II: Darth Vader (1977)
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| Iconic Darth |
Last week at the Comic Con convention
in San Diego, preview a clip for the newest film in the Star Wars collection was shown,
and (surprise!) the three best-known surviving stars of the original 1977 film
(Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford) made an unannounced appearance to hysterical
acclaim. Even better, they will reappear
in the new epic, along with other stars of the first film.
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| Then |
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| Now |
If I certainly wasn’t around for
the opening performance of La Sylphide,
in 1832, I did see Star Wars with
friends the weekend it opened in San Antonio in 1977. From the first opening scroll to the giving
of the final medal, we were completely entranced. The vividness and fast pace of the action,
the sweeping sense of sheer adventure and quirky fun, real heroes and villains and the battered world of that galaxy
“a long time ago and far, far away,” swept us into a complete and gleeful suspension
of disbelief, and just let us be carried along.
John Williams’ exciting score helped too, with its echoes of Holst’s The Planets and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring amalgamated into its own
originality enhanced the action. When,
regretfully it was over, we all bounced out of the theater, high as kites—or
spaceships.
Like la Sylphide, Star Wars
arrived at a moment in popular culture when the audience was ready for it. After all, otherworldly nymphs had been
wafting around story lines long before The Sylph ever floated by, but it was
the supernatural in that exotic Scottish setting and Doomed Love that resonated
with the audience caught up in Romanticism.
For us, science fiction and fantasy had already existed for 80 years or
more. Both George Lukas and I had grown
up with the klunky Flash Gordon
serials, made in the mid 1930’s on the cheap with recycled sets, blimp-shaped
rocket ships spewing exhaust and reused costumes from second-rate movie
musicals, seen 20 years after their creation on ten-inch TV screens. The first Star Trek series had already come
and gone as well, not to mention Kubrick’s acid-tripping 2001, a Space Odyssey. But
Lukas, over a period of four years, had created a visually rich and very
accessible space world at a moment when the digital age and all its
possibilities and overkill hadn’t yet arrived.
Reviews contemporary with the 1977
premier reflected an almost universal (forgive the pun) intoxication. Vincent
Canby of the New York Times, after
summarizing the plot said:
That's
about all the plot that anyone of voting age should be required to keep track
of. The story of "Star Wars" could be written on the head of a pin
and still leave room for the Bible. It is, rather, a breathless succession of
escapes, pursuits, dangerous missions, unexpected encounters, with each one
ending in some kind of defeat until the final one.
The initial movie became the first of a trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back and Return
of the Jedi continuing the story, a sort of cinematic Ring Cycle, Wagner
more than Tolkien. Not leaving well
enough alone, three more films were made, prequels
to the first three, putting the original Star Wars as episode IV.
These three, necessarily with different casts, over-explained the Jedi
story and Anniken Skywalker’s fall from grace and metamorphosis into Darth
Vader. With newer digitization
techniques, all sorts of magic became effortless—and for me, it was certainly
overkill and very forgettable—like so many Sylphide
knockoffs. And of course all of them,
like La Sylphide, generated all sorts
of Star Wars commercial paraphernalia, on a far greater level, due to all of
the improvements to mass media.
The first Star Wars was actually a great stand-alone film, and has influenced
the science-fantasy world to this day.
Like La Sylphide, serious
scholars of popular culture, as well as religion and philosophy have endlessly
dissected it, and like La Sylphide’s
scholarly literature, basically dehydrating the miracle in the process.
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| Princess Leia of Alderaan |
For the rest of us, we can delight
in Lukas’s archetypes, but not explore it too deeply (has anybody noticed, for
example, that Princess Leia’s hairdo echoes an earlier powerful heroine’s—Ozma
of Oz)? The heroes are all recognizable
in type, even the bots, priggish R2-D2 and that wonderful garbage-can computer
C-3PO. And what about our favorite
Wookie—an extraterrestrial who looks like an amalgamated lion, chow dog and
great ape? And then, there are all of
those critters in the famous bar scene.
On the other hand, the villains of The Empire, with their gray-black
uniforms and the anonymous white troopers certainly invoke all-too human Nazis. Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Laia
are all humans too, and so is the Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobe. There’s just enough human population here for
us to identify with, mixed with those crazy extraterrestrials to make this film
appealing to us humans. Once again, this
is similar to all those Scots in La
Sylphide versus the Sylph and her companions. The fascination of both is that we’re
suspended between the familiar and the fantastic.
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| Princess Ozma of Oz |
And then there’s my favorite
villain, Darth Vader. His appearance,
all black, implied massiveness (though human in scale) made monolithic by his
black cloak and his both fly-like and skull-like mask, and that wonderfully
wheezing and menacing voice! It took three
humans to produce this character, the body, provided by David Prowse, the
lightsaber fighter by Bob Anderson, and the raspy voice by James Earl Jones
(uncredited in the initial movie), plus costume designers and other production
folk. All the “human” actors merely needed stunt-doubles.
Vader evolves through the other
films in the series —indeed as everyone who follows Star Wars in all of its
manifestations knows, how Aniken Skywalker, Jedi knight, went over to the dark
side and became Darth Vader (and a cyborg, no less), is the theme of the
Prequel.
But in the initial film, Vader is a
stand-alone figure, a former Jedi master with the Force still with him, and
already tragic. He is a space-age
equivalent of a World War I – era Prussian General, imbued with an older
chivalry of war, who lives long enough to become a Nazi, but is clearly uncomfortable
within the New Order. In short, a
formidable foe for Obi-Wan Kenobe and Luke Skywalker.
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| Darth Vader and Other Neighboring Gargoyles |
Darth
Vader’s mythic status has been elevated to the world of art as well: he is one
of the gargoyle figures added to the Washington National Cathedral in the
1980’s (and they sell his bobble-head in the gift shop). He has become as universal a figure in black
for the 20th and 21st century as the Sylphide was in white during the
mid-1800’s.
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| Darth Vader as Bobblehead |
We can’t
recreate the initial euphoria and wonder we had in 1977, not only are we older perhaps
more jaded now and over-bombarded with CGI images, but the film itself has
changed. George Lukas modified it
somewhat and added digital footage in 1997 and tweaked it further later on,
partly because of new technologies, but partly to synchronize better with the
succeeding episodes.
Meanwhile,
the iconic Darth Vader mask has been immortalized on the Cathedral, and it
keeps serving as a model-type for other fantasies: just have a look at the
costume of Ant Man, a film that debuted last week!
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| Ant-Man!? |
In the
original Star Wars, George Lukas took universal fantasies and contextualized
them for the 1977 world, much as Filippo Taglioni did for the romantic imagination
of 1832, and both emblems for their times.
Can the upcoming Star Wars VII bring any of that initial magic
back? If so, it will have to satisfy both
the 2015 mindset and the nostalgia for the 1970’s--pretty much what Laclotte
tried for in his 20th century Sylphide
reconstruction.
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Some Sources:
Wikipedia has an excellent article on Star Wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_%28film%29
For an old original episode of Flash Gordon see:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1MOvthQYz4
Vincent Canby's 1977 review in the New York Times is at: http://www.nytimes.com/1977/05/26/movies/moviesspecial/26STAR.html?_r=0
A complete study of the changes that George Lukas made to Star Wars when it was rereleased and made into Episode IV can be found at: http://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=4334040
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