'Star Wars’ strong stays at 40
With an evil father, a love triangle and a servant class, the George Lucas universe is full of melodramatic tropes - and there's no sign that the storylines are running out
H ow far has Star
Wars penetrated our culture, our language, our frames of reference? The president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, reportedly dismissed Theresa May as someone who is “on a different galaxy” when it comes to Brexit negotiations.
Well, yes, although exactly how far, far away remains to be seen. That was an easy pop-culture trope to reach for — and I like to think that JeanClaude had in the back of his mind the free trade and tax dispute that begins The Phantom Menace — although Theresa and Jean-Claude each see their adversaries as Darth Vader, presiding over an evil and superannuated empire, always likely to strike back against righteous resistance.
As fans celebrate the 40th anniversary of
Episode IV: A New Hope — as it was then not known — for my generation, indulging in nostalgic reminiscence about the first time we saw this gigantic event movie — in an era when event movies were a relatively exotic rarity — has become a subsidiary pleasure.
For me, it was as a teenager at a shopping mall cinema in Freeport, Maine, if memory serves, in August 1977, with my cousins and their friends
on a summer trip. I was saucer-eyed, awestruck and faintly delirious about it — as well as being insufferable about having seen the film before it opened in Britain. In my innocence and ignorance and clueless Britishness, I even pronounced the title with the emphasis on the second monosyllable, Star Wars, before I realised that it should be said with the earlier inflection, Star Wars.
Some years ago, Bafta held a surreal reception at Windsor Castle, at which the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Duke of Kent and Prince Michael of Kent were present, mingling with people in the business, including the shy, bearded and softspoken figure of George Lucas. Approaching the great man was hardly less fraught with procedural issues than embarking on idle chit-chat with the Queen. When I was introduced, I gibberingly tried to find ways of talking to him about Star Wars, or alternatively not talking about Star Wars, until Nick James, the editor of
Sight and Sound, shrewdly asked if he was enjoying Downton Abbey.
Lucas then launched into a long and detailed discussion of Downton, of which it emerged he was a huge fan, and told me he had been watching a box set of season one with his fiancee in Bermuda. And that experience opened my eyes to something that fans had long realised: that Star Wars is a soap opera, the biggest, grandest, most intergalactic soap opera in the world.
Two years later, Lucas himself made this point explicit when talking about The Force Awakens, the first Star Wars film over which he did not have direct creative control, saying: “People don’t actually realise it’s actually a soap opera and it’s all about family problems — it’s not about spaceships.”
Just like Dynasty; the dynasty in question being the Skywalkers. Quite aside from similarities in content, the Star Wars franchise itself has become like a soap opera, in that it is bigger than just a series of sequels. The word “episode”, previously restricted to television or radio shows, has now become part of the title of each Star Wars film.
Episodes VIII and IX are on their way; no one seriously suggests that they will stop there, and there are now auxiliary spin-off movies of which last year’s Rogue One was the first, branded with the
Star Wars mythic identity, exploring other parts of the Star Wars universe.
When Episode IV came out, its style was widely compared to the Saturday-morning pictures and the unassuming entertainment value of their endless serials. Yet that is now coming true, and the franchise has an actual smallscreen series,
The Clone Wars, set in the interim between Attack of
the Clones and Revenge of the Sith.