From a certain point of view...
What
are the most personal films ever made? In fact, what is it that defines a
personal film in the first place? Is it the quasi-autobiographical stylings of
Woody Allen in his prime, turning his intimately hilarious stand-up routines
into little New York operas of love and loss? Is it the works of Abbas
Kiarostami, who went so far as to not only make movies of his life experiences,
but then go on to remake said experiences within the context of making movies
themselves? What if I told you that some of the most personal films ever made
boil down to a quiet kid from Modesto speeding around in his convertible,
trusty canine companion Indiana in the passenger’s seat, his overactive
imagination painting them as a space pirate and his fuzz-ball alien copilot
zipping around the galaxy on one unbelievable adventure after another? Because,
make no mistake, the Star Wars films are
an intensely personal expression of their own creator’s life (yes, even the
Prequels), and they do so within the confines of one of the most populist film
franchises out there.
But to best understand
how the Star Wars saga encapsulates
its maker’s experience upon this little blue marble of ours, first we must go
back to the oldest of stories: the one where the boy meets the girl. The boy
was named George Lucas, and the girl was Marcia Griffin.
The
fact that Lucasfilm has almost wiped all mention of Marcia Griffin from the
history of Star Wars is a shame of
the highest caliber - one that hopefully that company’s new management will
seek to rectify in the coming years. Being that she was one of the editors on
the first film and subsequently won an Oscar for her troubles, she always gets
a passing mention in all the officially-sanctioned “Making of…” books, but Marcia’s influence extends far beyond winning the
little golden statuette. It’s not a stretch to say that without Marcia Griffin,
there would be no Star Wars (or, at
the very least, not in the form we know it today). Frankly, it’s safe to say
that with no Marcia Griffin, there would be
no George Lucas, either.
The
two met by chance, a USC film student and a seasoned assistant thrown together
on a project legendary film editor Verna Fields had assigned them to, and they
seemed an odd-yet-perfect match in that beautifully-rare way of complimenting
opposites. Lucas was the prototypical nerd: quiet, shy, but fiercely
intelligent and with a seemingly-endless imagination. Griffin, in turn, was the
dream of every male film nerd: bright, beautiful and outgoing, and able to argue
Goddard or Kurosawa with the best of them. The two eventually married and found
themselves becoming titans of the film industry in their own, particular ways:
Lucas as a filmmaker/outright media mogul, and Griffin as one of the defining editors
of the Film School Brat generation.
It
was not always so, however; Lucas’ first film was a flop. THX 1137 was a technical marvel (and absolutely worth seeing, if
any of you still haven’t taken the plunge into Lucas’ early work), but
emotionally distant - far more concerned with what it was trying to say without
ever figuring out why it wanted to say it in the first place. Griffin was
reportedly never fond of the movie, and was incredibly supportive of Lucas’
idea to turn to something personal for his follow-up, something that was more
emotionally engaging than the experimental films her husband was so fond of. And
that was how the most indie of independent filmmakers, who once planned to
shoot his friend John Milius’ script Apocalypse
Now documentary-style on location in Vietnam while the war was still
raging, wound up directing an honest-to-goodness, feel-good Hollywood film, what
is arguably still Lucas’ best: American
Graffiti, a coming-of-age tale about kids and their cars in the early
sixties. The success of that film gave Lucas the clout to bring his biggest
dream yet to the screen, a children’s sci-fi saga that would recall the passions
of his youth whilst also pushing them forward into uncharted territory. But the
filmmaker was still stuck in his own head, busily writing down complicated
histories and civilizations inspired by cheap pulp thrills and old movie
serials. It was Griffin who helped him bring it back down to a relatable human
place, all the way up to when they were assembling the film into the final cut
for which she won her Oscar for.
Star Wars came out in the summer of 1977,
and you all know how that particular strand of the story wound up. Its
monumental success further emboldened Lucas to build his own Hollywood away
from LA, turning the nascent Lucasfilm, Ltd into something far more than a mere
production company - a multimedia empire where he could make the movies he
wanted to make unencumbered from the major studios. He threw himself into its
building with a passion that was borderline obsessive. Lucas became more
difficult to work with and harder to reach - literally and emotionally. That
all-encompassing devotion to building the company slowly drove a wedge in
George and Marcia’s relationship, one that eventually ended in divorce the same
year Return of the Jedi was released
and Lucas’ epic trilogy was completed.
It was a messy break-up by all accounts, with the Lucas’ mutual friend Steven Spielberg once
saying in an interview with 60 Minutes,
“George and Marcia, for me, were the reason you got married, because it was
insurance policy that marriages do work...and when that marriage didn't work, I
lost my faith in marriage for a long time.” Following their divorce, Griffin
left the film industry altogether and Lucas fell into a deep depression,
stepping back from directing and engaging in most projects in a producer-only
capacity. It seemed like Star Wars too
was done for good and all, destined to settle into a cult-film status following
its original success. But then, as these things usually go, Lucas got bitten by
the bug again, and found himself intrigued by the possibility of returning to
the world of Star Wars with an
all-new trilogy. These new films wouldn’t be sequels, however, but rather
prequels, and would go on to tell the story of bad guy-turned-tragic hero Darth
Vader’s fall from grace…
Do you see what I’m
getting at here, dear reader? Are those six little pieces of George Lucas
falling into place? Because the Star Wars
saga is many things, but - when viewed through the filter of Lucas’ evolution
as an artist - it is most chiefly a reflection of the filmmaker’s own life and
career. Look at the story told by the original trilogy, and you see the younger
Lucas weaving threadlike beneath the very fabric of the main story itself: a
young hero standing up and proving himself against a vast and nigh-unbeatable
establishment, the figurehead of which it turns out is his literal father - the
plight of the entire Baby Boomer generation laid bare for all to see. Fast-forward
twenty years later, and with the Prequel trilogy we get another young hero,
only this time it’s different. This time the hero is working for the establishment, and becomes so corrupted through his
devotion and obsession that he loses his wife and everything he holds dear in
the process - the prophesied hero becoming the very thing he was supposed to
defeat in the first place. That’s more or less the journey of George Lucas, the
Eternal Skywalker of the Star Wars universe,
who “won” the story of his life by making peace with the fact that he had
undergone a sub-Oedipal transformation from the brash son to the co-opted
father (as many a Boomer has likely discovered on many a New Age therapist’s
couch).
That to me is why the
Prequels can never be written off completely - you literally cannot trace
Lucas’ career or life without including them alongside the actual good movies
of the series. That’s what makes them art in the truest sense, an honest and
naked look into the mind of George Lucas. Now, this isn’t some defense of those
dramatically inert, lifeless jumbles of pixels and trade negotiations; they’re
unmitigated piles of shit. But they are
still art. Some people like to think of that term as purely a descriptor of
quality, reserved only for the best of the best, the most hoi of the aristoi. But
art is far more complex than that. Art is true neutral - neither
intrinsically good nor bad. As long as something is an expression of whatever’s
going on inside the creator’s head, then that makes it art. And despite their prepackaged
Cambellian mythmaking and their endlessly marketable toyetic qualities, the Star Wars saga provides a unique look
into the artistic evolution of one of the greatest and ultimately most
compromised filmmakers of our age…
George Lucas’ soul
bared in six little pieces.
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