Star Wars on Trial

by David Brin

  No, really.' There is even a prose parody of Star Wars that is also a parody of the conventions of porn writing, as if those two things naturally go together.2

  Star Wars parody quickly became a staple on TV as well as cinema. The mighty Muppet Show persuaded Mark Hamill himself to guest-star in their 1980 parody special episode. Plenty of other TV shows have followed suit, from Friends to Family Guy. And above all there is The Simpsons. The Simpsons is simply stuffed to its yellow gullet with Star Wars parody. There are far, far too many moments to mention here.3 My two favorites are probably "Mayored to the Mob" (1998), which features a wrestling match called "The Mighty Robots of Battlestar Galactica Versus the Gay Robots of Star Wars!" and "Worst Episode Ever" (2001) in which the Comic Book Store Guy chances upon a box of little-known Star Wars goodies, including "Princess Leia's anti jiggle breast tape" and a film reel titled "Alternate Ending: Luke's father is Chewbacca."

  But Star Wars parodies have not been limited to film and TV They crop up in every genre and mode. "Weird Al" Yankovic has written parodies of the Star Wars that utilize the idiom of song, and a "Star Wars Gangsta Rap" (2000), available for Flash download from www. atomfilms.com, has even won awards from Star Wars fans themselves. And, in fact, that's an important point: whatever brickbats you may want to hurl at Star Wars fans, you can't accuse them of being uptight or lacking a sense of humor. And that's no coincidence. If they were po-facedly defensive of their favorite films, they would hardly have purchased (in such large quantities) the dozens of comics that have parodied the original, not least amongst them the sensitively titled Fart Wars (from Entity Comics, 1997).

  And the same is true across the board. Star Bores, a book by British humorists Steve Barlow and Steve Skidmore, appeared in 1997, and was reissued with new parody material in 2004. And of course the Web contains hundreds of Star Wars parody sites. Among the best is the Wikipedia parody site Uncyclopedia, which is threaded through with Star Wars parody, not least in its lengthy and often hilarious entry on the film series itself (www.uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Star_wars). The LEGO parody of Star Wars Episode III ("Revenge of the Brick") can be downloaded from the LEGO site (wwwlego.com/starwars/ default.aspx). Dylan Jones's fan film "Stick Wars" animates crucial scenes from the film using stick men (www.stickpage.com/stickwars. shtml) and is surprisingly funny. And there's the "Official Site Gag" (wwwgeocities.com/SunsetStrip/Alley/7028/swosg.htm), a nice parody of the official site. It goes on and on.

  Here's the obvious question: why?

  Why are there so many parodies of these particular films?

  The short answer to the question must be that Star Wars suits parody, in some way. The logic of those films connects in some way with the logic of Lucas's six films.

  The purpose of a parody is to make people laugh. To examine why there are so many Star Wars parodies is to examine that weird and as yet unexplained human phenomenon called laughter.

  LAUGHTER

  Let's get back to my theory. In order to make my case, allow me to call back to the witness bar those two aforementioned SF films: Battlefield Earth (directed by Roger Christian in 2000) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). Which of these two films is the greater? (I say "greater" because it seems to miss the point, somehow, to ask which of two films is better when both films are famous for being very, very bad.)

  But when I put the question the answer is obvious. Battlefield Earth is strenuously, earnestly, seriously bad where Plan 9 is gloriously, hilariously, delightfully bad.

  The phrase "so bad it's good" really doesn't apply to the former film, which aims to combine the satisfactions of blockbuster entertainment with a buried, seriously meant Scientological messageaims, and misses. It's so bad it's bad, and that's all there is to it. When we watch it, the pleasure we feel is one of superiority. We watch Battlefield Earth to mock.

