The Force and Freedom

A podcast about the meaning of Star Wars, beginning with the original trilogy.RSSVERIFY

A Portrait of the Artist as a Jedi Apprentice from the Wild West 11/18/2025

Transcript: A Portrait of the Artist 11/18/2025

Transcript: A Portrait of the Artist Welcome to The Force and Freedom, Part 5. Last time I finished laying out what I think are the central ideas of A New Hope. First, there's an important kind of unfreedom. One where someone determines not just whether I have certain options, but the very terms of engagement, the rules for how we'll decide how to resolve our disagreements. This kind of unfreedom typically arises through fear. That's what the Death Star is for. The Death Star is a kind of unfreedom generator for the Empire, a control generator. So by conquering fear, you can achieve some freedom. That's what Han Solo is all about, not being afraid. But by learning not to see everything in the terms the dominator presents, you achieve more freedom. And by letting go of yourself, you achieve even more freedom, even more ability to control the terms of engagement. That's what the Jedi are all about, not letting others control the terms of engagement. They do it by learning to see the situation in a different light, and by letting go of themselves. That's what Obi-Wan's sacrifice is all about. Now it's unclear whether this is a complete solution in two senses. First, is learning all this enough to give me real personal freedom? That's the question that came up when Han Solo showed up to save Luke. Luke's understanding of the ways of the Force was not enough to destroy the Death Star by itself. Second, does learning all this make me fit to be a guardian of others' freedom? That's the question that came up at the end when we saw that the Rebel Awards ceremony looked a lot like a Nazi rally from a famous Nazi documentary. Are these people fit to rule? I also suggested we get a hint of this in the reactor trench when Obi-Wan has to turn off the tractor beam. He has to stand on a narrow ledge as he powers down the tractor beam, suggesting that turning off control in the Empire is a very delicate thing to do. It's hard to maintain balance and order when you turn off the fear that keeps the local systems in line. Now that we've got an overview of the ideas of Star Wars in mind, I want to go back and see the significance of a couple of other parts. First, I think there's something interesting about starting the film in the desert after the opening battle. As we've seen, the images in the opening battle present a conflict between two sorts of values, freedom and order. In the opening battle, we're presented with one possible outcome of this conflict. Order wins and freedom is suppressed. The desert planet Tatooine suggests two alternatives. The first is isolation. There's no need for social order if there's no society. Everyone is free to go their own way. And that's exactly what happens to the two droids in the desert. They come to a disagreement about which way to go, and since there's nothing compelling them to arrive at some consensus, they each go their own way. Total freedom. You just need to get away from other people. According to the script, Jundland means no man's land. But as C-3PO remarks, this isn't a great condition to live in. "What A desolate place this is." You avoid limits to your freedom, but at the cost of all the benefits of living in society. And as it turns out, because there's no order, there's no guarantee that you avoid limits to your freedom. Before long, both 3PO and R2 are enslaved and dragged back into a kind of society. This is a second alternative to Empire. Life in contact with others, but without much order. And for this alternative too, it's significant that they're in a desert. Deserts have an association with freedom in US filmmaking because US deserts are in the West, and the West used to be the frontier of the United States. An inhabited place, but a place beyond or on the fringes of the reach of the law. This is a classic subject for a Western. Life on the fringes of civilization. Freedom without order. And there's some romance to it, but it's ultimately not a very attractive possibility for any except those with the power to impose their own will. The freedom that allows Obi-Wan to cut off an arm and Han to shoot first is the same freedom that almost gets Luke killed. You'll be dead. And by the way, Han's approach to freedom comes straight out of Westerns, and it works a lot better in a Western context than in a rebellion against an empire. In a Western, no one has so much power that they can impose their will absolutely, and so those who can hold their own in a gunfight do well enough. It's no mistake then that Han is dressed as a cowboy. The shirt, the vest, the boots, the cavalry pants, the low-slung holster on his gun belt, and in case we don't catch the reference, we meet him in a Wild West saloon. Casting director Diane Crittenden said, "George knew what he wanted. He wanted Han to be a cowboy, the James Dean character. But instead of a horse, he's got a spaceship. Luke was a farmer. I said, 'What do you mean a farmer?' And he said, 'It's a moon farm or an interplanetary farm.'" It's also no mistake that Han is so focused on himself. In the Western, the heroes were often individuals who valued their independence so much that they preferred life in the desert. You don't become a cowboy because you love political causes and civilization. Anyway, the desert plays an important role in developing the main problem in the movie. We see in the opening battle that there can be a conflict between freedom and order. In the desert, we see why we can't just ditch order. So given that we're committed to freedom, somehow we need to find space for freedom in order. As I mentioned before in talking about social contract theory, agreeing on terms of engagement, agreeing on the laws, is an important step in constituting our freedom. The Wild West is a place without any law or without sufficient enforcement, so its inhabitants have no guarantee that others will treat them in ways that they can agree to. So for all its seeming freedom, the Wild West is missing a very important kind of freedom. People like Obi-Wan enjoy freedom there because they can enforce their own terms of engagement. But Luke and his family can't go out at night because it's too dangerous with all the sand people around. A second point to notice is that the scenes following the initial space battle repeatedly raise questions about freedom. R2 and 3PO have an argument about getting into the escape pod. 3PO doesn't like it. "Hey, you're not permitted in there. It's restricted. You'll be deactivated for sure." R2 responds by calling him... Which apparently includes the accusation that 3PO is a mindless philosopher. 3PO is scared of getting caught, but R2 is on a mission that makes the usual rules irrelevant. Presumably he calls 3PO a philosopher because he won't take action. He's all words. But he's mindless because he has no mind of his own. He's thoroughly under the control of the people who set the rules. In fact, not only does 3PO not have a mind of his own, he has few words of his own. His strong point is translation and interpretation, repeating what somebody else has said in another language. He's a protocol droid. He's good at etiquette, at doing all the things you're supposed to do. His character is pretty well summed up in this exchange. "Can you speak Bachi?" "Of course I can, sir. It's like a second language to me. I'm a speaker." "All right, shut up. I'll take this." "Shutting up, sir." Even when Threepio makes a decision for himself, like when he parts with R2 in the desert, he ends up blaming it on R2. "That malfunctioning little twerp, this is all his fault. He tricked me into going this way, but he'll do no better." The idea of taking responsibility for his own decisions is totally foreign to Threepio. You can't be free if you're so thoroughly under others' control. When R2 and Threepio are captured by Jawas, they're fitted with restraining bolts. And of course, R2 finds a clever way to get rid of his, but Threepio doesn't. "He says the restraining bolt has short-circuited his recording system. He suggests that if you remove the bolt, he might be able to play back the entire recording." In the very next scene, Luke asks his uncle if he can head off to join the academy, and his uncle refuses. Another issue of freedom. Then Luke goes back to find R2 gone. The sandwiching of the R2 scenes around Luke's conversation with his uncle poses a question. We know what was keeping R2 from going on his mission, the restraining bolt. But what's keeping Luke from going on his mission? The obvious answer is his uncle. But what's making him do what his uncle tells him? From what Luke says later, it sounds like it's related to fear of his uncle. "Boy, am I going to get it." This isn't as terrifying as fear of the Death Star. It might not even be a threat of violence. Although in an early synopsis of the plot, Lucas wrote that at the dinner when Owen tells him he can't go to the academy, they argue and Owen strikes the boy, who's protected by Beru. But in the actual film, it's more like 3PO's mindless philosophy, a fear of what's restricted. It probably arose from past threats of punishment. "I'm not going to Alderaan. I'm going to get home. It's late. I'm in for it as it is." But how can Luke be punished when he's gone? Now I think these scenes are particularly important for posing the issue because Luke's situation is so like our situation. Weapons of mass destruction don't loom large in most viewers' lives like the Death Star. It isn't fear of the atomic bomb that restricts our freedom, at least in most cases. It's fear of the people in our lives, of our parents, our colleagues, our bosses, of our peers, even of our friends. And that's another important feature of the setting on Tatooine. If the desert brings to mind the western of our imagination, the Skywalker homestead turns out to be the familiar American household, almost to the point of stereotype. It's so familiar that the mother figure