Attack on Star Wars

CHAPTER 8

The attacks on Star Wars were again typically cultural, political and philosophical, inspired by its pre-supposition of an essential conflict between Good and Evil which could be translated as a "Cold War" view, and its subscription to various other values outlined earlier.  More than one hostile critic identified it as being in favour of "free enterprise".  As with The Lord of The Rings it was taken by its opponents more seriously than one might expect if it had been a mere escapist fantasy.  Heavy critical artillery was brought up to attack it.  The American liberal screen-writer William Goldman called Star Wars a "comic-book movie", ⁽⁵⁶⁾ while lamenting the box-office failure of films at variance with traditional ideas of heroism.  Similar critiques were made of other successful films at variance with progressive pre-conceptions.

The thrust of many less obviously dialectical progressive critiques of Star Wars, apart from simple abuse, was that it was unoriginal, and exploited previously-used ideas or images.  This criticism, apart from suggesting George Lucas was some sort of rapacious class-enemy, again showed conscious or unconscious hostility to the idea of an artifact being the product of a long tradition.  The New Statesman, for example, published a lengthy and hostile review by New Worlds editor Michael Moorcock, who described Star Wars as being, among other things "the biggest exploitation movie of them all ... a naive compendium of other people's images used haphazardly without grace or wit". ⁽⁵⁷⁾  He continued, "It rips off a sub-culture and gives nothing back to it.  It is an empty thing".  How a film could have "ripped off" a sub-culture and given nothing (or anything) back, except in some private meta-physical sense, is a mystery.

The reaction, the critique, even the vocabulary as it emerged, was strikingly similar to Stimson, Richardson etc. vis-a vis Tolkien.  Moorcock attacked George Lucas personally ("... the first to claim so much credit for so little work"), and alleged that he had exploited writers and artists, evidently meaning those who had created less-successful fantasy stories.  New Worlds itself had in fact not scrupled to publish stories that a critic might say looked like exploitations of themes and images popularised and made fashionable by Tolkien, such as stories of noble, fair elves fighting brutish trolls.  Indeed, it might be said that under Moorcock's editorship New Worlds had exploited Tolkien's name even more directly.  Issue No. 168 (1965), had advertised an exclusive interview with Tolkien in large letters on its cover (since it was an interview rather than an article, one may assume Tolkien was not paid for it).  It might further be argued that some of the titles and themes of Moorcock's own books also exploited the popularisation of heroic fantasy achieved by The Lord of The Rings.  These included The History of The Runestaff, The Sword of The Dawn, The Knight of the Swords, and The Sword and The Stallion.

Moorcock's criticism of Lucas was rather reminiscent of the progressivist critique of the English painter Constable, which held that Constable, coming of a property-owning family, had appropriated and taken possession of the English landscape for himself with paint.  As Bernard Levin suggested in answer to this, no pieces of the English landscape are actually missing as a result of Constable's activities.  Similarly, Star Wars had impoverished no preceding works, except that it made many of them look rather feeble by comparison.

In another 1977 article, with the loaded title "Starship Storm-troopers", ⁽⁵⁸⁾ Moorcock made his political agenda more obvious.  Star Wars, he said, raised instinct above reason, a fundamental Nazi doctrine.  The statement that Star Wars raised instinct above reason is apparently based on the fact that in the successful attack on the first Death Star, Luke Skywalker turns off his targeting computer (a dubious representative of Reason) and at various times when learning the ways of the Force is told to trust his feelings.  Such an injunction has obvious echoes of some Zen teachings and aspects of it are found in most religions and ethical systems, as well as in some stories by Moorcock himself. ⁽⁵⁹⁾

Accepting the Force involves making moral choices in ways that are anathema, or meaningless, to totalitarians.  To describe this as a "fundamental Nazi doctrine" is an absurd distortion.  Again, the hypothetical parallel detection of a "fundamental Communist doctrine" by a "right-wing" critic from comparable evidence would surely give rise to charges of literary McCarthyism.

Moorcock wrote in the same article that he considered Tolkien's ideas comparable to Hitler's.  He said that if he were sitting in a tube train and the other passengers were all reading Mein Kampf with obvious enjoyment and approval, it would not disturb him much more than if they were reading Tolkien.

