Title: THX 1138

Year: 1970

Director: George Lucas

Reviewed By: Garrett Chaffin-Quiray

George Lucas was born on May 14, 1944 in Modesto, CA. He was an intelligent youth with a fascination for fast cars. He attended Downey High School and became interested in drag racing before an accident ended such a career ambition just after his high school graduation. Turning to more traditional pursuits, he enrolled at Modesto Junior College and finally found his way to the now-world renowned School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California.

As a film student he attended lectures, studied movie history, became involved with the so-called film brats, including people like John Milius, and he made short movies to complete his degree. Among his projects was the film THX 1138: 4EB (Electronic Labyrinth) that won first prize at the 1967-1968 National Student Film Festival.

Based on this success he was awarded a scholarship by Warner Bros. that let him observe the making of Francis Ford Coppola�s 1968 studio musical, Finian�s Rainbow. Having free reign on the studio�s lots, when added to his shy demeanor, helped Lucas fall into Coppola�s good graces. Coppola then took Lucas on as an assistant and allowed him to make a documentary called Filmmaker: A Diary by George Lucas about the making of Finian�s Rainbow.

Unfortunately, Coppola�s film was a flop, the first of several mainstream disappointments in the director�s long, and uneven, career that already produced the exploitation title Dementia 13 in 1963 for Roger Corman. Yet the two filmmakers formed a lasting friendship that was cemented with the production of Coppola�s independent film The Rain People in 1969 and was consummated with the creation of American Zoetrope that same year.

Nursing his mainstream failure while at the same time seeing his Hollywood cache rise after winning an Academy Award for the script of Patton in 1970, Coppola remained true to his one-time assistant. Organizing American Zoetrope�s first project around a newly blown up version of Lucas�s award winning student film, Coppola persuaded Warner Bros� to finance the production to the tune of $777,000. Enterprising sound designer Walter Murch added new story dimensions to fatten the script and the resulting feature was shot almost entirely in Northern California, some of it in the incomplete underground tunnels of San Francisco�s BART subway system.

Titled THX 1138 from a mnemonic of Lucas�s phone number when he was a student, the film frames a dystopian view of a highly mechanized and regimented human society. Neither past, present or future, certain elements of this society relate to our own such as having television and being able to visit a shopping mall. Somehow, though, the film�s screen world is strangely distant due to its sheen of polished floors, fluorescent lighting, chrome-plated, robotic cops and affectless people.

Without recourse to outdoor activities, indeed with the whole film occurring underground, the world of THX 1138 is one predicated on similarity and conformity. Every person is bald and wears white clothing or is the nude subject of pornographic TV shows. Seemingly omnipresent cameras and sound recording equipment look upon all activities, parsing the smallest deviation for instant correction with a state sanctioned and purposefully nameless automated police force. So regimented is this world, in fact, that citizens are told to report indiscretions, confess sins, work hard, avoid worry and be happy because it�s their individual duty to society at large, if not also to its capital accumulation and overall efficiency.

The man 1138, prefix THX (Robert Duvall), finds himself out of synch with this world. Not particularly happy or unhappy, articulate or inarticulate, he�s a factory line worker who deals with nuclear waste. But THX is also a private man with a particularly strong confessional impulse towards Big Brother�s weird, God-like figures and a true conflict about his culture�s asexual people who are made that way by strict drug controls.

When THX�s female roommate LUH 3417 (Maggie McOmie) begins tampering with his drug regimen, the pair spirals out of the prevailing standards. They begin feeling affection for one another. They make love, enjoy touch and intimacy, exhibit jealousy and disappointment at their separation and are ultimately "caught" by the authorities when another citizen called SEN 5241 (Donald Pleasence) reprograms the living arrangements to make THX his new roommate.

Angered by this complication, THX reports SEN to the authorities but is further spurned when he finds out LUH is pregnant and he is sentenced to an isolated purgatory of disconnection from society. In this nothingness he re-encounters SEN and struggles for some sense of how to break free.

Caught in a field of infinite distances with no center or border, THX begins to unravel. Among his imprisoned companions, some of whom spout philosophical treatises while others lie about in catatonia, he eventually decides to seek his fortune. Walking off in the direction their guards, the chrome-faced robotic cops, have come, THX and SEN encounter a hologram-turned-drone named SRT (Don Pedro Colley).

