Star Wars on Trial

by David Brin

  DAVID BRIN: Your Honor, we are trying each charge separately. Therefore, it is perfectly possible for a person of Mr. Bethke's caliber to serve as a Defense witness on one charge and as a witness for the Prosecution on another!

  DROID JUDGE: Agreed. In the interests of justice, Mr. Bethke can retake the stand.

  HERE IS A DEFINING MOMENT in Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and it takes place quite early in the film. No, it's not the moment when Anakin Skywalker gives in to his anger, his pain and his desire to emulate Russell Crowe in Gladiator by using two lightsabers to slice off Count Dooku's head, only to then spend almost an entire thirty seconds afterward agonizing over the morality of beheading helpless prisoners. Rather, the scene I'm thinking of begins about another minute after that, when General Grievous's flagship takes a solid hit in the vitals and begins to plunge toward the surface of Coruscant, and R2-D2, the Jedi starfighters and pretty much everything else that isn't lashed down begins to fall toward the bow of the ship. During this scene, Anakin, Obi-Wan and Palpatine get to take some pratfalls and do some light heroics in an elevator shaft, as the direction of "down" undergoes several rapid changes-

  But think this through with me. They are onboard a spacecraft. In orbit. Meaning, in free-fall in a vacuum, as will become evident three minutes later, when General Grievous is blown out the window by explosive decompression and does not immediately plummet to his doom. And yet, for the sake of the action sequence in the elevator, R2-D2 and everything else within the ship briefly behaves as if they have looked down, suddenly noticed the presence of gravity and gone rushing headlong toward that great big round planetthingy down there, in hopes that it will be their friend.

  As I said, this is a defining moment. And what, precisely, does it define?

  Well, if you still haven't guessed after watching Episodes I and II, what this scene is telling you to do is to take your mind off the hook. Don't just suspend your disbelief, pay it off and send it home for the day. Buy yourself a jumbo bucket of popcorn, kick back and enjoy the ride, and don't even bother trying to make sense of anything else that you might see or hear in the next 120 minutes. You have entered a world where style and spectacle trump physics and sense; where it's perfectly logical for space battleships to have keels and superstructures and trade broadsides at point-blank range; where of course the great starships float serenely through the void, accompanied by the throaty purring sound of dirigible engines. You have entered a place in the universe of fiction where combat spacecraft have wings and engage in swirling space dogfights like swarms of Hellcats and Zeros, where flak bursts and missiles leave smoky black trails through the vacuum and damaged pieces of ships fly away in nonexistent slipstreams, and where gravity works, but only when it's funny.

  That's right, Jake. You're in Toontown now. And to be specific, you're in the charming little ethnic 'hood commonly called anime.

  The original three Star Wars movies have often been described as a fantasy trilogy that borrows heavily from Japanese samurai movies. By now, this idea should not come as a surprise to anyone: even George Lucas admits the story line for the original Star Wars was strongly influenced by Akira Kurosawa's 1958 historical adventure, The Hidden Fortress. Live-action samurai-film themes and tropes abound in Lucas's original three movies, along with an abundance of simple visual styling cues such as the oversized helmets of the Death Star's crew in A New Hope, Lando Calrissian's boar's-tusk mask in Return of the Jedi, the grotesque face masks on the elaborate but apparently worthless body armor of the imperial stormtroopers (hey, even an Ewok can take one of these guys out), and Darth Vader's gravity-defying and wire-assisted sword fighting moves throughout the entire series. For that matter the basic setup of the original movie should seem completely familiar to anyone who's watched enough oriental action movies, or at least a few episodes of Tenchi Muyo or InuYasha. To wit: a restless young boy comes into possession of a magical sword, learns that he is actually the son of a great warrior and goes off with his aged sensei to confront an ancient evil and fulfill his terrible destiny.

