Star Wars on Trial (34 page)

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: (checks his notes; mutters indistinctly)

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

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Uh, let's see ... this is where I'm supposed to come up with some questions to make the case that the prequel trilogy is actually brilliantly written, with sparkling performances all around?

DROID JUDGE: Yes... ? And ... ?

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: I'm thinking! I'm thinking! Give a guy a month or two, huh?

DROID JUDGE: Mr. Stover-

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: I mean, Revenge of the Sith won the People's Choice Award for both Favorite Movie 2005 and Favorite Movie Drama 2005-so it's clearly indefensible-

DAVID BRIN: Objection! Defense counsel is trying to argue facts not in evidence!

DROID JUDGE: Sustained. Remarks regarding Revenge of the Sith winning the People's Choice Award for both Favorite Movie 2005 and Favorite Movie Drama 2005 will be struck from the record.

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: All right. Fine. I'll take one for the team. Mr. Hemry, as I understand your testimony, you don't actually blame Star Wars or Mr. Lucas for the slew of embarrassingly bad big-budget sci-fi disasters that befouled eighties cinema. That you place blame instead on the lemming mentality of the Hollywood shit factory. So the actual crux of your argument-the crux of the Prosecution's entire case on this charge (lacking similar bigbudget lemming die-offs following the prequels)-is that madefor-Sci Fi-Channel movies pretty much suck. This, the Defense is willing to stipulate. In fact, it seems as though many of them suck on purpose, but that's another issue. Mr. Hemry, you write SF legal thrillers, can you explain to the Court the logical (and legal) fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc, and explain how this fallacy is the entire basis of your argument? Or would you like me to do it?

JOHN G. HEMRY: Will the judge kindly remind the Defense counsel that this is a court of law, not a basketball court, and trash talk won't score any points for him?

DAVID BRIN: I agree, Your Honor.

DROIDJUDGE: Sustained. Let's keep it PG-13, Mr. Stover.

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: (mutters indistinctly)

JOHN G. HEMRY: The Prosecution is deeply saddened that the Defense has grossly misstated the Prosecution's case in a blatant attempt to mislead the Court. Nor will the Court be fooled by the Defense's attempt to impress the jury by showing that he can recite a Latin phrase which, in fact, has nothing to do with the Prosecution's case. Contrary to the claims of the Defense, the Prosecution did not directly link such brilliant films as The Empire Strikes Back to the current crop of "Sci Fi" movies. No, such films reek of (and "reek" is an appropriate term in this case) the example created by the unholy union of the once-great Star Wars legacy with jar jar Binks. The inspiration (if I may use such a word in relation to Sci Fi Channel movies) for those awful creations is to be found in the prequel trilogy. The Defense can't argue with a straight face that the movers and shakers in the movie industry haven't been looking at the financial success of the films in the prequel trilogy and paraphrasing the famous line from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: "We don't need no stinkin' writers."

This is the Wookiee in the room that the Defense is trying to ignore, the Sith behind the curtain, the alien in the egg. As the Prosecution agreed, the original Star Wars trilogy can't be directly faulted for the junk that attempted to cash in on its success. But the prequel trilogy must bear responsibility for what it has done, making bad writing, bad acting and bad stories not only profitable, but also once again the image of SF in the eyes of the general public.

The Prosecution is willing to stipulate that Revenge of the Sith won the People's Choice Award for 2005, but challenges the De fense to name the last five films that won that award. This is not a mark of immortality, but of fan enthusiasm. Professional wrestling has many devoted fans as well, but that doesn't make it art.

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: The Defense is not willing to stipulate anything about professional wrestling, having no expertise on the subject; it appears to the Defense to be a violent variant of commedia dell'arte. And while the Defense admittedly cannot name the last five films that won the People's Choice Award, the Defense is similarly incapable of naming the last five films that won the Golden Globe Award, the Screen Actors Guild Award, the Film Critics Circle Award or the award of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, also known as the Oscar. Defense counsel is notoriously dim on this subject, as he is on so many others.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc means "This followed that, therefore that caused this." A car ran over my foot after George Bush was elected, therefore the Republican victory broke my toes. In other words, simply because a slew of crappy SF flicks showed up on basic cable after the prequel trilogy came out does not in any way show that the prequel trilogy caused that slew of crappy SF flicks; all it shows is that special effects technology has become cheaper, that the Sci Fi Channel has been making money off the Stargate franchise, and that not enough decent screenwriters live in Hollywood.

DAVID BRIN: Objection! Defense is again trying to argue facts not in evidence!

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Oh, fine. Withdrawn. This whole trial thing is too damned complicated, anyway. Can't we just have a couple drinks, stand around and argue?

DROID JUDGE: Mr. Stover-

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Yeah, I know. Call Bruce Bethke.

1. INTRODUCTION

The history of American cinema can be described as a case study in evolution by means of punctuated equilibrium. The "equilibrium" part of this expression is fairly easy to understand: making movies is a hellishly expensive and labor-intensive business, and whenever you have that much money and that many people's careers on the line, the innate conservatism of the group always comes to the fore. There is a film industry truism that nothing succeeds like success, and another that holds that the quickest way to find success is by clinging tightly to the coattails and following closely in the footsteps of someone else who's already found it. The net result of these two ideas is that movie studios quite naturally have an ingrained tendency to become cinematic sausage factories, churning out mile after mile of motion picture by-products while very rarely departing from the established recipes.

It's the "punctuated" part of the expression that makes for an interesting discussion. Every now and then, while the rest of Hollywood is busy making remakes of adaptations of old TV sitcoms, a filmmaker comes along with a movie that is so fresh, so different and so seemingly original that it makes everyone else spill their kiwi frappuccinos in their rush to grab its coattails. More to the point, every now and then a film comes along that upsets the paradigmatic fruit cart and so insinuates itself into the larger zeitgeist that it becomes a cinematic watershed, and in some way the history of movies is forever after defined in terms of those films that came before, versus those that came after.

As you may have guessed, I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that Star Wars'
is one such film. The original 1977 movie had such an enormous impact, and left its footprints so far and wide across our popular consciousness, that there is simply no ignoring it now. The social phenomenon that is Star Wars is like a granite mountain or a law of physics; any work of fiction that comes afterward must either acknowledge its presence or find a way to work around it. For good or ill, Star Wars is a movie that has changed the world.

In being this, it joins a rather elect and somewhat peculiar company. The Jazz Singer (1927), The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Ten Commandments (1956), Psycho (1960), The Graduate (1967): all of these are films that changed their respective worlds, and all changed them in different ways and for different reasons. Nor is there necessarily a correlation between being a "great" film and being a "good" film: George Romero's original 1968 version of Night of the Living Dead, for example, is almost universally regarded as a lousy picture, but ever since, it's been impossible to venture into the same territory without either paying homage to it or working against it. D. W. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation, on the other hand, is generally considered a great film that forever changed the way dramatic narratives unfold on screen-but watch it as I have, with a roomful of African American film students, and you might come away with a somewhat different impression. And while Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 masterpiece Triumph of the Will is unquestionably a great film, it is equally unquestionably an evil film, right down to the blackest depths of its utterly rotten core.

What, then, makes Star Wars both a great film and a good film, and one that's been both very good to its creator and a positive influence on the films and other works of fiction that have come after? Well, to assess the impact of something, you must first determine how to establish a baseline, and in this case I believe the proper way to start is by asking one question: what was the state of sci-fie
in films in the years immediately preceding the release of the original Star Wars?