May 21, 2007
Star Wars Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:40 PM EST The homepage of this website notes that this is the anniversary of the 1980 release of The Empire Strikes Back, the first Star Wars sequel. It wasn’t much, and by my standards, things got steadily and rapidly worse; I stopped watching after the beginning of the second trilogy. Too bad. The first installment of Star Wars, in 1977, was in its own way thrilling. What happened? In part, someone apparently made the decision to drop the mental age of the intended audience by a few decades with each successive episode. Maybe family movies were the best business to be in, or maybe someone only thought that was the case, but the effect was dispiriting. Another possibility is that nothing had ever before looked like the first installment, which was thus visually thrilling. I have a vague sense that the first one was very early CGI, so maybe nothing could have ever looked like that before—the trick photography of earlier film was suddenly measured against new technical possibilities, and found wanting. There was also some visual wit, and an intriguing pseudo-realism about the way that movie looked. Before 1977, I am pretty sure that all TV and move spaceships were gleaming and spanking new, the very essence of visual hypermodernity. In Star Wars, old spaceships looked rusty and dented, in some cases clearly obsolete. When I looked at the movie seven years on, preparing to debate it with some minor academic luminary at a seminar on recent cultural history, I was startled to see how dreadfully it had aged. What had looked startling in 1977 looked very dreary, decidedly old hat, by 1984. Seen a second time, Star Wars was filled with very little homages, visual and otherwise, to incompatible genres of film—World War II bomber movies, epics of the British Raj, tramp steamers in the South Seas, and so forth down the line, but those genres were mostly invoked only with petty visual tropes: a 1940s-style pilot’s leather jacket, something two-barreled that moved like a pom pom gun (but was set in a ball turret), or a solar topee. Some of the characters were savagely indebted to older movie personae, and those, too, were oddly melded. Someone obviously knew the history of the movies but didn’t sufficiently value the thematic conventions of the genres that were being pillaged, at least not enough to do them any real justice. Star Wars had looked wonderful, but it seemed to have economized on aspects of the writing, which didn’t matter when irony and wit were allowed to dominate the tone but suddenly mattered all too much when irony and wit were pared away. One of the oldest jokes about the movies turns on an actress allegedly so dumb she slept with the writer, a joke that has an oddly sharp point when pondered in the light of the Star Wars sequels. And it turns out that nothing, absolutely nothing, ages so fast as the look of the new. Perhaps the movies, as a very learned screenwriter I used to know long insisted, are not really a visual art.
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