Amazon is having a $2.99 MP3 album sale
[SALE’S OVER] that includes a surprisingly large number of really good selections, should your collection lack them (and if you are an old-fashioned fogey, like me, who still pays for music.) Get your Dark Side of the Moon, or Speaking In Tongues, or Heroes, thereby closing that gap in the list. May I recommend: the new album by the Japandroids. (It was on “All Songs Considered” best of the year so far just a couple weeks ago.) And get fun.’s first album, Aim and Ignite. (I like their second album, too, but I really don’t like their hit, so if you, too, are sick of the draggy, lighter-waving stadium anthemic tedium of “We Are Young”, maybe give “Walking The Dog” a try.) I also bought an Elvis Costello album for the first time in I don’t know how long because, hey, for $2.99 you never know. A month ago I played My Aim Is True through a couple times, and it’s as good as they say.
In other good deal news, I recommend the 99 cent Kindle edition of Star Wars on Trial: Science Fiction And Fantasy Writers Debate the Most Popular Science Fiction Films of All Time 
. This is the book – well, a book – that a lot of those ‘philosophy on pop culture’ books want to be but aren’t. The structure is: David Brin plays rationalist, progressive Plato, prosecuting Poets. Good SF has been polluted by retrograde fantasy. “Are we being taught, gradually but inexorably, to turn away from the whole modernist agenda? The concept that science, society, citizenship and faith are things that go well together, contributing to the good of everybody? Or that there was once a good idea – to replace arbitrary leader-worship with democratic institutions that we can all hope to share? What about the notion that any of us regular people – not just mutant chosen ones-can be the hero, if we’re ever called upon?” Matthew Stover is the main defense attorney, introducing some intriguing niceties: “I have had the pleasure of spending considerable time in a room with Mr. Lucas himself, discussing in detail certain elements of the Saga, including deeper implications of the destruction of the Jedi Order, the nature of the Force and any number of other things, some of which are still covered by the confidentiality clause in my contract. What this means is that I have access to a great deal of inside information, which I fully intend to use in the most ruthless manner possible without actually getting myself hauled off in binders by Lucasfilm Licensing stormtroopers.” At some point someone should submit a FOIA request: if we citizens are entitled to all the dirt on Nixon, after a decent interval, we bloody well ought to be entitled to know how midichlorians work.
The ‘philosophy’ of the book is pretty free-wheeling. But, for all that, the debate is sharp, thanks to the adversarial structure. It bloats out into geekiness, then the other side punctures, satisfactorily. One of the main vices of the Philosophy On Pop competitors, in this line, is that no one hauls off and makes the blunt argument that the films are philosophically valueless, or worse; Yoda is a puppet saying stupid stuff. You are never going to get anywhere interesting if you don’t spend quite a bit of time considering that rather obvious worst-case scenario.
And occasional CT commenter Adam Roberts contributes a good piece, for the defense, about Stars Wars as comedy. So true, so true! [UPDATE: He’s also a scholar, successful novelist, blogger, friend and who knows what else?]
Since I’m preparing to teach “Philosophy and Film” again, and since I always focus on SF, this is an excellent book for me. I enjoyed it for myself, and I predict it will be good for undergraduates who need ‘how to make an argument’ models. “Philosophy and Film” can be bad that way, since – well, let’s not beat around the bush: since it’s not clear what counts as a good argument here. When I tell my students, ‘make an argument!’ I like to think it’s not a complete Kobayashi Maru. Now I can say: make like Brin or Stover. That’s artificial, and certainly this is very far from being the only way to do it. But at least it’s a clear, imitable way to do it. I consider the non-academic tone a bonus as well, for academic teaching purposes. It’s too confusing for students to try to 1) make arguments; 2) about film; 3) in an ‘academic way’. Two out of three is close enough for classroom work, and I consider 3 the most dispensable.
Possibly you are not in the market for a Star Wars book, but the price is right.
{ 50 comments }
Andrew Smith 07.01.12 at 5:39 am
If you don’t own any Led Zeppelin (it always blows my mind that any wouldn’t already have at least some, but many people don’t), that’s a great buy for those. Personally, though, I prefer listening to the albums after the IV.
John Holbo 07.01.12 at 5:56 am
Oh quite so. I probably blipped over that one without even suggesting because entertaining the very thought that someone might wholly lack for it would be, as you say, medically dangerous.
Walt 07.01.12 at 7:00 am
Many people don’t own Led Zeppelin. Thank God, it means we’re finally winning.
The best part of getting old is that the people older than you who always hype stuff eventually die. I have outlived Elvis’ hype, and with luck I will outlive Led Zeppelin’s.
Watson Ladd 07.01.12 at 7:03 am
I don’t know if Brin or Stover count as good arguments. Brin relies heavily on the reader sharing with him the history of American cinema or hard SF: If you don’t know either, the argument is completely lost. Stover’s defenses, while insightful, often don’t hold up in other ways: Ghost in the Shell is far, far deeper then his witness’s depiction of it. It should be an example of how not to use other works in comparison.
Metatone 07.01.12 at 7:13 am
Bit of an aside, but anyone else noticed that 90% of Star Wars books are not on Kindle in the UK? Anyone know why? (Beyond the generic curse – “Publishers!”)
Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy is just the right kind of brain candy for long travel days when you’re tired – but somehow despite promises it still isn’t on UK Kindle…
Metatone 07.01.12 at 7:14 am
(My last comment prompted by finding that the Brin/Stover book is not on UK Kindle.)
Andrew Smith 07.01.12 at 7:40 am
Metatone, the US amazon account has a lot more of the slightly-less-popular (incl. star wars books) than the oz one does. I imagine the same thing is true in the UK. How does one get a US amazon account?
yeah! Because rock is crap. And blues is crappier. And modern music is brilliant and crazy, can I call you maybe?
Walt 07.01.12 at 7:41 am
I’m impressed you were so easy to convert, Andrew. Congratulations!
John Holbo 07.01.12 at 1:11 pm
“I don’t know if Brin or Stover count as good arguments. Brin relies heavily on the reader sharing with him the history of American cinema or hard SF: If you don’t know either, the argument is completely lost.”
I’m planning to teach him in a class in which we review the history of American sf cinema, so that’s (mostly) alright. And his argument fits in nicely with others I intend to review: H.G. Wells contra “Metropolis”, and (of course) Plato contra the Poets in the Polis. I don’t really agree with either Brin or Stover. But that’s ok. I’m not sure either of them fully agrees with them. Both are exaggerating, by way of taking up the requisite, adversarial, argumentative posture. I’m hoping that will make them pedagogically useful.
mattski 07.01.12 at 1:12 pm
I have outlived Elvis’ hype, and with luck I will outlive Led Zeppelin’s.
Not to get into the weeds here but… if you just ignore the lyrics which are often impossibly inane, the brilliance of the music is hard to deny.
Marahall 07.01.12 at 2:13 pm
On retrograde phantasy, what about A Song of Fire and Ice which teaches that not only the mutant chosen ones the important people, but that their dance leads inevitably to the destruction even of Agriculture? I think it’s a stretch to say that this sort of thing is teaching a turning away from the modernist agenda, since leaders only lead where there are followers, but as an indicator it isn’t encouraging.
John Holbo 07.01.12 at 2:19 pm
“the lyrics which are often impossibly inane”
“And Gollum, and the EEEVIL One, crept up and slipped away with her, heeeeer.”
Brin complains about fantasy infecting science fiction. We shouldn’t neglect the parallel problem of fantasy infecting the Delta Blues.
tomslee 07.01.12 at 2:47 pm
I’m preparing to teach “Philosophy and Film†again, and since I always focus on SF
Always? Can I ask what the gender ratio is in your classes?
John Holbo 07.01.12 at 3:25 pm
“Can I ask what the gender ratio is in your classes?”
About the usual – not conspicuously skewed male, if that is what you are wondering. When I say I ‘always’ focus on SF that shouldn’t be taken to mean that’s it’s only SF in some narrow way. It’s the spine I’ve opted for. The idea is not to nerd out all semester but to take a sane cut from the history of cinema, and coordinate it with some philosophy issues. We start with Melies and that good old trip to the moon. Melies saw film as an extension of the stage wizardry he had previously practiced. There is, of course, a natural tie-in with later effects extravaganzas. “Metropolis”. “The Wizard of Oz”. “Star Wars” changes things forever by making Hollywood go for effects extravaganzas ever after. Big cinematic watershed. What did that do for ‘philosophy in film’?
SF is a paradigm of what spectacle-focused cinema is like, so I take it as a focus, to get a handle on spectacle; but it isn’t the whole story of film spectacle. Related issue: sf prides itself on being the fiction of ideas. So there is some tension if it turns out most sf film is, erm, a bit on the summer blockbuster eye-candy side. I also branch out from sf proper into metaphysics generally. Films that center around ‘metaphysical mcguffins’ as I call them: “Groundhog Day”, “Exterminating Angel”, “Being John Malkovich”. Something metaphysically bizarre happens and there really isn’t a reason for it. But it’s the hinge for the story. How different is that from, say, the monolith in “2001”? Again, I try to use sf as a staging ground for talking about other areas of cinema. Another example: what is the philosophical difference, if any, between a con film like Mamet’s “The Spanish Prisoner” and a Full Monty virtual reality scenario like “Inception”? SF gives us some blaringly clear appearance/reality thematics, which we can then tone down or extend in various directions.
I tell students that if they hate sf film they may still find the lectures quite interesting, if ‘philosophy and film’ interests them – even if they choose not to attend absolutely all the screenings. They can write a final paper about why the fact that they hate sf proves that they are philosophically wise. Or something like that.
There was a moment in the now rather distant past when I decided: comedy or sf? Comedy or sf? I wanted something less than everything, genre-wise. I went for sf and will stick with it until I get bored.
John Holbo 07.01.12 at 3:30 pm
I also thought about going for all Singing Cowboy films.