  But Plan 9 is a completely different matter. It is so unpretentiously and spontaneously bad it goes beyond bad, in a strange way, and enters its own bizarrely magical territory. We don't watch Plan 9 in order to mock it. The laughter it provokes in us is a warm and communal sort. It spills out from the film itself to encompass the story of the making of the film, and the hilarious life of its director. The one star attached to the project, Bela Lugosi, died before shooting. In his place Wood hired Dr. Tom Mason (not so much an actor; more the producer's wife's chiropractor) to stand in for Lugosi's parts. Lugosi was small and dark. Mason was tall and blond and bore no facial resemblance to the horror star. In a stroke of inadvertent comic genius Wood thought he could elide these differences by getting Mason to hold his cloak in front of his face in every single shot in which he appears. It is hard to express how singularly delightful and life-affirming it is to watch a film as unpretentiously catastrophically bad as this one.

  This is a roundabout way of making a crucial point about human laughter. Laughter comes in two flavors: there is nasty laughter and there is nice laughter. There is laughing at and laughing with. Sigmund Freud, one of the greatest minds to consider this complicated business of laughter, realized this early on. He named the former kind of laughter "witz" (sometimes translated as "jokes") and illustrated it by quoting a great many rather unpleasant jokes, many of them antiSemitic, or anti-women. The other, "good" sort of laughter he called "humor" (it's the same word in German and English; though we Brits put an elegant second "u" in there after the "o")-and he argued that this served a completely different psychological purpose altogether: this is a positive, social, bonding sort of laughter.

  It's easy to think of examples of both sorts of laughter. There is a tiresome and depressing wasteland of offensive humor that mocks minorities (black, Jewish, Irish, homosexual) or which reaffirms misogynist stereotype, or which takes a selfish pleasure in watching the affliction and suffering of others. Such jokes are no more than pointing at a person and braying like a donkey. These sort of jokes are straightforwardly racist, cruel and despicable. They reflect discredit upon the person laughing, and suggest that human nature is a mean, spiteful and bitter thing.

  But, thankfully, most laughter is not like this. Most laughter is the good sort. I don't mean that most laughter is safe-in fact, it's very obvious that the reverse is true. The things that make us laugh often are exactly the subjects about which we are most anxious: death, sex, embarrassment, failure. There's nothing safe about any of this. But the laughter that liberates from these alarming subjects is inclusive, not exclusive. Laughter binds us all together; it is our solace in the face of the intractable facts of a heartless cosmos. The greatest humor breaks taboos precisely in order to trick us into facing up to the human condition. It says: Don't bury your head in the sand-we all must die, we all must deal with pain; we're all embarrassed, nerdy and awkward. In a single phrase: We're all in this together.

  The best laughter is the sort that we experience in company with our friends and the people we love, that infectious and wonderful laughter that as often as not comes out of nowhere at all when the mood is right, and that leaves everybody feeling stronger and happier. Nasty laughter is a solitary and ultimately, alienating thing. Good laughter is the cement of community.

  So where does Star Wars fit into this?

  The enormous proliferation of Star Wars parodies taps into something laughable about the original six films; but this humor is not of the nasty sort. I want to call it joy, a word meant to evoke a special kind of forceful, unifying, positive sense of rightness, a bubbling emotional pleasure that can manifest as laughter, but equally well might simply create that glowing sensation of pleasure in the solar plexus, or goosebump stippling, or just a big grin. This is the effect Star Wars has on its enormous fan base.

  Perhaps you disagree? Perhaps you feel that, insofar as you can bring yourself to sit through the film, you watch with snooty and condescending disdain? Well then, you are indeed to be pitied. There are some people (poor souls) who really have no sense of humor, who don't get the jokes everybody else is enjoying, who live their lives in chilly isolation from the
currents of warm, breathing, joyous human community. May I offer a suggestion? If that's you, it may be that you are trying to analyze the films in a way incompatible with their appeal. Everybody knows that a joke explained isn't funny anymore. What would you say to somebody who reported, sour-faced, that he had just watched a couple of Marx Brothers films and that he disapproved? "All that running around and chattering wisecracking... terrible! What's the political and ideological implication here? Why don't they show society as being supportive of the little guy? Why do they deal in stereotypes like this? Are they really saying that the police should be mocked and lampooned? In one scene a Marx brother made fun of legal contracts by repeating the phrase `party of the first part'-don't they see how important and serious legal contracts, and by implication the edifice of the law, is?" What could you say to such a person? Nothing, except: I'm afraid you're missing the point.

