"My films operate like silent films, the music and visuals are where the story's being told." - George Lucas from an interview reprinted on wired.com
After the anachronism/monochromism of THX, then bypassing the sleeper-success of his I Vitelloni-in-Modesto American Grafitti, Lucas hit metaphysical paydirt with a form of film he invented outright, as Disney, Welles, or Hitchcock before him, he births an entire genre himself, the space opera, its success so immediate that others attempt to duplicate it en masse not really comprehending what they’re imitating. Today they still don’t. Alien, Tron, The Black Hole, The Last Starfighter, Wing Commander, an endless array of copycats appear every summer now, hoping to crack the treasure Lucas found. Lucas’s cinematic evolution is so unusual, that no one except Spielberg comes close to the conditioning (and in homage Lucas gives Spielberg his own Star Wars-like serial, The Indiana Jones films). No single film or filmmaker has arrived to evolve this recent development in pop-craft, the mythic phenomenon, though each year film gives Star Wars a run for its money. Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Transformers, all compete with the ghost of 1977’s summer. Money might be minted, but they can’t unlock the inner. They can't decode the balance between outright visual form and twisting, competing plots (and plot holes). Why is Star Wars an evolution in media? Star Wars hides at various scales a massively formed metaphor inside its frames, a central satiric comment on our species plowing its way through the stars, this singular metaphor drives our kind onscreen to act heroic, destroy, fight, evade, in other words, this drive to succeed as a species defines us as travelers that will ultimately search for spheres to conquer, for colonies to be fought over, citizens and slaves to be controlled and taxed. The sphere. In our primitive space explorations we've landed on both the moon and Mars and Venus, and obviously we relish what little we've achieved as explorers. Lucas builds this from a prototype narrative, the evolutionary 2001, itself too clinical to birth a mythology. Instead Kubrick created some kind of anti-myth, hiding the central metaphor’s meaning too well: he labels the monolith alien, highly advanced- he robs us of any direct mirror to behold. And the metaphor is simple to decode: it's the film screen turned upright, a worshipped form nearly invisible to the audience, embodying this alien intelligence. Lucas avoids the void of the monolith and wisely continues a form-meaning conversion from 2001’s spacecraft narrative. George is simply more literal than Stanley. There in 1968's 2001, Kubrick moves from murder weapon (bone) to phallus-ship-rocket (Pan Am shuttle, where a female plucks a pen out of zero-G to counterbalance the bone), to mirrored wheel (that space station) to sphere (the Moon bound orb) to cybernetic, vertebrae’d cyclops being (the Discovery with HAL's central nervous system). Lucas takes Discovery’s sphere and mega-sizes to the Death Star and populates it with just one sex (maybe discount the prison population: Leia), in fact he hides a coup d’grace by making a majority of the males sourced to a single DNA strand, eventually revealed as Jango Fett. What else is lurking in this film? Subtle tweaks of our own forms searching for a way out of human paradox. It is like a clock after all: all those parts and shapes manuvering from planet to ship to planet. Star Wars is a ravenous, animating form-glyph escape-satire, and unlike his biggest competitor, Kubrick, who ultimately achieved this conflict-as-projected brain architecture with The Shining, he gets to fabricate most of it himself, conjure it out of miniature optics, Kubrick had to collect and frame our currency and past to achieve this form-flow-conflict in The Shining. Both films are conscious and unconscious attempts to resolve paradoxes inherent in our behavior, myths and the languages and encrypt them into physicality, yet A New Hope has a uniqueness no other film achieves. Star Wars is a phenomenological myth audiences root for. Born not in a novel, or a comic, or an epic, it was a rarity, like King Kong, born exclusively in script-form that executed its ideas visually, drawn by numerous, inventive optical thinkers, a reversion towards the orthographic/oral form (it's so fantastic it must be described visually, conversely its dialogue uses fewer words so the visuals do 'the talking'). And in its innovation, it evolves the spoken word epic: the plot that the characters seem to drive is largely irrelevant. It is an evolution back towards glyphic, form-languages, spliced from interpreters as early and as revolutionary as the Pre-Socratics, who deigned vortex and sphere as component metaphors of human experience and pictogrammatic languages that employ syllables. Visual states of being in extremes of our forms. An advacement of phenomenological mythmaking. Not so much a 'story' or a plot, but a fluid attack against our inert, error ridden written and spoken languages, destructive as it questions inherent (Konrad Lorenz would disagree) patterns that are sources of both greatness and total destruction, phenomenological myths revolutionize both the languages they capitalize on and the manner by which the story is told; Star Wars is perhaps the medium’s first epic visual mythology. Like The Odyssey it mocks its own seriousness and laughs at pain and cries at injustice, but unlike it, it has to be projected to be experienced, and it has doorways inside it that are evolved past any written symbol or symbols, no voice or text could encrypt this tale: the myth is almost entirely visual.
The Kaiser and his spherical desire: WWI political cartoon from France.
And unusually, the story keeps crucial ideas hidden from the audience, the real story of Star Wars is buried next to its mirrors, not the hidden mirror alternate realm of The Overlook of Kubrick, the mirrors here are visible, tangible, not reflective. Characters pass between them, stormtroopers are themselves mirrors and share them once two or four or six appear. The lessons of Antonioni, Resnais, Kubrick, the 70’s vogue geniuses that taught Lucas are ripely on display in this space epic but they are treated as displays of computer data, as spacescapes, as explosions, not confined to this mortal storm’s earth, or its metaphysical properties; Lucas expands his mirroring into the outer (which, because none of its audience have been into outerspace, becomes a deeper inner, an optical playground of limitless speeds and reaches — the cortexes innerspace never had it so good until lightspeed came along visually).
