The Medieval Genius of George Lucas
Jim Paul
Author's note:
I thought it might be best to answer the question posed for this
volume with a direct demonstration. I was Professor Garbáty's
student in graduate school, bound for a dissertation on Hart Crane, until
I was waylaid by this brilliant and dedicated teacher, in a required Chaucer
class. Four years later I found myself writing on Pearl, directed
in my dissertation by this same Garbáty. My studies in those
years were inspiring and deep, yet this period did not turn me into a medieval
scholar. After grad school I returned to my own writing and made a freelancer's
life in San Francisco, directing my attention at whatever and thinking
that truly I had left the Middle Ages back in Ann Arbor.
But no. Dispersed into the actual, nonfictional world, the medieval kept appearing, like geological outcroppings through the strata of the moment. I found that knowing about the Middle Ages implied knowing about the intervening years - the 500-year Modern period, apparently just ended. When I wrote the first of my books, medieval matter entered them unbidden. My most recent work is a novel called Medieval in LA, which intertwines a weekend in LA with a capsule history of western thought. The question was how much the modern moment had really changed us. The answer, for LA that weekend anyway: not a whit.
The book garnered some attention, and now I actually get calls from
editors who want to know the medieval slant on things. The following is
the result of such a call. Would there be anything medieval about the filmmaker
George Lucas, creator of Star Wars? Indeed there would.
It's Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. It's Gunsmoke and Uncle Scrooge, Kurosawa and Castañeda, Oedipus and ET. It's Star Wars, of course, and it came back with the much-anticipated pre-quel to the trilogy of the '70s and '80s. Lucas' Star Wars epic has something in common with the famous Watts Towers in LA: cathedral spires of whatever - hubcaps, freeway guardrails, balcony railings - all kinds of recognizable modern stuff welded together by a single driven man and raised in gothic tribute to the sky.
The Star Wars series is similarly an assemblage of pop elements. Some of it reflects the samurai films - the Jidai-geki - of Akira Kurosawa. Here are the cliffhanger sci-fi serials of the '30s and '40s; there, the aerial battle sequences from The Bridges at Toko-Ri and The Battle of Britain. If we look, we can discern the beloved hippie icons of the '60s and '70s, Tolkein's hobbits in Lucas' Ewoks, Castañeda's sage Don Juan in Lucas' Obi-Wan. The Star Wars universe is a paradoxical conglomeration, like the Watts Towers, eclectic and postmodern in its bits, yet in its expression essentially medieval.
Star Wars takes us to an ancient realm - "long ago and far, far away" - a land of knights and ladies, lords and minions, wizards and dragons. To see the film is to return to a universe with a personality, where you can tell the bad guys - and everyone else - by their costumes. Though Lucas draws on the century's pop culture for his raw material, out of it he composes a grand scheme seemingly from another epoch, the romantic, adventurous, moral, magically effective medieval world where Malory and Spenser, the Pre-Raphaelites and Tennyson and Errol Flynn have gone before. The place Lucas takes us - never mind the spaceships - is the Middle Ages.
Medieval times have, ever since, provided a screen upon which each succeeding epoch might project its fantasies. Why? Maybe because so little good information about the Middle Ages actually exists. The scant data on the period was slanted and weird, much of it carefully censored and a lot of it wildly reported in the first place.
In any case we are mostly free now to find what we seek in the darkness of the Dark Ages. In our times in particular the Middle Ages may easily seem our real home, a place beyond the vagaries and unsettling inconsistencies of the modern world. After all, modern science, for all its benefits, has bequeathed us a universe in which we are infinitesimal in space and instantaneous in time. Modern philosophy (and we're talking 500 years of Modern thought since the Renaissance) is even worse, having long ago shattered hope that we might rationally confirm the idea that we are central here, that in fact all this was created for us.
Oh for a meaningful universe. We're nostalgic for it, as if we've ever been there. The medieval mind found itself in a cosmos created expressly for it, ruled by a deity quite like us only better and more powerful. We were in the center of everything. For our myth of the Middle Ages we've imagined a place, in books and movies and in our own hearts, where will - human or divine - ruled everything, often in the form of supernatural influences and inspired, heroic deeds. No tree fell without significance. This mythic Middle Ages, though it may or may not have anything to do with the actual epoch, has everything to do with our sense of no longer being at the center, of not being entirely in control, of not feeling quite at home in the new condition. It is a projection, one might say, from that condition.
