Ntuple Indemnity

I’m not going to get anything done this week.

I know this because I just came back from Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and I can say with absolute certainty that the five hundred words I’m doing for The Gateway are not going to be sufficient. Were it not for the fact that I almost have a responsibility to enacting a meticulous scene-by-scene deconstruction of the Star Wars Trilogy DVDs when they come out later this week, I could be writing about Sky Captain for weeks. (Well, that and how I have yet to get around to explaining exactly why it is that I have been telling everybody to see Garden State lately.)

Let’s put an embargo on the specifics of my opinions about Sky Captain itself – you can read that in print later this week, and I have no intention of treading on the GSJS’ freelancing policy. I do, however, want to make you aware of one little detail before you go see the movie this weekend, which you really should, because it was one of the coolest moments in a movie full of really cool moments. When Sky Captain docks with the mobile landing platform in the clouds, his plane touches down on docking platform 327.

If I actually make good on my threat to deconstruct Star Wars scene by scene – and it’s not like I’ve never done it before – you can expect to hear the number 327 a lot. It appears several times in both trilogies, but most significantly as the number of the Death Star docking bay into which the Millennium Falcon is pulled by a tractor beam. The appearance that is perhaps even more relevant to Sky Captain, however, is that the Falcon is cleared for the exact same platform number yet again when it docks with another flying base, that being Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back.

If what I just said made you squeal in delight, Sky Captain is for you.

It just so happens that the one weekend I go camping in the Rockies, I miss a monumental piece of news:

Special Announcement: Episode III Title

starwars.com is pleased to announce that Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith is the full title of the next Star Wars film, scheduled for release on May 19, 2005.

The Sith are masters of the dark side of the Force and the sworn enemies of the Jedi. They were all but exterminated by the Jedi a thousand years ago, but the evil order continued in secrecy. They operated quietly, behind the scenes, acting in pairs – a Master and an Apprentice – patiently biding their time before they could take over the galaxy. In Episode III, they’ll finally exact their revenge on the Jedi.

The title was publicly revealed today in a special presentation to a packed audience of Star Wars fans at Comic-Con International in San Diego, California. “For some time now, the naming of a new Star Wars movie has taken on some special meaning among core fans, who love to take part in guessing games before a title is announced, and then engage in debate once it is,” said Steve Sansweet, Director of Content Management and Head of Fan Relations for Lucasfilm. “Let the debates begin.”

Coincidence or not, I first got into watching, writing about, living and breathing cinema at around the same time as the year or two leading up to The Phantom Menace. Until that first title was announced in late September 1998, the fans thought they knew it all; it was going to be Balance of the Force, Rise of the Empire and Revenge of the Sith. Nobody told them so – it was just one of those memetic phenomena that everybody just assumed. So The Phantom Menace came as a bit of a surprise, and created a temporary divide that would foreshadow a more permanent one to come – a rift between those outraged that George Lucas had not pandered to their collective expectations, and those more accepting of novelty who rationalized the merits. Attack of the Clones faced the same thing, only by the time of its release, the hostilities were already firmly cemented.

This time around, the camp better known to laypersons and the media at large – the complainants still aghast that Lucas isn’t adhering to their vision of a saga set in a universe of his own imagination – have nothing to complain about. Revenge of the Sith is what they always wanted, and if anybody wishes to contest that, I will gladly provide links to title speculation threads on any selection of Star Wars discussion forum on the Internet, including those I have never visited. I guarantee you that every one of them guessed this one. Not that I agreed, necessarily – I always preferred Duel of the Fates, which was the very appropriate name of John Williams’ thunderous choral track in the Phantom score, or alternatively, The Passion of the Christ. Think about it.

Of course, expectations are secondary to what works in the final product. Does Revenge of the Sith work, in the storytelling sense? You bet it does.

