The
recent news that there is going to be another Star Wars trilogy made has
brought out all the usual sinchellectual nonsense about Star Wars the original
movie being a dud story with bad acting saved by a vague use of technology and
other heathen misunderstood rants. However, reading one of them the other day
has me thinking about what it is about Star Wars that made it such an iconic film
and such a huge step forward in the sci-fi genre. Battles in space; mythical
beings that could use clairvoyance and telekinesis, light sabres and the rest
of it were not overly new concepts. Even Darth Vader’s look and sound can be
traced back through history to see an earlier incarnation of them in some way,
such as the 1938 films The Fighting Devil
Dogs:-
Many
of the ideas are taken right out of Flash Gordon and many common fairy tales
such as the Frog Princess and other collective subconscious ideas of our
society. I know that you are probably wondering if I’ve changed my mind from
last week’s rant that Genius
can take what talent borrows, but this is not what I am asking. What I am
asking is - what is it about the original trilogy, and even more so, the
original film that was such a step forward?
Reality.
For
my understanding, Star Wars was the first sci-fi movie that was totally
accepted by our culture where the characters were actual people and the story
was quite believable. Sci-fi stories had, up that point, been plagued by
obscure and awkward narratives and characters that one couldn’t really relate
to. Speculative fiction as a genre has a long history of being outside of any
form of reality. From modern day vampires that sparkle right back to the
beginning of it all, stories of vampires, ghosts and the like have a long
history of being told “A long, long time ago, In a galaxy far, far away.” Their
authors seem to be as confused by the scene as one would expect reading Lord
Byron’s vampires
with food poisoning,
However,
Star Wars was not. Star Wars was a story with scenes and characters that could
have taken place in the current era, in the current day. Why? Because Luke Skywalker wasn’t anything
more than a farm-boy, as were the ANZACs and many other successful military
people history has recorded, then morphed into something else. Luke Skywalker,
as he was introduced by his best friend toward the end of the original movie,
was “...the best bush pilot in the outer rims.” He is this normal guy, working
on a farm for his uncle and aunt, wanting to get away from it all and then a
few things happen and boom, there he is blowing up the Death Star and sticking
it to the man. That could be you in a month or two couldn’t it? You didn’t come
from Krypton, but you are an ordinary dude, aren’t you?
Looking
back through history, Lord Byron started Bram Stocker on a rant about a certain
villain, Dracula. Interestingly, in the original book, there is no
understanding given as to why Dracula is the way he is, how he became it or
why. The characters seem lifeless and infallible. Scan forward to the1992 retelling of the story and there is a huge
recounting of a noble and strong lord being tricked by his enemies, lost his
wife to suicide and cursed his God for His lack of passion.
In
HG Well’s The War of the Worlds, the
beings are not really known to us, nor are the heroes because there really
weren’t any. No one won that war, the Martians lost due to a strange
incompatibility that existed. Stories from Superman and Spiderman and all these
other speculative fiction franchises never really presented a character that we
could like. Did anyone actually want to be Superman? I remember wanting to be
able to fly like he could, to be as strong as he was and, especially as I grew
older, wanted that whole vision type thing. But did I want to BE him? No...not
really...he was kind of a dick. At the very least, he wasn’t really a person.
He wasn’t believable as a character. Neither was Louis Lane, who apparently was
a good reporter that at the same time couldn’t see through the unbelievably
complicated Clark Kent disguise. Damn those glasses, who could ever have
penetrated that disguise? Then, from my experience, the Louis Lanes of the
world don’t really see glasses or the eyes behind them, they are looking
elsewhere.
But
there is this supernatural nature behind all these stories that glosses over
the main plot-development story. Did Superman deserve to be Superman? He just
was, there was no why, when or how. But the simplicity of this type of story
breeds a lack of relatability to the characters and can be un-humanised easily
to the point of absurdity. Did the whole plot scene just fall on its own sword
with a little bit of prodding around the incompatibility of a person from
Krypton to live on Earth and dig Earth chicks? How could Superman live a normal
life even if he wanted to? A modern
relationship with Louis or any woman would have killed him. He couldn’t
possibly ever have gotten any, because in order for them to have sex, he would
have to wear condoms made out of kryptonite, given that that would be the only
substance capable of stopping the little guys. Or what is the alternative?
Unprotected sex? Surely that would leave many pissed off little Superboys
flying around and growing up with single mums that could not have plagued our
collective imagination in those times, or even now for that matter. Then what
happens when Superman gets a super-STD? The alternative, we are lead to
believe, is that he was abstinent. Yeah right....he’s looking buff as, all the
time, even when deliberately nerdifying himself as Kent, he still gets serious
lady cred, he can fly around and see things (see through things) and he’s not
after any? Yeah right.
Fast
forward to Star Trek, where there is a lot more humanity involved in the scene.
While there is this ever present God-like Spock, it is usually the very human
Kirk who is the hero. While Kirk does have a military background and persona, and
takes on a persona more akin to the six million dollar man or the like, he is a
character with flaws and phobias that we can relate to. We are able to know
him.
But
Luke Skywalker...who didn’t want to be him? Or Han and Leia for that matter?
They were real people. And that is what makes a good story – you have to be able
to relate to it in some way, the characters can’t be super-awesome all the
time. They have to be fallible. It is in their ability to fail that makes them
able to succeed. Think about Superman for long enough and his seemingly
inability to fail and you start to wonder whether cheering for Lex Luther would
be more to our liking. Lex was the underdog: cunning, rich, ruthless and the
like, but he was always biting off more than he could chew. It was only when
Superman became vulnerable due to criminals from his planet who matched his
power and then some that he became kind of interesting.
