Mini-Art-Criticisms: Star Wars, Fellowship of the Ring, There Are Doors, Star Trek The Motion Picture
[I am experimenting with various formats in this column as I continue to be quite busy (and also because experimenting with various formats is what this column is all about). This week, I decided to collect some thoughts on a few books and films I have read/watched recently.]
In the last week or so, I have read the following books in their entirety, and watched the following films. The latter is a bit unusual, as I rarely watch films these days. Nonetheless, it occurred to me that they really dovetail in various ways quite nicely.
Star Wars (1977)
I was able to see this film on the "big screen" of a cinema for the first time in my life. It is not the first time I have watched it; in fact, I cannot remember the first time I watched it or the other films in the Star Wars Trilogy (sometimes profanely known as the "Original Trilogy"). My eldest brother was a big Star Wars fan, so the films were simply a part of the air his siblings breathed as children, along with Star Trek and other good things.
Like my eldest brother, I have for a very long time been convinced that "A New Hope" (as it was known after its rerelease) is the best of the films in the Star Wars franchise, and indeed one of the best films of all time. Seeing it on the big screen for the first time only confirmed this for me.
What Star Wars accomplishes in it's deceptively short runtime is something that, I think, has never been accomplished otherwise in cinema: it establishes a completely convincing, breathtakingly beautiful, and magical "other world" in the almost complete absence of explicit exposition, solely by the mastery of its editing, craftsmanship, and synthetic combination of real-world elements.
Or rather, what makes it truly breathtaking is that it establishes at least five or six such worlds, each one convincing and beautiful in itself, and all co-existing logically within the same universe, and each one with a life of its own.
There is the world of the "Rebel Alliance," a world of tough-as-nails WW2 American fighter pilots and Robert E. Lee Lost-Cause cosplayers and farmboy conscript army men in slacks, presided over by a woman who is at once a WW2 American Rosie the Riveter take-charge homefront queen (not a '60s/70s feminist figure), a WW2 pin-up homefront girl, a 1950s "spunky" teenage heartthrob, and a fairytale princess. There is the world of the Galactic Empire, powerful British and American men dressed in WW1 and WW2 German military uniforms seated in gleaming modern 60s-70s board rooms discussing the "technological terror" of the Nuclear Age, walked in on by a grimacing Grand Mufti Dracula, who declares that the Sacred Emperor has dissolved the Roman Senate and sends the Samurai Warlord and his legions of plasticine white-knight Nazi stormtroopers to terrorize and kill. There is the world of Tunisia Tatooine, where diminutive Arab slave traders prowl the desert in armored crawlers preying on the weak and Bedouin fighters attack salt-of-the-earth American frontier settlers and their "whiny" 1950s teenager wards. There is the Mos Eisley Cantina, a Wild West saloon and "Eastern" trading port where people of every race gather and fight and hire smugglers to transport opium spice just out of reach of the patrol ships of the British Empire. There is the lost world embodied in himself by Alec Guinness' Obi-Wan Kenobi, a disarming Padre Pio lookalike dressed in a Franciscan Friar's robe and sporting a Samurai's laser katana, who disclaims on New Age spirituality with a slightly apologetic half-smile on his face and then becomes a god. And then there is Harrison Ford, a whole world in himself, the American Actor with 1970s Hair who speaks his lines laconically and sarcastically and with a shamefaced smile on his face, as if even he can't believe how dumb they are and he hopes the audience will forgive him for appearing in this stupid movie--and who makes the central part of the film work, against all odds, as a fun contemporary adventure.
Presented in this fashion, the seams (and the remarkable comprehensive, pastiche style) are clearly visible; but in the actual experience of watching film, each and every element works together to present a totally convincing world. This it does not only because of the skill of the basic nuts-and-bolts "classical" filmmaking, but even more because of the odd breeziness of the editing, which has no time for exposition or self-serious explanations, and because of the performances by the numerous, often slightly abashed but professional career "character" actors, presenting relaxed, workaday people of different genres and times and places all just going about their daily business.
