This Has All Happened Before, And It Will All Happen Again: The Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
by Michael Giammarino
3. The Force Awakens and The Star Wars Rosetta Stone
The trick I have found to truly appreciate the Star Wars sequels is to watch them through the lens of George Lucas.
I've already touched on some particular aspects of Lucas’s proposed sequels which didn't make it into the sequels we got (midi-chlorians, the Whills, a microbiotic universe, Darth Maul and Darth Talon). George elaborated further to Paul Duncan for Star Wars Archives 1999-2005:
“Episodes VII, VIII, and IX would take ideas from what happened after the Iraq War… Okay, you fought the war, you killed everybody, now what are you going to do? Rebuilding afterwards is harder than starting a rebellion or fighting the war.
“The movies are about how Leia — I mean, who else is going to be the leader? — is trying to build the Republic. They still have the apparatus of the Republic, but they have to get it under control from the gangsters. That was the main story. It starts out a few years after Return of the Jedi and we establish pretty quickly that there’s this underworld, there are these offshoot stormtroopers who started their own planets, and that Luke is trying to restart the Jedi.
“[Luke] puts the word out, so out of 100,000 Jedi, maybe 50 or 100 are left. The Jedi have to grow again from scratch, so Luke has to find two- and three-year-olds and train them. It’ll be 20 years before you have a new generation of Jedi.
“By the end of the trilogy Luke would have rebuilt much of the Jedi, and we would have the renewal of the New Republic, with Leia, Senator Organa, becoming the Supreme Chancellor in charge of everything. So she ended up being the Chosen One.
“When you win the war and you disband the opposing army, what do they do? The stormtroopers would be like Saddam Hussein’s Ba'athist fighters that joined ISIS and kept on fighting. The stormtroopers refuse to give up when the Republic win. They want to be stormtroopers forever, so they go to a far corner of the galaxy, start their own country and their own rebellion.
“There’s a power vacuum so gangsters, like the Hutts, are taking advantage of the situation, and there is chaos. The key person is Darth Maul, who had been resurrected in The Clone Wars cartoons — he brings all the gangs together.
“Darth Maul trained a girl, Darth Talon, who was in the comic books, as his apprentice. She was the new Darth Vader, and most of the action was with her. So these were the two main villains of the trilogy. Maul eventually becomes the godfather of crime in the universe because, as the Empire falls, he takes over.”
While Lucas’s intention was to steer political allusions to Iraq, the sequels we got continued to focus heavily on iconography from Vietnam, WWII, and Nazi Germany, maintaining a throughline we can follow along the entire saga. These “offshoot stormtroopers who started their own planets” became The First Order. As JJ Abrams puts it, they're like surviving Nazis who fled to Argentina after WWII.
Luke's mission to rebuild the Jedi Order had to wait until The Mandalorian Disney+ series covered it, while George's intention for Darth Maul to become the godfather of crime in the universe led to The Book of Boba Fett. Darth Maul and Darth Talon seem to have been swapped out for Boba Fett and Fennec Shand.
As for Leia becoming the Chosen One? I know several sequel detractors believe Rey stole Anakin's thunder, especially his mantle as the Chosen One. (She didn't, by the way.) George was very direct in his intention to rob Anakin of that title and award it to Leia. I suspect sequel detractors wouldn't have been into that.
While George's work on the sequels was minimal at best, and his plot outlines for them were, if not completely scrubbed, then at least, in the broadest sense, indirectly cherry-picked from, his presence – to use a Force analogy – is still very much felt in every frame of these films. George may have been absent during the production process, but his philosophy, his sensibility, and his rules were still recognized and interpreted, if not directly followed. The way in which they weren't directly followed is in the choice to shoot on film and not to shoot digitally.
We're also getting a fan perspective. JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson are lifelong Star Wars fans, so what we’re getting are George's sensibilities filtered through fans’ eyes. And Rey… Finn… Poe… even Kylo Ren… they're Star Wars fans! They all grew up on the adventures of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia, in one way or another. They're US. The sequel trilogy is about – within and without – lifelong Star Wars fans inheriting the Star Wars universe. They're us, living in George's world, playing in George's sandbox, and living by George's rules.