  Then again: from the critic's point of view, one of the truly wonderful things about the Star Wars universe is that the territory is so sprawling and borrows from so many sources that it's possible to find just about anything here, if you look hard enough. For example, the story of the original movie can also be summarized as, "A restless young boy chafes at life on the dusty old family farm, until he meets a wizard and is swept away to a wondrous land where he meets some munchkins, a tin man, a cowardly lion and Harrison Ford as the scarecrow."

  When considering the latest three installments in the series, though, the comparison breaks down. Episodes I through III are undeniably big, bold and beautiful. They look and sound incredible and are like watching a century's worth of fantastic art suddenly spring to life. But while The Phantom Menace borrows plot devices from Kurosawa again, Anakin Skywalker is no Taketori Washizu, and Revenge of the Sith is no Throne of Blood. There is something missing in these later movies, and it's something important: a soul, a heart, a human factor, a je ne sail quoi.

  I first began to suspect what the answer was while watching Attach of the Clones. Specifically, I was watching the arena scene on Geonosis and thinking of Ray Harryhausen. In the midst of admiring the intricate and fantastic architecture of the arena, and mentally comparing the set, the rampaging beasts and the army of skeletal droids to similar scenes in earlier movies, it suddenly stuck me: none of this is real.

  Not Real real, of course; that would be ridiculous. But not even "real" in the sense of being a miniature set with animated models. The entire thing-the arena, the Geonosians, the monsters, the droids and even most of the "human" characters-were all just CGI creations, perhaps adapted from scans of physical models, but with no objective existence anywhere except inside the memory of Industrial Light and Magic's animation rendering system. I was not watching a movie. I was watching the biggest, best, most expensive and most beautiful cartoon ever made.

  Once you consider the premise that Episodes I through III are not live-action movies with extensive special effects, but rather animated features with a few living actors rotoscoped in, many of the more common critical objections to the movies simply wither away. Yes, of course space warships in the ancient future will resemble World War II surface vessels, right down to the turrets and superstructures, and will maneuver as if they're floating on the plane of the ecliptic: didn't you ever watch Yoshinobu Nishizaki's Space Cruiser Yamato? Yes, of course space fighters will routinely sprout folding wings and maneuver as if they're in an atmosphere, and any missiles they launch will follow gracefully looping trajectories: didn't you ever watch Super Dimension Fortress Macross? Yes, what better way is there to defend your flagship against attack than with four-legged vulture droids that leap into the sky and morph into sleek and deadly combat craft: haven't you at least watched Transformers?

  Yes, of course the human' characters are dwarfed by their surroundings, and their voices are nearly drowned out by the background noise, and Mace Windu will strike a dramatic pose and deliver a speech instead of the one sword stroke that would settle the whole mess right here and now. Because, when you get down to it, in the universe of the new Star Wars movies, the human characters are not important.

  What is important in Episodes I through III? While it's tempting to identify raging mechaphilia as the key trait, and a strong case can be made that it's actually ornate costumes and ludicrous hairstyles-the Queen of Naboo may be called in witness-the critical distinguishing trait seems to be the same one that is at work behind the scenes in most anime, and it is this: that fully realized characters are hard to do, and full-motion character animation in the style of the classic Disney cartoons is expensive. Ergo, the best way to deliver a commercially successful product without driving yourself nuts or breaking the budget is by making the background paintings as absolutely gorgeous as possible, then restricting your human characters to a few dramatic poses and some long-winded speeche
s, in between the full-motion battle scenes, which are what the paying customers are really coming to see, anyway.

  And make no mistake: Star Wars, Episodes I, II and III are three of the most eye-poppingly beautiful and enthralling movies you could ever want to watch. The water world of Kamino, the lush pastoral landscapes of Naboo and Kashyyyk, and the massive palaces that seem to crop up everywhere look like sorts of things Hayao Miyazaki could do if he had an infinite amount of time and money. The sterile, endless cityscape of Coruscant would fit right into Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, while Coruscant's grubby and cluttered underworld echoes Otomo's Old Tokyo or Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell. The hellish worlds of Geonosis and Mustafar, with their incomprehensible foundries and rivers of fire, evoke Now and Then, Here and There, while the massive battle scenes that slaughter clones, Gungans and robots alike with cheerful abandon pay homage to generations of mecha-based manga, movies and TV series.

