Great post and thread! It’s given me a new appreciation for Star Wars, and a greater appreciation for the continuity of the ST and PT with the OT, even if I still don’t like either.
Good food for thought. I feel the Surrealist aspects of Star Wars are lost on most viewers. With so much sci-fi being derivative of Star Wars, it becomes normalized.
Yes, there’s a great irony in the fact that Star Wars, which started with a movie so weird that most studios rejected it, is now virtually the definition of mainstream. Few of the copycat films over the last four decades have understood what made Star Wars work. There’s been a lot of really good sci-fi inspired by the aesthetic and technical achievements of Star Wars, but not the storytelling “philosophy” it used, at least not in many other big budget mainstream films.
Very true. A similar thing happened with the Lord of the Rings. It sparked a new era of copycat fantasy books, but none of them get what made LOTR so great. I find it really interesting that you mention LOTR a few times in connection with Star Wars, because what drew people to them was quite similar I think:
- Basic good vs. evil story;
- Strong universe building–you really feel that the story takes place in a well-developed world in both of them;
- Archetypal characters;
- An internal logic that also doesn’t try to explain too much;
- A gritty (and thus believable) but also very magical world.
Unfortunately, people just try to copy the aliens and spaceships (in SW), or the different races and the magic (in LOTR), and miss almost everything that actually makes these films/books so appealing. Or their imitation suffers from a failure to write a good plot and they rely too heavily on the above-mentioned elements.
True, both LOTR and SW seems to have managed to really capture a sense of true mythology. Though I would say that where the two differ the most is in the world building, and I wouldn’t go so far as to apply the “surrealism” label to LOTR (though it does treat the more fantastical elements in a more abstract manner than most modern fantasy). F.ex. Tolkien worked out a very details time-line for Middle-Earth and of course he famously made several fully functional languages. The SW languages are generally speaking just gibberish with only Huttese having some consistency (and that’s mostly post PT-era and onward). Lucas originally went for a more more abstract approach to the world building as well. There’s enough there to create a sense of consistency between the movies, but unlike Tolkien he never really bothered to give the aliens much in terms of backstories, again, not until the PT and TCW era. But like Tolkien he did use the creatures and alien races as archetypal symbols, and most of the established lore is not by Lucas but by the EU authors.
It’s really interesting to see how abstract lore can change over time into something more “solid” as the series keep being expanded. Although Lucas definitely wanted SW to be more abstract compared to hard sci-fi I think it’s difficult for him, as it is with most storytellers, to avoid adding to the lore. Of course Tolkien started with the lore and then write the books, so I suppose all implied lore in an film or book can be considered to have “abstract lore” before they expand into a series. I can’t really think of many examples of artists that deliberately avoid continuity/lore.