The Son

Rating: Null/10 (15 February 2007)

The Son
I am convinced that movies are about other movies more than life. The original "Star Wars" was a success in my opinion because it had three things:
 a collection of images from other films, distinctly referencing them. Some were film- schoolish like the Kurosawa quotes. But most were like what Kurosawa himself referenced: already deeply embedded visual touchstones, not having lost their power in becoming clichés. These were collected in one large form, the Flash Gordan form let's call it, which all of us slightly knew. It could be recalled with enough familiarity to register but not enough to set expectations, so Lucas could fill the bucket with whatever he found and liked.
 a notion of a complete, understandable cosmology. Its the noir notion that laws of the universe exist and cannot be seen, and if they could they wouldn't be comprehensible. This notion is deep in film, so deep that when a movie comes along that posits a cosmology that is whole, and revealable, it shocks. What that movie did was give us enough of a glimpse into this to believe that we could understand the world, at least THIS world of the "galaxy far away." Remember when that original came out? The images were impressible, but what people talked about wasn't what they saw, but about how the world worked. It settled first in an ersatz religion among geeky kids and now has been swallowed by the "simple" US religions, and its presidential representative.
 the notion of a quest. Its an old form, but cast in the above noted situation, it takes new power. The traditional form, the Goethe-Lytton form was there to remind and reveal mysteries. Here it is clearer, to explain. There was a lowbrow professor at the time of a women's college that a TeeVee interviewer made popular. It was sort of a metaquest. This simple man said that we could actually understand the nature of trying to understand nature. It was a lucky break for Lucas, because it meshed with this shocking notion of a grand cosmology that we know our hero (check out the name: "sky walker") will grasp, master and show us.
That was the first film. A huge success, just huge. It did change many things, but from my perspective the key thing was how it reset that great American invention of noir, as important as jazz, and liberty which form a sort of trilogy of contradictory, three-way tension.
Okay. Now the second big Ted idea, the necessity for the equal size of steps in abstraction when you have two steps. It seems this is hardwired in the brain, a sort of human quantum mechanics. If you look back along the abstraction, say a cartoon in a cartoon, the distance between the two will be precisely the same as the surrounding cartoon.
So, when they made the second Star Wars movie, they could reference the previous one in the way that it referenced its cinematic background. It had a writer in Kasden who knew how to do this. And it had a director in Lucas' film school teacher who did also. Neither had a huge hit other than this because it was such a cool setup, having such a thing to build on.
You'll read lots about trying to humanize, and how faces were used. But all that is simply in the service of abstracting closer to us from the original, in equal portion. This is the son. Why did the franchise fail after this? Because there was no step left to abstract to and maintain the brand.
(This comment is a replacement of one deleted for unknown reasons. This was requested by a reader.)
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.