  But as for expecting to find a fully realized and engaging human story in the center of all this noise, beauty and excitement?

  Forget it, Jake. It's Toontown.

  Bruce Bethke works, writes, and when time permits, lives, in the frozen northern reaches of Minnesota. In some circles he is best known for his 1980 short story, "Cyberpunk." In others, he is better known for his Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, Headcrash. What very few people in either circle have known until recently is that he actually works in supercomputer software development, and all of his best science fiction gets turned into design specifications for future products.

  Bethke can be contacted via his Web site, http://www.BruceBethke. com.

  THE COURTROOM

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Damn, he's good.

  DROID JUDGE: Mr. Stover? Your cross-examination?

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Uh. Okay. Urn-all right, Mr. Bethke. When, exactly, did you sell out to the Sith?

  DAVID BRIN: (tiredly) Objection....

  DROID JUDGE: Mr. Stover, behave yourself.

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Do I have to?

  DROID JUDGE: Mr. Stover-

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Your Honor, I've got nothing. Nothing. This man, by his own testimony, couldn't see the human element in Star Wars; should I question a blind man on the colors in somebody else's garden?

  DAVID BRIN: Objection.

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Withdrawn. Your Honor, I must beg the Court's indulgence: I need another witness on this charge.

  DROID JUDGE: Oh, please....

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: The Defense must be allowed a rebuttal witness. Someone who understands humanity. Someone who sees the truth of all of us ... and laughs at it.

  DROID JUDGE: (resignedly) Whom do you have in mind?

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: The Defense calls science fiction writer, philosopher and humorist Adam Roberts, who will demonstrate that Star Wars falls plainly in the grand tradition of comic science fiction.

  DROID JUDGE: Oh, very well. The witness may be seated.

  HE CHARGE IS THAT Star Wars is fantasy masquerading as SF?

  Have the Prosecution even seen these films?

  Let me try to understand here. Why would somebody think such a thing?

  Well, perhaps because they have an unusually narrow sense of what SF is. Sure:

  If we are looking for a rigidly and technically exact transfer of "science" into "fiction," then Star Wars doesn't fit the bill terribly well. If we want an example of a "literature of ideas," then we'll find slim pickings. If our fetishes are seriousness of purpose or emotional maturity then we'd better look elsewhere. But who says that these are the true benchmarks of SF?

  There are other forms of SF than the dull and the weighty, the serious and profound; Star Wars belongs to one of those other forms-a specific, joyous and enduring sort. But that doesn't make it fantasy. (Uh-excuse me-spaceships? robots? a whole planet converted into a giant hi-tech city? Fantasy? Puh-lease!)

  Actually I'd better rein in my outrage. Now that I come to think of it, there is something interesting in the charge that Star Wars is fantasy: it reveals something important both about the Prosecution's preconceptions about the genre, and their shortsightedness about Lucas's six-piece masterwork. They're missing the point, and I hope to explain how.

  Put it this way: Here are two sorts of work from, roughly, the same period as Star Wars, both types being irreducibly SF. On the one hand there are films like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), or books like Arthur Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama (1973). On the other are John Carpenter's Dark Star (1974) or the first appearance of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978). Which of these two sorts of SF is the one with which our film has the most in common? Let me give you a hint.

  I'm going to make an argument that Star Wars belongs to the second kind of SE I'll come clean up front and admit that it's not an argument often advanced, and that it may take a bit of getting used to; but once you see where I'm coming from I think you'll not only see how misapplied it is to call Star Wars fantasy, you'll also see why it's plain wrong to point out so-called "plot holes," "inconsistencies," "lack of worthy ethical content" and all the other straw men and straw women the Prosecution have been propping up in this volume in order to knock them down. The point, here, is being missed.

  And what is the point? Read on and I'll tell you.

  PARODY

  Star Wars must be the most parodied work of modern times.

