Hello.
I've been in Barcelona for the last five days. The city, not the planet. All the dogs I saw definitely had noses.
I've changed the "settings" of this site to only accept comments from registered uses. It appears to be possible to create a blogger account in 12.5 seconds, and it doesn't generate any spam. (You could always claim that your e-mail accout was "wibble@fnurdle.hotmail.co.uk) I'll probably reset things back to normal in a week or two.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Monday, June 27, 2005
Sunday, June 26, 2005
.....because they are very eager to please, but not quite sure what they're supposed to be doing.
Memo to self:
When remonstrating with one of Branson's drones -- say, for example, about the fact that if they are going to replace all their trains with busses, (meaning that a 20 minute jaunt from Birmingham to Coventry is going to end up taking close to two hours) then they really ought to put up some posters on the station warning you about this -- it is best to maintain an aura of moral superiority. It is not a good idea, for example, to storm out of the ticket office shouting "And by the way -- all Virgin Trains smell of shit."
But they do.
When remonstrating with one of Branson's drones -- say, for example, about the fact that if they are going to replace all their trains with busses, (meaning that a 20 minute jaunt from Birmingham to Coventry is going to end up taking close to two hours) then they really ought to put up some posters on the station warning you about this -- it is best to maintain an aura of moral superiority. It is not a good idea, for example, to storm out of the ticket office shouting "And by the way -- all Virgin Trains smell of shit."
But they do.
Friday, June 24, 2005
Revenge of the Sith (Redux)
Once upon a time, a man made a horror movie. A lot of people thought it was the most frightening horror movie they had ever seen. It involved the most frightening monster in the world. One of the clever things about the movie is that you never actually saw the frightening monster: you just saw glimpses of it, shadows, the damage that it had done, and occasionally just a tiny glimpse of a claw or fang or tentacle.
Everyone who saw the film imagined that the monster was the thing that they were most frightened of. The movie cleverly called up the worst fears of everyone who saw it, and everyone left the cinema thinking they had seen the most frightening movie ever.
And, when the film came out, everyone admitted thatthe it was a very good special effect, and very, very frightening. But it was no longer the Most Frightening Monster in the World. Sid, who was scared of snakes, had imagined that the monster was a snake; Peter, who was scared of spiders, and imagined that the monster was a spider. And it turned out to be neither of those things.
The younger fans couldn't understand why the older fans thought the old films were so frightening. The older fans thought that CGI monster had spoiled the films for the younger fans. When they heard that the director was going to produce New Improved Editions of the old films, with the shadows taken out and footage of the CGI Special Effects Monster put in, they did not bother to go and see them.
And the director sold lots of action figures to the younger fans and lived happily ever after.
The end.
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Sunday, June 19, 2005
Friday, June 17, 2005
Avoid the internet until Saturday
Davros would be too obvious. No ground work has been laid for the Master. The Valyard would be preposterously fannish
So it's either Von Straten's Dalek, or else its Adam.
I'm betting 25p on Adam.
So it's either Von Straten's Dalek, or else its Adam.
I'm betting 25p on Adam.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
My, how we laughed....
All movies have to have a "tagline". The "tagline" for the forthcoming movie version of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" is going to be....and you may want to sit down before you read this....:
"There are a thousand stories in Narnia. The first is about to be told."
"There are a thousand stories in Narnia. The first is about to be told."
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Revenge of the Sith (6)
Galaxies we have lost
Ben: I guess it was a while back. I was a Jedi Knight, like your father.
Luke: But my father didn't fight in the clone wars. He was no knight. Just a navigator on a space (sic) frieghter.
Ben: Or so your uncle told you. Owen Lars didn't agree with your fathers ideas, opinions or his philosophy of life. He believed your father should have stayed here on Tatooine and not gotten involved in....Well, he thought he should have remained here and minded his farming. Owen was always afraid that your father's adventurous life might influence you and pull you away from Anchorhead. I'm afraid there wasn't much of the farmer in your father. {....} All this reminds me. I have something here for you. When you were old enough, your father wanted you to have this...if I can ever find the blasted device. I tried to give it to you once before, but your uncle wouldn't allow it. He believed you might get some crazy idea from it and end up followng old Obi-Wan on some idealistic crusade. You see, Luke that's where your father and your uncle Owen disagreed. Lars is not a man to let ideals interfere with business, whereas you father didn't think the question even worth discussing. His decision on such maters came like his piloting. Instinctively..."
Luke: How did my father die?
Ben: He was betrayed and murdered by a very young Jedi named Darth Vader. A boy I was training. One of my brightest disciples. One of my greatest failiures.
Star Wars by "George Lucas" (*)
"When your father left, he didn't know your mother was preganant. Your Mother and I knew he would find out eventurally, but we wanted to keep you both as safe as possible, for as long as possible. So I took you to live with my brother Owen on Tatooine, and your mother took Leia to live as the daughter of Senator Organa, on Alderaan."
Return of the Jedi, by James Kahn.
Aided and abetted by restless, power hungry individuals within the government, and the massive organs of commerce, the ambitious Seantor Palpatine causes himself to be elected President of the Republic. He promised to reuinite the disaffected among the people and to restore the remembered glory of the Republic. Once secure in office, he declared himself Emperor, shutting himself away from the populace. Soon, he was controlled by the very assasstants and boot-lickerts he has appointed to high office, and the cries of the people for justice did not reach his ears.
Star Wars by George Lucas
Luke: But my father didn't fight in the clone wars. He was no knight. Just a navigator on a space (sic) frieghter.
Ben: Or so your uncle told you. Owen Lars didn't agree with your fathers ideas, opinions or his philosophy of life. He believed your father should have stayed here on Tatooine and not gotten involved in....Well, he thought he should have remained here and minded his farming. Owen was always afraid that your father's adventurous life might influence you and pull you away from Anchorhead. I'm afraid there wasn't much of the farmer in your father. {....} All this reminds me. I have something here for you. When you were old enough, your father wanted you to have this...if I can ever find the blasted device. I tried to give it to you once before, but your uncle wouldn't allow it. He believed you might get some crazy idea from it and end up followng old Obi-Wan on some idealistic crusade. You see, Luke that's where your father and your uncle Owen disagreed. Lars is not a man to let ideals interfere with business, whereas you father didn't think the question even worth discussing. His decision on such maters came like his piloting. Instinctively..."
Luke: How did my father die?
Ben: He was betrayed and murdered by a very young Jedi named Darth Vader. A boy I was training. One of my brightest disciples. One of my greatest failiures.
Star Wars by "George Lucas" (*)
"When your father left, he didn't know your mother was preganant. Your Mother and I knew he would find out eventurally, but we wanted to keep you both as safe as possible, for as long as possible. So I took you to live with my brother Owen on Tatooine, and your mother took Leia to live as the daughter of Senator Organa, on Alderaan."
Return of the Jedi, by James Kahn.
Aided and abetted by restless, power hungry individuals within the government, and the massive organs of commerce, the ambitious Seantor Palpatine causes himself to be elected President of the Republic. He promised to reuinite the disaffected among the people and to restore the remembered glory of the Republic. Once secure in office, he declared himself Emperor, shutting himself away from the populace. Soon, he was controlled by the very assasstants and boot-lickerts he has appointed to high office, and the cries of the people for justice did not reach his ears.
Star Wars by George Lucas
(*)Presumably Alan Dean Foster
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Monday, June 13, 2005
Revenge of the Sith (5)
"Luke sensed that the old man had no wish to talk about this particular matter. Unlike Own Lars, however, Kenobi was unable to take refuge in a comfortable lie."
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Star Wars by George Lucas (*)
Obi-Wan: "Your father's lightsaber. Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough."
Maybe. But he never expressed any such wish.
Obi-Wan: "(Your Uncle) didn't hold with your father's ideals. Thought he should have stayed here and not gotten (sic) involved."
It is hard to work out when Anakin could have told Owen what his ideals were, and when Owen could have expressed an opinion of them one way or the other. By the time they meet, Anakin is already a Jedi Knight, already expressing a wish to be omnipotent, raise the dead, establish a benvolent dicatorship, massacre the natives, etc. Granted, Obi-Wan only says that Owen "thought" Anakin should have stayed at home, not that he actually told anyone that he thought so. Perhaps we are supposed to imagine Shmie telling Owen that the boy Anakin had left Tatooine some years previously, and Owen expressing the view that he shouldn't have done. Even so, you have to work fairly hard to say that Anakin left Tatooine because of his "ideals".
Obi-Wan: "(Your uncle) feared you might follow old Obi-Wan in some damn fool idealistic crusade, like your father did."
At a stretch, the Clone Wars were a crusade and Anakin was following Obi-Wan on them. The plain meaning of Obi-Wan's words are that Anakin left Tatooine to join a crusade which Obi-Wan was leading, which is not what happened.
Obi-Wan: "When I first met him, your father was already a great pilot."
Well, already a small boy with a kack for flying pod racers
Obi-Wan"....but I was amazed how strongly the force was with him."
Read: "I discovered that he was the Messiah."
Obi-Wan: "I thought that I could instruct him just as well as Yoda."
Read; "Yoda didn't want him to be trained at all, but allowed me to do so when I informed that I would do so with or without his permission, because of a promise I had made to my former teacher."
Obi-Wan: "You will go to the Dagaobah system, and learn from Yoda, the Jedi master who instructed me."
Read: "I have temporarily forgotten that Qui-Gon was the Jedi Master who instructed me, although admittedly Yoda had a hand in training all the, er, younglings".
Obi-Wan: "I haven't gone by the name of Obi-Wan since, oh, before you were born."
In the scene which directly follows the birth of the twins, Yoda refers to Obi-Wan as "Master Kenobi". So, I suppose, technically....
Obi-Wan: "A young Jedi named Darth Vader, who was a pupil of mine before he turned to evil, helped the Emprie hunt down and drestroy the Jedi Knights. He betrayed and murdered your father."
Pants on fire! Pants on fire!
Darth Vader: "I've been waiting for you, Obi-Wan. The circle is now complete.When I left you, I was but the learner. Now I am the master."
This is a slip of the tongue on the part of the Dark Lord who was, after all, under a lot of stress. What he meant to say was "When you left me, I was but the learner". On this assumption, everything makes sense. Obi-Wan leaves Anakin to go on a mission, and they have a row about whether the latter can be on the Jedi counci without having the title "Master". Later on, after the fight, Obi-Wan leaves Darth Vader for dead on the volcano planet.
Luke: Do you remember your mother? Your real mother?
Princess Leia: Just a little bit. She died when I was very young.
Luke: What do you remember?
Leia: Just images, really. Feelings.
Luke: Tell me.
Leia: She was very beautiful. Kind. But sad. Why are you asking me this?
Luke: I have no memory of my mother. I never knew her.
Niether Luke nor Leia have can possibly have any memories of their mother: she died a few minutes after they were born.
(*) Presumably Alan Dean Foster
Obi-Wan: "Your father's lightsaber. Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough."
Maybe. But he never expressed any such wish.
Obi-Wan: "(Your Uncle) didn't hold with your father's ideals. Thought he should have stayed here and not gotten (sic) involved."
It is hard to work out when Anakin could have told Owen what his ideals were, and when Owen could have expressed an opinion of them one way or the other. By the time they meet, Anakin is already a Jedi Knight, already expressing a wish to be omnipotent, raise the dead, establish a benvolent dicatorship, massacre the natives, etc. Granted, Obi-Wan only says that Owen "thought" Anakin should have stayed at home, not that he actually told anyone that he thought so. Perhaps we are supposed to imagine Shmie telling Owen that the boy Anakin had left Tatooine some years previously, and Owen expressing the view that he shouldn't have done. Even so, you have to work fairly hard to say that Anakin left Tatooine because of his "ideals".
Obi-Wan: "(Your uncle) feared you might follow old Obi-Wan in some damn fool idealistic crusade, like your father did."
At a stretch, the Clone Wars were a crusade and Anakin was following Obi-Wan on them. The plain meaning of Obi-Wan's words are that Anakin left Tatooine to join a crusade which Obi-Wan was leading, which is not what happened.
Obi-Wan: "When I first met him, your father was already a great pilot."
Well, already a small boy with a kack for flying pod racers
Obi-Wan"....but I was amazed how strongly the force was with him."
Read: "I discovered that he was the Messiah."
Obi-Wan: "I thought that I could instruct him just as well as Yoda."
Read; "Yoda didn't want him to be trained at all, but allowed me to do so when I informed that I would do so with or without his permission, because of a promise I had made to my former teacher."
Obi-Wan: "You will go to the Dagaobah system, and learn from Yoda, the Jedi master who instructed me."
Read: "I have temporarily forgotten that Qui-Gon was the Jedi Master who instructed me, although admittedly Yoda had a hand in training all the, er, younglings".
Obi-Wan: "I haven't gone by the name of Obi-Wan since, oh, before you were born."
In the scene which directly follows the birth of the twins, Yoda refers to Obi-Wan as "Master Kenobi". So, I suppose, technically....
Obi-Wan: "A young Jedi named Darth Vader, who was a pupil of mine before he turned to evil, helped the Emprie hunt down and drestroy the Jedi Knights. He betrayed and murdered your father."
Pants on fire! Pants on fire!
Darth Vader: "I've been waiting for you, Obi-Wan. The circle is now complete.When I left you, I was but the learner. Now I am the master."
This is a slip of the tongue on the part of the Dark Lord who was, after all, under a lot of stress. What he meant to say was "When you left me, I was but the learner". On this assumption, everything makes sense. Obi-Wan leaves Anakin to go on a mission, and they have a row about whether the latter can be on the Jedi counci without having the title "Master". Later on, after the fight, Obi-Wan leaves Darth Vader for dead on the volcano planet.