So
who would we rather be, Luke Skywalker or Superman? Luke or Vader? We associate
with Luke because we like that he is fallible and so are we, so we crave him as
a hero. Vader is cold and seemingly all-powerful while being beyond ruthless
(at least in the first two movies). Luke could have been an ANZAC, he would
have fitted right in. But then there is the obvious problem: ANZACs haven’t
always been like that. While Luke would have fitted in with our version of
ANZAC today, he would not have fitted in with the historical ANZACs, but Vader
would have been right at home.
I
guess there is the old question as to what the purpose of war is. Is the main
feature of a good warrior that he dies or at least risks his neck for Queen and
Country? Or is it that he kills for Queen and Country or just because that’s
who he is, that’s what he does. As Bono so wonderfully puts it “... What's the glory of taking a
man from his bed and gunning him down in front of his wife and his children?”
Yet isn’t this what Luke Skywalker does at the end of the first movie? A battleship
that big would have to have thousands of living quarters for family of crew.
Schools, children’s clinics, health clinics, socio-legal research centres of
excellence and do we care? No, they’re all blown up cause the good guys have to
win.
But
you don’t have to go back too far in history where apparently there is a
different story to be told. The historical ANZACs were ruthless killers whose
bloodlust was not only marked, but kind of feared by the British at the time.
They certainly wouldn’t have preferred having a yarn and a game of cricket with
the enemy, this is a modern invention . The ANZACs were successful because they
were great at killing people. The British War Correspondent, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett
wrote, in the Argus in May, 1915 that
“In less than a
quarter of an hour the Turks were out of their second position either bayoneted
of fleeing. But then the Australians, whose blood was up, instead of
entrenching, rushed northwards and eastwards, searching for fresh enemies to
bayonet...These raw colonial troops in these desperate hours proved worthy to
fight side by side with the heroes of Mons, the Aisne, Ypres and Neuve
Chapelle. Early in the morning of April 26 the Turks repeatedly tried to drive
the colonials from their position. The colonials made local Counter-attacks,
and drove of the enemy at the point of the bayonet, which the Turks would never
face” [1]
So
in 1915, the ANZACs would have appeared more like storm troopers really:
ruthless and unfeeling. Years ago, that made them successful, now it would make
them the bad guys. So what happened? Well, history was revised and rewritten.
Bill Gammage’s 1974 study The Broken
Years, Patsy Adam-Smith’s 1978 The
Anzacs and the movie Gallipoli replaced
the true nature of the First World War with a clean and innocent young group of
men who didn’t know what they were getting themselves into[2]
and didn’t shirk from their responsibilities to die for King and Country (as
opposed to kill for King and Country).
Peter
Costello, the then Deputy Prime Minister in 2003 stated that “There are
problems in the world today just as there were in 1915. You cant turn your back
on them...and young Australians, even today, are serving in the Middle East because
they want to make a difference...And you think back how their grandfather and
great grandfathers would have felt the same in 1915.” [3]
I
guess Kim Beazley makes a decent point when he thought that without the modern
myth of the ANZAC, no Australian government would be able to justify sending
troops to war[4].
But also think of the expense of it all. While an army is perhaps necessary for
peace in historical terms, have we not grown beyond that nowdays? Thomas Hobbes
theorised that peace is not the absence of war, it is the absence of the threat
of war. Surely in today’s Australia, the army represents the biggest threat to
that peace rather than the protector of it.
So
there goes my theory about Star Wars, and it’s a little lame to say that it was
the first movie that presented the modern version of the warrior hero, although
notice the tight timeline between these few points in the late 1970s.
Allow
me to have another swing at it. Jung made a distinction between sagas, fairy
tales, myths and legends. In particular focus on a fairy tale, he made
observations about them and the characters within them. The hero never
expresses emotion, he is lifeless; he kills the bad guy because he is the good
guy; the bad guy generally does what he does out of compulsion or the like,
certainly not out of self-interest or controlled rationalism. Luke Skywalker
goes from being a normal person in the first movie, to the ultimate fairy tale
hero in the last movie, right up until just before the end. He kills Jabba the
Huttt because he wants his friends back. He doesn’t show any emotion about it. “You
can either profit by this, or be destroyed” he tells Jabba, not threatening or
skiting, just telling it the way he sees it. He is slightly conflicted meeting
Yoda again, but then kills the bad guy (well, cuts off his hand and overpowers
him). He then stops being the fairy tale hero: he throws down his sword. I
mean, how cool is that? He enables his father to redeem himself. That’s even
better than killing all the bad guys and saving the girl, he’s not only a good
guy, he’s a good guy we can again relate to.
Or
maybe it’s just the cool swords we all wish we have.
This
post’s lame joke : You might be a bogan Jedi if
- You ever uttered the phrase, "May the force be with yuz"
- You have ever used your light saber to open a box of goon.
- At least one wing of your X-wing is primer colored.
- You have ever had a B-wing up on blocks in your yard.
- Wookies are offended by your B.O.
- You have ever used the force to get yourself another beer so you wouldn't have to wait for a commercial.
- You have ever had your R-2 unit use its self-defense electro-shock thingy to get the barbecue grill to light.
- You have a ‘love it or leave it’ Aussie flag painted on your flight helmet.
- You kinda think that Jabba the Hutt had a pretty good handle on how to treat his women.
- The REAL reason you got into a fight in the cantina was because you ordered Fosters Light...and they didn't have it.
- You knew Princess Leia was your sister all along.
This
post’s inappropriate over share:
There was this one time, when I was about 17
that
[REST OF POST REMOVED BY
ADMINISTRATOR]
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