This post is concerned with Star Wars on a very plain level

I almost don’t know how to react to Aidan Wasley’s Slate essay on how that Star Wars series is really just a two decade experiment in postmodern art. It is, without overstatement, jaw-droppingly fantastic. Clever, insightful and shamelessly academic, it’s lofty without being pretentious. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it in a publication as mainstream as Slate. He even drops a John Ashberry reference.

Wasley’s essay claims that the entire Star Wars series—even the much maligned prequel trilogy—is a visual and narrative representation of the artifice of drama. One particularly salient point he makes suggests that The Force is a literal device for the narrative control:

But Lucas takes this self-consciousness about narrative artifice a step further: He makes explicit his theoretical interest in the mechanics of plot. As viewers, we take pleasure in the implausible events that must happen for the narrative contraption to snap shut in a satisfying way. But the characters come to understand that there is another agent, external to themselves, that is dictating the action. Within the films' fiction, that force is called … er, "the Force." It's the Force that makes Anakin win the pod race so that he can get off Tatooine and become a Jedi and set all the other events in all of the other films in motion. We learn that Anakin's birth, fall, redemption, and death are required to "bring balance to the Force" and, not coincidentally, to give the story its dramatic shape. The Force is, in other words, a metaphor for, or figuration of, the demands of narrative. The Force is the power of plot.

Later, he points out Lucas’ use of a technique that’s quickly becoming popular in the production of gritty, serious science fiction—the use of rough, handheld camera movements in CGI:

Likewise, in Clones there's a fascinating instance of cinematic self-consciousness that speaks to Lucas' awareness of the imaginative costs of all-digital filmmaking. Amid a riotous and panoramic battle-scene on a desert planet, the film frame suddenly starts to shudder as it zooms in on a close-up of a clone-filled combat vehicle. As viewers, we recognize the jerky camera movement as that of a hand-held camera, familiar to us from news footage and war movies, and the shot gives a kinetic, you-are-there edge to the chaotic scene. Until, that is, we realize that the entire scene exists only in a computer hard-drive, that there is no hand-held camera, and that Lucas is using a computer program to mimic the authentic touch of the unsteady human hand. It's a startling moment, where the film calls our attention to its own technological artifice.

I don’t have much to add to his excellent interpretation, except that it’s curious to see the way critical appreciation for the Star Wars series has evolved. As baby boomers and Gen Xers (a term which has, to my great relief, quickly fallen from our daily lexicon) for whom Star Wars was a—or perhaps the—pivotal film experience of their young lives take over the reigns of film commentary, we’re seeing an increasing level of tension over how these iconic movies ought to be treated. The impact of the original trilogy cannot be overstated: the series inspired a generation of geeks to love science fiction and changed the face of Hollywood like few other films by cementing the idea of the blockbuster in studio executive minds. Two generations of critics, from fanboys to the most influential dailies, grew up living and loving Star Wars, but now, especially with the percieved failure (at least by many) of the prequels, there are growing movements to either justify these films or to distance oneself from them.

Subsequently, we hear lots of talk about how flippant and juvenile they are. They’re movies for kids, is one argument, and probably well-made movies for kids; but that’s all. The Hero’s Journey business was just a ruse tacked on by Lucas after the fact because it helped sell the film as myth and made Georgie-boy feel better about having spent a decade on a goofy kid’s story. It’s the “I was young and stupid excuse,” perhaps tinged with some boyhood nostalgia.

On the other hand, we’re also seeing a critical reevaluation of the film from a postmodern, visualist’s rspective. Wesley’s essay is one example, but hypervisualist critics like Manola Dargis are offering new justifications for Lucas’ handiwork by transferring the power of the movies entirely to their images. And in one sense, this is a pretty convincing argument. Lucas has a magnificent eye, mixing modernism and art deco into a gleaming, science fiction wonderland. These critics tend to reference Lucas’ comment about how he believes that the images should tell the story without the dialogue as well as Ron Howard’s reminiscence that, as a young man, Lucas encouraged him to check out USC’s animation department because it freed the director from dealing with actors. Images, not people, dominate this line of thinking.

I’m not inclined to settle my own opinions of the films yet, suffice to say that I’ll always love the original trilogy—even Jedi—and that I think that those three films succeeded on narrative terms while the prequels did not.

On a somewhat related note, I’ll also recommend this review of the Sith DVD at Ain’t It Cool. Alexandra DuPont, the wittiest, most graceful writer ever to opine for that repository of unrequited geek glee, returns from retirement to offer a highly amusing, smart take on the final Star Wars film that may be the closest thing we have to a definitive fanboy (fangirl, I suppose) reaction.