Luke: Do you remember your mother? Your real mother?
Princess Leia: Just a little bit. She died when I was very young.
Luke: What do you remember?
Leia: Just images, really. Feelings.
Luke: Tell me.
Leia: She was very beautiful. Kind. But sad. Why are you asking me this?
Luke: I have no memory of my mother. I never knew her.
Niether Luke nor Leia have can possibly have any memories of their mother: she died a few minutes after they were born.
(*) Presumably Alan Dean Foster
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Sunday, June 12, 2005
Revenge of the Sith (4)
You have your moments. Not many of them, but you do have them.
"The Empire Strikes Back"
1: Preamble
"Revenge of the Sith" is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good movie.
I think that it is a very good something; but it lacks all the normal things which go to make up a film–-character development, storyline, suspense, a script. I liked Episodes I and II a lot more than many fans did, but Episode III has tested even my patience with George Lucas. Tested, but not yet completely exhausted.
It has a very good opening and an absolutely stonking ending. They are, however, the opening and ending of two different movies. In between them comes a long, dull and largely incoherent middle. It is this middle that we remember. We don't come out of the cinema saying "Cool space battle!" or "Great mythic resonances!" We say "Oh. What a dull middle."
Lucas remains a virtuoso in the language of cinema. The pictures are beautifully composed and fantastically inventive. I don't just mean the special effects set-pieces--which are, it goes without saying, stunning. But it's the quieter moments that really impress me. The shadows cast by Anakin and Palpatine. Anakin's face half-covered by a hood. Anakin and Padme in the empty hall, full of pillars. How many seen-it-all-before fanboys predicted that Lucas would show Darth Vader putting the mask on from Vader's own point of view?
Lucas has said that he wishes he could have made silent movies(1). A lot of "Revenge of the Sith" falls into place when you know this. The first encounter between Padme and Anakin on Coruscant is made up of a series of tableaux, with any emotion being conveyed by the characters' posture and expression (as well as by the background music) rather than by what they say. The screenplay contains some rather ambitious directions:
Padme: Something wonderful has happened
They look at one another for a long moment
Padme: I'm....Annie, I'm pregnant.
Anakin is stunned. He thinks through all the ramifications of this. He take her in his arms.
Anakin: That's....That's wonderful.
"He thinks through all the ramifications of this"; "they look at one another for a long moment" and the two "...." amount to "they strike a pose" and "there is long pause" and "John Williams introduces a new background motif."(2) It would take a better actor than Hayden Christensen (and I can think of a few) to convey by expression that he is thinking through all the ramifications of something. Where the dialogue in "Attack of the Clones" was jaw-droppingly awful, that in "Revenge of the Sith" is merely banal. (3) But it is also frequently gratuitous. You could imagine the whole scene being mimed, with perhaps a couple of silent-movie style captions.
The sheer quantity of imagery in the movie ends up overwhelming you. George has allowed himself one last burst of Promethean creativity with which to breath life into his universe. He isn't showing you that universe, or telling you about it, or even telling you a story about it. He's just heaving great gobbits of landscape and back-story onto celluloid. He wants Alderaan and Kashyyyk to be real and the only place that they can be real is on a movie-screen. Even a ten second vignette is enough to bring them to life.
If "Revenge of the Sith" has a moral, it might be; "Don't try too hard to give life to the dead: you may end up killing the one you love."
2: Beginning
The opening of "Revenge of the Sith" is by far the most exciting thing in the prequel trilogy, and as good a spectacle as anything in the whole saga. There's a genuine sense of motion as the as the Jedi Starfighters zip along the Stardestroyer. It was cool to see the characters in the cockpits of star-fighters, like in the good old days.
There are too many characters and vehicles zooming around. There are the Jedi fighters, and things called Vulture Droids, which may or may not be the same as buzz-droids. The choreography of the battle is confused, and none of the pilots apart from Obi-Wan and Anakin are individualized.(4) But this doesn't matter too much because of the overwhelming "wow" factor. I love the way that we start with a massed battle in space, follow through into a running chase on board a starship and end up crashing to earth and physically dumping the heroes in the middle of the political storyline.
Several scenes seemed to quote the old movies. This looks good, but as ever, makes no real sense. The room where Palpatine is imprisoned just happens to recall the Throne Room that he had/will have on the Death Star in "Return of the Jedi". This means that Anakin's fight with Count Dooku recalls/foreshadows the final fight between Luke and Darth Vader. The Jedi ship speeds through the big landing bay doors of the starship just as they close, which reminds of of how Han will jump through the closing doors on the Death Star. (Incidentally: If you are designing a video game, it makes sense to put the shield generator right near the bay doors, to make it easy for intruders to shoot it off. I doubt that anyone would design a ship that way in real life.)
I am afraid that lightsabers are becoming wearisome. They are cool as dueling weapons, but tedious when used to clumsily and randomly dispatch mobs of robots in an uncivilized and inelegant fashion. Han Solo going "Peew! Peew!" at Stormtroopers feels cooler than Obi-Wan going snicker-snak at trade federation droids.
Poor Christopher Lee must be getting quite bored with being hired for big movies solely so he can be killed off in the first ten minutes. I suppose he must be grateful that his part wasn't cut altogether.
Anakin looks absurd in his proto-Darth-Vader costume. For future reference, Yoda: when a Padwan starts going around in a black cloak he's probably got an unhealthy interest in the Dark Side of the Force. Or at any rate Goth music.
As always, Lucas drops us in the middle of the action and lets us pick up the details as we go along. Usually, this works OK: we never find out what kind of mercy mission Carrie Fisher wasn't on, and it doesn't matter because it doesn't matter. But this time I felt confused. I would have welcomed a very brief re-cap about who the separatists were, what they were separate from, why, and what Christopher Lee has to do with it. An introduction for General Grievous would have helped, too. (Yes, I know he appeared in a cartoon series, but that's no excuse.)
Like a lot of good but second-rate action movies, I found it very exciting that the action was happening, without in any way being excited by the action.
3: Middle
Once we get back to Coruscant everyone starts talking.
Padme and Anakin say "I love you" and "I hope you don't die" and "I'm pregnant."
Anakin and Palpatine say "Please turn evil" and "No, I'll never turn evil" and "Oh, all right then, if you insist."
Obi-Wan says "I wish you hadn't turned evil".
This takes an hour and a half. The main sound effect is the audience starting to fidget and shuffle.
Some people say "There is no point in watching these films, because we already know the ending."(5) This does not necessarily follow. A great number of movies "tell you the ending" before the action starts. It can be a very effective device: you start by showing how things turned out, and then flash back to explain how we got there. Old plays often "give the ending away" in their actual titles: "Ye most piteous tragedy of Anakin Skywalker together with ye sad death of Padme, as has been shown diverse times in ye Coventry Multiplex."
A story teller can use the fact that the audience "knows the ending" in one of two ways. Either he can generate a sense of dramatic irony: we see that certain events are significant, because we know things that the character's don't. Or he can use it to intrigue the audience, to create a sort of "whodunnit" in which thy say "I know where we are going to end up, but I can't possibly imagine how we can get to there from here." If Lucas had used the first method, Obi-Wan might have said "Let's send Anakin to fight the Sith Lord – he's the one person we can be sure would never turn to the Dark Side." If he'd used the second, then perhaps the question of Anakin's turning would not even be mentioned; maybe we would see him reject the Emperor outright, and spend the last quarter of the movie thinking "When is he going to turn? What is going to make him turn?"
But Lucas doesn't use our fore-knowledge for any dramatic purpose whatsoever. There's no tension about whether or not Anakin will turn; no attempt to surprise us with the circumstances. We simply get to watch George moving his collection of action figures through their pre-ordained dance. Perhaps he really thinks that the film's main audience will be younglings who have never seen "The Empire Strikes Back."
There can't be any tension about the question "Will Anakin turn to the Dark Side?", because we already know the answer; so the whole interest in the film depends on the question "Why will Anakin turn to the Dark Side?" But this this question is answered within five minutes of our anti-hero's arrival on Coruscant. Anakin has a premonition that Padme will die in childbirth. Once we know this, it is very obvious how the rest of the film will develop: Anakin will try to use The Force to save her; Palpatine will tell him only the Dark Side is strong enough, blah, blah, etcetera. (6) Because this is so obvious, the long-drawn out scene in the theater-box, in which Palpatine gradually reveals to Anakin that the Sith once knew how to raise the dead, becomes redundant and pointless. We know what he is going to say; we know how Anakin is going to react; and thank god that George was restrained from mentioning on screen that the title of the "Mon Calamari ballet" that they are watching was "Squid Lake."
The one moment of real drama comes when Anakin finds Mace Windu and Palpatine engaged in lightsaber battle. Windu is on the point of killing Palpatine, in obvious contravention of the Jedi code. Anakin has to decide whether or not to intervene. This resembles, and is probably supposed to foreshadow the moment in "Return of the Jedi" when Anakin/Vader has to decide whether to stand by and watch the Emperor kill his son. But even here, it is pretty clear where we are going. I wasn't so much thinking "What's he going to do?" as "Oh for goodness' sake get on with it you dithering floppy haired luvvie."
The moment at which Anakin seals his Faustian pact was also pretty dramatic: Anakin kneeling before the Emperor; Vader's breathing playing in the background; the bars of the Imperial March emerging clearly in the sound-track (7) for the first time; Palpatine's face disfigured so it now looks like the Emperor we are familiar with. Impressive. Most impressive. One could wish that Hayden Christensen had been able to think of a better way of signifying "I am evil now" than by rolling his eyes. I also wish that when Palpatine said "Hence forth you will known as Darth...Vader" I hadn't thought of the fraternity initiation in "Animal House."
As an explanation for the origin of Darth Vader, I find this all very unsatisfying.
Darth Vader's evil is massively diminished. He isn't a good angel who fell through pride, but a noble victim of tragic circumstance. He has done a very bad thing for a very good reason. In "Attack of the Clones", Anakin appeared to be heading for the Dark Side because he was angry with his mother's killers and wanted vengeance against them; and because he simply wanted to be the greatest Jedi ever. Most of us probably agree with the Jedi that vengeance, arrogance and anger are Bad Things. But it turns out that the real reason he turned was because he wanted to save the life of a loved one, which most of us would regard as noble.
In the first 5 films, I understood "anger" to mean "uncontrolled violent rage", not "righteous indignation". I think that Anakin was allowed to be "angry" because his people were slaves, but not to have a tantrum over it. Episode II shows that his anger towards the Sand People doesn't get anyone anywhere. "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." ("To be in a passion, some good may do; but no good if a passion is in you.")
But Lucas now seems to believe that all feelings and emotions are equally dangerous, and that love, just as much as anger and hate, is a path to the Dark Side. I had no particular problem with the idea that Jedi Knights were forbidden to marry. I assumed that it was something like celibate monastic orders who say "Marriage is a very good thing, but for us, remaining celibate in order to follow a higher calling is an even better thing." But it now seems that the Jedi think that love is Bad in itself. Yoda goes so far as to warn Anakin that he shouldn't mourn the dead. Again if he were just saying that you shouldn't be too sad because the beloved dead are still with us, I wouldn't have a problem with this. But he seems to be saying that mourning is a symptom of emotional attachment, and attachment is in itself an evil:
"Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them, do not. Miss them, do not. Attachment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed that is. Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose." (8)
I don't agree with any of this. In "Star Wars", The Force was a dramatic device which admitted "spirituality" into the "Star Wars" universe without endorsing (or for that matter, offending) any particular religion. If The Force had any doctrinal content, it was "let go of your conscious self and act on instinct". Now, it has turned pretty explicitly into Buddhism Lite.
I am not entirely sure what is supposed to have transpired between Darths Sidious and Vader. Is Palpatine saying whatever he thinks is necessary to make Anakin embrace the dark? Or, when he talks about the Dark Side, the limitations of the Jedi, and the power of the Sith, is he telling him the truth as he sees it? Does Lucas have in mind an ideology for the Sith, a viewpoint which makes them wrong and the Jedi right? (9) Or are they just baddies because they are baddies?
Palpatine tells Anakin that the Jedi and the Sith are similar in many ways; that the Jedi care about power just as much as the Sith do; and that the idea that the Jedi are selfless may not be born out by experience. He seems to have a point. Anakin violates the Jedi code to kill Dooku; Mace Windu is on the point of doing so to kill Palpatine. What's the difference? Obi-Wan, of all people, tells Anakin to break the Jedi's rules and spy on Palpatine. One can't help feeling that if he'd been equally flexible about the "no marriage" rule a lot of bother could have been avoided. "Actually, the Jedi Code is more guidelines than rules."
If you asked ten people what the point of "Star Wars" was, nine and half of them would say "a battle between good and evil." But this is another idea which Lucas wants to blow out of the water. The Light Side is corrupt. Both Yoda and Obi-Wan are implicated in that corruption. The Sith may have a point. The black-cloaked operatic villain who strangles his admirals to encourage the others is victim of tragic circumstance. Society is to blame. The bad Sith talk about good and evil as "points of view"; but we know that for Obi-Wan, the difference between telling the truth and lying is also a matter of viewpoint.
Either this is all too subtle for me, or else it is completely incoherent. During their interminable light-saber duel, Obi-Wan shares with Anakin a great moment of insight. "Councilor Palpatine is evil," he explains. Anakin responds with a career-low for banal dialogue: "From my point of view, the Jedi are evil." "Then you are lost" ripostes his mentor. But hang on. Five minutes previously, Anakin had told Obi-Wan "If you are not with me, you are my enemy" and Kenobi had replied "Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes." I realize that this is a space opera rather than a text on moral philosophy, but you can't have it both ways. You can't condemn someone for being a moral relativist in one scene, and then blame them for being a moral realist in the next.
