Books, Arts & Manners: Mythopoeic Madness

If Star Wars struck me as no worse than harmless junk, the reason may have been the novelty of combining the hardware of 2001 with the software of Tolkien. But the sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, subtitled Star Wars: Episode V, is malodorous offal, and not only because it promises three prequels to its predecessor and four sequels to itself. Yet that, too, is repulsively commercial: George Lucas—whether directly, as in Star Wars, or indirectly, as here, through his new scenarists (the late Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan) and new director (Irvin Kershner) —had just enough vision for one intermittently diverting piece of nonsense. In the sequel, everything is stale, limp, desperately stretched out, and pretentious. And without innocence.

What innocence there may have been in the original Star Wars was surely forfeited by the exploitative industries that sprung up around it: unprecedented devices for blood sports such as parentbleeding and piggy-bank-sticking. You might say that the Disney people were not exactly guiltless of megalo-or meta-marketing, from Mickey Mouse watches to Disneylands and Disney Worlds, those Forest Lawns of the mind. But those were secular realms, whereas Star Wars is a religion, as the sequel makes even clearer, and religious cults are better than lay ones at mulcting their adherents.

JS

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John Simon

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If Star Wars struck me as no worse than harmless junk, the reason may have been the novelty of combining the hardware of 2001 with the software of Tolkien. But the sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, subtitled Star Wars: Episode V, is malodorous offal, and not only because it promises three prequels to its predecessor and four sequels to itself. Yet that, too, is repulsively commercial: George Lucas—whether directly, as in Star Wars, or indirectly, as here, through his new scenarists (the late Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan) and new director (Irvin Kershner) —had just enough vision for one intermittently diverting piece of nonsense. In the sequel, everything is stale, limp, desperately stretched out, and pretentious. And without innocence.

What innocence there may have been in the original Star Wars was surely forfeited by the exploitative industries that sprung up around it: unprecedented devices for blood sports such as parentbleeding and piggy-bank-sticking. You might say that the Disney people were not exactly guiltless of megalo-or meta-marketing, from Mickey Mouse watches to Disneylands and Disney Worlds, those Forest Lawns of the mind. But those were secular realms, whereas Star Wars is a religion, as the sequel makes even clearer, and religious cults are better than lay ones at mulcting their adherents.