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I've read that; and will happily re-read it. You could always trust Ellison to shit on anything pointed out to him, then back it up with decades of vindictiveness.
Edit for anyone curious:
Badmouthing Star Wars these days is considered a felony; on a level with spitting on the American flag, denigrating Motherhood, admitting you hate Apple Pie, or trying to dope Seattle Slew.
In the hysterical wake of all-stops-out media hype, uncritically slavish reviews, effulgent word-of-mouth praise and the chance of being trampled to death by ex—Star Trek groupies, who've had their epiphany-conversion, as they queue up to see the film for the sixth or eighth time . . . anyone daring to suggest that Star Wars is less monumental than the discovery of the fulcrum and lever, runs the risk of being disemboweled by terminal acne cases.
This lemminglike hegira to worship at the shrine of director George Lucas and "the return of entertainment!" has been so carefully orchestrated that otherwise sane and rational filmgoers whose desiccated sophistication has led them to find flaws in even such damn-near-perfect movies as The Conversation; Taxi Driver; Oh, God! and Nashville, roll their eyes and clap their hands in childish delight. And I think childish is the operative word in this lunatic situation.
And though I find the role of Specter at the Banquet somewhat less than salutary for my social life, as a practicing writer of fantasy (into which genre science fiction and space opera of the Star Wars variety plonk comfortably) I'm afraid I must reluctantly piss on the parade. Hollywood has never understood the difference between making science fiction films and making westerns, spy thrillers, Dr. Kildare flicks, historical adventures and contemporary dramas.
In an industry where nothing succeeds as consistently as repeated failure, the ex-CPAs, ex-mail room boys, ex-haidressers and ex-agents who become Producers conceive of imaginative fiction as just another shoot-'em-up with laser rifles. They have a plethora of hype but a dearth of inventiveness. And they think of films in terms of making the deal, not of presenting the logical story. For most of these yahoos, a "film" is something, anything, they can get Streisand and McQueen and Pacino to star in. The script can come later. What the hell does it matter if it's good, bad or imbecilic . . . just as long as the names of the stars can be featured above the title.
But science fiction is a very special genre. It is the game of "what if." What if we were forced to abandon the land and adapt physically to life in the seas? What if everyone was telepathic and could read everyone else's mind, how could you commit a murder and not be discovered when your thoughts gave you away? What if the male contraceptive pill became as common as the one women use? What if.
And playing that game is the core of the story. But it must be internally consistent. It must have a much more rigorous logic than an ordinary, mimetic story, because you are asking the audience to suspend its disbelief, to go with you into a completely new, never-before-existed landscape. If what goes on in the story is irrational and diffuse, then it all comes up looking like spinach.
But Hollywood doesn't understand that. They make films—like Star Wars —that are nothing but The Prisoner of Zenda or some halfwit wild west adventure in outer space.
Good science fiction films have been few and far between. I suggest as a quality level toward which to strive, the following films: Charly
1984
The Shape of Things to Come
Wild in the Streets
The Conversation
A Boy and His Dog
And there are a few others. But they grow harder and harder to name. Because all the films that we thought were great, like 2001, become, in retrospect, merely exercises in special effects. There are damned few "people" stories that deal with what science fiction at its best and most valuable handles better than any other kind of story: the effects on human beings of technology, unusual happenings and the future. Discount films that make us tingle, like The Thing or Dr. Cyclops, because they are really only horror stories told with a pseudo-scientific flair. I'm talking here about stories where we care about the people, films that cast some new light on the human condition.
Also notice, the films I select as the best are films you probably never even considered sf. Charly and The Conversation are classic examples. They weren't marketed or reviewed as sf, because they were free of overpowering special effects. They didn't look like orgies of bizarre technique, and they did very well at the box office, even with people who hate science fiction. Because they were "people" stories. They couldn't have happened without the scientific bases, but they took those technological advances—raising the I.Q. of an idiot by chemical means in one case, and electronic surveillance in the other—and dealt with them in terms of human angst.
This important measure of worth is missing entirely from Star Wars.
But before I enumerate the dangers of this classic simpleminded shootout movie, let me give you a few horror stories.
Incident:
During the third weekend in June, for three thousand dollars—the only thing short of bamboo shoots under the fingernails that could get me to do it—I spoke at something called Space-Con IV, held at the Los Angeles Convention Center. In the neighborhood of ten thousand people attended this combined Star Trek/space science/tv addict media melange: a hyperventilated whacko-freakodevo two-day blast that served as cheap thrill fix for a tidal wave of incipient jelly-brains who would rather sit in front of the tube having their minds turned to puree-of-bat-guano than have to deal with the Real World in any lovely way.
Traditionally, the dealers' rooms, wherein one can buy (at usurious rates) Spock ears, Federation starship gold braid and frogging, German versions of Star Trek comics and hairballs called tribbles, has been a place where Star Trek reigned supreme. A wad of Kleenex, authenticated as being the very item William Shatner honked into during the legendary phlegm epidemic of the second year of the series, could bring a price that would permit the dealer to return to his native island a rich grandee.
In June, however, Star Wars had been open for nearly three weeks; and those who formerly festooned themselves with buttons that said LIVE LONG AND PROSPER or TAKE A KLINGON TO LUNCH now paraded around wearing buttons that proclaimed LET THE WOOKIEE WIN and JEDI KNIGHT and the catch-phrase that has replaced the splay-fingered Vulcan greeting of Star Trek, MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU.
Dealers loaded down with Star Trek memorabilia had their annuities flash before their eyes in a brief two-day nightmare as Star Wars posters, light sabers, Darth Vader masks and Ballantine Books paperback novelizations vanished as if they'd been warped into hyperspace.
Even panels of erudite writers and NASA space shuttle engineers were overwhelmed with trivial badinage about Star Wars and the effects it would have on the course of Western Civilization.