4: More Middle
The story of Anakin's fall has some narrative interest, though it lacks pace and suspense. But the action sequences which it is intercut with are incoherent and rather pointless.
Lucas needs to get Obi-Wan and Yoda off Coruscant so that the Emperor can have a sporting chance at corrupting Ani. Obi-Wan can't be the one to come and arrest Palpatine, because we would never believe that Annie would chose the life of the Lord of the Sith over the life of his old friend – and anyway, if Ewan McGregor had got killed off at this point, Alec Guinness would be retrospectively out of a job. So off he goes on a pointless side-quest to kill General Grievous.
This section had some nice actiony bits, although when Grievous draws four lightsabers at once, I fear he revealed his origins as a cartoon character. The fight seems to happen on a fairly interesting planet (everyone is living on the sides of a gigantic crater) but we don't stay there long enough for it to become a place in the way that Tatooine, Bespin or the Death Star did. Obi-Wan has no-one to talk to apart from R2D2 and some aliens we haven't heard of. At times, he is reduced to talking to himself: this cannot be made the basis for snappy banter.
Obi-Wan kills Grievous. This is important, because it causes the surviving separatist leaders to decamp to a volcanic planet called – and if there's any sniggering, they'll be trouble – Mustafha. This is important, because the Emperor sends Anakin there to assassinate his erstwhile allies. This is important because Fate, in the form of as 30 year old back-story, requires that Anakin fights Obi-Wan in the vicinity of a volcano. The plotting really is that perfunctory.
The forfeit which Yoda pulls out of the Jedi hat is to go to Kashyyyk and help the Wookies defeat the trade federation robots. This is important, for, er, for some reason which completely escapes me. This sequence was a great missed opportunity. Yoda and Chewbacca (yes, he's in it) are as far removed from each other as two goodies can be and if Lucas had been interested in telling a story, rather than giving us a whistle stop tour of his note-book, great fun could have been had with their relationship "Pull their arms out of their sockets you must not. Patient you must be, and calm. Think with your stomach you must not." In fact, we get some pretty shots of wookies charging against some droids, and some pretty shots of Yoda in a wookie field HQ, and some pretty scenery, and a very prolonged scene in which Yoda says goodbye to Chewbacca even though they have hardly exchanged three words---and that's it.
But Lucas obviously didn't think that making us dance between three different plots is exciting enough. Shortly after Anakin's fall, Palpatine orders his spies in various parts of the galaxy to assassinate the nearest Jedi Knight. This triggers a bloated montage sequence in which we get brief glimpses of battles on various different worlds – a world of fungi, a dusty world, a world with a big a city built on a circular bridge. It all looks ravishing, but it is very, very unsatisfying film making. You could just hear the audience thinking "Where are we now? Is this a planet I'm meant to have heard of? Help!"
It is possible that if I had read the "Extruded Universe" novels, then some of these planets would have been instantly recognisable. But I haven't.
5: End
Lucas has said that he thinks of the "Star Wars" saga as a symphony with recurring themes. This is certainly true of the final minutes of "Revenge of the Sith." Scenes are set up in opposition to each other; images reflect other images; scenes become laiden with symbolic significance. It has some genuine mythic atmosphere and it looks gorgeous. And of course, it makes no sense whatsoever.
The actual duel between Obi-Wan and Anakin was sort of all right. A large amount of swash had to ceremoniously buckled before we could get to the dramatic moment that was really the object of the exercise. I liked the scene where they are climbing up a cliff edge, slashing one another as they climb. I thought the moment where the pillar of rock collapses, so they are briefly balancing on rock that's floating in a sea of magma was perhaps over done. I found myself forcibly reminded that this was all a computer compositing trick, and they weren't really there. It's kind of cute that poor George now thinks that if your movie's climax is a sword fight between two people, the way you make it exciting is by pouring in several trillion dollars worth of special effects. Lucas has had the nerve to claim that this is the greatest swordfight ever filmed. Sorry, George: that prize still goes to two actors in front of a fairly obviously painted background, delivering witty dialogue and performing real fencing moves that they'd been practicing for months. (Oh, and by the way -- I'm not left-handed either.)
I actually preferred the duel between Yoda and Palpatine, which Lucas contrives to have occur in the Senate itself, the literal heart of the Old Republic. Palpatine starts physically tearing the building apart and hurling it at Yoda; a nice bit of symbolism, if not over subtle.
But it's when Anakin is defeated and theme shifts to "life from death" that the movie really comes together. Lucas's habit of cutting between different plot threads really pays off, as the scenes add significance to each other. Each image is perfectly conceived. Anakin, with his hair and limbs burned off, claws his way out of the lava flow, which is is a powerful, brutal image of birth. While this is happening, Obi-Wan, goes and carries Padme back to her ship. The tender image of Obi-Wan rescuing Padme contrasts with the callous way in which he left his friend Vader for dead. As Obi-Wan saves Padme, Palpatine is also saving Vader. In a quite astonishing image, Vader is taken back to Corsuscant in a medical capsule that looks like a coffin – the scene in which it floats across the landing bay is clearly meant to be a funeral, so that Vader's birth is actually a kind of death. Everything comes together in three brief scenes: we see Anakin being fitted with new arms and legs in a medical center; and immediately cut to the operating theater where Padme is giving birth. We hear Padme say the words "Luke" and "Leia", and then immediately cut back to Coruscant and see Anakin putting on the familiar black mask. Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker are born at the same moment.
One wonders whether someone chickened out towards the end of the movie. When she expresses disquiet that he has gone over to the Dark Fide, Anakin uses his patented remote control choking power to strangle Padme. But she is still alive when Obi-Wan takes her back onto the ship. The robot-doctors says that there is nothing actually wrong with her, but that she is dying anyway. This is never explained. (Lucas apparently explored the idea that her body was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of midichlorians which she was carrying.) But when he asks where Padme is, the Emperor tells Anakin that he killed her, and he screams "No" in the way that characters in movies always do at stressful moments.
It would have been much more interesting if Vader had un-ambiguously killed her. "Darth Vader goes over to the Dark Side in order to save his wife's life, but, because he has gone over to the Dark Side, he kills her." That would have been a story worth telling.
Lucas still cannot handle time. (10) He wants the film to have a climax in which Yoda fights the Emperor and Obi-Wan fights Darth Vader. He wants these scenes to be juxtaposed against each other. But he also wants the "birth" of Darth Vader to be juxtaposed with the birth of Padme's twins: the champions of the the light and dark sides come into the world simultaneously. So having defeated Yoda the Emperor has one of those premonition thingys, senses that Lord Vader is in danger, and flies to the planet Mustafah where Obi-Wan left him for dead. He takes him back to Coruscant and rebuilds him: the rebuilding scenes being juxtaposed with Padme's labour. For any of this to work, we have to believe that ships can fly between Coruscant and Mustafah almost instantaneously – that interstellar flight takes only minutes. (This is assuming that there were no pre-flight checks and that the Emperor knew where he had left his ignition keys.)
The film ends, brilliantly, with four silent vignettes. First, Padme's funeral on Naboo, with a new, un-named queen walking behind her coffin; horribly contrasting with the celebration scene at the end of "Phantom Menace". (I don't think that there were any gungans.) The camera pans down her open casket, showing that her hand is still holding the pendant that Annie gave her. The camera seems to linger on her abdomen; the womb of heroes. We go from this scene of death to Vader and the Emperor—and also Grand Moff Tarkin, but you wouldn't know this without looking at the end credits—surveying their new Death Star, and from there to two vignettes about new life. Leia is delivered to her adoptive parents on Alderaan (the planet which the Death Star will destroy) and Obi Wan takes Luke to his "Uncle" and Aunt on Tatooine.
So the film ends, where it began at the Skywalker homestead. The combination of music and imagery was terribly suggestive. Beru and Owen are watching the suns set, just as Luke did in "Star Wars"; the familiar Luke Skywalker motif is playing in the background. Beru takes the baby from Ben, and then pointedly turns her back on him and takes him to Owen, who doesn't look round. The saga has come full circle. (Perhaps the impact has been slightly spoiled by the fact that we have already been back to the farm in "Attack of the Clones", but I forgive it.) The moment is perfect. As Owen, Beru and baby Luke watch the twin suns set, we want to see the next episode, in which the twin children rise up and end the long night that their father has initiated.
Except we can't, because it doesn't exist, and never can. "A New Hope" will not be a sequel which continues these mythical themes but a B movie about a farm boy who rescues a princess. The Sith, the Jedi council, Qui-Gon's secret knowledge, and the whole idea about bringing balance to the Force will simply never be mentioned again. Surely, surely, surely, when the redeemed Anakin finally dies, someone should say to him: "You didn't kill Padme – it was the concentration of the midichlorians in the twins". But they won't, because they can't, because when Anakin died, no-one had heard of midichlorians, or Princess Amidala, and no-one knew that Darth Vader was going to kill her.
The original "Star Wars" trilogy pointed backwards to a series of prequels that had not yet been made: now, the prequels point forward to different, unmade versions of episodes IV, V and VI which can now only ever exist in our minds.
6: Triumph of the Whills
So. Anakin has become Darth Vader; Palpatine has become Darth Sidious has become Emperor; Luke and Leia have been born. Republic has yielded to Empire; Yoda has stated his intention to go into exile. Leia has been adopted by a cardboard cutout. Obi-Wan announces his intention to return to Tatooine and watch over baby Luke. Seven and half hours of prequel later, the final piece moves into its pre-ordained starting position.
But Yoda has a surprise up his computer generated sleeve.
"Master Kenobi; wait a moment. In your solitude on Tatooine, training I have for you. An old friend has learned the path to immortality. Your old Master, Qui-Gon Jinn. How to commune with him, I will teach you..."
If you want to know why "Revenge of the Sith" fails as a move, then look no further than this scene.
It interrupts the flow of the narrative. It is undramatic. It's like the penultimate chapter of a bad crime thriller; where someone says "One thing puzzles me..." and the detective embarks on three pages of exposition. It has nothing to do with the story of "Revenge of the Sith", and is only tangentially relevant to the "Star Wars Saga" which Lucas actually filmed, as opposed to the one he might now wish he had filmed. "Revenge of the Sith", it seems, is not a story, but a set of linear notes.
It provides an explanation where no explanation is needed. In "Star Wars" Luke Skywalker hears the voice of the dead Obi-Wan Kenobi; in the sequels, he manifests as a ghost (11) Everyone who saw the first movie understood instantly what had happened. Old Ben, an exemplary Holy Man, continued to watch over his disciple after he died. The dead Jedi was now a single strange of the energy field which binds the galaxy together. What more explanation is needed?
The idea that dead Jedi can somehow talk to the living through The Force is simple and evocative. The idea that three specific Jedi can turn up as ghosts at the Ewok's feast is slightly weaker, but it still works. The idea that one Jedi in particular, through the use of secret disciplines, learned to cling onto consciousness when all previous ones had merged into vague pantheistic oblivion seems tawdry: almost as if Kenobi cheated. This explanation diminishes the original concept.
It is banal. Lucas probably has some Joseph Campbell notion at the back of his head: someone needs to go on another one of those bloody Hero's Journeys and bring back the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything from beyond the grave, so it might as well be Qui-Gon. But big mythic journeys require big mythic language. "Incidentally, did I mention that I've discovered the secret of eternal life?" is not really adequate.
It is pedantic. It's going back and worrying about the meaning of a small scene in "Star Wars" which Lucas actually put there because it seemed cool at the time. When Ben dies, his body disappears, and this seems to surprise Darth Vader. Yoda's body also disappears when he dies. Vanishing corpses were in fashion that season: remember the Mystics in "Dark Crystal"? However, Darth Vader, Qui-Gon and all the Jedi who get slaughtered in "Attack of the Clones" do not vanish. That Ben's death is unusual can be inferred by the fact that he says to Vader "If you cut me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine." So here is the answer: Yoda and Obi-Wan vanish because they have learned a secret discipline which allows them to retain their consciousness after death. That was worth waiting thirty years for, wasn't it?
It explains nothing, because the square peg of an explanation is being jammed into the round hole of an established story. If post-mortem survival is a secret known only to Qui-Gon, Yoda and Ben, then why does Anakin appear as a "ghost" at the end of "Return of the Jedi"? (Come to that, why doesn't Qui-Gon?) If Anakin is present as a ghost, why didn't his body vanish too? On Luke's second visit to Dagobah, Yoda says "Soon must I rest; forever sleep". When Luke replies "No, granddad, you'll outlive us all" or words to that effect Yoda replies "Strong am I in the Force. But not that strong." Why does he talk as if he is going to die, is resigned to dying, and accepts death as "the way of the Force", if he has spent two decades mugging up on the secret of immortality?
