One of the more buzzed about titles at this year’s South by Southwest film festival was Alexandre Phillipe’s The People Vs. George Lucas. As you can guess by the title, Phillipe’s documentary promised to take a courtroom style approach to the debate over whether or not George Lucas was, among other things, in the right when he re-edited the original Star Wars trilogy in the 1990s to make them closer to his intended vision. I stood in line for well over an hour before the film started, watching a few folks parading up and down the line wearing Imperial Stromtrooper outfits while listening to the friendly geeks around me wax philosophical about what Lucas meant to them and whether or not he did indeed rape their childhood with his post-Special Edition antics. Eventually we all filed into the theater, where I then proceeded to listen to geeks I didn’t know wax philosophical about what Lucas meant to them and whether or not he did indeed rape their childhood with his post-Special Edition antics.
I enjoyed the movie, but I did feel a little lied to. This was no debate. There was no courtroom approach to the discussion aside from labeling the non-celebrity talking heads things like “witness to the prosecution”. It was just a 96-minute long continuation of the exact same conversations that had taken place over the course of the 96-minute long wait to get into the movie. But I’m not here to review Phillipe’s film (though, for the record I found it to be a brisk, cleanly assembled bit of non-committal fun that I think will be a great time capsule of nostalgia to stumble upon in another 20 years) and I’m not here to fume about how making Greedo shoot first turns Han Solo into a pussy. I’m here to rhetorically muse over the idea of who actually owns Star Wars?
Obviously Lucas owns its copyrights and he has total authority over the entire Star Wars brand, but once a creative property reaches a critical stage of being “Too Big to Fail” (and, really, Star Wars is kind of in a league of its own here. The only possible joiners being other super-popular sci-fi series like Star Trek or Doctor Who), should it by default become part of the public’s domain? After all, we have been institutional throughout its entire lifespan and without us there would be no phenomenon to talk about in the first place. Naturally I’m not talking about Joe Schmoe with a DVD burner being allowed to legally sell bootlegs of A New Hope or some back-alley dealer making counterfeit toys, but shouldn’t the fans be allowed to take a certain degree of creative license with that which they’ve helped give birth to so long as no average consumer mistakes their fan-made art with the official brand?
Clearly I’m not the only one who thinks so, as evidenced by the, well, lack of evidence to support the opposite. Lucas has never had an itchy finger on the litigation trigger. In fact, he seems to be a big supporter of the fan art movement, often embracing unofficial short films and what not as though they were of his own commission. So, really, what’s to outright hate?
I get the complaints that George Lucas isn’t making the movies he used to and I sympathize with those who think the changes he made to Star Wars were egregious, but the man is hardly a monster. He’s an innovator and a gift giver, even if he is hypocritical (in the ’80s he campaigned for film preservation, only to allegedly alter the original trilogy’s negatives irreparably in the ’90s) and I for one think he deserves a bit more representation in this supposed trial. It’s not as though the prequel films or even the special editions have replaced the original films like some kind of cinematic pod people.
The unadulterated classics we all grew up with still exist and they’re still loved, so why is it that some people just can’t let it go? What is it about Star Wars and George Lucas in general that inspires such vitriol? I’ve got a theory: No one likes growing old. Every alteration, no matter how big or how small, is like hammering nails in the coffin that is idealistic youth. So what do you do when you start to realize life didn’t turn out the way you thought it would back when you daydreamed about Dagobah? You go complain to anyone who will listen, I suppose.
While there are some famous and quite successful people in the documentary, you’ll find that those who seem to be living their dreams (Neil Gaiman, for one) are far less hateful toward Lucas than those who filmed their loathing with a webcam (even the minor celebs like MC Frontalot are more playfully mocking in their tone than they are spiteful). Now that may just be a sample bias arising out of who was available for the documentary, but I’d like to think there’s a nice little revelation there. It’s not the Star Wars superfans or the film-preservation purists who hate Lucas these days, it’s the disenchanted. It’s the people who, deep down, are saddened by the corruption of the seemingly incorruptible, of the arrival of the inevitable. And is that Lucas’ fault? Is he to blame for growing old and changing?
Now I’m not saying that Star Wars fans need to “grow up”, as if that is somehow a miracle cure for fanboyitis, but is all of this really even worth arguing about? If we all just unanimously agree that the Special Editions and Prequels suck, aren’t we all winners in the end? Or by talking about this at all are we all instantly losers? I honestly don’t even know any more. All I know is that Han Shot first and anyone who says otherwise is either an asshole or George Lucas*.
*Dammit, somehow through the course of this article I became disenchanted myself. Time to wait idly by while the Ouroboros that is Star Wars starts to swallow itself and this whole argument comes full circle once more…
Check out last week’s MindFood here