And the only adverse criticism of any kind I heard, from anyone, was a comment from the science fiction writer Alan Dean Foster, who had just handed in the manuscript of the novelized sequel to Ballantine; a comment that removed, finally, any vestige of ambivalence I'd had about badrapping Star Wars. That comment, in a moment, but first, another:
Incident:
I called Tony, to ask him if he and Gail wanted to go to dinner. Gail sounded terrible. "What's the matter?" I asked, thinking maybe Tony had gone back to the bottle. "I haven't seen him in a week," she wailed, actually crying over the phone. "Where the hell is he?" I asked, thinking maybe I'd have to go pry him out of an X-rated motel down on Ventura Boulevard. "He's seeing Star Wars," she said, sobbing. "I think he's seen it fifteen or sixteen, maybe more, times. He won't come out of the theater, except to come home and shower and then go find another place where it's playing. What am I gonna do!?!"
Incident:
I stopped off at A-1 Record Finders, to pick up the new Jaco Pastorius side, and the dude behind the counter asked me if I'd seen it. No name, just IT, like the Second or Third Coming. So I ran a few negatives, and then I noticed these two teenaged kids lounging against one of the record bins, giving me sidelong glances one usually reserves for butchers who have a thumb on the scales.
I had to go out to my car, parked right in front of the shop, and they watched me. When I returned to the shop and resumed the conversation, the two young gentlemen walked out, got their bicycles from the wall, and crossed the street right beside my car.
The neatly-furrowed gash that runs from my left front fender all the way to the left rear tire-well, handsomely engraved with a house-key held tightly in a teenaged fist, is charming testimony to the religious fervor Star Wars junkies manifest. Fortunately, I drive a very old, very funky car, and the gash doesn't distress me overmuch; but if I ever need crazed True Believers to help me Kill for the Love of Kali, liberate The Holy Grail, or Save Ammurrica from The Red Menace, I will begin my recruiting activities at the Avco Cinema Center on Wilshire.
These three incidents are only grassroots reflections of the blind fanaticism Star Wars has generated in such pro-and anti-Establishment journals as New Times, New York, New West, American Film and Time magazine . . . good old Time magazine that set off the main charge with its six-page, four-color, May 30th story and banner-headlined cover (INSIDE: THE YEAR'S BEST MOVIE) (that's what I hate about Time: they're so wishy-washy).
Time was so determined to looooove that film, they even told an outright lie. On page 57 of the May 30th article, the following excerpt appears:
"Star Wars is the costume epic of the future," says Ben Bova, editor of Analog, one of the leading science fiction magazines. "It's a galactic Gone with the Wind. It's perfect summer escapist fare."
Now Ben is one of my closest friends, and I simply could not believe he had bubbled along that way. He's too smart for such an okeydoke. So I called him and asked him if he'd said what Time said he's said. After the bellowing ceased, he made it clear that Time's reporters simply were not going to hear anything negative about that flick, no matter what was actually said. Two issues of Time later, the following item appeared on page 6, in the Letters column:
Your quotation of my comments about George Lucas's film Star Wars makes it appear that I liked the film. I most emphatically did not. Those of us who work in the science fiction field professionally look for something more than Saturday afternoon shoot-'em-ups when we go to a science fiction film. We have been disappointed many times, but I had expected more of Lucas. Somebody Up There likes the film, it seems, and no dissenting views are allowed. Too bad.
Ben Bova, Editor Analog New York City
And that's what has been going down with New Times with its June 24th cover story likening the comic-strip characters of Star Wars to such American myth heroes as Charles Lindbergh, Joe DiMaggio and The Lone Ranger. Hurray for the robots, R2D2 and C3PO! New Times' Jesse Kornbluth sees in the film reassurance that machines are not taking over, that NASA isn't involved in a sinister conspiracy to keep us from knowing there is intelligent life on Mars, and that The Ole Debbil Technology will not savage us further. All that terrificness, from a comic strip.
People raves. Starlog gushes. Rona Barrett vociferates. The world loves Star Wars! And the studios and the television networks and the fastbuck blue sky independents and the mass media have once again discovered science fiction. Except they think it's hip to call it by that hideous neologism "sci-fi" and nowhere can be heard a discouraging word. All that terrificness, from a comic strip.
And that is precisely where my cavils with Star Wars begin.
As I write this, only the much-damned critic John Simon of New York magazine has had the courage to say the emperor is buck naked. While those who seem oblivious to the occasionally honorable and more-frequently trashy history of fantastic films that stretch back to Georges Méliès whoop and simper about how enriching Star Wars is, Simon puts his finger dead on the plaguebearing nature of this film and the way it's being received. In the June 20th issue of New York he said, in part:
I don't read science fiction, of which this may, for all know, be a prime example; some light years ago I did read Flash Gordon, of which Star Wars is in most respects the equal. But is equaling sci-fi and comic strips, or even outstripping them, worthy of the talented director of American Graffiti, and worth spending all that time and money on?
I sincerely hope that science and scientists differ from science fiction and its practitioners. Heaven help us if they don't: We may be headed for a very boring world indeed. Strip Star Wars of its often striking images and its highfalutin scientific jargon, and you get a story, characters, and dialogue of overwhelming banality . . . trite characters and paltry verbiage . . .
Still, Star Wars will do very nicely for those lucky enough to be childish or unlucky enough never to have grown up.
Were it not for Simon's sobriety—for which he must be commended in the face of such overwhelming mass hysteria—I would think I was the only one marching to the beat of that other drummer. Because, when I emerged from the 20th Century Fox advance screening, as far as I could tell, I was the only turkey evil enough to have ambivalent feelings and a beetled brow. It took me several days to codify my unease.
I pilloried myself. What's the matter with you, Ellison? The damned film is a wonder . . . filled with sight and sound and flash and filigree. It soars, it sings, it thunders through a wholly-realized universe of Lucas's imagination! Why do you feel as if you've been had? You're always bleating about the lack of magic and simple wonder in contemporary film, the kind of swell dazzlement you knew in Saturday afternoon dream-days of your youth . . . serials, B westerns, Val Lewton suspense films, great fantasies! Why does this hommage to Flash Gordon distress you? Have you lost the ability to see as a child sees?