None of this seems to have any bearing on "Revenge of the Sith": it is part of different story that Lucas has in his head, but which he doesn't have time to tell. According to some deutero-canonical texts, "The Sith" were an evil cult, defeated by the Jedi 1,000 years ago. Their secret teaching has survived a millennium by being passed down from Master to Apprentice. This is why there are only ever two Sith. A deleted scene in "Revenge of the Sith" has the ghost of Qui-Gon inform Yoda that he learned the secret of immortality from "The Shaman of the Whills". "Journal of the Whills" was the original sub-title of "Star Wars", before Lucas plumped for the more straightforward "from the adventures of Luke Skywalker." (12) So just as Darth Vader has offered himself up to be Palpatine's apprentice and learn about the Sith; Yoda has become Qui-Gon's apprentice in order to learn about "the Whills". That is: although there has been a Jedi hegemony for thousands of years, based on a single understanding of the Force, there are at least two buried, literally "occult" teachings, that understand it in a different way. After thousands of years, the Lord of the Sith succeeds in taking over the galaxy – but what he doesn't know is that the surviving Jedi have discovered there own secret teaching, which will enable them to become more powerful than he can possibly imagine. In the deleted section, Yoda says that Qui-Gon's teaching might enable Obi-Wan to retain his physical form when One with the Force. Are we supposed to infer that Obi-Wan and Yoda are already dead when Luke encounters them? That they are shades that have taken on physical forms in order to guard their last hope, and that the reason they disappear when they die is that they were never really there to begin with.? "How two long-forgotten secret traditions fought for control of a moribund mystical order, and of the galaxy itself" has the potential for being a very interesting story. But six lines at the end of a prequel do not turn the "Star Wars" edifice into that story.
7: The Face With a Thousand Heroes
Padme's last words are "There is good in him."
Obi-Wan, who I suppose we should now call "Ben", doesn't believe her, and nor, presumably, does Yoda. But years ago, Padme's son Luke will say the the same words: "There is good in him". And they are both right. The irony of the film is that as we watch Palpatine corrupting Anakin and creating Darth Vader, we know that he is creating the force that will ultimately destroy him.
Darth Vader has only ever really cared about two people: his mother, and Padme. Both of these loves conspire to turn him to the Dark Side; but finally, his love for his Son will bring him back into the light. In doing so, they will break the endless chain of Master and Apprentice, end the Sith, bring down the Empire and bring balance to The Force (whatever that means). Isn't it surprising, then, that when Anakin comes back from the Dark he doesn't mention Padme?
I have argued elsewhere that if you take a step back from the "Star Wars" movies and consider their imagery in mythical terms, the characters from the two trilogies tend to merge: Anakin and Luke are in some sense the same person, both aspects of the Everyman-Hero figure; and Princess Leia and Padme are both aspects of the Hero's Lover. (Padme is also literally the Hero's Mother, and therefore in some sense an aspect of Shmi.)
It seems that, in the last moments of "Return of the Jedi" Anakin will gain this mythic perspective and will sees his mother, his lover and his daughter as a single person. "There is good in him," says the hero's lover as she dies. So the hero's last words are a message to another lover of another hero.
"You were right about me. Tell your sister you were right."
NOTES
(1) Silent movies are surely the purest form of cinema, the one that owes least to drama or the novel, where moving pictures alone carry the story. When sound synchronisation was invented, there were those who said that "the movies" had been fatally tainted. Is anyone going to say that they didn't have a point?
(2) Characters also pause in fixed poses before delivering their lines in some of Kurasawa's films, which are said to be influenced by Japanese Noh plays.
(3) Episode II: "Now that I'm with you again, I'm in agony. The closer I get to you, the worse it gets. The thought of not being with you makes my stomach turn over, my mouth go dry. I feel dizzy. I can't breath. I am haunted by the memory of this kiss you should never have given me." Episode III: "This is a happy moment. The happiest moment of my life."
(4) This is what the original films got so right and the prequels got so wrong. "Star Wars" had two types of space ship, iconic good guy X-Wings, and iconic bad guy TIE fighters. "Empire Strikes Back" added basically one new vehicle: "The Imperial Walker". The new films have billions of different space ships and you can't recognise any of them. I can't, at this moment, call to mind what Obi-Wans Jedi star fighter looks like. (Although I rather like the fact that it has a sort of hoop-shaped hyperspace thingy which it docks and undocks with.) Towards the end of the film, Padme set out in that pointy gold starship from "Phantom Menace". I thought "If George had done this properly, that ship would feel like a home-from-home in the way the Millennium Falcon does. Maybe I would even be able to remember its name."
(5) These area the same kinds of people who say that there is no point in reading an adventure story written in the first person, because you know that the hero must escape to tale the tale. If the book is written in the third person, then it is theoretically possible that the hero dies on page 54, and pages 55-200 are blank.
(6) If you live the capital city of a massively high-tech Empire that spans the galaxy, and if you are best mates with its President, the natural thing to do when one of your loved ones is dangerously ill is to learn black magic. As opposed to, say getting her checked out in some fabulously advanced and expensive hospital. This is the kind of medical science which can glue new arms and legs on as a routine procedure, but has somehow neglected gynecology.
(7) I think John Williams music makes it clear that we are intended to listen to the saga chronologically, from Episode I – VI. He is composing his symphony backwards, introducing themes in Episodes I, II and III which will emerge more dramatically in the final movements. The Imperial March is buried in Anakin's theme in "Phantom Menace"; emerges recognisably when Anakin becomes Vader in "Revenge of the Sith"; is given a full orchestral realisation for Vader's entrance in "Empire Strikes Back", and fades away on a single string at the end of "Return of the Jedi".
(8) In a deleted portion of the script, the ghost of Qui-Gon appears to say that letting go of emotional attachments is the path to Eternal Life: "You will learn to let go of everything. No attachment, no thought of self. No physical self."
(9) Many years ago, Yoda will have told Luke that a Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack. But in the prequels, Jedi use the Force to attack with all the time. The only real difference seems to be that the Light side use telekinetic force to push their enemies around, where the Dark side zap them with electrical energy.
(10) He never had been able to. Luke Skywalker's adventures in Episode IV proceed more or less in real time; the journey from Tatooine to Alderaan appearing to take about 5 minutes. At the time of his death, Luke has known Ben Kenobi for somewhere between 45 minutes and, say, 12 hours – depending on how long it takes to get from Anchorhead to Mos Eisley in a land speeder. Yet he acts as if he's known him for years.
(11) The "reason" that he is a voice in film 1 and a ghost in films 2 and 3 is pretty obviously that Lucas wasn't going to hire Alec Guinness for a cameo, but only use him in voice-over.
(12) This sub-title occurs on the cover of Alan Dean Foster's apocryphal "Splinter of the Minds Eye", and, astonishingly, on the title page of Brian Daley's "Han Solo at Stars End" (a novel in which Luke Skywalker neither appears nor is mentioned.)
"The Empire Strikes Back"
1: Preamble
"Revenge of the Sith" is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good movie.
I think that it is a very good something; but it lacks all the normal things which go to make up a film–-character development, storyline, suspense, a script. I liked Episodes I and II a lot more than many fans did, but Episode III has tested even my patience with George Lucas. Tested, but not yet completely exhausted.
It has a very good opening and an absolutely stonking ending. They are, however, the opening and ending of two different movies. In between them comes a long, dull and largely incoherent middle. It is this middle that we remember. We don't come out of the cinema saying "Cool space battle!" or "Great mythic resonances!" We say "Oh. What a dull middle."
Lucas remains a virtuoso in the language of cinema. The pictures are beautifully composed and fantastically inventive. I don't just mean the special effects set-pieces--which are, it goes without saying, stunning. But it's the quieter moments that really impress me. The shadows cast by Anakin and Palpatine. Anakin's face half-covered by a hood. Anakin and Padme in the empty hall, full of pillars. How many seen-it-all-before fanboys predicted that Lucas would show Darth Vader putting the mask on from Vader's own point of view?
Lucas has said that he wishes he could have made silent movies(1). A lot of "Revenge of the Sith" falls into place when you know this. The first encounter between Padme and Anakin on Coruscant is made up of a series of tableaux, with any emotion being conveyed by the characters' posture and expression (as well as by the background music) rather than by what they say. The screenplay contains some rather ambitious directions:
Padme: Something wonderful has happened
They look at one another for a long moment
Padme: I'm....Annie, I'm pregnant.
Anakin is stunned. He thinks through all the ramifications of this. He take her in his arms.
Anakin: That's....That's wonderful.
"He thinks through all the ramifications of this"; "they look at one another for a long moment" and the two "...." amount to "they strike a pose" and "there is long pause" and "John Williams introduces a new background motif."(2) It would take a better actor than Hayden Christensen (and I can think of a few) to convey by expression that he is thinking through all the ramifications of something. Where the dialogue in "Attack of the Clones" was jaw-droppingly awful, that in "Revenge of the Sith" is merely banal. (3) But it is also frequently gratuitous. You could imagine the whole scene being mimed, with perhaps a couple of silent-movie style captions.
The sheer quantity of imagery in the movie ends up overwhelming you. George has allowed himself one last burst of Promethean creativity with which to breath life into his universe. He isn't showing you that universe, or telling you about it, or even telling you a story about it. He's just heaving great gobbits of landscape and back-story onto celluloid. He wants Alderaan and Kashyyyk to be real and the only place that they can be real is on a movie-screen. Even a ten second vignette is enough to bring them to life.
If "Revenge of the Sith" has a moral, it might be; "Don't try too hard to give life to the dead: you may end up killing the one you love."
2: Beginning
The opening of "Revenge of the Sith" is by far the most exciting thing in the prequel trilogy, and as good a spectacle as anything in the whole saga. There's a genuine sense of motion as the as the Jedi Starfighters zip along the Stardestroyer. It was cool to see the characters in the cockpits of star-fighters, like in the good old days.
There are too many characters and vehicles zooming around. There are the Jedi fighters, and things called Vulture Droids, which may or may not be the same as buzz-droids. The choreography of the battle is confused, and none of the pilots apart from Obi-Wan and Anakin are individualized.(4) But this doesn't matter too much because of the overwhelming "wow" factor. I love the way that we start with a massed battle in space, follow through into a running chase on board a starship and end up crashing to earth and physically dumping the heroes in the middle of the political storyline.
Several scenes seemed to quote the old movies. This looks good, but as ever, makes no real sense. The room where Palpatine is imprisoned just happens to recall the Throne Room that he had/will have on the Death Star in "Return of the Jedi". This means that Anakin's fight with Count Dooku recalls/foreshadows the final fight between Luke and Darth Vader. The Jedi ship speeds through the big landing bay doors of the starship just as they close, which reminds of of how Han will jump through the closing doors on the Death Star. (Incidentally: If you are designing a video game, it makes sense to put the shield generator right near the bay doors, to make it easy for intruders to shoot it off. I doubt that anyone would design a ship that way in real life.)
I am afraid that lightsabers are becoming wearisome. They are cool as dueling weapons, but tedious when used to clumsily and randomly dispatch mobs of robots in an uncivilized and inelegant fashion. Han Solo going "Peew! Peew!" at Stormtroopers feels cooler than Obi-Wan going snicker-snak at trade federation droids.
Poor Christopher Lee must be getting quite bored with being hired for big movies solely so he can be killed off in the first ten minutes. I suppose he must be grateful that his part wasn't cut altogether.
Anakin looks absurd in his proto-Darth-Vader costume. For future reference, Yoda: when a Padwan starts going around in a black cloak he's probably got an unhealthy interest in the Dark Side of the Force. Or at any rate Goth music.
As always, Lucas drops us in the middle of the action and lets us pick up the details as we go along. Usually, this works OK: we never find out what kind of mercy mission Carrie Fisher wasn't on, and it doesn't matter because it doesn't matter. But this time I felt confused. I would have welcomed a very brief re-cap about who the separatists were, what they were separate from, why, and what Christopher Lee has to do with it. An introduction for General Grievous would have helped, too. (Yes, I know he appeared in a cartoon series, but that's no excuse.)
Like a lot of good but second-rate action movies, I found it very exciting that the action was happening, without in any way being excited by the action.
3: Middle
Once we get back to Coruscant everyone starts talking.
Padme and Anakin say "I love you" and "I hope you don't die" and "I'm pregnant."
Anakin and Palpatine say "Please turn evil" and "No, I'll never turn evil" and "Oh, all right then, if you insist."
Obi-Wan says "I wish you hadn't turned evil".
This takes an hour and a half. The main sound effect is the audience starting to fidget and shuffle.
Some people say "There is no point in watching these films, because we already know the ending."(5) This does not necessarily follow. A great number of movies "tell you the ending" before the action starts. It can be a very effective device: you start by showing how things turned out, and then flash back to explain how we got there. Old plays often "give the ending away" in their actual titles: "Ye most piteous tragedy of Anakin Skywalker together with ye sad death of Padme, as has been shown diverse times in ye Coventry Multiplex."
A story teller can use the fact that the audience "knows the ending" in one of two ways. Either he can generate a sense of dramatic irony: we see that certain events are significant, because we know things that the character's don't. Or he can use it to intrigue the audience, to create a sort of "whodunnit" in which thy say "I know where we are going to end up, but I can't possibly imagine how we can get to there from here." If Lucas had used the first method, Obi-Wan might have said "Let's send Anakin to fight the Sith Lord – he's the one person we can be sure would never turn to the Dark Side." If he'd used the second, then perhaps the question of Anakin's turning would not even be mentioned; maybe we would see him reject the Emperor outright, and spend the last quarter of the movie thinking "When is he going to turn? What is going to make him turn?"
But Lucas doesn't use our fore-knowledge for any dramatic purpose whatsoever. There's no tension about whether or not Anakin will turn; no attempt to surprise us with the circumstances. We simply get to watch George moving his collection of action figures through their pre-ordained dance. Perhaps he really thinks that the film's main audience will be younglings who have never seen "The Empire Strikes Back."
