On View: Heroes

Long ago in a galaxy far, far away (1977 to be precise), Star Wars landed on an unexpecting world and in short order became the most phenomenally successful movie ever made. George Lucas, creator of Thx 1138 and American Graffiti, had always wanted to create a space fantasy on screen; originally he had hoped to do something with Flash Gordon. But he couldn’t get the rights to that hoary character, so he settled for a story of his own, and put into it everything he imagined from childhood as essential to the perfect movie. Like what? “Ray guns and running around in spaceships and shooting at each other, and a big battle in outer space, a sort of dog-fight thing. I knew I wanted to make a movie about an old man and a kid. And I knew I wanted the old man to be a real old man and have a sort of teacher-student relationship with the kid. I wanted the old man to also be like a warrior. I wanted a princess too but I didn’t want her to be a passive damsel in distress.”

The rest, as they say, is history, and the making not only of George Lucas’s fortune, but the beginning of a project now destined, the Force willing, to continue into the next century. From The Empire Strikes Back, which we now learn is episode V to Star Wars’s episode IV, Lucas intends to move forward with the tale of the battle between the forces of Good and Evil, and then back, with the first three episodes, to the days before things turned rotten, and finally onward, sometime near the end of this century, to the three concluding episodes wherein, we can safely guess, things will turn out all right.

The good news, by now trumpeted throughout the movie-going world, is that things have turned out quite ing to the inevitable wars between the twin monsters, fascism and communism. A future.

nicely indeed in The Empire Strikes Back. Gone, of course, is the sometimes stupefying series of surprises, the enchantment of first meeting the human and droid characters, and the initial introduction to some hundreds of first-rate special effects. But supplanting them is a new depth of character, and building upon the delights of Star Wars are the latest venture’s new effects, many even more thrilling, and two new characters, one of whom is, arguably, the oddest hero ever conceived in the cinema. Empire comes to us a sequel as worthy of its original as was the second Godfather of its precursor. How many of us will be around to measure the next seven installments against the first two no one can say, but anticipating them is reason enough to hope for a couple more decades in the movie reviewing business.

Empire begins a few months after the last scene of Star Wars. The Rebels, in flight from Darth Vader and his imperial forces and hiding on the icy planet Hoth, are soon discovered by the Empire and obliged to flee. The Emperor’s chief lieutenant, Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith, aims not only at crushing the rebellion but also at converting Luke Skywalker—the young naïf to whom Obi-wan Kenobi has bequeathed the Force—to the service of the Empire or destroying him. The chases are predictable, given this plot premise, and the C-3PO—R2-D2 cutesiness and the Chewbacca growlings and the other familiar ingredients all flow relentlessly from what has come before. Suffice it to say that we are left at the end with some of our friends temporarily free, one in suspended animation, and the cosmic battle unresolved. On, in the spring of 1983, to the next chapter.

George Lucas has imagined, and with the first two movies has majestically begun to create, a project more ambitious than any ever before attempted by a movie maker. Not only will the nine movies be integrated thematically, though each will presumably be able to stand alone as Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back are certainly able to do; the saga will also fully work out a philosophically coherent idea—not a unique idea, but a profoundly simple idea just the same. We may never see Atlas Shrugged translated to the screen, however often we are teased by promises of a mini-series on television derived from Ayn Rand’s masterpiece, but with good fortune and a great deal of patience we may be privileged to experience the completion of a project of comparable interest and kindred spirit.

I have undoubtedly alienated the Objectivists by presuming to suggest—hell, by bluntly stating—that this space hokum can be mentioned in the same context as Rand’s finest, fullest novel. Excepting only Stalinists, possibly, there are no more humorless true believers than Objectivists, and no doubt my psycho-epistemological whatsits are out of joint. Never mind; there is more to the Lucas brainchild than initially meets the eye, and the comparison with Atlas Shrugged is justified. Rand teaches us to beware, to analyze, to know the real meaning of collectivism, and she posits an alternative, rational individualism, which when actualized through voluntary cooperation among sane and decent and productive people becomes the saving power in a corrupted world. Lucas does precisely the same thing, the necessary changes having been made. Where Rand’s is a fantasy confined to the known world, peopled by types easily imagined because they have ample prototypes, Lucas’s is a fantasy carried into unknown regions, peopled not only by characters very much like those who now walk the earth but also by characters literally out of this world. That may seem to smash the analogy to bits, but the difference is superficial, not significant. The message is the same; the medium, obviously, is not.

