James Flint on Fri, 30 Jul 1999 21:13:35 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Star Wars and the Second Coming |
Written after a recent trip to see The Phantom Menace... How audacious is it possible for one man to be? As if not happy with writing, directing and producing the biggest independent film production of all time, George Lucas deigns to offer us, on the eve of the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Christ, the story of the second coming. Yes, this is another article about Star Wars, and yes I knew before I went to see the film that it was an attempt by the "master of myth" to "rewrite history", but I didn't know before I got to the outrageous scene in which Anakin's mother explains that her son is the result of a virgin birth quite what we were in for. Suddenly the mud and stone igloos of Tatooine take on another aspect: this huddle of desert buildings is Bethlehem, California-style, complete with three kings (played by Liam Neeson (Qui-Gon Jinn), Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi) and Natalie Portman (Queen Amidala/Padme)) arriving in their spaceship bearing gifts: a power pack, which will help Anakin win the Ben Hur chariot race-style pod race as Jabba the Hut (Tiberius/Herod) looks on, a Droid, R2 D2, about whom we know a great deal already, and... well, the third gift, the gold, is presumably a light sabre, no doubt to be given to Anakin by Obi-Wan in Episode 2. Once we get over the Hollywood racisms thinly disguised as classic stereotypes from the history of literature (junk-dealer Watto as Shylock, Jar-Jar Binks as a young Uncle Tom, plus assorted Chinese and Iraqi types in the role of the evil trade-blockaders) we begin to see that the moral world of Star Wars isn't simply about straightforward xenophobia. On the contrary, the story is advocating that we (the sympathic viewers, placed in subject position of the trusty band of friends) ally ourselves with the 'good' Asians, signified by the elaborate ceremonial robes of Queen Amidala. These are robes that literally turn out to be a disguise when the Queen swops places with a member of her retinue to gain strategic advantage; underneath she turns out to be just like us, i.e. she's Padmé Naberrie, a canny American girl, a Jewish New Yorker, tomboyish but sexy too, someone who has faith in the continued operation of the free market and the need to struggle unto death against the evil forces of the trade blockade (at which point we have to wonder if it's any coincidence that the Gungan underwater city on Naboo is strongly reminiscent of Jamaica, focus of the recent US contra EU struggle over bananas?). Although Anakin is a slave boy in the manner of the oppressed Jews of Biblical times and one with a talent for mechanics to rival the boy-Christ's talent for carpentry, he is also troped as the chosen one after the fashion of Tibetan Buddhism. Yoda's similarity to the Dalai Lama becomes more explicit in The Phantom Menace than in any of the later episodes, and indeed Qui-Gon Jinn presents him to the Jedi council as his candidated for the chosen one. While, for all its faults, the Matrix had the decency to make fun of 'chosen one' notions, Lucas takes it all 100% seriously, as befits an auteur who has set himself the task of sculpting a myth fit to carry not only the first generation of Star Wars viewers but also their children into the next Millennium. The blessed of Tatooine/California, he seems to be saying, must ally with appropriate mystical elements of the East, i.e. Tibet, and forge in the crucible of conflict a third way, a blend of individualism and holistic thinking ('You and they are in a symbiotic relationship', intones McGregor in his faux-Sean Connery tones (the bastard son of an attempt to sound like a youthful John Gielgud, we have to presume), 'whatever happens to them effects you.'), of Christianity and Taoism, of technology and mysticism. It's perhaps no mistake that this all sounds rather familiar. It strikes us that we've heard it before, under the banner of arch con-man and false prophet L.Ron Hubbard, the one that reads 'Scientology'? We should not be surprised that there's a accordance between the two - after all, Taoism has long been the preferred religion among those stars so divorced from the rest of us by success and spin (De Niro, Richard Gere, Cindy Crawford etc. etc.); for the even more whacked out among Scientology is the doctrine of choice (John Travolta and the holy trinity of Cruise, Kidman and Kubrick). It only took the Jewish Scorcese to throw a materialist New Testament (The Last Temptation of Christ) and a little bit of Tibeten revisionism (Kundun) into the mix, for Star Wars Episode 1 to emerge fully formed from the oven. Thus Lucas dishes up a rewriting of the history of religion in the form of a historical pastiche of Hollywood's previous rewritings of the history of religion. We have the chariot race from Ben Hur, the battlescene from Sparticus and, as a last, deft touch, the huge babylonian sets from Griffiths' Intolerance computer-rendered back into reality in the Menace's final celebratory scenes. He even taps the energy of parallel modern