Watson Ladd 07.01.12 at 3:52 pm
Wait, Brin is Plato? Brin is arguing for a kind of literature that provides exactly the kind of moral instruction that Plato thinks is impossible! It’s Strove who is defending a position similar to that Socrates takes in Ion, in which reason and its role in literature are dismantled and replaced by a divinely inspired emotional catharsis. Great epics require bad guys who need to die. To concretize this, the Foundation trilogy is clearly the novelization of philosophers discussing government. If Plato were a novelist, he would have written something similar to it instead of the Republic.
tomslee: It’s hard to think of what to say about Philosophy in film that doesn’t involve SF, unless you want to go all the way to pure aesthetics of film. One could write about The Last Metro and how the defense that the director mounts of his living in France is rooted in notions of humanism for example. But such a film is not really posing to us any philosophical problem. It’s of course possible to have such a contrivance as The Trolly Problem, but what does that add to a simple statement of philosophy?
Brazil and 1984 can make put the question of the nature of government far more sharply then Mr. Smith Goes to Washington because of the removal of their setting from reality. We look at them and our world in a way we are driven to think anew about. This distancing effect, what Brecht aimed to achieve through other means, enables a function as a space for social reflection not possible other ways.
phosphorious 07.01.12 at 3:53 pm
“sf prides itself on being the fiction of ideas. So there is some tension if it turns out most sf film is, erm, a bit on the summer blockbuster eye-candy side.”
This might be the source of the vague misgiving I have about this new age of comic book movies. It seems to me that only Nolan’s Batman movies that try to be more than spectacle. I loved The Avengers, but it was as an action movie that I loved it.
BillCinSD 07.01.12 at 4:00 pm
Andrew, you forgot stolen as a description for Zep’s music.
John Holbo 07.01.12 at 4:05 pm
“Wait, Brin is Plato? Brin is arguing for a kind of literature that provides exactly the kind of moral instruction that Plato thinks is impossible!”
It ain’t perfect, the Brin-as-Plato. This is broad brush-strokes to organize my syllabus. But I don’t see that Brin is arguing for something Plato thinks is impossible. What is the specific impossibility thesis you have in mind? (Obviously one problem here is that Plato is a tricksy sort of writer.)
Watson Ladd 07.01.12 at 4:13 pm
Is everyone prosecuting poets now Plato? I’m thinking about the section in the Republic of what kind of stories will be allowed: Plato wants heroic epics of persons doing their duty successfully, while Brin is advocating for a much wider and nuanced view of how fiction helps our development. I think there is enough of a difference to make this comparison really unhelpful.
Barry Freed 07.01.12 at 4:14 pm
Brazil and 1984 can make put the question of the nature of government far more sharply then Mr. Smith Goes to Washington because of the removal of their setting from reality. We look at them and our world in a way we are driven to think anew about.
While having nothing to do with the nature of government this is one reason why Buffy was so damned good.
tomslee 07.01.12 at 5:57 pm
John Holbo #14: “skewed male” was, of course, what I was wondering, so thanks for the explanation.
Watson Ladd: It’s hard to think of what to say about Philosophy in film that doesn’t involve SF. Really? I mean, I’m neither a philosopher nor a film geek but I’d have thought there is plenty to talk about regarding perception and reality (Rashomon, Mulholland Drive, and all those unreliable narrator films), about human relationships, about alienation (Hanecke), and much of interest in social realist dramas.
LFC 07.01.12 at 6:19 pm
Re the OP’s opening paragraphs: I don’t own an MP3 player — though I suppose, come to think of it, one could listen to an MP3 album on one’s computer — and I have never bought any music online. (In fact, I haven’t bought a CD in a store in a very long time, which is the only way I’ve ever bought music.) I also don’t own a Kindle.
LFC 07.01.12 at 6:21 pm
Correction: I might have bought an old-fashioned record or two before CDs existed.
parsimon 07.01.12 at 6:23 pm
Cripe, LFC, I guess you might not even like buying via Amazon either.
LFC 07.01.12 at 6:34 pm
Actually I have bought books now and then via Amazon (and other online sites, e.g. Abe Books, and Powells at least once). But have not bought music (CDs) via Amazon, though I’ve occasionally thought about doing so.
trevelyan 07.01.12 at 6:38 pm
I believe this is the first comment I’ve ever left on Crooked Timber, so I hope it doesn’t come across as terribly fanboy-ish. But I’m also disheartened by the lack of intellectual sophistication in most SF film criticism, and particularly David Brin’s comments on Lucas. Especially since there is better film criticism out there:
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/38/clones1.php
The essay covers several points (such as the purpose of the infamous Greedo edit), but one worth noting here is that as Lucas shows us visuals of the Republic embracing militarism, he also gives us visuals of 3CPO suffering a “biblical fall” and transforming into a battle droid. Disregarding the questionable dramatic value of this scene, surely anyone familiar with literary or film analysis can note that the underlying metamorphosis here (from diplomat to warrior) is the exact same transformation made by the “good guys” throughout the film, all of whom repeatedly abandon diplomacy and pacifism in order to embrace as a means to an end. And in every single confrontation in the film, this aggression is shown to be hollow and self-defeating.
So it is hard to take Brin’s comments on Star Wars seriously. The man either fails to understand allegory or seems incapable of recognizing it. At the very least, it is completely nonsensical to confuse a deliberately anti-war (and anti-Bush) message of pacifism with a romance of authoritarianism.
bob mcmanus 07.01.12 at 7:41 pm
22.2: Perhaps Anglo-American philosophy has become so narrow, specialized, and abstruse that it can no longer find anything of interest in the films of Godard, Antonioni, Bergman.
