A Two Hour Techo-Shock

Rating: 7/10 (30 May 2005)

So many millions of reviews have been written of this movie that its hard to imagine what else there us to say about it. Iconic? Sure. The special effects, certainly. Cannabilised from westerns, Japanese folk lore, 30's adventure serials, yep, heard it - seen it. We could talk about incest, the minimalist direction, the slumming Alec Guinness, Lucas's tone deaf ear for dialogue or the double entendres that cause the entire screenplay to list toward the Carry Ons but instead lets talk about what this thing is REALLY all about.
Star Wars is a film about domestic violence and sexual abuse. Don't believe me? Well it just goes to show that no matter how many times you've seen it, you haven't paid attention once. Lucas may have had the intellectual chutzpah to take the subject head on but his ability to hide the subtext amongst the dogfights and the cod-mysticism, is meticulous - daring even, and has escaped serious documentation. Tim Roth would do it better with his 1999 film 'The War Zone' but his debt to Lucas, for his tale of a sexually abusive father can not be be overstated. This is a film about childhood dreams, the destruction of the family, the sexual confusion born of repressed abuse and the gradual shift to confronting that sordid past. Lucas sets out his stall immediately with the infamous 'a long time ago in a galaxy far far away' card, deliberately evocative of childhood fairy tales and fantasy. What follows acts as an ironic counterpoint to this innocent introduction with the arrival of the Star Destroyer, a searing phallus forcefully pushing its way across the frame; its size and intimidatory potential calculated to mirror the perception of the Father's reproductive strongbox from the child's perspective. Symbolically we've barely grasped the significance of this opening scene and its horrifying implications until we realise that the pursuing vessel contains Vader: The violent parent with the abusive past, chasing his now teenage daughter under the pretext of searching for architectural blueprints- a hollow ruse. Vader, we come to realise from his monstrous appearance- an evil black visage, is a deranged psychopath, barely human and in denial of his parental status (he doesn't mention it once) and its this, Lucas suggests, that allows him to later administer an interstellar confection of drugs to Leia to gain her absolute 'co-operation', when she is held prisoner on the Death Star and is subjected to her Father's intergalactic insertions. We don't see it of course; Lucas's camera joins the complicit guards in the corridor outside, but the look of recognition, horror and resignation on her face, speaks to a forgotten childhood of sustained attacks. It's no coincidence that the man's speciality is constricting the flow of air to his victims. Prior to his mechanisation, its all too easy to see a gloved hand covering a small mouth; a size and weight advantage exploited for sadistic ends - a mother cowering and crying in an adjacent room. The dark side indeed. So why has Luke and Leia been forced to disavow their blood-ties and take refuge on the other worlds and in Leia's case, under an assumed identity? Split up as children and hidden from their father by Guinness' guilt ridden Jedi Knight (of whom more later) to protect them from his predatory impulses, they have begun the movie apparently unaware of their childhood horror. It is repressed as the Freudian paradigm would suggest, in the sibling's unconscious. However, several scenes hint at what we can only imagine...Luke's Aunt and Uncle who have raised him since his impromptu separation from his parents, react with horror when Luke looks like emulating his father. Little wonder. Anakin's shift to the 'dark side'(note the constitution of his mother as a sexual object in Episode II's under the covers scene), a euphemism for his descent into infanto-perversion, lead to the absence of Luke and Leia's mother from which we can read consistent beatings with bricks wrapped in stocking, the branding of flesh with a cow-iron and ultimately murder, from which an eruption of sodomy gushed forth like a Mustafian geyser. Skywalker the elder was an animal,Lucas intones via notably disgusted composition, who did unimaginable damage as his old friend Obi-Wan looked on, slow to act and gripped by a failing of moral courage. Obi-Wan DID act of course but too late to halt the traumatic tide. His scenes in his Tatooine dwelling set up an interesting ambiguity in which we're invited to speculate as to whether or not he participated in, or was tempted to do the same before his moral compass finally pointed north. The more we know about Vader, the more it makes a frightening amount of sense. His own mother murdered by sand people, he allowed himself to be wooed by a princess with a predilection for men she met as children and then allowed himself to be groomed by a leering father figure who we know to be interested in the exploitation and subordination of youngsters for unspecified 'evil' purposes. In conclusion Star Wars is at turns both touching (the brother's noble rescue of the sister from their father's clutches) and horrifying (witness the scene in which Daddy literally and metaphorically destroys Leia's world - one of many allegorical episodes in which the psychological crimes of the past are represented in the present). Its a brave, misunderstood film that doesn't flinch from the exploration of its sinister subject matter and we can only hope that subsequent DVD editions will tackle the film's issues head on..