mythologies like Star Trek by exploiting the uncanny facial similarities that Ewan McGregor has to William Shatner (albeit more in his T.J.Hooker phase than his Star Trek one). Shatner must be furious in being co-opted like this; he, at least, has seen through his own myth and has battled alcholism to produce a new book (Get a Life) and film (Free Enterprise) both of which warn obsessive Trekkies to stop using the philosophical and moral kluge that is Gene Roddenbury's creation and to start to operate instead in the vastly more complex 'real' world that they live in. Key to the religion of Star Wars is the Force, and in The Phantom Menace this mysterious phenomenon is for the first time given some kind of explanatory basis, if only one founded in pseudo-science. We are told that it is something to do with the operations of the Midichlorians, "microscopic creatures that live in all cells", without which life would not be possible. A clear correlate for mitochondria, the organelles responsible for energy production in organic cells, the Force is thus conceived as some kind of bio-consciousness of the electromagnetic and gravitational forces of the physical world. This forgrounding of the idea that multicellular life is symbiotic with or rather parasitic upon a bacterial substratum is the most attractive and laudable idea in Star Wars; unfortunately Lucas feels it necessary to take the next step and load God-like qualities into that bacterial arena - the Midichlorians are conscious of unwanted perturbations in the force (they like a quiet life) to the extent that they are prepared to assemble appropriate chromosomes in the belly of a woman to produce an intervention in the multicellular world in the form of a leader who will put things to rights. At this stage I'd like to make my own audacious claim: that there are two basic kinds of narrative, or narrative ontologies, if you will. The first tells stories that are based on the assumption that someone or something somewhere is fundamentally in control, even though its ways are mysterious. The second tells stories that are based on the assumption that, while pockets of control may exist or even be created, there is no greater power, knowledge or operation that one may have recourse to. In the first category I'd place Star Wars, in the second (to be glib), Shakespeare. Actually, there's a third category too - that of stories that deal with the crisis of passing from the first category to the second (Kafka). Okay, that was a bit of fun. But it was a diversion with serious intent. Because a corollary of the first kind of story is that individual action must be able to make some kind of a difference in the big scheme of things. And this is very important, because it designates that the world of Star Wars (and of fantasy in general - Star Wars is after all a genre piece) takes place in a world of what is effectively hand-to-hand combat. It is simply not sexy to show the reality of modern warfare, which is that human beings form thinking elements in vast mechanised offensive forces that are remotely controlled by computer-aided strategy bureaucrats bunkered down way behind the lines (either that, of course, or they form the socius over which such a machine is trampling, or (category 3) they a bunch of more or less doomed freedom fighters/terrorists (delete according to which side you're on)). This kind of war machine is shown in Star Wars but only ever as evil (as in the extraordinary scene in which fighting droids are being unloaded from a troop carrier like bowling skittles); on the other hand Lucas promotes the myth of the chosen one, of the sword-fighter, of the one who feels the Force to persuade us that one dedicated person can make a difference. As Mao Tse-Tung is reputed to have told his small band of co-conspirators: "Never doubt that a small group of people dedicated to their cause can change the world - that's the only thing that ever has." This Mao/Lucas congruence leads us conveniently to the question that must be asked of the Star Wars myth of leadership: is it really offering us an alternative to the evil bureaucracy it professes to despise? Or is in fact the myth of leadership a prerequisite for the bureaucracy's very existence, something the masses need to sign up to in order for them to accept and accept again the dictates of bureaucratic rule. Because who is Anakin/Christ/Lama but another feudal lord, another manipulator who uses the techniques we now call spin to proclaim his right to rule as Jedi Knight, Sun King, Star God when the fact of the matter is he's just another annoying Californian teenager with a mother fixation, an elevated sense of self and a truncated moral sense that allows him to exploit tendencies in other peoples' emotions without worrying himself with the pain he might be causing them? Sound familiar? Slobodan Milosevic, William Clinton, you can put your hands down now, thankyou. And be quiet at the back. To be fair to Lucas, Star Wars was never going to be anything other than this, because it is, ultimately, just the most complex puppet show that's ever been constructed. Out of a total of 2000 shots that make up