The three find an exit and re-enter their world with its numbing continuities and massified society. THX learns how LUH has been killed in favor of her fetus which now bears her name. SEN gets lost, connects with some children who marvel at his anachronistic stories but is then recaptured without a struggle. THX and SRT find their way through their society�s infrastructure and steal cars to escape its confinement, heading towards the surface above the world they know to exist in numbing sameness and soul-killing regimentation.

After SRT crashes his car, two chrome-plated, robot, motorcycle cops chase THX. Throughout their pursuit the panoptic regime of his world reports on all his activities and tallies the cost of his recapture. Ingeniously, and at the precise moment of his near escape, THX�s cost of restraint is deemed too high so the robots are called off, leaving him to break free into the setting sun of an unknown world.

Long regarded as a lost work when given Lucas�s subsequent commercial success with American Graffiti in 1973 and the Star Wars epic begun in 1977, THX 1138 was a box office failure that nearly ground his career, and that of American Zoetrope, into the dust. Fortunately for all involved, this misfire from a master of pop mythology and special effects extravaganzas proved rare and seems like the sounding out of career directions before he found a more commercially viable fit for himself in the Hollywood industry.

Interestingly, Coppola has been rumored to say America lost one of its great filmmakers when Lucas made Star Wars because it commodified his creativity to such a degree that more experimental, less mainstream work like his feature debut were no longer possible. Without doubt there�s truth to this sentiment for, in fact, THX 1138 is an almost wholly unappealing entertainment as pure entertainment. Meaning, it is more an exploration of a philosophical position, of its strands and supporting experiences, than it is intended to be a straightforward science fiction tale with a clear beginning, unusual complication and sense of completion.

The very absence of catharsis, obvious points of meaning or of the sense of THX�s triumph in escaping to the surface of his world all indicate this emotional impasse. Moreover, THX�s passage from oddly irritated drone through revolt, incarceration and deliberately destructive liberation seems an unlikely moral for viewers to apply to their own lives.

To minimize the film because it fails to ring the harps of commercial success, or even of obvious social influence with any ideas about changing the world, however, would be to miss the point. To likewise perpetuate the positivist mythology surrounding the film by affirming its fundamentally more artistic purpose without the mainstreaming crutches of lowest common denominator crowd appeals would be to offer a similar disservice.

Instead it�s enough to know Lucas had trouble with certain tendencies he consciously and unconsciously felt were beginning to organize the world. Echoing previous generations of critics, including both liberal and conservative thinkers of his day, THX 1138 represents the potential problems of mechanization, over- visualization and omnipresent state controls. But it doesn�t stop there with the usual points of horror and hazard often associated with computers and technology.

By leaping ahead to affix an absolute value on human life in the way THX is ultimately abandoned as too expensive, Lucas correctly foretold our society�s interest in impersonally creating appetitive consumers at the expense of personal satisfaction. In the ultimate sense this may have an irreparable effect on the human community. Even so, Lucas gives THX some release under the bright orange, setting sun of his escape, although his subsequent career can easily be described as having "sold out" these earlier, more critical impulses.

We can only hope THX 1138: Episode 2�The Surface wasn�t already produced under the title Star Wars some seven years later. Not for nothing there appear to be parallels between the ending shot of the earlier film and the sun-drenched landscapes of Tatooine in the latter. If so, one of the more interesting science fiction movie dystopias, one on par with Blade Runner and The Matrix a generation later, would be simply one more tarnished jewel in the crown of Lucasfilm, Ltd.

As a final note it�s interesting to observe Lucas reportedly earned some $15,000 for THX 1138, $50,000 plus 20% of the gross for American Graffiti and $150,000 plus 40% of the profits from Star Wars. Perhaps the writer-producer-director saw his escape in using the rules of the system to his advantage as had been so soberly outlined in his feature debut as a means of individuation and escape. Or maybe it�s simply a coincidence of history that his most troubling work was his first and virtually all subsequent efforts have met with wider appeal, bigger paychecks and further comforts from the struggles of 1138, prefix THX.

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