MORE THOUGHTS ON “STAR WARS EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH”
WHY IS THE DIALOGUE SO HOWLINGLY BAD?
Click here to read the F&SN Critic's review of "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith."
So why is it, exactly, that the dialogue in the “Star Wars” prequels—“The Phantom Menace,” “Attack of the Clones,” and “Revenge of the Sith”—has at times been so amazingly awful? There’s no question that the original trilogy has its share of goofball utterances, my favorite being “you rebel scum!” But seldom are mouths so cumbersomely over-filled as they are in “Episodes I,” “II,” and “III.” Sayers of nay have put forth theories. George Lucas is drunk with power, a mad hermit alone on Skywalker Ranch, surrounded by virtual actors and no longer in touch with how flesh-and-blood humans communicate. Another popular notion is that, in the absence of the great Han Solo, there simply is no one to whom good lines of dialogue, such as “you love me because I’m a scoundrel,” can be given.
But let us suppose, for a moment, for fun, that Lucas intentionally wrote stilted, unnatural dialogue in the “Star Wars” prequels. Why would he do that? (Admitted, that Lucas would do such thing did not occur to me until my soul brother The Amused put forth the idea.) A possible answer can be found in two of “Star Wars’” biggest influences: Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the works of psychologist Carl Jung.
The similarities between “Star Wars” and “2001” are easy to spot. Kubrick, if my movie history is accurate, was the first to introduce a spacecraft—the Discovery—by having it enter the frame from one side instead of simply sticking a camera on it. Lucas’s homage to this is the first shot of the first “Star Wars” film, in which the fleeing blockade runner similarly appears. It’s neither an accident that that vessel shares the spinal column-to-brain structure of Discovery, nor is it a coincidence that both craft have pristine, hospital-white interiors. R2D2’s unblinking blue eye is not a million miles from HAL 9000’s ceaseless red stare. The moon where our heroes take shelter near the end of “Revenge of the Sith” is shot almost identically as our moon in “2001,” with astronauts making their way to a pit in the surface.
Here’s another similarity: isn’t the dialogue in “2001” stilted, odd, and inhuman, until the introduction of HAL 9000? Listen to Heywood Floyd use bland platitudes when discussing not just his choice of sandwich en route to the first monolith, but also in describing what has been found on the moon. Observe how nonchalantly and casually he deflects the questions of the Russian scientist who wants to know what’s been going on. He makes first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence sound so banal in his formalized, middle-class vernacular. Both he and one of the astronauts on Discovery share long-distance, interstellar messages with loved ones, but discuss nothing more substantial than birthdays and shallow, dispassionate “I miss you” remarks. We almost have to watch “Dr. Strangelove” and “A Clockwork Orange” just to find out, for certain, that, yes, Kubrick has intentionally made “2001’s” dialogue so blank.
It’s no secret that the machines in “2001” are much more human and interesting than the humans are. Astronaut Frank Poole’s silent-cockroach death means nothing to us, and neither do the motionless deaths of three other astronauts. HAL’s deactivation, on the other hand, is heartbreaking. The spaceships dance and, yes, copulate in the docking sequence set to “The Blue Danube.” Do the humans do anything as interesting as dancing or screwing? Never. Roger Ebert describes Kubrick’s actors as “lifelike but without emotion, like figures in a wax museum.” The point that Kubrick might be making is that this is the fate of humans who have become beings of total reason. The humans we meet in the future of “2001” have reached an evolutionary dead-end, repeating the same platitude-laced patterns again and again. A dead pattern is just what happened to their pre-human ancestors in the “Dawn of Man” sequence, set 3 million years in the past. But while the evolutionary dead-end of the ape men is life without tools, the evolutionary dead-end of future man is an existence of pure reason. It takes the monolith—which could be considered a benevolent alien intelligence or simply the hand of God—to push man first to the world of tools and then to show him that reason is not the “end-all, be-all” of existence. This is an unpopular notion in science-fiction, which so often asserts that with pure reason we can do anything. This is also why, in a AFI special, Martin Scorsese referred to the end of “2001” as “a religious experience.”
I digress, as I so often do when discussing this greatest-of-films. But do you see the connection between “2001” and the “Star Wars” prequels? Does the lifeless, wax figure-world of “The Phantom Menace,” “Revenge of the Sith,” and especially “Attack of the Clones” bespeak a dead-end for the Republic? The chapter set most within the heart of the Republic is the unwieldy, unimaginably stilted “Attack of the Clones,” a movie built largely of constricted conversations between players unable to interact with their virtual surroundings. (The Amused calls it “high opera speak.”) It is not an evolutionary roadblock that the Republic has encountered and which Lucas is embodying with wax museum formality, but a dead-end in Jungian self-realization.
Admitted, I don’t know as much about Jung as I do about “2001.” This ignorance is probably because no one has filmed Jung’s dream of being told by a leathery dwarf to kill the Teutonic god Siegfried so that Europe can be flooded in rivers of blood. But the connections between “Star Wars” and Jung are so powerful that, in his accessible online overview of Jung’s work, Dr. C. George Boeree actually uses “Star Wars” characters to explain Jung’s theory of archetypes! Luke Skywalker is identified as the hero archetype, that is, “engaged in fighting the shadow” and “dumb as a post.” Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda represent wise old men, and Darth Vader is the “dark father.”
Suffice it to say, Boeree sums up Jung’s views on self-realization in this way:
“Every wish immediately suggests its opposite. If I have a good thought, for example, I cannot help but have in me somewhere the opposite bad thought…Once I tried to nurse a baby robin back to health. But when I picked it up, I was so struck by how light it was that the thought came to me that I could easily crush it in my hand. Mind you, I didn’t like the idea, but it was undeniably there.
“According to Jung, it is the opposition that creates the power (or libido) of the psyche. It is like the two poles of a battery, or the splitting of an atom. It is the contrast that gives energy, so that a strong contrast gives strong energy, and a weak contrast gives weak energy.
Page two of "More Thoughts on 'Star Wars Episode III.'" Back to home.