John Holbo 07.01.12 at 11:36 pm
“So it is hard to take Brin’s comments on Star Wars seriously. The man either fails to understand allegory or seems incapable of recognizing it. At the very least, it is completely nonsensical to confuse a deliberately anti-war (and anti-Bush) message of pacifism with a romance of authoritarianism.”
He understands allegory. But I think he does not conflate the presence of allegory with philosophical sophistication. Allegory can be a stupid thing, after all. This is one of the only points on which Brin seems in line with a lot of classic literary/film criticism, actually: heavy-handed ‘this means that’ messaging somewhat deprecated as an account of what work is being done. The “Clone Wars” as anti-Bush allegory argument is one of the main arguments for the defense, contra Brin, in the book. Brin’s response is, in part, that he is more concerned with Episodes IV-VI, because those are the better films in the series – more paradigmatic of why the films have the status it do; in part, he is saying that the counter-evidence is comparatively superficial as to how even “Clone Wars” ‘works’. In part he is saying that the thematic point trevelyn is pushing is strained apologetics for Lucas. The whole thing is a hash, in which anti-Bush messages cut one way, and other things cut another way and the whole thing makes no sense.
I don’t fully buy Brin’s argument, but it isn’t nonsense, in my view.
“Perhaps Anglo-American philosophy has become so narrow, specialized, and abstruse that it can no longer find anything of interest in the films of Godard, Antonioni, Bergman.”
Perhaps. But I have my doubts.
bianca steele 07.02.12 at 12:00 am
LFC, you can buy MP3s and copy them from your computer to a CD, though the quality won’t quite as good as if you bought the CD (unless maybe you spring for the higher-quality digital format).
Ted 07.02.12 at 12:57 am
The Elvis Costello record they have up (“When I Was Cruel”) is a really excellent one. I’m one of those fans of his who loves his early stuff and then loses interest around “Punch the Clock.” This one has some of the old anger and bite.
Watson Ladd 07.02.12 at 5:46 am
tomslee: A dead man testifies about his death in Rashomon, Muholland Drive has a being so terrifying looking at it kills you, in addition to the Club Silencio sequence. Every unreliable narrator film is about a world being constructed to be a lie. Of course your point is well taken: there can be philosophical aspects to works that aren’t SF. But some aspects, say the relation of man to new technologies, are not likely to be expressed in other forms. (Chaplin’s Modern Times is one example, but should be be surprised Metropolis explores a similar theme?)
trevelyan 07.02.12 at 7:49 am
@John Holbo,
It is not the case that the philosophy is peurile or that “anti-Bush messages cut one way, and other things cut another way and the whole thing makes no sense.” It is the case that Brin does not know how to read a film.
http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~anne/clones.html
And it is absurd that Brin berates Lucas for romanticizing violence and authoritarianism, while excoriating the deliberate edits.
trevelyan 07.02.12 at 7:53 am
@John Holbo,
It is not the case that the philosophy is peurile or that “anti-Bush messages cut one way, and other things cut another way and the whole thing makes no sense.†It is the case that Brin does not know how to read a film.
“A filmmaker who grew from boyhood to maturity in the 1960s, Lucas is developing his six-part whole as, among other things, an epic political critique—in part from a 1960s make-love-not-war perspective, but without a sixties’ naivety about human nature—of the unrestrained political and economic appetite which hundreds of years ago, his films imply in their visual allusiveness (the Roman-like circus/amphitheatre sequences in both Phantom Menace and Clones), destroyed the Roman Empire (turning it into a dictatorial, bread-and-circuses Empire), which in the earlier twentieth century destroyed pre-Nazi Germany and Europe, with the rise of Hitler and his stormtroopers, and which, the saga indirectly suggests (in its political and economic terminology, American archetypal protagonists, and historical and popular culture references) has the potential as surely today to destroy democratic capitalist nations and especially the republic of contemporary Americaâ€
http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~anne/clones.html
And it is absurd that Brin berates Lucas for romanticizing violence and authoritarianism, while criticizing the deliberate changes (like the Greedo edit) he has made to make his older films philosophically consistent with his newer ones and eliminate philosophical and thematic inconsistencies.
John Holbo 07.02.12 at 3:05 pm
Well, feel free to make your case that Brin doesn’t know how to read a film, trevelyan. He is familiar with the sorts of readings you are proposing. He doesn’t buy it, but not because he’s unaware that it is possible to read these films – or any film – in this sort of allegorical way.
Ginger Yellow 07.02.12 at 7:42 pm
Metatone, the US amazon account has a lot more of the slightly-less-popular (incl. star wars books) than the oz one does. I imagine the same thing is true in the UK. How does one get a US amazon account?
You can’t, as such. It’s impossible to buy Kindle books from Amazon.com if you’re in the UK, even if you have an email registered there and are using a Kindle bought in the US. I’ve heard conflicting reports as to whether you can buy internationally directly from the Kindle device, but the system is designed to prevent cross-border sales.