And then I realized that was the problem. When I was a child, I learned from movies. I learned that you never screw a friend, never snooker him or her behind the eight ball; I learned that systems and governments intended to serve human needs frequently spend their time maintaining themselves in power to the anguish of the people; I learned that Hemingway had a workable definition when he said guts was grace under pressure; I learned about what was in store for me when I became an adult. All of these I learned without realizing I was being taught, because even those sappy, illogical schlock flicks of the Forties and Fifties had people in them.
Star Wars has no people.
Which instantly brought to mind a rule-of-thumb for films of this sort: any motion picture—such as 2001: A Space Odyssey; Demon Seed; Silent Running or Forbidden Planet—or Star Wars—in which the most identifiable, likeable characters are robots, is a film without people. And that is a film that's shallow, that cannot uplift or enrich in any genuine sense, because it is a film without soul, without a core. It is merely a diversion, a cheap entertainment, a quick fix with sugar-water, intended to distract, divert and keep an audience from coming to grips with itself.
And in these days of widespread illiteracy, functional illiteracy, future shock, belief in coocoo conspiracies and Bermuda Triangle/UFO/reincarnation/Atlantis/est stupidities, information overload, urban terror and television stereotype, anything that keeps people stupid is a felony. "Entertainment is back!" the reviewers trumpeted, as if it had ever vanished. Nabokov is entertainment; Shakespeare is entertainment; Katherine Anne Porter is entertainment. Must "entertainment" be synonymous with "mindless" or "without content"? How foolish of us to have thought Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was entertaining, or Poe, or Pinter, or Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Troubling, yes; forcing us to think, yes; but entertainment nonetheless.
But not Star Wars. For all of its length, for all of its astonishing technical expertise, its headlong plunge and its stunning effects, at no time can one discern the passage of a thought. It is all bread and circuses. The human heart is never touched, the lives are unexamined, the characters are comic strip stereotypes.
But that's the point! is the single defense I get when I alienate myself at dinner parties by my negativity. It's supposed to be mindless, I'm told. And then those professorial types who are safe in loving Star Wars where they might be attacked for reading the latest Robert Silverberg or Thomas Disch sf novel, explain to me as carefully and quietly as one would a retarded child, that Star Wars is a return to the worship of the Eternal Verities: honor, truth, fighting Evil. All black and white.
Try black and white in a world of credit cards, punk rock, mastectomies, Watergate, the rise of homegrown Nazism, Anita Bryant, and the terrifying fact that more than half of all serious crimes in the United States are committed by people between the ages of ten and seventeen—and that includes rape, murder, robbery, aggravated assault and burglary.
In the Real World, anything that keeps people stupid is hardly a chuckleable item. And for several weeks I resisted putting Star Wars in that category. It was fun, I told myself. It was good for people to see a simple film in which the Good Guys were extraspecial good and the Bad Guy wore not merely a black hat, but black body-armor and a black death-mask, I told myself. Nor could I bring myself to fault Lucas, who had clearly set out to make an hommage to the Saturday afternoon serial and had done it with what Flaubert called "clean hands and composure." Then I heard the comment I mysteriously referred to earlier, from Alan Dean Foster; and I felt no qualms about pinning the butterfly to the board.
Not to keep you in suspense a moment longer. There we were—Alan, myself, Theodore Sturgeon and Frank Catalano—all of us properly or erroneously tagged "science fiction writers"—sitting on a panel at Space-Con IV, fielding questions about Star Wars. And I began the raving you've witnessed here. And I said the movie keeps people stupid. But I didn't have chapter and verse. All I had was a vague feeling. I said Lucas had done what he wanted to do, and all honor to him for that; he hadn't compromised. But then I remarked that one of the things in the film that was indicative of keeping people stupid was the constant boom one heard when something blew up in outer space throughout the film. And, as everyone should know, but most people don't know, since there is no air in deep space, since it is for all intents and purposes total vacuum, there can be no transmittal of shock waves, no displacement of molecules of air, and thus . . . no sound. And I said this was another example of giving people what they want to hear, literally, though it contravenes the laws of the physical universe. And in a time when we're so abysmally uneducated about technology, which rules our lives more each day, that was a criminal act of artistic prostitution.
Then Alan looked thoughtful and seemed reluctant to speak, perhaps because he had just written the sequel to the Star Wars novelization that Lucas had sold to Ballantine Books, but in his reserved and gentlemanly fashion he told the audience of a day when he had seen a rough cut of the film and had remarked on just this scientific illiteracy to Lucas. He had even suggested a workable alternative . . . no, two workable alternatives . . . and Lucas had said words to the effect of (approximate quote), "There's a lot of money tied up in this film and people expect to hear a boom when something blows up, so I'll give them the boom."
And at that moment, the cynicism showed through.
If the masses want bread and circuses, we give them bread and circuses. If they want witch-hunts, bear-baitings, kinky sex, Inquisitions, burning crosses, scapegoats, trivia and persiflage—we give it to them. Keep them entertained and they'll never hear the whistle of the executioner's axe.
As a writer who works in the medium of fantasy, both in print and in film, what Star Wars and its success portends is frightening to me. Already, Universal Studios is planning a Buck Rogers movie. Already, a major network that has bought one of my stories for a TV film and series, has asked me to alter realistic situations in a future society where absolute realism is the ground, to include "Star Wars kind of violence . . . you know . . . laser guns and all that."
The dispensers of mass information have once again discovered science fiction. They do it every seven or eight years. The last time was with 2001. The only trouble is, they've discovered 1939 science fiction. Mindless shoot-'em-up and hardware. Paeans of praise to the grommet and spanner. And that means more of the same, just the way it happened in the wake of 2001. It means that thought-provoking sf, the kind written by Gene Wolfe and Kate Wilhelm and James Tiptree, Jr. and Michael Moorcock, has no value. It means that an entire genre of fiction for our time, material that informs and educates and entertains, will be bypassed in favor of more cops&robbers in outer space, more cowboys&indians on Tatooine.
Goodbye science fiction, hello sci-fi. That's pronounced skiffy. If you like peanuts, you'll love skiffy.