Return of the Jedi is the best Star Wars title for a number of reasons, the paramount of which is that it has a triple meaning, just as Star Wars is really three parallel stories that cross at six catastrophic turning points. For the sake of discussion, let us refer to them as the Metaphysical, Political and Individual. The Metaphysical story is the tale of how the balance of the Force sees disruption and restoration, demarcated by the resurgence and vanquishment of the Dark Side, corporeally embodied by the Sith Lords. The Political story is the conflict introduced by the rise of the Galactic Empire as the Republic crumbles beneath its feet, only to be thwarted by the restorative Rebel Alliance. The Individual story deals with two individuals, really – on one hand, the rise, fall and redemption of Anakin Skywalker; on the other, the role of his son Luke in facilitating the latter, something I discussed in depth last Father’s Day. Return of the Jedi, the title, means three different things: the return of the Jedi Order with the induction of Luke Skywalker as he overcomes his last trial (Metaphysical); the return of the Jedi Anakin Skywalker from the Dark Side (Individual); and most overtly, Luke’s own return to the surface of the narrative as he accompanies the Rebel Alliance to Endor (the eye of the Political storm).

Popular legends tell of how prior to Jedi‘s release, the title was announced as Revenge of the Jedi to thwart bootleggers, only the ruse fooled distributor Twentieth Century Fox itself, resulting in some of the most coveted merchandise items on the Star Wars auction block. The Episode III title is a neat homage to that particular debacle. Revenge, of course, is quite contrary to the doctrines that guide a Jedi, something never specifically named and often crudely referred to as the “Light Side” out of ease.

But the Sith, on the other hand – to them, the employment of revenge is quite different, in that it is not only acceptable as a motive, but encouraged. Now, I must hastily tack on a quick disclaimer that I have not read anything pertaining to the plot points in Revenge of the Sith, and the execution of what we all know must happen, but it is already easy to see – by method of interpolating the events that must link Episodes II and IV – that it contains the three-story structure. Like “Jedi” in Return of the Jedi, “Sith” in Revenge of the Sith can be either singular or plural. It fits neatly into all three major narrative threads. The upheaval that marks the transition from Republic to Empire is an exactment of revenge against the political structure that thrived for a thousand years on the banishment of the Sith Order, or so it is implied. At a greater level is the spiritual motive to vanquish the decrepit stabilizing force that is the Jedi and deliver the galaxy to the Dark Side of the Force. Then we have Anakin Skywalker, who emerges as the Sith Lord Darth Vader – and the groundwork has been laid for his own vengeful intentions, in line with what we already know about his demeanour; observe the massacre of the Tusken camp in Clones, or the seeds of hatred in his personal conflicts with Count Dooku and in a whole other way, Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Given that we know how the story ultimately ends, Revenge of the Jedi does not breed the same level of speculation as something ominous like Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. (Tangential observation: Anakin Skywalker is a half blood prince in his own right… hmm.) The title is something to which it is quite easy to be accustomed, and in terms of tone and word choice, fits the Star Wars saga like a glove – “Revenge”, aside from being a dish served cold (in the words of another franchise), is a compatible neighbour with the likes of “Menace”, “Attack”, “Strikes” – words that comprise titles of chapters where on one level or another, the bad guys win. Come May we will know not only the full significance of the title, but possess the last pieces of a grand thirty-year puzzle. Being of that oft-overlooked demographic that saw the Prequels and left the cinema as a satisfied customer, I can hardly wait.

Virtually all character dynamics in the movies, it can be said, are covered to one extent or another in Casablanca, which Robert McKee (screenwriting instructor, author of Story and butt of many a joke in Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay to Adaptation) rightly acknowledges as being the paragon of all cinema as far as writing is concerned. You have the more obvious themes of love lost, forbidden and rediscovered between Rick and Ilsa, the love inspired by romantic heroism in the case of Victor Laszlo, and a resulting triangle that is so prototypical as to be Pythagorean; these are constantly emulated, though often unconsciously, and regularly with only the merest trace of the same emotional complexity.

Yet while Casablanca is among movies the undisputed king of the portrayal of love in its romantic forms, often overlooked are its more understated pairings, and how they are seen time and again in even the best of the films in the decades that followed. Take no less than Raiders of the Lost Ark, for instance, and notice René Belloq’s subservience to the Nazis, one that he independently but weakly denies: “All in good time,” he replies, when Indiana Jones asks him what will become of his prize upon delivery to the Fuhrer. Belloq is a striking villain, but we trace him back to that other allegory of occupied France, Captain Renault. Louis, of course, has quite a different fate than Indy’s archaelogical rival. Between him and Rick, we see “the beginning of a beautiful friendship” in a manner where both shirk their supposed allegiances or lack thereof, certainly at their own peril, but with consolation in each other. The great conflicted partnerships follow a similar pattern, be it T.E. Lawrence and Sherif Ali, Blondie and Tuco, or heck, even Shrek and Donkey.

