nyway, Revenge of the Sith is, so Lucas assures us, a ‘tragedy’. It might have been wise to have stationed an announcer at every movie house to announce this fact over the PA system since it eluded the audience I saw it with last weekend. When the Sith hits the fan, the fan bursts out laughing. Oh, to be sure, they were diverted by the opening dogfight and Obi-Wan Kenobi riding a wild four-legged space beast to hunt down General Grievous. But they were howling with laughter through all the so-called ‘tragic’ elements.
but wait here is the money shot
h, put a lightsabre in it, will you? The allegedly anti-Bush ‘subtext’ has won Lucas the unlikely approval of the Cannes Film Festival crowd, but honestly: how desperate do you have to be to applaud mockery of Bush for seeing everything in black and white from a guy who’s spent 28 years peddling a fairytale so basic the good guys and the bad guys are called the Good Side and the Dark Side. Other enduring pop-culture yarns get going because some fellow comes up with an idea, rattles it off, no big deal — and, if it takes off and hangs around for a few decades, what began as necessary functional plot mechanisms gradually deepen and darken: hence, all those gloomy Batman ‘reinventions’ in which the ‘dark knight’ sits hunched in his cape on a Gotham City rooftop brooding over the death of his parents, his inability to form lasting relationships, etc. Many of us think the conversion of great junk into self-conscious art is not altogether a blessing, but nonetheless it reflects a basic truth: that simply by sticking around long enough, a two-dimensional comic-book character becomes real. With Star Wars, the opposite’s happened:
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