the destroyer > reviews > On the Killing of Obi Wan and E.T. / Steven Boone
RADICALS: THE COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY KILLING OF OBI WAN AND E.T.
A few years ago, a twentysomething filmmaker friend asked me what movies I loved when I was a youngster. My automatic answer was, "Star Wars and E.T." He couldn't hide his alarm, but quickly made sense of my statement aloud, with sympathy: "Oh, yeah, well, back then you were into that corporate shit. We all have our moment with childish things." It was my turn to be aghast.
Corporate? Shit? Childish things? I had named the two most radical, revolutionary Hollywood films of their era.
The revolution that these films called for was one of peace and love. Hey, don't laugh. Sure, Star Wars communicated this message in the paradigm of old movie serials—gunfighters and Arthurian knights and swashbuckling pirates—because such imagery was the first to stir that generation's imagination at the movies. Young eyes stare up at the blank screen and pray for anything to pass across it. Anything but boredom. When I first saw Star Wars, the most exciting imagery I had yet come across was the opening credit sequence of the TV cop show Starsky and Hutch.
My cousin Al and I would dive and roll and creep along the walls up to open doorways before leaping out with imaginary guns drawn. But Al was a tough kid out in the real world. The violence I knew, at that time, only as an abstraction, he knew from neighborhood brawls with kids twice his size and half his speed. For kids like him, who had already graduated to fist fights, playground politics, and the Darwinian contest for girls, something like Star Wars didn't register. For those of us who lived mostly inside our imaginations, Star Wars wasn't a war at all, but an awakening to the spiritual, moral landscape charted in myths. The Force wasn't just a plot device but something deeply felt that seemed to eradicate barriers between physical and spiritual existence, the distance between the ancient and present. Our toys and technologies were only dead objects without inspiration, imagination, and love to guide them to dizzyingly precise and illuminating targets.
That battle station exploding at the movie's end is a military victory on paper, but the rhythm and pace of images leading up to it allow it to arrive with the sensation of a grand healing. It's such an elegant use of screen time and space that the simple summation, "Good triumphs over evil," didn't cut it. This was more like, "The Force pushes aside all fears, all sadness, and defeat. The universe sings." This was Age of Aquarius stuff, a fireworks display ignited by a counterculture spirit of not just rebellion but revolution. Not anything to do with Marx, except for his notion of breaking chains and tribal barriers. It was more like Christian activist Jane Addams, who in her 1909 book, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, wrote: "We may listen to the young voices rising—clear above the roar of industrialism and the prudent councils of commerce, or we may become hypnotized by the sudden new emphasis placed upon wealth and power, and forget the supremacy of spiritual forces in men's affairs." Star Wars was a revolution waged in the heart of the American body politic, which, by 1977, had accumulated enough despair and cynicism to warrant a toxicologist.
Film critics and showbiz publicity types welcomed Star Wars as a throwback to the good, clean movie serials that inspired it, but only acknowledged that it was a new way into fantasy from the technological standpoint. For a five year old kid on the poor and working class south side of Mount Vernon, NY, it was more like a new religion.
Growing up, I was taught to pray to God every night ("Now I lay me down to sleep..."), but only after Star Wars did He become more plausible than Santa Claus. Watching Obi Wan Kenobi perform Christ-like self-sacrifice in the middle of a movie where everybody else was trying to win was breathtaking. The Force was my first sensation of a bond between us all, a bond that certain other forces were constantly trying to break. The film's historic ticket sales set those forces of profitable distraction and disunion to work on their Grand 30 Year Project, to turn the movie audience into a collection of self-absorbed, insecure, mindlessly reactive consumers filing into the movie theater with the same single-minded purpose they bring to shopping the big box stores: get in, get your shit, get out.
The movies have never been a purely social event like, say, music concerts, but The New Yorker's Anthony Lane was onto something when he lamented the ascendancy of Video on Demand over the theatrical experience:
You don't go to the movie theater to meet strangers but to share an experience with them, no introductions necessary. What passes across the screen, if it strikes chords of universal resonance, is introductions enough. Our correspondence passes silently, an intimacy peculiar to cinema. The past 30-plus years of corporate consolidation and increasing hegemony have been about turning universal resonance into shared avarice, cynicism, and hostile regard for a selected Other or Lesser. It's a cinema for competitors, cheerleaders, and hecklers.
