The Dark Heart of STAR WARS

It's not really about good vs evil.

In 1977 everyone just wanted a break. The past ten years had been destabilizing, paradigm-shattering, scary and often unpleasant. From the Summer of Love to the Years of Malaise, the United States had been up, down and sideways and everybody kind of had enough. They were tired. They had dealt with a losing war of aggression and they had faced a criminal President who left in his wake a deep mistrust of every institution in the land. 

In Hollywood the ground was just as unstable, and the studios found that what had worked before the late 60s just didn’t work anymore. Nobody was coming out to see Paint Your Wagon, and Cleopatra was such a bomb it almost sank Fox. Desperate, unsure how to bring the hippie generation into theaters, the studios turned to a new wave of young filmmakers who upended everything people knew about American movies. This was New Hollywood, and a gang of film school brats descended on Tinseltown with movies where the good guys lost, where the good guys weren’t always so good and where downbeat endings were de rigeur. The films were about an exhausted America and its destroyed ideals, and they were masterpieces the likes of which the system had never made before. 

But man, eventually people just wanted a happy ending to a movie. They wanted films where the good guys were in white hats and the bad guys were in black hats; the nation longed for some kind of return to an imagined simpler time and a Hollywood where right and wrong were easy to distinguish. They got hopelessness and confusion in the morning paper and the evening news; they wanted something different at the movie theater. 

Enter Star Wars. 

Obviously there were movies that had happy endings made during the 70s. Hell, Jaws had just changed the entire box office landscape a couple of years before, and that movie ends with the monster vanquished and the town safe. But even that movie had authority figures you couldn’t trust and heroes with feet of clay. Star Wars, on the other hand, was pure. The scrappy fighters of the Rebellion were against the evil Empire, and the difference between the two was stark and obvious. The menacing Darth Vader, in his black mask and swooping cape, contrasted with blue milk-fed farmboy Luke Skywalker. You knew who to root for. It was a new take on Nazis versus Allies, one of the most cut-and-dried conflicts of all time. 

The guy behind Star Wars, George Lucas, did this on purpose. He saw the landscape and understood that old fashioned escapism was the order of the day. He had a vision that no one else did, and he saw the future that he would make. He saw the blockbusters and the toy sales and he built a new new Hollywood to his specs. For the next forty years the legacy of Star Wars informed the studio system. 

But George Lucas wasn’t some kind of happy-go-lucky fella who turned his back on politics and the darker stuff in the world. Just the opposite; Lucas was inherently political and he was very much a product of his own generation. Again and again he found his focus turning towards ideas and moments that would undercut the seeming hopefulness of his films. 

Take THX-1138, for example. The movie ends with THX triumphant, escaping the dystopian, fascist underground city and making it to the surface, but at a terrible cost - his illegal lover LUH dies and his friend SRT doesn’t make it. THX climbs out of the tunnel, pursued by cops, but they call off the chase because the budget has been exceeded. He steps into the world above, but Lucas refuses to show us what’s up there. Is it a wasteland? Is it liveable? What will happen to THX now that he has escaped control and is free? Is there a future for him? This ending isn’t a cliffhanger to set up a sequel, it’s meant to be ambiguous. THX stands in silhouette against a huge orange sun, shielding his eyes from the natural light he’s never seen before and all alone. If you give it even one moment of thought this is not a great position for this guy to be in. 

And then there’s American Graffiti. This is, of course, the movie that put Lucas on the map, that helped fan the flames of the nostalgia boom, that paved the way for decades of 50s fetishism. It’s a lighter movie, with bittersweet elements and sharply observed moments from cruising culture that make you feel like you’re idling down the streets of Modesto, eagle eyed for the girl who is going to steal your heart. The movie is wholesome; the main characters are all-American and dorky, good kids who are just trying to navigate the last night of summer before they head off to college. Clearly there’s no darkness here… except there is. Lucas ends the movie with a coda that tells us what is going to come next for these kids - the exact opposite of how he ended THX-1138 - and it’s not exactly great. Sure, Ron Howard’s Steve ends up an insurance agent, which is a respectable, if boring, middle class job. But Richard Dreyfuss’ Curt ends up in Canada, and the unspoken rationale for that is he dodged the draft. That makes him lucky - Terry the Toad disappears into the jungles of Vietnam, going MIA. And John Milner, the sweet natured hunk who drove Mackenzie Phillips around the whole movie, is killed by a drunk driver. 

Lucas could have ended Graffiti as he ended THX, with the future uncertain. The difference would have been that an uncertain, unspoken future at the end of Graffiti would have been read as positive by the audience. What Lucas wanted to do with the final frames of his movie was close his nostalgia work with a sense of the painful advance of time. He’s keenly aware that not only will the golden era not last forever, but that when it ends it will end in ways that are sad and awful. 