The age of real heroes, we are routinely advised, has passed. The world’s leaders are crummy politicians, technocrats, and committeemen, grinning hypocrites in the Kremlin jousting with their counterparts in Washington, tin-horn dictators rising up for an hour or two in this or that Third World backwater, throwbacks proclaiming an Islamic Republic here, a socialist paradise there, but essentially little men dreaming dreary, puny dreams of personal glory erected atop the graves of their victims domestic and foreign, trumpeters of one or another inane ideology proclaimed as The Truth, champions of savagery politely clothed in the vestments of diplomatic doubletalk. Those who would conquer the world come bearing standards proclaiming such stirring notions as Things Go Better With Coke, and Back To The Koran, and Marxism-Leninism, and you name it. The glory of Islam is reduced to a holy war on pimps, prostitutes, and druggies; the Indians can do no better than resurrect a dictator in a flowered sari; the New World’s apostle of millenial perfectionism shows his highest aspirations by allowing a hundred thousand dissenters to depart his Cuba and sail or sink; and the leader of the “Free World” manifests his fullest understanding of freedom by forbidding his jocks to play basketball in Moscow.

The age of real heroes, surely, is dead.

But mankind hasn’t yet quite accepted the fact. Reactionaries—like George Lucas, like Ayn Rand, like many of those who are creating the movement that has made this magazine and its friendly rivals possible, like your humble servant, like most of those reading this—have not wholly bought the notion that nothing can be done except give up the ghost and shrug. Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back and the inspiration that brought them to the screen rest firmly on a belief contrary to the flaccid accommodationism of our day. It is a belief wholly at odds with the kind of “ethical relativism” that considers every political system essentially the same political system, every arena of human endeavor similarly limited, and every majority inevitably tyrannical, and so wonders why we should bother to struggle against the givens. I do not mean to place the two starry movies of Mr. George Lucas at the pinnacle of philosophical greatness, only to point out the remarkable fact that we have here the beginnings of a monumental project designed not only to entertain, and entertain most generously—of which more later—but also a project directed toward glorification of the finest potential of ’man.

Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back arise out of a conception of the world that our ancestors sometimes held quite seriously but that our age considers, if not vulgar, then at least unseemly. But whereas once upon a time a hero was defined as perfect and a villain as wholly dastardly, our “modern” sensibility has refined the dichotomies, so that we recognize, and properly, that to be heroic is to be valiant yet human. We expect human beings to have faults, though to the truly contemporary mind those faults are considered sufficiently great as to negate heroism. And so our literature and our movies tell monotonously of anti-heroes and weak heroes and devious heroes but almost never, at least in the literature and movies that matter, of fully courageous and wholly admirable heroes. Lucas will have none of that: his heroes are archetypal. Lucas is in the best sense of the word reactionary, which translates as well into revolutionary.

His story, accordingly, is of nothing less than revolution against oppression. Consider the cast of characters: The droids, pudgy, beeping little R2-D2 and fussy, gleaming, humanoidal C-3PO, embody pure reason delightfully blended with humanistic concern. These two, by the way, are slated to hold central roles in all nine projected movies, whereas each of the human characters will appear in some but not all of the films. The droids will in time emerge as the connecting links. Their attributes, refined intelligence and reason and loyalty and devotion to friends and to the cause of liberty, are, after all, precisely the attributes we (theoretically) esteem most. These creatures may function as comic relief —they are very funny, and children instinctively respond warmly to them—but they function even more importantly as the carriers of those values Mr. Lucas wants particularly to uphold.

The Princess Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) is at once that damsel always in distress and yet never passive: Woman, if you will, not glued to a pedestal but the focus of manly concern. Leia would not likely rush into the arms of some intergalactic Phyllis Schlafly, to be sure, but she serves in the central trilogy, of which Star Wars and Empire are the first two installments, as the symbol around which the valiant warriors rally. Leia Organa: the name is of course a play on words, a carnal play on words at that, though her behavior belies the orgasmic and no one lays her, even if Han Solo (Harrison Ford) kisses her and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) is kissed by her. She is not an ice maiden but she has standards to maintain, and rather traditional ones at that. (The movies are also PG-rated, which accounts for some of this chasteness, but let that pass.)