There can't be any tension about the question "Will Anakin turn to the Dark Side?", because we already know the answer; so the whole interest in the film depends on the question "Why will Anakin turn to the Dark Side?" But this this question is answered within five minutes of our anti-hero's arrival on Coruscant. Anakin has a premonition that Padme will die in childbirth. Once we know this, it is very obvious how the rest of the film will develop: Anakin will try to use The Force to save her; Palpatine will tell him only the Dark Side is strong enough, blah, blah, etcetera. (6) Because this is so obvious, the long-drawn out scene in the theater-box, in which Palpatine gradually reveals to Anakin that the Sith once knew how to raise the dead, becomes redundant and pointless. We know what he is going to say; we know how Anakin is going to react; and thank god that George was restrained from mentioning on screen that the title of the "Mon Calamari ballet" that they are watching was "Squid Lake."
The one moment of real drama comes when Anakin finds Mace Windu and Palpatine engaged in lightsaber battle. Windu is on the point of killing Palpatine, in obvious contravention of the Jedi code. Anakin has to decide whether or not to intervene. This resembles, and is probably supposed to foreshadow the moment in "Return of the Jedi" when Anakin/Vader has to decide whether to stand by and watch the Emperor kill his son. But even here, it is pretty clear where we are going. I wasn't so much thinking "What's he going to do?" as "Oh for goodness' sake get on with it you dithering floppy haired luvvie."
The moment at which Anakin seals his Faustian pact was also pretty dramatic: Anakin kneeling before the Emperor; Vader's breathing playing in the background; the bars of the Imperial March emerging clearly in the sound-track (7) for the first time; Palpatine's face disfigured so it now looks like the Emperor we are familiar with. Impressive. Most impressive. One could wish that Hayden Christensen had been able to think of a better way of signifying "I am evil now" than by rolling his eyes. I also wish that when Palpatine said "Hence forth you will known as Darth...Vader" I hadn't thought of the fraternity initiation in "Animal House."
As an explanation for the origin of Darth Vader, I find this all very unsatisfying.
Darth Vader's evil is massively diminished. He isn't a good angel who fell through pride, but a noble victim of tragic circumstance. He has done a very bad thing for a very good reason. In "Attack of the Clones", Anakin appeared to be heading for the Dark Side because he was angry with his mother's killers and wanted vengeance against them; and because he simply wanted to be the greatest Jedi ever. Most of us probably agree with the Jedi that vengeance, arrogance and anger are Bad Things. But it turns out that the real reason he turned was because he wanted to save the life of a loved one, which most of us would regard as noble.
In the first 5 films, I understood "anger" to mean "uncontrolled violent rage", not "righteous indignation". I think that Anakin was allowed to be "angry" because his people were slaves, but not to have a tantrum over it. Episode II shows that his anger towards the Sand People doesn't get anyone anywhere. "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." ("To be in a passion, some good may do; but no good if a passion is in you.")
But Lucas now seems to believe that all feelings and emotions are equally dangerous, and that love, just as much as anger and hate, is a path to the Dark Side. I had no particular problem with the idea that Jedi Knights were forbidden to marry. I assumed that it was something like celibate monastic orders who say "Marriage is a very good thing, but for us, remaining celibate in order to follow a higher calling is an even better thing." But it now seems that the Jedi think that love is Bad in itself. Yoda goes so far as to warn Anakin that he shouldn't mourn the dead. Again if he were just saying that you shouldn't be too sad because the beloved dead are still with us, I wouldn't have a problem with this. But he seems to be saying that mourning is a symptom of emotional attachment, and attachment is in itself an evil:
"Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them, do not. Miss them, do not. Attachment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed that is. Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose." (8)
I don't agree with any of this. In "Star Wars", The Force was a dramatic device which admitted "spirituality" into the "Star Wars" universe without endorsing (or for that matter, offending) any particular religion. If The Force had any doctrinal content, it was "let go of your conscious self and act on instinct". Now, it has turned pretty explicitly into Buddhism Lite.
I am not entirely sure what is supposed to have transpired between Darths Sidious and Vader. Is Palpatine saying whatever he thinks is necessary to make Anakin embrace the dark? Or, when he talks about the Dark Side, the limitations of the Jedi, and the power of the Sith, is he telling him the truth as he sees it? Does Lucas have in mind an ideology for the Sith, a viewpoint which makes them wrong and the Jedi right? (9) Or are they just baddies because they are baddies?
Palpatine tells Anakin that the Jedi and the Sith are similar in many ways; that the Jedi care about power just as much as the Sith do; and that the idea that the Jedi are selfless may not be born out by experience. He seems to have a point. Anakin violates the Jedi code to kill Dooku; Mace Windu is on the point of doing so to kill Palpatine. What's the difference? Obi-Wan, of all people, tells Anakin to break the Jedi's rules and spy on Palpatine. One can't help feeling that if he'd been equally flexible about the "no marriage" rule a lot of bother could have been avoided. "Actually, the Jedi Code is more guidelines than rules."
If you asked ten people what the point of "Star Wars" was, nine and half of them would say "a battle between good and evil." But this is another idea which Lucas wants to blow out of the water. The Light Side is corrupt. Both Yoda and Obi-Wan are implicated in that corruption. The Sith may have a point. The black-cloaked operatic villain who strangles his admirals to encourage the others is victim of tragic circumstance. Society is to blame. The bad Sith talk about good and evil as "points of view"; but we know that for Obi-Wan, the difference between telling the truth and lying is also a matter of viewpoint.
Either this is all too subtle for me, or else it is completely incoherent. During their interminable light-saber duel, Obi-Wan shares with Anakin a great moment of insight. "Councilor Palpatine is evil," he explains. Anakin responds with a career-low for banal dialogue: "From my point of view, the Jedi are evil." "Then you are lost" ripostes his mentor. But hang on. Five minutes previously, Anakin had told Obi-Wan "If you are not with me, you are my enemy" and Kenobi had replied "Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes." I realize that this is a space opera rather than a text on moral philosophy, but you can't have it both ways. You can't condemn someone for being a moral relativist in one scene, and then blame them for being a moral realist in the next.
4: More Middle
The story of Anakin's fall has some narrative interest, though it lacks pace and suspense. But the action sequences which it is intercut with are incoherent and rather pointless.
Lucas needs to get Obi-Wan and Yoda off Coruscant so that the Emperor can have a sporting chance at corrupting Ani. Obi-Wan can't be the one to come and arrest Palpatine, because we would never believe that Annie would chose the life of the Lord of the Sith over the life of his old friend – and anyway, if Ewan McGregor had got killed off at this point, Alec Guinness would be retrospectively out of a job. So off he goes on a pointless side-quest to kill General Grievous.
This section had some nice actiony bits, although when Grievous draws four lightsabers at once, I fear he revealed his origins as a cartoon character. The fight seems to happen on a fairly interesting planet (everyone is living on the sides of a gigantic crater) but we don't stay there long enough for it to become a place in the way that Tatooine, Bespin or the Death Star did. Obi-Wan has no-one to talk to apart from R2D2 and some aliens we haven't heard of. At times, he is reduced to talking to himself: this cannot be made the basis for snappy banter.
Obi-Wan kills Grievous. This is important, because it causes the surviving separatist leaders to decamp to a volcanic planet called – and if there's any sniggering, they'll be trouble – Mustafha. This is important, because the Emperor sends Anakin there to assassinate his erstwhile allies. This is important because Fate, in the form of as 30 year old back-story, requires that Anakin fights Obi-Wan in the vicinity of a volcano. The plotting really is that perfunctory.
The forfeit which Yoda pulls out of the Jedi hat is to go to Kashyyyk and help the Wookies defeat the trade federation robots. This is important, for, er, for some reason which completely escapes me. This sequence was a great missed opportunity. Yoda and Chewbacca (yes, he's in it) are as far removed from each other as two goodies can be and if Lucas had been interested in telling a story, rather than giving us a whistle stop tour of his note-book, great fun could have been had with their relationship "Pull their arms out of their sockets you must not. Patient you must be, and calm. Think with your stomach you must not." In fact, we get some pretty shots of wookies charging against some droids, and some pretty shots of Yoda in a wookie field HQ, and some pretty scenery, and a very prolonged scene in which Yoda says goodbye to Chewbacca even though they have hardly exchanged three words---and that's it.
But Lucas obviously didn't think that making us dance between three different plots is exciting enough. Shortly after Anakin's fall, Palpatine orders his spies in various parts of the galaxy to assassinate the nearest Jedi Knight. This triggers a bloated montage sequence in which we get brief glimpses of battles on various different worlds – a world of fungi, a dusty world, a world with a big a city built on a circular bridge. It all looks ravishing, but it is very, very unsatisfying film making. You could just hear the audience thinking "Where are we now? Is this a planet I'm meant to have heard of? Help!"
It is possible that if I had read the "Extruded Universe" novels, then some of these planets would have been instantly recognisable. But I haven't.
5: End
Lucas has said that he thinks of the "Star Wars" saga as a symphony with recurring themes. This is certainly true of the final minutes of "Revenge of the Sith." Scenes are set up in opposition to each other; images reflect other images; scenes become laiden with symbolic significance. It has some genuine mythic atmosphere and it looks gorgeous. And of course, it makes no sense whatsoever.
The actual duel between Obi-Wan and Anakin was sort of all right. A large amount of swash had to ceremoniously buckled before we could get to the dramatic moment that was really the object of the exercise. I liked the scene where they are climbing up a cliff edge, slashing one another as they climb. I thought the moment where the pillar of rock collapses, so they are briefly balancing on rock that's floating in a sea of magma was perhaps over done. I found myself forcibly reminded that this was all a computer compositing trick, and they weren't really there. It's kind of cute that poor George now thinks that if your movie's climax is a sword fight between two people, the way you make it exciting is by pouring in several trillion dollars worth of special effects. Lucas has had the nerve to claim that this is the greatest swordfight ever filmed. Sorry, George: that prize still goes to two actors in front of a fairly obviously painted background, delivering witty dialogue and performing real fencing moves that they'd been practicing for months. (Oh, and by the way -- I'm not left-handed either.)
I actually preferred the duel between Yoda and Palpatine, which Lucas contrives to have occur in the Senate itself, the literal heart of the Old Republic. Palpatine starts physically tearing the building apart and hurling it at Yoda; a nice bit of symbolism, if not over subtle.
But it's when Anakin is defeated and theme shifts to "life from death" that the movie really comes together. Lucas's habit of cutting between different plot threads really pays off, as the scenes add significance to each other. Each image is perfectly conceived. Anakin, with his hair and limbs burned off, claws his way out of the lava flow, which is is a powerful, brutal image of birth. While this is happening, Obi-Wan, goes and carries Padme back to her ship. The tender image of Obi-Wan rescuing Padme contrasts with the callous way in which he left his friend Vader for dead. As Obi-Wan saves Padme, Palpatine is also saving Vader. In a quite astonishing image, Vader is taken back to Corsuscant in a medical capsule that looks like a coffin – the scene in which it floats across the landing bay is clearly meant to be a funeral, so that Vader's birth is actually a kind of death. Everything comes together in three brief scenes: we see Anakin being fitted with new arms and legs in a medical center; and immediately cut to the operating theater where Padme is giving birth. We hear Padme say the words "Luke" and "Leia", and then immediately cut back to Coruscant and see Anakin putting on the familiar black mask. Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker are born at the same moment.
One wonders whether someone chickened out towards the end of the movie. When she expresses disquiet that he has gone over to the Dark Fide, Anakin uses his patented remote control choking power to strangle Padme. But she is still alive when Obi-Wan takes her back onto the ship. The robot-doctors says that there is nothing actually wrong with her, but that she is dying anyway. This is never explained. (Lucas apparently explored the idea that her body was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of midichlorians which she was carrying.) But when he asks where Padme is, the Emperor tells Anakin that he killed her, and he screams "No" in the way that characters in movies always do at stressful moments.
It would have been much more interesting if Vader had un-ambiguously killed her. "Darth Vader goes over to the Dark Side in order to save his wife's life, but, because he has gone over to the Dark Side, he kills her." That would have been a story worth telling.
Lucas still cannot handle time. (10) He wants the film to have a climax in which Yoda fights the Emperor and Obi-Wan fights Darth Vader. He wants these scenes to be juxtaposed against each other. But he also wants the "birth" of Darth Vader to be juxtaposed with the birth of Padme's twins: the champions of the the light and dark sides come into the world simultaneously. So having defeated Yoda the Emperor has one of those premonition thingys, senses that Lord Vader is in danger, and flies to the planet Mustafah where Obi-Wan left him for dead. He takes him back to Coruscant and rebuilds him: the rebuilding scenes being juxtaposed with Padme's labour. For any of this to work, we have to believe that ships can fly between Coruscant and Mustafah almost instantaneously – that interstellar flight takes only minutes. (This is assuming that there were no pre-flight checks and that the Emperor knew where he had left his ignition keys.)
The film ends, brilliantly, with four silent vignettes. First, Padme's funeral on Naboo, with a new, un-named queen walking behind her coffin; horribly contrasting with the celebration scene at the end of "Phantom Menace". (I don't think that there were any gungans.) The camera pans down her open casket, showing that her hand is still holding the pendant that Annie gave her. The camera seems to linger on her abdomen; the womb of heroes. We go from this scene of death to Vader and the Emperor—and also Grand Moff Tarkin, but you wouldn't know this without looking at the end credits—surveying their new Death Star, and from there to two vignettes about new life. Leia is delivered to her adoptive parents on Alderaan (the planet which the Death Star will destroy) and Obi Wan takes Luke to his "Uncle" and Aunt on Tatooine.