Most importantly, though, there is the world of the Droids, the Slaves, the Peasants, the hoi polloi, the one element that most sets this Star Wars film apart from all its sequels and imitators and sets it clearly above them. This is, really, the most brilliant thing in the whole film: to realize that the idea of robot servitors, ubiquitous in science fiction, was really, at heart, the same thing as the dirty, despised untermenschen of every human society in history and all genres of art from the beginning of time. And then to somehow take a Jeeves British butler comic archetype covered in gold foil and a trashcan on wheels and make them the most utterly likeable and relatable Vladmir-and-Estragon Jim-and-Huckleberry figures to watch stumble in and out of trouble while every other character treats them, without a second thought, as subhuman nothings to be bought and sold and ignored and disparaged and shot to pieces. It is the "Droids-eye-view" of the first and best part of ANH that is without a doubt the most original and daring part of Star Wars; and this first and best part of ANH that makes it a classic within, not just modern cinema, but human art. No sequel, imitation, or successor has ever followed up on this satisfactorily. And perhaps that is for the best.
To a degree, the film's slow transition out of the world of the droids and into the world of the Big Three is an artistic falling-off from which Star Wars never quite recovers; but it remains enjoyable and impressive from first frame to last, somehow combining three centuries of artistic works depicting worlds past and future into one new place presented with total assurance, as though we were simply wandering into a foreign cultural saga somewhere in the middle, after centuries and with centuries to come. This is narrative art in the basic human sense stretching back to Homer: cultural human creation of a story, a place, a time, out of but apart from the everyday. It is also indelibly modern and 20th century in the breadth of the places and times and cultures it combines and synthesizes, and in the way in which it reaches them through the cliches of American genre filmmaking and comic books and novels.
It is an unmatched accomplishment; and the entire "Star Wars saga," the entire "Star Wars franchise," even The Empire Strikes Back, one of the greatest cinematic sequels of all time, is a falling off.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (JRR Tolkien, 1954)
By a coincidence, earlier in the week I read, for the first time in many years a novel also famous for its convincing and breathtaking world-building. I don't want to talk about that here, though, since it's been talked about so often.
When I first read the Lord of the Rings, I was eight years old; which is really quite a bit too young. And though I successfully worked my way through the saga, I came away not only with some remarkable impressions (impressions that I am very grateful came before the films, and are therefore unmarked by them), but also with memories of general arduousness and complexity. I quickly moved on to the Silmarillion, which I found, paradoxically, far easier to read, since it was in effect little more than a compilation of the sort of historical narratives and myths and legends that I already enjoyed reading. Since then, I have revisited the Silmarillion every year or so, but have much more rarely returned to LotR, seeing it (I think rightly) as a much bigger commitment. I do not remember the last time I read straight through the whole trilogy, but this will be for all intents and purposes my first reread as a full-fledged adult.
I was struck, then, this time, by how easy a read it was, especially by comparison to the Victorian and other modern novels I have read since then; how modern and realistic and breezy and even cinematic it is as a work of art.
To begin with, LotR is an immensely visual novel, in a way that I, at least, feel would have been impossible before the advent of cinema. Objects, people, settings, cities, places, even actions are described in straightforward terms designed to present a clear, striking image to the mind, and events proceed in a logically focused way from action to action and from setting to setting. The LotR films are quite good as adaptations; but one of the reasons they are so good is simply that LotR is made for visual and even cinematic adaptation in a way that few novels are.
More than that, I was especially struck by how gritty and even realistic LotR felt, in a particular way that does not seem to exist in 19th century literature. By a pleasing juxtaposition, I had just finished a book of Maurice Baring's memoirs from WW1, and I was struck by how similar the basic tone and sense of the world is in both books: a mundane daily existence of labor and effort and hardship humorously born juxtaposed with terror and violence on unimaginable scales threatening and eventually disrupting and overpowering a quotidian life of comfort belonging to a "lost" idyllic pre-war world but bringing it with it glimpses of light and heroism and falls of moral corruption and the overpowering emotions of close, military camaderie among men.
