S I G H T S

Attack of the 
Star Wars Menace

by Robert E. Schnakenberg

Well, the much-anticipated fifth installment of George Lucas’ Star Wars saga, Attack of the Clones, has finally opened, raking in $110 million in its first four days despite lukewarm reviews. Fanboys from sea to shining sea are lining up for their third, fourth and fifth viewings, steeling themselves to debate its finer points until their beanie propellors spin off from overstimulation. Magazine racks teem with cover stories about this masterpiece of American popular entertainment, for which we all have waited so patiently, and its legendary creator, who is considered a god.

There’s only one problem: I’m immune. I hate Star Wars.

Chinatown. Taxi Driver. Midnight Cowboy. Network. These were some of the mainstream features Hollywood produced in the decade before Star Wars.

Gremlins. The Goonies. Ghostbusters. Beverly Hills Cop. These were the witless, soulless individually wrapped slices of cinematic cheese that followed in its wake.

Is it wrong to ascribe the aesthetic decline of an entire sector of the entertainment industry to one film? Perhaps. Certainly Star Wars was not alone in ushering in the era of the blockbuster. Jaws and The Towering Inferno before it did their part as well. But it was Star Wars that gave big-budget schlock a veneer of artistic integrity.

Nominated for 10 Academy Awards in 1977 (it won six of them, and was even given its own special award for the film’s robot sound effects), the crowd-pleasing sci-fi epic wowed even the gimlet-eyed critics of the 1970s. The New Yorker legitimized it with an enthusiastic review. Discotheques pulsated with dance versions of its theme music (that never happened with Towering Inferno). Pundits everywhere hailed it as a nationwide cultural sensation.

Star Wars left me cold. I couldn’t put it into words at the time, but as my vocabulary improved so did the brief I cultivated against the film, to the consternation of many of my male friends, who considered such charges nothing short of blasphemy. That Star Wars was a half-baked melange of old Saturday morning serial plots gussied up with some pseudo Manichean west coast spiritual malarkey, I thought, could not be refuted.

I cringed at the lameness of the byplay between Han Solo and Princess Leia, like one of those romantic subplots MGM used to graft onto a Marx Brothers movie. I rolled my eyes at Darth Vader, as heavy-handed and obvious in his huge black helmet as a moustache-twirler from an old two-reel western. I blanched at the sheer bloodlessness of California-issue leading man Mark Hamill.

But it was the film’s simplistic vision of good and evil that irked me most of all. Having been raised on the dark and ominous sci-fi films of the 50s, like Invaders from Mars and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I found Star Wars almost atavistic in its soothing squareness. Watching it was like eating pastrami on white bread. Ersatz. Insipid. Tiresome and boring.

After Star Wars, Hollywood’s machers more or less cut off the capital spigot to truly visionary filmmakers, opting instead to turn out schlockbuster after schlockbuster. Think about it: Was there one major studio release in the 1980s, other than Raging Bull, that packed the discomforting power of Lenny, The Deer Hunter or The Conversation? Have there been that many since? Not until American Beauty took home the Best Picture Oscar in 1999 did a film as dark and disturbing as those earlier triumphs win over a popular audience outside the art houses.

Most distressingly of all, the simplistic moral calculus of Star Wars became the template not only for America’s filmmakers, but for our entire culture for more than a decade. Overnight, it seemed, the world of Watergate and Vietnam, the vision of moral ambiguity reflected in the works of Polanski and Scorsese, was gone, replaced by Lucas’ vision of black-cloaked villains and simon-pure heroes — in short, the world of Ronald Reagan and Oliver North. The nuanced conception of evil depicted in films like Chinatown and The Conversation, of an evil that implicates you, no matter how good your intentions, was supplanted by the shoot-first-and-ask-ethical-questions-never ethos of Rambo.