In the past month I have received calls from half a dozen film and television producers who are planning "sci-fi" projects. I won't even report on the call I received about a new Disney project-in-discussion called Star Skirmishes.
I'll only tell you about the producer who called to ask me if I wanted to do a space war sorta film, and all he could say was, "This is gonna be a winner. We've got really terrific state of the art."
I didn't know what that meant. So I asked him.
He didn't understand why I didn't understand, but he started saying they had Magicam and new miniaturization techniques, and computer graphics, and ChromaKey, and videotape crossovers, and "all the very latest state of the art." I finally got hip. He was talking about special effects, pure and simple. No story, no terrific idea for a film that would illuminate the human condition, not even a plot. He had no plot. That's why he was calling me.
To write something stupid around his stupid animation and special effects nonsense.
And nomenclature had struck again. Now they were calling it "state of the art." And I submit that when filmmakers begin thinking that pyrotechnics can replace stories about people, then the ambience of the toilet has set in.
So here we sit. Ben Bova and fantasy film director/animator Jim Danforth and cranky John Simon, and good old me; all alone grumbling about the most wonderful film ever made. Running our main squeeze of sour grapes over the heads of a multimillion person audience that goes back again and again to sit in awe as the Empire dreadnought Death Star roars overhead, making its big boom of passage through airless space. Specters at the Banquet. Loveless, lightless nuisances saying the Emperor has pimples on his bare butt.
And all I can think about, in childlike wonder, is that amazing scene in the 1939 version of The Thief of Bagdad where Ahbhu, the little thief, uncorks the bottle and lets out the seventy-foot-tall genie. And I ask myself: If Star Wars is so goddamn good, howzacome all I can think about is a dumb fantasy made almost forty years ago, that taught me so much about fighting to stay free and individualism and love and the value of friendship and honor . . . ?
And why do I remember that moment of characterization when the evil vizier, Jaffar, as evil as Darth Vader any day, shows how vulnerable his love for the Caliph's daughter has made him? Was that movie less "entertaining" because the evil villain had a touch of identifiable humanity? Yeah, I sit and think all that; and in my adolescent heart of hearts I know that Luke Skywalker is a nerd, Darth Vader sucks runny eggs, and I'm available for light saber duels any Wednesday between the hours of D2 and 3PO.
Los Angeles / August 1977; Gallery / March 1978
In the hysterical wake of all-stops-out media hype, uncritically slavish reviews, effulgent word-of-mouth praise and the chance of being trampled to death by ex—Star Trek groupies, who've had their epiphany-conversion, as they queue up to see the film for the sixth or eighth time . . . anyone daring to suggest that Star Wars is less monumental than the discovery of the fulcrum and lever, runs the risk of being disemboweled by terminal acne cases.
This lemminglike hegira to worship at the shrine of director George Lucas and "the return of entertainment!" has been so carefully orchestrated that otherwise sane and rational filmgoers whose desiccated sophistication has led them to find flaws in even such damn-near-perfect movies as The Conversation; Taxi Driver; Oh, God! and Nashville, roll their eyes and clap their hands in childish delight. And I think childish is the operative word in this lunatic situation.
And though I find the role of Specter at the Banquet somewhat less than salutary for my social life, as a practicing writer of fantasy (into which genre science fiction and space opera of the Star Wars variety plonk comfortably) I'm afraid I must reluctantly piss on the parade. Hollywood has never understood the difference between making science fiction films and making westerns, spy thrillers, Dr. Kildare flicks, historical adventures and contemporary dramas.
In an industry where nothing succeeds as consistently as repeated failure, the ex-CPAs, ex-mail room boys, ex-haidressers and ex-agents who become Producers conceive of imaginative fiction as just another shoot-'em-up with laser rifles. They have a plethora of hype but a dearth of inventiveness. And they think of films in terms of making the deal, not of presenting the logical story. For most of these yahoos, a "film" is something, anything, they can get Streisand and McQueen and Pacino to star in. The script can come later. What the hell does it matter if it's good, bad or imbecilic . . . just as long as the names of the stars can be featured above the title.
But science fiction is a very special genre. It is the game of "what if." What if we were forced to abandon the land and adapt physically to life in the seas? What if everyone was telepathic and could read everyone else's mind, how could you commit a murder and not be discovered when your thoughts gave you away? What if the male contraceptive pill became as common as the one women use? What if.
And playing that game is the core of the story. But it must be internally consistent. It must have a much more rigorous logic than an ordinary, mimetic story, because you are asking the audience to suspend its disbelief, to go with you into a completely new, never-before-existed landscape. If what goes on in the story is irrational and diffuse, then it all comes up looking like spinach.
But Hollywood doesn't understand that. They make films—like Star Wars —that are nothing but The Prisoner of Zenda or some halfwit wild west adventure in outer space.
Good science fiction films have been few and far between. I suggest as a quality level toward which to strive, the following films: Charly
1984
The Shape of Things to Come
Wild in the Streets
The Conversation
A Boy and His Dog
And there are a few others. But they grow harder and harder to name. Because all the films that we thought were great, like 2001, become, in retrospect, merely exercises in special effects. There are damned few "people" stories that deal with what science fiction at its best and most valuable handles better than any other kind of story: the effects on human beings of technology, unusual happenings and the future. Discount films that make us tingle, like The Thing or Dr. Cyclops, because they are really only horror stories told with a pseudo-scientific flair. I'm talking here about stories where we care about the people, films that cast some new light on the human condition.
Also notice, the films I select as the best are films you probably never even considered sf. Charly and The Conversation are classic examples. They weren't marketed or reviewed as sf, because they were free of overpowering special effects. They didn't look like orgies of bizarre technique, and they did very well at the box office, even with people who hate science fiction. Because they were "people" stories. They couldn't have happened without the scientific bases, but they took those technological advances—raising the I.Q. of an idiot by chemical means in one case, and electronic surveillance in the other—and dealt with them in terms of human angst.
This important measure of worth is missing entirely from Star Wars.