Many things have been said about the connections between Tolkien's works and the World Wars, many of them very silly; but it is unquestionable that the whole tone and feel and sense of the work would be unimaginable without the experience of those wars. In particular, the style of realism found in them, with its emphasis on overpowering experiences of desire and terror and comfort and sharp juxtapositions of action and inaction is immeasurably different from the sort of social comedy found in Dickens or George Eliot or the kind of neurotic personal conflict and crisis and social realism found in Dostoevsky and other Russian authors.
I greatly, greatly dislike the entire genre of "Fantasy Literature" as it has emerged since the publication of Lord of the Rings; and especially the ugly, dishonest ways in which it covers gross postmodern worldviews with mocking pasteboard props of "Medievalism." Lord of the Rings, however, is not really a "Fantasy" novel in the modern generic sense, however much it may be imitated in externals or details by such universes. It is, in fact, thoroughly and unabashedly modern, from the English squirearchy comfort of the Shire to the rapacious industrialism of Mordor to the postmodern relativism and progressivism espoused by Saruman to the realpolitik of Boromir and the Men of the West.
In fact, the world of Middle Earth is not a Medieval or Ancient world, culturally or religiously or even technologically. It is not a pre-modern, pre-technological, pre-industrial world; it is not an "enchanted" "magical" pre-modern world. It is, in fact, a world defined by the movements of great peoples and the stresses of progressive change and the decisions of distant leaders and by the use and abuse of technology on a mass scale.
The central theme of Lord of the Rings, setting it apart from any previous literary tradition I am aware of, is a thoroughly modern reflection on technology, its essential nature, and its dangers in the light of the mass violence and destruction of the World Wars. The Elves are a technological civilization whose every artifact possesses far-future, science-fictional properties and whose technology is bent on the mastery of nature and the healing of grief and pain and the preservation of memory and the transcendence of time. The Hobbits are a technological civilization whose technology is focused on domestic comfort, food and drink, and amusement. The Men of Gondor and the West are descendents of an ancient, technological civilization whose technology was bent on military force, the combating of evil, and the building up of "civilization" through strong fortresses and roads and the communication across great distances. And the Enemy is, simply, a modern industrial civilization of the era of the World Wars, bent on utterly dominating nature, destroying its life, damming its rivers, cutting down its trees, polluting its air, and, using it as raw material to mass-produce weapons of war and to breed and train men and animals in vast, anonymous masses to die in battle in service of global domination. The Ring, as the central reality of the Trilogy, is an attempt to get at the central technological feature and telos of modern civilization: the domination and seduction of the human will. The power of the Ring is simply that it can seduce and dominate anyone--just as mass-media and modern and especially post-modern technology can seduce and dominate anyone. It is difficult to find many analogues for any of this in pre-modern art or literature.
It is precisely these visions of technological life and civilization and ethics that LotR is focused on presenting and pitting into conflict; and that is what makes it one of the great, and quintissentially modern novels, embodying the entire sweep of the 20th century like few others.
There Are Doors (Gene Wolfe, 1988)
I quite like Gene Wolfe, and would like to eventually write an essay about why I like him so much. This post will not be that. What makes the greatest and most quintessentially Gene-Wolfe-ish Gene Wolfe novels and stories what they are is a vast, labyrinthine vision of a singular reality of co-existing and co-interacting and violently clashing layers, including different people with completely different cultural visions and states and levels of virtue and vice and degrees of insanity and also the laws of physics and engineering and stories and myths and gods and demons and aliens and Christ and God. There Are Doors, though, is mostly entirely unlike this, and is the first Gene Wolfe work I have ever read to come off as somewhat short and straightforward. This is notable in itself, however.
There is worldbuilding in There Are Doors, but it is deliberately surreal and bizarre and presented through a dreamlike filter. Our protagonist spends a great part of the novel in an alternate world where all men die after they have sex. This world is mostly like our own--in fact, far too much like our own given that great, dramatic difference. This is commented on and openly acknowledged within the novel itself--and for a master of worldbuilding like Gene Wolfe is clearly deliberate. These Are Doors is interested, though, not in worldbuilding, but in psychology.
