Star Wars, postmodernism and marketing

I've posted this in the prequal forum but I think it would be more apt to put it here...

Hey guys,

Im doing an English unit in class at the moment called "History and Memory". To cut to the chase, part of the unit essentially involves taking a postmodern, deconstructionist approach to texts-asking questions like "what is history" in light of "relativity" and postmodernism.

My teacher mentioned Star Wars as an example. Part of deconstructionism, especially the variety espoused by Hayden White in the 1970s, involves assesing and 'deconstructing' any sort of text, especially from the point of view of 'power relations' between dichotomous opposites-men and women, homosexual and heterosexual people etc. These relationships usually involve some degree of oppression. Essentially, then, postmodernism seeks to analyse texts from the point of view of radical suspicion.

In this light my teacher was discussing some of the "latest" Star Wars movies, describing it as a "franchise" (in the pejorative sense) and seeking to make the point that such phenomena as the "franchise" (like Star Wars) can be deconstructed from the suspision point of view (I was thinking about all this in relation to Palpatine's dialogue-"All those who gain power are afraid to lose it! But thats another thread!!)

My teacher's quick analysis involved the idea that the prequals were designed with marketing in mind and indeed "structured" to adhere to a certain mold. Essentially, to morph into a particular type of "product" dependant not upon inherent artistic concerns but on the needs, wants and desires of the chosen target audience (he frequently used the language of commerce and business)...

His ultimate point was that the inherent validity of a text could perhaps be determined by analysis like this.

My teacher argued that the Star Wars saga could be declared invalid, in a sense.

I find this whole debate interesting in light of zombie's book (which I greatly admire) and the assertion that Lucas returned to Star Wars in order to offset his debt situation.

Makes me wonder about the idea of determanism too!!??

Anyhow thoughts anyone? hehe

(btw I dont adhere to my teacher's opinon)

 

I guess it's true that the economic aspect of Star Wars was pivotal to making three extra movies. The wanted it and GL had played his game right to control the (his) galaxy
However, Star Wars is a modern fairy tale, or better said a modern mythology. Stories which are great in itself, but also carrying a deepter truth in itself. Like the great mythologies from India and Greece they will eventually be carried by the people themselves, because of the embedding in their conciousness.

 

I've read the quotes from Lucas in which he basically confesses to making the PT for primarily financial reasons. However, IMO, this does not in and of itself invalidate or negate the artistic forces at work in the prequel films or in the Saga itself.

Art and commerce have long proceeded hand-in-hand; to name only one example, the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo would never have undertaken this -- arguably the greatest painting (or indeed, artwork) in history -- unless he had been commissioned to do so by the Pope, and well-paid at that. Also of note with regard to this discussion is that Michelangelo was beholden to numerous market-related expectations and traditions in his design of the painting (many of which he was able to subvert in interesting ways, but that is another topic).

To conclude, crafting an artwork, including a film, with specific marketing concerns in mind does not invalidate the artistry of the work itself. Only subjective aesthetic responses, and intellectual analysis of the work, can validate or invalidate a work of art.

 

Good points! Of course artists (or "craftsmen" or whatever term is applied) have always been guided by market forces: you can't chisel a sculpture or conduct a symphony if you're dying on the street from starvation!

If the financial component of SW somehow "invalidates" it, then the teacher should be able to explain precisely how that is so. He should be able to give detailed examples instead of just saying, "It's invalid". That'd be like if I told a mechanic that he did a crappy job on a car because he was smoking while he worked: "Okay....but explain how that diminished my work?"

(It's my overall sense that the SW movies were relatively uncorrupted by financial concerns, at least as far as the core story goes. Now lots of the EU and this embarrassing bit of government-worshiping propaganda known as 'The Clone Wars' is just totally submissive to financial and propaganda influences.)

 

Ask your instructor what he thinks the chosen target audience was for these new films.

If it was children, then why did Lucas shift the emphasis from swashbuckling to court intrigue? Why all the massacres, child slaughters, and immolations?

If it was teenagers, why all the goofy slapstick?

If it was the older fans, why the melodramatic courtships and the upending of said audience's expectations (e.g., Anakin as 9-year old cherub, Vader only appears in last five minutes of ROTS)?

 

I can't say that I would agree with your instructor. If the Prequel Trilogy had merely been created to cash in on the STAR WARS saga, I think that it would have turned out to be a mere rehash of the Original Trilogy and Lucas would have included aspects to the story that many of the fans had anticipated. Instead, he created a more morally complex story and pretty much erased a good number of assumptions made by fans.

 

Great points. I would suggest that my teacher argues thus because he is thinking out an argument like this:
-After many years of silence, George Lucas comes out with a second Star Wars trilogy that for all intensive purposes isn't required to understand the original story. Questions about whether the prequals enrich the saga are pretty much irrelevant in this conception.
-what matters is that the motivations appear to be suspect, especially considering that, in the popular mind:
-the prequals are considered to be inferior (not so much in my generation: I was nine years old when i saw TPM for the first time), and therefore the very motivations for their production are suspect.
-The "lesser quality" of the films proves that they can't have been motivated by artistic concerns.

