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<a href="http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2005/05/i_hates_lucas_i.html" title="www.bynkii.com/archives/2005/05/i_hates_lucas_i.html" target="_blank">.Truth.</a><br /><br />"Mmm....starcruiser crash!"
I have seen the Holiday Special! — Page 2
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"The Star Wars Holiday Special" is depressing to watch, but it's not depressing in the usual way. The only other film that I can think of that resembles it is Alexander Payne's "About Schmidt". In "About Schmidt" the title character is a recent retiree who realizes early into retirement that he has wasted his life. He is easily replaced at the job he has worked in for decades and has alienated his wife and daughter in the process. Throughout the film he writes letters to Ngudu, an African child that he is sponsoring. In the film's last scene, he gets a letter back from one of the nuns at Ngudu's mission. It does not address any of the things that he had put in his letter. No connection has been made. He also gets a fingerpainting, which causes him to cry. He may have been moved by this, but it is similarly likely that he is lamenting the fact that he will essentially die alone; unnoticed and entirely forgotten by a dead wife, an angry daughter, and a geographically and culturally detached surrogate son. "About Schmidt" sure sounds like it's depressing in a traditional way. But coming out of the theater onto a sunny if cold early spring afternoon, I somehow felt implicated by it. A nihilistic play on Akira Kurosawa's "Ikiru", the film is about a man's wasted life, subject matter so banal and sad that my own life seemed to have been wasted in witnessing it.
I felt implicated in much the same way while watching "The Star Wars Holiday Special". The thing that I find the most disturbing about the film is not the virtual reality Wokkie porn sequence featuring Dianne Carrol. It's not the image of Chewbaccas's wife Mala chopping up Bantha loin, briefly reminding, somehow, of a crazed Northwestern loner preparing for his crusade against the federal government. It is not even the warping that Han Solo's face endures through the transition from live action to animation. No, the most disturbing thing about "The Star Wars Holiday Special" is the realization that we just spent an hour and a half of our lives watching other people watch TV. Breaking the fourth wall is one of the conventions of the variety show format. There is typically an emcee that talks directly into the camera to give a monologue and introduce the acts. We understand that he is, in reality, talking to a live studio audience, but by design we intuit that he's talking to us. There is no emcee in "The Star Wars Holiday Special". It doesn't have the form of a variety show, but the form of a narrative which ignores the viewing audience altogether. The musical acts and skits in "The Star Wars Holiday Special" are not done for our amusement; rather they exist as television programs designed for the characters' amusement. If amusement is really the word for it. As a narrative, the film demands to be taken in holistically, we can't divorce the skits and musical acts from the actual story. When Jefferson Starship comes on, we repeatedly cut back to an Imperialist general watching and tapping his fingers to it. When we see some space-age holographic circus performers, they can only do their space-age acrobatics under the omnipotent gaze of Chewbacca's son Lumpy. The virtual reality Wookie porn sequence is intercut some images of Chewbacca's dad Itchy smacking his lips as Diane Carroll tells him that she is "his fantasy". In the stupidest but most potent example of all, when they have to cut to commercial during the animated sequence, they cut to Lumpy being interrupted by an Imperial guard who barks "What are you doing?" They didn't put the "cliffhanger" in the animated sequence; they put it in the surrounding story because the surrounding story is really the meat of the film. The distance that the narrative puts between us and the skits and musical numbers is unavoidable and perhaps even the point. And so; when taken holistically, the film basically consists of Wookies watching TV until Dad comes home. There is something about watching people watch TV that really frightens and depresses me. I can't say that I am effectively anti-television. I watch; and there are certainly many things worth watching: Nip/Tuck, The Sopranos, ER, mid-early X-Files, mid-early Roseanne, mid-early Married with Children, Law and Order, Twin Peaks, Family Guy et cetera et cetera. However, typical of most people in my age group, I can't effectively make a habit or better yet, a routine of catching one show at one time. When I watch television it's on cable before or after prime time (usually in repeats) or on DVD. On my own time. Still, having been a latchkey kid growing up (although I would assure you that my sister had the disease much worse then I did and much of it rubbed off through association) I understand well that a good deal of television is shit that you know is shit but is shit that you still consume simply because it's there in front of you and you have an addiction. Watching people on television who are watching television can't help but to serve as sort of an indictment on the act itself. You're forced to acknowledge the shameful passivity and experiential bankruptcy of what you are doing as you are doing it. You are not allowed to delude yourself into believing that what you are doing is harmless or even particularly healthy.
