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Zen and the Art of Watching Star Wars
By Eric Barker
“This
one, a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked
away...to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where-he-was!
Hm? What-he-was-doing!”
-- Jedi master Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back (Star
Wars, Episode V; 1980)
As I write
this, it’s just two weeks until the opening day of Star
Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones, and I have to
say I’m very excited, without reservations, like a kid, you
might say. The advance buzz is good, while the hyperkinetic
trailers have promised a darker, more thrilling tale in which
Anakin Skywalker will move inexorably closer to a terrible
destiny; a destiny which the audience, if they’ve been paying
attention, already knows about.
In case
you’ve been living under a rock, here’s a spoiler: at some
point in Episode II, Anakin is tempted toward the Dark Side,
perhaps beyond saving. That’s right: Anakin, that cute little
boy with the high midi-chlorian count, the thing that gives
him such a powerful connection to the Force, is all grown
up now, but he is going to fall under the spell of Senator
Palpatine, who is really the nasty, wicked Emperor we know
and love from Return of the Jedi (Episode VI,
1983). Come on, it’s the same actor.
Furthermore,
Anakin is actually Darth Vader, Luke’s father, which was revealed
at the climax of The Empire Strikes Back (not to mention
the poster for Episode I). Pretty soon here, he’s going to
betray the Jedi who have been so good to him. He’s going to
be so bad he’ll make that candy-ass, make-up wearing chump
Darth Maul look like the intergalactic putz he is (or, rather,
was; Obi-Wan Kenobi settled Mr. Maul’s flashy hash in a single
stroke last movie, no more messing around. Don‘t fool with
Obi-Wan).
Sorry
if I ruined anything, but that’s the plot, and its basic outline
has been known for over two decades. All of these things must
happen, either this episode or next, in a story suspiciously
reminiscent of an old James Cagney/Pat O‘Brian, Warner Brothers
epic where one boy grows up to be a priest and the other a
gangster. Anakin is going to impregnate the gorgeous Padmé
Amidala, it was telegraphed by the story, dialogue, and Natalie
Portman’s three film contract, the moment they met in the
last film, and she will give birth to twins named Luke and
Leia, both of whom inherit their father‘s powerful symbiosis
with the Force. But that’s their trilogy; in this trilogy,
the Republic will fall into a dictatorship and the Jedi are
wiped out and the Dark Times descend, all thanks to Anakin/Vader’s
betrayals of himself and the people who love him. We
don’t know what happens to Padmé, but it probably won’t be
good because she vanishes from the story in the last three
episodes, although anything is possible these days, the way
George Lucas insists on tinkering digitally with the content
of his previous films.
We do
know Obi-Wan eventually messes up Anakin/Darth Vader enough
that the Dark One must wear a breathing apparatus the rest
of his life, and it is “General” Kenobi who hides the children
on different planets to await their brighter destinies. Obi-Wan
Kenobi is the hero of this trilogy, that much is clear from
Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999). This
movie or next, someone takes off Anakin/Vader’s right hand
-- you can count on it. It’s all part of his journey toward
evil, it was revealed in Return of the Jedi, and everything
else I’ve mentioned is right there in the four extant chapters
of the saga. I think it’s safe to say that some very tumultuous,
maybe even heartrending, but certainly spectacular cinematic
events are on the way. No guess work here. It’s the story.
So why
was Episode I such a colossal disappointment to so
many people? Personally, it didn’t disappoint me at all --
I kind of liked the damned thing, in spite of its many flaws
and casual, sometimes rambling narrative. I’ve liked all the
Star Wars movies in spite of their many flaws and persistent
rambling. But all around me I heard sneering dismissals of
the film, as if it was a self-evident disaster, first from
some of the people in my circle of friends, then a more general
feeding frenzy in the media. I found this unadulterated, almost
vindictive disgust as baffling as the blind adoration which
the first movie engendered upon its initial release, twenty-five
years ago this month.
More than
one person suggested George Lucas had lost touch with the
audience, but that’s just plain baloney: he thought Star Wars
(1977) would gross about $15 million domestically, just enough
to break even in those days and keep the studio off his back.