Moreover, he claimed, Tolkien's villains were "thinly-disguised working class agitators" -- an odd, a very odd, description, one feels, of Sauron and Smaug, Shelob and Saruman, unless perhaps "working-class agitator" and "totalitarian tyrant" mean the same thing (of course the author of Mein Kampf was both).  Moorcock argued that Star Wars was authoritarian and totalitarian, and asked:  "What if the Force comes knocking at your door at 3 a.m.?"  With singular inappropriateness, he also recalled here his own role in organising a petition by some science-fiction writers opposing the Western defence of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.  (When, partly as a result of many organised protests, Western troops were withdrawn, it was the abandoned Indo-Chinese who got the 3 a.m. door-knocks, but that was another story.)  Robert Heinlein, from whose novel Starship Troopers, Moorcock, with obvious didactic intent, took the title for his article, was associated with a counter-petition that Western troops should continue to defend the people of Indo-China.

Moorcock returned to the attack later in Wizardry and Wild Romance, ⁽⁶⁰⁾ particularly in the essay "Epic Pooh", an emotional attack on "bourgeois" heroic fantasy.  He described The Lord of The Rings as being, among other things, "a pernicious confirmation of the values of a morally bankrupt middle class".  In this book he widened the indictment to include the work of the Czech-British playwright Tom Stoppard, apparently for similar reasons.

Another review of Star Wars in the same issue of the New Statesman as Moorcock's, by John Coleman, asked plaintively why "this olio should have been so gratefully grabbed by both audience and media?"

A benign but significantly rather defensive review in the Illustrated London News denied that Star Wars was "a sign of newly emerging Fascism", or that there were Fascist echoes in the final scene where Princess Leia decorates the heroes with medals in a great hall before a parade of the rebel troops.  It was, critic Michael Billington said:

[W]ittily inventive ... aimed at all age groups ... beautifully designed ... if people are flocking to it in large numbers it is because they hunger for a well-made escapist fantasy ... I, for one, do not begrudge it its success.

When "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi" appeared, with enormous success, in 1980 and 1983, Coleman's attitude had hardened.  Of "The Empire Strikes Back", he commented:

Already it is possible to foresee the day when conveyor-belts start moving in the PhD factories and silly old Tolkien is quite dethroned.

It was, he said, much worse than its predecessor (the first Star Wars film was now called "A New Hope").  "The Empire Strikes Back" was:

[F]ar less entertaining at almost every level. ... That undercurrent of irresponsible gaiety that largely reconciled some of us to the plot confusions and unacknowledged borrowings ⁽⁶¹⁾ has been, by and large, defused ... delusions of significance.

This was probably one of the last times a progressive journal used the word "gaiety" in that particular sense.  Coleman sneered at the actor Mark Hamill, who plays Luke Skywalker, for having said "I know that being Luke Skywalker places upon me the responsibility to lead a good life", a statement which New Statesman readers would apparently think too self-evidently ridiculous for anything but derision, the fact that Mark Hamill-Luke Skywalker might be a hero and role-model to many children notwithstanding.  It might, said Coleman, "tell us as much about the way this giant project is being promoted as it does about the inner workings of Mr Hamill".  By the time of "Return of the Jedi", Coleman's ire was well and truly raised.  He began:  "One of the biggest cinematic cons of all time goes on its noisy, mindless way".

He paused, however, to make a self-criticism, with an odd vocabulary almost hinting at sin or guilt being confessed before a People's Court, that it was "Better to admit right off that I quite enjoyed Star Wars back in 1977".  For this lapse he proceeded to attempt atonement.  Again, a string of abusive phrases and buzzwords were employed, rather than reasoned criticism.  No specific flaws in construction or texture were pointed to.  The word "con", presumably meaning confidence-trick, was unexplained.  Was the audience's money being somehow taken under false pretences?  Was the film showing less than it purported to and not giving full value?  Did it contain hidden didactic pitfalls?  Or was it ideologically unsound?  Coleman seemed not to notice that while reasoned argument contra mundum may be noble, abuse contra mundum, with nothing to back it, risks looking ridiculous.  It said, perhaps, something about the inner workings of Mr Coleman that he described Carrie Fisher, the actress playing the heroine in the most successful film series of all time as "unappealing", not, apparently, as his personal judgement but as objective fact. ⁽⁶²⁾