But let's concentrate on George’s rules, sensibilities, philosophy, and aesthetic. If we look at these elements as the Rosetta Stone from which to decipher George's cinematic language, we'll be able to read between the lines of every Star Wars movie.
George always liked to open his films in medias res. In other words, “in the middle of things.” You're dropped into the drama immediately, and you're forced to catch up as you go along.
He did this in A New Hope, by opening the film with the tail end of a space chase between Princess Leia's Corellian Corvette and Darth Vader's Star Destroyer above the planet Tatooine. Rebel spies stole the plans for the Empire’s battle station off camera. A Galactic Empire superseded an Old Republic. A Galactic Senate was dissolved, off camera. There were Clone Wars. There were Jedi Knights who defended that Old Republic. There was history between old Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi and his friend Anakin Skywalker, relayed to Anakin's son, Luke. Before there were prequels, before Rogue One existed, exposition was all we had to go on.
He did this with The Empire Strikes Back, by opening the story three years after A New Hope. In the intervening years, Darth Vader learned of the existence of Luke Skywalker and began scouring the galaxy for him. Han Solo had an altercation with a bounty hunter on Ord Mantell.
He did this with Return of the Jedi, by opening the story a year after The Empire Strikes Back.
He did this with The Phantom Menace, setting the story when the Jedi serve the Republic and the Sith were believed to have been extinct for a millennium.
He did this with Attack of the Clones, setting the story ten years after The Phantom Menace. Anakin has been a padawan for a decade. He and Obi-Wan have been on several missions; one such mission involved a nest of gundarks. Jar Jar Binks is a senator. Padme Amidala is now a senator. Darth Sidious’s plan has progressed. Anakin and Chancellor Palpatine have grown close.
He did this with Revenge of the Sith, setting the story three years after Attack of the Clones. The Clone Wars have raged for three years. General Grievous has become a formidable enemy.
And, in a sense, George did this with the entire original trilogy since it's turned out to be the middle three. He literally starts the saga in the middle of things.
Likewise, JJ Abrams does this with The Force Awakens, setting the story thirty years after Return of the Jedi. In the intervening years, Luke and Lando Calrissian have gone in search of Jedi and Sith artifacts and abandoned Jedi temples. Snoke corrupted Ben Solo. Leia had trepidatious visions of her son's future, and in her haste, put him under Luke's mentorship, which didn't go so well. Han and Leia separated, Han returned to smuggling, and the Millennium Falcon was stolen. The New Republic moved to Hosnian Prime. Leia founded a resistance to combat the rise of the First Order. Luke's Jedi Academy was burnt to the ground following a failed confrontation with his nephew. Ashamed, Luke went into self-imposed exile. And the machinations of the Emperor continued. (I'm sure someone somewhere is hearing this in their head, so here, I'll say it: Yes, somehow Palpatine returned.)
I'll let Brendan Nystedt, in his essay highlighting the opening of A New Hope, "Here's Where the Fun Begins: Star Wars and In Medias Res," on the Star Wars official website, break it down even further:
The opening crawl sets the scene, making the audience aware of everything that's happened previously. Before you see any Rebel spaceships, a hidden base, the evil Galactic Empire, or anything else mentioned in the crawl, you're given just the bare minimum of context. What the crawl lets you know is that this story isn't just beginning -- it's been in motion for some time.
This idea is hit home by what comes next. After the camera tilts down from the vast galactic expanse, we’re treated to that iconic shot of a Star Destroyer in hot pursuit of Leia's blockade runner above Tatooine. This is the power of a storytelling technique called in medias res. Translated from Latin, this term means “into the middle of things.”
In medias res has been in use for as long as there have been epic stories to tell, and The Iliad is often cited as a classic example. The term was coined by a Roman poet named Horace around 13 BCE. In medias res exists as the opposite of what Horace terms ab ovo, or “from the egg,” meaning that the story starts from the very beginning of the action. Rather than set up the introduction of a story on-screen, A New Hope throws you into the middle of a dramatic chase, avoiding exposition that is unnecessary to understanding the gist of the plot.