But before I enumerate the dangers of this classic simpleminded shootout movie, let me give you a few horror stories.
Incident:
During the third weekend in June, for three thousand dollars—the only thing short of bamboo shoots under the fingernails that could get me to do it—I spoke at something called Space-Con IV, held at the Los Angeles Convention Center. In the neighborhood of ten thousand people attended this combined Star Trek/space science/tv addict media melange: a hyperventilated whacko-freakodevo two-day blast that served as cheap thrill fix for a tidal wave of incipient jelly-brains who would rather sit in front of the tube having their minds turned to puree-of-bat-guano than have to deal with the Real World in any lovely way.
Traditionally, the dealers' rooms, wherein one can buy (at usurious rates) Spock ears, Federation starship gold braid and frogging, German versions of Star Trek comics and hairballs called tribbles, has been a place where Star Trek reigned supreme. A wad of Kleenex, authenticated as being the very item William Shatner honked into during the legendary phlegm epidemic of the second year of the series, could bring a price that would permit the dealer to return to his native island a rich grandee.
In June, however, Star Wars had been open for nearly three weeks; and those who formerly festooned themselves with buttons that said LIVE LONG AND PROSPER or TAKE A KLINGON TO LUNCH now paraded around wearing buttons that proclaimed LET THE WOOKIEE WIN and JEDI KNIGHT and the catch-phrase that has replaced the splay-fingered Vulcan greeting of Star Trek, MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU.
Dealers loaded down with Star Trek memorabilia had their annuities flash before their eyes in a brief two-day nightmare as Star Wars posters, light sabers, Darth Vader masks and Ballantine Books paperback novelizations vanished as if they'd been warped into hyperspace.
Even panels of erudite writers and NASA space shuttle engineers were overwhelmed with trivial badinage about Star Wars and the effects it would have on the course of Western Civilization.
And the only adverse criticism of any kind I heard, from anyone, was a comment from the science fiction writer Alan Dean Foster, who had just handed in the manuscript of the novelized sequel to Ballantine; a comment that removed, finally, any vestige of ambivalence I'd had about badrapping Star Wars. That comment, in a moment, but first, another:
Incident:
I called Tony, to ask him if he and Gail wanted to go to dinner. Gail sounded terrible. "What's the matter?" I asked, thinking maybe Tony had gone back to the bottle. "I haven't seen him in a week," she wailed, actually crying over the phone. "Where the hell is he?" I asked, thinking maybe I'd have to go pry him out of an X-rated motel down on Ventura Boulevard. "He's seeing Star Wars," she said, sobbing. "I think he's seen it fifteen or sixteen, maybe more, times. He won't come out of the theater, except to come home and shower and then go find another place where it's playing. What am I gonna do!?!"
Incident:
I stopped off at A-1 Record Finders, to pick up the new Jaco Pastorius side, and the dude behind the counter asked me if I'd seen it. No name, just IT, like the Second or Third Coming. So I ran a few negatives, and then I noticed these two teenaged kids lounging against one of the record bins, giving me sidelong glances one usually reserves for butchers who have a thumb on the scales.
I had to go out to my car, parked right in front of the shop, and they watched me. When I returned to the shop and resumed the conversation, the two young gentlemen walked out, got their bicycles from the wall, and crossed the street right beside my car.
The neatly-furrowed gash that runs from my left front fender all the way to the left rear tire-well, handsomely engraved with a house-key held tightly in a teenaged fist, is charming testimony to the religious fervor Star Wars junkies manifest. Fortunately, I drive a very old, very funky car, and the gash doesn't distress me overmuch; but if I ever need crazed True Believers to help me Kill for the Love of Kali, liberate The Holy Grail, or Save Ammurrica from The Red Menace, I will begin my recruiting activities at the Avco Cinema Center on Wilshire.
These three incidents are only grassroots reflections of the blind fanaticism Star Wars has generated in such pro-and anti-Establishment journals as New Times, New York, New West, American Film and Time magazine . . . good old Time magazine that set off the main charge with its six-page, four-color, May 30th story and banner-headlined cover (INSIDE: THE YEAR'S BEST MOVIE) (that's what I hate about Time: they're so wishy-washy).
Time was so determined to looooove that film, they even told an outright lie. On page 57 of the May 30th article, the following excerpt appears:
"Star Wars is the costume epic of the future," says Ben Bova, editor of Analog, one of the leading science fiction magazines. "It's a galactic Gone with the Wind. It's perfect summer escapist fare."
Now Ben is one of my closest friends, and I simply could not believe he had bubbled along that way. He's too smart for such an okeydoke. So I called him and asked him if he'd said what Time said he's said. After the bellowing ceased, he made it clear that Time's reporters simply were not going to hear anything negative about that flick, no matter what was actually said. Two issues of Time later, the following item appeared on page 6, in the Letters column:
Your quotation of my comments about George Lucas's film Star Wars makes it appear that I liked the film. I most emphatically did not. Those of us who work in the science fiction field professionally look for something more than Saturday afternoon shoot-'em-ups when we go to a science fiction film. We have been disappointed many times, but I had expected more of Lucas. Somebody Up There likes the film, it seems, and no dissenting views are allowed. Too bad.
Ben Bova, Editor Analog New York City
And that's what has been going down with New Times with its June 24th cover story likening the comic-strip characters of Star Wars to such American myth heroes as Charles Lindbergh, Joe DiMaggio and The Lone Ranger. Hurray for the robots, R2D2 and C3PO! New Times' Jesse Kornbluth sees in the film reassurance that machines are not taking over, that NASA isn't involved in a sinister conspiracy to keep us from knowing there is intelligent life on Mars, and that The Ole Debbil Technology will not savage us further. All that terrificness, from a comic strip.
People raves. Starlog gushes. Rona Barrett vociferates. The world loves Star Wars! And the studios and the television networks and the fastbuck blue sky independents and the mass media have once again discovered science fiction. Except they think it's hip to call it by that hideous neologism "sci-fi" and nowhere can be heard a discouraging word. All that terrificness, from a comic strip.