"Return of the Jedi" was, Coleman said, "resoundingly hollow and rootless".  Apart from Carrie Fisher being "unappealing", the "freak creatures" had been introduced with "absolute Muppet-show arbitrariness" (no more "irresponsible gaiety"), while George Lucas's "tumorous child-brain" had "no position and no point".  He further emphasised George Lucas's class enemy status by asserting that he wore Gucci shoes.  He seemed particularly angered in his final review, of 3 June, 1983, by what he called "The Sting".  That was the opening legend:  "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away".  Most people, he said, talked about Star Wars as if it were set in the future, "barely noticing that the crucial 'ago' implies past events.  What wily Mr Lucas has always been doing, of course, is to blend SF with sword-and-sorcery".  What evidently made this so objectionable was that it was subversive of an idea of scientific progressivism.

Lucas, incidentally, had written quite plainly and without the least wiliness, that Star Wars:  "unites the hardware of contemporary science-fiction with the romantic fantasies of sword and sorcery" in the book of the film published in 1976.

Across the Atlantic, the Nation's film critic, Robert Hatch, on 25 June 1977, said of the first Star Wars film:

Star Wars belongs to the sub-basement, or interstellar comic-strip, school of science-fiction:  "Terry and the Pirates" with astro-drive. ... [Han Solo] is an irreverent free-enterpriser. .,. This is the sort of thing that leaches one's brain.

[emphasis added]

Again, the tone of the attack on "Return of the Jedi" in the New Statesman was largely duplicated in the Nation in a review by Robert Hatch on 18 June 1983:

George Lucas, the presiding genius of Star Wars, wants us to take his enterprise seriously.  When "The Empire Strikes Back" -- the middle film of the middle section of the projected nine-part saga -- was released three years ago, he remarked to a New York Times interviewer, "Fairy tales are how people learn about good and evil, about how to conduct themselves in society" ... Used in moderation, cuteness is a useful ingredient of popular amusement, but I doubt that viewers cooing over valorous balls of fur are learning much about good and evil.  Nor do I think that they will conduct themselves better in society by being persuaded that morality deals in absolutes and that virtue is the prerogative of supermen.  Fairy tales no doubt embody our fears and aspirations;  how reliable they are as moral guides is another question.

This review distorted the plot beyond what might reasonably be expected by the limitations of space in that the "moral" parts of the film had nothing to do with "valorous balls of fur" (presumably a reference to the Ewoks), but to the three-way confrontation between Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader and the Emperor, and the efforts of Luke to resist the temptations of the Dark Side of the Force, on his own and Vader's behalf.  The statement that "virtue is the prerogative of supermen" as a description of the values of the film is also remarkably obtuse.  The "good" side are, throughout the war against the Empire until the end, very much the weaker side.  The expositions of the "good" side's use of the Force by Obi-Wan and Yoda contain no "superman" mentality.  Possibly the word was used here to import Nazi Übermensch associations.

By contrast, an often irreverent neo-Conservative magazine, the American Spectator, in a review of August 1983, gave "Return of the Jedi" serious and favourable treatment praising its "richly suggestive images" of, for example, the difference between those who rule by exploiting human nature and those who rule by suppressing it, and recounting, as an example of the film's artistry:

Dying, Darth Vader requests Luke to remove the headpiece "so I can look upon you with my own eyes".  Again, there is no mention of mind control.  But we see the actor David Prowse's face and head furrowed, bruised and slightly scorched.  Not excessively, but just enough to suggest that wearing the damn thing has always been a constant, low-level pain.  We can feel his physical and mental relief at simply being in the air ...

The fact that Star Wars dealt with traditional moral values was also the subject of derisive comment from Britain by the progressive writer Julie Burchill in Damaged Gods.  In this she wrote:

The Story of Star Wars and the sequels ... is basically a Good v. Evil one.  Not again!  I hear you beg and plead ... ⁽⁶³⁾

Ms Burchill also ridiculed "the usual sensible theories about Star Wars being a CIA plot, etc", and the Moorcock theory that it had Nazi associations ("On the contrary, there is a lot of liberal ethos about the film ... the mega-men are on the bad side").  Unfortunately, her writing was such that it was difficult to guess what point she was trying to make overall.