So the film ends, where it began at the Skywalker homestead. The combination of music and imagery was terribly suggestive. Beru and Owen are watching the suns set, just as Luke did in "Star Wars"; the familiar Luke Skywalker motif is playing in the background. Beru takes the baby from Ben, and then pointedly turns her back on him and takes him to Owen, who doesn't look round. The saga has come full circle. (Perhaps the impact has been slightly spoiled by the fact that we have already been back to the farm in "Attack of the Clones", but I forgive it.) The moment is perfect. As Owen, Beru and baby Luke watch the twin suns set, we want to see the next episode, in which the twin children rise up and end the long night that their father has initiated.
Except we can't, because it doesn't exist, and never can. "A New Hope" will not be a sequel which continues these mythical themes but a B movie about a farm boy who rescues a princess. The Sith, the Jedi council, Qui-Gon's secret knowledge, and the whole idea about bringing balance to the Force will simply never be mentioned again. Surely, surely, surely, when the redeemed Anakin finally dies, someone should say to him: "You didn't kill Padme – it was the concentration of the midichlorians in the twins". But they won't, because they can't, because when Anakin died, no-one had heard of midichlorians, or Princess Amidala, and no-one knew that Darth Vader was going to kill her.
The original "Star Wars" trilogy pointed backwards to a series of prequels that had not yet been made: now, the prequels point forward to different, unmade versions of episodes IV, V and VI which can now only ever exist in our minds.
6: Triumph of the Whills
So. Anakin has become Darth Vader; Palpatine has become Darth Sidious has become Emperor; Luke and Leia have been born. Republic has yielded to Empire; Yoda has stated his intention to go into exile. Leia has been adopted by a cardboard cutout. Obi-Wan announces his intention to return to Tatooine and watch over baby Luke. Seven and half hours of prequel later, the final piece moves into its pre-ordained starting position.
But Yoda has a surprise up his computer generated sleeve.
"Master Kenobi; wait a moment. In your solitude on Tatooine, training I have for you. An old friend has learned the path to immortality. Your old Master, Qui-Gon Jinn. How to commune with him, I will teach you..."
If you want to know why "Revenge of the Sith" fails as a move, then look no further than this scene.
It interrupts the flow of the narrative. It is undramatic. It's like the penultimate chapter of a bad crime thriller; where someone says "One thing puzzles me..." and the detective embarks on three pages of exposition. It has nothing to do with the story of "Revenge of the Sith", and is only tangentially relevant to the "Star Wars Saga" which Lucas actually filmed, as opposed to the one he might now wish he had filmed. "Revenge of the Sith", it seems, is not a story, but a set of linear notes.
It provides an explanation where no explanation is needed. In "Star Wars" Luke Skywalker hears the voice of the dead Obi-Wan Kenobi; in the sequels, he manifests as a ghost (11) Everyone who saw the first movie understood instantly what had happened. Old Ben, an exemplary Holy Man, continued to watch over his disciple after he died. The dead Jedi was now a single strange of the energy field which binds the galaxy together. What more explanation is needed?
The idea that dead Jedi can somehow talk to the living through The Force is simple and evocative. The idea that three specific Jedi can turn up as ghosts at the Ewok's feast is slightly weaker, but it still works. The idea that one Jedi in particular, through the use of secret disciplines, learned to cling onto consciousness when all previous ones had merged into vague pantheistic oblivion seems tawdry: almost as if Kenobi cheated. This explanation diminishes the original concept.
It is banal. Lucas probably has some Joseph Campbell notion at the back of his head: someone needs to go on another one of those bloody Hero's Journeys and bring back the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything from beyond the grave, so it might as well be Qui-Gon. But big mythic journeys require big mythic language. "Incidentally, did I mention that I've discovered the secret of eternal life?" is not really adequate.
It is pedantic. It's going back and worrying about the meaning of a small scene in "Star Wars" which Lucas actually put there because it seemed cool at the time. When Ben dies, his body disappears, and this seems to surprise Darth Vader. Yoda's body also disappears when he dies. Vanishing corpses were in fashion that season: remember the Mystics in "Dark Crystal"? However, Darth Vader, Qui-Gon and all the Jedi who get slaughtered in "Attack of the Clones" do not vanish. That Ben's death is unusual can be inferred by the fact that he says to Vader "If you cut me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine." So here is the answer: Yoda and Obi-Wan vanish because they have learned a secret discipline which allows them to retain their consciousness after death. That was worth waiting thirty years for, wasn't it?
It explains nothing, because the square peg of an explanation is being jammed into the round hole of an established story. If post-mortem survival is a secret known only to Qui-Gon, Yoda and Ben, then why does Anakin appear as a "ghost" at the end of "Return of the Jedi"? (Come to that, why doesn't Qui-Gon?) If Anakin is present as a ghost, why didn't his body vanish too? On Luke's second visit to Dagobah, Yoda says "Soon must I rest; forever sleep". When Luke replies "No, granddad, you'll outlive us all" or words to that effect Yoda replies "Strong am I in the Force. But not that strong." Why does he talk as if he is going to die, is resigned to dying, and accepts death as "the way of the Force", if he has spent two decades mugging up on the secret of immortality?
None of this seems to have any bearing on "Revenge of the Sith": it is part of different story that Lucas has in his head, but which he doesn't have time to tell. According to some deutero-canonical texts, "The Sith" were an evil cult, defeated by the Jedi 1,000 years ago. Their secret teaching has survived a millennium by being passed down from Master to Apprentice. This is why there are only ever two Sith. A deleted scene in "Revenge of the Sith" has the ghost of Qui-Gon inform Yoda that he learned the secret of immortality from "The Shaman of the Whills". "Journal of the Whills" was the original sub-title of "Star Wars", before Lucas plumped for the more straightforward "from the adventures of Luke Skywalker." (12) So just as Darth Vader has offered himself up to be Palpatine's apprentice and learn about the Sith; Yoda has become Qui-Gon's apprentice in order to learn about "the Whills". That is: although there has been a Jedi hegemony for thousands of years, based on a single understanding of the Force, there are at least two buried, literally "occult" teachings, that understand it in a different way. After thousands of years, the Lord of the Sith succeeds in taking over the galaxy – but what he doesn't know is that the surviving Jedi have discovered there own secret teaching, which will enable them to become more powerful than he can possibly imagine. In the deleted section, Yoda says that Qui-Gon's teaching might enable Obi-Wan to retain his physical form when One with the Force. Are we supposed to infer that Obi-Wan and Yoda are already dead when Luke encounters them? That they are shades that have taken on physical forms in order to guard their last hope, and that the reason they disappear when they die is that they were never really there to begin with.? "How two long-forgotten secret traditions fought for control of a moribund mystical order, and of the galaxy itself" has the potential for being a very interesting story. But six lines at the end of a prequel do not turn the "Star Wars" edifice into that story.
7: The Face With a Thousand Heroes
Padme's last words are "There is good in him."
Obi-Wan, who I suppose we should now call "Ben", doesn't believe her, and nor, presumably, does Yoda. But years ago, Padme's son Luke will say the the same words: "There is good in him". And they are both right. The irony of the film is that as we watch Palpatine corrupting Anakin and creating Darth Vader, we know that he is creating the force that will ultimately destroy him.
Darth Vader has only ever really cared about two people: his mother, and Padme. Both of these loves conspire to turn him to the Dark Side; but finally, his love for his Son will bring him back into the light. In doing so, they will break the endless chain of Master and Apprentice, end the Sith, bring down the Empire and bring balance to The Force (whatever that means). Isn't it surprising, then, that when Anakin comes back from the Dark he doesn't mention Padme?
I have argued elsewhere that if you take a step back from the "Star Wars" movies and consider their imagery in mythical terms, the characters from the two trilogies tend to merge: Anakin and Luke are in some sense the same person, both aspects of the Everyman-Hero figure; and Princess Leia and Padme are both aspects of the Hero's Lover. (Padme is also literally the Hero's Mother, and therefore in some sense an aspect of Shmi.)
It seems that, in the last moments of "Return of the Jedi" Anakin will gain this mythic perspective and will sees his mother, his lover and his daughter as a single person. "There is good in him," says the hero's lover as she dies. So the hero's last words are a message to another lover of another hero.
"You were right about me. Tell your sister you were right."
NOTES
(1) Silent movies are surely the purest form of cinema, the one that owes least to drama or the novel, where moving pictures alone carry the story. When sound synchronisation was invented, there were those who said that "the movies" had been fatally tainted. Is anyone going to say that they didn't have a point?
(2) Characters also pause in fixed poses before delivering their lines in some of Kurasawa's films, which are said to be influenced by Japanese Noh plays.
(3) Episode II: "Now that I'm with you again, I'm in agony. The closer I get to you, the worse it gets. The thought of not being with you makes my stomach turn over, my mouth go dry. I feel dizzy. I can't breath. I am haunted by the memory of this kiss you should never have given me." Episode III: "This is a happy moment. The happiest moment of my life."
(4) This is what the original films got so right and the prequels got so wrong. "Star Wars" had two types of space ship, iconic good guy X-Wings, and iconic bad guy TIE fighters. "Empire Strikes Back" added basically one new vehicle: "The Imperial Walker". The new films have billions of different space ships and you can't recognise any of them. I can't, at this moment, call to mind what Obi-Wans Jedi star fighter looks like. (Although I rather like the fact that it has a sort of hoop-shaped hyperspace thingy which it docks and undocks with.) Towards the end of the film, Padme set out in that pointy gold starship from "Phantom Menace". I thought "If George had done this properly, that ship would feel like a home-from-home in the way the Millennium Falcon does. Maybe I would even be able to remember its name."
(5) These area the same kinds of people who say that there is no point in reading an adventure story written in the first person, because you know that the hero must escape to tale the tale. If the book is written in the third person, then it is theoretically possible that the hero dies on page 54, and pages 55-200 are blank.
(6) If you live the capital city of a massively high-tech Empire that spans the galaxy, and if you are best mates with its President, the natural thing to do when one of your loved ones is dangerously ill is to learn black magic. As opposed to, say getting her checked out in some fabulously advanced and expensive hospital. This is the kind of medical science which can glue new arms and legs on as a routine procedure, but has somehow neglected gynecology.
(7) I think John Williams music makes it clear that we are intended to listen to the saga chronologically, from Episode I – VI. He is composing his symphony backwards, introducing themes in Episodes I, II and III which will emerge more dramatically in the final movements. The Imperial March is buried in Anakin's theme in "Phantom Menace"; emerges recognisably when Anakin becomes Vader in "Revenge of the Sith"; is given a full orchestral realisation for Vader's entrance in "Empire Strikes Back", and fades away on a single string at the end of "Return of the Jedi".
(8) In a deleted portion of the script, the ghost of Qui-Gon appears to say that letting go of emotional attachments is the path to Eternal Life: "You will learn to let go of everything. No attachment, no thought of self. No physical self."
(9) Many years ago, Yoda will have told Luke that a Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack. But in the prequels, Jedi use the Force to attack with all the time. The only real difference seems to be that the Light side use telekinetic force to push their enemies around, where the Dark side zap them with electrical energy.
(10) He never had been able to. Luke Skywalker's adventures in Episode IV proceed more or less in real time; the journey from Tatooine to Alderaan appearing to take about 5 minutes. At the time of his death, Luke has known Ben Kenobi for somewhere between 45 minutes and, say, 12 hours – depending on how long it takes to get from Anchorhead to Mos Eisley in a land speeder. Yet he acts as if he's known him for years.
(11) The "reason" that he is a voice in film 1 and a ghost in films 2 and 3 is pretty obviously that Lucas wasn't going to hire Alec Guinness for a cameo, but only use him in voice-over.
(12) This sub-title occurs on the cover of Alan Dean Foster's apocryphal "Splinter of the Minds Eye", and, astonishingly, on the title page of Brian Daley's "Han Solo at Stars End" (a novel in which Luke Skywalker neither appears nor is mentioned.)
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Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Revenge of the Sith (3)
But Andrew, remember: you are very, very old. "Revenge of the Sith" is not intended for you. It's basically a kids action movie. If you had seen "Revenge of the Sith" when you were 12, or even 12A, you would have loved it.
You would have rushed home and bought the book, the comic, all the guide books. In fact, you would have gone to see the film already having read the comic. You would have known the script by heart and known when a good bit was coming. You would have narrated the plot to your baby sister until she wanted to throw her teddy bear in your face.
Kids in your class with whom you had previously had nothing in common would have turned out to be your friends when you discovered that they also had creased-up copies of the "Revenge of the Sith" paper-back novelisation in their Addidas hold-alls.
You would have got special dispensation from your form teacher to read the new issue of "Revenge of the Sith Weekly" on Wednesday mornings during class-reading time (*), after showing him that it contained quite a lot of text and big, grown up words in the speech bubbles.
Using cardboard boxes and felt-tip pens, you would make a sequence of progressively weak attempts to conctruct replicas of a Obi-Wan Kenobi's Jedi Starfighter in your bedroom.
You would join the "Revenge of the Sith" fanclub and try to start local chapters among your school friends.
You would become so familiar with the characters through the comics and toys that when you went back to the cinema for the third, fifth, tenth, twelfth viewing, it would almost come as a shock to see these comic-book, four-inch high action figures appearing in "real life"on the screen.
You would have favourite bits of dialogue. You would recite faviourite bits of dialgoue and act them out with your friends.
You would walk past your Junior School, look through the window of your first classroom, and it would cross your mind that when you were sitting there crosslegged drinking milk with a straw some impossibly long time ago, seven years or maybe eight, "Revenge of the Sith" had not been made – maybe not even thought of. Thinking about "a time before 'Revenge of the Sith' "would make you think about other strange notions: time and mortality.