doesn't even seem to be wearing much of a costume. If any Star Wars character could walk into an Applebee's without anybody batting an eye, it's Aunt Beru. Luke and Owen dress in some kind of robe, seemingly Japanese-inspired, and Aunt Beru is wearing a denim jacket. It's as if the costume is trying to say, "This is you, typical American family." Now that does something interesting to the movie. We started out long ago and far, far away in the middle of a space battle, which distances us from the conflict. It suggests this is just escapist entertainment. We can leave the troubles of this world behind and be entertained by the troubles of another world. But then 10 minutes later, we find out that battle was not so far away after all, because it turns out to have some relevance to the typical American family. And how does it become relevant? Well, first, think about how Luke learns about the battle. He watches a movie. Maybe you didn't quite think of it this way, but the first time we see Princess Leia, she's just finishing up an indie movie. And Luke reacts to this indie movie the way that a typical entertainment-seeking teenager reacts to a movie. "She's beautiful." In fact, the way that Luke is responding to this movie is one of the main ways people have tended to react to Star Wars itself, as entertainment. And it is entertaining, but it's trying to say something else. It's trying to turn your attention towards an important conflict, just like Leia is trying to grab attention for the rebellion in her movie. It's fitting that seeing the full message is going to require Luke to release the restraining bolt on the droid. He needs to let the droid take him places that he didn't anticipate. Places he probably wouldn't have allowed the droid to take him had he realized what was going on. In this case, out to the Jundland Wastes. So contrary to the charge that Star Wars is simply escapist fantasy, I see this: Star Wars is at least partly a film about the power of film to get us thinking about the bigger political questions. It's a film that says, "Hey you, Typical American, ogling Carrie Fisher, wake up. This is more than entertainment. There are important ideas here, and they call for action." Of course, even when Luke does get the full message, he's still resistant. He's got other things to take care of. The battle over freedom and order is not something he can afford to take on. The next plot point, I think, is a direct response to this resistance, and is probably the most shockingly graphic scene of the entire trilogy, certainly more graphic than the scene from The Searchers it's modeled on. Luke returns home to take care of his responsibilities to his family, only to find the homestead aflame, and amidst the smoke, the charred bodies of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. It's as if the film is saying, "You can't ignore these issues about freedom and order in society because you've got too much going on in your own life. They can rip right through your life. They can rip right through your typical American family." In short, these scenes are practically telling the audience to think about the movie, like Luke should think about the message, and to act on it. Lucas explained, "When the challenge comes with Ben at his home after he gets Leia's message, Luke immediately rejects it. He wants to go fight the Empire, you can tell he wants to, but he doesn't feel that he can take on the responsibility. As a result, destiny comes into play. Because if you don't do anything about the Empire, the Empire will eventually crush you." Lucas continued, "To not make a decision is a decision. It happens in all countries, when a certain force, which everybody thinks is wrong, begins to take over, and nobody decides to stand up against it. Or the people who stand up against it can't rally enough support. What usually happens is a small minority stands up against it, and the majority portion are a lot of indifferent people who aren't doing anything one way or the other. And by not accepting the responsibility, those people will eventually have to confront the issue in a more painful way. which is essentially what happened in the United States with the Vietnam War." Now maybe you're a bit skeptical about my interpretation here, but this business of Luke's encountering the rebellion in the form of an indie film is actually part of a broader autobiographical thread running throughout the movie. The young George Lucas had some important things in common with Luke. They both liked racing. Lucas raced cars when he was young until he got into a terrible crash that almost ended his life. They both wanted to head off to an academy to learn more. In Lucas's case, this was film school at USC. And they both had father figures who opposed these dreams and wanted them to do something more practical. Mark Hamill, who played Luke, said, "George is Luke. He is. I always felt that way. I even went so far as to do his little beard gestures. George even gave me his nickname, the Kid. They used to call George the Kid until he grew his beard. I'm really playing him in the movie." Now when I claim that Luke is inspired by Leia's indie film to go on a journey, there's an important parallel with George Lucas's life. Because Lucas himself was inspired by indie films to leave his hometown and go to film school to become a filmmaker. I mentioned earlier that Lucas wrote in his notes while working on the second draft, "Luke reluctantly accepts the burden. Artist, not a warrior. Fear." Why is Lucas putting an artist in this story? Because Luke is Lucas. I've already discussed the parallels between imperial control and the way that fear of career consequences could have controlled Lucas's artistic freedom. But we can add a few more examples. When George Lucas moved to Los Angeles to go to film school, he already had connections with an experienced cinematographer named Haskell Wexler. Wexler had his own film company, but Wexler couldn't get Lucas a job in his own company unless Lucas was willing to join the union. And Lucas didn't want to join. That became Lucas's first major frustration with the filmmaking machine in Los Angeles. He later said, "I was disposed against it, mainly because of my first experience trying to get a job with Haskell and not being able to. Being shut out, I thought it was extremely unfair." I've already talked about Lucas's indignation at Universal Studios for cutting 4 minutes from American Graffiti. His sister Wendy said, "That was the beginning of his passion to become an independent filmmaker. so that he would have total control over his films and not be under some MBA studio executive who himself had never written or directed or edited a film from the ground up." Lucas once said, "I don't mind getting input from the creative people around me, but not the executives. I fought for many years to make sure no one could tell me what to do." I've also already pointed out that the Rebel pilots' debriefing looks like a film class. Just as Lucas went to film school, we see Luke in a sort of film class towards the end of a new hope. The parallel in Lucas's life to Luke shutting off the navigating computer was something like realizing that if you want to make a movie that means something, technical skills and following instructions are not enough. You have to fly, or film, by instinct. This autobiographical element in Lucas's filmmaking runs throughout the six Star Wars films Lucas made and beyond. Lucas even made a film in film school called Freiheit, the German for freedom. It's about a student trying to escape across the border from communist East Germany to democratic West Germany. I'll probably make reference to these autobiographical elements of Lucas's filmmaking from time to time as we work through the films, but I'll treat it as a side story or an example of the more general ideas I'm after. In the end, even those of us who interpret Star Wars don't watch Star Wars to learn about who George Lucas is. We watch Star Wars to think about who we are and what the world is like. Lucas was successful in creating films that speak to the human condition, partly because he channeled his own experiences into the films. But it's the human condition that makes the films worth watching again and again, not the details of Lucas's experience of it. So to underline this, I want to give you one more example of Jedi strategy from Lucas's lifetime that I think is even better than Lucas's own biography, the nonviolent resistance of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. King used nonviolent resistance as a strategy to resist Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow laws established all sorts of unequal treatment for black people in the South in the United States. And if you didn't accept the unequal treatment, you got punished. Now punishments are calculated to be unpleasant, to force you into accepting the laws as the terms of engagement. So if you don't want Jim Crow laws to be the terms of engagement in your society, it seems like you might need some way of avoiding punishment. But it's hard to resist punishment without violence, fighting fire with fire, Han Solo style. The problem is law enforcement has an advantage of training and equipment. It's going to be hard to win that fight. The idea of non-violent resistance is that you resist the unequal treatment, but you don't resist punishment. And at first, maybe that doesn't sound very promising, because you're still accepting terms they dictate to you. You're accepting the punishment, and the punishment is unpleasant. You might think, look, if I'm going to accept something, I might as well accept the unequal treatment, because at least then I get the benefit of not being punished. But the insight behind non-violent resistance is that it draws society's attention to the injustice of the punishment. You see the sharp contrast between the civility of the people going to jail and the barbarity of the people sending them there. And when a society can recognize that, they start to put... /episode/index/show/1ec33c7f-fd81-43dd-845e-40871e40a48e/id/39064490