  What's that? You don't think the Marx Brothers can be compared with Star Wars? You think the one was intended as comedy, and the other wasn't?

  This is (you're right) the crux of my argument. Because by suggesting that Star Wars is comedy I'm suggesting a wider definition of comedy than is usually the case. This is not Jackass: it is not laughing at other people. It is joy: it is laughing, or grinning, with others. Those others are the global community of Star Wars fans, the people behind the films' continuing success (each film grossing nearly a billion dollars globally), the authors of the thousands of specialist Web sites and fan forums, the same people who parody and re-parody the whole. And one thing that not even the most mean-spirited Star Wars hater can deny is that these films have created a vast human community of admirers and fans. If you hate the films then you're put in the position of having to look down your nose upon millions upon millions of your fellow human beings. Which, to say the least, isn't very nice of you.

  Comedy is more than just moments designed to make people laugh aloud. It is a whole genre of literature, a whole mode of art. We call one-third of Shakespeare's plays comedies, not because they make us laugh (we can be honest: they don't), but because they reaffirm human positivity; because they end happily; because they light a candle of love and communality in the darkness of cosmic indifference. This is where Star Wars belongs.

  In a way the films' moments of deliberate comedy are the weakest part of the broader effect. Sometimes the brittle banter of the droids is amusing. More often the slubberly pantomime of Jar Jar Binks tries for laughs and misses. I think this is because it is impossible to laugh with jar jar, that most irritating of screen creations, and so we are thrown back upon laughing at him. (This in turn, because of the character's patent relationship with blackface minstrelsy, implicates us uncomfortably as racists.) But jar jar is the exception in these films, not the rule. Generally the currency of Star Wars is exhilaration, excitement, glory and hilarity: joy.

  The final assault on the Death Star in A New Hope is not played for laughs in the sense that a Farrelly Brothers (shudder) film is played for laughs.4 But the exhilaration we experience as the rebels soar away from the detonating space fortress is precisely the currency of joy. It is because the films are expressions of this joy that really small comic triggers-say, Han Solo running chasing a platoon of stormtroopers up a corridor and immediately coming running down again chased by the stormtroopers-generate such excessive gales of laughter in the theater when they're played. This is the joy that makes you bounce up and down with excitement at the prospect of another film in the series, that makes you hug yourself or grin. That's the sense in which the films are comedies.

  There's one more point to make about these films. One of the chief motors of comedy is precisely incongruity. It is putting the fear-inspiring Spanish Inquisition (our anxieties about torture, pain and death) together with comfy chairs and soft pillows. It is thin stupid Laurel and fat complacent Hardy. Incongruity means the expert coordination of radically differing elements. The Star Wars universe is based on a brilliantly sustained process of creative incongruity: all manner of strange aliens and human beings coexist, elements from a hundred famous SF novels and films are thrown into the mix, and finally-in the prequel trilogy-live action and CGI are incongruously mixed together in every scene. This incongruity is the backbone of the Star Wars universe. Lucas's instinct for the right incongruity prevents it becoming merely a mess. But it acts as more than saving grace; it is the fundamental point of the whole. Of course these films have weaknesses: inconsistencies, shifts in tone and color, a plodding apperception of romantic love and a somewhat simplistic understanding of the working of international politics. But these elements do not cancel out the glorious action sequences, the frequently stunning visual aesthetic, the thrills and imaginative stimulation that the films also manifest. The incongruity between the best and the worst of the films-in every individual movie-is precisely the point. The melange of the Star Wars films are their strength. Because life does not hermetically seal away "high seriousness" and "tragedy" from "comic bathos" and "general grinning hilarity." They are all mixed in together.