This notion informs much of the way that first Star Wars film is constructed. It boldly refuses to spoon-feed the audience, plunging you into a foreign land with strange sights, sounds, and, most importantly, dialogue. In A New Hope, we are told about (but never see) Tosche Station, Beggar's Canyon, the Imperial Senate, and the Emperor. The Clone Wars are mentioned, but who are the clones? Why was there a war? All of these tantalizing ideas are sprinkled throughout the film, but it's always in service of adding texture and depth to the universe. Things have happened off screen, in the past, that have a bearing on the events that we’re watching unfold.
Film professor Will Brooker traces the opening of A New Hope back to Lucas’ earlier works, with which it shares other distinguishing characteristics: “[It] represents the synthesis of Lucas’ film-making at that point in this career: the surveillance culture of the Death Star is inherited from THX, and the teen banter from American Graffiti, but the sound montage, the in medias res immersion in a strange culture, the fascination with machines…the underlying theme of escape, and the documentary approach, with its implications for naturalistic improvisational performance, are common to both -- and all these elements can be traced back in turn to aspects of [his] student films.”
By putting the audience into the story and universe abruptly, Lucas aimed to evoke what he and his friends felt when watching Kurosawa movies and other Japanese cinema in the 1960s. Walter Murch, sound designer on THX-1138, says that “the problem that George and I found with science fiction films that we saw is that they had to explain these strange rituals to you, whereas a Japanese film would just have the ritual and you’d have to figure it out for yourself.”
The sequels work very much the same way Brendan Nystedt describes. We pick up on details as we go, with a narrative already in progress.
Okay, so let's set the scene, and to do that, I need to start with the opening crawl. (Because what's a Star Wars movie if it doesn't have an opening crawl? I'm talking to you, Rogue One!) While we were busy reading alternate history Star Wars novels and watching prequels and animated Clone Wars, events have been transpiring in a galaxy far far away, essentially in real time, and we need to catch up. (In medias res, you know?)
When The Force Awakens begins, we're told: Luke Skywalker has vanished. In his absence, the sinister FIRST ORDER has risen from the ashes of the Empire and will not rest until Skywalker, the last Jedi, has been destroyed.
With the support of the REPUBLIC, General Leia Organa leads a brave RESISTANCE. She is desperate to find her brother Luke and gain his help in restoring peace and justice to the galaxy.
Leia has sent her most daring pilot on a secret mission to Jakku, where an old ally has discovered a clue to Luke’s whereabouts…
As the crawl rises into infinity, the camera pans down, and from a low angle, we watch the Star Destroyer Finalizer cross the frame, eclipsing a moon of the planet Jakku. This represents the First Order's metaphorical goal, to blot out all light in the galaxy.
The name Jakku may or may not be based on Jacurutu, a seitch – a community or village – of the Fremen on the planet Arrakis, from the Dune books, written by Frank Herbert. More on Dune in a bit.
Four atmospheric assault troop landers – each carrying 20 troops – descend towards Jakku. Keeping watch outside Tuanul Village, we get our first look at BB-8, Artoo-Detoo's spiritual cousin, rolling into his Spielbergian closeup to get a better look at the approaching troops, peering at the lights in the sky coming closer.
The design of BB-8, hotshot pilot Poe Dameron's faithful astromech droid, came from a very familiar place… Ralph McQuarrie's original concept art for R2-D2. BB-8's look, an oval dome sliding up, down, and side to side over a metal ball, calls to mind an early sketch by Ralph McQuarrie of Artoo, in concept art from the early stages of pre-production on Star Wars (1977).
It's only fitting, if we're re-entering this world thirty years hence of Return of the Jedi, that the look of it would still celebrate and acknowledge those same McQuarrie designs; designs which captured my childhood imagination with the original trilogy.
While BB-8 may not identically resemble his early Artoo sketch, McQuarrie's initial intent surely does:
“I think Artoo was just described as a small robot. I thought of him as running on a giant ball bearing — just a sphere, a circle, wheel-like. He had gyros so he could go in any direction on this ball.”
Analyzing and authenticating those lights in the sky, a distressed BB-8 rushes to warn his companion, Leia's "most daring pilot," Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), who is meeting with Lor San Tekka in Tekka's tent. Their meeting is like a scene in a David Lean picture, like Peter O'Toole's Sir Lawrence deliberating with Alec Guinness's Prince Faisel in Lawrence of Arabia.
