- Post
- #1601460
- Topic
- Star Wars is Surrealism, not Science Fiction (essay)
- Link
- https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1601460/action/topic#1601460
- Time
Well, I more-or-less much agree with everything you just said, minus the conclusion–and even that is fairly hair-splitting.
First off, my title is admittedly a tad click-bait-y, and had I written the essay now I might have phrased a few things a bit differently. But overall, the reason I label SW as surrealism is because of how its themes are incorporated into the ‘world-building.’
Yes, all fiction adheres, or should adhere, to our instinctual understanding of the physical world around us, and yes, even “hard SF” can get this wrong simply because space travel isn’t currently a natural part of our lives. But, there is a difference between getting it wrong due to laziness and doing it on purpose. SW often breaks these rules the same way fantasy or myth do in order to tell a symbolic, larger-than-life story where the ideas and impressions matter more than realism or plausibility.
Even hard SF can have themes and symbolic meaning, but there is generally a surface narrative where the depicted world hss its own set of strict rules that goes beyond simple continuity or our baseline understanding of physics. The themes are for all intents and purposes “tacked on”, even when they are the main reason for the story being told. In Fantasy, this line is often more blurred. F.ex. in Homer’s the Odyssey, Ulysses travels to several islands with strange creatures on them, but there’s no inherent logic to them beyond baseline physics. They can’t be placed on any maps, there’s no inherent logic in a lone giant inhibiting an island, nor do we need to know how Circe got to her island. They are simply there because Ulysses needs to face his trials before being allowed to get home to his family. These places and theie inhabitants don’t exist outide the narrative.
This is trickier with SW because of the EU and our modern tendency to turn everything in not only a franchise, but everything tends to evolve into a LOTR-type world now. Even so, there are things in in Tolkien’s world that breaks the established rules in order to tell a symbolic story. This is especially true for Gandalf’s magic, which is notoriously hard to pin down to any coherent internal logic. Though to Tolkien the themes trumped lore, and he chose the abstract and mythic approach.
Yes, SW has strong SF elements baked into it, but even a forcefield generator, if seen through an abstract lense can simply be a SF-ified version of a castle wall that needs to be brought down by invading army. Likewise, I don’t agree with the idea of there being AI or proper robots in the OT. The droids are effectively space-ified slaves. They are symbolic humans (and based on the two peasants in Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress). It’s hard to do a space fantasy, or science-fantasy, without established technological tropes slipping through, but the OT never really does much with these ideas because they don’t matter beyond their symbolic meaning and recognisable surface function. In Star Trek it matters how a warp drive works (even if the science is a bit questionable in hindsight), but the hyperdrive in SW is simply an engine. Ulysses had sails, Han has a spaceship engine. And considering the sounds it makes, and since we see X-Wings being fuelled by seemingly gasoline (or something similar), its basically a “normal” engine added to space ships. No dilithium crystals or atomic reactors needed here.
Anyway, I hope you don’t take this response as being harshly worded, as I think you raised a lot of excellent points. And admittedly, drawing the line between the abstract and the “literal” in fiction is extremely difficult and the lack of any universally agreed upon genre definitions doesn’t exactly help either. And I’m more than willing to agree with the use of science-fantasy being applied to SW, even if I personally think space-fantasy is better. Though you obviously don’t seem to label it as just SF, there are those that do, and that I do strongly disagree with.
Right, I wouldn’t say Star Wars is entirely science fiction. I’d probably call it sci-fi/fantasy or something like that.
I agree with what you’re saying about surrealism in the world building, and the example of Odysseus’ adventures at sea. I guess the giant asteroid worm and the Sarlacc pit are examples of things in Star Wars that are somewhat analogous - trials for our heroes to overcome with little inherent logic on their own.
I also agree that something like a deflector shield can be replaced with a castle wall, but I think Star Wars also contains elements that cannot be replaced with some pre-technological approximation without losing a lot in the translation. The Industrial Revolution inspired the emergence of sci-fi as a new story-telling genre that seemed fundamentally different from any genre that came before. While there are obscure examples of pre-Industrial stories that arguably incorporate elements that superficially resemble sci-fi, the stories that emerged during the Industrial revolution, like Frankenstein, seemed categorically different because they extrapolated from current technological developments in order to imagine ways that technology could radically impact the human condition in the future, while also bestowing the human inventor/scientist with powers previously reserved for gods or the supernatural.
My argument is that Star Wars incorporates themes that are directly related to the effects of technology on humanity, and thus can only have meaning to a post-Industrial, technological society. I agree that a deflector shield can be translated to a castle wall and a laser gun can be translated to a bow and arrow - but then you have themes like “spirituality vs. technology” with Darth Vader warning the Imperial elite not to rely so much on their “technological terror” or Luke Skywalker switching off his targeting computer before pulling off an impossible shot. These elements invoke themes that cannot be meaningfully translated to a pre-Industrial, pre-technological equivalent without losing a ton of meaning and social context in the translation. Even the Death Star and the political implications it has - an absolute technocratic, totalitarian dictatorship with no need for bureaucracy - invokes dystopian fears and themes that can’t be translated to a pre-Industrial equivalent without fundamentally altering their essence.
I mean, the Romans and other pre-Industrial civilizations could not even conceive of a Death Star or an atomic bomb and what it could mean for governance and politics. Their notions of political power were rooted in things like manpower and ties to the divine or previous dynasties. Sure, they developed some impressive new technologies with military applications, but this had a limited effect on the average person and never inspired writers or poets to imagine a fundamentally different future by extrapolating from current technological developments. It would take the wide-ranging effects of the Industrial Revolution to inspire the emergence of science fiction as a categorically new genre, and I think Star Wars includes important themes that only make sense in a post-Industrial, technological society.
Good point. Yes, although the core narrative of SW could work in an ancient myth context there are definitely elements that only makes sense in the modern world. I can’t recall the exact quote, but I think Lucas once said something about how he wanted to create a myth/fairytale for the space age.
So yes, there are definitely science-themes involved, even if they can be translated into something more universal and mythic. I agree that Vader being a cyborg carries with it very modern anxieties about loosing humanity in technology, though within in the “sub-narrative” it can still be seen as a SF-ified visual metaphor for simply loosing one’s humanity. You could find equivalent ways this could have been done in a pure Fantasy setting (something akin to Gollum, the ringwraiths, etc.), though then it wouldn’t be a space age myth. That’s what makes SW so unique, even forty plus years later, all the core principles of Fantasy/myth are there, but “updated” with familiar SF tropes.