The Jedi's Freedom 11/11/2025

Transcript: The Jedi's Freedom 11/11/2025

Transcript: The Jedi's Freedom Welcome back to The Force and Freedom. Last time we saw that Han and Obi-Wan disagree about how to face fear. They discuss their disagreement while Luke trains with a lightsaber, and then immediately after, their disagreement is illustrated in an encounter with a TIE fighter. Han thinks they should blow it up. Obi-Wan thinks there's something fishy, and they'd better let it go. And then we saw that throughout the Death Star scenes, Han consistently wants to solve problems with guns. And Luke and Leia, on the other hand, show a kind of Jedi openness to alternatives. The Jedi idea is that there are things that hold our lives together and control our destinies. Lucas said, “I have come to the conclusion that there is a Force larger than the individual. It is controlled by the individuals, and it controls them. All I'm saying is that the pure soul is connected to a larger energy field that you would begin to understand if you went all the way back and saw yourself in the purest sense.” What the Jedi do is get in touch with these broader patterns that hold our lives together and control our destinies. Since these patterns determine how we each act and behave, awareness of these patterns can give us control of ourselves and others. Luke and Leia are able to figure out how to get through the Death Star because they understand how Death Star life has to operate. Space stations need garbage rooms, and garbage compactors need controls. When Obi-Wan scares away the Sand People, it's similarly based on an awareness of their way of life, of who their predators are, and how they react to signs of them. When he uses his Jedi mind trick, he's acting on his awareness of the way that a certain kind of psychology holds Imperial hierarchies together. He knows just what stormtroopers respond to, orders. Why does the mind trick work? Because stormtroopers take orders. That's what they're trained to do. It's not just a mystical power that allows Obi-Wan to get past the stormtroopers. It's that he understands who he's dealing with, and he can see how to change the terms of engagement by putting on an authoritative tone of voice. Of course, the Force is also a mystical power, and it makes possible things that would be impossible in our world. But the core idea is that using the Force is tapping into an awareness of the laws of the universe. And Han rejects this. Han says, There's no mystical energy field controls my destiny. Han is an individualist in a deep sense. He doesn't see himself and his actions as the product of laws, mystical or otherwise. Great. I take orders from just one person, me. It's a wonder he's still alive. But that's a skewed self-understanding. Living beings thrive on a give-and-take relationship with their environment, and the Jedi learn to sense the give-and-take relationships in an environment and work with them. Remember that the lesson we learned from Rousseau was that you can be your own master in society with others by coming to an agreement on the laws. But if you're expecting to take orders only from yourself without regard for those around you, good luck. If Luke and Leia seemed like good creative problem solvers, they're mere apprentices compared to Obi-Wan. In some early notes, Lucas described Obi-Wan as having the James Bond-like quality of always being in control. He's very sure of himself and always comes out ahead, regardless of the danger. Aboard the Death Star, Obi-Wan doesn't need to find clever ways to escape the Stormtroopers, because he makes sure they never find him. While Luke and Leia are desperately thinking up ways out of jams, Obi-Wan has such a refined awareness of the possibilities open to him that he avoids violence entirely. He wanders freely about the Death Star without being noticed, until he encounters Vader. It's hard to tell whether Vader's command of the Force has allowed him to catch up with Obi-Wan or whether Obi-Wan has allowed himself to be captured. Escape is not his plan. We're going to see that Vader and Obi-Wan are always a few steps ahead of where they seem to be in their lightsaber duel. But before we get to the duel, it's worth mentioning that in itself the lightsaber already represents the Jedi's determination to take control of the terms of engagement. It's a completely different kind of weapon from a blaster. It requires a different set of skills, and it generates a different kind of fight. When introducing the lightsaber to Luke, Obi-Wan describes it as a weapon out of step with the times. An elegant weapon, but a more civilized age. You don't choose a lightsaber because that's what other people are doing. When you choose a blaster, you're choosing to accept the terms of an uncivilized age. But when you choose the lightsaber, you're choosing a very different way of engaging with your enemy. You also don't choose the lightsaber because it's obviously better for dispatching your opponents. It has obvious limitations compared to a blaster. You won't be able to shoot first like Han. You choose it because it gives you control. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster. The laser bolt of a blaster, once flown, is out of my control. But the laser beam of a lightsaber always answers to its wielder's hands. The lightsaber is for someone who values control more than destructive power. The first lightsaber battle of Star Wars is not the most visually stunning, but in a way that's entirely appropriate, because the real battle in this case is not the battle fought with lightsabers. It's a battle of wits. Vader initiates this mental battle by taunting Obi-Wan as he lures him into the fight. When I left you, I was but a learner. Now I am the master. These words are calculated to offend Obi-Wan, to hurt his pride. The natural reaction is for Obi-Wan to try to outfight Vader, to prove that he, Obi-Wan, is still the master, that he still has something to teach Vader. In other words, Vader is trying to set the terms. He's trying to make the confrontation a duel to prove who's the master, because he thinks those terms are favorable to him. Now Obi-Wan does accept the duel, but not in the spirit that Vader intends. He isn't really trying to beat Vader. In fact, he deliberately loses in the end. He's using the duel to achieve his own ends, first freeing his friends. If you watch the duel carefully, you'll see that Obi-Wan pivots around Vader, positioning himself on the opposite side he starts from, and then he starts to back up, luring Vader to the doorway. Why? Maybe he's trying to get away. But remember that Vader had earlier told us that escape is not his plan. He seems to have something else in mind. From the doorway where he stops his retreat, he can be seen by all the stormtroopers in the hangar. and the stormtroopers, enticed by the flashing dance of the lightsabers, abandon their posts to get a closer look, leaving the heroes with an open path to the Millennium Falcon. Vader wanted to make the duel about who's better with a lightsaber, but Obi-Wan has other priorities, and he sticks to them. He's fighting Vader not to prove that he's the master, but to help his friends reach their ship. But Vader's strong in the Force too. Obi-Wan may have created a diversion so his friends could get to the Falcon, But Vader had already planted a tracking device on the Falcon. He wants them to get away so they can lead him to the Rebel base. So perhaps Vader is one step ahead of Obi-Wan. But Obi-Wan has a second goal beyond the diversion, as we can see in the knowing look he directs towards Luke before he gives up the ghost. He's going to make himself a martyr to inspire the cause. You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. The thought is that Obi-Wan's death will do more to inspire Luke and the Rebels than his life would. And here I think we see a Jedi insight that goes beyond simply thinking outside the box to set the terms of engagement. One of the Jedi insights, one that Vader seems to lack, is that if you're willing to give yourself up, you gain greater control of the situation. Obi-Wan is fighting a losing battle against a younger, stronger opponent. As long as Obi-Wan assumes that the task before him is to defend his honor as a Jedi Master, or even to find a way to survive, he's trapped. But Obi-Wan doesn't assume that he needs to survive. He realizes that his life is less important to the cause than Luke's, and that seeing his death will inspire Luke, so he lets go. Taking a step into a broader world doesn't just mean seeing alternative ways of getting what you want. It also means re-evaluating the importance of what you want. Vader is trying to get Obi-Wan to define the situation in terms of his identity as a Jedi Knight, a master warrior. That identity is under threat, and the natural reaction is to defend it. But Obi-Wan doesn't let concern for his identity as a warrior, or even for his life, get in the way of seeing the possibility of saving some friends and a cause. The point here is that if you don't let your sense of yourself and of your importance blind you to possibilities, if you're willing to let go of yourself and ally yourself with a greater cause, You can find a measure of meaningful freedom even when your choices are very narrowly constrained. So maybe Obi-Wan was one step ahead of Vader after all. Think back to Obi-Wan's talk of letting go of one's conscious self, of letting the Force control one's actions, of stepping into a larger world. A lot of the time what blinds us to our possibilities are deeply rooted assumptions about ourselves and our importance. This may all sound paradoxical, How is Obi-Wan more free in giving up on his desire to save his own life? Isn't Vader the one forcing him to give up on this goal? So how is he not subject to Vader's will? It's certainly true that Vader is limiting Obi-Wan's freedom at this moment. Obi-Wan can't have everything because Vader is in his