It isn't exactly a random thing that I find this scene evocative of a David Lean picture. To form the crazy quilt of pastiche that is Star Wars, Lucas lifted from the likes of Akira Kurosawa, Sergio Leone, John Ford, and, yes, David Lean.
And there's more to it than simply homage.
An homage is a tribute paid to an earlier work or another artist within the text of some other artist's work. Critics might sometimes shrug these public displays off as callous rip offs or evidence of a filmmaker trying to be flashy, hip, or cool by referencing other films and the auteurs who made them.
But there's a bigger purpose to homage (and George's use of it), or to referencing other films, than a filmmaker or a film being flashy, cool, or hip, by wearing their influences on their sleeves, right out in the open. Using homage to tell a story is another aspect of George’s cinematic language; another element of the Star Wars Rosetta Stone.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before I get to cinematic language, I'd like to touch on the importance of visual literacy first, and George Lucas's advocation of visual literacy.
Visual literacy is the ability to read, write, and create visual images. John Debes, founder of the International Visual Literacy Association, defined visual literacy this way in 1969:
“Visual Literacy refers to a group of vision-competencies a human being can develop by seeing and at the same time having and integrating other sensory experiences. The development of these competencies is fundamental to normal human learning. When developed, they enable a visually literate person to discriminate and interpret the visible actions, objects, symbols, natural or man-made, that he encounters in his environment. Through the creative use of these competencies, he is able to communicate with others. Through the appreciative use of these competencies, he is able to comprehend and enjoy the masterworks of visual communication.”
Common techniques from which visuals can be interpreted and studied include angle and perspective, body language and gaze, color, framing, layout and composition, omissions, positioning, salience, symbols, text style, and vectors. Invariably, these techniques apply to the interpretation and study of not only Star Wars, but all cinema.
George Lucas is a major proponent for the importance of teaching visual literacy in schools and founded The George Lucas Foundation in 1991 to inspire and advocate new ways to educate students. During a lecture posted on the George Lucas Foundation website, Edutopia, in 2017, Lucas explained how important it is to teach visual literacy to students as soon as possible.
George Lucas: The issue we're discussing here, in terms of multimedia literacy, is that we stress so hard learning English and learning English grammar and then we shove music and art and… most schools don't even get into cinema. We move those over into some sort of artistic – which means, some sort of therapeutic or fun – thing. lt's not approached as a very valid form of communication. Kids know this. When you take a five-year-old… they can speak, they can use words, they don't know how to write very well and they may not know much grammar, but they know how to speak. They also know music. They may not know the grammar of music. They know cinema because they spend a huge amount of time in front of the television, so they know visual communication; they know the moving image. They intuitively know a lot of the rules, but nobody's actually taught them anything, any more than they've taught them anything about grammar in English. So we go through school, and then later on, we start to learn the grammar of English. You have punctuation, capital letters, you know? Run-on sentences, what a verb is. But nobody teaches anybody about what screen direction is, what perspective is, what color is, what a diagonal line means. Those are rules; those are grammatical rules that appear in an art class. If you've taken art class, the first thing you'll do is get into graphics and you start learning, “well, a jagged line means this, and a blue color means this, or red color means that.” So if you're trying to convince somebody that what you want to do is excite them, then you use red or yellow. If you're doing it with music, then you use a fast rhythm, not a slow rhythm. You don't have to teach them, necessarily, how to read music, and you don't need to have to teach them how to be an artist, but you do have to teach them how to use the grammar of the language. Somehow, we've gotten to the point where the words have gotten way up here and these other forms of communications, which all started out equal and at the beginning, much more equal before we had words. Somehow, in the educational system, they'II need to be balanced out, so the kids could communicate using all of the forms of communication, not just put it into little categories and say you really need to learn how to use a verb; that's much more important than learning perspective Or learning screen direction But it's not really, especially in this day and age where the power of multimedia is coming to the children. It used to be, like with cinema, only the very elite professionals worked in this medium. But now anybody can work in it.
Moderator: Are we talking about a new way of teaching?
