Star Wars on Trial (35 page)

II. BEFORE STAR WARS: THE CREATION MYTH

George Lucas is on record as saying that his original script for Star Wars was heavily influenced by the writings of Joseph Campbell, and that his intention all along was to create a modern mythology that recapitulated the archetypal "monomyth" described in Campbell's book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Given Lucas's self-conscious myth-making, then, it is entirely fitting that another creation myth has sprung up around Star Wars, and it goes something like this:

Before Star Wars, sci-fi movies were the redheaded stepchildren of low-budget B-grade drive-in horror films. In those dark days cinematic sci-fi was a wasteland, populated only by mad scientists, giant insects, invading aliens, robots resembling ambulatory jukeboxes and the occasional oversized Japanese reptile.'
The scripts were universally awful, the acting even worse and the special effects laughably bad. The story always revolved around some sort of homicidal monster and the new and exciting way it killed its victims, and the plot always centered on the two-fisted, square jawed hero and the clever way that he and his screaming lady love interest found to unmask and defeat said monster. After the 1950s ended, the situation got even worse, and you could count on your fingers all the serious, big-budget sci-fi movies made between 1960 and 1977-and even then, some of them were pretty dicey in their claims to be "major" pictures.

After Star Wars sprang fully grown from the brow of Lucas, the field of science fiction experienced a great renaissance, and sci-fi writers and filmmakers alike finally got the attention they deserved. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at last began to recognize the long-standing creative genius of sci-fi filmmakers and issue Oscars accordingly, major stars at last began to take roles in scifi movies, and studios around the world finally began to give their sci-fi filmmakers serious budgets to work with.

In making Star Wars, then, George Lucas single-handedly revitalized science fiction, led it out of the tawdry drive-in wilderness, and made it the loved, respected and highly profitable member of the family of creative arts that it is today4

The problem with this creation myth, of course, is that its central assertion is easily proven false. While there certainly were plenty of low-budget films in the 1950s, with titles like The Crawling Spleen and Attack of the 50-Foot Tapeworm, there were also serious-message pictures such as The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), This Island Earth (1955) and On The Beach (1959); taut and effective thrillers such as The Thing from Another World! (1951), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1953) and Them! (1954); and big-budget effects pictures such as Destination Moon (19505),
When Worlds Collide (19516),
War of the Worlds (1953'),
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (19548),
and Forbidden Planet (1956). Nor were the 1960s the doldrums that the creation myth would make them out to be: in those years we saw The Time Machine (19609),
Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Fantastic Voyage (19661°),
One Million Years B.C. (1966"),
Planet of the Apes (196812),
2001: A Space Odyssey (196813)
, Charly (196814)
and Marooned (196915)

Wait a minute. Charly? Marooned?

If those last two titles seem unfamiliar: good. Because this brings up a very important point.

III. THE THREE Rs OF SCIENCE FICTION

One of the problems we encounter when trying seriously to assess the impact of Star Wars on science fiction in films is one of definition: just what is science fiction?"
Is Dr. Strangelove science fiction? Certainly it was made by the brilliant Stanley Kubrick, whose next two films were the sci-fi masterpieces 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, respectively. Without question, nuclear Armageddon and its aftermath has been the subject of a ton of overtly sci-fi movies, from any number of low-budget 1950s atomic mutant horror shows to Mel Gibson's krovvy-splattered Road Warrior series. But is Dr. Strangelove sci-fi?

And if so, does that mean Fail-Safe is as well? For that matter, what about the 1962 version of The Manchurian Candidate? The 2004 remake, with its plot switch to mind control via implanted computer chips, clearly was science fiction and was marketed as such. But what of the original, in which unwilling subjects' minds were controlled using drugs and implanted memories, not unlike the methods used in Total Recall? How about the 1968 social-upheaval fantasy Wild in the Streets? Or the early James Bond films Dr. No and Thunderball?17

You see, the problem we face when discussing anything involving genre fiction is that the membrane between "genre" and "mainstream" is constantly shifting and extraordinarily permeable. If a piece of genre fiction reaches a wide enough audience, then by definition, it becomes mainstream. In science fiction, especially, this shifting boundary is a daily problem for practitioners in the field. Things that were once sci-fi-computers, spaceships, lasers, genetic engineering, test-tube babies, cars that know where they're going and talk back to you, killer viruses that erupt from nowhere and threaten millions-can very quickly become tomorrow's news, or worse, yesterday's history.

