[May 27th will see the much-anticipated release of the first episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi, the newest Star Wars show. So this week I’ll offer a few ways to AmericanStudy the iconic series and its contexts and connections. May the Force be with us all!]
On how the original Star Wars was directly influenced by a
Japanese film—and, critiques of the American director notwithstanding, why that
influence is a positive thing.
As the 2017 40th
anniversary celebrations illustrate, few cultural texts have had a more
significant and ongoing presence over the last four-and-a-half decades than
George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) and
its many sequels, prequels, novelizations, television spinoffs, parodies, merchandising
and marketing and material culture connections, animated versions,
Wookie-centric Christmas
specials, and the like. Because of that lasting presence, and perhaps
especially because a whole generation of students and scholars (including this
AmericanStudier to be sure) has grown up alongside Luke Skywalker and friends,
Lucas’s prominent debt to
Joseph Campbell’s analyses of heroism and mythologies has likewise been
very well established and documented; which is to say, this is a pop culture
text and artist whose multigenerational and cross-cultural (at least in the
sense of Campbell’s ideas linking myths from multiple cultures) connections and
influences seem already well known.
Far be it for me to disagree with
that longstanding and very thoroughly developed assessment—did you note the
ridiculously comprehensive Lucas-Campbell chart at that hyperlink?—but there’s
another, also very influential and much less broadly known, source for Lucas’s
first film. As this website
conversation highlights, Lucas’s initial story outline for Star Wars (particularly in the story’s
initial events and exposition) closely parallels Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 film The Hidden Fortress; Lucas would
change certain events and details between that outline and the film’s
screenplay, but many of the Kurosawa echoes remained very much present in the
finished film, as mashups of the two movies such as this one cleverly
highlight. Such mashups could be used as exhibits in a plagiarism case against
Lucas, and indeed many who have noted the similarities to Fortress have done so in a critical way, arguing that at least
Lucas owed Kurosawa a more overt acknowledgment of the influence as Star Wars gained in popularity and Lucas
became one of the most famous and wealthiest filmmakers of all time.
Certainly I
believe that Kurosawa’s film should be better known, not only because of its
clear influence on Lucas’s early ideas for his own series, but also because it
seems (from, admittedly, the handful of clips I have seen and the descriptions
I have read) to be an interesting if minor work from one of cinema’s most
prolific and talented artists. Yet far from serving as an indictment of
Lucas or his film, this additional influence highlights, to my mind, just how
genuinely and impressively American Star
Wars really is: inspired in equal measure by centuries of cross-cultural
mythology and a Japanese film, with the seminal fantasy series by a British
author thrown in for good measure; starring young American actors and some
of England’s most established screen veterans; shamelessly cribbing from the
styles and stunts of early serials and pop culture classics like Flash Gordon and Buck
Rogers; with all those elements thrown into a space opera blender and turned
into a hugely unique and engaging entertainment. Lucas had called his first,
much more grounded and local and historically nostalgic, film American Graffiti
(1973)—but it’s Star Wars that really
exemplifies the cross-cultural, multi-genre, intertextual, inspiring mélange
that is American culture and art.
Next
StarWarsStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Star Wars contexts you’d highlight?
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