Lucas knows this as well as anyone. Lucas' vision for Star Wars is in some ways explicitly medieval - the original costume for Princess Leia, for instance, was copied from dress designs of the Middle Ages. But in a more important way, Star Wars is implicitly medieval, returning us to this older way of thinking, to a cosmos with a plot and a population of stark moral exempla. The Star Wars Universe proves systematic and comforting, like the medieval cosmos, at the heart of which was man, and I do mean man. The question for the Phantom Menace is whether Lucas can take us back to this place again; or more profoundly, whether we can still get there from here.
In the Middle Ages, the great illiterate masses received and stored their information in complex visual signs, or icons. In pictures of the saints, every detail had some prescribed meaning - the color blue for the Virgin, a dove for the Holy Ghost. Darth Vader, too, is an icon, an effective visual sign, instantly familiar from our own cultural catechism, black and caped and evil. In this way Star Wars proceeds iconographically, its characters straight out of stock, figures from ancient ritual and matinee melodrama, recloaked in every age. The Kid, the Cowboy, the Girl, the Sidekick, the Evil Counselor, the Wise Benefactor, the Ultimate Villain - we know them in advance. They aren't original, but that's not the point. Like tarot cards or runes, these effective images come pre-loaded with their significance, and so can combine efficiently and move easily in a narrative.
By drawing upon icons from popular culture, Lucas tapped the spirit of the age for his artistic enterprise. In other ways, too, Lucas has shown a genius for enlisting the Zeitgeist. When he was making Star Wars the first time, Lucas looked again at some of the old space cowboy serials that had so entranced him as a kid, watching KRON out in Modesto. He was astonished to see how fakey they were, to note how much he, as a young moviegoer, had contributed to their effect. Since then, Lucas has developed a knack for knowing precisely what the audience's imagination does contribute to the film. He knows how to get out of the audience's way, and this makes him, for one thing, a superb editor, who in the cutting room takes the movie's ultimate questions into consideration. Knowing how viewers will respond, he knows how much he can remove, anticipating their reactions and enhancing their participation in the re-creation of his vision.
This begins to reveal Lucas' principal medieval gift. He is a true visionary, like the itinerant poet, a regular marketplace feature of the Middle Ages, who drew upon traditional sources to depict his own elaborate, mystical vision. As a filmmaker Lucas is a realizeur, as the director is sometimes called in France, the one who realizes the film, who makes the idea manifest. Lucas conceives a universe in his mind, makes a film mentally before any shooting starts, then harnesses the stubborn will to see his vision through to its realization. "I'll have a picture in my mind," he said recently in Style magazine. "I'll say, 'it has a mushroom shape, it should have a glint, and it should be chrome.'"
His is not the extemporaneous approach to filmmaking. Lucas works to make the film the absolute reflection of the vision that preceded it. On the set of the second Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back, Irvin Kershner - who took over from Lucas as director - would often depart from the original storyboards, attempting to find something better on the spot. "George would never do that," said producer Gary Kurtz, who watched both men work. "He'd stick to the storyboards and fix it in the editing room."
Manifesting the vision, this is Lucas' medieval specialty. The moments in filmmaking when the process of realization is most apparent - in the drawing of the original storyboards, in the overall art design, in the special effects and in the editing suite --- these are Lucas' moments of genius. This genius -- "obsession" may not be too strong a word - for realizing a pre-conceived world has driven George Lucas from the beginning. "I used to do it with cars, then I did it with film, now I do it with the ranch," he told his biographer Dale Pollock in the late '70s, when the Skywalker Ranch was still in the planning stages. The ranch itself is an icon, for which Lucas composed a fictional history to explain the range of architectural styles and planted thousands of mature trees. He is obsessed with making his imagined world literal, with putting his vision on earth.
As a neo-medievalist, Lucas cares everything for the vision and not a whole lot for the medium that expresses it. "I don't think, as a craftsman, that my films are extremely well made," he has said. "They're kind of crude." In the medieval world view, too, the actual manifestations of a vision are always unworthy, flickering shadows that can never fully recreate the dream. "The moving image isn't any more truthful than the cave paintings," Lucas wrote in Premiere. "The artist finds the truth behind the 'truth'."
