![]() ![]() ![]() Writers such as Tolkien and HP Lovecraft had invented such universes, but the Star Wars franchise was the first to self-consciously commodify an invented world on a mass commercial scale. What was being sold was not a particular film, but a whole world, a fictional system which could be added to forever (via sequels, prequels, novels, and any number of other tie-ins). What Star Wars did invent was a new kind of commodity. JG Ballard acidly referred to it as “hobbits in space”, and, just as Star Wars nodded back to Tolkien’s manichean pantomime, so it paved the way for the epic tedium of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptations. But Star Wars didn’t really belong to the science fiction genre any way. Late capitalism can’t produce many new ideas any more, but it can reliably deliver technological upgrades. While the emphasis on effects became a catastrophe for science fiction, it was a relief for the capitalist culture of which Star Wars became a symbol. All that Star Wars added to the formula was a certain spectacle – the spectacle of technology, via then state-of-the-art special effects and of course the spectacle of its own success, which became part of the experience of the film. The theorist Fredric Jameson cited Star Wars an example of the postmodern nostalgia film: it was a revival of “the Saturday afternoon serial of the Buck Rogers type”, which the young could experience as if it was new, while an older audience could satisfy their desire to relive forms familiar from their own youth. Star Wars was a trailblazer for the kind of monumentalist pastiche which has become standard in a homogeneous Hollywood blockbuster culture that, perhaps more than any other film, Star Wars played a role in inventing. In terms of the film itself, there was nothing much very new about Star Wars. The rebel group were the North Vietnamese, and the Empire was the US.” Of course, by the time the film was ideologically exploited by Ronald Reagan, everything had been inverted: now it was the US who were the plucky rebels, standing up to the “ evil empire“ of the Soviets. Star Wars was Lucas’s “transubstantiated version of Apocalypse Now. According to Walter Murch, the editor of Apocalypse Now, Lucas had wanted to make Apocalypse Now but had been persuaded it was too controversial, so he decided to “put the essence of the story in outer space and make it in a galaxy long ago and far, far away”.
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