The skits that the Wookies watch, in particular the Harvey Korman ones, go beyond incompetent or even just "bad". This stuff is unfunny in a sort of alien way for lack of a better word. They certainly seem to be trying to be funny, but you can't detect what exactly the joke is supposed to be. There is no perspective or angle to the material. It's just acting goofy; Korman doing a scene in drag and talking falsetto. These skits are so terrible that I have to wonder if the awfulness is intentional. As if they are testing us to see how much punishment we will take before we bother to change the channel. If "The Star Wars Holiday Special" was just shit that would be one thing, but it consists of us watching other people watch shit. There is that second layer of cognitive distance and the experience becomes uber-banalized.
I'm not going to win any awards by arguing that "About Schmidt" is a better film then "The Star Wars Holiday Special", but it is. It reaches further and is far thornier and meatier. As with the character of Miles Raymond in his subsequent film "Sideways", Payne seems to sympathize with Schmidt just as deeply as he satirizes him. Sympathy and satire are of course contrasting perspectives, the former suggests identification whereas the latter is detached, moralistic, and angry. Payne is not a hypocrite however, hypocrisy as I would define it, is when one element counters and neutralizes the other (like "Trainspotting" and "Fight Club" which are neither effectively moral or immoral). There is something earnest and sly about what Payne is doing. He has created what could only be described as humancentric satire; in sympathizing and identifying with Schmidt we are indicted into Payne's condemnation of the values and culture that he represents (in "About Schmidt" this seems to be ineffectual upper middle class white guilt and ennui). "The Star Wars Holiday Special", on the other hand, is incompetent and wrong-headed; attributes very closely related to hypocrisy. Instead of self-neutralizing out of fear of the consequences, (hypocritical films desire neutralization as a safeguard against criticism) "The Star Wars Holiday Special" neutralizes out of an incapability to effectively communicate its point of view toward it's subject matter.
When Itchy is interrupted from watching the animated sequence there is the implication that his watching the animated sequence was somehow a revolutionary act. I suppose, and I feel like a nerd in making this association, the guard regarded the cartoon as being Alliance propaganda. The passive act of television watching is then made to be something rather heroic. At the same time, the filmmakers value television for its qualities as an opiate. The Art Carney character uses a Jefferson Starship number to distract the Imperial guards until Han and Chewbacca can come to save the day. I'm not sure what the hell the "Harvey Korman Robot" sequence is all about, but Lumpy watches it shortly after he discovers his destroyed toy Bantha and it appears to cheer him up. In any case the filmmakers do use it to bring some levity to the unpleasantly melancholy scene. Television is the dominant form of communication in "The Star Wars Holiday Special". Everybody here lives and breathes television. Television has replaced telephones in this future setting, everybody uses "video phones" and talks face to face. The concept was not a new one when "The Star Wars Holiday Special" was first broadcast, Fritz Lang used it in "Metropolis" as early as 1927. The video phone was also used in Stanley Kubrick's "2001" in 1968; and after "The Star Wars Holiday Special" in Ridley Scott's 1982 masterpiece "Blade Runner" and Marco Brambilla's underrated 1993 "Demolition Man". The video phone actually made a debut in the real world roughly ten years ago. I remember seeing a rather primitive one being used during one of those Nickelodeon sweepstakes. It's obvious why that vision of the future died out along with the hovercars and moon colonies; it was just too much cost for too little benefit. It doesn't really matter anyway, the basic philosophy behind the video phone was basically a negative one, and one that has managed to manifest itself into the present in a barely changed form of cellular phones and the Internet. For Lang, Kubrick, Scott, and even Brambilla the video phone represented the potentially dehumanizing globalization inherent in any utopia/dystopia (the two being, of course, two sides of the same coin). The video phone in effect appropriates one's privacy, and it would follow, one's individuality. To own one is be rather forcibly assimilated into society. Most of these movies focus on totalitarian governments or microgovernments (i.e. coporations, like in "Metropolis") that use the video phone to internalize and streamline communication between their constituents. "Blade Runner" did provide a rather interesting twist to the idea; and in doing so is easily the most realistic, or perhaps the most truthful, vision of our future to date. In "Blade Runner", the video phone was seen as an extension of urban assimilation/alienation; that curious aspect of city life that is simultaneously assimilative and balkanized. There are no fringes in the city, and there is no center either. The boundaries between the two are smudged. Without fringes the outsider finds himself in a very unusual spot. The video phone in "Blade Runner" is just one more futuristic invention that facilitates the process. I really think that this is where society is really heading towards in the post-industrial landscape.