You would start to notice that they were no-longer talking about "Revenge of the Sith" on Blue Peter and in the Daily Mirror; that the toys were harder and harder to find in the shops, and that it was harder and harder to find a cinema where the film was showing.
You would start to wait for the sequels.
You would notice that your friends had become less interested in running a local chapter of the "Revenge of the Sith" fan club, and that it had in any case never been very obvious what such an organisation might actually do.
People would start to snigger at your "Revenge of the Sith" pencil case.
"Revenge of the Sith" would gradually cease to be the film that "everyone" is talking about. People would start to identify you as "that "Revenge of the Sith" nerd."
"Revenge of the Sith" would no longer be the first comic you read on a Wednesday. But the older issues would still retain their magic, and certain specific images would retain their aura. (The colours; the typscripts; the design would be as important – more important – than what you remember of the actual movie.)
You would start to wonder if you would ever see "Revenge of the Sith" again, because, like Disney cartoons, it would never be shown on TV.
One Christmas, you would watch "Revenge of the Sith" on TV.
Eventually, you would not be twelve any more, and "Revenge of the Sith II" would come out, and everybody would be talking about it again, but, even though you would see it a dozen times and even though you would agree that it was even better than the original, you would feel on the outisde, because, somehow, "Revenge of the Sith" is special, special to you, and this sequel which everyone is talking about is, well, only a movie.
Or, on the other hand, maybe not.
(*) Literacy hour? (Typing the words make me want to vomit.)
If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider buying a copy of George and Joe and Jack and Bob >which contains all of my essays on Star Wars (going right back to the opening night of the Phantom Menace!) and related subjects.
Alternatively, please consider making a donation of £1 for each essay you have enjoyed.
You would have rushed home and bought the book, the comic, all the guide books. In fact, you would have gone to see the film already having read the comic. You would have known the script by heart and known when a good bit was coming. You would have narrated the plot to your baby sister until she wanted to throw her teddy bear in your face.
Kids in your class with whom you had previously had nothing in common would have turned out to be your friends when you discovered that they also had creased-up copies of the "Revenge of the Sith" paper-back novelisation in their Addidas hold-alls.
You would have got special dispensation from your form teacher to read the new issue of "Revenge of the Sith Weekly" on Wednesday mornings during class-reading time (*), after showing him that it contained quite a lot of text and big, grown up words in the speech bubbles.
Using cardboard boxes and felt-tip pens, you would make a sequence of progressively weak attempts to conctruct replicas of a Obi-Wan Kenobi's Jedi Starfighter in your bedroom.
You would join the "Revenge of the Sith" fanclub and try to start local chapters among your school friends.
You would become so familiar with the characters through the comics and toys that when you went back to the cinema for the third, fifth, tenth, twelfth viewing, it would almost come as a shock to see these comic-book, four-inch high action figures appearing in "real life"on the screen.
You would have favourite bits of dialogue. You would recite faviourite bits of dialgoue and act them out with your friends.
You would walk past your Junior School, look through the window of your first classroom, and it would cross your mind that when you were sitting there crosslegged drinking milk with a straw some impossibly long time ago, seven years or maybe eight, "Revenge of the Sith" had not been made – maybe not even thought of. Thinking about "a time before 'Revenge of the Sith' "would make you think about other strange notions: time and mortality.
You would start to notice that they were no-longer talking about "Revenge of the Sith" on Blue Peter and in the Daily Mirror; that the toys were harder and harder to find in the shops, and that it was harder and harder to find a cinema where the film was showing.
You would start to wait for the sequels.
You would notice that your friends had become less interested in running a local chapter of the "Revenge of the Sith" fan club, and that it had in any case never been very obvious what such an organisation might actually do.
People would start to snigger at your "Revenge of the Sith" pencil case.
"Revenge of the Sith" would gradually cease to be the film that "everyone" is talking about. People would start to identify you as "that "Revenge of the Sith" nerd."
"Revenge of the Sith" would no longer be the first comic you read on a Wednesday. But the older issues would still retain their magic, and certain specific images would retain their aura. (The colours; the typscripts; the design would be as important – more important – than what you remember of the actual movie.)
You would start to wonder if you would ever see "Revenge of the Sith" again, because, like Disney cartoons, it would never be shown on TV.
One Christmas, you would watch "Revenge of the Sith" on TV.
Eventually, you would not be twelve any more, and "Revenge of the Sith II" would come out, and everybody would be talking about it again, but, even though you would see it a dozen times and even though you would agree that it was even better than the original, you would feel on the outisde, because, somehow, "Revenge of the Sith" is special, special to you, and this sequel which everyone is talking about is, well, only a movie.
*
Or, on the other hand, maybe not.
(*) Literacy hour? (Typing the words make me want to vomit.)
Alternatively, please consider making a donation of £1 for each essay you have enjoyed.
Monday, May 30, 2005
Revenge of the Sith (2)
"It says here that this is Star Wars part III. That's funny. I would have thought that there had been more of them than that."
Overheard in cinema.
Major geek movies create an aura of religious fervor. "Star Wars" (*) is holy writ. Hating "Phantom Menace" is an object of faith. "Star Wars" is the greatest film ever made: "Empire Strikes Back" was a travesty. Or else "Star Wars" was a pointless B movie whose only merit was as a set up for "Episode V".
Who do you love more, Mummy or Daddy? Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
Of course "Star Wars" is not 'just another movie', or just another series of movies. "Revenge of the Sith" considered on its merits, is a spectacular, galaxy spanning space operetta, with battles, high powered galactic politics, mysticism and tragedy. Parsifal considered as a pulp serial written by Doc Smith. What's not to like? Thousands of starships zoom across the screen; spectacular planet-scapes created almost in passing, billion dollar special effects as give-away lines. Did you ever stand in W.H Smiths drooling at the rows of "sci-fi" paper backs with lurid covers and lamenting that you would never, ever be able to read them all? George made this film for you, and for you alone. But would I have actually bothered with the movie if I wasn't already committed to these characters – or, if you want to be cynical, to the Star Wars "brand"?
I ask myself the same question at 7PM each Saturday.
Overheard in cinema.
Major geek movies create an aura of religious fervor. "Star Wars" (*) is holy writ. Hating "Phantom Menace" is an object of faith. "Star Wars" is the greatest film ever made: "Empire Strikes Back" was a travesty. Or else "Star Wars" was a pointless B movie whose only merit was as a set up for "Episode V".
Who do you love more, Mummy or Daddy? Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
Of course "Star Wars" is not 'just another movie', or just another series of movies. "Revenge of the Sith" considered on its merits, is a spectacular, galaxy spanning space operetta, with battles, high powered galactic politics, mysticism and tragedy. Parsifal considered as a pulp serial written by Doc Smith. What's not to like? Thousands of starships zoom across the screen; spectacular planet-scapes created almost in passing, billion dollar special effects as give-away lines. Did you ever stand in W.H Smiths drooling at the rows of "sci-fi" paper backs with lurid covers and lamenting that you would never, ever be able to read them all? George made this film for you, and for you alone. But would I have actually bothered with the movie if I wasn't already committed to these characters – or, if you want to be cynical, to the Star Wars "brand"?
I ask myself the same question at 7PM each Saturday.
*
We've known Darth Vader for a long, long time. He is no longer just a movie character: he's a hieroglyph for "evil" (Or, if you prefer, for "Jungian Shadow" or "Freudian Father Figure"). Some comedians – John Cleese, Eric Morcambe, Tommy Cooper – could get a laugh just by walking onto the stage. There was nothing especially funny about their physical shape; but somehow, their presence reminded you of every episode of "Monty Python" and "Fawlty Towers". Darth Vader – his mask, the sound of his breathing, the Imperial March - triggers off a similar kind of Pavlovian response in a way that a big entrance by Just Some Villain never ever could. If "Revenge of the Sith" ends up delivering an emotional punch – and with qualifications, I think that it does – it's a punch that the film hasn't earned. It's paper money, backed up by a gold standard that hadn't been minted since "Empire Strikes Back."
*
I have a smart answer to the question "What do you think of the 'Star Wars' prequels." It is this: "I like ALL of the "Star Wars" movies, apart from "Empire Strikes Back", and the ones came afterwards."
It's a joke, of course. But it is true that when I saw "Empire Strikes Back" at the age of 15, my first reaction was disappointment. Whatever else this all-over-the-place without an ending movie where the good guys lose might have been; it wasn't the sequel to "Star Wars" for which I'd waited three years. In retrospect, "The Empire Strikes Back" was exactly the film which a 15 year old "Star Wars" fan needed to see. The very fact that we'd seen the first film when we were 12 and waited three years for the sequel guaranteed that what Lucas served up, however good, would be a disappointment. And that's what the film's all about: disillusionment, disapoinment, the demytholigisation of Luke Skywalker's world. Darth Vader tortures Han Solo and threatens to freeze Luke Skywalker; and then, in five words, destroys his world. Dad was evil. Your mentor was a liar. Deal with it, kid.
Did Lucas "intend" this? Not at any conscious level. He is an accidental film maker. Before The Force got fully appropriated into Buddhism, it's ethic was "let go of your conscious self and act on instinct" I don't know if that's a good code for living, or whether it would really help you blow up battle stations, but it works well enough as a guide to creating works of art. (**) Put down the first thing which comes into your head, and it will probably be interesting. Write what your conscious mind tells you you ought to write, which is probably what you think Mummy will approve of, and it will almost certainly be trite. Forget what your teachers said -- sketch or scribble or jam. George did what he felt was right, of course, and ended up with the film we needed to see at the time we saw it. It was in the wrong place at the wrong time: naturally, it became a classic.
That's why I found it so hard to hate "Phantom Menace": I'd already gone through my disillusionment with the saga, and decided that I could love "Empire Strikes Back" for being what it is, even if it wasn't exactly what I wanted it to be. "Phantom Menace" may not be a good prequel to "Star Wars", but it's a more than adequate sequel to "Return of the Jedi."
A more serious answer to the question "What do you think of the "Star Wars" prequels?" would go as follows. George Lucas is producing what sci-fi writers used to call "a fix-up", a novel which has been assembled out of previously published short stories. He's like Niggle, taking his first, brilliant, rendering of a single leaf and physically pasting it into a vast, uncompletable painting of a tree, and then a forest. Lucas has taken the film which I loved and made it a single chapter in a science-mythical saga. The process of pasting the fairy tale into the epic drains the original of almost everything I loved about it. The innocent farm boy who rescued the princess turns out to be a second generation Messiah who has a role to play in the culmination of a conspiracy which goes back 1,000 years. I like the "Star Wars Saga" less than I like "Star Wars"; but I still think "the Saga" is a good and interesting thing.
It's a joke, of course. But it is true that when I saw "Empire Strikes Back" at the age of 15, my first reaction was disappointment. Whatever else this all-over-the-place without an ending movie where the good guys lose might have been; it wasn't the sequel to "Star Wars" for which I'd waited three years. In retrospect, "The Empire Strikes Back" was exactly the film which a 15 year old "Star Wars" fan needed to see. The very fact that we'd seen the first film when we were 12 and waited three years for the sequel guaranteed that what Lucas served up, however good, would be a disappointment. And that's what the film's all about: disillusionment, disapoinment, the demytholigisation of Luke Skywalker's world. Darth Vader tortures Han Solo and threatens to freeze Luke Skywalker; and then, in five words, destroys his world. Dad was evil. Your mentor was a liar. Deal with it, kid.
Did Lucas "intend" this? Not at any conscious level. He is an accidental film maker. Before The Force got fully appropriated into Buddhism, it's ethic was "let go of your conscious self and act on instinct" I don't know if that's a good code for living, or whether it would really help you blow up battle stations, but it works well enough as a guide to creating works of art. (**) Put down the first thing which comes into your head, and it will probably be interesting. Write what your conscious mind tells you you ought to write, which is probably what you think Mummy will approve of, and it will almost certainly be trite. Forget what your teachers said -- sketch or scribble or jam. George did what he felt was right, of course, and ended up with the film we needed to see at the time we saw it. It was in the wrong place at the wrong time: naturally, it became a classic.
That's why I found it so hard to hate "Phantom Menace": I'd already gone through my disillusionment with the saga, and decided that I could love "Empire Strikes Back" for being what it is, even if it wasn't exactly what I wanted it to be. "Phantom Menace" may not be a good prequel to "Star Wars", but it's a more than adequate sequel to "Return of the Jedi."
A more serious answer to the question "What do you think of the "Star Wars" prequels?" would go as follows. George Lucas is producing what sci-fi writers used to call "a fix-up", a novel which has been assembled out of previously published short stories. He's like Niggle, taking his first, brilliant, rendering of a single leaf and physically pasting it into a vast, uncompletable painting of a tree, and then a forest. Lucas has taken the film which I loved and made it a single chapter in a science-mythical saga. The process of pasting the fairy tale into the epic drains the original of almost everything I loved about it. The innocent farm boy who rescued the princess turns out to be a second generation Messiah who has a role to play in the culmination of a conspiracy which goes back 1,000 years. I like the "Star Wars Saga" less than I like "Star Wars"; but I still think "the Saga" is a good and interesting thing.
*
So,. "Revenge of the Sith". Secular critics hate it, almost on principle. The review in the Indy said that the film would only appeal to people who collected the figurines. (Since that has included about 70% of the male population under the age of 40 that's not a terribly damning criticism.) Geekdom is already splitting along denominational lines: I've heard "better than 'Episode IV' " and "worse than 'Phantom Menace'', two statements which are pretty absurd. A lot of us are discussing the meanings of lines, points of connection with the previous movies, possible sequels, and the extent to which it causes some "Extended Universe" novels to be relegated from the canon to the apocrypha.