way. Ideally, Obi-Wan would help his friends escape, inspire Luke, and also escape with them. But while Vader is succeeding at limiting Obi-Wan 's options, he isn't controlling Obi-Wan the way he wants to. He isn't succeeding at getting Obi-Wan to invest in the fight as a test of who’s master. He wants this to be a humiliation for Obi-Wan. He wants this to be intimidating for any onlookers, proof that Obi-Wan is weak and that resistance to the Empire is futile. But to accomplish that, he needs Obi-Wan to be trying his hardest and losing in spite of it. Instead, Obi-Wan gives Luke a knowing look and refuses to defend himself anymore. And then he disappears, leaving even Vader flummoxed about what's happened. He completely robs Vader of his moment. So although Vader imposes limits on Obi-Wan's options, he doesn't manage to dictate Obi-Wan's actions to him the way that the Empire dictates actions to those who are afraid of them. Obi-Wan's self-abnegation doesn't give him the freedom to get whatever he wants, though he has a lot more of that kind of freedom than most people because he's so good at negotiating the terms of engagement. The freedom that Obi-Wan's self-abnegation gives him is the freedom from having his actions dictated to him by threats of violence and domination. The freedom from having Vader control his actions. Gilbert Murray once wrote, “Be careful in dealing with a man who cares nothing for sensual pleasures, nothing for comfort or praise or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he believes is right. He is a dangerous and uncomfortable enemy because his body, which you can always conquer, gives you so little purchase on his soul.” Of course, if you just do care about sensual pleasures, praise and promotion, about preserving your own life, or being the best with a lightsaber, being forced to give up these things will always be a limitation on your freedom. And if you only care about these things, and someone threatens to take them away, and you can't find a way around their threat, then you won't have this freedom. People who care about something that others are able to take away from them will always be vulnerable to those others. It just so happens that Obi-Wan cares about something much bigger than himself, and hence harder to take away from him, and so it's harder for Vader to get a lever on him. And Obi-Wan 's refusal to defend himself sends a powerful message. The Empire can't make you do anything. They can kill you, but they can't control your actions unless you let them. They can't keep the systems in line without the fear of this battle station, and you can choose whether to be afraid. When Mussolini invaded Abyssinia, Mohandas Gandhi wrote, “If the Abyssinians had adopted the attitude of non-violence of the strong, that is, the non-violence which breaks to pieces but never bends, Mussolini would have had no interest in Abyssinia. Thus, if they had simply said, you're welcome to reduce us to dust and ashes, but you will not find one Abyssinian ready to cooperate with you, what would Mussolini have done? He didn't want a desert.” In one 1987 interview, George Lucas emphasized the application of these Jedi principles to technology. He said, “When I made graffiti, I was 23 years old. I was very aware of the changes taking place around me as I was growing up, and I loved it, but at the same time it was sad. I was kind of nostalgic for the loss of youth, I guess. But that's the point. Things change, life goes on. Life is a constant transition, and you have to accept that fact. The film is all about the fact that you can't hang on to the past. The future may be completely strange and different and scary, but that's the way it should be. I thought that was one of the biggest challenges facing teenagers. I got to do what I wanted to do by not being frightened away by the future and the unknown. And I figured that was a good message to get across. Star Wars says the same thing in terms of technology, space flight, and opening up the world. The idea is not to be afraid of change. Star Wars shows progression. You may be frightened, and it's sad because you're leaving something behind. But go forward. That's what life is about. You can either have a good attitude about change or a bad attitude about it. You can't fight tidal waves, you can only ride them. So the best thing to do is get your surfboard and make the best of it. The force is what happens in spite of us, that we can either use or not use. We can fight these changes or we can use them, incorporate them into our lives, take full advantage of them. The opposing view is the nostalgic notion I was talking about, fear of change. I don't want to lose myself in the greater ocean of humanity. Kick and scream all you want, but that's the way things are going.” So notice the language Lucas is using here. The problem is fear, fear of change. And in particular, what kind of change? I don't want to lose myself in the greater ocean of humanity. It's a fear of self-loss. That's the opposite of the Jedi message. You can see why Han and Obi-Wan are in such stark disagreement. Fear of self-loss is Han's primary motivation. The thought is that you have to let go of the world you thought you knew, Let go of the self you were attached to, and accept how things are. And when you do, that empowers you, and it gives you some control over your situation. Now this Jedi strategy wasn't just something that Lucas made-up for the movies. Remember from our last episode that Lucas was living these problems. He was living under freedom-limiting empires. The studios controlled the terms under which films were being made, and Lucas wasn't happy with those terms. In response, Lucas managed to do a Jedi trick of his own. Broadly speaking, there have been two main approaches for filmmakers to make a movie. On the one hand, you can make a movie for the studios. They provide the budget and you make your movie. But they usually keep a lot of control of the final product, because they want to make sure they can earn something on their investment. On the other hand, you could forgo the studio money and try to gather money on your own, make an independent film. It's going to be difficult to get anything like the kind of money you could get for a studio film. And that's going to mean that if you're an independent filmmaker, you're going to be much more limited in the sorts of things you can do, especially back before digital technology had made it so affordable to make all sorts of movies. Lucas once said, “After THX, I realized I had to make entertaining films or back off and release through libraries. I didn't want to struggle to get $3,000. It was too limiting, like giving a painter one brush, a piece of hardboard, and tubes of black and white paint. You can do it, but... I didn't want to be a self-indulgent artist, and I didn't want my wife to support me forever.” So Lucas seems to have opted for the studio strategy. Now, of course, these weren't the only two possibilities. There were hybrid approaches. Some people would work for the studios to get money so they could use that money to finance their own projects. Orson Welles was famous for this sort of thing. He'd start filming his independent film, then he'd run out of money. So he'd go back to Hollywood and do some acting to get some more money so he could keep filming. In the most extreme case, The Other Side of the Wind, it actually took him almost six years to complete the filming, because he kept running out of money and having to pause the filmmaking so he could go look for more money. George Lucas did something very clever. He didn't take either of the standard approaches exactly, or even the hybrid approach Orson Welles used. He out-studioed the studios by approaching the studios like a businessman rather than like an artist. Coming fresh off his first commercial success, American Graffiti, he was in a position to demand more money. But he didn't demand more money. Instead, he demanded two things that most directors didn't want or didn't think to demand. First, he demanded merchandise rights. And at the time, merchandise rights were garbage rights. Nobody was making money off the merchandise. Lucas said, “We found Fox was giving away merchandising rights just for the publicity. They gave away tie-in promotions with a big fast food chain. They were actually paying these people to do this big campaign for them. We told them that was insane. I simply said, I'm going to be able to make t-shirts, I'm going to be able to make posters, and I'm going to be able to sell this movie even though the studios won't. I'm going to make five times as much money as Francis on these science fiction toys, and I won't have to make The Godfather.” So Lucas realized that if Star Wars turned out the way he hoped it would, he could make a lot of money selling toys and t-shirts. And that money would help set him free from the studios in the future. Which brings me to the second thing that he asked for, sequel rights. The studio was slow to concede these, but when it came down to it, the sequel rights were only going to be worth something if the original movie was successful, which wasn't a guarantee. And even if Lucas had sequel rights, he was probably going to need studio money to make a sequel with. So he was probably going to come back to the studio for the second movie anyway. Which he did, but not for nearly as much money as you would have thought because he made so much money from the first movie and the merchandise that he was able to finance it mostly by himself. And remember that this was an era when franchises weren't really a thing. Sequels rarely made money, even if the first one did. In fact, Lucas' own first sequel, More American Graffiti, was a total bomb in spite of the original's massive success and the star power of Harrison Ford, Ron Howard, and Cindy Williams. But the goal of the whole franchise was to make... /episode/index/show/1ec33c7f-fd81-43dd-845e-40871e40a48e/id/38996705