In conclusion, I suspect that my teacher's point was that if art is influenced to any great degree by financial/extraneous concerns, it will turn out to be inferior.

This gets us into the debate about the inherent quality of the prequals, a topic that I was hoping this thread will avoid.

But to answer dbrennan's question...I think he was thinking along those lines. So in a sense my teacher had already made an apraisal of the films, on artistic grounds, and considered that this must be because they were motivated by other, less artistically valid concerns, at least in his conception.

I agree that the story is more morally complex, as well as having many elements that would be extraneous to a franchise entirely aimed at "kids" or "fanboys" or "adults" exclusively.
On closer inspection, my teacher's ideas really fall apart, whatever your stand on the prequals themselves. Still...interesting questions.

 

I posted this in the prequel forum thread:

His argument is valid in some sense but deeply flawed as well--all of these which apply to the prequels can be largely applied to the originals as well. Even in 1977's Star Wars, Lucas envisioned a marketing plan from the beginning, ie R2D2 cookie jars, that recalled the fun merchandising tie-ins of the 1950s, and of course one of Lucas' most famous business moves was the foresight to retain merchandising for himself--and actually put it into production--and to keep sequel rights, as he envisioned the series as a franchise. In fact, ESB, considered the most artistic of all six films, was made primarily as an economic device to provide him the funding for Skywalker Ranch. And of course ROTJ with its palaces of muppets and planets of teddy bears, has been critcized as a merchandise and child-targetted film since its 1983 release--in fact, internal Lucasfilm documents reveal that marketing firms were even consulted in order to decide on the films title.

I really think the teacher is just projecting his views onto the inferior construction of the prequels--they may be lesser films, but theres not as much difference motivating them compared to the originals as some may believe.

To Drg:

The schizephrenic nature of the PT I think is a reflection that Lucas could never figure out what the heck the series actually was. One minute he goes on about how its a saturday matine serial for ten year olds within intentionally bad dialog, swift character development, a somewhat lighter and more kid-friendly construction and an emphasis on action/FX, the next he is going on about the deeply complex nature of the characters, and motivational nuanace and emotional subtlety and Anakin's fall and the tragedy of the galaxy and the heavy, deep themes and sub-plots and the very dark, adult, mature nature of the trilogy. Which is it? He wants it to be one or the other depending on the mood he is in and how he is trying to sell or defend the franchise. You can't really balance Power Rangers and King Lear--pick one and go with it. I think a franchise like LOTR showed how to incorporate elements of both without changing the essential nature and aim of the series--its a dramatic epic, but there's an appropriate sprinkling of B-movie adventure homages weaved into the way the epic plays out.

I think Lucas suffered from a similar problem with ROTJ as well, and that film gets pinned as failing for the exact same reasons. The end result is that it comes across as a great epic sold out for kid-marketing. ESB never had any delusions that it was anything but a mature fantasy film, and in spite of what Lucas says he still made Star Wars for the nerdy thirty-year-old that was George Lucas in the mid-70s--both films were simply made in such a way that kids could latch onto them; they were kid friendly, but there was never a single instance where it pandered to them in any way or shape.

 

Zombie: Schizophrenic is as apt a descriptive as any to describe these new films, but honestly, I think Lucas was doomed no matter what tone he settled for. The OT itself barely works as a trilogy: Star Wars a self-contained fairy story, Empire a Greek myth, and ROTJ a failed synthesis. I can't really say what route he should have taken with the PT, if he were aiming for congruence. Had he taken the proceedings just a little further into the beclouded, then the original and ROTJ would have looked as corny as a Kansas Christmas.

What we're left with is a patchwork approach?-Lewis Carroll meets Sir Thomas Malory?-and if the effort isn't completely successful, I can at least admire its novelty. There is nothing quite like the PT. And if it fails to reach the heights of the Wagnerian Lord of the Rings productions, it's at least more memorable than the streamlined, unoffensive Harry Potter/Chronicles of Narnia adaptations.

 

Its funny, I've always enjoyed the incongruence of the PT. Zombie may be right, but I think that it would be false to generalise about the all pervading "badness" of said incongruence. In my experience, The Phantom Menace is made more subversive by the fact that there is slapstick. The end of the film, seemingly light hearted, is in fact nothing but. I dont think that Lucas is a total idiot, but zombie is also right in saying that he has anything but a clear vision.

Still, I agree with drg that incongruence is interesting, a novelty. Why should a movie series conform to one particular paradigm?

I guess that the counterargument would be that Lucas didnt use said incongruence well and so the films are a hodge podge.

I suppose it comes down to opinion in the end.

 

Which is why I can't agree with your instructor. For Heaven's sake, the children's choir was actually singing the Emperor's theme! That's a mite bit too clever for this series. No one was asking Lucas to be that clever; we just wanted to be entertained. And that's the thing?-if it was just money he wanted, Lucas could have simply rehashed the original film, as he did with ROTJ. He could have taken a cue from any number of Dark Horse comics, and given the older fans something edgy. But he gave us...this, instead.

