By Jonathan Alexandratos
In 1998, David Foster Wallace, in his “The (As It Were)
Seminal Importance of Terminator 2”
argued that Cameron’s sequel represented the prototypical film in cinema’s
shift into the realm of “F/X porn.”
Well, he was right. Except,
now, that F/X porn has spread, like ivy up the brick wall of a very old
building, and is on the verge of strangling popular cinema, as its econotropic
leaves open to photosynthesize massive quantities of money into sugary scenes
of meaningless explosions and stock characters and beaten-to-death, basic moral
dilemmas and cheesecake lines like “Chill” and “I am the law!” and anything
normally heard at your local neighborhood Wal*Mart but with a peppering of
“motherfucker” or “bee-otch” or “shiiiiiiit” thrown in. This final nail in the coffin of
innovative, popular, low-budget film has been driven in by Disney’s recent
purchase of Lucasfilm.
It’s tragic, really.
Star Wars (and the original
two sequels that followed) represented the efforts of filmmakers working
overtime, some for next-to-nothing in the way of salary, in a garage or
basement, sanding down household gadgets to make them into X-wings or
lightsabers or TIE fighters. These
films so clearly spoke to archetypal mythology – an obvious lovechild of George
Lucas’ friendship with Joseph Campbell.
They were concerned with taking a story that the Native Americans knew,
the Ancient Greeks knew, the Ancient Chinese knew (et many, many al.) and
putting that tale onscreen, filtered through the lens of genre, more
specifically sci-fi. It was a
literary and social pursuit – more adaptation than creation. The arc of those initial three films in
the Star Wars franchise seemed to be
born out of concern: concern that, if the myths that have followed us through
time are not transcribed onto the popular media of each era, we risk losing the
universal connection that has always, whether widely-known or not, followed
these myths through time.
George Lucas’ ‘90s-era concern with adding an alien frog to
this scene, or an extra Cloud Car to that one, or scrubbing the walls of his
films even cleaner than they originally were showed the start of a
director/producer’s unfortunate interest in the postmodern superficiality of
storytelling. The prequels that
emerged on the heels of these “special” editions fully grounded Lucas in this
mindset. From Episode I, II, and III,
audiences were force-fed ridiculous, contrived plots that were designed not to
build on the universal narrative of humanity, but:
1.
Create the largest Return of Investment (ROI –
something Wallace also indicates Cameron was chiefly concerned with in T2) by billing the biggest possible
names and scripting shallow characters to fit whomever the star du jour might be to fill the role.
2.
Use language that is basic to create a simple
plot that can easily be translated into other languages and distributed
throughout the world, again, to help sales (another quality Wallace attributes
to T2).
3.
Further Wallace’s Inverse Cost and Quality Law
(ICQL) by showing yet another three (!) colossally-funded pictures that display
immensely shitty artistic quality.
4.
Console audiences that these films won’t seem
too long because, after all, they’re just “episodes” (just like TV! Remember how much you love TV? Short, quick TV…), and they contain
lots of pointless action sequences that ensure the movie just *flies* by
because it, while feature-length, uses quick camera angle changes that jolt ad
nearly infinitum and impose the illusion of a shorter film.
5.
Give audiences episodes within these “Episodes”
that are markable by their action sequences (Pod Racing, the Battle of Naboo,
the Clone War) so that the thin bridges constructed to hold these masses
together can basically be skipped. This is much in the same way that Hamlet can be made less daunting by boiling the whole thing down to
six soliloquies. Except Hamlet is actually good.
6.
Focus on the merchandise, merchandise,
merchandise. Star Wars: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Return of the Jedi could let the
mechanics of a particular starship fall second to story because there was less
of a certainty, especially for the first installment, that any of these
galactic vessels would make it into 1/30,435,342-scale plastic replicas with
lights and sounds for the delight of children ages 3+.
And now Star Wars
is in the hands of a corporation that has created a monopoly on the film
industry that would make John D. Rockefeller charge, wild-eyed, up the steps of
the Supreme Court yelling, “And you prosecuted *me*!?” It is in the hands of a corporation
that not only has not read Campbell, but has not read [period]. It has seen only the material that informs its bottom line, all of which
follows the Wallacian ICQL. Disney
has promised to crap out new Star Wars
sequels every couple of years starting in 2015. There are already rumors of the bankable names that will
star. As we approach a date which
the Mayans surely *meant* to put on their calendar, take a look at the above
six items. I’ll be shocked if
Disney does not digitally-enhance all of them so that they look their
sanitized-best when put front-and-center of our new Made-for-Movie TV episodes.
In other words: we’re screwed.*
*Though, if you can get around the feeling that you’re being
pretentious (a struggle I grapple with all the time, now), there are low-budget
diamonds in the roughs of the $2.99 bins at your local, nameless, off-the-grid
DVD/Blu-Ray distributors (and online).
Immerse yourself, take risks, and you’ll be greatly rewarded.
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