Star Wars on Trial (36 page)

But once again, we're straying into the no-man's-land between perception and truth, and the point is not worth arguing over. There was an enormous boom in both film and print science fiction in the decade after Star Wars, and while some of us might think that the writing just possibly had something to do with it, if others want to credit the Star Wars coattail-effect, so be it. To dispute this point now is to overlook Lucas's one great, single and hopefully lasting accomplishment. In making Star Wars, George Lucas did just what he claims he set out to do:

He reintroduced the hero.

Consider that for a moment. In an industry dominated by a follow-the-leader mentality, at a time when scripts were full of cynical, violent and foulmouthed antiheroes and Linda Lovelace movies were playing in first-run theaters, George Lucas gave us Luke Skywalker: a pure, honest, good-natured and unalloyed hero. He gave us a stouthearted lad who was loyal to his friends and uncompromising to his enemies; who, when faced with the choice between good and evil, chose good; and who, in the final scene, did not utter a pithy epigram as he finished off his greatest enemy, but actually tried to save him.

That is Lucas's great contribution. Luke Skywalker's cinematic progeny live on, not in the big-budget splat-'em-ups or the later Star Wars episodes,"
but in the movies like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. Movies with kindly hearts. Movies with heroes. And for that one accomplishment alone-even if that were his only accomplishment-I am willing to forgive George Lucas for everything he's done ever since, including Howard the Duck.

P.S. But all the same, Han did shoot first.

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

DROID JUDGE: Mr. Brin, your witness.

DAVID BRIN: The Prosecution will gladly stipulate the honorable Mr. Bethke's central point, that the original Star Wars movie, later called Episode IV A New Hope, was revolutionary in that it stimulated ebullience, wonder and joy, where SF filmmaking had been obsessed with the dark and depressing.

So? We are not here to look at Episode IV all by itself. Indeed, a key Prosecution contention has been that the joyful, can-do spirit of Episodes IV and V was gradually eroded and betrayed, as time went on, until a dreary sense of utter fatalism took over. One that eats away at us, even now.

Consider The Phantom Menace. Can you point to a single heroic act, by any Jedi or those poor, slaughtered Gungans that even remotely makes a difference or makes anything better? Palpatine's plan was to use the crisis to get appointed Chancellor, and then be seen coming to the rescue. This plan was accomplished, and he grins while the surviving heroes foolishly celebrate a totally unvictory. Bummer!

The Prosecution accepts Mr. Bethke's point about Episode IV But isn't it only half a point. What about today? What has Star Wars done for us lately?

BRUCE BETHKE: An excellent question. This is why I believe it's essential to talk about Star Wars as two series, set in the same universe, but separated by sixteen years. In the original 1977-1983 series we were plunging into an unknown universe, with each new scene revealing a new wonder or a new thrill, and at the end of the series the future of every character still living was still wide open. In the later 1999-2005 series we were returning to a known universe, and to the stories of characters whose fates were already long since decided, so of course these episodes are saturated with dreary fatalism. We know how it all ends. There is little room for surprise or unexpected character development, as the characters' futures are closed. The story of Anakin's rise and fall unfolds with exactly the same sense of slow and awful inexorability as a slow-motion car crash on an icy road. All that's left to do is to marvel at the scenery while it happens and try to enjoy the ride. (Er, I just remembered that you live in California. Does this metaphor make sense to you?)

In a peculiar way, I believe Lucas was a victim of his own early success, and the later trilogy is in some strange sense a 1980s period piece. I think he felt trapped by the story lines he'd already ended, the situations he'd already explained and the wonders he'd already put on-screen, and this sense of being trapped shows up, however subconsciously, in the story he wrote. I'm sure there were things he didn't think of when he made those early films, that he thought of and would have found really cool to use in the later films, but he couldn't, because they would have contradicted his own established orthodoxy. For example, in a universe where clones are apparently cheaper and have fewer rights than droids, and the man-to-machine interface is seamless-witness the Skywalker boys' repeated resurrections from the spare parts bin-it's surprising that clones aren't routinely vivisected and turned into integrated weapons systems or truly mechanized warriors, a la General Grievous.

There must have been a lot of ideas like this that occurred to Lucas while he was making the later series, and he must have found it enormously frustrating to be unable to use them.

So, to answer the question of what Star Wars has done for us lately:

1. As I said in the main body of my testimony, it restored the cinematic fortunes of the unalloyed hero. To give us Luke Skywalker in an age of rampant antiheroes, and to give us a film in the 1970s that lacked the seemingly obligatory profanity and nude scenes, was a move of great courage. I do believe that the success of Star Wars is what made films like the Lord of the Rings movies, The Chronicles of Narnia and the Harry Potter series possible.

(To truly appreciate what a departure the original three movies were, just imagine what they would have been like if they'd been made by Sam Peckinpah or Martin Scorsese.)