  I mentioned Hitchhiker's Guide earlier; and in a way I am arguing that Star Wars belongs to the same family as that sublime SF work (and who would call Hitchhiker's fantasy?). One difference, of course, is that Douglas Adams could write gags like nobody else could write gags; he was the god of gags; he carried about, as mental luggage, bags of gags, and was surrounded by gaggles of good gags. Lucas isn't in the same continent as far as gag writing goes. But think again; would you really want to argue that Hitchhiker's Guide can be reduced to nothing more than its gags? Of course not. The reason that show has won so many hearts is more than the jokes and the punch lines; it is because there is a joy at the heart of it-a warmth, a diversity and beautiful incongruity, an exhilaration, all things that are comic in the fullest sense. It's in this way that Star Wars is close kin. This is where Lucas's broadest appeal is located.

  The title of this essay itself gestures toward parody. Ever since Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex (another glorious, joyous work that combined the very good-lots of sex-with the very bad-detailed line drawings of an ugly bearded man having lots of sex), writers have reverted to that title. But I don't mean it in a throwaway sense. The success of Star Wars is no fluke; it is a function of the film's perfect expression of human joy. This is what makes it a comedy; this is what excuses its weaknesses and reinforces its strengths. This is both what makes it so very parodyable, and what makes those parodiesall of the ones I listed-not snide potshots at the movie, but genuinely affectionate extrapolations of its underlying logic.

  What title was my own parody eventually published under? Well, the point of this essay hasn't been to try and flog copies of my own book, but to defend Star Wars from those po-faced, Hitchhiker's Guide humorless, overly literal types who cannot embrace the whole glorious messy splendor of the films. But I suppose I promised to tell you the title, and a promise is a promise.

  The title we went for was Star Warped. I know what you're thinking. It's not, as titles go, one half as funny as Revenge of the Sith.s But that's as it should be. Star Wars is the source of the joy, and the humor, into which any parody hopes to tap. To accuse it of incongruity, of stereotypes, of lacking seriousness and depth-all this is spectacularly to miss the point of what the films have to offer. When they're right, they're very, very right; and when they're wrong, they're funny. And not funny in a bitter or unpleasant way; funny in a way that captures the life-affirming, sprawling joy of humor.

  So: Star Wars a fantasy? No, no, no. Fantasy, and especially High Fantasy in its Tolkienian form, is all about dignity, weight, seriousness and a hidden message of religious profundity. It is monolithic, often ponderous and arthritic, refusing to accept that society and culture has changed and clinging tenaciously to an outdated past. But SF-the best SF-the sort of SF that Hitchhiker's Guide and Star Wars exemplified-is the very opposite of this: it is synthetic and diverse in itself; it delights in sprawl and incongruity; it embraces change and traffics in polymorphous joy
.

  You know it's true. You've been sitting, very politely, reading all these essays by furrowed-brow writers ponderously pointing out plot holes and failures of moral seriousness in the universe of Star Wars; and you know that they're all fundamentally missing the point. You feel it in your gut, in your heart, which is where humor lives. Intellectually the Prosecution are marshaling some ingenious arguments; but all they are doing, in a strugglingly circumlocutory manner, is showing that they don't get it.

  You get it. Enough said.

  My advice? Don't fret it. Why try and explain to these anti-Star Wars-ists what they're missing? Has there ever been a case, in the history of the world, when an individual without a sense of humor has been persuaded to laugh at comedy-to open his heart to its joy-by force of intellectual argumentation? Haranguing won't convert them. Let them be.

  Adam Roberts was born in 1965. He has a day job, as professor of nineteenth-century literature at the University of London, and has published a variety of academic criticism; he also writes science fiction novels and parodies. He lives with his wife and daughter about a third of an inch (on a map, that is) to the left of London, UK. Unlike Star Wars, he has never been on trial. Not so far, at any rate, although he believes that "it doesn't do to tempt fate" and has touched wood.

  THE COURTROOM

  DAVID BRIN: Your Honor, the Prosecution would like to stipulate that Adam Roberts is a funny guy. And this is a very interesting insight ...

  ... And it has very little to do with the topic at hand. Seriously, if this were crafted to be a scholarly tome about general Star Wars criticism, I would suggest inviting some wonderfully insightful critics of science fiction, such as-