Star Wars and the Seraglio

I wrote this in 1999, as a preview piece for the first of the Star Wars prequels. It ends hopefully, but as we now know those hopes were dashed when we actually got to see Episode 1 … and 2 and 3.

The new Star Wars movie, Episode I: The Phantom Menace, is due for release in May in the States and the publicity machine is already well into gear: teasers on the internet, a two and a half minute trailer showing in cinemas, glossy 'sneak' photos in Vanity Fair. Not that a publicity machine needs to do very much. A new Star Wars movie after sixteen years is a publicist's dream; a movie that generates its own hype; a movie big enough to make it in the media as a legitimate international news story, like war in Kosovo or a tornado in Nebraska. One can imagine George Lucas convening a meeting of his bean-counters and announcing his intention to make another one. Were they able to hide their glee? Did they nod to each other solemnly and say, "Yes, that is a sound decision that will grow the product returns." Or did they all start dancing and giggling hysterically with arms outstretched as if to catch the billions falling from the sky like rain?

In the extant series, the first film is distinct from the others as the most complete and self-contained. The word that critics most often use to describe the original Star Wars is pastiche. Lucas's trick was to take a constellation of moments from the American experience and honour them, without a hint of irony, by placing them in a made-up epic that was itself a compilation of older pop culture myths. So Star Wars is a kind of meta-myth that adoringly mimics the cinematic representations of a dozen others: The Searchers, Seven Samurai, Triumph of the Will, Twelve O' Clock High, as well as Fairbanks and Flynn swashbucklers and old Flash Gordon serials.Its characters are ciphers: hero, sage, princess, rogue, jesters and villain, and all acted like pantomime by a cast of, in 1977, mostly unknowns. Harrison Ford as Han Solo must get a special gong for putting in one of the most mind-bogglingly execrable performances in modern cinema history, and getting incredibly worse as the series progressed. But it is in the details that jaded 70's Americans saw their heroic reflections. Luke looks like the archetypal mid-western farm boy with a destiny, but as his Aunt loads up the food processor in the morning we know he is really a suburban kid with too much time on his hands; Han Solo, firstly gun-slinger in the saloon, then reckless carnival barnstormer, picks up an electronic spanner and reveals a backyard grease-monkey; Leia, though, really is a little princess, like every preppie New England college sophomore. And how about that lip-gloss?
But if this was all there was, it would hardly have had the legs to create a multi-billion dollar industry over the last quarter century. Star Wars really gets cracking as it expands to encompass The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and now jumping back a whole generation to when Darth Vader was the boy Anaken Skywalker in The Phantom Menace. On this grander scale, we have left behind the cheesy, self-conscious myth-making of the original movie to find ourselves in History 101: The Age of Empires. Details of The Phantom Menace are sketchy, but it begins, apparently, with the Galactic Republic in turmoil from disputes over taxation of the outer star systems and the planet Naboo blockaded by battleships from the Trade Federation. Huh? Whatever. It's a grand historical narrative, the kind that can generate an entire parallel world of literature, entertainment, bizarre pseudo-scholarship, stationery, manchester and even, on occasion, some old-fashioned fun.

The grand daddy of all such narratives is, of course, European imperialism. Post-colonial "black arm-band" history has long undermined the righteous racism and Dan Dare colonial heroics that once captured youthful imaginations, so what better idea that to just make up a whole new imperial project that a youth now blessed with discretionary income can literally buy into.

And of course if you're doing that you're going to need an Orient.

Freed from the suburban confines of the first film, Star Wars becomes an exotic adventure story that echoes the earliest Western encounter with Asia. At the very beginning of Western expansionism, small European states armed with Christianity and good compasses discovered the vast empires of the Middle and Far East and created the discourses of orientalism: accounts of Jesuits like Matteo Ricci in the Ming court of the 1580's of the fantastic scale and sophistication of imperial China, with its elaborate bureaucracy for taxation and military conquest, able to muster the colossal resources required for huge projects like the Great Wall, and the Grand Canal, and all of it controlled by a single ruler; the sultan's seraglio in Montesquieu's "Persian Letters" from the early eighteenth century, depicting the harem, the Orient of depravity and forbidden sexual desire; the Turkish bazaar trading with a hundred languages and races; the mystic East from the religious and medicinal practices of India and China; the honourable warrior from the samurai of feudal Japan.

Star Wars rolls them all together and takes us back through the Western encounter of the Other in Asia. As Luke and his companions venture through the movies, they become the archetypes of the western missionaries, merchants, and soldiers-of-fortune who adventured through the East – scandalized, jaded, 'going native', speaking the languages, befriending the colourful locals, getting in trouble – but all with the centred subjectivity that comes from being European.

Luke finds his sensei who teaches him about the Force – read qi in Chinese or ki in Japanese – a mystical spiritual energy, and cocky Han Solo says he'll trust a gun any day. It recalls the Boxers who laid siege to the foreign legation in Peking in 1900 and believed their Chinese qi would protect them from western bullets. Then off he goes into the jungle to live with an old yogi, called Yoda, becomes a vegetarian and starts levitating. Obi Wan Kenobi is a Jedi, that is samurai, and turns up as a young man played by Ewan MacGregor in The Phantom Menace, but one of thousands of such righteous warriors keeping peace and justice. Sounds like Japan under the Tokugawa Shoguns. And through it all is the Emperor Palpatine. Not a warrior-king like Ghengis Kahn, but a decrepit, inscrutable, effete oriental despot. The very vision of a Chinese emperor during the last decades of the Qing.

The series reaches its Orientalist apotheosis in the lair of Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi. Jabba himself is the most fabulously high camp caricature of the sultan – a grotesque figure of disgusting habits and depraved appetites. He deals out exotic painful deaths to his enemies and is surrounded by eunuchs and minions in a scene of mostly cartoonish debauchery. In perhaps the edgiest scene of the entire series, Jabba casts a dancer to her death for his sexual gratification as she begs for her life. Raffish Han Solo falls foul of this oriental chief, and when our feisty Brown's girl Leia enters the fiend's den to rescue him but is herself captured, it resonates with all those titillating stories of proper young women sold into white slavery in the East.

Without the original cast, and with its broader "historical" scope, The Phantom Menace has an opportunity to move beyond such an orientalist discourse. One cannot expect any surprises, but the sowing of modern Japanese and Chinese culture in the American consciousness on the back of their economic growth may invest Phantom with a richer acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the Asian experience in its own right. Examples of new characters' names are a Korean-sounding Qui-Gon Jinn and Queen Amidala of Naboo. Art direction looks to owe far more to the East than the previous films. Amidala's costume, in particular, is a stunning take on mediaeval Mongolia and Central Asia. But whatever the result, it will be hard to resist the hype as George Lucas single-handedly adds a few tenths of a percent to the world economy later in the year.