It was left to a remarkable and perceptive critique in the Communist Party of Australia's theoretical journal Australian Left Review (formerly Communist Review), to seek out, analyse and display the political implications and ideological challenge Star Wars posed.  This critique, unlike some, paid tribute to the film's "crackling pace ... good lines and stunning visuals and special effects".  It was also able to get beyond abuse of Lucas to spell out some reasons why the forces of collectivism must recognise it as enemy work.  Written by Kathe Boehringer, and published in May 1978, this critique is worth quoting at some length:

Given all this monumental dualism and free enterprise special pleading, you'll hardly be surprised at the associations conjured up through costume and characterisation.

The Empire:  led by the icily malevolent Peter Cushing ... its supreme war council wear bottle-green Russian-style uniforms with modified Chinese collars.  Their faces are stereotypically "slavic", stonily recommending ruthless, heartless, power-mad order-obsessed actions (such as the destruction of an entire planet) without a blink.

The white, clanking armour of the Imperial stormtroopers symbolises the chilling, impassive, clinical sterility of the vivisectionist, and the Empire's starships are menacing, whirling death-machines in Nazi silver and grey.

The Republic:  as befits pluralist ideology, the Republic is portrayed as a broad front of individually-motivated right-thinkers. ⁽⁶⁴⁾  The rebel military leaders and troops are short-back-and-sides, clean-cut American types, wearing the khaki or loose orange overalls distinctly reminiscent of US Air Force flying suits.  They are presented as the valiant underdogs, whose commitment to freedom cannot be quenched.  Outgunned and outmanned by the Empire, their weapons are multiplied by a cornucopia of boy-scout virtues:  kindness, courage, humour, ingenuity, determination and skill.  It is no surprise that their starships are slim and streamlined, like souped-up versions of present-day military jets ...

The common-sense understanding that the world is "somehow" divided between those who want power and those who want freedom is massively reinforced, Star Wars is a profoundly ideological film.  As organised, it is impossible even to consider the inappropriateness of the power-freedom dichotomy to our world where structures and processes generated out of capitalist contradictions and crisis management render pious good intentions meaningless as categories of social analysis. ⁽⁶⁵⁾

Given the film's Cold War mentality, and the range of characters assembled as Good Guys -- the individualist (Solo);  the wise knight (Ben) [Obi-Wan] whose commitment to justice brings him out of retirement for one final, terrible encounter;  the brave novice (Luke) motivated by his love for the beautiful princess and his loathing for his father's murderer;  the resourceful woman (Princess Leia), whose tongue is appropriately tart for modern audiences;  the loyal robots and Han Solo's animal-mutant [sic] co-pilot Chewbacca, devoted to their humans' cause -- it is important to recognise just how the film structures the Bad Guys.  Interestingly, the enemy is not monolithic.  One might have expected that Our Heroes would combat some dread, inexorable historical process -- like the Technology Run Amok, or Mother Nature's Revenge films of the '50's and 60's.

Instead, they are involved in two battles:  one against the cold, technological political power of the Empire;  the other against the Dark Force of the human spirit which, through Darth Vader, the last of the Force's dark knights, has allied itself with order and the Empire.

The Force, in a previous time, waged through its knights the battle for good in the Universe.  At some point, some of the knights defected ... The source of the force's power means that the alliance between it and technology is an uneasy one:  Darth Vader puts the double-whammy on the oafish Imperial strategist who dismisses The Force as mystical humbuggery.  Such tension is a far cry from the usual Star Trek formula, which portrays a useful collaboration between science (represented by Spock) and human judgement, however emotional. ...

As Star Wars develops, two modes of opposition emerge.  The first, against the Empire, is conducted like a conventional war, with appropriate tactics, manoeuvres, and set-piece battles.  The second, against the Dark Force, is conducted both by single-handed, laser-sword combat (e.g. between Ben and Darth Vader) and by a curious kind of Crusade.  At bottom, the film is concerned with a quest -- not for mere victory over the Empire, but towards the grasping again of those powers that The Force can unleash, positively, within one.  Hence the pseudo-religious symbolism.  Ben (Alec Guinness), is robed like a monk, his face registering the resigned, weary passion of an El Greco Saint;  the pilgrims, as in Tolkien's Lord of The Rings, are led inexorably into the enemy's heart.  As in Frodo's journey to Mordor, the Good seek out and challenge the Evil.  The film is rife with mediaeval crusade images, where doughty champions sally forth to do battle with infidels and dragons.