2. It made it much easier for subsequent SF films to get the green light for production and the budget needed to do the special effects right. One need only compare the Academy Award-winning special effects in Logan's Run (1976) to anything made after 1980 to appreciate the difference. So for example, while the success of Star Wars did not make Star Trek: The Motion Picture possible, it quite likely had a strong effect on the amount of time and money that Paramount was willing to put into effects in postproduction, and it probably had a very profound effect on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which is the movie that really launched the rebirth of the Star Trek franchise. In fact, in my mind's ear I can almost hear some Paramount studio executive saying to Roddenberry, "Gene, baby, loved the first movie, but for the next one, you really need to blow up some spaceships. And are you sure you can't have Kirk and Khan get into a big laser sword fight at the end?"

3. It raised the bar and provided the impetus for major and continuing advances in special effects technology, especially in the areas of CGI and SPMD programming models. I realize this is a two-edged sword and that in my other testimony I criticize the later movies for overuse of CGI, but speaking now on a purely personal level, as someone who has a circuit board from S/N 108 hanging on the wall above my desk, I think that this was a truly great thing.

S/N 108, 1 should point out, was the Cray X-MP supercomputer used to generate the CGI footage used in The Last Starfighter (1984), 2010 (1984), Dune (1984), Labyrinth (1986) and the pilot for Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987). This machine was returned to Cray in 1987 and kept running as a test bed and as the backup for a meteorology system in India, until we finally decommissioned and scrapped it in 2001. Not a bad track record for a twenty-year-old pile of hardware, eh?

4. It gave us the film career of Harrison Ford. Without Star Wars there would have been no Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Ford would probably have spent the rest of his career playing supporting roles in clunkers like Force 10 from Navarone. The fact that Lucas later changed the cantina scene would seem to indicate that he really didn't understand what he'd created in Han Solo, and the fact that there is no comparable character in the later series seems to indicate that he really didn't understand that it was Harrison Ford who was the star of the original series.

Look: Han shot first. It's a defining moment for his character, easily equal to when Rick Blaine plugs Major Strasser in Casablanca, and I could write a lengthy essay on this topic alone. But I'm trying to reach a conclusion here, so we'll move along.

5. Finally, from a writer's point of view, the Star Wars series taken in toto has taught us all a very important lesson, and this is: prequels are bad. Science fiction writers should always strive to go forward, into the unknown, and to tell the story that has not been told yet. Speculation is more interesting than history: the story whose ending is not known in advance is always more interesting to more people than the story that goes back and explains how things got to be the way they are now. From the very first frame of The Phantom Menace we know that the Jedi will be destroyed, the Republic will fall, and the Empire will rise. In retrospect, then, Lucas's single biggest mistake was to go back and tell the story of the rise and fall of Anakin, rather than to go forward and tell the stories of the further adventures of Luke, Han and Leia.

Once Lucas committed to making a prequel, though, there was no way that the second series could be anything but depressing, futile and fatalistic.

DAVID BRIN: If the ebullience of Episodes IV and V helped engender other fun SF films in their day, is it possible that the dour, simmering pessimism of Episodes I-III has been just as influential, helping bring us to the point where it's hard to name more than a few optimistic sci-fi films in the last ten years?

Make your own list. Find more than one or two exceptions to the tone of defeatism, failure and predestined doom that pervades everything from The Matrix to the new Battlestar Galactica.

BRUCE BETHKE: I'll admit my list is pretty short: Men in Black, Men in Black II, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Independence Day, Stargate-and now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure Stargate is more than ten years old. Maybe Red Planet, if you count a "survival against impossible odds" story as being optimistic; maybe the comic books movies such as Hellboy, Spider-Man and X-Men, if you want to stretch the definition of sci-fi far enough to include them.

But I don't think we can lay the blame for this on Episodes I through III. As I think the list of precursor films described in the main body of this testimony shows, sci-fi has always had a profoundly pessimistic streak. Even in print, optimistic SF stories are rare; by and large, sci-fi is the literature of disaster, human extinction, inhuman invasions and the end of the world as we know it. Even the Hitchhiker's Guide series starts with the complete destruction of the Earth and the near-total annihilation of humanity, and even the genre's most optimistic stories usually require the viewpoint characters to experience some difficult dislocations, terrifying transformations and painful sacrifices before the ostensibly happy ending is reached.

I believe the reason for this is far older than and goes beyond the influence of a few recent movies. I might even go so far as to claim that it's a fundamental principle: science fiction is the literature of people who are deeply discontented with the way things really are right now.

I mean, when you're telling the optimistic story of contented people, you're peddling a utopia, right? And what's more boring than utopia? The readers, writers and fans of science fiction have always shown a pronounced preference for dystopia. If you present them with a utopia, they immediately start looking for the blue pill, the seamy underside, the dirty little secret that underlies everything, the Morlocks munching away in the dark, or at least the incinerator that everyone goes into when they turn thirty.