beginning of the end

Rating: 1/10 (3 August 2006)

Paul to the Corinthians - 'when i was a child, i thought as a child and played as a child; but when i became a man, i put away my childish things.'
i was living near new york city when this film was first released - i think this was a test release in the new york area; the original promo suggested a serious science-fiction story, along the lines of the cult-favorite 'dune'. it bombed. shortly afterward, on re-release Lucas got the promo he really wanted - part fairy-tale, part Jungian Ur-myth, part retro-serial - and the rest is history. but the history of what -
this film marks the beginning of the end of serious film-making in America. fairy-tales are for children; the old serial films were fun, but badly made; and 'Jungian Ur-myths' constitute a debatable psycho-babble theory; thus what Lucas was really telling his audience, in both film and promo, was that we all needed to be children watching bad films written by Carl Jung - or at least Jungian literary theorist Joseph Campbell, who was actually hired as consultant on this film.
humans, to maintain their self-respect, need to grapple with difficult moral issues, we need to mature, and to learn how to relate to other human beings in complex and sometimes difficult situations; and we need the freedom to think for ourselves in such matters, to risk our own happiness and to live with the consequences. no one is saying that children should not enjoy fairy-tales, and perhaps they really do need these for psychological development. but even eventually children need to 'grow-up' - to stop being children.
'star wars' would not have been so damaging to this culture if it had presented itself as a children's film. but Lucas was quite explicitly targeting, as audience, burnt out hippies, participants of the failed 'cultural revolution' of the '60s; and in doing so, he began steering them toward the political decisions that would at last put our culture and its economy, and its future, into terrible jeopardy - voting for Reagan, selfishly demanding tax cuts, mockery of dissent and dissenters, and flocking into paganistic 'fundamentalist Christian' churches seeking 'spiritual awakening' and, as many now proclaim, apocalypse.
well, obviously, just one movie isn't going to accomplish all that. what the success of star wars did was to distract adult attention from ethically mature films where moral choices could be examined in their complexity; to such an extent that Hollywood - never all that supportive of such films, anyway - simply stopped making such films for a time. the bottom came in 1985, when the 2 best films to use truly cinematic storytelling to wrestle with mature choices were from japan - Kurosawa's 'ran' and 'Godzilla 1985'. and you know the world's doomed when a big green lizard has to be the one to make you ask important questions about the ecology, and history, and whatever place in the larger universe our tiny species finds itself.
i mention Godzilla not simply for rhetorical effect. like the old fairy-tales, Godzilla is best appreciated by the young and the young at heart; like the old serial films, the Godzilla films are filled with gaffs and silliness; like the typical Jungian Ur-myth or archetype, Godzilla calls to some deeper part of our psyche, which is why we are entertained by his appearance.
but unlike star wars, the Godzilla films never insist that they are the only show around - or at least the only worth viewing. and unlike star wars, they never pretend to be better than they are, or that they're accomplishing some necessary cultural mission. and unlike star wars, they do not insist that we remain 'forever young', only that we respect our having once been young, and that we respect the youth of others. and unlike star wars, they are inherently democratic - not because they insist we all be individuals, but rather that they insist that we all are already individuals, and yet to survive, we must come together and learn to depend on one another - democracy only has value to a collective of individuals, a human society. rabid individualists are monsters - rather like Godzilla's most intractable foe, king ghidorah.
well, that's the big argument. for those who prefer simple solutions - star wars is a crude, fascistic, socially-retarded scam that the ex-hippies foisted on what was once a great culture. whether it will ever achieve greatness again - or whether it shall have cinema when it does - remains open to question.
'now we see as through a glass, darkly, but then face to face.'