Star Wars on Trial (55 page)

As a friend, I think you really need to break off your unhealthy codependent relationship with George Lucas. His achievementsincluding the creation of Princess Leia's character in the original film-are amazing, inspiring, groundbreaking. But he's not perfect. The Star Wars films went on to undermine her, neglect her and sap her strength, and the sooner you stop making excuses for that, the sooner you can get out of that uncomfortable-looking pretzel position. I know a good chiropractor.

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Hey, thanks. Can he do anything for this cold chill I get whenever Opposing Counsel looks this way? Or how my mind goes blank whenever he twitches his fingers like that?

DROID JUDGE: Mr. Stover, the Court suspects that the blankness of your mind has nothing to do with Force-based powers.

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER Probably true, Your Honor. Well, thanks anyway, Ms. Cavelos, and on behalf of Lucas Enterprises and the entire Star Wars franchise, I would like to take this moment to apologize to you personally for not putting some brutal torture of Princess Leia on-screen. It was a mistake. I'm sure we'd all feel better about her character if we could have watched her screaming in agony.

DAVID BRIN: Objection! That's not a question-he's just abusing the witness.

DROID JUDGE: Sustained.

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Don't want to see her in pain, huh?

DAVID BRIN: (tiredly) Objection....

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Withdrawn. No further questions.

DROID JUDGE: Mr. Stover, you have not addressed the portrayal of the other female character, Padme Amidala.

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Your Honor, I most certainly have. I spent nearly a hundred pages addressing exactly that in my novelization of Revenge of the Sith, and members of the jury still troubled by this issue can find my arguments in better bookstores everywhere (another shameless self-promoting plug). Next witness!

-HINGS WERE NOT GOING well for the good guys. I

Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Chewbacca the Wookiee had just infiltrated the detention level of the first Death Star. They had located the missing Princess Leia, but the only way out of the cell block was through a squadron of imperial stormtroopers.

"This is some rescue," Leia says. "When you came in here, didn't you have a plan for getting out?"

"He's the brains, sweetheart," Han snaps, referring to Luke.

The princess's response is almost as quick. She grabs Luke's blaster and fires at a panel on the opposite side of the corridor. "What the hell are you doing?" Han demands.

"Someone has to save our skins!" Leia crosses the corridor, while laying down covering fire. "Into the garbage chute, flyboy!" she orders.

Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope changed the face of movies in many ways. One change that is sometimes overlooked is the role of women in action-adventure films. The Star Wars films gave us women who didn't wait passively to be rescued, women who could match the male characters in independence and resourcefulness.

The above scene captured this new attitude for a lot of people. And that approach received a warm welcome. Like many first-gen eration Star Wars fans, I made regular trips to the theater in 1977 to explore that galaxy far, far away. On those trips, I often heard cheering and applause when Leia took charge on the detention level.

Although there have been some definite missteps along the way, strong female characters like Princess Leia have appeared in the SW prequel trilogy and in the licensed fiction of the Expanded Universe. In addition, she has made an impact on pop fiction as a whole. Ripley, Sarah Connor, Buffy Summers and Xena can all trace their ancestry back to Leia Organa. Leia even paved the way for another character that Lucas had a hand in creating: Marion Ravenwood, the hard-drinking, tough-talking female lead of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Now, almost thirty years after A New Hope, seeing a strong woman in an action-adventure film doesn't produce the same surprise that it used to. So, I think a good way to explain what George Lucas, Carrie Fisher and the other SW creators accomplished would be to compare Leia against other women in pop culture in the 1970s.

Hollywood was willing to cast women as stars in serious dramas during that time. In 1974, Ellen Burstyn starred in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. In 1977, the year A New Hope was released, Vanessa Redgrave starred in Julia, while Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine shared the lead in The Turning Point.

Action-adventure films, however, were another matter entirely. The testosterone-laden Dirty Harry and The French Connection premiered in the early 1970s. They were followed by The Exorcist, which featured the young Linda Blair as a damsel in demonic distress.

As far as genre films were concerned, I think the character that came closest to Leia during that time was Zira, the chimpanzee scientist portrayed by Kim Hunter in the first three Planet of the Apes films. Zira didn't have any combat skills-chimpanzee pacifism was a significant plot point in the series-but she was intelligent, strongwilled and unwilling to be treated like a second-class citizen.

The situation on television was a little better. Both Wonder Woman and the Bionic Woman were fighting crime during the mid-70s. People who wanted to watch TV late Friday night-or who had that technological innovation, the VCR-could watch Joanna Lumley invoke the spirit of Diana Rigg on The New Avengers.

At the same time, this was the era of Charlie's Angels and Police Woman. For those unfamiliar with the latter show, here's how The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows describes Police Woman: "Sexy Sgt. Pepper Anderson (Angie Dickinson) was an undercover agent for the criminal conspiracy department of the Los Angeles Police Department ... she was called on to portray everything from a prostitute to a gangster's girlfriend."

There's a reason why the phrase "jiggle TV" originated in the seventies.

"THE BOYS JUST KIND OF TAG ALONG"

George Lucas has said more than once that the Flash Gordon movie serials were a significant influence in the creation of Star Wars. However, he probably never wanted Leia Organa to be mistaken for Dale Arden, Flash's perpetual girlfriend.

In "The Characters of Star Wars," a mini-documentary on the original trilogy DVD set, Lucas says, "It was always about these twins, and their father.... At some point I took the female lead and made her the hero and then, eventually, I shifted it around to the male character."

On the audio commentary for A New Hope, Lucas says he considers Episode IV to be Leia's story. "The boys just kind of tag along on her adventure."

Princess Leia is young, Lucas says, but "instead of being kind of an idealistic young farm boy from the nether lands of the galaxy [she's] very sophisticated, an urbanized ruler, a senator.... She rules people and she's in charge."

Elsewhere in the audio commentary, he says Leia is "very, very strong even though she's very young.... She's pretty much in control of things."

Carrie Fisher told another interviewer that Lucas "wanted me to be proud and frightening....I was not a damsel in distress. I was a distressing damsel."

This approach did cause some problems for Fisher, as a performer and as a writer. In her part of the audio commentary, Fisher says she wanted a chance to ad-lib some of her lines in A New Hope. However, she said, it wasn't easy to change Leia's dialogue. "When I would change it, I would make it funny, and really, she's not that funny." Given that Fisher has gone on to write novels and screenplays rich in humor, it's really not a surprise to hear that her ad-libs were funny.

I think Leia maintains her strength and independence in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. In the former, she leads the evacuation of Hoth and spars verbally with Han Solo during the long trip to Cloud City. In the latter, Leia takes part in a clever reworking of the Orpheus myth. She enters the metaphorical underworld of Jabba the Hutt, in a daring attempt to rescue Han.

Of course Jedi also contains the sequence where Leia is enslaved byjabba, and dressed in a skimpy outfit reminiscent of the women in metal bras who decorated the covers of science fiction magazines in the 1950s. Now this certainly detracted from her image as a liberated woman, but it should be remembered that, at that point, she wasn't liberated. She was a slave. Jabba had her dressed in those clothes; she didn't choose them for herself.