Years ago I saw John Landis do a Q&A after a screening of Animal House, which uses the same coda conceit as a joke. Landis, many years older now than the man who directed that comedy, said he had come around on what Lucas was doing - what had struck him in the 70s as corny was, he learned, actually powerfully melancholy and very close to the truth of how life works. 

While all of this was happening - between THX and American Graffiti - Lucas was developing a movie that, had he made it, would have fundamentally altered the course of American cinema. Because if he had made it he would never have had the juice to make Star Wars. That movie: Apocalypse Now. This was Lucas’ movie originally, and he had a whole vision for it - he wanted to shoot it handheld, documentary-style. He developed the movie for four years with writer John Milius, going so far as to send producer Gary Kurtz to the Philippines to scout locations. 

When Francis Ford Coppola eventually made the movie Vietnam was over, and America was ready to begin reckoning with that era of defeat and shame. But Lucas was working on Apocalypse Now in 1971, as the war raged in the jungles. American soldiers would have been dying as the movie premiered. What’s more, Lucas saw the film - an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness - as a black comedy. What would that have looked like? In many ways this would have been an ultimate Lucas film - about the exact pivot point when the golden age ends and with an ending that was open (the war would have been ongoing!), but trending towards tragedy.

For all the pulpy positivity that audiences got from it, the sense of the golden age being over permeates Star Wars. It’s a movie about people who have come onto the scene after the best days are done; Luke lives in the shadow of his Jedi father, the Empire dissolves the Senate during the events of the film, thus ending the last vestiges of the Old Republic, and our heroes exist in a world whose aesthetic is used and exhausted. We call it “lived in,” and it’s one of the hallmarks and joys of the Star Wars universe - this place looks like it exists - but a grimy, jury-rigged world was very familiar to audiences suffering through the late 70s in an America whose infrastructure was collapsing. 

Within this Lucas gives us a very traditional, old-fashioned heroes vs villains story, and because of that the thin layer of sadness, regret and failure is less obvious. But it’s there. It’s there in the way that Obi-Wan Kenobi talks about the old days, before the Empire, and then lets slip that it was his apprentice Darth Vader who helped kick some of that off, as well as having murdered Luke’s dad. I think another filmmaker, another world builder, might have left it there, but this line of dialogue, this small aside as Ben is showing Luke the lightsaber, becomes what Lucas zeroes in on over the next five films in the franchise. And it’s a scene that plays different once you’ve seen the next film in the franchise, when you’re aware that Old Ben is lying through his teeth. And it could have been worse! Lucas knew that he wanted to reveal Ben as a liar in The Empire Strikes Back, but it wasn’t clear at the time how it would play out, and for a while Lucas toyed with the idea of revealing that Kenobi himself had killed Anakin Skywalker. That was the alternative take during the Vader/Luke showdown - “Obi-Wan Kenobi killed your father” rather than “I am your father.” Lucas very much wanted to undercut the first movie’s simplicity.

It’s funny how distorted our vision of the Star Wars films can be, and it’s all because of this first film, where the stakes are pretty black and white and the heroes are very heroic. But this doesn’t really interest Lucas; he does it once and then never bothers to do it again. If Lucas undercuts the wizened mentor figure of Obi-Wan Kenobi by making him a terrible liar, one who kept telling Luke that his dad was killed by Darth Vader while his dad was Darth Vader, he takes it even further in Return of the Jedi. Both Yoda and Ben are too limited by their own anger and biases to see what Luke sees, that Vader can be turned. In the final act of this movie Lucas* reverses the black and white elements that made the original Star Wars a hit by introducing a deep gray - Vader can come back from the Dark Side

*I’m assigning authorship of all six Star Wars films Lucas oversaw to Lucas himself, whether or not he directed them.

Now, Lucas ends his first trilogy with the establishment of what might be a new golden age. We don’t actually know; the film ends well before any movement can happen on a political or social front. The Emperor is killed (sigh, until the sequels) with the destruction of the second Death Star and everybody dances like it’s all over. But allow me to draw a modern parallel here - in 2020 people danced in the streets and banged pots and pans when Joe Biden was declared winner over Donald Trump, but it wasn’t like all of our Donald Trump problems suddenly ceased. Lucas knows better, and he had lived through it; the Original Trilogy was about the Nixon/Vietnam era and the Prequel Trilogy was produced during the Iraq War buildup. Lucas saw a return of Nixonian politics and quagmire wars in his lifetime, and it looks like he had seen it coming a mile away. So the idea of history repeating itself - it echoes, it rhymes! - was built into how he approached these films. 

This, I think, is where the heart of darkness lies in Star Wars. Lucas sees the world as trapped in a cycle of rises and falls, a wheel that keeps spinning back to the same place. Now, he’s not entirely nihilistic about this and part of his vision is that each generation can perhaps improve upon what the previous generation did. But he doesn’t believe in a happy ending; in fact he might not believe in endings at all. For Lucas every happy ending is a prelude to something tragic or difficult. Bittersweet is the best you get, unless you close the curtain early, as he does in Jedi*. In many ways defeating the evil Empire is the easy part; building a new world is much more challenging (and this would have been the focus of his version of the Sequel Trilogy). 