To "review" this movie therefore seems almost redundant. We'd all decided in advance what we were going to think about "Revenge of the Sith" and two and a half hours in a cinema are hardly going to change our mind.
*
Maybe "Revenge of the Sith" will turn out to have been the film that "Star Wars" fans who are pushing 40 need to see. As the fellow said, it's too early to say..
(*) "Star Wars" is the title of a film which George Lucas made in 1977. "A New Hope" is an after-the-event sub-title, appropriate only for considering the movie in the context of the large work.
(**) That is to say, for producing sketches and first drafts. If you learn to trust your feelings, write down what comes into your head and then polish it, improve it, and listen to criticisms, you may end up with "Sgt. Pepper". If you run away with the idea that you can publish your first drafts, then you are only ever going to produce the White album.
Alternatively, please consider making a donation of £1 for each essay you have enjoyed.
Revenge of the Sith (1)
How is this reason (which is their reason) to judge a scholar worth?
By casting a ball at three straight sticks and defending the same with a fourth
But this they do (which is doubtless a spell) and other matters more strange
Until, by the operation of years, the hearts of their scholars change....
Last Thursday, about a quarter of Channel 4 News was given over to one news story.
Apparently, a group of foreigners wearing red shirts had scored more goals in a football match than a group of foreigners wearing some other colour of shirt. This was particularly exciting, because at one point the second group of foreigners had had more goals than the first group. A lot of people who lived in the city after which the winning name was named were quite pleased about this. The winning team was driven around the city really, really, slowly in an open-top bus. A lot of people turned out to cheer them. They sang a rotten song from a rather sexist musical over and over again and very badly. There wasn't a riot. There wasn't a riot during the "game" either. This came as a relief to the police, because there sometimes is.
Why did the most "serious" TV news programme give such prominence to this non-story? "It's a bus. Yes, it's definitely a bus. There are lots of people. Thousands. They are very pleased. They haven't been this pleased since the last time their team won something which was quite a number of years ago now."
While they were "reporting" it, various thoughts crossed my mind. How many of the half million supporters have ever read a book? Come to that, how many of the team have? Did the team coach become a football instructor primarily because of the opportunities it provides him with to look at young men with no clothes on? Did he tell them that if they didn't try hard enough at todays match he would spank them with his plimsole; or make them train in their underwear? Or did he become a football coach because he was such a pathetic, abject failure as a geography teacher?
My apathy towards football is limitless. Last weekend was the wedding of two of my friends, and I genuinely had no idea that it was also Cup Final day until the vicar made a joke about it. (My reaction was, as it always is: "Gosh, that means it must be the Eurovision Song Contest as well. Which do I care about less?")
I find it hard enough to undersrand why anyone would, under any circumstances, want to watch to someone else playing a game of any kind. But Association Football seems pointless even by ball-game standards. I understand that what people pay to see are sort of exhibition matches, in which skilled athletes impress the audience by making balls behave in surprising and unexpected ways. And I can occasionally look at a game of Rugby Footbal or cricket and see that something clever is being done, as "You wouldn't think that such a big man could run so fast" or "That man must have a great grasp of Newtonian mechanics to make the ball bounce in that particular way." But "professional" soccer is to me no cleverer or more interesting than the kids playing in the park. Grown men passing a ball to each other in a vaguely energetic way.
I admit that I don't properly understand the rules of Cricket. Cricket exists mainly in order for people not to understand the rules of it. It's purpose within the class structure is to define an in-group of those who went to the right school and therefore know the difference between a silly-mid-on and an ablative absolute, and an out-group who didn't and don't. (This is also the reason that an irritating hard-core of pedants are at this moment composing an e-mail pointing out that I should have said "laws" rather than "rules" in the previous sentence.) But this I admit: if I understood cricket better, and had a better idea of what was going on, I might it enjoy it more. But I am rather afraid that I understand the "laws" of soccer perfectly well, and that the reason that I am missing the game's subtle points is because it hasn't got any.
Athletics I have a slightly better handle on, provided we are talking participation and the Athenian ideal. If I can go to the gym and challenge myself to run a mile in less than 20 minutes, and then gradually reduce that time over the next few years, then I can see why a sports enthusiast would want to push himself to the limits of what he is physically capable of. Run a mile in 300 seconds; run 26 miles without falling over; read the back page of the Sun without his lips moving. It makes even more sense if you are challenging yourself to do something which it might have occurred to a human being to do in any case: run a very long distance; run a short distance very quickly; jump very high; lift a very heavy weight. I'll even put up with "throwing a spear", because when the Greeks first invented P.E lessons, spear-throwing was a useful skill, and I'm a sucker for tradition. When you get into "jump very high holding a fiberglass stick" my eyes start to glaze over again. If you are an averagely good club runner, then maybe it is interesting to you to know what speed the best runner in the world achieved in last years egg-and-spoon race: but I find it hard to correlate actually watching someone else running with anything that I would call "fun" (Unless, I suppose, you are studying their technique in order to improve yours, in the way an amateur chess player might study the games of the masters to improve their own.)
I understand how you can love the city where you grew up a lot better than I understand how you can "love" your country. A city is a concrete thing which you can know; a country is too big and abstract to have many feelings about. So I can see how a religion could have emerged in which champions of particular cities battle one each other in order to ritually earn status. If the battle involves kicking a ball rather than cutting each other up with swords, so much the better. If it prevents the less well-educated citizens from getting into real fights, then it's obviously a Good Ritual. If –as very often happens-- it encourages them to get into fights, riot, and from time to time, murder each other, then it's a very Bad Ritual and Tony Blair should abolish it.
If sport was still mostly amateur, I could understand it even better. If Liverpool FC consisted of local lads who had started out duffing up softies behind the changing rooms of Liverpool Bog Standard Comprehensive, and had gradually worked their way up to playing in the city's First Team – if the people you were cheering were really "your own boys" -- then I could I see the point of it. In fact "our" team consists of people from different cities and different countries who is wearing a red shirt because a businessman is paying them a lot of money to do so. Next season, some other city will buy their loyalty for a six figure sum.
In order to appreciate something, you have to understand it, and, since one can only understand a finite number of things in a life-time, the majority of people are not going to understand the majority of things. If I decided to watch 100 hours of cricket (that's the equivalent of about two test matches, and feels longer) at the end of the process I would probably have a good idea of how the game works, and would therefore be in a position to enjoy it. (I would probably also start wearing blazers and ties in the summer and feeling nostalgic about the Empire.)
But perhaps there is really nothing to understand. Human beings invest the most unlikely things with significance. Collections of beer mats; numbers on the fronts of railway trains; ball games; twenty-eight-year-old movies; forty-two-year-old TV shows. If you have got to the point where 500,000 people regard a football match as being important, than it is important. To attempt to deconstruct the game, to understand where its importance resides, is to miss the point.
As a wise man once said: you gotta ask the question, you ain't never gonna know the answer.
NOTE: The above contains a lot of personal prejudice; several out-of-date stereotypes and caricatures; numerous over-generalisations; one or two factual inaccuracies and also a grain of truth.
Just like everything written in the mainstream media about Revenge of the Sith.
By casting a ball at three straight sticks and defending the same with a fourth
But this they do (which is doubtless a spell) and other matters more strange
Until, by the operation of years, the hearts of their scholars change....
Last Thursday, about a quarter of Channel 4 News was given over to one news story.
Apparently, a group of foreigners wearing red shirts had scored more goals in a football match than a group of foreigners wearing some other colour of shirt. This was particularly exciting, because at one point the second group of foreigners had had more goals than the first group. A lot of people who lived in the city after which the winning name was named were quite pleased about this. The winning team was driven around the city really, really, slowly in an open-top bus. A lot of people turned out to cheer them. They sang a rotten song from a rather sexist musical over and over again and very badly. There wasn't a riot. There wasn't a riot during the "game" either. This came as a relief to the police, because there sometimes is.
Why did the most "serious" TV news programme give such prominence to this non-story? "It's a bus. Yes, it's definitely a bus. There are lots of people. Thousands. They are very pleased. They haven't been this pleased since the last time their team won something which was quite a number of years ago now."
While they were "reporting" it, various thoughts crossed my mind. How many of the half million supporters have ever read a book? Come to that, how many of the team have? Did the team coach become a football instructor primarily because of the opportunities it provides him with to look at young men with no clothes on? Did he tell them that if they didn't try hard enough at todays match he would spank them with his plimsole; or make them train in their underwear? Or did he become a football coach because he was such a pathetic, abject failure as a geography teacher?
My apathy towards football is limitless. Last weekend was the wedding of two of my friends, and I genuinely had no idea that it was also Cup Final day until the vicar made a joke about it. (My reaction was, as it always is: "Gosh, that means it must be the Eurovision Song Contest as well. Which do I care about less?")
I find it hard enough to undersrand why anyone would, under any circumstances, want to watch to someone else playing a game of any kind. But Association Football seems pointless even by ball-game standards. I understand that what people pay to see are sort of exhibition matches, in which skilled athletes impress the audience by making balls behave in surprising and unexpected ways. And I can occasionally look at a game of Rugby Footbal or cricket and see that something clever is being done, as "You wouldn't think that such a big man could run so fast" or "That man must have a great grasp of Newtonian mechanics to make the ball bounce in that particular way." But "professional" soccer is to me no cleverer or more interesting than the kids playing in the park. Grown men passing a ball to each other in a vaguely energetic way.
I admit that I don't properly understand the rules of Cricket. Cricket exists mainly in order for people not to understand the rules of it. It's purpose within the class structure is to define an in-group of those who went to the right school and therefore know the difference between a silly-mid-on and an ablative absolute, and an out-group who didn't and don't. (This is also the reason that an irritating hard-core of pedants are at this moment composing an e-mail pointing out that I should have said "laws" rather than "rules" in the previous sentence.) But this I admit: if I understood cricket better, and had a better idea of what was going on, I might it enjoy it more. But I am rather afraid that I understand the "laws" of soccer perfectly well, and that the reason that I am missing the game's subtle points is because it hasn't got any.
Athletics I have a slightly better handle on, provided we are talking participation and the Athenian ideal. If I can go to the gym and challenge myself to run a mile in less than 20 minutes, and then gradually reduce that time over the next few years, then I can see why a sports enthusiast would want to push himself to the limits of what he is physically capable of. Run a mile in 300 seconds; run 26 miles without falling over; read the back page of the Sun without his lips moving. It makes even more sense if you are challenging yourself to do something which it might have occurred to a human being to do in any case: run a very long distance; run a short distance very quickly; jump very high; lift a very heavy weight. I'll even put up with "throwing a spear", because when the Greeks first invented P.E lessons, spear-throwing was a useful skill, and I'm a sucker for tradition. When you get into "jump very high holding a fiberglass stick" my eyes start to glaze over again. If you are an averagely good club runner, then maybe it is interesting to you to know what speed the best runner in the world achieved in last years egg-and-spoon race: but I find it hard to correlate actually watching someone else running with anything that I would call "fun" (Unless, I suppose, you are studying their technique in order to improve yours, in the way an amateur chess player might study the games of the masters to improve their own.)
I understand how you can love the city where you grew up a lot better than I understand how you can "love" your country. A city is a concrete thing which you can know; a country is too big and abstract to have many feelings about. So I can see how a religion could have emerged in which champions of particular cities battle one each other in order to ritually earn status. If the battle involves kicking a ball rather than cutting each other up with swords, so much the better. If it prevents the less well-educated citizens from getting into real fights, then it's obviously a Good Ritual. If –as very often happens-- it encourages them to get into fights, riot, and from time to time, murder each other, then it's a very Bad Ritual and Tony Blair should abolish it.
If sport was still mostly amateur, I could understand it even better. If Liverpool FC consisted of local lads who had started out duffing up softies behind the changing rooms of Liverpool Bog Standard Comprehensive, and had gradually worked their way up to playing in the city's First Team – if the people you were cheering were really "your own boys" -- then I could I see the point of it. In fact "our" team consists of people from different cities and different countries who is wearing a red shirt because a businessman is paying them a lot of money to do so. Next season, some other city will buy their loyalty for a six figure sum.
In order to appreciate something, you have to understand it, and, since one can only understand a finite number of things in a life-time, the majority of people are not going to understand the majority of things. If I decided to watch 100 hours of cricket (that's the equivalent of about two test matches, and feels longer) at the end of the process I would probably have a good idea of how the game works, and would therefore be in a position to enjoy it. (I would probably also start wearing blazers and ties in the summer and feeling nostalgic about the Empire.)
But perhaps there is really nothing to understand. Human beings invest the most unlikely things with significance. Collections of beer mats; numbers on the fronts of railway trains; ball games; twenty-eight-year-old movies; forty-two-year-old TV shows. If you have got to the point where 500,000 people regard a football match as being important, than it is important. To attempt to deconstruct the game, to understand where its importance resides, is to miss the point.
As a wise man once said: you gotta ask the question, you ain't never gonna know the answer.
NOTE: The above contains a lot of personal prejudice; several out-of-date stereotypes and caricatures; numerous over-generalisations; one or two factual inaccuracies and also a grain of truth.
Just like everything written in the mainstream media about Revenge of the Sith.
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Sunday, May 22, 2005
Revenge of the Sith (0)
Preliminary review, written after having actually watched the movie.
1: It didn't suck.
2: George Lucas has clearly gone completely insane.
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Alternatively, please consider making a donation of £1 for each essay you have enjoyed.
1: It didn't suck.
2: George Lucas has clearly gone completely insane.
Alternatively, please consider making a donation of £1 for each essay you have enjoyed.
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