George Lucas and me

(above: kit-bashed Mars Liner. That would be George Lucas on the right.)

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that of all the director/writers out there, the ones that I felt closest to were George Lucas and Robert Rodriguez. This includes artists and experimental filmmakers. Ben found this surprising and curious for some reason. Anyway, as I continue working with the plastic models, some of the connections become clearer and clearer.

For me, the whole "Star Wars is based on mythology" thing is vastly overblown. Besides the wistful longing for a colonial age and a nostalgia for World War II and B-movies, I think a huge reason for the series' popularity is its emphasis on technology. In Lucas' scheme, utopian technology is represent by the Ewoks, the Gungans and the Wookies. Their technologies are folk technologies, essentially Romantic, integrated into nature. Evil technologies are overly formalized. This formalization leads to two main problems: 1) overspecialization/an inability to function within varying contexts and 2) the creation of technological achilles heels. Good technology falls in between. We have Luke's speeder, something like your Dad's rusty T-bird. There's the hot-rodded Millennium Falcon. The X-Wing fighters represent the epitome of rebel firepower (in Ep. IV). They contrast with the snowflake fighters. Like the Nazi technologies of our collective imagination, the snowflake fighters fuse mysticism with hardware. Their very shape embodies their transcendence of the laws of physics.

Compare this to the secular X-Wing fighters. They are subject to physics conventions; their wings are designed for lift and their shape minimizes wind resistance. Like an F-14, their aerodynamics change to fit the situation. The X-wing fighters depend on a pilot who must incorporate the Force into his being and then control his craft. The design of the snowflake fighters, on the other hand, suggests that the Force, is mystically—and unnaturally—embedded into the very substance and design of the craft itself.

There are several things going on in the Star Wars films. First, there are the characters and the narrative (presumably based on myth). These come across as the least important part of the films. They function principally as a gluey binder to give the film structure. Lucas' principal concerns seem to be these: 1) the nature of technology both as theme and in terms of the filmmaking process, 2) the integration of abstract animation into narrative filmmaking and 3) noting the qualities of film itself. Lucas is quite an astute observer of the qualities of things-in-motion and is good at embedding these observations within practice (e.g., what makes something look fast? What makes something look exciting?). This contrasts with people like Spielberg and Michael Bay. I see them as adept at using conventions which have already become codified as film grammar.

My project

As I wrote in the post on the Ekranoplan, I like bricolage technologies, machines that look as if they were assembled out of existing technologies. The obvious parallel to model-making is kit-bashing: taking parts of different models and putting them together. I also like hobby technologies as is evident from the Noise project. Any project I'm likely to work on will probably include these sorts of technologies as a focus. The characters, like Ben in Noise, are more likely to be backgrounded. Also likely to be foregrounded are the visual art aspects. In Noise film we have the shrine, the clue video and the installation rooms, all of which integrate a form of modernist abstraction into narrative filmmaking.