The central story of the rather short novel is that of a boring, mundane, middle-aged, utterly un-virtuous, and increasingly psychologically unstable and disturbed man who has had a one-night stand with the Goddess of Love and has become utterly obsessed and consumed with finding her again. He follows her between worlds, into the world described above and back again, encountering her in disguised form in the forms of various people--a famous movie star, the step-daughter of a political leader, and so forth--refusing the deadly temptations of the women in this alternate world out of loyalty to her, being coopted into a violent "men's rights" movement and getting out of it again, acquiring a tiny sentient (non-sexual) doll designed for children and lonely men, finding involving but soul-crushing success in his real-world career as a department-store salesman, spending time in psych hospitals in both worlds, and all the time caring for nothing other than finding his Goddess again.
All of this is actually more straightforward than it sounds (even if very surrealistic), and it all focuses on the one singular point of the (male) psychology of romantic and sexual obsession. The entire "alternate" world is little more than an amplification of a certain (very neglected in art) male psychology of suspicion and fear of women and sexuality. In this, the novel can't help appearing rather prescient now that we live in a media and Internet landscaped increasingly dominated by this psychology. This psychology of fear and distrust of women, though, exists in the novel, as it does in reality, inextricably bound up with a pyschology of romantic and sexual obsession with a singular-yet-multiple, completely idealized, completely sexualized, and ultimately unattainable "Goddess of Love": a vision that is strongly associated with mass-media and pornography and political and social power.
In the end (SPOILERS), the novel narrows its focus to a single choice. The Goddess of Love is found again in the guise of the secretary at the psych hospital in the real world at which our hero had been previously interned. We are thus left to contemplate the possibility that everything we have read is in fact a disturbed fantasy, and the Goddess of Love is nothing more than a projection of a warped one-night stand with a woman in a position of power, preying on our hero in a psychologically weakened state, and forbidden by professional and moral standards.
The novel, though, ends with a return to fantasy (or reality), as the Goddess of Love reveals herself as a serial user of lonely desperate men and shows him his future if he continues to pursue her: an old man long cast aside in favor of newer lovers but desperately serving her and carrying out her wishes merely to be able to see her and hear her voice and do her will. The only "real" woman in the novel to show an interest in our hero, albeit from the alternate world, offers him a life together: and in the last scene, he locks her out of the taxi-cab and proceeds, accompanied by his sentient companion doll, on the trail of the Goddess.
Given its theme and focus, it is hard to think of a better or more incisive ending, or a more tragic one.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
Star Trek: The Motion Picture ends, purportedly, on a much more positive note: with ultimate (sexual, interpersonal, interspecies, interreality) union, transcendence, and the birth of a new life form. It is in many ways, though, an even stranger and more chilling story.
Like many Star Trek fans, I have long had a profound love-and-hate relationship with this movie. I explored one side of this in the post I wrote about the story on this blog some time ago; but since then, the film has gradually grown in my estimation and even my love without really lessening the countervailing hatred.
In general fandom mythos, TMP was for decades blamed for being a failed, bloated project that nearly killed the franchise before it was saved by The Wrath of Khan. It is also, though, in many ways the end of a whole era of filmmaking: the last great, big-budget sci-fi film in the mold of 2001: The Space Odyssey before Star Wars and TWoK and the '80s changed the genre forever into something breezier and more adventure-based. Due to this, and due to the changes in culture since then and especially the general growth of fan devotion and general cultural self-seriousness and portentuousness, TMP has had something of a renaissance in the last ten years, leading to several successive re-releases, including a new 4K Director's Edition that I watched this time around.
In fact, TMP and Star Wars have a lot more in common than appearances might suggest: both are classical filmmaking of a highly visual, big-screen-focused variety, and both are preoccupied with worldbuilding and possess a certain background air of portentuous serious and a certain industrial-futuristic sense of aesthetics that were perhaps simply in the air in the 1970s. I have always liked Star Wars, but I could not really say I liked TMP in any genuine sense until I finally saw it on the big screen a few years ago.
In the end, and especially after my latest rewatch, my feelings about the film have neatly bifurcated in two: (nearly) all the Star Trek and (nearly) all the character aspects of the film are bad and ugly and slipshod and unpleasant and nearly unbearable, while the central, special-effects-and-soundtrack-and-ideas-driven 2001-derived part of the film is in fact beautiful and good.