This is not to say that all films are necessarily Casablanca‘s sons and daughters – such a claim, at least as it would pertain to conscious intent or chronological order of production, would be a stretch – but try and name one other piece that brings together so many degrees of character interaction.

That said, the films that most emphasize the relationships not found in Casablanca and do it well are the ones that we recognize as being similarly exceptional in their own right. Think, here, of the unrequited charity of friendship Melanie offers Scarlett, or to use a recent example, the unspoken bond between Bob and Charlotte in Lost In Translation that should make one consider yet again the cleverness of its title. But perhaps the most prominent absence in the Bogart classic is the relationship between father and son, a staple of world mythology both ancient and contemporary.

That brings me to what I would like to examine today: the films that model the many aspects of the father-son relationship, much in the way that Casablanca tackles pretty much everything else.

I speculate that a lot of people, when asked to name the definitive movie about fathers and sons, will quite justifiably make a very strong case in favour of The Empire Strikes Back. Loath as I am to divide a sweeping congruous saga into its parts when it is greater than the proverbial sum, I would actually point to Return of the Jedi.

If we look at dramatic narratives as driven not by individual characters, but instead the tangled bonds between them, the final redemption of Anakin Skywalker is an event of monumental literary consideration. Star Wars is, on a basic level, a tale about slavery. In The Phantom Menace, we see Anakin enslaved in a literal sense, though it is not altogether that uncomfortable nor physically demanding so much as it is he is treated as an asset to buy and sell, and a matter of pride in the eyes of his owner. He is freed under the promise of high adventure across the stars, but we see in Attack of the Clones that he becomes a Jedi only to be, in his eyes, enslaved to a code of conduct that forces a lid onto his rampant emotions and severs his forbidden attachments, albeit finally in vain. Although there is that chasm of ambiguity to be filled next May with the release of Episode III, we are aware of his fate: somehow, in his efforts to be the free spirit he is at heart, he winds up under the most tragic enslavement of all: he finds his very spirit dominated by the Emperor and moreover, the Dark Side of the Force.

So what we see is a cyclical process whereby at every turn, Anakin’s freedom from one form of slavery only leads to another even greater. Star Wars, then, revolves around the search for a force (pardon the pun) powerful enough to trump the seemingly irrevocable corruption of the Dark Side. The key decision point is in that moment in the Death Star Throne Room when Vader looks back and forth between his master and his son, the former with lightning shooting out his fingers, the latter crying for mercy. The pleas for paternal intervention ultimately win out, and the bond between father and child trumps that which has held so long, the connection between master and apprentice. It is a poetic turn of events, given how Anakin himself never knew a father, but only one master after another.

It is also ironic, considering that the very fact that Luke even knows the identity of the man-machine behind the mask is due to the latter’s voluntary revelation of the facts in the bowels of Cloud City at the end of Empire. Vader chooses to divulge the information of his fatherhood, by all appearances to try and convince Luke that it is his destiny to fall to the Dark Side; he acts as an agent of the Dark Side, beckoning for the continuation of the cycle of slavery. At the end of all things, Luke’s knowledge of the truth is what draws the saga to its fitting conclusion.

Luke’s journey through Jedi is itself notable. After the scenes on Dagobah where his two mentors verify Vader’s claim, he accepts the truth, but never does he accept that his father is at heart an evil man. It can be argued that in screenwriting terms, the strongest scene in the entire saga is Luke and Vader talking on the plank where an Imperial Walker is docked, the former having just surrendered himself; that is a whole other discussion, but notice what happens. “So, you have accepted the truth,” says Vader, when his son calls him Father. Luke’s reply speaks volumes: “I’ve accepted the truth that you were once Anakin Skywalker, my father.” And it is that knowledge that drives Luke to put everything on the line just to prove that somewhere in that mechanized suit, humanity remains. In doing so he defies the word of everyone before him, every assertion that upon a fall to the Dark Side, there is no redemption.