George Lucas: lt is a different way of teaching, in that I think English classes should broaden themselves. And my personal thing… I think we should rename English to be – I mean, I know in some schools we call it Language Arts, but I think it should be renamed Communication. It's a communication class, and you learn the English language, learn how to write, you learn grammar, but you also learn graphics. If you take graphics out of the art department, take cinema, and put it into the schools, take music out of the music department. If you want to learn how to play an instrument, if you want to learn how to be a composer, then you can go to the music department. If you want to learn how to do beautiful renditions of paintings and follow the great artists then you go into art class. But if you really want to just learn how to communicate, then what is the basic grammar of communication, then that should be taught basically in the communications class. It shouldn't be taught in some esoteric arty thing; it should be taught as a very practical tool that you use to sell and influence people and to get your point across and to communicate to other people.
Movies give us just enough condensed information in as quick an amount of time as possible to serve its limited running time in order to tell the story they're trying to tell. To be able to condense that information down, a filmmaker has a number of different ways of doing that. There's the most direct way, the dialogue. There's also the way they block or frame each shot. There's what's in the background and the foreground of the frame, the mise-en-scene. Another way is through color, or lighting, or use of shadows. Or in the way the film is edited; the succession of shots. Another way is through how the scene is shot, what lenses are used, how it affects the image and how that image gets a particular point across, or how the camera is moved, whether the camera is handheld or on a dolly, or on a tripod (i.e., "on sticks"), or by the distance between the camera and the subject of the shot. And yet another way is by using specific artwork as an influence on a shot or a scene to not only evoke a mood, but also get a point across if the subject of the art being used coincides with the point the filmmaker is making in the scene and/or the film itself. This can also be done by quoting dialogue from other films or from literature.
And even yet another way is by replicating shots or moments from other movies in order to create parallels for the audience to pick up on, or to present certain messages to the audience. When particularly significant movies become embedded within the cultural landscape, their images become indelible; they become part of the visual language of cinema. These aren't homages done only for the sake of homage. These are relevant references that contribute to telling a story.
Movies, like all art, are not isolated phenomenon. They are not singular or unique creations disconnected from the rest of cinema or other artforms, trapped within the boundaries of their aspect ratios, their proscenium frames. No, movies are tapestries, interconnected – stitched – to other tapestries, other movies, that support similar styles, messages, and aesthetics.
But movies are also experiential events, and watching movies is an experiential activity. As audience members, we, each of us, take from a movie only what we bring to it. I equate it with joke-telling. If someone tells you a joke and you don't get it, it's because the topic or the punchline is beyond your experience. It “went over your head,” as they say. If the joke needs to be explained to you, it isn't funny. But you will find it funny – at the very least, you should – the next time the joke is told, because now you'll have a frame of reference for it. Because now you'll understand the joke. You'll finally be able to appreciate it on an experiential level. That's why a director's commentary, a cast member's commentary, or a crew person's commentary is always beneficial. It's why film analysis is always beneficial. Because maybe you've never seen Lawrence of Arabia, so you don't have a frame of reference to be able to recognize Lawrence of Arabia as part of this particular movie's visual language. But once somebody points out the significance of Lawrence of Arabia, maybe it’ll inspire you to check the movie out, so that the next time you see Star Wars, you'll notice the reference, and appreciate its significance.
It's only one of many reasons why visual literacy is so important, and why it should be taught in tandem with all other pertinent forms of communication. If filmmakers are using images to tell their story, shouldn't we have a reasonable understanding of the language of images to be able to fully appreciate that story?
Since a filmmaker only has ninety, a hundred, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and fifty, or a hundred and eighty minutes to tell a story, they're jam-packing enough story elements into their film in such a compact and condensed manner, such material demands to be unpacked if the story is going to be properly appreciated. That's how cinema works. That's how Star Wars works.
Which brings us back to Sir Lawrence.
David Burger, in his article for Cineluxe, "The Films That Made Star Wars, Pt. 2," cites David Lean as a major influence (amongst those aforementioned names, Akira Kurosawa, Sergio Leone, and John Ford) on Lucas and on Star Wars, quoting a note from the official Star Wars website, a note that's no longer present, but I would probably attribute to columnist and Star Wars expert Bryan Young, who is no slouch when it comes to the Wars.
Many moves from David Lean’s epic were cribbed for sequences on Tatooine. The shot of Mos Eisley from the distance as Luke and Obi-Wan look from on high reminds one instantly of shots looking down at Damascus. Shots of Tusken snipers looking down at speeders moving below echo the same sorts of shots in Lawrence of Arabia.