The central journey, a boy who discovers how good of a pilot he really is, showcases a similar pathway to 2001 made out of forms: arrows, tri-wings, landspeeders, domes, hooded figures, tusken beings, missing arms, sabers, and finally a simplified conflict, TIE fighters vs. X-Wings and Y-Wings, dogfighting around a massive, destructive holocaust engine sphere. If universal life is born on spheres that orbit stars, then the Death Star (named with Lucas’ panache with joker’s paradox: “farmboy” on a desert planet, a “senate” led by an Emperor) is a sphere that destroys the products of stars. And then if we extrapolate Carl Sagan's space-born biological view that the male is the sun and the female is the oort cloud’s endless stream of icy comets that lubricate planet surfaces with ammonia-laced water, then there is a self-fulfilling rationale to exclude females, males bring this heat to massive battle-play. Here they dessicate and destroy planets with desire for control, a scale-adjustment of our own armageddon-style conflicts. The inverse of a star’s role, to generate light and heat to sustain life in the universe, the universal death-machine, is built by men and machine (not women). At film’s climax, the final battle for the sphere is revealed as metaphorically biological: X and Y’s, the chromosome’s only commonly known distinction, compete like conscious sperm, piloted by men, to drop a torpedo down a shaft that waits at the end of a canyon. Luke does what his Wing Commander cannot, he inseminates this massive, male-designed gametological sphere and darkly inverse-mirrors biocreation with a megasized immolation. He destroys an object-tool that crunches spheres where all life is created and sustained. The last battle resembles our biology massively reversed in both scale and order (the sperm acting as the destroyer not the initiator). As a myth attempting at various scales and levels to remove females from any roles or choices in creation, the final battle of Star Wars is incredibly satiric in undertow and has mythology’s lesson about sun gods like Apollo as backbone. This is no psychology quiz directed by George Lucas, he's questioning our uses of myth in biology, even in phenomenology, this is an instructive lesson for humans, a warning that creation and apocalypse go hand in hand when control is in question, and that this pure fantasy is not a female driven enterprise, it is a drive inherent in males. It’s simple to mistake this as a perverse simplification of creation, but difficult to realize just how riveting this form-metaphor works on the audience both male and female, since each group extracting specific sides of the same joke, no film has achieved anything close to this shared experience in myth or blockbuster: the summary climax was amazingly successful in condensing the entire film into one explosion, Luke actually gasps as the proton torpedoes are cleanly inserted (when an officer is commanded to target Alderaan he replies “…with pleasure.”). Likewise, Lucas must have gasped when the MPAA rated it G initially, Fox was leery of a G and requested an upgrade to PG and was granted its wish.
Almost 30 years later in his mirror-merge of Star Wars, pulled from Sith (these films are unusually paired), Lucas showcases inversely a prediction-visual for the Death Star battle inside a scene that condenses Anakin’s birth story as a coded message from/narrated by his father figure. In a private box with three seats (one person is missing) the tale of Darth Plaguesis, who could create life out of nothing, is told as Anakin and Palpatine romantically watch a massive, spherical orb of water (above) that is circled and penetrated by flying beings. This visual opera, shown only from a distance, predicts The Death Star battle as a water-park musical that duplicates microscopic biology at an absurdly gigantor scale. Accompanied by low singing male voices. Lucas fluidly blends Anakin's origin story with a visual initiation for the Death Star. Anakin’s son destroys this form metaphor one film/20 years later as a prelude to stopping the conflict inside Anakin aboard another mighty sphere. Having his cake and eating it: Lucas directly incorporates an opera as a metaphor of his own Space Opera invention. Below more inside Episode IV.
Though Vader is shown initially emerging from a center point in the gray haze, his second frame is from below and from the right, he exits frame like the Destroyer earlier; now though he is black and the background is white. The ceiling lights duplicate the paragraphs of the opening crawl, above like the destroyer was below the crawl in the initial pan down. Reversal now into darkness, a hand, colored similarly to the skintone of the Rebel troops (not white, pink) inserts a square form below the eye of R2, Lucas reflects a dot of red on his 'eye' that refers to HAL and its infinite blackness, convex on square, is a cyclops version of Vader's eyes. As R2 departs (and Leia departs left), the gray haze they were encircled by has dissipated and a glowing red eye is revealed above R2. R2 leads 3PO away from Leia, in reverse towards a bisecting gray room with two circle forms split from a center. We cut to a trooper emerging from these same animate forms of hallways with an upright rectangle at corridor's end. In reverse we now see Vader standing in a room behind him that duplicates his eyes as doors, the animate hallway forms inside each eye distend deeper into the vessel. Duplicating the previous scene, a stormtrooper enters a hallway alone, centered, then another makes a mirrored pair. Leia now peers from right in her establishing corridor and from within a mirrored mechanical form is shown, her gun aping the piping that juts from the darkness. Notice her hair shape animates with these walls, she kills a trooper with a blast that renders him red (and highlights a ringed mechanical form red), and the trooper returns with a circle of blue light, that passes through reverses, we see both sides of the ring, and it renders her blue.