The Empire Strikes Back is an incredible film on all counts, but its role in the development of the father-son connection is minimal in comparison. Sure, you have the most thoroughly spoofed scene in the movies, the revelation that is now such a part of the cultural consciousness at large that it is known to those who have never even had the pleasure of seeing a Star Wars instalment. You have Vader’s quest in that movie’s own plot arc, the obsessive hunt for the boy who sent his TIE Fighter spinning out of control. Still, it is Return of the Jedi that takes this setup and runs with it, and features the concept of fatherhood as a focal point with respect to both the plot and the final stage of development of the overarching themes in that galaxy far, far away.

That is why Return of the Jedi is as definitive a father-son film as one can find, one that clings to the mythic tradition unlike any other film. Of course, it is hardly lonely at the summit of its subgenre. The Godfather is a piece to consider, though it is more about the sons themselves than their relationship to Don Corleone: Sonny as the devoted son, stopped short by a few hundred bullets, give or take; Tom, the good son, but subtly removed and restrained by his status as an adopted child; Michael, the son who initially abandons his father’s legacy the most, only to become its inheritor; and Fredo… well, the less said about Fredo, the better. Road To Perdition is more overtly about fatherhood, focusing on the ideas of neglect, disapproval, sibling rivalry, and the following of paternal footsteps. The two Henry Joneses in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are a more comical pair, but no less serious about fatherly neglect and idolatry. One hopes to see more of the strained, disapproving relationship between Denethor and Faramir in the Extended Edition of The Return of the King; the trinity of the Steward of Gondor and his two sons is a literary highlight insofar as fathers and sons are concerned, and the added scenes in Osgiliath in the Extended The Two Towers was already a valuable addition.

If my desert-island selection of father-son films were limited to two, though, count on the second as being Finding Nemo. One of the many reasons Nemo is indisputably the best animated film in recent years is the complexity of its character dynamics, which one will notice are outside Casablanca territory as often as possible. This is the definitive movie that we see told from the unblinking eyes of the father, and there is no other piece that expresses anywhere near the same level of fatherly devotion. The way Marlin braves underwater minefields, sharks in denial, the docks of Sydney, and the darkest depths of the ocean floor, all in the name of an impossible rescue, is one of the most compelling adventures in recent cinema. Look at the way he tries to escape the highly symbolic belly of the whale, hurling himself at the barrier of baleen, with nothing more on his mind than a determination that no matter what the obstacles, he must tell his son that a hundred and fifty is young for a sea turtle. As overprotective as he is, Marlin is the greatest dad in any movie, period.

I’d like to move on to legendary movie moms while I’m on a roll, but the essay on Almost Famous will have to wait until next May. Go read Sophocles or Freud or something. Oh, and Happy Father’s Day.

By now, anyone who cares has already seen the leaked shot from the DVD of Return of the Jedi that features a long-haired Hayden Christensen, not Sebastian Shaw, as the redeemed spirit of Anakin Skywalker. The fact that the DVDs boast further changes to Classic Trilogy above and beyond the 1997 Special Editions is nothing new – The Digital Bits has been reporting it for months – for many self-professed fans, this is probably the first time an image has really packed the magnitudinal punch for what’s happening to hit home: yes, Star Wars is changing. Yes, it’s moving closer to the controversial Prequel Trilogy. Why, exactly, is this causing an uproar, as if it were a bad thing?

The truth is, when it comes to revisionism in art, Star Wars has been almost exclusively singled out to take the heat for being changed and updated. The extended and revised cuts of Blade Runner, Almost Famous, The Big Sleep and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are considered the definitive versions of those films. After the rebirth of high-profile modified re-releases with the Star Wars Special Editions, we saw Apocalypse Now Redux and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial receive similar treatment, with the only noise being made about the latter’s trivial replacement of a few guns by walkie-talkies. Many classic films that are seeing release on DVD are as much as half an hour to an hour longer than the original without modern-day audiences knowing they were ever any different; observe the restorations of Spartacus and Lawrence of Arabia.