Many say that it was always so with commercial cinema, that there is a built-in baseness. Weren't the westerns all about conquest? Sure, but there was something intrinsic to filmmaking practice and aesthetics that kept spiritual values in relatively healthy proportion to the dog-eat-dog ethic. Andrei Tarkovsky came closest to describing this spiritual aspect in physical, practical terms, in his book Sculpting in Time:
Tarkovsky believed this sense of time marked by rhythm and physical presence to be the best means of communicating his philosophy of life:
He was describing the vision behind such magisterial works of art as his Andrei Rublev and The Mirror, but the words evoke a sensation I had during my first encounter with the Star Wars thrill machine: The Force. George Lucas's methods of achieving this sensation are far closer to Tarkovsky's than to those of his present-day commercial descendants.
A FALSE HOPE
With the help of new technologies, a range of editorial practices that had evolved into a rich visual language by the 1970s was slowly dismantled and re-purposed across the ensuing three decades. The Tarkovskian language of cinema, which cultivates contemplative beauty and pleasure through an arrangement of screen time and space, gave way to the Eisensteinian methods of television commercials, which render time and space subordinate to selling a concept as quickly and forcefully as possible. In commercials, the concept represents a brand or product, and the time-pressure is external, owing to the expense of broadcast air time. Traditionally in cinema, time-pressure emerged from the internal demands of story and character as exerted in physical reality.
When salesmen determined the nature of time-pressure —or when filmmakers, in effect, became salesmen—it cultivated an unnatural expectation in the audience. A business-like "get to the point" impulse began to redefine filmmaking and film watching. There was a certain peak velocity to this practice which the industry-wide adoption of digital non-linear editing in the 90s rocketed past. With this new ability to grab shots and place them anywhere on a timeline instantaneously, many filmmakers spared little thought for their cumulative effect upon the viewer, just the "gotcha" impact of individual content fragments.
From the success of Jaws and Star Wars, movie executives concluded that young audiences wanted their screen entertainment, to borrow Lucas's standard direction to his actors, "faster and more intense." Right on, but the means with which to boost speed and intensity were widely, grossly misapplied. One couldn't simply shorten the duration of shots or the interval between spectacular set pieces to get there. Jaws and Star Wars moved like express trains because they were hitched to character, recognizing that narrative efficiency should never come at the expense of emotional and sensory investment—"the life of the object in the frame".
Assigning various directors competent at project management to oversee a laundry list of plastic elements associated with the Spielberg-Lucas success—explosions, chases, effects, gore—the major studios gave us decades of strenuous yet lifeless "entertainment." It takes real artistry and film sense to pull off a genre blockbuster that people will cherish rather than just reflexively attend.
At first, certain studios seemed to grasp this point. In the early '80s, they hired a handful of super-stylish British commercial directors (the Anglo equivalent of France's cinéma du look auteurs) to helm several would-be hits. These directors had refined their visual signatures crafting 30-second TV spots. In making the transition to feature filmmaking, they managed to lend some of high-end advertising's opulent art direction and cinematography to the longer medium without disregarding the sanctity of the individual shot as building block.
But eventually, the clipped editing of commercials would port over to movies as well, and the slow death commenced. Ridley Scott, whose Alien and Blade Runner were the twin flagships of that welcome British invasion, where style and substance achieved distinct harmony, is now just another assembler of high-priced poster images thrown together in bulk. For a comparison, just revisit the fraught and enveloping atmosphere of Alien, then sample the fastidious PowerPoint-in-Ikea-showroom glibness of its prequel, Prometheus. Scott and other big league directors may argue that this is what audiences now expect, but maybe what we have come to expect from movies and what best nourishes us are as alien to each other as we are.
Star Wars didn't do this. Corporate execs, bankers, exhibitors and marketeers who misread its revolutionary message and hadn't the time or discernment to perceive its formal elegance, they turned the tide.
In Reagan's America, an escalating Cold War took advantage of Star Wars's vigorous triumphalism, encouraging a world view in which The Dark Side was elsewhere in the world, places where our new technologies would help fight them even in outer space. Lucas, who had entered a side door of Hollywood as a visionary troublemaker with THX-1138, was now a mogul, building his own industry upstate. Just when he might have directed the rapt attention of millions of fanboys and fangirls to greater moral and spiritual provocation, he closed up shop on the Force.
I was at play in the south side of Mount Vernon, NY at the time. 1983. Crack cocaine had just arrived in the drive-thru drug supermarket that was the playground between my house and the Levister Towers housing project. Return of the Jedi, the last film in the original Star Wars trilogy, had just taught me that bad men suffer as terribly as their victims. Luke Skywalker attempting to persuade his father to break his own spiritual chains ("I sense the good in you, the conflict") hit me right between the eyes. I imagined what my life would have been like up to that point if I'd had a bad man for a father. (There were three kinds of fathers in my pop culture landscape: Conan the Barbarian's father taught him to trust nothing but his sword—in short, to be a violent asshole; Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader was the absentee, criminal father; Charles Ingalls of Little House on the Prairie and James Evans of Good Times were strong, compassionate dads, like mine.)
