The roof of the world film market must be in shreds. In the last six months
three films have zoomed up through it on their opening weekends: Harry
Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, The Lord of the Rings, and Spider-Man.
Now, to ravage the roof further, comes the latest Star Wars missile, subtitled
Episode II--Attack of the Clones (20th Century Fox). Where will it all end? (It
probably won't.)
Crammed though Episode II is with all kinds of combat--interplanetary
conflict, shoot-outs with futuristic guns, electric assaults, duels with neon
swords--what it produced in me was serenity. Little could make me feel more
serene than the thought that an imaginative person is fulfilling his dreams. Can
there be a happier person in our time than George Lucas, the originator and
chief creator of the now five-part Star Wars series? He is the archetypal
fantasizing boy made king. Steven Spielberg comes very close, but Spielberg is
sometimes assailed by grave themes, and, what's more, he deals fruitfully with
them. Lucas is unencumbered by mature thought. No daydreaming kid with a
bedroom full of comic books and a cellar full of gadgets ever had such a
chance to realize his fantasies.
What is especially singular is that Lucas did it all on his own. The three
smasheroo pictures listed above were derived from smasheroo published
works: a Rowling novel, a Tolkien novel, and a comic book. Lucas is native to
cinematics all the way. Educated in film, geared and lubricated by film, he
revels in film. Of all these recent bonanzas, Star Wars is the only one with no
subservience to a previous incarnation, with no need to transform a previous
work into screen material. Star Wars was born where it lives. To think of
Lucas, unbound by any inherited stricture, dreaming away busily so that he
will have sufficient dreams to embody--this is a vision of one sort of paradise.
The Star Wars series
has reached the point
where criticism is
irrelevant. The many
millions around the
world, young and older,
frothing for this latest
progeny of the Lucas
brain are not in the least
concerned with critical
appraisal. Even the
relative few who are not
frothing presumably
have the same
uninterest in criticism,
though for different
reasons. A good deal of
what I have read about
Episode II--I even omit
explanation of the
numbering--is not criticism but cultural commentary, exploring what the
success of the Star Wars series says about us. The New York Times ran an
op-ed piece called "A Very American Movie." This seemed to me unduly
parochial. At least half the revenue from this picture, as with its predecessors,
will come from abroad. To talk about the imperialism in these films, the
magnifying mirror of the American geist, is to forget that these pictures are
devoured everywhere. They are not, in this sense, American. They are global.
The same could also be said about those much deplored sex-and-violence
American films: they are made here but are gobbled up by the world. Yet
there is one huge difference between those action flicks and the Star Wars
quintet. Lucas's films have no people in them, not even to the token degree of
Grade B gun-and-girlie flicks. His characters, as is now his norm, are plastic
puppets, even in the confectionary love scenes. Most of their dialogue is so
doughy that it could be spooned into comic-strip balloons. Lucas simply has no
interest in these people. He puts invisible tags on them, winds them up, and
sets them loose. He doesn't care in the least, for instance, that some residents
of the same planet speak with British accents and some do not. With a
fantasizer's aplomb, he treats the hybrids, the animal-humans that he creates,
as "people."
The reason for this disregard is central. Lucas showed in American Graffiti
(1973) that he had some ability to understand the life around him, but even
before that (THX 1138) and certainly afterward, he has understood something
else. He is more interested in what he does when he is figuratively alone than
in what the actors do, and he knows that his kind of oneiric privacy is precious
to many. Thus, for him and for his audience, the people in his films are
incidental, almost intrusive: the real protagonists are the imagined settings and
devices. Who would care about what these people would say and do if they
were transported to Earth? Lucas keeps them in a dream, a galaxy "far, far
away," because where they are is more important than who they are. The
gorgeous planets and stellar highways are feasts for children who love wonder
and battles and escape from parents--and for those adults who want
pseudo-juvenile privacy for a few hours. Star Wars is not science worship: it
is science-flavored secular sin, all the more welcome because it also purveys
bite-size moralism.
Some critic, probably French, will write--possibly already has written--that
Lucas is an unrecognized postmodernist. The death of character, an idea
much advanced by pomo thinkers, is pretty much achieved here; and the
strictures of form are bent. I hope only that this critic will also note that Lucas,
for all his devout juvenility, is not without humor: the robot waitresses in a
coffee shop who wheel around swiftly on unicycles, the cool bad guy who
says, "I'm just a simple man, trying to make his way through the universe."
But Lucas will not fret about anyone's monkish analysis. He is happy, and
what is more, he is free. He may be the freest person on Earth.
Once in a while an event comes along that, we can foresee, will be used for a
film, even though it probably will not make a good one. In 1965 a
twenty-eight-year-old named Daniel Burros, a member of the American Nazi
Party and an official of the Ku Klux Klan, was discovered to be a Jew. When
the discovery was published, he killed himself. The inevitable result is The
Believer (Fireworks).
Henry Bean has directed adequately. Ryan Gosling in the leading role (given a
different name of course) is entirely credible, which means credibly scary.
Gosling plays a New York Jew who does not look Semitic, who is furious in
his antiSemitism and polemically clever about it. This man's physical
viciousness toward Jews and his quick polemics in argument are done well
enough to be unsettling. But, as in previous films about warped and dangerous
people, this screenplay--also by Bean--salivates over the frightening episodes.
These are the least enlightening moments in the story. We know how
anti-Semites spout. All that could be truly interesting is how this Jew became
a Nazi in the first place, and why he was sufficiently harrowed to kill himself
when exposed--and these matters are scanted in the screenplay. Perhaps this
man thought the easiest way to escape anti-Semitism was to become an
anti-Semite. Perhaps the hatred he felt against Jew-baiters could best be
released by becoming one himself. These matters, or other reasons, are left
nebulous. His contrition, brought about by an encounter with a Torah when he
and friends desecrate a synagogue, is facile.
This film might have succeeded if Bean had understood that the beginning and
the end of the story are really what it is about. The middle, so easily
exploitable, is run-of-the-muck-mill.
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Post date 05.31.02 | Issue date 06.10.02
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