Ginger Yellow 07.02.12 at 7:42 pm
Of course, using a US proxy might circumvent the restriction…
bianca steele 07.02.12 at 8:47 pm
I was under the impression that you could buy US books for your US-bought Kindle while you were in the UK, by connecting over wireless and shopping on the Kindle itself. You just can’t (I thought) buy on a computer and have the book sent to the device (or read it on the computer for that matter).
As a result of the Rousseau thread I found out you can search French e-editions on Amazon.com even when you can only by them from Amazon.fr. I personally would be happy to buy foreign language e-books from my local bookseller someday instead.
Jerry Vinokurov 07.02.12 at 9:03 pm
This has to be a competitor for “Most Staggeringly Incorrect CT Comment Ever”.
trevelyan 07.02.12 at 9:21 pm
John,
I don’t want to hijack your thread if this sort of discussion is unwelcome. That said, perhaps you can simply be forthright about what exactly you consider “strained” about the analysis? Which particular assertion do you find unconvincing, and/or which character or event do you find it difficult to reconcile with the argument that Lucas is giving us a moral lesson in pacifism?
To restate the argument: Brin correctly observes that the “heroes” in Star Wars are not always good. He interprets this as implying that Lucas has authoritarian tendencies. What he does not understand is that Lucas is deliberately linking (1) the downfall of individuals to their failure to master subconscious aggressive tendencies, and (2) the downfall of democratic political systems to the rise of taboo behavior and particularly greed among its political class.
This reading is easily supported by attention to the allegorical, symbolic and cinematic references Lucas layers onto his film. These are discussed in the pieces linked above, but even if we ignore all of these more subtle ways that Lucas winks at his audience and condemns his leads for their aggression, the dead giveaway that Lucas is not endorsing violence comes in the fact that he continually punishes the aggressors in his films by killing them. When Luke attacks rather than “confronts” his father in Empire, he suffers a biblical fall and crucifixion as a result. This pattern holds in basically every confrontation in the film, and in the one case where it clearly didn’t (the Greedo shot), Lucas went back and unapologetically fixed it.
With regards, and the hope this makes the point slightly clearer.
tomslee 07.03.12 at 12:53 am
#39 makes it look like I made the most staggeringly incorrect etc. Just for the record, I didn’t.
John Holbo 07.03.12 at 9:35 am
“I don’t want to hijack your thread if this sort of discussion is unwelcome.”
No, not unwelcome at all. That’s what this thread is for, if anything.
First, I don’t want to fully take Brin’s side. I think he somewhat exaggerates for effect. In fact, clearly he intends to do that, to some extent, so it’s a better idea to ask ‘is there some truth to what he’s saying?’ not ‘is he going overboard?’, because the answer to the latter question is obviously ‘yes’, whereas the answer to the former question is not obviously ‘no’.
That said, your first point against him seems like a clean miss.
“To restate the argument: Brin correctly observes that the “heroes†in Star Wars are not always good. He interprets this as implying that Lucas has authoritarian tendencies.”
Brin isn’t saying anything like: it’s bad to have tragic characters, or flawed characters. He isn’t saying that if heroes have bad characteristics, it follows that those bad characteristic are really good. (That would be a really strange argument.)
He also isn’t saying that Lucas is a war-monger. But he is saying his pacificism is presented in a thematically muddled way.
Let me suggest a place to start in reading him. Read all the stuff about Yoda. (Obviously that’s all over the place, but at least you can search inside.) Stover and other witnesses for the defense try to argue that Lucas is making sophisticated points about how flawed the Jedi are, leading to their downfall. That is, neither the Sith nor the Jedi represent a valid spiritual vision. Brin doesn’t say it would be a terrible thing to present such a view, in which there are no heroes. Rather, he says this moral picture just doesn’t come through.
Brin: “Your Honor, the Prosecution is perfectly willing to stipulate that Luke Skywalker is a righteous dude and a swell guy. He may be dim, but at no point is he anything other than a stalwart fellow, ethical, brave and true. He well and truly represents what we have already accepted as the superficial – or childlike – moral lessons of Star Wars. For example, “be loyal to your friends,” “be brave” and “mean people suck.” Furthermore, we are further willing to admit, as Scott Lynch ably points out, that Luke winds up defying his Jedi Masters, questioning their authority, overcoming their mistakes and helping to bring about a new Order that might – one can hope – rise above the flaming lunacy that both sides of the old Force represent. Nevertheless, the question at issue here is not the relative goodness of Luke Skywalker, but the lessons that are taught by this science fiction epic. Both Jedi and Sith get-across all six films-about an hour of on-screen time to lecture us about their horrific light-and-dark versions of nastiness. Are we supposed to then rely on the public to analyze the situation, in the very last five minutes of Return of the Jedi, and say to themselves, aloud: “Aha! Luke and his friends rejected all that Force crap in favor of a world of openness and egalitarian democracy!” Are we, really?”
The defense then suggests: yes, that is a more sophisticated reading of the film as a tragedy, maybe minus the snark.
Brin doesn’t buy it. He thinks the enticingly inconsistent bits that suggest this reading against the grain are just sloppy storytelling.