That's why, though he has been described as the avatar of high-tech filmmaking, Lucas' attachment to technology is just more evidence of his hot-rodder's readiness to employ whatever works in the realization process, be it computer graphics or C.S. Lewis. "I'm not that keen on technology," he has said. "I'm a storyteller, but to enable me to tell my stories, I've had to develop the necessary technology."
Lucas' much-commented-on reliance on classical mythology is similarly an item in his toolkit, the bag of the bricoleur, of the improvising handyman. His version of the hero's journey may have supplanted its precedents for the generation that saw Star Wars during its formative years, yet what Lucas sought from the classics was first of all a stripped-down way of telling stories, a distillation intended to reveal a narrative formula for his iconographic characters.
Lucas harnessed the Zeitgeist in 1977, when Star Wars proved prophetic. The film was able to galvanize its audiences, to give life to its B movie action, its technological gloss, and its collection of pop references and medieval fantasy. The work was instantly and unconsciously recognized, in the blockbuster fashion. People were moved. The icons worked.
Still, it's hard to be the Zeitgeist twice. The Phantom Menace will be immensely popular and make a huge amount of money. May people paid nine bucks simply to see the trailer, then walked out when the accompanying feature came on. But look what's happened since 1977, the year, by the way, when Best Director and Best Picture Oscars went to Woody Allen's Annie Hall, when Star Wars posters competed with Farrah Fawcett Majors for icon of the year. We are way more discerning about special effects, for one. We see them by the thousands, and mostly dismiss them, everywhere, even in TV commercials. Lucas' sharp cuts, thunderous sound track and speeded action are similarly ubiquitous.
More critically, since Star Wars (and in some measure because of it) popular media has revisited and re-framed (and re-framed) much of the world heritage of story and myth, not to mention any and all popular dreck like The Beverly Hillbillies and The Flintstones. Our great myths have been replaced by extraterrestrials in the lead roles. Whole nations have adopted the iconography of the movies - witness Scotland and Braveheart. We've had a cartoon Moses, a George Washington for white sales and the lottery, and Bill and Ted in Hell, subbing for Virgil and Dante.
We've spent the last quarter of the century refurbishing the icons, placing them in new, deracinated contexts, and witnessing the same on a daily and repeated basis. Compared to any previous era, we are more familiar with everything and less connected to any of it. In some ways this is ideal, of course, though the casualty of the process is wonder, which we then pursue with more and more realistic special effects.
So it's possible that Lucas' very genius for his times may undo his ultimate aim, which is to return us to our old belief in ourselves and our stories. Maybe it's too difficult for any of us now to take the icons seriously, having played with them all our lives. But taking them seriously is what Lucas asks of us, and what the new film especially seems to require, as this time Lucas may be attempting a tragedy.
The new trilogy - the other two films promised for 2002 and 2005 - relates the fall of Anakin Skywalker, whom we knew and will know as the evil Darth Vader. Tragedy above all relies on the believability of the myth – we identify with the tragic hero, we comprehend and even desire the evil he embraces, we know his downfall as our own. Only then are we lifted into the humanizing terror and pity and made human again – that’s the point of tragedy. It is a genre for mature cultures. It is the way a culture grows up.
Our current culture, which seems to become ever more juvenile in the process of marketing itself to teens, defies tragedy. The ironic, fragmented, young-as-spring-though-somehow-already-nostalgic spirit of this age can’t relate to the tragic fate, and this unfocusgroupable genre has all but disappeared from pop culture in the last twenty-five years. Leonardo DiCaprio’s blue face slipping into the North Atlantic in Titanic is about as close as we’ve gotten.
Still, there’s no overestimating George Lucas. He remains an extraordinarily tough and dedicated filmmaker, who refuses to submit to short-term thinking, even when it risked his very livelihood—betting the whole ranch, literally, in the beginning.
Nor is there any overestimating the popularity of medieval
thinking, in any age. Just now, at the change of the millennium, we may
in fact be all the hungrier for the old sense of connection, of belonging
in the cosmos. So who knows? Maybe we and George Lucas can collaborate
again. Maybe we can rebuild our old home, that castle in the air, and at
least for a couple of hours in a darkened movie house, live out our medieval
dream.
©2001, Jim Paul
Jim Paul is director of the University
of Arizona Poetry Center
1216 N. Cherry Avenue
Tucson, AZ 85719
Phone 520 626 5880