STAR BORES
by Anthony Lane
Lane is a critic with the New Yorker magazine. The magazine itself is a good read on some occasions, with a more serious literary intent. Similarly, its critics are less inclined to like Spielberg or Lucas pictures (I think a lot of it has to do with conflicting ideologies - Spielberg and Lucas are largely of the Ronald Reagan school of thought - which also happens to coincide with classical hollywood narratives and Christian teaching) - but many of his concerns about the film are legitimate - and there are some comic statements. And please, don't tell me Star Wars doesn't have an ideology to it - Lucas himself has admitted it, so I'm not looking like a fool whenever I say that a certain film works on "so many levels".
"A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, people made movies with people in them, and some of those movies made sense. Then something happened and the people started to vanish from the movies, along with most of the sense. For a while, the spectacle was fun to observe, but slowly the pictures tipped into insanity, or, at any rate, into the hypnotically bad. The joke was that the number of viewers willing to submit to such hypnosis went not down but through the roof. Historians of this phenomenon are now agreed that the change became irrevocable shortly before the end of the second millenium, with a George Lucas film entitled "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace."
As everyone in our own galaxy has been informed, this is the first of three prequels to the old Star Wars trilogy; the resultant sexology, if that's the word I'm groping for, will bring us the history of the Force from soup to nuts. THe last person to try this tactic was JRR Tolkien; after finishing "The Lord of the Rinds" (whose Frodo and Fandalf are clear forerunners of Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi), he devoted his day s to filling in the mythological back story of his epic. Lucas groupies - of whom one hears so much, but of whose acquaintance one never actually seems to have the pleasure -contend that "star wars" is all about good and evil, or the search for a father figure, or the struggle to find significance in the universe at large. This being so, the same admirers may be troubled by the surprising revelation that "The Phatom Menace" is all about taxes..Why Lucas didn't release it on April 15th (tax time in the USA) is beyond my comprehension. The opening credits tell us that "The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute." There are young americans whose hearts will leap like deer at this news; if so, they will be the first creatures to be inspired as the direct consequence of an aesthetic experience, to plan a career in the I.R.S.
But that, after all, is the Lucas way. Geographically, the
Star Wars series may b the most outlandish of sagas; in terms of
its emotional politics, however, it remains the most shrinkingly
conservative. Every time it sets sail for new worlds, it turns
out to be landlocked by attitudes that would have sat snugly in a
Western of the nineteen twenties (me: so what?). The threat of
malformed and the rapacious is regularly defuced by a body of
tall white knights; Samuel L Jackson plays a Jedi in the new
movie, but he is fobbed off with a handful of lines and no
determinable character. In the Lucas scheme of things, the token
woman may be spunky, but she is stil a token, and the idea of a
female on the Jedi Coundil semes as pointless as a punk in a
gentlemen's club. (me adds: Were there 12 Jedi on the council?
and is there really no woman?). The warriors fronting "The
Phantom Menace" are the young Obi Wan and his mentor QuiGon
Jinn, who are dispatched on urgent business to the planet Naboo -
a peaceful spot, ruled by Queen Amidala and threatened by a
hostile takeover bid from the Trade Federation. The Federation,
the object of principled scorn throughout the movie is a massive
corporate body that happily tramples over the protests of elected
gocvernments in its bid to expand, and will not rest until
wearily compliant leaders sign on the dotted line; "The
Phantom Menace," on the tother hand is being distributed by
20th C Fox, a charming family business that ventures only where
it knows it will be welcome, and likes nothing better than to
close a deal with a cup of coffee and a smile.
On Naboo, the Jedi do battle with tedious droids and run into Jar Jar Binks, whose name suggests a failed rap artist. He is, in fact, a gungan - a tall creature with ears like flippers, who makes his home in an underwater city. He is also, I regret to announce, the focus of the film's "comedy." This entails his getting caught in the stirrups of one lumbering beast, stepping in the excrement of another, and so on; Jar Jar has a squealing accent, apparently borrowed from Peter Sellers in his "Goon Show" era, and a weaknes for malapropism. All in all, he is one of the unfunniest characters you could wish to encounter, and even the small children beside me stayed tight-mouthed through his fruelling antics. So did the heroes; like many of his fellow bit players, Jar Jar was added separately, by computer, so if Liam Neeson and Ewan McGreggor look straight through him you can hardly blame them.