Via Jedi's father-son opera, all the ruthlessness and violence I witnessed in my neighborhood from the safety of a loving two-parent household took on a tragic dimension, underscored by the third-act John Williams dirge playing in my peanut head. I saw no meaningful difference between the ambition of neighborhood dope boys and stickup kids and that of Third World warlords and big business reptiles. They were all chasing something worthless, in the end. I wondered, with my straining 10-year old mind, whether anyone else could see what Return of the Jedi, underneath its war machine pyrotechnics with its reimagining of Viet Cong as guerilla Care Bears, was telling the world. Could George Lucas himself see it?
Of course, another revolutionary film had rendered me unusually sensitive to such messages the year before.
ALL MY LIFE, EVERY DAY...
I saw E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial the same year I entered Lutheran school, a two-room schoolhouse on the white north side of town that would teach me Christian principles over the next four years. Steven Spielberg's little movie about a lonely kid and his new friend taught me what life should be about in just two glorious scenes. Not the iconically cheesy farewell or the glowing-finger laying-on-of-hands. They're smaller moments, easily missed or dismissed as corn. In one, E.T. and Elliot build a communicator that sends a signal to the alien’s home planet. They celebrate. It looks like E.T. may get to go back home. Suddenly, Elliot is overcome with sadness. His friend may not be leaving this instant, but it's now certain that he will leave as soon as his folks get the distress signal and come to pick him up. Elliot's chin presses down into his chest, his black Halloween makeup making him resemble a sad clown out of Chaplin. How sappy can you get? And yet, with the help of a John Williams cue which I can only describe as saintly, and a bit of gorgeous restraint in Spielberg's direction of Henry Thomas, this moment transcends itself, defining the director's career-long spiritual project: Without a word, E.T. lifts Elliot's chin until their eyes meet. Cut to a close-up of E.T. offering an expression of empathy and affection that belong in the dictionary entries for those words. A simple understanding passing between individuals or groups of people is a potentially drama-killing trope that Spielberg fashioned into a dazzling personal signature.
The other wonderful incident in E.T. that told me which way to go is the moment when Elliot speaks to E.T.'s refrigerated corpse. Henry Thomas's performance here was a shock to my young eyes, unused to onscreen children my age expressing anything close to the strange sadness and confusion I knew so well. But it's the line, "I'll believe in you all my life, every day..." that froze me in place. This was a declaration of a lifetime. The kid was acknowledging that the long life ahead would likely chip away not at his memory of E.T. but his belief in him. This was a testament to faith.
But faith in what?
Faith in imagination guided by an embracing heart. It was central to the E.T. parable, which was constructed on a movie set that actor Peter Coyote, a veteran leader of the 1960s counterculture, compared to a harmonious commune.
I was at my own daily commune, the Lutheran school where we troubled kids from the south side who couldn't quite make it in public school had a relatively quiet time learning the Bible. Relatively. We fought and fucked up as much as our friends who'd stayed on in "normal" school. The cornerstone of our education was the New Testament, the chronicle of men who believed in their savior all their lives, every day. Acts of the Apostles, which is sort of the X-Men of Bible books, showed us these true believers facing down their persecutors with a combination of miracles and classic non-violent resistance. The stoning death of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, and the miraculous redemption of Saul, who has a Vader-like conversion to the Light Side, stole my attention away from Marvel comics.
Spielberg himself found all the scholarly writing about E.T. as a Christ allegory to be silly conjecture: "If I ever went to my mother and said, ‘Mom, I’ve made this movie that’s a Christian parable,’ what do you think she’d say? She has a kosher restaurant on Pico and Doheny in Los Angeles.” Tarkovsky, who likely saw Spielberg as a mere studio contractor delivering not art but shallow entertainment, would probably laugh along.
And you might find it ludicrous that I’m making so much about what is essentially a corporate product, financed, produced and cross-marketed by a host of companies hoping to mine Spielberg’s showman reputation for gold. But that kind of cynicism mistakes the vehicle for the destination. The intimate relationships we are conducting with pop culture creators aren't to be mistaken for intimacy with their corporate facilitators. Media companies are just the ungainly means to produce and share films, and sometimes beautiful, truthful things escape from their profit-churning bureaucracies.