For Attack of the Clones, not only did Lucas shoot Padme and Anakin's arrival to Naboo at the Plaza de España, the theatrical one sheet poster and their Varykino lake retreat are also evocative of Lean's Doctor Zhivago.
A couple scenes from now, in The Force Awakens, when Rey packs up her things, hops on her speeder and hightails it to Niima Outpost to trade scavenged parts for rations, we see her framed in a wide shot, passing by a mountainous, downed Star Destroyer, an image which echoes a similar shot in Lawrence of Arabia, where Sir Lawrence passes a mountain of comparable size, by camel.
Any discussion of Lawrence of Arabia and its connection to Star Wars will ultimately lead me to Dune. Now, it's common knowledge how much Frank Herbert's Dune influenced Star Wars. What might not be common knowledge is how much Lawrence of Arabia influenced Dune. In The Secret History of Star Wars, by Michael Kaminski, Kaminski notes:
Frank Herbert was one of the most popular contemporary science fiction writers at the time Lucas was writing Star Wars. His epic novel Dune had been released in 1965 (after being serialized in Analog magazine in two parts in 1963 and 1965) and was an instant hit in science fiction circles, marking a milestone in the genre - many have compared its context in science fiction to Lord of the Rings' context in the fantasy genre. The story of Dune concerns an intergalactic empire made up of three regional Houses, the largest of which is the Imperial House Corrino, which controls the lesser two fiefdoms, House Harkonnen and House Atreides; the plot is propelled by the political struggles between these three Houses. The Protagonist of the novel is young Paul Atreides, son of Duke Leto Atreides and heir to the dukedom due to his noble status, he receives special martial arts training, as well as mystical powers from the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood cult. House Atreides becomes seen as a threat, and so the Corrino Emperor Shaddam IV decides that it must be destroyed. The Emperor cannot wipe out House Atreides with an open attack, and so he employs subterfuge, granting the Atreides control of the treacherous desert planet Arrakis, also known as Dune, an inhospitable world coveted for its spice Melange which increases one's lifespan and which had previously been controlled by House Harkonnen. The Emperor's scheme culminates when he sends an army dressed as Harkonnens to Dune to wipe out the Royal family, but Paul and his mother escape into the desert wilderness. Here they meet a roaming desert band of fighters known as the Fremen. With Paul's developing abilities, he begins training the band of rebels, later becoming known as demigod military leader Paul Muad'Dib. He and his army quickly overwhelm the Imperial forces with their mystical skills and Paul becomes head of the Imperial throne.
Many have observed the desert setting of Dune as being an obvious inspiration for Tatooine, although the planet does not exist in the synopsis. The 1973 synopsis, however, does indeed bear a strong Dune influence, and that is the latter half, where it drifts from the Kurosawa source material.
… In Frank Herbert's novel, Paul Atreides comes across a band of rebels, and in order to finally assault the Empire he will need their help; he comes to lead them, and with his small army he attacks the Imperial fortress and topples the Empire. In the Star Warstreatment, General Skywalker comes across a band of rebels, and in order to finally assault the Empire to free the captured princess he realises he needs their help; he begins training them and they attack the Imperial stronghold and rescue the princess. The use of coveted "spice" in the synopsis is evidence of Dune's influence.
Kara Kennedy, in a Tor.com piece, notes:
Herbert himself was very interested in exploring desert cultures and religions. As part of his extensive research and writing process, he read hundreds of books, including T.E. Lawrence’s wartime memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (1926) [Brian Herbert, Dreamer of Dune, Tom Doherty Associates, 2003] He saw messianic overtones in Lawrence’s story and the possibility for outsiders to manipulate a culture according to their own purposes. [Timothy O’Reilly, Frank Herbert, Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1981]
And in the Decider article, '''Lawrence Of Arabia’ Is The Unlikely Prequel To ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Dune,’ And All Your Favorite Fantasy Epics," Meaghan O'Keefe expands on the relationship between Lawrence of Arabia, Dune, and Star Wars:
Even if you’ve never devoted the three hours and forty-odd minutes necessary to plow through David Lean‘s extraordinary Lawrence of Arabia, chances are you know it’s a masterpiece. The 1962 epic won seven Oscars and currently holds the No. 7 position on the AFI’s Top 100 movies list. It’s also — strangely — the foundation for most of our favorite science fiction and fantasy stories.
