the Empire's Death Star (a big ship with a super-powerful ray gun attached to it) as a part of a continuing war involving an Imperial Senate and an Emperor and many other complicated things. Not to mention that this political conflagration goes back at least a generation – to something called The Clone Wars, in which Luke's father and Obi-Wan both fought – and the order of Jedi knights goes back thousands of years.
Like the pull of the dark side of The Force, the pull of this world-building (as it's called, in a phrase that has led both critics and fans disastrously amok in certain ways, I think, which ways will hopefully be more clear by the end of this piece);– the pull of this world-building is strong. One wants to ensconce oneself in this universe for as long as possible. And many people have.
But therein lies the point. The world Lucas created in the movie is magnetic only secondarily because of the ideas contained in it. The primary source of its power lies in what appears concretely on the screen.
In Star Wars, George Lucas and the team he assembled display immense skill in creating immersive, convincing, and tactile sequences, one after another. The set design and costuming in the film is, for my money, as good as any that has ever appeared in a Hollywood film.
From Luke's sunken farmhouse, to the junk aesthetic of the machinery and droids, to the interiors of the various spaceships, we are treated to a transcendently believable set of locations. These are populated by humans and non-humans who look so real, and are costumed so well, that our suspension of disbelief in the proceedings is never threatened by the thought that what we are seeing are actors in costumes. Finally, the model work and choreography of the battle scene set in space is impeccable, as is the sound design throughout, from the swoosh of the light sabers to the whine of the TIE Fighters.
This is a truly astounding feat, given the technology available in 1977; watching this in the years after its initial release, the shadow under Luke's landspeeder on Tatooine was perhaps the only effect (at least for me) that threatened what John Gardner once memorably called our immersion in "the fictional dream." Our eyes and ears can be trusted; the feel of the film is not simply authentic, it is perfectly convincing.
This is what I mean by the "seen" in the film.
The unseen arises from the implied history, religion (as The Force is referred to by several characters in the film), and ethos of the whole.
When Obi-Wan explains what The Force is, or Vader assures us that "the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of The Force," we are given but a few words, small hooks indeed on which to hang the coats of our belief. The historical references work similarly. When Obi-Wan gets misty-eyed about the Clone Wars, or Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing) remarks that "I've just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away," they can't be bothered to explain to the audience what the hell they're talking about.
Which is to say that part of the fundamentally masterful way the film is written is that it gives us just enough to make this world seem fully formed in the eyes of the characters – they talk the way real people do about real history and real religion, referencing without explaining – while letting us build the rest in our minds.
This is, of course, a classic technique of storytelling. The more you let the audience imagine, the better off you are, because what they come up with in their heads will always outstrip what you can make literal.
It's this audience imagining that I mean by the "unseen" in the film.
And the key point is this. As with the base/superstructure theory beloved of old-school Marxists, the unseen in a movie like this arises, and can only arise, out of the seen. The ideology – the superstructure of the whole, the wonderful byzantine architecture of ideas and beliefs and beloved imaginings – is born of the base on which it rests. And that base, here, is the visual, sonic, and actor-driven world of the film.
It may be too provocative by half to say that the garbage smasher scene is more significant than all of the talk about The Force in creating the lasting impact of Star War…but I think it’s essentially true. If this is a world with trash, then it’s also a world that has religion; the existence of daily life implies the existence of spiritual life. And it’s this consuming reality that invites us to share the mythos.
In the end, any belief, in film or otherwise, must always be based in some way on what we can see and hear.
There is a certain tragedy here, I think. But human life is tragic. (Which doesn't mean that it's not hopeful at the same time.)
It's the tragedy that led Lucas into his famous insistence that there was a biological source for The Force – the midi-chlorians – in his attempts to begin to envision what he so wisely left to the imagination in the first films. It's the tragedy which has led to the fact that the movie many consider to be the best of the new batch in the franchise is more or less just a war film that happens to take place in the Star Wars universe – it's a Star Wars movie, that is, in the same sense that American cheese is cheese.
This tragedy, in short, is that the more we try to concretize the unseen, the more it recedes from us. The more we try to give explanations about the ephemeral phenomena – What did Yoda look like as a baby? What can and can't The Force do, really? – the more open to ridicule they become. What we would like most desperately to grasp fades away from us.
None of which is to say that they should stop making Star Wars movies and shows and merchandise and novels and games. There are great reasons – commercial, sentimental, and entertainment – to keep doing so. But it is to say that to call these things the "myths" of our contemporary culture isn't quite right. Unlike myths, they're grounded in concrete detail. The exploration of them is an attempt to get down to the imaginary origin of that detail, not an attempt to explain our own existence.
If you enjoyed this essay, make sure to subscribe to receive a new one in your inbox every Friday.