*It’s worth noting that one of Lucas’ earliest concepts for the ending of Jedi had Han Solo dead, Leia the head of the New Republic but totally isolated from her friends, and Luke exiling himself after he kills Darth Vader. It didn’t end up that way, but you can get a sense of what his thinking is like.

Failure haunts Star Wars. Obi-Wan failed, and then Lucas made a whole trilogy depicting that failure. The vaunted Jedi Knights failed, and as a result the whole Republic fell. Even Qui-Gon Jinn, the guy who has a sense that something is wrong, fails by bringing Anakin Skywalker into the Jedi Order*. The Prequel Trilogy is an astonishing work in this way, three zillion dollar films about people simply fucking up the entire galaxy. They’re not good movies but they’re pretty ballsy, and for Lucas to go and show us the Jedi at their height and make them suck this badly took a lot of guts, and was in service of a very specific vision of the world. It’s easy to think that this is Lucas throwing shade on the generation before his, the so-called Greatest Generation, but I think that his approach to the Prequels is about the failure of his own generation. “We blew it,” Wyatt says in Easy Rider, and the Prequels are that sentiment blown up to about seven hours in length.

*Or does he? Would Palpatine have found Anakin no matter what? Was it his Jedi training that gave Anakin the space to turn at the end of Jedi? None of this is clear, 

The Prequels are also notable for how much they show off the way Lucas likes to give us happy endings that are actually not so happy at all. At the end of The Phantom Menace the day is saved, Naboo is liberated, Anakin has a new home… but Senator Palpatine, who we all know is actually the evil Darth Sidious, meets Anakin and tells him he will watch the young man’s career with great interest, establishing this little tow-headed boy’s eventual downfall. At the end of Attack of the Clones the day is saved when an army of clones materializes out of nowhere, but Yoda intoning “Begun, these Clone Wars have” tells us that this is bad, and that the fact that nobody knows where these clones came from is bad. Revenge of the SIth inverts it a bit; the movie’s ending is tragic, but there are small moments of hope as Leia and Luke are smuggled away to become the next generation of heroes. Lucas’ worldview is largely that a happy ending will eventually turn to shit, but he also has some hope - the bad ending can itself be reversed. 

The Prequels are also remarkable because they take away the traditional Star Wars idea of good vs evil - there are no good guys in this trilogy because both sides of the war are fighting at the whim of Palpatine, who is using the conflict as a way of cementing his galactic power. The whole Clone War is a false flag! In the end Obi-Wan Kenobi not only has to deal with the fact that his padawan became Darth Vader but that his role as a general in the Republic army paved the way for the Empire. This, I suspect, is closer to Lucas’ real worldview than the white hats/black hats of the first Star Wars. 

All of this is to say that it’s not a Star Wars story unless it’s partially about someone dealing with the ways they royally screwed up in the past. (Some) Complaints about the Sequel Trilogy, and now Ahsoka, come from a place where people don’t like seeing their heroes unhappy. They wanted the Sequels to have Luke, Han and Leia living fun lives, more or less like they did in the original, decanonized Expanded Universe novels. When it comes to Ahsoka fans complain that the story begins with Ahsoka and Sabine having some kind of falling out, with Ahsoka failing as a mentor to the Mandalorian. The story beat of Luke thinking about killing Ben Solo gets a chorus of boos from fans who perhaps have never gotten past the first Star Wars and never engaged with the kind of storytelling Lucas does. That Luke should fail is absolutely in line with everything else that has happened in the Star Wars universe, but what is even more in line with Lucas’ worldview is that Luke should come back from that, and that part of his redemption should be in helping the next generation carry the ball a little bit farther. 

What I find fascinating about this is that I’m not even sure if Lucas fully knows whether his worldview is positive or negative; all the heroes must eventually fail and fall, but there are always new heroes, always the next generation, to pick up from where they stumbled. It is, for lack of a better term, realistic. It’s what we see in the real world all the time, and what’s intriguing is that we don’t much like it in reality either. We expect our heroes to be perfect and unblemished, and when they falter or fail we judge them harshly. We need a kind of perfection from our heroes, and it’s bad enough when they are not perfect in real life - when they’re imperfect in the movies it can be too much to bear. 

Star Wars exists forever in the shadow of that first film, the movie that comforted a nation with a simplistic morality. It’s a great movie, a total cinematic classic. But what has made the subsequent continuing Star Wars universe so terrific is the way that it has turned from that simplicity, the way that Lucas immediately began injecting doubt, failure and gray morality into what had been an almost childish piece of pop fun. Star Wars has a dark heart, a dark heart of doubt and regret that gives it depth and meaning and has kept it relevant for decades.