And that is precisely where my cavils with Star Wars begin.
As I write this, only the much-damned critic John Simon of New York magazine has had the courage to say the emperor is buck naked. While those who seem oblivious to the occasionally honorable and more-frequently trashy history of fantastic films that stretch back to Georges Méliès whoop and simper about how enriching Star Wars is, Simon puts his finger dead on the plaguebearing nature of this film and the way it's being received. In the June 20th issue of New York he said, in part:
I don't read science fiction, of which this may, for all know, be a prime example; some light years ago I did read Flash Gordon, of which Star Wars is in most respects the equal. But is equaling sci-fi and comic strips, or even outstripping them, worthy of the talented director of American Graffiti, and worth spending all that time and money on?
I sincerely hope that science and scientists differ from science fiction and its practitioners. Heaven help us if they don't: We may be headed for a very boring world indeed. Strip Star Wars of its often striking images and its highfalutin scientific jargon, and you get a story, characters, and dialogue of overwhelming banality . . . trite characters and paltry verbiage . . .
Still, Star Wars will do very nicely for those lucky enough to be childish or unlucky enough never to have grown up.
Were it not for Simon's sobriety—for which he must be commended in the face of such overwhelming mass hysteria—I would think I was the only one marching to the beat of that other drummer. Because, when I emerged from the 20th Century Fox advance screening, as far as I could tell, I was the only turkey evil enough to have ambivalent feelings and a beetled brow. It took me several days to codify my unease.
I pilloried myself. What's the matter with you, Ellison? The damned film is a wonder . . . filled with sight and sound and flash and filigree. It soars, it sings, it thunders through a wholly-realized universe of Lucas's imagination! Why do you feel as if you've been had? You're always bleating about the lack of magic and simple wonder in contemporary film, the kind of swell dazzlement you knew in Saturday afternoon dream-days of your youth . . . serials, B westerns, Val Lewton suspense films, great fantasies! Why does this hommage to Flash Gordon distress you? Have you lost the ability to see as a child sees?
And then I realized that was the problem. When I was a child, I learned from movies. I learned that you never screw a friend, never snooker him or her behind the eight ball; I learned that systems and governments intended to serve human needs frequently spend their time maintaining themselves in power to the anguish of the people; I learned that Hemingway had a workable definition when he said guts was grace under pressure; I learned about what was in store for me when I became an adult. All of these I learned without realizing I was being taught, because even those sappy, illogical schlock flicks of the Forties and Fifties had people in them.
Star Wars has no people.
Which instantly brought to mind a rule-of-thumb for films of this sort: any motion picture—such as 2001: A Space Odyssey; Demon Seed; Silent Running or Forbidden Planet—or Star Wars—in which the most identifiable, likeable characters are robots, is a film without people. And that is a film that's shallow, that cannot uplift or enrich in any genuine sense, because it is a film without soul, without a core. It is merely a diversion, a cheap entertainment, a quick fix with sugar-water, intended to distract, divert and keep an audience from coming to grips with itself.
And in these days of widespread illiteracy, functional illiteracy, future shock, belief in coocoo conspiracies and Bermuda Triangle/UFO/reincarnation/Atlantis/est stupidities, information overload, urban terror and television stereotype, anything that keeps people stupid is a felony. "Entertainment is back!" the reviewers trumpeted, as if it had ever vanished. Nabokov is entertainment; Shakespeare is entertainment; Katherine Anne Porter is entertainment. Must "entertainment" be synonymous with "mindless" or "without content"? How foolish of us to have thought Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was entertaining, or Poe, or Pinter, or Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Troubling, yes; forcing us to think, yes; but entertainment nonetheless.
But not Star Wars. For all of its length, for all of its astonishing technical expertise, its headlong plunge and its stunning effects, at no time can one discern the passage of a thought. It is all bread and circuses. The human heart is never touched, the lives are unexamined, the characters are comic strip stereotypes.
But that's the point! is the single defense I get when I alienate myself at dinner parties by my negativity. It's supposed to be mindless, I'm told. And then those professorial types who are safe in loving Star Wars where they might be attacked for reading the latest Robert Silverberg or Thomas Disch sf novel, explain to me as carefully and quietly as one would a retarded child, that Star Wars is a return to the worship of the Eternal Verities: honor, truth, fighting Evil. All black and white.
Try black and white in a world of credit cards, punk rock, mastectomies, Watergate, the rise of homegrown Nazism, Anita Bryant, and the terrifying fact that more than half of all serious crimes in the United States are committed by people between the ages of ten and seventeen—and that includes rape, murder, robbery, aggravated assault and burglary.
In the Real World, anything that keeps people stupid is hardly a chuckleable item. And for several weeks I resisted putting Star Wars in that category. It was fun, I told myself. It was good for people to see a simple film in which the Good Guys were extraspecial good and the Bad Guy wore not merely a black hat, but black body-armor and a black death-mask, I told myself. Nor could I bring myself to fault Lucas, who had clearly set out to make an hommage to the Saturday afternoon serial and had done it with what Flaubert called "clean hands and composure." Then I heard the comment I mysteriously referred to earlier, from Alan Dean Foster; and I felt no qualms about pinning the butterfly to the board.
Not to keep you in suspense a moment longer. There we were—Alan, myself, Theodore Sturgeon and Frank Catalano—all of us properly or erroneously tagged "science fiction writers"—sitting on a panel at Space-Con IV, fielding questions about Star Wars. And I began the raving you've witnessed here. And I said the movie keeps people stupid. But I didn't have chapter and verse. All I had was a vague feeling. I said Lucas had done what he wanted to do, and all honor to him for that; he hadn't compromised. But then I remarked that one of the things in the film that was indicative of keeping people stupid was the constant boom one heard when something blew up in outer space throughout the film. And, as everyone should know, but most people don't know, since there is no air in deep space, since it is for all intents and purposes total vacuum, there can be no transmittal of shock waves, no displacement of molecules of air, and thus . . . no sound. And I said this was another example of giving people what they want to hear, literally, though it contravenes the laws of the physical universe. And in a time when we're so abysmally uneducated about technology, which rules our lives more each day, that was a criminal act of artistic prostitution.