Even though Lawrence of Arabia doesn’t take place after the apocalypse or in a galaxy far, far away, the film is chock full of imagery and plot details that wiggled their way into the imaginations of people like George Lucas, Frank Herbert, and their legions of acolytes. Why? Because even though it’s a biopic, Lawrence of Arabia is a pitch perfect realization of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth. Campbell, of course, is the 20th century’s leading influence on mythology and the “hero’s journey,” and he’s credited with breaking down every major human myth into a single story.
As Campbell lays it out, a hero is a someone who starts their life being ordinary until one day they receive a “call to adventure” to enter a strange, mysterious, or unusual world. There he or she encounters a series of trials that test the hero’s worth. Sometimes the hero is aided, but often he or she must face these setbacks alone. The hero must then survive a perilous ordeal armed with the lessons learned during the “road of trials.” If the hero wins, then he or she is given a gift, “boon,” or sacred self-knowledge. From there, the hero must to decide to return to his or her ordinary world, but the return is not without further tests and trials.
This is the DNA of every great myth, adventure, legend, and science fiction/fantasy saga. And yes, it’s perfectly captured in Lawrence of Arabia. The film follows young T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) as a young British officer, frustrated to be cooped up in Cairo working on maps while the action of World War I rages elsewhere. Then he’s called to take a special journey to meet Prince Faisal (Alec Guiness – yes Alec “Obi-Wan Kenobi” Guiness) and procure information. He embarks on an intoxicating journey through the desert where he encounters danger and excitement. Once he meets Faisal, he finds himself tempted to go off-journey in pursuit of a larger quest: to take Aqaba. This new mission finds him confronting the best and worst parts of himself. He makes friends and loses them. He steps away from his British background and embraces the Bedouin ways. He becomes a hero and a murderer. He is dubbed a prophet and ruthlessly struck down and tortured. He wins the fight, but at what cost? And at the very end, he is pulled back to his old way of life where he is heralded as a hero, but he was really an instrument of British imperial expansion.
Paul’s journey follows many of the same beats as Lawrence of Arabia and Dune even lifts a thrilling scene from Lawrence of Arabia. However, instead of leading a band of bedouin tribesmen against a mechanical monster, Paul Atreides leads the Fremen to conquer a worm.
Dune uses the scene to solidify Paul’s leadership amongst the Fremen. He has proven that he has a great destiny and may in fact be a prophet. Lawrence’s charge on the Turkish train also adds to his mystique, but with a twist. Even as Lawrence dodges death and plays the hero, he’s making it more and more obvious that he’s merely a man playing at prophet. A metaphoric difference that most readings of Dune overlook in Herbert’s text.
Dune might have been the first great science fiction epic to steal ideas from Lawrence of Arabia, but it certainly wasn’t the last. George Lucas placed much of Star Wars on the desert world of Tatooine. Luke, his young hero, is given the same blonde head of hair, white clothes, and wistful spirit that Lawrence has. Lucas didn’t just recycle Lawrence of Arabia‘s vast desert vistas for his films; He stole some of the sets. David Lean used the Plaza de España to depict Britain’s base in Cairo… decades later, Lucas would use the beautiful backdrop for a tepid scene between Anakin and Padme in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones.
Lawrence of Arabia's influence over science fiction and fantasy persists to this day. It’s a continued source of inspiration for the genre’s most beloved directors. Steven Spielberg has called it his favorite film of all time. In Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, the android David (Michael Fassbender) watches the film while the human members of the crew are in hibernation. George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road uses the desert, once again, as a playground for battle and bloodshed. If the trailers are any indication, J.J. Abrams is continuing the tradition of using Lean’s glorious direction as inspiration for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
You might think that science fiction movies look to space and the stars, but most of them are looking back — whether they know it or not — to one glorious film about a man’s real-life adventures in Arabia.
