The Empire Strikes Back. Director: Irvin Kershner. Producer: George Lucas. Screenplay: Lucas. Photography: Peter Suschitzky. Editor: Paul Hirsch. Music: John Williams. Twentieth Century-Fox.
Millions of kids (and many adults as well) have come to inhabit Star Wars' imaginative universe as a basis for their own play and fantasy. Since it uses a narrative structure and characterisations straightforwardly adapted from comic books, Flash Gordon, and Saturday matinee Western serials, the film is easily assimilable to children's everyday discourse. For adults, the reduction of the conflict between good and evil to the interactions of characters participating in cartoon-balloon dialogue and mind-boggling technical feats, has both self-conscious satire of, and a loving feel for, its popular culture sources. It is engaging and, above all, funny. Building on this cross-generational and often cultish audience, Star Wars has grossed $410 million, making it financially the most successful film in history.
As you read this, Star Wars may stand on the brink of losing that designation to its first sequel, The Empire Strikes Back. Empire begins by redrawing the parameters of the Star Wars narrative. This is no ordinary spin-off from a successful blockbuster. Instead, it is the second episode of the middle trilogy in a projected nine-part Star Wars epic. Thus the film we have come to know as Star Wars is, in fact, Episode IV: A New Hope. In some ways this shift is quite simply made. Yet this is not just the lengthening of a sure-fire moneymaker. One of the over-arching connotations of the film is its own place in a discourse on Truth and Meaning. Thus, Time magazine in its cover story on Empire can analogise creator/executive producer George Lucas to Homer and John Bunyan, in case we haven't caught the point.
This shift to the serious and self-important — Empire has very few laughs — has elicited a split critical response. One either proclaims Empire mythology for modern man (sic) or dismisses it as the end of a creative innocence. Among the former are the glossy magazines playing the special-effects numbers game. Cooing over the cost, the technique, and the sheer volume of the effects (with accompanying colour stills), they bring us 'behind the scenes' of the spectacle. They try to enlist us in a sort of technocratic ode which parallels their own self-image and forms part of the basis of their ideology. Having suitably loosened us up, they spring the analogies with Virgil and Dante.
The detractors, who are largely film critics by trade, grant Empire's spectacular achievement in special effects — they clearly outdo those in Episode IV. Nevertheless, they maintain that the attempt at 'real characters', at psychological motivation and metaphysical nuance, brings this huge technostructure crashing down in a cacophony of pretence. Having critically slain the dragon, they rest.
The most unfocused aspects of Empire are on the level of what is usually known as content: what is this film about? From the beginning of Star Wars (i.e., Episode IV), we have been in the presence of a great battle between the forces of good and evil — or more precisely the good and evil sides of the Force. Yet it is never quite clear what the basis of the Empire's evil is, nor what precepts motivate the cause for which the Rebels fight. The good guy/bad guy dichotomy is entirely pre-given. It finds reinforcement in the films only at the level of individual behaviour. So we [illegible] the representatives of the Empire acting in a calculating and cold-blooded manner. Darth Vader kills off his commanders when they fail to capture the heroes; he goes back on the deal he coerced Lando into, etc. The Empire is not so much evil as nasty.
The good guys, on the other hand, act unambiguously on principles of comradeship, deep concern, and courage. Again, the manifestations are interpersonal: they feel deeply for one another. We are given no sense of a set of underlying principles of a collectivity beyond themselves for which they are fighting. That we accept them as 'The Revolt' is entirely a matter of our ideological identification with 'the underdog'.
Luke, who is being tested in this elaborate rite of passage to manhood, does not yet know substantively the difference between good and evil. His impatience and immaturity are manifested in his inability to place his loyalty to his friends in the wider context of their common project. Like the view the film offers the viewer, Luke's moral universe is a pre-defined confrontation between light and dark ... The threat of a dark side within Luke, at this point strongly hinted, approaches a moral ambiguity previously unknown to the saga. The first shades of grey are appearing on the screen.
