concluded
Slipping Boba Fett as an extra into this Mos Eisley encounter must have seemed the ultimate in “kewl” to the Fett fanboys who hung on each one of his twenty-seven words in Empire Strikes Back, but this fleeting visual bonus also confuses what basic sense the original films gave of the bounty hunter’s alignment and motivations: in 1980 he appeared as a freelancer serving the highest bidder, but this 1997 addition suggests he has a steady job on retainer for the Hutt. Those twenty-seven words, incidentally, have just been redubbed for 2004 by Temura Morrison, Attack of the Clones’ Jango Fett: the original voice-talent, Jason Wingreen, has been wiped out of Star Wars history, just like Declan Mulholland.
This is arguably the most contentious aspect of Lucas’ revamp: not just the obsessive adjustment of characters he did, after all, create himself and donate to the public imagination, but a purging of actors who contributed their talents to the original movies, were considered more than adequate for approximately twenty-five years, but no longer fit in with the revised, prequel-era continuity. So the Emperor’s revised appearance in the 2004 Empire Strikes Back now includes the subtle character-shift of Vader denying all knowledge of Skywalker’s son, despite referring to Luke by his surname earlier in the film; it also replaces an unbilled, elderly actress and the voice of Clive Revill with a new performance by Ian McDiarmid. The shot of Obi-Wan, Yoda and Anakin as glowing blue Force-ghosts, as Luke torches Vader’s armour on an Endor funeral pyre, now asks us to believe that Luke recognises his father as a young man, rather than as the battered but kindly older figure who was revealed under Vader’s mask; it also replaces actor Sebastian Shaw with Hayden Christensen. The ethics of such changes are open to debate: Lucas claims a right to change his creation as often as he likes, and the voice-actors like Jason Wingreen and Clive Revill were just doing a day’s work, but there remains something chilling about the retroactive continuity that rewrites history with every revision. Each new release of the Star Wars saga is offered as the definitive version; within Lucas’ official canon, any inconsistencies in previous cuts of the film are now ruled not to exist. Mos Eisley always looked that way. Anakin Skywalker’s ghost always appeared as Hayden Christensen. Vader always feigned ignorance of Luke to his Emperor. Luke never screamed as he fell from Cloud City. Greedo never shot first.
Yet these last two are already double-switches, reversing back to a previous decision and undoing the 1997 version of the “truth”. Just as the DVD casts doubt on Lucas’ claim that he always planned for Luke and Leia to be twins – in that case, why sanction a trailer focussing on their affair, titled “Forbidden Love”? – and fudges the issue on whether the director originally planned three, six or nine films in the saga, so it’s difficult to believe that Lucas is guided by a shaping vision, without caprice, changes of plan or snap decisions. It is, perhaps, going too far to compare his elimination of character actors to the Soviet propaganda that wiped Trotsky from official photographs and rewrote his role in history, but the process irresistibly recalls George Orwell’s comment in “The Prevention of Literature”, written in 1945 and a clear precursor of Ninteen Eighty-Four’s doublethink: “What is new in totalitarianism is that its doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also unstable. They have to be accepted on pain of ****ation, but on the other hand they are always liable to be altered at a moment’s notice.” (p.167)
In a 2001 interview, Shaun of the Dead actor and Star Wars fan Simon Pegg told me why he felt increasingly disillusioned by Lucas. “When he made Star Wars, he was Luke, when he made The Phantom Menace he was Jabba. Go figure.” The Empire of Dreams does, unflatteringly, show Lucas as a stodgy, jowly figure, his face barely moving on a thick neck; but in the documentary’s final moments, Lucas drops the comfortable, smug banalities and shruggingly reveals a self-critical awareness.
What I was trying to do was stay independent… but at the same time I was sort of fighting the corporate system, which I didn’t like. And I’m not happy with the fact that corporations have taken over the film industry. But now I find myself being the head of a corporation. So there’s a certain irony there, in that I’ve become the very thing that I was trying to, uh, avoid. Which is basically what part of Star Wars is about.
Rather than the intergalactic gangster-slug, then, Lucas accepts that he has, at least in part, taken the role of the Empire – an interpretation with which many fans, especially those whose online fiction or amateur movies have been stamped out by Lucasfilm’s cease-and-desist copyright orders, would resignedly agree.
It may be difficult to reconcile the stolid, snowy-haired George Lucas with the stereotype of an independent filmmaker, even if we accept that strictly speaking, the label can’t be denied him; from his resistance to studio interference in the 1970s to his obsessive authorial control over the DVD Star Wars in 2004, Lucas has kept a dogged, two-handed grip on his personal creations. But at the start of his career, the nervy young director did fit the stereotype a lot more neatly, and while the Star Wars saga was in many ways startlingly innovative, Lucas’ earlier films were distinctly avant-garde. Jean-Luc Godard had visited USC in 1966, and Lucas, already a fan of the Nouvelle Vague director, explicitly modelled THX1138: 4EB on Godard’s 1965 science fiction film Alphaville. A New Hope took the breezier space operas of Flash Gordon serials as its more direct inspiration, but the leap from THX’s “Electronic Labyrinth” is not as vast as it might appear: the re-released, feature-length THX was prefaced with a clip from Flash Gordon, and its dystopic future includes the germ of familiar Star Wars icons like the Jawas and trash compactor monster.
It would be fruitless, though perhaps fascinating, to try to redefine A New Hope as avant-garde cinema. However, the documentary disc’s snatched black-and-white production footage, often silent and grainy, does give the Death Star corridors an uncanny resemblance to both THX and Alphaville. An unexpected bonus of Lucas’ Star Wars DVD is this reminder of the vibrant, raw cinematic energy, the edge of experiment, that still lies, still visible for the moment at least, behind his CGI confection.