Star Wars on Trial (42 page)

ADIES AND GENTLEMEN of the jury: i

Most people would agree that there's a difference between fantasy and science fiction-except, of course, for people who shelve books in chain bookstores-but what exactly is that difference? Unless we can agree on this basic distinction, there would be no point in arguing that Star Wars was one and not the other.

At first glance it might seem like the key difference between the two is whether the story uses science or magic to explain any speculative story elements. But one problem with this approach, as Arthur C. Clarke famously pointed out, is that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." There's some truth to this, which means that simply using science or technology is not enough to make a story science fiction. And, to take the other extreme, any system of "magic" that follows universal, well-understood rules would effectively make the study of this magic a science.

But surely we can agree that there's a real difference between magic and science, between rules made up for a story and the rules that actually might govern our universe. Here's a thought experiment: Pick some speculative element from a science fiction or fantasy story, and imagine asking the author why that element works the way that it does. Then ask why about the answer, and then why again, like an over-curious nine-year-old. If the trail of "whys" eventually leads to something we know about the real world, shouldn't we call that science fiction? If it leads to a snappy "Just because!" well, wouldn't that make it a fantasy?

In this way of thinking, the important point is not whether the story is about dragons or rocket ships, but rather the attitude of the story toward those speculative elements. If the story treats those elements as a natural extension of the real world, if the story implies that the string of "whys" would intersect with known reality, then it's science fiction. But if those elements are just some big "what-if" exercise, then that part of the story is fantasy.

This explains why typical science fiction is set the future, something that might result from present-day reality. Fantasies, on the other hand, are often set in some alternate world with no clear connection to our own. There's no need to explain the location of that alternate world, or how exactly to get there from here. In a fantasy those answers will come down to magic, or at least a "Just because."

This distinction between science fiction and fantasy is the only one that really draws a meaningful line between two fundamentally different ways of telling a speculative story. And while it's still possible to find examples that blur the distinction between the two, those borderline cases are forced to treat the story inconsistently. For although fantastic premises must be simply accepted, science fiction premises not only can be questioned, but will be questioned by the audience. You can't ask an audience to both take something as a given and also question it, which means that attempts to blur my suggested distinction between fantasy and science fiction will simply lead to bad storytelling.

And so, with these thoughts in mind, let us turn our attention to Star Wars. Specifically, I will now introduce Exhibit A:

"A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...."

The very first line in each movie screams out that we're on the fantasy side of the divide. Sure, we sort of know where and when this is taking place with respect to present-day Earth, but there's no connection between anything in this story and known reality. These events are not some future history. They're not even some secret past history. By placing the setting in the distant past, in a faraway galaxy, George Lucas was effectively introducing an alternate fantasy universe. You can't get there from here.

Lucas puts this text at the beginning of his movies for a reason. Not only to create a sense of epic myth, but also to make sure the audience wouldn't question some of his premises. Indeed, in the commentary on the special edition of the original Star Wars, Lucas himself gives us Exhibit B:

Since it's based on a very, kind of, old story, and not a high-tech story, it's more of a fantasy film than a science fiction film.

If Lucas had a better understanding of the difference between fantasy and science fiction I could rest my case right here. (And we also wouldn't have had to suffer through the midichlorian debacle in Episode I, but we'll come back to that subject later.)

Unfortunately, while Lucas is admitting it's a fantasy, this confession seems to be based on the misimpression that it is technology that makes science fiction. But as Clarke tells us, technology and magic can be indistinguishable-you can use both in a fantasy, so long as they're just "what-ifs" without a well-thought-out connection to known science. Similarly, the issue of whether a story is "old" or not-a retelling of old myths-doesn't necessarily make it fall in one category or the other. Still, Exhibit B is useful, because it tells us a bit about Lucas's motives. He's not striving to make this science fiction, which means he's not striving to connect his premises to reality. This is reinforced elsewhere in the same commentary, when Lucas says:

And in terms of fantasy films and everything, I can't stand it when you sit around and try to explain why a teleporter works....

Clearly the technology in these movies does not make them science fiction; they're treated as what-ifs, so they might as well be magic. But the heart and soul of Star Wars, the speculative element that arguably made the movie so incredibly successful, is the idea of the Force. Enter Exhibit C, spoken by Obi-Wan Kenobi in Episode IV:

[The Force is] an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together.

I trust that I don't have to bring in any physicists as expert witnesses to tell you that there is no such thing. This is a fantasy premise, through and through; a what-if that the audience fully accepts because by this point in the movie it's clear that we're watching fantasy, not science fiction. Three different characters in Episode IV, including Han Solo, refer to the force as a "religion." A startlingly effective religion, for sure, but the repetition of that word throughout the movie is no accident. A religion is something that you take on faith, not something that you test with science. The line between faith and science is very similar to the line between fantasy and science fiction, and Lucas is clearly putting faith and the Force on the same side of the line.

The issue here is not whether the Force is real or not in the movies. Han himself is converted from his original view that "There's no mystical energy field that controls my destiny," and few would argue that Luke's success at destroying the Death Star resulted from his skill at bull's-eyeing womp rats. The issue here is that the audience has faith that the Force exists in the Star Wars universe, despite the fact that there is no connection between the Force and anything we know about the real world.

And what holds it all together is that the audience doesn't want answers, the audience is willing to just accept the premise. Lucas himself goes to considerable effort to make sure this remains the case, by not asking "why" Consider Exhibit D, Lucas's commentary on Episode I:

Every time these rather larger concepts come into play-how does the galaxy work, what is the Force, all this kind of stuff-you have to be very sort of cryptic and deal in almost fortune-cookie descriptions of things.