This applies not only to film, but also to literature; academically, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is still popularly studied using the text of the 1831 edition, which is heavily rewritten from the 1818 original, though the First Edition can be found and is even preferred by some. J.R.R. Tolkien rewrote the entire “Riddles in the Dark” chapter of The Hobbit after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, which itself underwent subsequent revisions and the addition of supplementary material now considered to be integral to the Middle-Earth canon.

So, why the kerfuffle about Star Wars?

Having spent more time observing the patterns of the online Star Wars community over the past six or seven years than is healthy for the sanity of any given individual – I was once an Administrator at TheForce.net’s forums (lack of a hyperlink intended), which is a hive of scum and villainy akin to everything bad about any arbitrary Internet messageboards all rolled into one – I bring forth this indisputable fact: the majority of people who call themselves Star Wars fans, at least, the ones on the Internet, are idiots.

This isn’t a matter of who agrees with me and who doesn’t. I am clearly in the minority in the sense that, strike me off your Christmas lists if you want, I love the Prequels. A lot of idiots also love the Prequels, so like I said, this is not an issue of who holds what opinion. The real issue is that the Star Wars fan culture on the Internet is one giant pep rally after another of flag-waving lunacy, where people mobilize themselves into congruous rival gangs under the banner of liking or disliking something, justifying their cliquy behaviour by citing victimization and a bunch of other excuses they borrowed from the same bag of tricks used by racial supremacists.

Back when I was still patrolling the bozo-boards, there was actually a set of n-thousand-post chat threads started by a group that called themselves the “Expanded Universe Defense Force”, or EUDF, which was started by so-called fans that did their darndest to convince themselves and everyone else that a) the licensed fan fiction coming out of Lucas Licensing is valid literature, and b) despite the volume of said licensed fiction that comes off the press every year, its readership is an oppressed tribe of nomads under the thumb of those who for some crazy reason think that the Prequels are, in fact, not based on the aforementioned non-literature. Call it EU-vangelism, if you will. What they would do is assign themselves squadrons and ranks, and when a member logged in, he would go to the current n-thousand-post “home base” thread and post a notification that he’s patrolling their imaginary borders for danger, along the lines of, “Blue 5, coming in.” After he finished pissing on say, a given community-forum discussion about classic literature by mentioning Michael Stackpole’s I, Jedi within a ten-post radius of the name “Dickens”, it would be straight back to the EUDF thread with a “Blue 5, signing out.” And this is how they act before you engage them in conversation and debate.

Predictably, some of these camps are targeted to despise anything that was done with Star Wars after 1997, be they SE-bashing preservationists or Prequel-bashing neo-cons. For some reason, this is the camp that has a lot of allies in the online media – mostly a generational quirk unifying the fans and laypeople who liked the original films in ways that George Lucas didn’t, and are now appalled at the mere suggestion that they, in fact, do not know more about Star Wars than its creator.

A lot of the vitriol directed to the DVDs does have a valid concern, though: the fact that without a digital release in the DVD format, the orginal version of the Classic Trilogy is doomed to degrade on unreliable magnetic media. This is not quite true, as Star Wars has already been marked for preservation, original reels do still exist, and nothing’s stopping a restoration years down the road like what has had to be done with any old film transferred to DVD, much like what Criterion tends to do. The trouble is that a lot of people out there want their version and they want it now.

It’s undeniable that gradually, a lot of those who claim to be Star Wars fans have lost a lot of faith in the direction of the saga, as if George Lucas were the late-nineties Calgary Flames or something. I use “faith” here because a lot of it is predicated on the religiously fervent belief that George Lucas circa 1977-1983 was God and the Classic Trilogy was His divine creation. It just so turned out that God disagreed. God had a very different plan in mind.