Hell, it did that much in it’s first weekend. There’s a sense
in which he never was in touch with the audience, whoever
they are.
Other
commentators, closer to the mark, have suggested that the
hype killed the joy -- no film could have lived up to the
global anticipation generated by the announcement that a new
Star Wars trilogy was beginning. But I think the biggest
reason of all is not that Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom
Menace (1999) was hyped to death, although it certainly
was, or that George lost touch with what people wanted to
see. It’s probably churlish of me to say so, and pedantic,
and what have you, but I think the audience never did know
what they were watching.
“An
audience will not take something from a film or a book...if
they do not give to it.”
-- Marlon Brando, "Conversations with Brando"
I drove
fifty miles to see Star Wars on it’s opening day in
1977. There had been very little advance hype because 20th
Century Fox did not yet know they had something on their hands
they could actually sell. The film was beginning its run in
a limited release, a standard cost-cutting practice then and
now, keeping prints to a minimum in case it tanked. It was
only showing in one theatre in Indiana, where I lived, but
I didn’t mind the drive. THX 1138 (1971) and American
Graffiti (1973) had already turned me into a big George
Lucas fan, and I couldn’t wait to see what he had done with
an expanded budget, working in one of my favorite genres.
But when
the audience sat down at that first one o’clock show -- me,
my girlfriend, a half-full house of people around us -- and
the silent, fluorescent blue titles faded onto the wide, wide
screen...“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...,” none
of us was prepared for what followed.
It was
the first movie I ever saw that was too loud. Improved high
fidelity movie sound was in its infancy then, and in spite
of the Dolby labels on everything, there was a lot of distortion
at both ends of the spectrum. The sheer exuberance of the
filmmaking, though, its nearly continuous innovation and joy
in its own medium, was exhilarating. It was a mysterious,
sometimes hilarious universe being unveiled, a giddy cultural
stew drawing on countless movie tropes and genres, pulp fiction
allusions and fairy tales.
It greatly
disappointed me. I was expecting some good, spectacular, smart
science fiction, and this film was something else altogether.
I remember walking through the lobby afterward, looking at
a display of stills from the movie with their brilliant primary
colors and glossy surfaces and thinking, “He’s made a children’s
movie. I’ve waited four years for a live-action cartoon with
all the depth of a wading pool.”
Still,
the music was great, and by golly, the cumulative experience
was a hell of a lot of fun. I decided my father must see this
movie as soon as possible, because the whole thing had a purposeful,
cliffhanging serial feel to it that I knew he would enjoy.
It turned into a movie expedition, with my mother joining
as well, and my sister and some of our friends all piling
into one car, and when we arrived at the theatre, the parking
lot was a madhouse. The box-office line snaked around the
building twice, composed of people from every age group. In
just forty-eight hours the Star Wars virus had spread
across the country and was moving into every city at the same
time. There had been spring blockbusters before, but this
was something very different, something that crossed generational
boundaries.
The film
had now become a collective, standing-room only experience.
The audience cheered as one when the battle cruiser rumbled
overhead in the opening shot, they fell out of their chairs
laughing at the antics of R2-D2 and Han Solo, they screamed
triumphantly when the Millennium Falcon made the jump to light
speed. Ah, the madness of crowds. Watching Star Wars
when it was new was a kind of infection, a tacit agreement
among audience members to just sit back, relax and fall in
love with pure energy. Even if you were curmudgeonly enough
to balk at the phenomenon, it was hard to sit with a packed
house and not be swept away by the joy in moviemaking and
movie-watching that permeated the air. It was a once-in-a-lifetime
thing, or as my sister recently said, you only get to jump
into hyperspace once. The thrill can never be repeated.
Initially,
I had been disappointed because I would have made a very different
movie. But George had wisely started his story in the middle,
skipping the tragic stuff and consciously evoking Space Opera,
a subset of science fiction that ignores science in favor
of historical allegories and archetypes everyone can recognize.
With Space Opera, everyone can understand what’s going on
without a program, and a moviemaker can reach the widest possible
audience, especially those who may be put off by real ideas.
