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Will Brooker writes THE perfect article detailing WHY the new changes don't serve the film and how Lucas's explanations and party line on 'creative decisions' are inconsistent.
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Return to Mos Eisley: The Star Wars Trilogy on DVD
Mos Eisley Spaceport, a landspeeder-drive from Luke Skywalker’s homestead on Tatooine, is the connection between Luke’s farming community and the worlds beyond - like the end of a funnel turned wide-side up to the galaxy, channelling bizarre foreign species and exotic travellers into a single neighbourhood, and specifically into the single dark interior of the Cantina. Mos Eisley is a hub, a centre – a microcosm of the galaxy, representing the diversity of the broader spheres outside Tatooine – and it also concentrates much of the essence, the charm and energy of George Lucas’ 1977 Star Wars: A New Hope into a single sequence. In the twenty-seven years since the movie was first released, it is Mos Eisley – its layout, its inhabitants, the action that takes place there – that has changed the most dramatically, and so this sequence also illustrates the key differences between Lucas’ creation of 1977 and the revised versions – the 1997 Special Edition is now altered further with this DVD release – that supposedly take us closer towards the pure vision that Lucas wanted all along, had he not been constrained by budget and technology.
“Well, you know, its fun to make films for young people,” Lucas muses casually in the DVD set’s core documentary, Empire of Dreams, explaining why he ever began drafting a Flash Gordon-style space opera during the mid-1970s. “It’s a chance to sort of make an impression on them.” Of course, Lucas made a seismic impression on the young people who saw A New Hope and its successors between 1977 and 1983 – some went into filmmaking because of it, some drew a system of religious belief from it, and millions woke up in C-3PO pyjamas, spent the day making laser noises with mini-action figures and fell asleep in the glow of an R2-D2 nightlight. That he originally meant A New Hope to be a children’s film is less obvious, especially given that the saga is frequently accused by today’s adult fans of having become progressively infantile, with return of the Jedi’s Ewoks marking the beginning of a slide that reached its nadir in Episode I’s Jar Jar Binks. The standard messageboard retort to this criticism claims nay-sayers have lost their “inner child” and the sense of innocent wonder with which they approached A New Hope: if they watched the original Star Wars movie now for the first time, as adults, these cynical “bashers” would find fault with its fairy-tale qualities.
Watching the Mos Eisley scenes now, as an adult who first experienced them in 1977 – a time before domestic videocassettes, let alone DVD – there does seem a clear difference in tone between this fourth episode in the saga and the prequel films to date, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. Mos Eisley is an adult world presented for a young audience; the urban nightlife in Attack of the Clones is, by contrast, a childish version of an adult world. Coruscant’s Outlander Nightclub where Anakin and Obi-Wan track Zam Wessell is a gaudy neon den, as threatening as a set from the 1960s Batman. The young Jedi weave confidently through the crowds, hassled only by a kid who tries to sell them “death sticks”; even the local drug sounds lame, with a sensible health-warning as its street name. The Nightclub is a set-piece, one more visual spectacle in a sequence that looks like pre-production for a video game; it’s a ten year-old’s idealisation of the kind of “adult” place his big sister goes to when she’s dressed up for the evening.
The Mos Eisley Cantina carries entirely different connotations. This is a stripped-down, basic hole for locals, and it’s immediately clear that while Ben can mingle successfully, the droids are unwelcome and Luke, the point of identification for the young viewer, is a potential target. Despite being of legal drinking age – just about – Skywalker is a farm-boy, gauche and over-eager, fired up on bluff to cover his nerves. He boldly tugs the barkeep’s jacket to get served, but immediately gets bullied by one of the patrons for no reason other than that he’s a new face and an easy mark.
Luke’s behaviour in Mos Eisley is a constant performance, an attempt to act big and keep up a tough-guy front in an environment where, right from the start, he’s out of his depth. “Watch your step,” Ben advises. “This place can be a little rough.” “I’m ready for anything,” Luke boasts, and tries to borrow his mentor’s worldly tone as he in turn advises Threepio, “why don’t you wait out by the speeder. We don’t want any trouble.” Even at the table with Han Solo, Luke squares up to the older man, trying to bargain and brag on an equal level – “I’m not such a bad pilot myself, we don’t have to sit here and listen to all this – ” – while the smuggler lounges back in amusement. It’s in his wondering comment to Ben, though – “I can’t understand how we got by those troopers. I thought we were dead.” – that Luke reveals the more genuine combination of apprehension and awe that Mos Eisley evokes in him. This spaceport, however minor and shabby, is an edgy, dangerous place, and Luke’s reactions cue us to that.
The novelisation of A New Hope, ostensibly by George Lucas himself, confirms this sense of teenage unease and self-consciousness through which we experience the Cantina.
Luke now found himself the subject of some unwanted attention. He abruptly became aware of his isolation and felt as if at one time or another every eye in the place rested a moment on him, that things human and otherwise were smirking about him and making comments behind his back. Trying to maintain an air of quiet confidence, he returned his gaze to old Ben… (pp.95-96)
Rather than a child’s fantasy of adult venues, the Cantina feels like a real adult venue, captured in the way that it appears to a kid: something big and daunting, smoky and noisy, shadowy and dirty. And kind of sexy too – even if the finished movie does cut “the humanoid wench who had been wriggling on [Han]’s lap” (p.101) along with Koo Stark as Luke’s friend Camie (who “wriggled sensuously, her well-worn clothing tugging in various intriguing directions” in the novel (p.18)) – both characters were actually filmed before being edited out of the final cut, and this unpolished, unashamed sensuality still seems to leave its tint, lingering in Mos Eisley like perfume and hinted at in the remaining, brief shot of poised, pretty floozies surveying the bar through hookah-smoke. Though this may be a compromised version of the original conception, it hasn’t lost all the flavour of John Mollo’s pre-production sketches, with their rough fashion-plates of humanoids labelled “2 x Space Girls, Tight Top.” The Cantina owes something to scenes of Harlem bars in 1970s Blaxploitation, as well as Western saloons in John Ford films; Coruscant’s Outlander Nightclub, on the other hand, looks like somewhere the Teletubbies would go for a drink. The funk outfit Meco produced a vinyl rendition of the Cantina Theme soon after A New Hope’s release, and indie band Ash reprised it on a b-side, around the time of their debut album 1977. A generation of Star Wars fans could play that tune on a kazoo as a party piece. I wonder if any fans of whatever age – adult, teenage, under-10 – would even recognise the music playing in the Outlander scene.
One of the pleasant surprises of the DVD documentary is seeing unfamiliar glimpses from a movie so familiar that most viewers
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." - Goebbels.
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." - Orwell.