Much of the opposition to the Prequels is not so much a critique based on merit; one should remember that both Episodes I and II initially opened to favourable, albeit divisive reviews. A lot of the criticism they suffer accumulated over time, though not because the scrutiny of them was any more meticulous. The opposition to the Prequels is instead largely because they are in many respects quite different from the original three, and constitute an independent trilogy. The stories are more political, the protagonists come from a higher social class, and the villains are a less visible presence (phantom menaces, alas). The Doug Chiang designs of a Republic in its last renaissance have a fluidity not present in Ralph McQuarrie’s junkyard vision of a galaxy ruled by the Empire. Given that many out there consider the Classic Trilogy perfect, and given that you can’t do better than perfect, the syllogism follows that in their eyes, you can’t do better than the Classic Trilogy – not with the Prequels, and especially not with the Special Editions, both of which compound the sense of negativity by way of a multiplier for perceived blasphemy.

But in addition to these sociological factors, the specific opposition to “fixing the Special Editions” is silly on its own merit. It has been established from the beginning that no, we are not getting the original editions this September. So what would you rather have: the 1997 Special Edition’s experiments in digital editing that, while lauded at the time, now seem like a dated and half-finished test to see if the Prequels were viable (cf. the model of Jabba the Hutt in Episode IV’s restored hangar scene) – or a project brought to completion, consistent with the rejuvenated continuity and aesthetic established by the Prequels, in the name of better flow between the two trilogies? If we are getting a Special Edition anyway, a representation of what George Lucas would have done had he possessed new-millennium technology back in 1977, why not go all the way?

Star Wars is experimental, and always has been. Experiments tend to produce the occasional unintended errors, and no matter how much the audience has grown accustomed to these errors, it does not make their errancy any different in the eyes of the artist. When something avant-garde gets pigeonholed into the status of a mainstream franchise, it faces a new obstacle: fans do not commit to franchises to see something new. They commit to see more of the same. Kudos to George Lucas for not succumbing to the demands of the mob and instead continuing to push the envelope, approximating his own ever-changing imagination more precisely with every iteration.

If you have noticed the conspicuous absence of any entries in the past week – and if you are one of the handful of people who lurk here without telling me – three things: a) I know you’re out there by way of third-party information, b) the “Annotate” link is there for a reason, and 3) you are probably wondering what I thought of The Matrix Revolutions.

Regarding the film, I have drawn the conclusion that I cannot formulate an adequate assessment until a second viewing. My initial impression is one that lacks fulfilment. This is a movie that needed to provide both plot resolution and thematic resolution, and save for the best exchange of dialogue in the entire trilogy during the final fight, the second was distractingly incomplete. Plot-wise, there was the appropriate balance of denouement and ambiguity. Theme-wise, some ideas were swatted away rather than provided with appropriately soft landings.

The film was enjoyable nonetheless, though the intelligence and visual audacity exhibited by The Matrix Reloaded was not improved upon. The biggest problem with Revolutions is that next to the first two films, it feels all too conventional.

The laziness-business dialectic axis prevents me from elaborating any further at this time, so do not take this as a full review.

Another release that deserves some comment is the debut of Cartoon Network’s Clone Wars series of shorts by Genndy Tartakovsky, perhaps the flag-bearer of this generation of expressionistic animation, a generation without a Friz Freleng or Chuck Jones at the helm. The first episode is on the Cartoon Network website, but is inaccessible for anyone outside the United States. File-sharing is a Canadian’s best friend – except hockey, that is.

Chapter 1 is, more than anything, a tease of what’s to come. So far, it looks good. The best part about it is that it does not yet show any signs of falling victim to the stock conventions that make the Expanded Universe so unbearable. It’s slick, it’s stylish, and even though it isn’t at all like the style of the films, it possesses a dynamism that somehow feels right. Chapter 2 is due out tonight, so we will see how this develops.

As for what occupied me all weekend: I was debating in the University of Alberta’s home tournament, the Hugill Cup, Friday through Sunday. That’s right – Sunday. For a variety of reasons, among which was the ineligibility of a rubber duck named Bismarck, I made it into one of the two semi-final rooms and won an exquisite set of coasters. Unfortunately, I botched my secret mission from uncharted space to break into public speaking finals right in the very first round. Next time, Gadget, next time.

Check out the results. And if you see one of Misters Crossman or Tse, buy him a well-deserved drink, and ask him to show you that snappy champions’ pocketwatch.