  I know whereof I speak, for I have parodied it myself. On the back of a couple of (only modestly successful) Tolkien parodies, my publisher approached me with an idea to cash in on-did I say cash in? I meant pay sly, comedic tribute to-the release of the third Star Wars film. He and I sat in a London bar and hammered out a deal. By "hammered out a deal" I mean that we got hammered, and then struck a deal: I would write a parody book six chapters long, each of the 10,000-word chapters parodying a different Star Wars film. I needed to be hammered to agree to this, because the third film had not at that point been released, so the last of my six parodic chapters was going to be a parody of my idea of what the film would be about; or to apply a technical phrase, "pulling stuff rather frantically out of my hat." We then spent the best part of an hour trying to brainstorm a title for the parody. You know the sort of thing: a cod-title for The Da Vinci Code might be The Da Vinci Cod. By the same logic, a codtitle for Star Wars might be ... ?

  In your own time. There's no rush.

  Actually, when we began go through the options, we realized that most of the titles had already been taken. Why? Because Star Wars is easily the most parodied work of modern times. We couldn't call our parody Star Bores, or Spaceballs, or Czar Wars, or Fart Wars-in, fact, pretty much all the likely parodyesque titles, because they had all been taken. We ended up really scraping the barrel. In fact we went further: we threw the barrel away and started scraping the floor underneath the barrel. I remember, dimly, banging my shoe on the restaurant table and booming drunkenly, "I insist upon Sitar Wars; I want to write in lots of instrumentation from classical Indian music," and my editor going red in the face as he shouted back, "No! No! It must be Star Warts or nothing, and you'd better put in all manner of pimples, moles and facial disfigurement...."

  Of course, as title, neither Sitar Wars nor Star Warts made the cut. At the end of this little essay I'll tell you the title we eventually decided upon. But before I get to that endpoint I want to reiterate my first sentence for the third time in as many pages, by way of making clear my argument: Star Wars is the most parodied work of modern times for a reason, and the reason has to do with the extraordinary and enduring excellence of the original. It is parodied because it has such cultural currency, because it is so well-known; it is parodied because so many people, parodists included, love it so much.

  Indeed, I want to argue something more. I want to argue that the proliferation of Star Wars parodies in fact uncovers something unique and wonderful about the original, something denigrators of the six films often overlook. A superficial explanation would go somethin
g like this: "The fact that there are scores of parodies of Star Wars is a reflection of the fact that Star Wars is inherently ridiculous, absurd, deplorable and derided. Star Wars gets parodied again and again because it is bad. You don't see parodies, after all, of great cinema."

  But this is not only wrong, it is Wrong and indeed wrong. Parody is a barometer of cultural weight, not of cultural insignificance. Why would anybody parody something that is very bad? What on Earth, or out of it, would be the point in parodying L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth, say, or Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space? These works are beneath parody. But the greatest cinema gets parodied again and again.

  Nobody could accuse Ingmar Bergman of being ridiculous, absurd, deplorable or derided; but his great film The Seventh Seal has been parodied almost as often as Star Wars. His black-cloaked whitefaced Death crops up in films as diverse as Woody Allen's Love and Death to McTiernan's Last Action Hero. The Wizard of Oz, Kubrick's 2001, The Godfather-these films crop up in parody form in everything from movies to multiple episodes of The Simpsons to TV ads. Parody is the homage ordinariness pays to genius. Believe me, I'm a parodist and I know.

  The first Star Wars parodies came out pretty much as soon as the first film was released. Michael Wiese's film Hardware Wars (1977), a thirteen-minute spoof of the original featuring gloriously wooden actors and props drawn (as the title suggests) from the kitchen and the tool shed, appeared only a couple of months after Star Wars itself. Apparently it is Lucas's favorite parody. Mel Brook's feature-length spoof Spaceballs (1987) parodies the original at greater length, and with more variable comic effect; although it also takes the opportunity to fit in some 2001 and Star Trek parody as well. And you would not believe how much parodic Star Wars-themed porn there is out there.