Two Responses to Fear Aboard the Death Star 11/04/2025

Transcript: Two Responses to Fear 11/04/2025

Transcript: Two Responses to Fear Welcome back to the Force and Freedom Podcast. We've been exploring the ways that images express ideas about freedom and threats to freedom. In the first episode, I gave some examples from the first couple of minutes. In the second, I focused in on some images that highlight a concern about how fear can undermine our freedom. I pointed out that the first scenes aboard the Death Star repeat this theme three times, with three separate visual reminders of the Death Star, small spheres that share some of the Death Star's features. The last of the small spheres pops up in the scene following the Death Star's destruction of Alderaan. In that scene, a game of holo-chess illustrates how fear can change the terms of engagement from ones we've agreed to, ones we don't agree to. The association between the Empire and fear goes beyond the Death Star and the holo-chess match. Recall that in the first episode, I quoted Joe Johnston saying that the TIE fighters were supposed to achieve something of the effect of World War II super dive bombers. Those dive bombers had an artificial siren wail created by air ducts. Johnston said about the air ducts, they didn't serve any purpose except to create this noise, which would terrify people. It was intended that the TIE should achieve the same effect with just a menacing appearance. It was supposed to look terrifying, even though it wasn't necessary that all that stuff have a specific function. Imperial design is both about fear and conformity, and it's no accident that the two mix so well. Fear produces conformity. In this episode, I want to start by pointing out that some of the same points can be made using some details from George Lucas's own life. Prior to making Star Wars, Lucas directed a movie called THX 1138. It's an Orwellian movie. It's about an individual's struggle to escape from a dystopian world where people's lives, emotions, and thoughts are controlled by drugs and machines. At the time Lucas made THX, he wasn't known for his storytelling. He was known for short art films that aimed at a kind of visual poetry, and that's how he approached THX. There's an interview with an actor in that movie, Don Pedro Colley, and it gives us some insight into the process of making the movie. Colley was worried about Lucas's focus on visual poetry. He was worried it was making him neglect the storytelling. He described his concerns as follows. When the final cast was assembled, we worked very hard at letting George know that we were all responsible to Warner Brothers for the $1 million they fronted us to bring them a product that warranted their going out on a limb to an unproven first-time director. In fact, everyone's rep was on the line. We kept telling George, this film will not work unless we're able to breathe life into these characters. George wasn't too happy to have to deal with our ideas. but he came around. Notice what's motivating Colley. He's afraid that a powerful studio could be disappointed. He's afraid of the consequences for all involved. The fear of a box office failure doesn't just motivate the actors to do their work professionally. It motivates them to put unwelcome pressure on Lucas. Notice that Colley doesn't frame the issue in terms of wanting to make a great movie for its own sake or for the audience's benefit. He doesn't say, hey George, I have some ideas for making a better movie. Instead, he frames his concerns in terms of fear of betraying the studio's trust. He says, hey George, I'm worried about what the studios are going to think. Fear will keep the local systems in line. The irony is that THX is itself a dystopian movie about Big Brother controlling everyone's lives. As Colley puts it in the same interview, When THX hit the screen, you were thrown into a world that was not that far in the future. The idea that Big Brother not only was watching, but was controlling every part of your life. So here Lucas is making a movie about Big Brother watching everyone, and he's surrounded by people pressuring him to watch his step because Warner Brothers is watching him. Now as we saw before, fear tends to change the terms of engagement. Fear of the studio can turn decisions that could otherwise be about artistic vision or even pleasing audiences into decisions about pleasing the studio. And Lucas abhorred these terms of engagement. He hated studio involvement in his artistic process. Now, Lucas was a little unusual in not being afraid of the studios and their power, at least not the way that Colley was. Lucas was more like Han or Obi-Wan. But of course, fear of the studios is rooted in the economic and legal power the studios have over filmmakers. So although not being afraid made Lucas freer than Colley, not being afraid alone only got him so far, especially when he was surrounded by people who were afraid. In the end, the studio was in fact worried about THX and decided to cut it shorter, and Lucas faced the same problem with the studio cutting several minutes from his second feature-length movie, American Graffiti, and it infuriated him again. Lucas said, there was no reason for the cutting. It was just arbitrary. You do a film like American Graffiti or THX, it takes 2 years of your life. You get paid hardly anything at all, and you sweat blood. You write it, you slave over it, you stay up 28 nights getting cold and sick. Then you put it together and you've lived with it. It's exactly like raising a kid. You raise a kid for two or three years. You struggle with it. Then somebody comes along and says, well, it's a very nice kid, but I think we ought to cut off one of its fingers. So they take their little axe and chop off one of the fingers. They say, don't worry, nobody will notice. She'll live. Everything will be all right. But I mean, it hurts a great deal. In another interview, Lucas described the Hollywood film studios like this. They're rather sleazy, unscrupulous people. LA is where they make deals, do business in the classic corporate American way, which is screw everybody and do whatever you can to make the biggest profit. They don't care about people. It's incredible the way they treat filmmakers, because they have no idea what making a movie is about. To them, the deal is the movie. They have no idea of the suffering, the hard work. They're not filmmakers. I don't want to have anything to do with them. He said, Universal wanted to take 5 minutes out of American Graffiti. Five minutes in a movie is not going to make a difference. It was nothing more than an exercise in authority, Universal saying they had the right. Lucas was so upset about this that he swore to get total independence from the studios. Part of Lucas's aim in creating the Star Wars franchise was to earn enough money that he wouldn't have to ask the studios for money again, so that they couldn't dictate the terms of engagement to him. His dream was to create a place called Skywalker Ranch, where independent filmmakers could experiment and create art films, free from the studio's control. He was already dreaming of this while making THX. At the time, Lucas was working with Francis Ford Coppola's production company, American Zoetrope, which Lucas managed to sync with the box office failure of his THX. Lucas described American Zoetrope's operating scheme as basically the opposite of Hollywood's. He said, we say, we think you are a talented, functioning person, and we're hiring you because of your abilities. And whatever you come up with, we're going to take. If we make a mistake, it'll be in picking the wrong person. What we're striving for is total freedom, where we can finance our pictures, make them our way, release them where we want them released, and be completely free to express ourselves. That's very hard to do in the world of business. In this country, the only thing that speaks is money, and you have to have the money in order to have the power to be free. So the danger is in being as oppressive as the next guy to the people below you. We're going to do everything possible to avoid that pitfall, but if we fail, it's another saga in the history of man. So I hope you can see how these ideas about fear, domination, fair terms of engagement, and freedom were pretty clearly at the front of Lucas's mind when he was writing Star Wars, and so it's no surprise that Star Wars deals with these themes. In fact, even while Lucas was working on Star Wars, there was a strong sense that Fox was not respecting Lucas. Orrin Hellman said, “My perception is there was a lack of respect for George. The movie industry is a very vituperative and petty industry most of the time, and part of the negotiations was just to see how much they could push George around because they felt like they could.” But these aren't just themes from Lucas's life. This problem of fear dictating the terms of our decisions is something that most of us encounter regularly. Even in situations where we're not dominated by economic, political, or other kinds of coercive power, think about how fear works in social pressure. Think about all the things that people do or don't do because they're worried about what someone else will do, say, or think in response. If you're afraid of what someone will do, say, or think, they don't ever have to do, say, or think it for their presence to dominate your decision-making. So Star Wars is about an everyday problem. We're surrounded by social force fields and tractor beams like the ones the Death Star makes. Mohandas Gandhi felt that internal freedom from fear had to precede external freedom. During his fight against British colonial rule, he wrote, I've come to the conclusion that we should stop going to law courts. Taking such cases to the courts does little good. Where the peasants are so crushed and fear-stricken, law courts are useless. The real relief for them is to be free from fear. You can win a battle for a right here or there in the courts, but