Taking a sortcut via Naboo's core, Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon arrive
at its majestic capital, which combines the styles of myriad
archetectural periods and therefore resembles an overpriced
Indian restaurant. Here they pick up the queen and spirit her
away, only to spring a busted hyperdrive in deep space - always a
bummer on weekends. The nearest spare spacecraft parts can he
found on Tatooine, a dusty crock of a planet on the Lower East
Side of the galaxy. By chance-or, if you prefer, by the
beneficent will of the Force-they bump into a kid named Anakin
Skywalker (Jake Lloyd), a slave who builds robots in his bedroom
and lives with his mother. 'There was no father,' she says to
Qui-Gon. "I carried him, I gave birth to him.... I can't
explain what happened." Now, this is only a wild guess, but
I suspect that we are in the presence of a Religious Parallel.
Anakin has been sent to save those life-forms who have behaved
themselves properly, and the jedi are his evangelists. Here ends
the lesson of 'The Phantom Menace," although Lucas has made
it clear that everything will go haywire in future installments:
Anakin will turn bad and become Darth Vader, if you please, but
not before boffing Queen Amidala and fathering Luke and Leia.
This is the hardest part to imagine: you look at the exquisite
Natalie Portman and the cocky jake Lloyd and think, She's going
to go to bed with that? By then he will have been replaced by an
older and less brattish actor, but the idea still gives me the
creeps.
It is telling that Lucas, reticent and control-freakish in many
respects, has been so liberal with his declarations of narrative
intent. He seems to have lost all interest in suspense, either in
this particular plot or within the larger saga; what he really
doesn't want to give away is his special effects. I would dearly
love to spoil them for you, but there's not that much to report,
apart from an in-distinguishable array of rubbery snouts. The one
moment at which this moribund enterprise comes alive is during
the high-speed pod race, in which Anakin pits his wits and his
rusted, scrap-metal machine against those of the snouts. The
sequence has a gutsy, Roman-circus buzz to it, unbothered by the
mystical claptrap that prevails else- where, and it reminds you
hearteningly of the Indiana Jones movies (which were partly
devised by Lucas himself). But Spielberg has a gift for the swift
sketching of character, whereas Lucas is so fatally gulled by the
latest tricks of his trade that he abandons the actors to their
fate; it's as though, unable digitally or animatronicafly to
control their expressions, he had to shut them down altogether.
(There's no Han Solo figure to mock the grandeur here, and that's
a dangerous loss.) Natalie Portman, whose lightly worn radiance
in 'Beautiful Girls' is my fondest memory of moviegoing in the
nineties, seems baffled and overawed; Liam Neeson has the sullen
air of a man who would rather be three galaxies away; as for Ewan
McGregor, what happened? He looks as if he just sat on the sharp
end of his lightsabre. It must have taken some nerve to drain the
charisma out of this cheerful Scotsman and force him to speak
like Noel Coward. McGregor may well be laughed off the screen
when the movie opens in Britain--an unthinkable turn of events.
His first words in the film are 'I have a bad feeling about
this." Yes, laddie, and you've got two more episodes to go.
It is, of course, profoundly gratifying that "The Phantom
Menace" should emerge as a work of almost unrelieved
awfulness. It means, for one thing, that the laugh is on all
those dweebs who have spent the last month camped out on the
sidewalks beside movie theatres, waiting for the big day. You
could argue that they will he so conditioned to enjoy themselves
that they may not notice the awfulness; if so, they are getting
the movie they deserve. There is nothing more off-putting about
'The Phantom Menace"--more insulting, in the light of
Lucas's democratically barnstorming credentials--than the feeling
that it has been made solely to feed the habit of "Star
Wars" junkies. For the first ten minutes you think, What the
hell is going on?, and two hours later you want to cry out,
"Is that it?" I dutifully thrilled to the earlier
films, to their contrast of black-velvet skies and blinding white
sands, but I was a little too old to worship them or study the
variorum editions. Even in the late seventies, we had a suspicion
that "Star Wars" was nerd territory for boys who had
the toys (rarely girls, who know junk when they see it), who were
tuned in to Mos Eisley, womp rats, and Pizza the Hutt, or
whatever his stupid name was. If you wanted cool new movies, you
watched "Jaws" seventeen times, and, rather than rush
to 'The Empire Strikes Back," you treated yourself to the
grownup horrors of "Alien.' Lucas couldn't give us a human
being to rival Sigourney Weaver's Ripley, let alone an android in
the same league as the replicants of 'Blade Runner," and the
mother ship in 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' could have
blown a fleet of Imperial star cruisers out of the sky.
