August 27, 2011

The news reports a navy Seal named Tumlison was killed in a helicopter crash, and at his funeral in Iowa, his dog lay beside the casket, shameless in his devastation, annihilated, the one soul in the room willing to admit himself utterly undone. You think that the grief of humans is deeper because it includes understanding, but maybe the opposite is true. The dog, Hawkeye, had no rationalizations to offer himself, no consoling faith, no rhetoric of courage, merely loss unfathomable, loss the end of which cannot be seen. I am undone by this image. When I close my eyes I see the dog lying on the wooden floor beside the casket. I would take wing and be some kind of angel to console this, to comfort this, to end this, but, of course, I have no idea how.

Borrowed DJ’s Star Wars DVDs, beginning my journey with the commentaries and documentaries and extra materials. On every relevant occasion, George Lucas confesses that having his own way, not being under anybody’s control, was the important thing to him, and though there is romance in that, and though one agrees that if he is referencing the cowardice and stupidity of the studios he is probably right, the fact is that the series may have been better if he had yielded his own way from time to time to someone with deeper understanding. The series is not good, all in all. Some of it is quite bad. The first script is terrible and the scripts do not improve with time. Some are better than others, but the improvement doesn’t seem to be intentional. Carrie Fisher remembers joking about the badness of the script, saying, “You can type that, but you can’t say it.” Almost as often as Lucas declares his desire for autonomy, someone credits him with revolutionizing the movie industry. In terms of technical advances, this cannot be denied, yet one suspects that these advances–when Lucas was tearing them out of the void–were to insure that one could get one’s own way without being very good. You convince other people you have a vision, and then they do the work for you. The series is not good, but it is spectacular. What Lucas achieved–and this in itself is an act of genius–is changing the process of movie making so that a half-baked idea or shallow dialogue can be smothered under layers of special effects. He created a state in which one’s own inadequacies can be redeemed by the expertise of others. No matter how flimsy a world is in conception, model makers and composers and costumers can make it spectacular. Spectacle can indeed make you forget for a while the absence of nourishment. Since Star Wars there has been a flood of movies whose basic narrative qualities have been neglected because the movie maker knew that special effects could make an audience pass over shoddiness or implausibility or triviality. It is the cynical, final admission that film is not an art, not even purely a commodity, but a kind of manipulation. You know this movie will be bad, but you will go to it because it has space ships and gigantic explosions and robots run amuck. This process doesn’t work so well as they hoped, maybe (people not being quite so stupid as they had hoped), but well enough to make all the wrong people rich. I don’t blame Lucas. He was a resentful boy who wanted his own way whether he deserved it or not. I understand that. The abuse came after.