the film, only 200 have not been enhanced using animatronics or digital effects. This makes Lucas's reliance on caricature somewhat more understandable, if not more laudable - Star Wars as millennial Punch and Judy show (Watto is no longer simply Shylock but also Mr. Punch - and I'm not even going to start on the characterisation of the comedy-Jamaican proto-Rasta figure of Jar-Jar Binks, presumably based on some street kid who'd wormed his way onto the private beach of the gated community where Lucas spent his last Caribbean holiday and who threw cartwheels for the rich foreigners to prevent being beaten and thrown out by their guards). As puppeteer Lucas displays spell-binding technique, drawing on and extending tricks developed by Disney to distract kids with foreground battlefield japes and tomfoolery while in the background, for the moms and dads, a truly vicious and violent firefight develops. What makes this such a grand event in the history of the puppet theatre is that the puppeteering continues off-screen in a hundred million bedrooms and shop windows courtesy of the merchandising tie-ins: dolls and X-wing fighters and video games and themed chocolate bars, which prompts the worrying thought that that in unguarded moments, late at night when he can't sleep, when the window has blown open in the damp Pacific wind and the sheets are pulled tight up around his chin, Lucas dreams of post-apocalyptic futures in which a decimated and irradiated sub-humanity gathers in caves and on hillsides to reconstruct the myths of the race's downfall Riddley Walker-like* using only the tools at hand: Luke and Lea dolls, a life-size Darth Vader helmet vibrating telephone, a Tie-fighter with one melted wing, a broken R2 whose battery acids have melted through its casing. The idea that two hundred years hence we might all be worshipping at shrines topped off with miniature Ewan McGregors is an edifying thought. And yet, a future along the lines of Return to the Planet of the Apes may not be all that Lucas has in store for us. We should not forget that Tatooine has not one sun but two, and star gods born into bipolar solar systems may face a different fate that those born into simple systems like our own. For we already know that Anakin becomes, not a saviour, but a destroyer. The happy-go-lucky California boy with a penchant for pod-racing will cross over to the dark side, become Milosevic/Darth Vader, manipulator, destroyer, the man who will perhaps kill his own mother when, as he promised her on his departure with Qui-Gon Jinn, they do eventually meet again. If I remember my Revelations correctly, second time around it's the anti-Christ that's born of woman (which begs the terrifying question: as the series' most significant machine, does this mean that R2D2 incarnates the second coming? Stranger things have happened). Perhaps Lucas will yet prove to defy our expectations and confound our stereotypes; perhaps his six-episode monster will not prove to be a Wagnerian epic of will but a morality play which shows us that leaders designated as chosen ones can only bring war, death, destruction, and that it is Anakin's dippy son, Luke, played by the equally dippy Mark Hamill, who will carve chip out the space of a truly moral world: Luke, the boy whose foster parents are brutally murdered as part of the randomness of war, Luke the boy who overcomes in the end not by dint of his bloodline or his mitochondria but simply because he tries to understand even though he knows in the end that he can't and that the world is larger than he is himself. Despite all its binary overcoding and black and white semiotics, will the moral system of Star Wars prove in the end to be not that of good versus evil but rather that of good constantly becoming into evil and vice versa, and this a continual operation in a complex universe in which the respect of difference is the highest ideal and the exploitation of others the greatest depth to which you can sink, whichever side you happen to be on? Perhaps we will discover that this it is this message, the saving grace of the American ideal, that George Lucas wants to pass on to us and our kids - for, as we should always remember, Star Wars is really for kids. * Riddley Walker is a novel by Russell Hoban in which the secret of gunpowder is rediscovered in a post-apocalyptic Britain thanks to an alchemical information dissemination system based on a travelling Punch and Judy show. ENDS JBF 20/07/99 ------------------------------------------------- eat local, act global http://come.to/themillenniumlunch ------------------------------------------------- Blah: +44 (0) 171 837 7479 Blither: +44 (0) 793 137 2461 Blax: +44 (0) 171 689 5008 Blather: flint@bigfoot.com Blurb: www.bigfoot.com/~flint The brain is a gland, not a computer - Bruce Sterling # distributed via nettime-l: no commercial use without permission of author # <nettime> is a moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # un/subscribe: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and # "un/subscribe nettime-l you@address" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org/ contact: <nettime@bbs.thing.net>