He did have an agenda -- his idea of the Force, a combination
of pop metaphysics and vaguely Einsteinian speculation about
the connectedness of all things in the Universe -- but first
things first, he made a film that was fun to watch, just in
case he got to make another.
The moral:
in big budget cinema, if you use all your powers to entertain,
they will come. This principle was immediately demonstrated
by the sluggish box-office performance of the greatest movie
in the Star Wars series, The Empire Strikes Back.
Empire
is a genuinely beautiful film, one of the best sequels ever
made, a dark dreamscape preserving the spirit of the original
characters and the visual energy of its predecessor, while
significantly deepening our understanding of the universe
we are watching. And it’s still fun. It is a film, moreover,
that deserves the adjectives operatic and epic in every respect,
much more sophisticated than Star Wars in its vision,
writing and execution, yet it remains the least successful
chapter of the saga at the box-office, lagging far behind
the other three (if we include The Phantom Menace),
even after the enormously successful re-issue of the original
trilogy during the mid-nineties. When one is making films
on which ride millions of dollars and many hundreds of jobs,
it’s best to watch that bottom line. At such a dizzying fiscal
plateau of The Business, every decision becomes about insuring
you get to make another movie.
Meanwhile,
The Phantom Menace finished its theatrical run as the
fourth biggest box-office hit of all time. It may have been
a disaster to somebody, but many more somebodies were going
to see it several times. No film generates that much moolah
without thousands of repeat viewers. It may be the most famous
flop in film history that never happened.
“In
the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the
expert’s there are few.”
-- Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, "Beginner’s Mind"
Hill Street
Blues and Twin Peaks may have started it; The Sopranos and
Six Feet Under on HBO, The X-Files on Fox and NBC‘s West Wing
are fulfilling it‘s possibilities. Our culture has entered
an age of the serial narrative, sprawling, open-ended stories
that go on and on, chapter after chapter, often attempting
an encyclopedic survey of different social realities or invented
worlds. Serial narratives are everywhere and they’re being
done well, too, and people are watching and reading them.
It’s a cultural moment that, at last, can support the idea
of a three-part, big screen version of The Lord of the
Rings, as well as George Lucas’ crazy attempt to unveil
the backstory of the most successful movie serial ever.
Partly
as a response to this media environment, I recently began
studying the great English storyteller Charles Dickens. A
master of the serial narrative and a marvelous showman, Dickens’
working method was to chart gigantic social novels that ran
the gamut of dramatic incident, peopled with dozens of quirky
characters, and then he would dole out his story two or three
chapters at a time over a period of years, sending magazine
sales aloft, keeping his Victorian readership hooked not by
getting to the end, but by forestalling it, by plunging luxuriantly
into a reality of his own making and then taking the relevant
details down as he ambled along every found path. Or as literary
critic Norrie Epstein puts it in her advice on how to read
Dickens, “Take a Zen approach: the destination doesn’t matter,
it’s the journey that counts.”
I would
add this is a good way to watch or read anything, but it is
especially true of serial narratives, perhaps the Star
Wars films most of all, because each episode is a completely
self-contained work and, at the same time, a thematic movement
in a larger, six part design. These are chaotic, busy entertainments
with many side trips and detours, a lot of repeated motifs
and blatant symbolic elements, all of which makes it seem
as if they are doing the same thing again and again, and yet
each film has its own style and intentions. Because one Star
Wars film takes so long to put together, each episode
is to some extent the result of its particular time and place.
To fully enjoy one -- say, Return of the Jedi -- it
simply does no good to wish you were watching another.
The film
that is unspooling before you at this moment is the film you
are getting, you must take it or leave it, regardless of the
baggage you have brought with you, regardless of other films
this moviemaker has made, and especially, regardless of the
movie you wanted it to be. This doesn’t mean you have to unconditionally
accept any crap you’re getting, but it does mean letting go
of expectations and assumptions, and being open to what is
in front of you right here and now.
In the
discipline of Zen, this state of awareness is called beginner’s
mind (or original mind), and it is very hard to maintain because
our consciousness is forever chattering and jumping around
and distracting us, as the Tibetans say, just like a monkey.