Because of this, the Director's Cut of the film is in fact in almost every way simply worse than the Theatrical Edition--because the Director's Cut cuts down the lengthy, bloated special-effects-and-soundtrack sequences and adds more character moments. The characters, though, are simply terrible: unpleasant, unlikeable, hostile, unhappy, on-edge careerists fighting over bones; and the last thing I want to do is spend more time with them. That they happen to share names and actors with beloved characters from Star Trek just makes this worse.
Gene Roddenberry in his later days was (in)famous for insisting that his characters all be flawless perfect people with no conflicts among themselves, products and servants by a perfect utopian society: yet in both TNG Seasons 1-2 and in TMP, the two latter-day Star Treks he dominated and in which he was enabled to present his vision, he instead presented a collection of unhappy, nervous, egotistical careerists obsessed with personal aggrandizement and constantly squabbling unpleasantly among themselves. This, I think, was far truer to Gene Roddenberry's actual beliefs and psychology, and is in fact somewhat interesting in itself: it's a shame that it's so unpleasant to watch. He also, apparently, had a really weird thing for jumpsuits, ugly shades of tan, mauve, and grey, and large, empty rooms; and that is also on great display in TMP.
The central story of the film, though, which was concocted by Alan Dean Foster with some key additions by other members of the company, is really quite striking, and it is embodied by Douglas Trumbull and Jerry Goldsmith, the special-effects-artist and composer, respectively, with absolute mastery and with a degree of freedom that has rarely been granted to such artists since. Robert Wise, the director, Gene Roddenberry, the auteur visionary, and Harold Livingston, the hapless screenwriter were, by all acknowledgements, simply swamped out by the new technology and the infinite, spiralling budget being fed to it. And this is all to the good.
The only three characters who in any way belong in the resulting bizarre, fabulistic visual surrealist cinematic narrative are Spock, Decker, and Ilia: and the latter two are not really characters at all. Spock, though, has the closest thing to a genuine arc, and the only real character connection to the narrative.
V'Ger, an awesomely powerful machine, exists as a being of pure logic, information, and technological power, and has traveled the cosmos and collected all the information possible according to its lights: and now it is returning, desperate and empty and bereft of purpose, to its unknown creator, demanding some kind of transcendence and meaning and fulfillment and union. In this cosmic quest, it takes for its representative Ilia, a shaven model named Persis Khambatta who by all accounts could barely pronounce her few lines of dialogue but who is excellent at staring wordlessly into the screen, her large eyes brimming with longing. Spock, an older, more withdrawn, and immeasurably colder Leonard Nimoy, goes on a solitary cosmic-surrealist visual trip through the bowels of the machine, culminating in a mindmeld with a giant, glowing representation of Ilia, after which, utterly devastated, he weeps and informs the other terrible characters that V'Ger is "cold and barren" and desperate for true connection. Then, in the denoument, V'Ger is revealed as a descendant of a Voyager probe, and her creator as Man; and Decker steps forward eagerly to merge with her. Decker has a part to play in the other, terrible human plotline, but is likewise at his best when he stands silently, vibrating with suppressed energy and with his huge, bulging eyes brimming intensely into the screen. In the climax of the film Decker and Ilia, Creator and V'Ger, Man and Machine, Adam and Eve, Man and Woman make their respective eyes at each other, transform into glowing god-like beings, merge in a glorious light-show display, and then the screen explodes.
And then, of course, sadly, we are returned to our terrible human characters, who proceed to issue mundane, boring, soul-crushing careerist commentary on what has just happened, and we are left with nothing to look forward to but more time with the Careerist Pajama people. We wish we could transcend this horrible human world of secular careerism along with the Cosmic Man and Cosmic Machine Woman: but we cannot.
We can, however, look forward to The Wrath of Khan, a totally different (and much better) movie about people who sort of resemble the terrible careerists.
Conclusion
All of the preceding works of art are deeply, profoundly interconnected in themes and focus and artistic technique. All are, in their own way, indelibly modern, in their focus on technology and media and sexuality and cultural synthesis and isolation. All also reflect human themes that are much more universal.
That's all for now.
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