when you live in fear of what the British colonial rulers will do to you, you won't enjoy any real freedom, because you're too scared of what the rulers might do to you. The fear-stricken peasants didn't just avoid crossing the legal line. They went out of their way to keep the British from getting upset with them, even when the law didn't require it. We saw last time that the remote Luke is training with is a visual reminder of the Death Star. And so Luke's training against the remote is a sort of metaphor for how to deal with fear and maintain our freedom. And we saw that Han is critical of Obi-Wan's coaching, that he seems to have his own approach to fear. I want to quickly review what I said last time and then give some illustrations of the two strategies from the film itself. Han's approach to someone using fear to try to change the terms of engagement is to accept the new terms and do his best under them. If Greedo's drawn blaster makes the conversation into a gunfight, then try to win the gunfight. Shoot first. Han has a sort of natural courage bordering on rashness. He's not immobilized by fear the way others are. He's learned how to fend for himself. But his approach doesn't solve the deeper problem that fear creates. He engages with the Empire on their terms, which means that everything is decided by violence. And as we saw, in the long run, that's a losing strategy because the Empire has the most firepower. That's why the Empire chooses those terms. Obi-Wan has a different strategy in mind. Don't let others dictate the terms of engagement to you. After all, when you've let others dictate the terms, you're already unfree. Instead, take a step back from the situation and learn to see it with new eyes. As soon as Han and Obi-Wan 's conversation has laid out their differing views, the film starts illustrating the contrast and strategies. As they drop out of hyperspace, a TIE fighter fires on the Falcon before screaming past the cockpit, racing away. Han thinks they should chase it down and blow it up, and that fits perfectly with his approach to fear. He's taking things on Imperial terms. There's a fighter. What should we do? Let's fight it. He's reactive. He's following his opponent's moves. And his opponent hopes that he'll do just that. The TIE fighter is bait to lure him close enough to get caught in the tractor beam. Meanwhile, Obi-Wan has been suggesting alternatives. He thinks they should let the fighter go. He points out that a fighter that size couldn't have gotten this deep into space on its own. And he's the first to realize that the Death Star is no moon, but a space station, and suggests that they turn around. When it's clear that there's no turning around, Han swears that they won't get him without a fight, but Obi-Wan suggests they look for alternatives. The first alternative is to hide themselves in secret compartments, a plan Han Solo evidently doesn't much like even after it's worked. The whole cockpit scene is a contrast between Han taking the terms that the Empire gives him, physical force and violence, and Obi-Wan suggesting that they consider other terms, other ways of engaging with the Empire, or of avoiding engagement altogether. And this is just a preview of what's going to happen on board the Death Star. The heroes’ time on board the Death Star is a continuous juxtaposition of these opposed ways of dealing with fear, which makes sense. Think about it. The heroes are now aboard a symbol of fear and control, and they're trying to get free from it. The first thing they do is smuggle themselves in Han's smuggling compartments. Think about that. They're not just hiding contraband goods, they're hiding themselves. The individual self has no business on this space station. On the Death Star, everyone wears a uniform. Most of them even have identical masks covering their faces. Individuality has no place here, so it's natural that Luke and Han have to dress up as stormtroopers to get around. And Chewie, who can't fit in stormtrooper armor, has to walk around in shackles. Not long after they blow their cover, they end up in a trash compactor, a sort of mechanical stomach that tries to digest them, recalling our earlier thoughts about empire and control. The thought is clear. On the Death Star, you have to conform. And if you're not in conformity, the Death Star is going to try to force you to conform. Notice that Obi-Wan doesn't have to dress up as a Stormtrooper to avoid problems, and he doesn't end up in a trash compactor. Obi-Wan has a way of dealing with the Death Star that allows him to maintain his individuality without fighting. We'll talk about that next episode. First, I want to focus on how Han handles the Death Star. Now, if you've seen the next two movies, it's easy to forget what Han is like in A New Hope. In the later movies, Han always has some clever trick up his sleeve. But in A New Hope, Han seems to have only one answer to any problem. Shoot it. He doesn't just try this on stormtroopers. He shoots the comm link when his conversation is going poorly. He shoots the door to the trash compactor to try to get out, even as his friends try to warn him it's magnetically sealed. He shoots into the trash compactor again after they get out to show Chewie there's nothing to be afraid of, in spite of Leia's warning that their enemies will hear him. Probably the best example comes when they round a corner to find themselves face to face with a dozen stormtroopers. Han shoots one, and instead of running away, charges after the rest of them as they retreat. When he rounds another corner to find they've regrouped, it's his turn to beat a hasty retreat. The only thing Han suggests besides shooting things is running away. Han's even impatient with the clever ideas other people come up with. He objects to having to smuggle himself in the secret compartments on his ship. After they manage to get themselves into the command office by disguising themselves in stormtrooper uniforms and pretending to have a transmitter malfunction, Luke complains that Han is making too much noise with his blasting. And Han responds, Bring them on. I'd prefer a straight fight to all of us sneaking around. He complains to the princess twice about her leading them into the trash compactor. Han doesn't like creative solutions. Blasting and running are the obvious moves when you accept the terms of engagement dictated by the Empire. That's what the stormtroopers do, run and blast. In limiting himself to those options, Han is accepting the terms the Empire dictates to him, terms of violence and coercion. He's braver than most, certainly has courage, and fear doesn't completely immobilize him like it does others, but he lets it dictate the terms. Now contrast Han's one-dimensional blast-and-run approach with what we see from Luke. Luke is a Jedi in training, and we can already see some of Obi-Wan 's influence on him. The first time we see Luke reframe a conflict is in his argument with Han about rescuing Leia. Han doesn't want to rescue the princess, and he's unmoved by Luke's pleading. But they're going to kill her! Better her than me! Luke pauses to think, and we can see on his face the moment the light bulb goes off. She's rich. Up until that moment, Luke has been trying to argue with Han in terms of what Luke himself cares about. Since Han doesn't share Luke's point of view, the arguments fall on deaf ears. But suddenly Luke realizes this and inhabits Han's perspective. What Han cares about is money, and the princess is bound to have some money. So by stepping out of his own perspective into a larger world, Luke is able to make things happen. A similar sort of creativity gets them to the detention center. Luke probably asks himself, what would be a legitimate reason for us to go to the detention center? Taking prisoners there. Where could we find a prisoner? One of us would do. And how about Chewie, since he can't fit in a Stormtrooper uniform? Luke isn't the only one with clever ideas. When Leia shows up, she adds her fair share. It's Leia who finds a way out of the detention area through the garbage chute, when neither Han nor Luke have any ideas about getting out through the doors. And that's fitting, because Leia is a seasoned rebel fighter, and it'll turn out that she has some sense for the Force as well. Leia also offers the first idea for how to deal with the trash compactor by bracing the walls with bits of trash. It doesn't work, but it's the first idea. It's Luke who solves the trash compactor problem by realizing that he can contact C-3PO through the comlink and get R2 to shut the trash compactor down and open the door. And finally, Luke manages to get himself and Leia across the chasm on a rope after he's destroyed the controls to the bridge. Destroying the controls to the bridge might be a little more Han-like, but after that, Luke needs to get a little bit more creative. All of these solutions require some creative thinking, some non-obvious solution to a problem. And not all of them are cases where an opponent has tried to present them with certain terms. The trash compactor was not designed to attack humans in it. But the same sort of creativity that allows you to get out of the terms others try to impose on you can help you rethink all sorts of situations. And Luke and Leia are able to choose their own terms by discovering alternative ways of engaging or avoiding engagements with their enemy. All of these more creative approaches to problems are foreshadowed by Luke's training. Recall that Obi-Wan made Luke fight the remote blind. It's easy to fall into the habit of seeing things the way that fear presents them to us. In fact, it can be important to see them the way fear presents them to us. Fear can warn us about real dangers. But sometimes, fear moves us to do things that are counterproductive. And sometimes it short-circuits our thinking so that we don't see all the options available to us. Anyone who understands this... /episode/index/show/1ec33c7f-fd81-43dd-845e-40871e40a48e/id/38882775