Unlike something like "Back to the Future 2" , which self-consciously parodied the futuristic genre with the video phone and earned the right toward a superficial reading, I think that the creators of "The Star Wars Holiday Special" understand the nature of the video phone and have appropriated it for what they think is a positive context. They think that the assimilating properties of the video phone (and by extension television) are a plus. Even though he had nothing to do with it, George Lucas should be blamed for the existence of "The Star Wars Holiday Special". The entire thing stems from the one significant flaw with "Star Wars": it's a political film that has been made apolitical. "Star Wars" was originally a Vietnam allegory with the evil (imperialist!) Empire representing the United States and the Alliance representing the North Vietnamese. It's sort of a hippy dippy movie. The idea of "The Force" is a hodge-podge of Eastern philosophy. The Alliance is made up of all nations, (with the inclusion of Chewbacca in "A New Hope" anyways) whereas the Empire is all lilly-white guys with the occasional robot. In later entries the pampered Princess Leia, without comment one way or the other, sheds her white robes for military fatigues to fight along side her lover: the roguish Han Solo. But it seems that Lucas may have coded it a little too well. One doesn't associate the Empire with Imperialism, but just with "evil", evil not needing any explanation. Just ask Ronald Reagan.
While there is a brief suggestion that "The Star Wars Holiday Special" represents Joe Sixpack coming to terms with the Vietnam conflict, (Art Carney, who had previously testified to being a friend of the rebellion, mentions to an Imperial guard that his son is in the military and "loves it" reminding of the portable-toilet-man in Michael Wadleigh's 1970 "Woodstock") much of the film's political content amounts to little more but me-tooism. By the end Princess Leia talks about how they all seem different but are united in their common fight against the forces of evil. Well, of course. Nobody likes evil. "The Star Wars Holiday Special" is social protest for retards; read: social protest that excludes no one also in the room. The video phone consolidates the Alliance and the Empire into this one big television addicted glob. The Alliance is good, and the Empire is evil, but they both love their television. The culture of television is, by necessity perhaps, tied into a culture of domesticity. In the original "Star Wars" films, it's domesticity that is seen as the enemy. Homelife isn't evil, but enables evil. Staying out home instead of joining the rebellion proves to be ineffectual in overthrowing the Empire as well as stifling to Luke Skywalker's spiritual development. In "The Star Wars Holiday Special" watching the boob tube is fighting the power. And the warrior Chewbacca is not the focus of the piece, but his family at home; implying that a Dad's place is not in fighting the good war but staying at home to suckle on the glass teat with his loved ones. The frivolousness and overly broad political scope of "The Star Wars Holiday Special" is it's true underlying message. It's telling you to watch your "Maude" and drink your Ovaltine. Television is good for you and it's good for your family and it fights evil. Glurge!