Brin: “But then, if George Lucas wanted to make a point of all this, might he have given a hint, in dialogue, that anything like this was in mind? (It could have happened. One minor Qui-Gon-like character, in ROTJ, could have put a seed in our minds, about a “third way, the way of freedom.”) Isn’t the test quite simple? What fraction of the viewing fans of Star Wars would stand up and avow-as my honorable adversary has-that Obi-Wan and Yoda really are a “pair of shifty-eyed sons-of-bitches”?
So again it’s not that Brin says it’s wrong to have heroes who are shifty-eyed sons of bitches. It’s that he doubts Lucas either intended or succeed in making his Jedi into anything of the sort, in an artistically successful way.
That’s a better start than what you’ve got, although this isn’t a fully adequate statement of Brin’s point either.
Metatone 07.03.12 at 3:12 pm
Since it’s not on Kindle UK, I haven’t read it, but I suspect that (distressingly) I side with Brin.
It makes a lot of sense to read Star Wars as centred on an anti-modern mystical core battle. You can reach for other readings (Han Solo as a non force using character who changes history) but when you get down to it, the spectacle and excitement rest on the Force at key moments. And the Force users are some kind of hereditary aristocracy of power.
However, it’s worth noting that Brin’s “justified emotions” thing isn’t just repudiating the Buddhism lite that Lucas seems to favour, but Stoic thought and other humanist schools too.
Still, what nags at me most about Brin’s critique is that many of his counterexamples seem to postulate worlds of plenty, where Star Wars is explicitly set in realms of limited resources. There’s a valid role for utopias, but it’d be nice if literate, humanistic Sci-Fi as championed by Brin more often took on the realities of the American Dream, as opposed to the dream of it.
Jerry Vinokurov 07.03.12 at 4:14 pm
Sorry about that. Formatting fail on my part.
trevelyan 07.03.12 at 5:48 pm
Hi John,
Brin repeatedly accuses Lucas of being “anti-democratic and elitist”, and attacks him for promoting violence (“Got a problem? Cleave it with a lightsaber!”). If you think it makes sense to soften this claim to “thematically muddled” I won’t argue the point, but then you are still left with same problem as Brin: pointing out where Lucas is in fact thematically inconsistent.
Brin makes allegations rather than presenting evidence. The snippet you cite is a fairly good case in point, and do a good job illustrating some of the problems with his approach. Let’s take a look:
Why on earth does Brin believe this? Luke is brave and loyal when rushing to save his friends in Empire, but Lucas criticizes his rescue attempt on both a narrative and symbolic level. And he is not alone — many other characters are brave and loyal and die for their troubles because they use violence as a means to an end. Among the more prominent examples, Qui-Gon dies attacking Darth Maul, Mace Windu dies attempting to kill Palpatine, the Gungans are slaughtered when they attack the Trade Federation, and the Jedi are exterminated marching into battle.
So right away we can see that Lucas has a much more complicated view of morality than Brin assumes. And far from being muddled about it, Lucas is consistent in making the relatively sophisticated point that even positive impulses can be dangerous if they lead people to embrace violence. The idea that violence can accomplish good is the temptation of the dark side. Lest we forget, the original trilogy had Darth Vader attempt to seduce Luke with the lure of peace (“join me and end this destructive conflict”), while the Emperor tempted him to violence by threatening his sister. Anakin is seduced to the dark side first through his attachment to his mother and then through his desire to protect Amidala from death.
If Lucas is thematically muddled, it should be easy to simply marshal evidence of where he is actually inconsistent. But where is this? Not only is Lucas consistent in punishing aggression, he is even-handed at rewarding characters who reject violence. The endings of Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace offer perfect cases in point, since both films have tripartite endings in which victory for the good guys only occur once they choose (in Jedi) or are forced (in Menace) to adopt defensive strategies.
And here I thought Luke rejected authoritarianism at the end of Empire!
John Holbo 07.04.12 at 12:59 am
trevelyan,
I think one reason Brin thinks the film is muddle is that it’s hard for a movie that appeals primarily on a ‘swashbuckling and sword-fights are awesome!’ level to articulate a coherent ‘violence is bad’ message. The original movies were Flash Gordon serial fun. They had ‘messages’, of course, but as Brin says, the messages were pretty simple. The idea is that, even if Lucas is trying to turn the boat around, it just doesn’t turn that easily and the results are thematic mush.
“And here I thought Luke rejected authoritarianism”
Everyone rejects authoritarianism, nominally. That’s easy. The question is whether Lucas does so in a coherent and interesting way. The complaint is that the film doesn’t encourage us to see an ideal that isn’t, in effect, a feudal ideal. But feudalism, even if ideally not a form of bad authoritarianism, is not the ideal way to think our way out of authoritarianism.
Let’s sharper it up a bit: do you think the film tells us to reject all this Force crap because the Jedi are almost as bad as the Sith? I think Brin’s point that no one actually takes away this message from the films is a valid one.
Again, I don’t actually agree with Brin about everything and am just taking his side for educational reasons!
trevelyan 07.04.12 at 6:10 pm
Hi John,
Do you disagree that Star Wars offers a coherent message of pacifism and democracy? If not you must agree that Brin is incorrect in his reading of the film. If you are not sure or just feel like arguing for Brin as devil’s advocate or to promote discussion, then the obligation must surely be on you to cite at least a single instance from any of the six films where Lucas paints aggression in a positive light.