All movies encourage the monkey, by constantly poking cognitive
associations: with other movies, with people we’ve known,
with emotions that are close to us. If you can cultivate a
beginner’s mind on the way to the theatre and before the film
starts, the benefits are many, particularly if you know too
much already, as many film critics and some Star Wars fans
do. Beginner’s mind, the mind everyone took to their first
Star Wars movie, merely clears a space in the cluttered
garage of consciousness so that it is possible to become,
just for a little while, childlike in the dark again. Otherwise,
study and experience can dupe us into thinking we know it
all. The point of study, the lesson of knowledge, should be
the continually humbling discovery that we do not, and cannot,
know everything. As Yoda phrases it for Luke, “You will know.
When you are calm, at peace...Clear your mind of questions.”
Whether
reading or watching, I’m always on the lookout for a mind
more original than my own, waiting for a storyteller ballsy
enough to make their work jump through difficult hoops in
spite of audience expectations, and that includes performing
new tricks with old gags, or cross-breeding stale plots that
no one has thought of introducing to each other. With any
luck in this formulaic world, you may see a movie that you’ve
never seen before.
There
were plenty of moments the first time I saw Star Wars,
Episode I: The Phantom Menace during which I asked myself,
“What the hell was that!” Frankly, I enjoyed the sensation.
Although
it was apparent George Lucas might be rusty as a director,
not getting quite the performance he should have out of Jake
Lloyd, for instance (though young Jake was a game little actor
anyway, and only some of his scenes fall short of the mark,
not all), and the pace was sluggish here and there under the
weight of a lot of new exposition, I had never seen a movie
like this, and neither had anyone else. The only obvious things
The Phantom Menace had in common with its predecessors
were a quantum leap in special visual effects, which we apparently
take for granted now, and the continuing evidence of George
Lucas’ thundering, cross-fertilizing imagination.
As soon
as one of my favorite actors, Ewan McGregor, stepped into
the widescreen foreground and said “I’ve got a bad feeling
about this,” chanting the series’ goofy mantra, I knew the
movie was going to be a good time, and for me, it was. Going
back to the beginning of the story, showing us things that
had only been suggested before, and on a scale that had been
prohibitively expensive until this movie, The Phantom Menace
was a promise that all questions would be answered in time.
It was clear that George had lost none of his visual brilliance,
which has always been close to poetry: two light sabers springing
to life in a dense cloud of gas; the bouncy, multi-referential
silliness of the pod race, all speed and light as usual; the
breathtaking visions of Coruscant, a planet covered by cityscapes;
the extraordinary choreography of the “Duel of the Fates”
between Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan and Darth Maul; the moment during
Qui-Gon’s Viking/Jedi funeral, when Anakin turns to Obi-Wan
and asks “What will happen to me now?”
The
Phantom Menace, like its immediate predecessor The
Return of the Jedi, follows a three tier structure that
mimics Elizabethan comedy, cutting back and forth between
a set of characters representing different social strata in
the film‘s universe: (1) Royalty and/or the Gods (Queen Amidala,
her court, and the Senate); (2) a feisty middle class to whom
we can all relate, and who determine the central dramatic
thread of the story (the Jedi, Anakin and the people of Tatooine);
and (3), a boisterous underclass which, faerie-like, represents
the best ethical values of the plot, and not a little comic
mischief (the kindly, amphibious Gungans, who literally live
in an underworld, where the much vilified Jar Jar Binks was
born and became clumsy).
The dramatic
idea is to bring the tiers together in various, mostly humorous
ways, and to find out how different classes interact as social
barriers dissolve, a structure that not only served the theatre
of Shakespeare’s day, but also the novels of the Victorians,
among whom Charles Dickens was the best selling author of
the age. It was Dickens’ novels, overflowing with every strata
of life, which inspired the movies’ first narrative genius,
D.W. Griffith, to come up with most of his visual ideas. Griffith
consciously used Dickens’ prose as a template and inspiration
for the fluidity of his editing, his multiple changes of perspective
and the musical rhythms of his cross-cutting between parallel
actions in different locations, jumping back and forth through
space rather than time, bringing all the social layers into
contact for a tension- and chase-filled climactic showdown.