Basically, I think that it's very difficult to definitively argue that "The Star Wars Holiday Special" is a satire of shitty television instead of just shitty television incarnate. The genre of "unintentional" satire depends on a hatred for the characters; we hated the cops in Michael Bay's "Bad Boys 2", we hated the strippers and pimps in "Showgirls", and we even hated the Eisenhower-era square jaws in Ed Wood's otherwise charmingly innocent "Plan 9 From Outer Space". But we don't hate these Wookies, we feel sort of numb to them and the film never really seems to score any points against them. I think that the film actually believes, on some deep level, in that message: television is good for you. We don't get that external perspective necessary for good satire. Their system of values and ideals are then not indicted; rather they have metastasized into the very bones of the piece. I don't just hate the subject matter of "The Star Wars Holiday Special", I hate the "Star Wars Holiday Special" itself. Upon it's release "The Star Wars Holiday Special" no doubt existed exclusively as an indictment of television audiences. Some twenty five years later, we see that it indicts the ironics and Star Wars apologists in very much the same way: it is so unbelievably shitty that it dares us to throw our arms up in the air and cry "uncle". I have established that one cannot use irony to derive any lasting artistic value from "The Star Wars Holiday Special" but can one laugh derisively toward it? Not for long, I would argue. In a group setting with some skilled Crow T. Robots in the crowd, one could certainly squeeze some pleasure out of the opening credits and the infamous sequence where Chewbacca's family squawks at each other sans subtitles. Mark Hamill's femininity makes for a borderline decent target as well. But when Harvey Korman comes onscreen, all the air goes out of any possible attack. The ironist no longer has anything more to push against.
And you know, it's not just the vitriol that makes those "unintentional" satires great. From Paul Verhoeven’s hyper-aestheticized plasticity to Michael Bay’s kitchen sink excesses to and Ed Wood’s attention (for lack of a better word, I’m sure) to cheeseball B-movie detail, they all have some kind heat, some kind of visual power and electricity. Whereas Ed Wood managed to offset his admittedly static camera work by filling the frame with all kinds of good stuff; “The Star Wars Holiday Special” never surpasses the non-style of its television pedigree. There comes a time when you become acutely aware that you are basically looking at photographs of people talking and there is really no longer any point in feeling superior to this material.
When he made "Star Wars", George Lucas saw his version of the future as being "used". “Lived-in” might be a more polite term for it, but in the official history-of-“Star Wars” documentary “Empire of Dreams” they use the word “used”. “Used” is perhaps the best possible way to define the 1970s from this outsider’s eyes. I don’t mean that just in a historical sense, although yes, fresh off of Vietnam, Watergate, and the self-absorbed fallout from the failed Cultural Revolution America was badly used. But I think that I mean “used” in a much more specific way. The seventies were really the beginning of the post-industrial revolution. The eight-track, the VCR, the personal computer, video games; all that stuff it began in the 1970s; and coming back to that philosophy-of-the-video phone, balkanized while assimilating the country. There will come a time, foreseen by the video phone genre, when actual human contact will become passé. Ultimately less has changed between 2005 and 1975, than between 1975 and 1945. Watching Richard Linkletter’s “Dazed and Confused” I was stunned to realize that it wasn’t really a period piece, it felt terribly contemporary. Those people, they just had older shit. Older shit probably looking like newer shit back in the day. It’s the most primitive form of ironic condescension imaginable. The “used” future of “Star Wars” was part of its hippy dippy aesthetic. The “used” aesthetic was the antithesis to the “new” aesthetic of the Empire, which was established as fascist. Hey, I can dig that. Any excuse not to bathe and shave. But here, “The Star Wars Holiday Special” simply looks out of date. “Star Wars” had a shallow philosophy, but damn it, it had a philosophy. By bothering to laugh at “The Star Wars Holiday Special” we are enabling this banal spiritual bankruptcy to thrive.
