Star Wars on Trial (50 page)

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-

DROID JUDGE: Your point is taken under advisement. Shall we proceed to the next charge?

DAVID BRIN: By all means. The Prosecution now calls Jeanne Cavelos to address the issue of whether women ought to have a beef with Star Wars.