The PT doesn't fit the definition of hackwork. It's too strange.

 

Well, the thing about the OT is that it didn't have a storyline designed to it from the beginning. I think it works as a trilogy, but its really only ESB and ROTJ that "go together", and even then there is a distinct arc where we go from lightness (ANH) to darkness (ESB) and then back to lightness (ROTJ), and it also works where we have comic-book odysse ANH, gravely mature ESB, and then ROTJ that tries to balance both.

You raise a good point though--Lucas shot himself in the foot the minute he wanted to make it a 6-part story in the 1990s. No matter what you did you would still go from dark Episode III to inappropriately flippant ANH, and then everything else gets thrown off.

You also raise a good point about TPM; theres something so RIDICULOUS about it, the way its a more sophisticated plot than a kids film deserves, yet told in a very childish way most of the time, that the end result is something thats so schizephrenic that it becomes appealing exactly in that way, the way it bounds from offensively juvenile to charmingly imaginative to very subtle and sophisticated to grave and serious, and often jumping back and forth between two or more of the above within the same scene. Its almost accidentally brilliant for this reason. I think most people consider TPM the most cohesively structed film of the trilogy and I agree but I could never figure out why (aside from the rather self-contained plot)--could this have something to do with it? In any case, the following two films IMO don't gel in the sort of gonzo way that TPM does, because TPM has the flippant or playfull and child-oriented outlook that allows that kind of gonzo approach to be permissable, whereas AOTC takes itself far too seriously and has a far more adult story to tell that it becomes like building a brick building on a popsicle stick foundation, it all falls inward under an inadequete base. As I said, ROTJ fails in a similar respect for the same reasons.

 

TPM....it's got something for everybody! I agree with the above posts stating that TPM is sort of thematically open and diverse. To a certain extent, this could be said about all the SW movies, and I think this is part of the appeal: You can see in them whatever you want.

(The most incongruous moment in TPM, I think, is just before the podrace when the banner's are being flown and there's this exciting, dramatic music....and then an eopie farts. It totally ruined the effect of the moment, but it demonstrates just how schizophrenic the movie is.)

 

I would argue that Lucas' desire to "cash in" on toys, cartoons, and other "profitable" spin-offs was actually a desire to deliver on the Prequels in the most artistic way possible. If no kids wanted to buy the toys, the movies would not have worked the way he wanted them, too. Not because they weren't money-makers, but rather because they didn't evoke a response from the young audience. As an artist, he was attempting to create a thoughtful toy-factory, which is exactly what the OT obviously was. Just like when Pixar writes a story. They want it to work on all levels.

As a four year old when Star Wars came out, the movies were a jumping off point for the toys, and so forth. The figures, for me, were essential to the transcendental experience unique to Star Wars in the first place. Not only were they great movies, but they were executed in such a way that you could sit in class and dream about a thousand different stories occuring in a thousand different parts of the world Lucas created. This lends itself to toys that allow you to act out your imagination. I truly believe that while Lucas is clearly a businessman, he always maintained his integrity because he simply tried to deliver on all levels. And for the record, if all you care about is getting four year olds to like your movie, you don't start off with a complex Trade Federation blockade scneario.

Interesting thread.

 

Excellent points! TPM as gonzo!! I love it! hehe. We must keep in mind that TPM is in many places told from Anakin's point of view, or more to the point, from a child's point of view. It is not so much the film is child oriented, rather its perspective is very much that of a child. As the audience, we are positioned this way through use of cinematography and characterisation. The following two films allow the audience to grow with Anakin in age and maturity, but also understanding about the central story-the diabolical rise of the Sith and Vader's ascension. A particularly obvious example is the landing platform sequence. The cameras are always looking up, from an oblique angle, at the key players-Palpatine, Valorum, the Queen. They ignore the camera, and do not stare into it or even acknowledge Anakin's (and thus the audience's) existance. Plot wise, Anakin's extraneousness (ironically) is emphasised, though the cinematography also accentuates the audience's dissolusionment (or perhaps is seeking to elicit this response from audiences. Apparently it worked!)

As the audience, we are ourselves initiates. Perhaps this is part of TPM gonzo incongruence. We are encouraged to come to the film in a childlike way and respond to it, at least initially, with innocent acceptance. Only when we have come to know the story (in the guise of the well meaning but less well constructed AoTC and the well excecuted ROTS) can we understand the deeply ironic, subversive and utterly disturbing truth inherent in the story. And yes, the film is almost accidentally brilliant...perhaps it wasnt entirely an accident though! Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say the prequels are brialliantly thought out polemics on the nature of reality and truth (though even here there is more...a LOT more...than meets the eye), I am agreeing though that simple, psycho babble minded hypothoses like those presented by my teacher are not well thought out nore considered. Having said that, I'm sure there are those here who can brilliantly argue on the contary.

My own opionion is certainly that TPM especially cannot be considered a hodge podge film...by chance or design, as zombie said, it turned out to be REDICULOUS, though in an irrisistibly brilliant way.

There truly are no other films like the prequels.