Then Alan looked thoughtful and seemed reluctant to speak, perhaps because he had just written the sequel to the Star Wars novelization that Lucas had sold to Ballantine Books, but in his reserved and gentlemanly fashion he told the audience of a day when he had seen a rough cut of the film and had remarked on just this scientific illiteracy to Lucas. He had even suggested a workable alternative . . . no, two workable alternatives . . . and Lucas had said words to the effect of (approximate quote), "There's a lot of money tied up in this film and people expect to hear a boom when something blows up, so I'll give them the boom."
And at that moment, the cynicism showed through.
If the masses want bread and circuses, we give them bread and circuses. If they want witch-hunts, bear-baitings, kinky sex, Inquisitions, burning crosses, scapegoats, trivia and persiflage—we give it to them. Keep them entertained and they'll never hear the whistle of the executioner's axe.
As a writer who works in the medium of fantasy, both in print and in film, what Star Wars and its success portends is frightening to me. Already, Universal Studios is planning a Buck Rogers movie. Already, a major network that has bought one of my stories for a TV film and series, has asked me to alter realistic situations in a future society where absolute realism is the ground, to include "Star Wars kind of violence . . . you know . . . laser guns and all that."
The dispensers of mass information have once again discovered science fiction. They do it every seven or eight years. The last time was with 2001. The only trouble is, they've discovered 1939 science fiction. Mindless shoot-'em-up and hardware. Paeans of praise to the grommet and spanner. And that means more of the same, just the way it happened in the wake of 2001. It means that thought-provoking sf, the kind written by Gene Wolfe and Kate Wilhelm and James Tiptree, Jr. and Michael Moorcock, has no value. It means that an entire genre of fiction for our time, material that informs and educates and entertains, will be bypassed in favor of more cops&robbers in outer space, more cowboys&indians on Tatooine.
Goodbye science fiction, hello sci-fi. That's pronounced skiffy. If you like peanuts, you'll love skiffy.
In the past month I have received calls from half a dozen film and television producers who are planning "sci-fi" projects. I won't even report on the call I received about a new Disney project-in-discussion called Star Skirmishes.
I'll only tell you about the producer who called to ask me if I wanted to do a space war sorta film, and all he could say was, "This is gonna be a winner. We've got really terrific state of the art."
I didn't know what that meant. So I asked him.
He didn't understand why I didn't understand, but he started saying they had Magicam and new miniaturization techniques, and computer graphics, and ChromaKey, and videotape crossovers, and "all the very latest state of the art." I finally got hip. He was talking about special effects, pure and simple. No story, no terrific idea for a film that would illuminate the human condition, not even a plot. He had no plot. That's why he was calling me.
To write something stupid around his stupid animation and special effects nonsense.
And nomenclature had struck again. Now they were calling it "state of the art." And I submit that when filmmakers begin thinking that pyrotechnics can replace stories about people, then the ambience of the toilet has set in.
So here we sit. Ben Bova and fantasy film director/animator Jim Danforth and cranky John Simon, and good old me; all alone grumbling about the most wonderful film ever made. Running our main squeeze of sour grapes over the heads of a multimillion person audience that goes back again and again to sit in awe as the Empire dreadnought Death Star roars overhead, making its big boom of passage through airless space. Specters at the Banquet. Loveless, lightless nuisances saying the Emperor has pimples on his bare butt.
And all I can think about, in childlike wonder, is that amazing scene in the 1939 version of The Thief of Bagdad where Ahbhu, the little thief, uncorks the bottle and lets out the seventy-foot-tall genie. And I ask myself: If Star Wars is so goddamn good, howzacome all I can think about is a dumb fantasy made almost forty years ago, that taught me so much about fighting to stay free and individualism and love and the value of friendship and honor . . . ?
And why do I remember that moment of characterization when the evil vizier, Jaffar, as evil as Darth Vader any day, shows how vulnerable his love for the Caliph's daughter has made him? Was that movie less "entertaining" because the evil villain had a touch of identifiable humanity? Yeah, I sit and think all that; and in my adolescent heart of hearts I know that Luke Skywalker is a nerd, Darth Vader sucks runny eggs, and I'm available for light saber duels any Wednesday between the hours of D2 and 3PO.
Los Angeles / August 1977; Gallery / March 1978
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wtfNeedSignUp
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
I don't know it's through South Park or RLM that Gen Xers decided that the prequels were awful.
The comparison to the Sequel trilogy isn't a simple case of "look how bad X is compared to Y", it's that Gen Xers whined for over a fucking decade on how the prequels were done incorrectly and when they get their Monkey Paw wish they needed to rationalize hard why it sucked so much that people wouldn't even remember a single scene in the sequel, and after that it happened yet again only with the "Star Wars need to be dark" crowd with an extra flavour of culture war.
I might be misremembering but RLM was initially favourable on TFA because of that. Gen Xers are as bad as Boomers.
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2017
If you want decades of vindictiveness, I strongly recommend tracking down the White Wolf paperback of his original screenplay for City on the Edge of Forever. It's prefaced with an essay he'd clearly been waiting to write for 30 years in which he spends about 50 pages shitting on Gene Roddenberry's corpse. It's about the nastiest thing he ever wrote, and I say that with full knowledge of how ugly he could get in his essays.
- Joined
- Apr 30, 2016
It was through watching them because they are AWFUL movies and the Phantom Menace in particular was incredibly hyped only to be all the worst things we saw in Return of the Jedi combined with a bratty shitty child actor version of Anakin.
- Joined
- Apr 14, 2018
Its ridiculous to claim that RLM or whatever brainwashed people to dislike the Prequels. Its as dumb as saying people like Mauler are singlehandidly responsible for why people dislike the Sequel trilogy.
Don't get me wrong, there are good elements of the Prequels, but Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones were mostly shitty films, and I can imagine given the hype of Phantom Menace being the first Star Wars movie in 16 years at the time.