In the case of Marooned, then, we had a major-studio, major-budget, major-star-powered sci-fi thriller about a disaster in space, that was based on a novel by established SF pro Martin Caidin and had the bad luck to precede the real-world drama of Apollo 13 by a mere six months. In the case of Charly, on the other hand, we had a movie based on the Science Fiction Hall of Fame story "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes. It's the heartbreaking tale of a retarded man who undergoes an experimental medical procedure to increase his intelligence and becomes a genius, only to realize that the experiment has been a tragic failure and he will just as quickly revert to his original mind. The title role earned Cliff Robertson an Oscar for Best Actor, but today, only obsessive fans and critics recognize Charly as being science fiction.

This suggests that the reason why so many people seem to think there was a sci-fi drought in the years before Star Wars is not that serious, major-studio SF films were not being made; they were. Rather, it appears that despite all educational efforts to the contrary, the majority of the population still suffers from SAMMS: the Saturday Afternoon Monster Matinee Syndrome. Science fiction in film is equated with The Brain from Planet Arous, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and old Flash Gordon serials, not because these are truly representative samples of what was being made, but because these were the only films that were both old enough and cheap enough to be shown on the local UHF station during non-prime-time hours.

Thus, we discover another principle: in the world of motion pictures, more so than in any other human activity, perception always trumps the truth. In this case, a widespread perception has developed that all other arguments are just pedantic nonsense and pathetic cries for respectability, and that real science fiction is defined solely by presence of the Three Rs: rocket ships, robots and rayguns.

IV. GROKKING THE ZEITGEST OF THE 1970s

To understand the astonishing impact of Star Wars, then, it's necessary to cast a wider net. We not only need to survey the other films that were being released at about the same time, both inside the genre and out in the mainstream, we need to develop at least a su
perficial understanding of what was going on out there in the larger popular culture.18

In television, for example, Star Trek and Lost in Space-both quintessential "Three Rs" shows-had long since been canceled, but they lived on in reruns, and Gene Roddenberry was stumping around the country trying to raise the money to shoot his Star Trek movie. New sci-fi TV series were not entirely absent from the major networksPlanet of the Apes, Logan's Run, The Questor Tapes, Genesis II and Man From Atlantis all had their shot at prime time-but most of these series are, thankfully, forgotten now.

In cinema, major-studio SF films continued to be made, but they were by and large either dystopian and nihilistic things or else barely recognizable as sci-fi, when not both. For example, Michael Crichton's 1971 medical thriller The Andromeda Strain seems restrained now in comparison to the Ebola-inspired films that have come since, not to mention the latest CNN headlines about West Nile and Asian bird flu. Crichton's next film, WestWorld (1973), sent a remorseless killer robot chasing after Richard Benjamin more than a decade earlier than The Terminator (1984), but today it is best known as being the inspiration for a particularly good Simpsons episode. In 1973 we learned that Soylent Green is people-need we say more?-and Woody Allen released Sleeper, but in keeping with the principle that the mainstream always assimilates successful genre films, Sleeper is now considered a comedy, not sci-fi, even though the Three Rs are present in abundance.