Whether Lucas’ brand of enlightened pacifism constitutes a sophisticated message is a separate question, but I believe the very existence of this debate speaks in favor of the defense. If the political commentary is simple and childlike then it is damning that no-one in the popular press noticed the anti-war sentiment until the end of Episode III. David Brin continues not to even address the arguments today.
Brin is asserting something that is not true. Star Wars does not advocate feudalism or elitism. Let us address the complaints:
There are certainly heroes in the story: but in the Campbell monomyth the hero’s journey is an archetype that is intended to reflect the universal human experience. So Brin is misreading Campbell. He accuses the monomyth of having a single “plot line” where what it really offers is an allegorical framework for reading many traditional hero stories. The essence of this interpretation is the claim that the villains in these stories represent the externalized potential for evil that lies within the hero figure. Lucas has admitted to basing much of Star Wars on Campbell, so it is bizarre to see Brin argue that the heroes in Star Wars are intended to be superior to the common man rather than representative of him.
This leaves Brin with a meta-argument that Star Wars still has an elitist subtext. But this falls apart when one looks at the film because Lucas not only rejects violence among his elite (and why should being better at fighting/dying make one elite in a film condemning violence?), but he rejects it for all of the major characters in his saga regardless of whether they have mystical powers. Leia grapples with the same feelings of problematic desire in the original trilogy that Amidala faces with Anakin, while Han struggles both metaphorically and literally with greed(o). These non-Jedi pass through the same character arc as their Jedi counterpart, to the point where Lucas even gives Han and Leia their own hallucinatory journey-into-the-id in the original trilogy. At almost the same time Luke travels into the tree cave and encounters his own potential for evil, Han and Leia give in to temptation and come under attack by a phallic space-worm.
The recurring political cycles of the film (Roman Empire, WWII, modern America) and the timeless placement of the drama (simultaneously past and future) further stress that these struggles are recurring and thus universal to the human experience. So does the way the characters change, and yet their moral challenges remain the same. Darth Vader’s temptation of Luke in Empire repeats Palpatine’s seduction of the younger Anakin. Less obviously, when Obi-Wan arrives in a giant cave in Episode III and is told “there is no war here unless you have brought it,” it should spark us to recall Yoda’s admonition to Luke about the other cave that contained “only what you take with you.” The violence which is unleashed in both cases is meant as negative commentary by Lucas on the moral failings of his characters for choosing violence over peace.
The answer is both yes and no. It should be apparent that the new trilogy starts with the Republic in “balance” and shows its fall into Imperial despotism (the comparison point in the original trilogy is Bespin). The color symbolism in the ongoing visuals of Coruscant should be enough to make this point clear. But even without them or the countless more sophisticated ways Lucas depicts the moral decay of the city in Episodes I and II, we get unassailable evidence of collapse in the opening crawl to Episode III, which boldly refers to “heroes on both sides” and thus implies the presence of villains on both sides as well.
Getting to the point — while Lucas intends us to criticize the individuals in the new trilogy for their lack of control over their destructive subconscious impulses, it is wrong to assert that the Jedi are “as bad as the Sith,” because the Jedi and Sith are less political factions than allegorical constructs in the Campbell tradition. Just as the Republic and Empire represent the duel potential for societies to be democratic or authoritarian (Coruscant switches between the two), so do the Jedi and the Sith represent the dual potential of individuals for both good and evil (and multiple characters switch between the two). This allegorical subtext is the fundamental reason neither the light side nor the dark side can ever be fully eradicated in the Star Wars universe, since these impulses will continue to exist as long as mankind does. It is also the reason for the otherwise inexplicable “Jedi-radar” and “Sith-radar” that some characters seem or fail to possess. Vadar can sense the presence of Luke in Return of the Jedi where Palpatine cannot because Vadar still has good within him and thus can recognize it in the world beyond him. Conversely, the Jedi Council in the new trilogy is blind to the presence of the Sith both among them and in the Senate because they are blind to their own potential for evil and thus cannot recognize it in others.
Put plainly, the Star Wars saga is operating on a level of symbolic and allegorical sophistication that Brin never comes close to recognizing and refuses to engage with. To provide one small side note that should show the sophistication with which Lucas manipulates symbolism, let us assert that the Jedi Council’s blindness to its own potential for evil is also the reason for its ignorance of both the Gungans on Naboo and the clones on Kamino. Both of these races are militarist ones symbolically associated with the subconscious through their aquatic environments. And while the delivery of the clone army marks the ascent of the aggressive subconscious in the most obvious terms, it is no less significant than the way Lucas engineers having the childish Jar Jar (warrior) replace Amidala (diplomat) as the deciding vote in the Senate.
trevelyan 07.07.12 at 8:51 am
@John,
No reply, so let me just close this thread by suggesting some readings you might want to incorporate in your course if you are tackling Star Wars. There are no online versions of these as far as I’m aware, but they are seminal readings and well-worth dredging out of your local library:
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon Books, 1961.
Gordon, Andrew. “Star Wars: A Myth for Out Time.” Literature/Film Quarterly 6 (1978): 314-326.
Lancashire, Anne. “Complex Design in The Empire Strikes Back.” Film Criticism 5.3 (1981): 38-51.
