Star Wars on Trial (49 page)

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 something 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.

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.