It is important to separate these two strands of villainy because the tendency is to dismiss Star Wars as just another space western, padded out with a grab-bag of other genres and/or a send-up of everything.  To the extent that the film recognises widespread feelings of impotence and frustration engendered by contemporary technology, and dissolves it by operating a triumphant quasi-religiosity, Star Wars validates the re-emergence of de-institutionalised Christianity.  The film marks its crucial transformation -- gone are the Jesus Freaks, gone is flower power, but here is The Force, a new wave of mystification.

[emphasis added]

This critic plainly saw further than many of her fellows, and this observation is not intended sarcastically.  Her attack on Star Wars crystalised what others on the Left in larger metropolitan cultures had been groping towards.  It included the points that:

• In political terms, Star Wars' values were anti-collectivist.
• It postulated a dichotomy between power and freedom, and thus had what is translated in this type of analysis or polemic as a "Cold War mentality".
• It had presumptions of political pluralism, perhaps implying advocacy of a multi-party society and rejection of oligarchy.
• Heroism was an important theme, as was a morality that was not dictated by social conditions.
• It contained a religious consciousness.

Virtually all these points are incompatible with collectivism.  Of Boehringer's accusation that the film implied a dichotomy between those who valued power and those who valued freedom, most libertarians and non-collectivists might reply:  "And so say all of us!"  The point was made rather more learnedly by Professor Karl Dietrich Bracher in The Age of Ideologies:

The idea of political progress is marked by two major opposing orientations ... From Hegel ... the idea of power has closely been linked with a historical-political view of progress.  On the other hand there is the belief of liberal enlighteners and democrats that political progress consists primarily in the steady and ever more universal extension of personal freedom in the world ... This fundamental ambivalence was reduced to a formula:  progress as freedom and progress as power.  And in fact the ideological development of progressivism can be traced in both directions.  Active in the former sense are the ideas of thinkers such as Turgot, Gibbon, Comte, Adam Smith, the American Founding Fathers ... while Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Saint-Simon, Comte, Marx and Gobineau are seen as supporting the opposite trend.

The following two episodes of the Star Wars series were to confirm Boehringer's forebodings amply.

---

ENDNOTES

56.  William Goldman:  Adventures in the Screen Trade (Macdonald & Co, 1983), page 151.  Goldman also recorded that the most successful American movie stars over the previous 20 years had always been those playing heroic roles:  Clint Eastwood, John Wayne etc.  He introduced the book, however, by quoting the somewhat obtuse comment:  "[W]e're missing the audience by a wider margin than ever before.  We don't know what they want."

57.  16 December 1977.

58.  Reprinted in The Opium General and Other Stones (Grafton, 1986).

59.  This is indicated by, for example, Moorcock's 1965 book, The Final Programme, a story at whose climax the population of Europe commits suicide out of infatuation with an hermaphrodite, a situation which appears to engage the author's approval.  The jacket blurb described this as:  "Moorcock's world of Fantasex ... Moorcock's dazzling fantasies are not escapism.  His millions of addicts (sic) can be described as pilgrims rather than refugees, and his brilliance lies in the way he can open up new vistas of identity for them ... SOON TO BE A MAJOR FILM."  This can hardly be said to be promoting the exultation of reason.

60.  (Gollancz, 1987).

61.  One wonders how "unacknowledged borrowing" in a film could be acknowledged.  By footnotes?  In fact, many of Star Wars' own innovations, such as filling the top of the screen with the undersides of gigantic space-ships, were later the object of such "borrowings" themselves, in productions including Alien, Battle Beyond the Stars, and The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

62.  By early 1986 the two sequels alone had grossed well over a billion dollars with no end in sight.  (See The Reader's Digest, February 1986, page 134.)

63.  Julie Burchill, Damaged Gods (Century Hutchinson, 1986), page 60.

64.  Compare Russell Kirk, Ten Conservative Principles (The Heritage Lectures, No. 86):  "Conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety.  They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of ... modes of life, as distinct from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems".

65.  It is interesting that, while leftist critiques can apparently apply such judgements as "a profoundly ideological film" more or less routinely, such a critique applied from the other direction to films like Monty Python and the Holy Grail would probably be considered illegitimate by the critical community at large.