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2017
Seriously, where does this idea people only dislike the prequels because of RLM (or South Park?!?) even come from? Gen X'ers didn't need to be convinced that these movies sucked. What made the Plinkett reviews stand out was critiquing them beyond midichlorians (which everyone hated, although I personally thought they were an intriguing idea) and Jar Jar (who everyone wanted to burn at the stake).
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- Aug 31, 2020
Okay Gen Xer.
- Joined
- Apr 30, 2016
I'm pointing fingers where I always do -> zoomers who were pre-K when the Phantom Menace came out and overdosed on /r/prequelmemes because the Disney Star War movies are a different flavor of retarded.
To my eternal shame I am a millennial born too early to not be in grade school when the prequels came out, meaning I was never the target audience of EITHER of the first two trilogies.
- Joined
- Jul 30, 2017
In other words... the first Ewok movie.
(No really. Go watch the first Ewok movie, "Caravan of Courage" and play a drinking game of how many times it parallels episode 1.)
Spectre Saren
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 9, 2024
Are you refering to the Jedi Temple burning? lmao at 9/11 imagery "appropiation". It's a burning building. What, every instance of a burning building post 9/11 is appropiating it?
lmao at 9/11 imagery "appropiation". It's a burning building. What, every instance of it happening post 9/11 is a reference to it? There's no imagery of ashes or mass hysteria.
The prequels are "shit", but people like them. I do, for what they are. I'm never gonna huff the cope of Lucas being "a genius of wooden dialogue", maybe he is just shit at writing dialogue? Even the og trilogy has plenty of instances of wonderfully AWFUL dialogue and delivery. It's been a meme for decades.
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2017
The imagery is a direct riff on how the WTC looked when it was pouring smoke: the blue sky, the distance shot everyone saw on their television that morning, and yes, Padme's line which had in one form or another been spoken thousands of times that day. The only thing that was missing was the sky full of paper, presumably because the CGI couldn't handle it yet. In 2005, everyone knew exactly where that imagery had come from.
wtfNeedSignUp
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
We've seen plenty of times when influencers decide to criticize something and people will latch on to it, especially if it makes them look as smart contrarians. The prequels had a huge hype for sure but most movie goers and critics didn't care about it and were reasonably satisfied with what they've seen.
- Joined
- Apr 30, 2016
bro we were roasting these movies in 2005 on Geocities and Livejournal blogs.
RLM didn't make us think that. If anything, they consolidated a decade's worth of anon internet hate into a single video series.
The prequels fucking suck. I don't care that Disney's version of Star Wars is a different flavor of bad, Lucas was/is a total hack.
- Joined
- Oct 6, 2016
That's funny. (lol) I didn't know it was so widespread.
I remember reading a youtube comment from someone claiming that everyone in his theater was laughing too and how jealous he was of C-3PO getting his memory of the prequels erased.
Anyway, sucks that such cool designwork was wasted on a bunch of confused distasteful movies.
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2017
I saw AotC the day after it opened and I remember laughing along with the rest of the audience. It was that perfectly timed for comedy. I have no idea if the original footage survives anywhere; my recollection is that they had the new footage ready to go within a couple of weeks of the premiere.
I will say this: there is good Star Wars-flavored stuff in the prequels. Qui-Gon is an interesting character with a solid performance; MacGregor is a fine Obi-Wan when he isn't mugging (which he does the most of in RotS); Palpatine is handled with great aplomb. My feelings on the prequels are mixed at best, but nothing in them turned me off to the franchise the way Disney Star Wars has.
- Joined
- Dec 12, 2022
Speaking of laughing at Star Wars in theaters...
When Anakin busted out his lightsaber at the kids asking for his help in Revenge, I unintentionally started chuckling pretty hard only to cause a chain reaction for the rest of the audience to start laughing at the scene.
Sorry to ruin the big dark moment, George.
When Anakin busted out his lightsaber at the kids asking for his help in Revenge, I unintentionally started chuckling pretty hard only to cause a chain reaction for the rest of the audience to start laughing at the scene.
Sorry to ruin the big dark moment, George.
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2017
"Master Skywalker! What are we going to do!"
lightsaber ignites
"You goan DIE, little nigga."
- Joined
- Apr 26, 2023
yeah pretty much, even the prequel memes, they mainly focus on ROTS which was hands down considered the best film of the 3. Basically a big reason for the hatred of star wars is people showed up to PM expecting ROTS-tier fun. This is one of the times where i wish someone could just interview George Lucas about his writing or universe making because its odd to even have the episodes be about those parts of the story and not all about 3.
just don't focus on the medium; painting it with the same brush is like saying Home Improvment, The John Laroquette Show, It's Gary Shandling's show, and Living Single are basically the same show because they're all multi-cam sitcoms in the early 90s. And while at fist glance anyone would assume they're all mostly the same thing. they aren't and are more different than you'd expect.
knowing how shit panned out i assume it was all because of union bullshit, also you'd think Lucas of all people would have been asking the shitload of indie film makers that looked up to him to try and help out. Robert Rodriguez visited the Ranch one day in the early 2000s and completely abandoned how he did film making to embrace the green screen bullshit and even told the union to get fucked all because he was so enamored with Lucas. you really telling me that guy wouldn't have helped spice up the prequels, or Kevin Smith punching up dialogue or the dozen other people who at minimum made fan videos and wouldn't mind doing some rewrites? None of the EU people were considered either?
name me a thing that man did like, i bet the only good review he gave was to child sex change operations.
This is a great example of something that would hit every time if the prequels were a stage play and not a movie. One of the weird parts about the trilogy and what people talk about when they said X helped Lucas make the OT is the lack of "soul" Everything is to the point, none of the natural way humans behave, Its over emoted and the dialogue is to the point, like an autist made it. Someone made the great point that without Star Wars the 1980s Saturday Morning Cartoon wouldn't exist and the way everything is so black and white reminds me of that stuff, true children's entertainment.
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2017
Well, he loved Ghostbusters and Big Trouble in Little China. He didn't shit on everything ... just most things.