And now, what about the Star Wars apologists? “The Star Wars Holiday Special” seems to legitimize every complaint one could have toward the Star Wars saga, while shortchanging their strengths. The animated sequence is seen by many of Star Wars fans as being the only salvageable thing in the Holiday Special. George Lucas has even stated that he has thought about releasing the animated sequence as an extra on a future DVD release or by itself as part of a collection. The sequence was produced by Nelvana Studios who would later produce the cartoon series “Droids” and “Ewoks”. (Available on video and DVD, but will probably not be seen much less reviewed by me as by the time I also plow through the two Ewok movies and the Star Wars prequels, I know that I will be sick to fucking death with everything Star Wars). Unlike “The Star Wars Holiday Special” and the Ewok pictures, Lucas does not seem to be intent on suppressing these ‘toons.
But anyway, no, the animated sequence in “The Star Wars Holiday Special” is certainly not salvageable. As with the Jefferson Starship number you feel something akin to pleasure when it comes on, but I think that’s attributable to the fact that when you keep hitting your hand with a hammer it feels great when you stop. The animation sequence isn’t terrible, meaning it’s not boring, but it is mediocre. It has an aggressive, rather unrelenting pace. The kids won’t settle for anything less I suppose. The segment is more or less self-contained, however the dramatic arc feels forced. The characters are always babbling in order to keep the thing moving along and produce the illusion that something is happening. As is the case with most bad Saturday morning television, the storyline is simultaneously impenetrable and simple-minded, something about a magic talisman and Bobba Fett helping out and then betraying Luke, Han, Chewie, and Leia (One sometimes gets the impression that you're watching an episode of Yu-Gi-Oh). It's cheap, is what it is; a big wet glob of salty sweet beef lard; fast food with all the nutrition boiled out. Or as Pauline Kael said of the original "Star Wars" as a matter of fact, a box of Cracker Jacks that's all prizes. If we were to divorce the animated sequence from "Star Wars" and perhaps even more importantly "The Star Wars Holiday Special" and take it on it's own terms, we would be more than likely to forget it as soon as we finished watching it. As a "Star Wars" fan, I find that the animated sequence cheapens a good deal of the deep reality of the Star Wars saga. C3P0 says that the talisman only effects "humans" and puts them to sleep, however the word human was never used in the Star Wars trilogy. Bobba Fett rides a dinosaur that licks it's lips. The monsters in the Star Wars films were always monsters first. While the Ewoks and Wookies were awfully cute, they weren't cute in that way. They weren't conscious about it, rather they just did what they did. Only the droids were allowed to play that card. This lick licking, it's tonally dissonant. The icing on the cake is perhaps the Star Trek-esque Captain's log narration that bookends the piece. Captain of what? I don't know, it appears to be a voice that only pops up to shoehorn Star Wars into Star Trek territory.
At the end of the segment, Chewie says that he didn't trust Bobba Fett because "he just didn't smell right". ‘Cause Chewbacca is a dog, get it? This is keeping in line with a disturbing trend throughout "The Star Wars Holiday Special" where the humans condescend to the Wookies. "Come on Mala, let's see a smile!" Luke coos to Chewbacca's wife. Princess Leia is no better, after practically rubbing her temples while listening to the Wookies squawk at her she asks Mala to put her human friend, the trader Art Carney, on the video phone, like a parent asking her children to go get the babysitter. “Take good care of my friends,” she tells him, implying that Wookies need a human to take care of them. This is the antithesis to that great scene in “Star Wars” where Chewbacca resists the shackles that Luke tries to put on him when trying to come up with a ruse to fool the Imperialists; a casual very delicate play on the pseudo-Blackness of the Wookie race. As a fighter in the Alliance, Chewbacca is a slave no more. In “The Star Wars Holiday Special” the Wookie goes back to being the dog. It’s slightly surprising to see Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher in this thing. Hamill is a pure professional, going full throttle with the material and eagerly embarrassing himself. Ford is the exact opposite, he phones it in and rushes through his horrible dialogue hoping that nobody will notice him. But it’s Carrie Fisher that sabatoges the movie. Her Princess Leia, grows through the trilogy as much as Luke Skywalker does, she goes from Powerpuff girl in “A New Hope” to Hawks-ian foil in “The Empire Strikes Back” to Jane Fonda/John Walker Lindh in “Return of the Jedi”. The Star Wars films always had an angle into the whole “princess” thing, a way to somehow subvert it. But some major laziness on behalf of the writers and on Fisher herself, spins what was previously a comment on upper class privilege into its embodiment. Princess Leia is a racist in “The Star Wars Holiday Special” and she’s a spoiled little brat. I was disappointed in her.