And, so, as The Force Awakens opens, we find ourselves on another desert planet – Jakku, possibly named after Jacurutu, from Dune. But why another desert planet, and why not Tatooine? This might be a little bit of Star Wars visual shorthand and a little bit of accommodation. The Force sensitive hero – in this case, heroine – always starts out on an inhospitable, sandy planet. Tatooine is very much the Skywalker homeworld. In The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan rescue Queen Amidala after the Trade Federation invades her sovereign world of Naboo. Needing repairs to their cruiser after taking heavy fire during their escape, they hide on Tatooine, where they meet slave boy Anakin Skywalker, who bears an uncanny connection to the Force. "Nothing happens by accident," Qui-Gon assures Anakin's mother, Shmi. Winning his freedom in the Boonta Eve podrace, Anakin leaves with the Jedi to Coruscant to be tested by the Jedi Council. In A New Hope, multiple events converged on Tatooine. The Empire built the Death Star, rebels stole the Death Star plans, and those plans were passed on to Princess Leia like a hot potato, who then hurried, via Corellian Corvette, to solicit Obi-Wan Kenobi's aid. Complications arose when Leia's Corellian Corvette was intercepted by Darth Vader. Leia stashed the plans in R2-D2 with a message to Kenobi. Artoo and Threepio escape to the desert surface, are accosted by Jawas, sold to Owen Lars, and his nephew Luke Skywalker stumbles upon the message. Artoo slips away to find Kenobi, and when Threepio and Luke pursue the astromech droid, they're attacked by Tusken Raiders, which brings Kenobi out of hiding. Certainly, when Artoo finally plays Leia's message to the elderly Jedi Master, the will of the Force could not be plainer.
In The Force Awakens, Poe is sent to Jakku to receive a piece of a map that could lead the resistance to Luke Skywalker. The First Order gains this intel and raids Tuanul village, capturing Poe. Before his capture, Poe manages to hide this MacGuffin in his droid companion (like his mentor, Leia Organa, before him). A stormtrooper involved in the raid experiences an awakening, which leads to his desertion. He needs a pilot, so he rescues Poe. Their stolen TIE fighter is shot down, crash lands on Jakku, and Finn, thinking he is the sole survivor of the crash, finds not only BB-8, but also Rey. Rey becomes a target by association, necessitating her joining Finn in his escape from the planet, to deliver the map piece to the resistance. In the Millennium Falcon, no less. In A New Hope, Luke refuses his call to adventure. It isn't until his aunt and uncle are killed that he decides to go with Obi-Wan. In The Force Awakens, Rey remains on Jakku under the impression her parents will come back for her. When she gets involved with BB-8 and Finn, she has no other recourse but to escape with them. And in both cases, Luke and Rey ultimately face their destinies. In each of the three trilogies, our hero leaves a desert planet to confront their destiny. Anakin and Luke from Tatooine, Rey from Jakku. Giving Rey her own desert planet gives her individuality. This way, she's not living where the Skywalkers used to live; she's living where she lives, but it still allows for some poetic parallelism. And being adopted into the Skywalker family calls for her to make a pilgrimage to Tatooine to pay her respects to the Skywalkers and then to announce her adoption into the Skywalker family.
I like to picture the Star Wars galaxy this way: imagine Earth itself as a galaxy; every country, continent, island, ocean, lake, city, and state represents a world in that galaxy. There's more than one desert on Earth, so there's more than one desert planet in the Star Warsgalaxy.
Tuanul village is a settlement populated by members of the Church of the Force, a religious sect whose members, while they are not Force sensitive, chose to follow the tenets laid down by the order.
While the Church of the Force isn't mentioned by name in the film, it is identified in The Force Awakens Visual Dictionary, and is appropriately bookended by the Sith Eternal on Exegol in The Rise of Skywalker.
According to Star Wars Visual Dictionary author Pablo Hidalgo, the Church of the Force was originally conceived by George Lucas for Star Wars: Underworld, a prepped but never produced live-action TV series Lucas was working on with Battlestar Galactica co-showrunner Ronald D. Moore. (More on Battlestar Galactica in a bit.)
So the sequel trilogy begins with the good intentions of a member of the Church of the Force, to find Luke and bring him back into the fold, and ends with evil pursuits of the Sith Eternal, who maintain Emperor Palpatine's spirit in a clone body.
But to know any of this minutiae, you'd have to consult Star Wars ancillary material.
In Chapter 4, we will.
No comments:
Post a Comment