All four
Star Wars films follow the Elizabethan-Dickens-Griffith
model, especially in their twenty and thirty minute finalés
(no doubt the narrative lineage goes even further back, to
Homer or someone before him, nevermind), each film moving
toward a grand scale clash that cross-cuts faster and faster
among several subplots until they collide. No matter what
else happens in a Lucasfilm extravaganza, this much can be
counted on: George and company will draw on these familiar,
sometimes classical elements to create an entertainment too
big to be absorbed in one viewing.
The
Phantom Menace is not a great movie, but that doesn’t
make it a bad movie. The Star Wars films are packed
with references to Old Hollywood, they are fever dreams of
world culture, past and present, phantasmagoric confections
that mix the cinema, literature and drama which have come
before us, and all of it given an interesting sheen with the
latest technological advances in filmmaking. On close reading,
they’re obviously the work of a guy who grew up loving comic
books, and movie serials with cliffhanging chapter endings;
experimental cinema and eastern mysticism; bebop rock and
hot rods; whose politics would swing decidedly to the left,
if we were told anything about them (which we aren‘t, and
probably never will be). He never misses a chance to visually
quote H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs, the
true fathers of the Star Wars saga, while he peppers
every film with affectionate tributes to Howard Hawks, George
Stevens, William Wyler, John Ford, Akira Kurosawa, and a lot
of films and filmmakers you’ve never heard of or may have
been avoiding, like Michael Anderson’s The Dam Busters
(1954), John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (1966; a film
on which the young George Lucas worked as an assistant cameraman),
and Flash Gordon (1936), a 13-part, Saturday chapter
serial for kids, each episode of which opens with a forced
perspective title crawl that is, whattaya know, exactly like
the one opening every Star Wars film.
The overriding
project of the entire series since its inception, whenever
it turned serious for just a moment, has been to humanize
Darth Vader, to make us see ourselves in the villain, not
to champion his evil but to explore what human impulses can
make good people turn bad (like impatience, for instance,
or that greatest sin of both Buddhist and Jedi disciplines,
unchecked anger), ultimately to explore how a villain can
be redeemed.
The
Phantom Menace gave us an innocent boy vested with a power
he doesn’t understand, much as his own offspring Luke will,
in the later episodes, practically stumble upon his own destiny.
Having seen Luke’s struggles to be free of the youthful anger
that draws him toward the Dark Side should make Anakin’s inevitable
fall all the more tragic when it finally happens, and we know
it will happen, yet we‘ll be safe from complete despair because
we know how it all turns out in the end: with redemption,
and an honorable Viking/Jedi funeral.
I’m excited
about the new film because, already, when I watch the four
existing films in order, I can feel them taking on new shadings
as George invents tangle upon self-referential tangle (such
as the demise of Darth Maul and its visual echoes with the
Emperor’s final plunge into an abyss, or the recurring loss
of a mentor as an essential thematic step in the making of
a hero). I can’t wait to see how he makes it all come together,
but I also plan to exercise a little patience, to clear my
mind of expectations before going to the theatre on May 16.
After all, it’s George’s show, not mine.
Take a
breath.
Cage the
monkey mind.
Feel the
Force flowing through you. It
surrounds us and penetrates us, you know. It binds the galaxy
together.
Trust
in George to put something in there just for you (like a dazzling
light saber battle, or an eye-popping chase).
Listen
to Master Yoda; his advice sometimes stings, but in his own
little Zen/Jedi way, he‘s usually right.
Think
fun.
An
easy Jedi meditation for the hopeful:
Next time you watch Phantom Menace, sit all the way
through the end credits, enjoy the imagery of John William’s
encore, with your eyes closed if you have to, and listen at
the very end for the subtle, basso strains of the Darth Vader
March which close the music. There’s a little audio surprise
on the final fade out, a George Lucas-ian wink. Bet it also
happens at the end of Attack of the Clones.
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