Lancashire, Anne. “Return of the Jedi: Once More with Feeling.” Film Criticism 8.2 (1984): 55-66.
Lancashire, Anne. “The Phantom Menace Repetition, Variation, Integration.” 24,3 (2000): 23-44.
Once you have the basics with the original trilogy you can easily extend the same analytic logic to the new trilogy and see the consistency across the saga. When you see a cave or underwater sequence, ask if you are being shown a metaphorical journey into the id. Pay attention to moon/sun/mask/cloud imagery and when you see a visual or dialogue allusion to another film (Ran, Ben Hur, Metropolis, The Searchers, etc.), assume the reference is intentional (Lucas was a student of cinema) and ask why he is making the reference. Watch individual fight scenes and you’ll begin to see notice the way attackers invariably lose, or are engineered into a losing position by Lucas in order to reverse the logic of battle and offer a temporary victory. And don’t worry so much about “the force” — it is irrelevant to the point of the films.
I suspect if you take this sort of thing serious you’ll end up with a much more fulfilling and complex discussion of the saga. The new trilogy has its problems, particularly in the realism of the final film and the way it is hard to sympathize with Anakin. But once you start reading the saga as allegory and political commentary it is hard not to be delighted on a separate level with the sheer audacity of the structure. Tiny lines such as “blue for the boy, red for his mother” are loaded with meaning, and many small details — such as the positioning of Palpatine’s seduction of Anakin in front of a water ballet — will leap out as quite clever. And who can fault a summer blockbuster which takes as a central theme the corrupting influence of corporatism on democratic political institutions?
And one more reason to take this stuff seriously as an academic — these allusions are quite common and resurface in a great deal of more literary sci-fi. We see the same treatment of water in both Artificial Intelligence and Inception (“the shores of our subconscious”). The most sensible readings of the former (as a search for God) and the latter (Matthew 7.24 and a parable of faith) are difficult to decipher without reading the symbolic subtext. But how rewarding!
John Holbo 07.07.12 at 1:10 pm
Sorry I didn’t notice your response to mine a couple days ago, trevelyn. Otherwise I would have replied. As it is I’m a bit busy tonight so here’s something quick.
“Do you disagree that Star Wars offers a coherent message of pacifism and democracy? If not you must agree that Brin is incorrect in his reading of the film. If you are not sure or just feel like arguing for Brin as devil’s advocate or to promote discussion, then the obligation must surely be on you to cite at least a single instance from any of the six films where Lucas paints aggression in a positive light.”
I don’t think Star Wars offers a coherent message of pacifism and democracy, no. The single instance would be: every scene in which there is an awesome fight that thrills. Luke blowing up the Death Star, for example. Or Luke, Leia and Han fighting their way through the Death Star. You can say that these are all cases in which the heroes are forced to fight. But the fact is: it’s thrilling, swashbuckling violence. Now I expect you will say: but the heroes aren’t angry and aggressive. They are fighting in self-defense and so forth. But I don’t really buy it. I think the texture of the swashbuckling adventure story pulls apart from the Yoda sermonizing.
As to reading Joseph Campbell: definitely gotta talk about that if you are going to talk “Star Wars”. Yes, of course.
Maybe more later. But thanks for comments either way.
trevelyan 07.07.12 at 4:17 pm
Hi John,
Thanks for the reply. This is a break from actual work for me, so if you want to continue I’m happy to, leaving it to you to come up with specific examples and trying to address them as best I can. Just to address your two specific points:
Specific examples are great.
And yes. The rescue attempt by Han and Luke shows our heroes embracing violence. But it also shows this to be a failure, something Leia even comments on when the three are cornered in the detention center and forced to plunge down a garbage chute into what is essentially a death trap.[1] And regardless of whether we read the monster in the water as allegorically reflecting the subconscious violent tendencies of our leads (there will be many more of these), the total failure of force to accomplish anything but put our heroes in more immediate distress should be self-evident. Much like the scene in which Han chases a number of stormtroopers only to be shown running away from a greater number in the next scene, we have an almost immediate reversal of fortune in which the embrace of violence puts our characters in a worse situation than before.
And how does the escape actually work? As happens consistently through the saga when violence fails, the rescue is effected by R2D2, a symbol of pacifist friendship who is repeatedly shown avoiding confrontation while on the Death Star. And then the flight from the Death Star is only possible thanks to the self-sacrifice of Obi-Wan Kenobi, a figure whose death is also signaled in advance in the way Lucas shows him drawing his lightsaber first in his confrontation with Vadar. This trend of killing off the aggressors is so consistent across the films it is difficult to argue it is accidental.
As far as the closing battle goes, the Death Star is clearly attacking Yavin at the climax so the example works counter to your argument and we should expect the Empire to lose. Even so, while it should not be necessary to make this point, it is perhaps worth pointing out that even though the Rebels are technically acting defensively, Lucas adds visual allusions to Triumph of the Will in the closing medal ceremony. This is not the sort of reference the general public is going to notice, but to those with a knowledge of film history the reference is clearly critical of the implicit fascism in the Rebel Alliance’s reliance on military force as a means to an end.
[1] Lucas uses a fair amount of biblical symbolism, and falling is never a good sign.
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