And the men? Obi-wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) was vanquished in Star Wars and in Empire he appears only as a float-on. His, however, is a linking role, the fallen embodiment of the Force, now the spiritual mentor to Luke. Luke is the searcher, the neophyte, the innocent who must master the Force in order to rescue his friends and reestablish freedom in the universe. Lucas had originally considered Darklighter as Luke’s surname, then

Starkiller. Skywalker touches on both concepts but, shall we say, uplifts the name, in preparation obviously for Luke’s final mastery of the Force. Han Solo prefers to operate alone, solo —much prefers a life of devil-may-care piracy to saving the universe. Circumstances, however, make him a partner with the good guys. He is a latter-day John Wayne hero, as wooden as the original, as resigned to his destiny, as pure at heart (however profane in action and lustful thought). The new human hero in Empire is Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams), an old buddy-in-crime of Han Solo, now also dragged unintentionally into service to the Good. I do not know just exactly what a Wookie like Chewbacca thinks, since the furry thing makes sounds intelligible only to his friends on the screen and not to his fans in the audience, but he, too, perhaps as some sort of example of interspecies brotherhood, knows the difference between virtue and vice and unhesitatingly opts for virtue. The friends on the screen are really a variation on the old war movie theme of the ethnically balanced cast of GI Joes all pulling together to crush the Hun. More to the point, they are all fully heroic. Excepting only Lando Calrissian, who briefly believes that he can appease Darth Vader and save his own little domain from imperial domination, these heroes hold no illusion about coexistence (détente?) with fiends.

And the fiends? We finally get a glimpse of the Emperor, who shimmers before Darth Vader as a hologram, and we learn what frightens him: the prospect of the Force, fully effective, in the person of someone committed to the Good. More of the Emperor, surely, in the next installment. Darth Vader: dark, death, water, father, Death Father! One of the wonderful surprises in Empire hinges on a revelation concerning both of these last words, a revelation too important to give away here. Nevertheless, we can say without spoiling the fun that a mature understanding of the Force, which we come closer to now, having the second movie to amplify the project’s theme, leads inexorably to a recognition of the connection, or a connection of some sort, between the heroes and Vader, the synecdoche of all villainy. It is whimsical Freudianism, a polite bow, perhaps, to the modern sensibility, but not thereby a cheat.

Comes now Yoda, a two-foot muppet (created by Frank Oz, who does TV’s Miss Piggy, and does Yoda’s voice too), eight hundred years old, resident in a slimy, dank world, and, as we and wide-eyed Luke Skywalker learn to our abundant surprise, the Jedi Master himself—Obi-wan Kenobi’s teacher in days gone by, now Luke’s teacher too. Every child who sees Empire immediately adores Yoda, who speaks to humans in a distinctive syntax: “Why wish you become a Jedi?” “Ready are you?” he asks Luke; “what know you of ready?” Ready is Luke not, no no, if I might borrow a bit of Yoda’s approach to language. But the kid’s the only game in town, Kenobi having bequeathed the Force to Luke. The Force: the source of all possibility; the wellspring of action; the strongest thing in the universe.

The Force, and may it be with you, too, is what the Lucas idea is all about. I said earlier that Lucas is working out a philosophically coherent but not unique idea, a profoundly simple idea. It should by now be clear that the idea is the struggle for possession of the Force, with which Vader and his master, the Emperor, can inflict unspeakable misery on everyone and everything, or with which a matured Luke can bring the light and the truth and (may I say it?) the way. There is certainly a point beyond which such pecking away at a couple of movies grows not only tedious but ludicrous. While I don’t believe that anyone who bothers to look can see George Lucas’s idea and fail to understand it, I recognize that we don’t live in a time very much interested in thinking. We “relate” to one another, like spinsters to their poodles, we “feel” a great deal, and we get “in touch” with each other over our Perrier and canapés, but thinking we find distasteful. As Yoda might say: think we? Think not we! For those who think not, these movies will remain just great good fun, and welcome. No one is required to dive into Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back and carry on about them as I have done. I do so, however, because I find the fun compounded by comprehension of the meaning. To me, the joy of Lucas’s well-wrought movies is enhanced, not diminished, by grasping the sober lessons they teach.

We take our leave of The Empire Strikes Back with the dark side of the Force much more powerful than the light, with Darth Vader amply armed with fiendish schemes, with Luke just beginning to push himself outward to the limits (if there are limits) of the Force his master, Yoda, would impart to him. We stop, until the third movie appears in 1983, with our friends still in flight and Darth Vader still in hot pursuit, but with a richer knowledge of the meaning of heroism and of the opportunity available to all mankind at least to catch a ride on heroism’s tail. Lucas would have us see the way to our ennoblement. Can there be a higher aspiration for an artist?

LR’s film critic writes about movies weekly for The Boston Herald American and reviews films twice weekly on WHDH Radio and daily on WNAC-TV (CBS), all in Boston. He is the host of talk programs on both stations, writes a thrice-weekly newspaper column, and reviews books for a number of journals. He is also Deputy Sheriff of Middlesex County (Massachusetts).

©Copyright David Brudnoy, 1980