The Problem of Fear 10/28/2025

Transcript: The Problem of Fear 10/28/2025

Transcript: The Problem of Fear Welcome back to the Force and Freedom Podcast. Last time I posed a question, What is Star Wars about, or what does Star Wars mean? And I began to unpack my answer. Star Wars is about freedom. But I should point out that there have been a lot of other interpretations of Star Wars. You may have heard of some. One of the most common is that Star Wars is about the hero's journey. There was a scholar, his name was Joseph Campbell, and he was influenced by some psychologists who thought that myths contain deep truths about our psychology. So Campbell studied the myths of lots of different cultures, and he claimed to find a pattern that he said they all tend to share in common. He called this pattern the monomyth, or the hero's journey. And he said the reason all these cultures have myths that contain this pattern is because their myths reflect universal psychological needs. Needs we may not even be aware of, because they're buried deep within our unconscious. He said that as we grow up, we all have to pass through similar stages of development. The hero's journey is that story of human development. It's a story of crisis and transformation that all humans have to pass through as they grow up. Now, George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, was interested in mythology, and he read Joseph Campbell's work, and he wanted to make a myth for our time. That's what he said in interviews at the time. So the thought goes, Star Wars reflects universal features of human psychology. That's one view of what Star Wars means. Another view is that Star Wars is about the battle between good and evil. The thought is, there's a conflict in the real world between good and evil. Maybe it's a conflict between good and evil people, or maybe just between the good and evil in each one of us. Star Wars dramatizes that conflict. It represents that conflict in a vivid way that resonates with us. Another interpretation is that Star Wars is about personal responsibility. This is the interpretation of Dale Pollock, author of Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas. Pollock writes, the major theme in Star Wars, as in every Lucasfilm, is the acceptance of personal responsibility. What Lucas seems to be saying is that we can't run away from our calling or mission in life, but have a duty to do what is expected of us. Hard work, self-sacrifice, friendship, loyalty, and a commitment to a higher purpose. These are the tenets of Lucas's faith. And then another thought that I see in a lot of critics is that Star Wars is about making money. George Lucas wanted money so he could be independent of the studios, and Star Wars was a great way to do it. People who focused on this tend to think there isn't really anything interesting going on in Star Wars. It's just entertainment. It doesn't mean anything important. Now, I think there may be something right about most of these interpretations, and I don't think they have to be mutually exclusive. Star Wars can be about the hero's journey and about the fight between good and evil, and, as I'm arguing, about freedom. The assessment that I don't accept, though, is that Star Wars is just entertainment, that it doesn't mean anything interesting. As I started to argue last time, I think Star Wars is worth thinking about, and I think that there's a side of Star Wars that hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. Whatever else Star Wars is about, I think Star Wars is about freedom, and I'm going to try to convince you of that. Unfortunately, the thought that Star Wars is just entertainment, it doesn't mean anything important, seems to be the most prevalent assessment among film critics. And to illustrate this, I've pulled up a handful of reviews from 1977, the year when Star Wars came out. Vincent Canby of the New York Times wrote, “Star Wars pretty much defines what most people mean when they speak of escapist entertainment. It isn't about anything at all in any serious way, though it is so beautifully and cheerfully done and so full of references to the literature of one's childhood that the escapism is of a particularly invigorating sort.” Pete Hamill, no relation of Mark Hamill, wrote a review of Star Wars in the Chicago Tribune entitled, “Star Wars: Dumb Good Times Here Again?” It included this passage. “This movie, which was written and directed by George Lucas, is this season's big dumb flick. That is to say, it's not about anything. It doesn't make you think, it doesn't preach, it does not in any way add to the knowledge of the human heart. It's just entertainment. You walk in off the street after a long wait in line, and for a couple of hours you are somewhere else flying around the galaxy watching white hats fight black hats. And maybe this movie is the truest indication that we have moved into another era of wonderful nonsense, as Westbrook Pegler once described the 1920s.” Finally, Gene Siskel also wrote a review of Star Wars in the Chicago Tribune that year. It started with these lines. “I'm sure the folks at 20th Century Fox were thrilled when Time Magazine this week called Star Wars the year's best movie, but that kind of outlandish remark can hurt the film. Star Wars is not a great movie in the sense that it describes the human condition. It simply is a fun picture that will appeal to those who enjoy Buck Rogers-style adventures. What places it a sizable cut above the routine is its spectacular visual effects, the best since Stanley Kubrick's 2001. That's all it has in common with Kubrick film. There's no mysterious symbolism in Star Wars, although calling it the year's best movie might trigger image searching. That would be unfortunate, because its story is terribly simple.” Now I think Siskel is just dead wrong. And last time I started to make my case by interpreting some of the images in the first two minutes of Star Wars. But the point of this podcast really goes way beyond the kind of thing I covered in the first episode. What I want to show you is not just that Star Wars dramatizes the conflict between freedom and conformity, but that Star Wars really explores that problem in a nuanced way. The images of Star Wars don't just make the conflict vivid, they investigate the conflict. So rather than continue scene by scene analyzing images, I want to jump straight to an image that I think gets to the core of the threat to freedom, the Death Star. I'm sure there are a lot of ways you can interpret the Death Star's shape. It kind of looks like an eyeball, maybe suggesting that it's watching. Maybe sort of a big brother feel. But let's set aside whatever associations we can make with the shape and consider an association that the film itself makes through a repeating pattern. When you watch the first scenes on board the Death Star, here's the pattern you see again and again. First, an establishing shot of the Death Star. Second, a scene involving a small sphere that looks a bit like the Death Star, as if to remind us that the scene is about the Death Star. And third, somewhere in connection with the Death Star and the sphere, some reference to fear. Now the first bit, an establishing shot of the Death Star, is a pretty standard way of introducing a scene. But the repeated inclusion of small spheres that look like the Death Star suggests that the film is trying to make a point. and the repeated references to fear seem to be the point. Now just as a warning, some of these references to fear will come in the dialogue, and so my interpretation will rely on more than just the images. But my point in this podcast is not that the dialogue is unimportant in Star Wars, or that you can give a good interpretation of Star Wars without paying attention to the words in the script. My point is just that the images play a crucial role in expressing the meaning of the film. In this case, the images are a kind of guide to the words. The images are what helps you understand the meaning of the words. The first scene on board the Death Star is preceded by an establishing shot, 4 seconds of footage of the Death Star with the menacing sound of the Death Star theme playing in the soundtrack. As a Star Destroyer in the foreground flies away from the camera and towards the Death Star, it shrinks to a barely recognizable sparkle. The Star Destroyer was enormous, but the Death Star is orders of magnitude larger. We're then transported into a conference room, A handful of officers in Nazi-like uniforms are debating strategy around a large, round, black table. In the center of the table is a shiny black sphere whose surface is only broken by what appears to be a set of thin metal bands around its equator. Now we've just seen the Death Star, also a sphere with a distinctive pattern of bands around its equator. So we're primed to see this little sphere as a sort of representation of the Death Star. Of course, the resemblance is abstract. but it is, after all, in the middle of a conference room aboard the Death Star. The debate turns out to be about the danger posed by the Rebel Alliance. Commander Tagg is warning the group that the Rebellion is gaining support in the Imperial Senate when Governor Tarkin and Darth Vader stride into the room. The camera begins to move around the table, keeping Tarkin and Vader constantly on the opposite side of the table as they walk around it to get to Tarkin's seat. It's as if the camera has suddenly been pulled into orbit around the model Death Star in the middle of the table. Now think about what it means to be pulled into orbit around the model Death Star in the middle of the table. What's happening here is that the Death Star is being compared to a real star. Stars are large celestial bodies that tend to draw objects into regular orbits around them, forming star systems. They create a kind of order. The Death Star is supposed to do the same thing for political organization. It exerts force on the various local systems, as Tarkin explains in this scene. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station. The Death Star and a real star both create order. A real star creates order by its gravitational force on the planets, and the Death Star creates order by generating fear among the local systems. And it's the authorities with the power to use the Death Star that direct that fear. So it makes sense that the entrance of Tarkin and Vader is what draws us into orbit around the little black Death Star on the conference table. So it's not just the way things look that communicates the ideas of Star Wars. Even the camera's motion can communicate something about the ideas at work in the scene. Now interestingly, Lucas wasn't actually the one who proposed making the room and the table round. That credit goes to John Barry. But Lucas saw something in it and kept it. Lucas said, John Barry decided he wanted to keep the round motif, so he made more round rooms in the Death Star. Intellectually, it's all wrong because of the fact that they're the enemy. The interiors should really be very angular, but it works. In other words, normally you would want angular interiors for the enemy because they look less comfortable, less welcoming, harsher. But in this case, the general sense of harshness is less important than the motif that the movie is generating, a motif that we're going to see again and again. The second Death Star scene is once again introduced by an establishing shot of the Death Star to the tune of the Death Star theme, this time with three TIE fighters screaming in the foreground. Inside the Death Star, Vader and two Imperial guards march into Leia's prison cell, followed by a black, humming spherical droid floating in the air. The droid has various terrifying gadgets poking out of it and a peculiar strip of lights around its equator. Again, there are some differences between this droid and the Death Star, but a floating sphere with a stripe around the equator is just too similar to the Death Star for the resemblance to be an accident, especially when we're on board the Death Star and just barely saw a shot of it. Vader announces that the purpose of his visit is to discuss the location of the rebel base. The camera focuses in on a syringe protruding from the droid's surface, and the humming of the droid intensifies. In the following shot, Leia gasps with fear. The thought is, Leia will betray the location of the rebel base out of fear of the droid. It's the same idea Tarkin expressed in the last Death Star scene. When people are afraid of something you might do to them, they'll do what you say. People give up their freedom when they're scared. The third scene that fits this pattern is the one in which the Death Star blows up Alderaan. As usual, we begin with an establishing shot of the Death Star. Horns blare the sinister Death Star theme. The Death Star is in the foreground and darkly lit this time to make it look more menacing compared to the lighter, smaller Alderaan in the distance. This time, the small Death Star-like sphere doesn't show up right away. It comes in the next scene. We'll get to that in a minute. In the meantime, we don't need a reminder of the Death Star because the scene climaxes in shots of the actual Death Star blowing up Alderaan. And once again, the scene emphasizes that the purpose of the Death Star is to generate fear to take away freedom. Tarkin wants Leia to betray the location of the hidden Rebel base, and he's hoping that fear that the Death Star will blow up her home planet is going to get her to do it. But Tarkin isn't just aiming at controlling Leia. Even after he's gotten a location out of her, he blows up Alderaan anyway. Why? To make a demonstration of the Death Star's power. To send a message to the galaxy that they'd better keep in line. So in this scene, Tarkin is trying to use fear of the Death Star to control both Leia and the entire galaxy. The thought that fear can be used to control people is really nothing new. You see it happening in all sorts of movies, especially movies with villains. But what sets A New Hope apart from many of these movies is that it focuses on fear and control as the problem, rather than on the character who happens to be generating the fear. Darth Vader has gone down in film history as one of its greatest villains, but the focus in these scenes isn't Vader or even Tarkin. The problem that comes up again and again is fear and its power to undermine freedom. And that matters because while Vader and Tarkin aren't problems we face in our world, fear is all around us. So if this is a movie about fear and its relationship to freedom, maybe it's got something important to say to us. And indeed, I think we get some clues about what it might have to say to us in the very next scene. At this point, I think it should be no surprise that the next scene starts with a third small Death Star-like sphere. It's a remote that Luke is training with Aboard the Millennium Falcon. The first shot of this scene is kind of complex. Luke is training on the left. In the middle, further back, Chewie and the droids are engaged with a game of holochess. And to the right, Obi-Wan is overseeing Luke's training. So the shot turns out to be a kind of sandwich. Obi-Wan on the right and Luke on the left are doing one thing. And Chewie and the droids nestled between them are doing something else. The scene itself is going to turn out to be a kind of sandwich. It starts with Luke's training and some conversation between Luke and Obi-Wan, then turns to the holo-chess match, and finally returns to the training. I don't think this sandwiching is a coincidence. Luke's training and the holo-chess match are about precisely the same themes. Let's start with the beginning of the scene. There's a little remote on the screen to give a visual echo of the Death Star. This time there are no lines around the sphere's equator, but it's kind of a Death Star gray and it shoots lasers at Luke. right after we saw the Death Star shoot a laser at Alderaan. So again, it's hard not to see a resemblance. And sure enough, the scene immediately deals with fear, specifically the terror of the inhabitants of Alderaan that Obi-Wan senses, a terror that was in fact caused by the Death Star. After Obi-Wan explains the disturbance he felt, he encourages Luke to get back to his training, and the focus turns to holochess. Chewie is upset because R2 has taken one of his pieces. He made a fair move. Screaming about it can't help you. But then Han explains that screaming about it might in fact help. “Let him have it. It's not wise to upset a wookie.” Let's think carefully about this. 3PO was appealing to a standard of fairness when he said that screaming accomplishes nothing. Under a standard of fairness, the terms of engagement are set by the rules of the game that each freely agreed to. Those rules stipulate who can move which piece in which ways. So they limit the kind of control that Chewie has over R2's pieces. Chewie can strategically move his own pieces to try to make R2 move his pieces in certain ways. But Chewie can't directly move R2's pieces or tell R2 where to put them. And any frustration he feels over how R2 moves his pieces has no bearing on what R2 is free to do. Under a standard of fairness, as long as R2 sticks to the rules, Chewie has no legitimate complaint about what R2 does. But once the scream is properly understood as a threat, it's clear that Chewie is not appealing to a standard of fairness at all. He's trying to impose a different standard, different terms of engagement. The new rule he's adding is basically, if you win, I tear your arms out of their sockets. And that completely changes the stakes and therefore the strategy. “I suggest a new strategy, Artwo. Let the Wookiee win.” In other words, Chewie completely changes the game. He turns a game of wits into a game of physical violence. But why not just play the game of physical violence with Chewie, Turn this into a wrestling match? Fear. Fear will keep the droids in line, fear of getting their arms torn out of their sockets. In the Holochess game, we're replaying in miniature the story of the empire. Just as fear will keep the local systems in line, fear is supposed to keep R2 in line to make him bow down and let the Wookiee win. Let me see if I can spell out the relationship between fear and freedom in a little more detail, starting with freedom. There's a way in which chess is always about struggling for control of your opponent. restricting your opponent's options. You block my pawn so I can't move it where I'd like. But when we sit down to play a game of chess, we've agreed to the rules of the game. So even if you get the better of me, I'm not really unfree. At one level, I don't want you to move your piece there, because it causes me problems. But at another level, I do want you to move your piece there. In the first place, I want you to be able to move your piece there, because it's part of the rules of the game. and I agree to the rules of the game and want us to play by them. Not only that, I want you to do your best because that's what will make this game satisfying. So if moving your piece right where I don't want it to go is your best, then there's a sense in which you're doing exactly what I want you to do. And so there's an important sense in which everything that's happening in the game, your moves and mine, are all in accordance with my will. And so I'm totally free. A similar thing can happen in everyday life. For example, suppose we're neighbors and I've got tomatoes near the edge of my yard. You come along and put up a fence around your yard and your fence puts my tomatoes in the shade. There's a sense in which I don't want you to put your fence there. It's blocking sunlight from my tomatoes. But whether I realize it or not, there's another sense in which it's important to me that you be able to put your fence there. The same principle that allows you to choose what you... /episode/index/show/1ec33c7f-fd81-43dd-845e-40871e40a48e/id/38796885