Part of this move towards depth is a rather constant appeal to depth psychology. The tension between Luke and Princess Leia, the unobtainable woman in white, hinted at the end of Episode IV, is here disrupted as she recognises her sexual interest in a mature man. If we are unclear as to the implications of this, we are treated to Luke battling against Darth with those Force-field phalluses, of which one reviewer of Star Wars deftly commented, 'You carry it in your pocket until you need it, then press a button and it's three feet long and glows in the dark.' Darth declares himself Luke's daddy and slices off his sword and hand in one fell swoop. This opens up a host of ambiguities because, when it comes to papas, 'if you can't kill "em..."'
Can the Stars War serial carry this enormous symbolic weight? Up to now it has not even begun to clarify the political terms of this conflict over colonisation and empire. Star Wars (Episode IV) didn't have to. Standing alone, it was a one-shot camp extravaganza. Its simplicity, bordering on the simplistic, was one of its greatest attractions. It just won't work over the long haul. With Empire, Lucas and associates have already made a plunge into the waters of self-conscious myth-making. To answer the big questions the film poses, it will be necessary to put some political and spiritual meat on the bones of its caricatures of good and evil. If we are to judge by what we have seen so far in either sphere, the possibility of cogency looks bleak.
What are we to make of the enormous popularity of these films among kids?
The Empire Strikes Back is a high-tech shoot 'em up, with all of the implications this popular culture form has always had for children's play. Much like generations of Americans before them, they can be seen in parks and playgrounds, hiding behind convenient shields and shouting, 'Zap, zap. I got you with [illegible]' ... And like kids before them (and probably these are still mostly boys), the result of getting zapped by thumb and forefinger is instant death ... followed by instant resuscitation. Like always, [illegible] 'the good guys' or your favourite 'character' is something to be alternated, shared, or decided by other measures of status.
The title notwithstanding, these films are not primarily about warfare. Although both Star Wars films have contained a variety of stylistic references to many popular culture genres, the saga stands in clearest continuity with the Western. It comes complete with an 'outsider' (Han) on the fringes of society who possesses extraordinary skill, and who is drawn, despite his worldly cynicism, by the passion of a boy intent upon avenging the destruction of the old homestead by the 'bad guys'. While Luke is like a young colt yearning to run free, Princess Leia, like generations of Western heroines, is the embodiment of community-rooted norms and an ethic of responsibility. And, just as the Western is a representation of dehistoricised moral and social conflict, Star Wars evokes a future which, though technologically dazzling, is presented as 'like the present — only more so'. Starting from this classic schema, Star Wars is far from being the primer on clean, technological destruction which some have claimed. Like other Westerns, these films open most immediately and forcefully onto questions about individual commitment within a broader ideology of individualism. And though its facile treatment of moral issues may make Empire a mediocre film, it nonetheless may leave open more imaginative space than other, more coherent thematic formulations might.
On the other hand, this is not just another Western.
Star Wars has upped the technological stakes of producing a film which will keep kids involved and excited. Enormous amounts of capital must now be risked for such a project. Under these conditions, studios opt for the sure thing, thus exerting a centripetal force upon more innovative creative energies. Hopalong Cassidy will never be the same.
Another clear difference is the array and the marketing of the paraphernalia. In 1979, Kenner sold forty million Star Wars-related figures and games. And, admittedly, there is something sobering in watching a five-year-old crying desperately to his mother that he wants a Stormtrooper doll.
Perhaps it is the formulation of the question about the films' 'effects' that rings false. Assuming that The Empire Strikes Back 'does something to kids' lands us in a mire of behaviourist assumptions as mucky as the Dagobah swamp.
Kids are not so much formed by its rhythms and assumptions but rather adapt these forms and stretch their boundaries in their active play and fantasy. This is not to deny that power and domination are among the rules of the game learned at play in American society. Yet Star Wars provides a wide range of possible roles to occupy and relations to produce and reproduce. It is a fairly traditional piece in the complex puzzle of social determinations and cultural codes. Any simplistic notion of these films colonising the imagination is off the track.
This is a shortened version of an article which appeared in the American journal Socialist Review September-October 1980.