I wonder whether the pre-release fuss over "The Phantom
Menace," which has surely been greater than the sum of all
the fusses that surrounded the earlier episodes, will prove to be
nothing more than the last, ludicrous gasp of seventies
retro-chic---'Boogie Nights' for the sci-fi crowd, with the
prosthetics in different places. Trying to see the picture in
advance was like asking Bill Clinton if I could borrow his
nuclear codes; no one would tell me the location of the screening
until I presented myself in person at the Fox offices to collect
my ticket. As Iapproached the theatre, I was expecting a
full-body search, with employees snapping on rubber gloves and
telling me to face the wall, and it was a relief merely to have
my hand blue-stamped on entry, as in a teen-age disco. This was
all part of the monstrous amalgam of secrecy and publicity which
has scaled the picture from the public gaze; the worst marketing
ploy I have found so far is the "Star Wars Learning Fun
Book,' for kids of kindergarten age. ("What is this? It is a
Hutt. Say it out loud: Hutt.") 'The Phantom Menace' raises
the spectre of an industry where the parasitic arts of buildup
and spinoff will outgrow and choke the product itself. In fact,
the true masterstroke would have been never to release the film;
Lucas could have milked the anticipation for as long as he
pleased.
In truth, something like this has already happened. The most
costly and influential instalment of 'Star Wars,' after all,
failed to come to fuition. It was otherwise known as the
Strategic Defense Initiative, but not until it acquired its
enticing nickname was the interest of the public-and, more
important, of the President-aroused. You cannot help thinking
that it was images of Han, Luke, and Leia that spun round inside
Ronald Reagan's head as he approved funding for the program--one
of those rare occasions when he did not see eye to eye, or dream
to dream, with the un-fanciful Margaret Thatcher, who was not
known as a moviegoer. (Another instance was the U.S. invasion of
Grenada-again, more of a bad war picture than a serious military
undertaking.) One should not underestimate the effect, at once
extravagant and insidious, of popular entertainment on the
political imagination. It is only since 'Star Wars," after
all, a work that displays the casual annihilation of planets but
not a single drop of blood, that America has discovered its
alarming and wholly impractical taste for the deathless war in
which, if we must have dying, it should always happen to the
other side.
What the effect of "The Phantom Menace" will be on
America, and on the wider world, I shiver to imagine. The Force
is with this movie, whether we like it or not, and it will
doubtless tap into our cloudy millennial disdain for the
operations of reason. 'Concentrate on the moment," Qui-Gon
says to Anakin. "Feel. Don't think." This is an update
of Alec Guiness's advice to mark Hamill in the original
"Star Wars": "Let go your conscious self, and act
on instinct." Wise words, Obi-Wan, but there has never been
a less instinctive movie than "The Phantom Menace." Its
calculation glitters in every frame; the climax is hectically
explosive, as you would expect, yet perplexingly uncathartic.
None of the fans around me, not even the kids, were whooping or
waving their fists in the approved manner, and I had the
dismaying thought that Lucas may be doing it on purpose - that he
may have held back from providing satisfaction because there are
more courses still in the kitchen. "The Phantom Menace"
is at once childishly unknowing and rotten with cynicism; I would
call it the disappointment of the decade except that, along with
many other people, I had a sneaking fear that it would turn out
this way. What is this? Crap. Say it out loud: Crap. And will it
make the magic billion dolalrs? You bet.