Transcript: Visual Storytelling in Star Wars 10/21/2025

Transcript: Visual Storytelling in Star Wars Welcome to the Force and Freedom Podcast. This is a podcast about the meaning of Star Wars, about what Star Wars is about. Now when I ask, what is Star Wars about, I'm trying to get at something beneath the surface of the movies. On the surface, you could say that Star Wars is about the fall and redemption of Anakin Skywalker, and about the demise and restoration of the Republic, a story that takes place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. But the Star Wars movies were made not so long ago, in our very own galaxy, so they mean something to us. They represent ideas and values that matter to us. In this podcast, I'm going to focus on one idea, one value in particular, freedom. That is, being one's own master. I think Star Wars is about how you can be free, about challenges to being free from people who want to control you, and about how you can face those challenges. Now you might wonder, how could Star Wars have anything interesting to say about freedom? The word freedom appears only once in A New Hope, in the opening Crawl, and not at all in the sequel, Empire Strikes Back. Star Wars may be about a fight for freedom, but it doesn't seem to have anything particularly interesting to say about freedom. But it's important to remember that Star Wars was created by George Lucas, and Lucas had a particular style as a director. Lucas wasn't terribly interested in dialogue. He was interested in images. Lucas once said, “Star Wars is basically a silent movie.” And of course what he means by that is not that there's no synchronized sound in the movie, but that the sound isn't the primary vehicle for the story, or for that matter, for the ideas. The images carry the movie. Lucas's interest in visual communication goes back to childhood. As a child, Lucas was fascinated by Norman Rockwell's cover illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post. Lucas said to them, “Every picture shows either the middle or the end of the story, and you can already see the beginning, even though it's not there. You can see all the missing parts because that one frame tells you everything you need to know.” Lucas later described his filmmaking in film school in these terms. “I was into trying to create emotions through pure cinematic techniques. All the films I made during that time center on conveying emotions through a cinematic experience, not necessarily through the narrative. Throughout my career, I've remained a cinema enthusiast. Even though I went on to make films with a more conventional narrative, I've always tried to convey emotions through essentially cinematic experiences.” Now what he meant by cinematic experience is the kind of experience that's unique to cinema. Lots of different art forms tell stories. You can tell a story in a novel; you can tell a story through a painting; you can tell a story through a movie. Story isn't essentially cinematic. What's essentially cinematic is the moving picture. So Lucas's idea was to focus on the power of the moving picture. Although he switched to more conventional narrative storytelling by the time he made Star Wars, you have to be very attuned to the images to pick up everything that Lucas is trying to do in the film. Another example of Lucas's focus on the visual is in his casting technique. Casting director Diane Crittenden described Lucas's process as follows. “Generally, George would ask, what have you been doing? And they would respond, you mean today or with my life? And George would say, either. And you could see people start to squirm. They'd ask, what's this about anyway? And he'd say, well, we're doing a science fiction movie. I received hundreds of phone calls later with people asking, what was I doing there? What happened?” Crittenden concluded, “George was looking for something very visual.” It's kind of a weird way to audition people, but George Lucas basically just wanted to see how people moved and how they were going to look on film. So it's not the dialogue that carries the ideas of Star Wars. It's the images, especially in the first movie, the one that George Lucas himself directed. And one of the main ideas the images are expressing is freedom. Long before Lucas had settled on a plot or the characters that ended up making it into the final script, some of Lucas's earliest notes on Star Wars contained this phrase, a conflict between freedom and conformity. I think this conflict is not just the excuse for some adventure and a coming-of-age story about Luke. I think that the adventure and the coming-of-age story are the means for exploring the conflict between freedom and conformity. Freedom is at the heart of the movie. Lucas said in an interview, “I'm not really interested in plots. That's one of the problems I've had with this movie. It's a plotted movie, and I find plots boring because they're so mechanical. You go from here to there, and once you know what's going to happen, that's it. And I just am not enthralled with that kind of action. I'm much more into the scenes and the nuances of what's going on. I find that fascinating.” So to give you a sense for how profoundly the conflict between freedom and conformity is woven into Star Wars, let me walk you through the images in the first 2 minutes of A New Hope, after the opening crawl. As the opening crawl fades into the distance, we find ourselves gazing out at the starry universe. The camera tilts down to reveal a pair of moons and a planet. And suddenly a ship cruises into the frame, accompanied by lasers and explosions. Another ship follows not long after, chasing after the first. And it grows, and grows, and keeps growing. Until it's so wide it no longer fits into the frame, and keeps growing still. It eclipses the more distant moon, then the first ship. Then it threatens to eclipse even the closer moon. This star destroyer is not just big. It's a whale chasing an anchovy. Leviathan in outer space. Notice how the camera positioning and ship design ensure that we feel the full impact of the Star Destroyer. This scene could have opened differently. Lucas could have shown both ships at once, for example, maybe from the side. We would have seen the enormous difference in size immediately. But instead, Lucas starts by showing us the Rebel ship, and that sets our expectations about the next ship. We naturally expect the next ship to be about the same size, and at first it seems it could be. When the Star Destroyer pokes into the frame, there's no telling how large it's going to be. It's kind of a pyramid on its side, and that's a shape that could go on expanding forever without changing its proportions. So the shape gives us no clues about the size of the ship. For all we know, at any second the back of the ship could come into view. But the ship just keeps expanding, and the film score adds to the suspense. The horns are playing a kind of repeated and increasingly dragged out rhythmic cadence. They're announcing the end again and again. And again and again, it doesn't come. Until finally the gigantic engines do come into view. The message is clear. The Empire is enormous. It's larger and more powerful than you could have imagined. And the Rebellion is small and weak by comparison. Lucas cared a lot about getting this effect out of the shot. They did the shot and then Lucas had them redo the shot to make the Star Destroyer twice as big as it originally was so that it would fill the screen. According to the producer, Gary Kurtz, Lucas had his heart set on the rebel ship coming in followed by the big ship with no cut, so that you got the entire effect of the big ship. But there's more going on here. Think about the difference in shapes. The Star Destroyer is simple, especially from beneath, as we first see it. It's an enormous horizontal pyramid. By contrast, the rebel ship doesn't have a simple shape, even in its broad outlines. It's a combination of various shapes. It's as if the rebel ship were thrown together from parts without much of a master plan. A cockpit, some engines, escape pods, shield generators. The ship has just so many parts thrown together and rounded out into a very rough symmetry. In fact, that's just what Joe Johnston, one of the ship designers, said about it. “It was supposed to look like a ship that had been assembled from other ships.” So what does that tell us? In the Imperial ship, the parts are subordinated to a single vision. Every bit of engineering and human functioning has to fit into the master shape, the horizontal pyramid. In other words, whereas in the Imperial ship the parts conform to the needs of the whole, in the Rebel ship, the whole seems to conform to the needs of the parts. Of course, this makes a lot of sense given the Rebels' precarious existence. They don't have a lot of resources, and this blockade runner looks like a ship they might have cobbled together with whatever they could get their hands on. On the other hand, the sleek Star Destroyer reflects a wealth of resources and time to plan. But setting aside how these ships make sense in the world of Star Wars, they're also the first symbols of rebellion and empire that we see. And the designs also seem to be communicating something about each side's values. The rebellion values individual freedom. It gives individuals the liberty to be who they decide to be rather than forcing them to conform with some plan for the whole. The empire, on the other hand, values order and power and efficiency, and is willing to sacrifice the individual's freedom to these values. So rebel and imperial ship architecture reflect their opposed values. The rebel architecture says, come as you are, and we'll find a place for you. The imperial architecture says, we're going to have to reshape you to fit you into the plan we've already got. And this kind of design isn't just in the first two ships we see. Think about the other imperial ships. TIE fighters: 2 hexagons with a sphere in the middle. Death Star: a big sphere. It wouldn't take much more description than that to get someone to draw these ships. Try describing any of the rebel ships in such simple geometric terms. Even the X-wing is so much more than just an X, and it's not even really an X in the first place. The wings are too flat to be an X. How flat? Well, it's not a simple geometric shape, so it's hard to describe exactly. And then how do you describe the fuselage and the cannons and the engines that add so much to its profile? And the X-wing is probably the easiest one to describe. Look at the rebel fleet in Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. I don't even know where to start to describe some of those ships. And if you think I'm reading too much into this, consider what Lucas's first model maker, Colin Cantwell, had to say about designing the ships. He said, “My premise was that you had to instantly know the bad guys from the good guys, by how a ship looks and feels.” How do you communicate who's on what side with the ship design? You have to think about what each side stands for and then reflect that in the design of the ship. Joe Johnston said this about the TIE fighters, “In World War II, the super dive bombers had an artificially created siren wailcreated by air ducts. They didn't serve any purpose except to create this noise, which would terrify people. It was intended that the TIE should achieve the same effect with just a menacing appearance.” It was supposed to look terrifying, even though it wasn't necessary that all that stuff have a specific function. Now it's not just the hard edges and geometric simplicity of the Star Destroyer that tell us something about the Imperial Order. It's also the particular shape. That pyramid shape is the classic symbol of hierarchy, because in a hierarchy you have very few people at the top, who give orders to a bigger group beneath them, who give orders to an even bigger group beneath them, and so on down to the bottom. So hierarchies are small at the top and big at the bottom like a pyramid. And after seeing the Star Destroyer enter the screen as an enormous pyramid bearing down on us from above, we see it from the front and realize that there's a command bridge mounted on top of it. And at the risk of reading too much into these images, we might say that that's another layer of hierarchy. And this all makes sense because the Empire is very hierarchical, as powerful organizations tend to be. If you want to get things done efficiently, it helps to have a chain of command. Contrast this with the rebel ship, which has little discernible hierarchy. You can take the engines off the back of the ship, flip it around, and mount them on the front, and the ship would make just about as much sense. And this makes sense because a rigid hierarchy would conflict with the rebel emphasis on individual freedom. with the individual's ability to make decisions about what to do and who to be. To sum up the idea so far, these first few seconds after the opening crawl already suggest that the empire is enormous, powerful, and hierarchical, and that it forces people to conform to its master plan. And the rebellion is small, weak, and egalitarian, and it yields to the needs of its individuals. You can already see the problem for freedom. How can people remain free When they have so much less power than enormous, hierarchical empires? And of course, in this first battle, freedom loses. The Star Destroyer catches up with the rebel ship. From inside the ship, we hear ominous noises. We see the nervous soldiers look upward in apprehension. The next shot takes us outside the ship, which is being sucked into the Star Destroyer's docking station, swallowed by its gaping mouth. In earlier drafts of the script, the Star Destroyer didn't have a docking station. It just got really close to the rebel ship and Some stormtroopers jumped out. But there's something fitting about seeing the rebel ship get sucked into the Star Destroyer. It looks like a giant space whale is eating a smaller fish through a mouth on its underbelly. The metaphor here is apt. Think about what digestion is. It’s this miraculous process that turns something that's not us into something that's part of us. A hamburger is turned into human flesh and the energy for powering it. We take the matter and strip the original animal or vegetable form and give it human form. Digestion is a process of breaking things down and making them a part of oneself. And this is exactly what empires do when they conquer other people. They take one form of life, one form of political organization, and they absorb it. They bring it into their territory, their body. And in the process, they strip off the conquered people's original form of organization and impose their own political order, at least partly. And just like in digestion, empires do this to provide territory, resources, and power for themselves, matter and energy. It's a kind of political digestion. So what we're seeing when the Star Destroyer swallows the rebel ship is really a fitting representation of the problem that empires pose for freedom. And I think this problem is at the core of the movie. It's not just that there are two ways of organizing people, one hierarchical and oppressive, and the other democratic and free. It's that hierarchical, oppressive empires conquer other states and make them their own. They're a threat to democracies. They're a threat to the freedom of people that aren't even a part of them. They digest people. They strip them of aspects of their individuality and political customs and whatever else gets in the way of the purposes of the empire. Conquered peoples are forced into conformity, reshaped as the tissues of the empire, placed within the pyramid, the master scheme. And by the way, this isn't the last time we're going to see this metaphor. It comes up again when the heroes get trapped in the Death Star's trash compactor. The trash compactor has a pinkish hue, like the inside of a stomach, and the trash is soaking in a murky liquid that recalls digestive fluids. And suddenly it starts to churn, like a stomach churns to process its contents. It even has a tapeworm. The thought is, the trash compactor is symbolically trying to digest the rebels, to strip them of their individual character, to turn them into raw material for the Empire. And the digestive metaphor maybe even continues in Empire Strikes Back. There's this moment when the Millennium Falcon escapes capture by floating away with a Star Destroyer's waste. But that's a story for another day. Let's get back to the beginning of Star Wars. There's one more critical thing to point out about the images in the first two minutes. Our first shot inside the ship is of C-3PO and R2-D2. C-3PO looks a lot like another gold humanoid robot called the Maschinenmensch. The Maschinenmensch is from an old silent film called Metropolis, and there's a reason they look alike. C-3PO was designed with the Maschinenmensch in mind. The idea that C-3PO would look like the Maschinenmensch from Metropolis dates back to Lucas's first conception of the droids. While working on the rough draft, Lucas wrote the following note. “Two workmen as robots, one dwarf, one Metropolis type.” Now the Maschinenmensch and C-3PO themselves seem to have very little in common, other than appearance. But the film Metropolis has a lot in common with Star Wars. And I think one point behind C-3PO's design is to get us thinking about these similarities. Metropolis was part of a film movement called German Expressionism. It was a movement that flourished in the 1920s. German Expressionist films tended not to be very realistic. They often had bizarre, stylized sets and costumes, which they used to convey their themes. There might be crooked doors, bizarrely slanted walls or ceilings, a table with legs far too tall, strange makeup and costumes, unusual camera angles, and lighting that casts striking, even terrifying shadows. This was the original Tim Burton. These things could express the themes of the movie very vividly, and above all, they expressed moods and emotions. The thought might be something like this. If you wanted to depictthe horrors of having lived through World War I, instead of making a realistic-looking film, why not make the sets and costumes look bizarre, even horrific? That would express visually how alienating everything is. The same techniques show up in Star Wars. We don't always notice this because Star Wars is a space fantasy, and it's easy to think of the visuals as just for entertainment. The Empire has this kind of ship because it looks cool, or because that's the kind of ship Empires have in a space fantasy. But sets and costumes in Star Wars are often used in the same way as in German Expressionism, to communicate something about the subject matter, and especially moods and emotions connected with that subject matter. So as we've already seen, the incredible size of the Star Destroyer as it passes overhead expresses the feeling of being intimidated by the power of the Empire. The colorless uniformity of imperial ships and uniforms expresses its stifling inhumanity. And the digestive qualities of the trash compactor scene express the horror of being devoured by a predatory political or economic system. So one reason that Lucas made C-3PO look like the Maschinenmensch might be to tell the audience, this is a movie in the German Expressionist style, a movie that sets realism aside and expresses ideas and emotions through its images. Again, remember what Colin Cantwell said about the ships. “My premise was that you had to instantly know the bad guys from the good guys by how a ship looks and feels.” But I think C-3PO is also supposed to remind us of something more specific to Metropolis. Star Wars and Metropolis have some of the same subject matter. Their images explore some of the same ideas. Metropolis is the story of a dystopian society in which a... /episode/index/show/1ec33c7f-fd81-43dd-845e-40871e40a48e/id/38723140

Visual Storytelling in Star Wars 10/21/2025

The Force and Freedom

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