That such transcendent episodes have inspired far too much faith in the machine rather than the spirit that animates it is what Spielberg and Lucas were railing against even as they became young millionaires. When asked, at the London premiere of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, whether his recent successes put him under pressure from "the money men" to produce another hit, he said, "Well, yeah, I'm under pressure, but it's my individual choice not to listen to the pressure or feel the pressure and make what I want to make as a filmmaker, not as somebody who has some sort of obligation to corporate Hollywood." He then described his next project, which sounded a lot like the domestic scenes in E.T.: "I'm making a very small movie, tiny budget, four week schedule, called After School about children growing up in America."
Several decades later, the Spielberg-Lucas juggernaut takes the blame for all that the movie business has become. Along the way to our present cinema of CIA/CSI/war fetishism, projects like The Matrix trilogy and Avatar tried to re-ignite the lost spiritual spark in multiplexland, only to get lost in the priorities of a market researcher or digital effects firm. The Star Wars prequels scrambled to keep up with the times, recasting the Jedi Knights as Jedi cops, grunts and bureaucrats. Attack of the Clones turned Yoda, the series' most priestly figure, into a grim desert field commander. These are David and Goliath stories in which everybody is Goliath-sized and the slingshot is an assault rifle. Peaceable Obi Wan types are presented as feeble fools (Alfonso Cuaron's apocalyptic humanist anthem Children of Men notwithstanding).
At Immanuel Lutheran, the emphasis was on scaling Biblical stories to life size. We read from The Way, a plainspoken translation of The Living Bible, with artwork, fonts, and introductory passages designed as if by the art director of Jesus Christ Superstar. Black and white photos of multiracial hippies opened each section. "The hippie Bible," I called it. In contrast to the King James version at home, it was warm enough in tone to have been written by Melissa Mathison, the author of E.T. and those other sensitive-boy chronicles, The Black Stallion and Kundun.
Immanuel's beloved teacher-principal, Joel Bahr, struck me as a combination of Fred Dryer from Hunter and Jon Voight in Conrack. The Conrack connection in particular because he loved us crazy black kids, and, in his own German-American Midwestern way, demonstrated it by sharing relevant bits of his life story. He said his favorite film was the TV movie Brian's Song, because the interracial friendship it depicted between footballers Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo reminded him of his black best friend.
He talked tough and taught rough. I'll never forget the time he picked up Ephraim Harvey's desk—with Ephraim still in it—and set it down just outside the classroom door, locking him out in the unlit chapel stairwell until he learned to behave. Even Ephraim had to laugh at the cartoon audacity of it. The parents never complained about all the tough love theatrics. They trusted Mr. Bahr completely, a privilege rarely granted by black parents accustomed to subtle and insidious racism from white teachers who accepted their non-white students seemingly as a stepping stone to "better" assignments.
Mr. Bahr's color-blindness was quite a shock to me as well. At nine, my only experience of actual white people was a few doctors, clerks, policemen, and those discreetly, politely hostile teachers. Otherwise, all I knew about white people came from books, television, and movies: they ruled the earth and could unleash terror on the disobedient ("Merry Christmas, nigger," the Southern sheriff said to the little boy he locked in jail in The Learning Tree) or heap rewards on the obedient (e.g. Gary Coleman's charmed life as Mr. Drummond's adoptee on Diff'rent Strokes). My mother shed a tear as one white man (Jimmy Carter) gave a bittersweet farewell to the nation and frowned and cursed as another (Reagan) said hello.
So, apart from President Carter, Mr. Rogers, Mr. Drummond, the pretty hippie girls of The Magic Garden, Jim Henson, and Mr. Bahr at Immanuel Lutheran School, the only other white person I felt some kinship with was this Spielberg fellow. Sight unseen, I could believe he was white but couldn't believe he was any older than, say, 12. He seemed to understand a lonely, daydreaming kid like me better than any adult. I imagined that he must have made a vow to believe in his childish daydreams all his life, every day. It was the only explanation that made sense. Adults were practical, prosaic creatures. Everything this Spielberg had shown me up to that point attested to someone who had guarded his creative spark vigilantly from whatever it was that made grownups so dull and unhappy. In my view, kids had true religion; adults had survival kits.
Star Wars and E.T. had placed a fairly extravagant gift in my spindly nine year old arms, the awareness that there is nothing to fight about; that we're all family, across the universe. It was a bit embarrassing. At that age, boys were learning to fight and compete, to out-shout and out-shove. Already naturally shy, I retreated that much further into my thoughts and fantasy life, hoping someone comparable in spirit to E.T. or Obi Wan would meet me there, and understand everything without a word. Amen. This was the revolution of the pacifist Christian Left, a history of quiet altruism, non-violent resistance, and love so radical that the powerful continue to label it "childish things."