George Lucas took a crack at depressing dystopias in THX 1138 (1971), John Boorman had his turn at the same in Zardoz (1974), and two young guys named John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon made an utterly insane little low-budget movie entitled Dark Star (1974), after which O'Bannon decided his "alien loose and wreaking havoc inside a spaceship" idea needed a more serious treatment, and the result was Alien (1979). A young actor by the name of Don Johnson starred in Harlan Ellison's postapocalyptic nightmare A Boy and His Dog (1975), while Roger Zelazny's postapocalyptic nightmare Damnation Alley (1977) got turned into a Jan-Michael Vincent starring
vehicle. In the year 1 BSW (1976) Logan's Run won the Academy Award for Best Special Effects,19
for a story about a dystopian future in which social stability is maintained by the simple expedient of executing everyone who reaches the age of thirty-and this movie was successful and popular enough to be spun off into a TV series!

Perhaps the defining sci-fi film of the pre-Star Wars 1970s, though, was Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running (1972). Expensively produced, well acted, beautifully photographed-Trumbull went on to work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Blade Runner, among others-Silent Running features a trio of squat robots who are clearly in R2-D2's direct lineage and a painfully overwrought ecological "message" script that's about as subtle as spending ninety minutes getting clubbed over the head with a five-pound organically grown heirloom zucchini. By the time Silent Running grinds down to its final, depressing, hopeless ending, you're left with a very slight feeling of sympathy for the surviving robot, and a profound sense of relief that at least it's over and you won't have to sit through that again.

And that, in a nutshell, is the lingering legacy of the years immediately before Star Wars: at least they're over, and we won't have to go through that again. In the larger world of mainstream cinema, Hollywood produced a lot of movies that left the audience with that feeling: Five Easy Pieces (1970), Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970), The Harrad Experiment (1973), Last Tango in Paris (1973), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Barry Lyndon (1975), Taxi Driver (1976), The Goodbye Girl (1977)....

America in the mid-1970s, you see, was deep in the throes of what President Carter termed a "national malaise." We were trying to sober up from our post-Vietnam War hangover, but inflation and fuel prices were rising fast, thermostats and friendly governments were dropping like flies, and the country as a whole was fresh out of heroes. Our astronauts were unemployed: the last three Apollo moon missions were canceled due to lack of funding, and the first space shuttle would not lift off until 1981. Our cowboys were discredit ed: in less than twenty years we'd gone from "winning the West" to "exploiting the Native Americans" and from Shane (1953) to Soldier Blue and Little Big Man (both in 1970).

Our military was even more deeply discredited: in less than a decade John Wayne had gone from the widely praised The Longest Day (1962) to the even more widely damned The Green Berets (1968). Even the police were now villains: Officer Friendly and Sergeant Friday had been replaced by Dirty Harry (1971), a surly, brutal man only slightly better than the criminals he pursued. And when we in desperation finally turned to our political leaders for hope, what we got was President Carter on TV, wearing a sweater he'd borrowed from Mr. Rogers and telling us that we'd better tighten our belts and learn to smile, because things would never be this good again.

There. That was the prevailing spirit of the 1970s. That was what was in our hearts and minds when we plunked down our five bucks and walked into the movie theater. And then some pale blue letters appeared on the screen: A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away ....

And the first brassy fanfares of John Williams's unabashedly triumphal score erupted from the speakers....

And 121 minutes later, the first waves of baby-boomer teenagers came marching out of those theaters, giddy from a megadose of the Three Rs, humming the Star Wars themeZ°
and ready to enlist in the Rebellion and join the fight against the evil Empire, if only someone would tell us just where exactly the evil Empire was.21

V. LIFE IN THE YEAR 28 ASW

Twenty-eight years later, it remains almost impossible to overstate the impact of the original Star Wars. No, George Lucas did not single-handedly rescue and revitalize cinematic science fiction. As I've shown, Hollywood never stopped making big-budget sci-fi films, and many of the films that appeared in the years immediately after Star Wars-Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Capricorn One (1978), Battlestar Galactica (1978), Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979), Alien (1979), Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), Flash Gordon (1980)-were in development long before Star Wars ever opened. It takes quite a while to make and distribute a major motion picture, or even a cheap one: Roger Corman, the King of the LowBudget Quickies, was not able to get his Star Wars coattail-grabber, Battle Beyond the Stars, into release before 1980.