Because of its introduction of Bobba Fett and the Chewbacca’s family it is considered to be “Star Wars canon”, but where do we draw the line? At what point will the Star Wars fan realize that the new material is so divorced from the heart of the original that its inclusion is no longer relevant? That’s perhaps among the most fruitful of any questions provoked by the “The Star Wars Holiday Special”. It’s bad art, it’s bad camp, and it’s bad Star Wars. That it has the novelty of being rather extraordinary shit seems to be the only thing making it worth keeping.
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I noted on there that it was a "thoughtful, in-depth review." There are also similar reviews on that guy's same site for the ewok filmns and the main star wars films.
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Originally posted by: Adamwankenobi
I have it on my list of favorites on Wikipedia.
I have it on my list of favorites on Wikipedia.
Who cares? Start a blog so you can mention Wikipedia a few hundred more times somewhere else.
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Originally posted by: Adamwankenobi
I care.
I care.
ZZZZZzzzzzz...
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Originally posted by: Adamwankenobi
I have it on my list of favorites on Wikipedia.
I have it on my list of favorites on Wikipedia.
You also list 2001, but you don't beat that into us.....oh, wait, yes you do.
Well, at least you don't yap on about "What the BLEEP do we know?", a movie which, in fact, put me to sleep.
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And I hope you weren't looking at my old account which was the same name as my name on here. My current, updated account is "The Wookieepedian."
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Originally posted by: Fat Jedi
I'm a professional ediotor and I could do it but I would need the origianal and that I'm sure Lucas has had it buried if not destroyed. If I could get a clean BETA copy thenmaybe I could do it.
I'm a professional ediotor and I could do it but I would need the origianal and that I'm sure Lucas has had it buried if not destroyed. If I could get a clean BETA copy thenmaybe I could do it.
Lucas didn't have the original destroyed. It is locked away in the archives. The official site confirmed that Kevin Burns, who did the Empire of Dreams documentary, was given access to it for use in the documentary. However, that segment was ultimately not included in the documentary.
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Originally posted by: Number20
Isn't the KCCI edition supposed to be a beta broadcast tape?
Isn't the KCCI edition supposed to be a beta broadcast tape?
Yes, IIRC.
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Originally posted by: Adamwankenobi
Lucas didn't have the original destroyed. It is locked away in the archives. The official site confirmed that Kevin Burns, who did the Empire of Dreams documentary, was given access to it for use in the documentary. However, that segment was ultimately not included in the documentary.
i dont get it why does lucas think the holiday special is so bad? his prequels are easily as bad, but at least the holiday special has a nostalgic factor to itOriginally posted by: Fat Jedi
I'm a professional ediotor and I could do it but I would need the origianal and that I'm sure Lucas has had it buried if not destroyed. If I could get a clean BETA copy thenmaybe I could do it.
I'm a professional ediotor and I could do it but I would need the origianal and that I'm sure Lucas has had it buried if not destroyed. If I could get a clean BETA copy thenmaybe I could do it.
Lucas didn't have the original destroyed. It is locked away in the archives. The official site confirmed that Kevin Burns, who did the Empire of Dreams documentary, was given access to it for use in the documentary. However, that segment was ultimately not included in the documentary.
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And by the way, does this site generally also support the release of the holiday special on DVD?
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cheers
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Originally posted by: Fat Jedi
You said it. The prequels where crap but the holidy special was absolute $hit.
cheers
i think you got it backwardsYou said it. The prequels where crap but the holidy special was absolute $hit.
cheers
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ell-the-ewok.com
Fighting the frizzies, at 11.
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Originally posted by: Ell the Ewok
Yay its Xmas eve! That means Holiday Special Day!
Yay its Xmas eve! That means Holiday Special Day!
Yay for me too!
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