Star Wars, redux (Part 1)

When I first saw it at age ten Star Wars (since renamed Episode IV: A New Hope) was a life-changing experience. This sounds like a typical hyperbolic fan screed, I know. Just bear with me for a minute. I personally went to see it three times in the initial release. Lots of kids who went to my school bragged about going to see it eight, ten, fifteen times. People didn’t get sick of it. We all loved it. Star Wars was a cultural phenomenon - the movie managed to capture the popular imagination, like Sherlock Holmes or Rubik's Cube.

Looking back nearly thirty years on, it’s easy to pull apart the paint-by-numbers storyline and the sometimes hokey dialogue, but at the time it was something new and different and it filled a gap that had been growing since the end of the sixties. On the back of it’s immediate antecedents, The Godfather (1972) and Jaws (1975), two really dark and (in different ways) somewhat disturbing “Summer blockbusters”, Star Wars gave the movie-going public permission to have fun at the cinema again, to cheer for the good guys (I saw the film twice within the first four or five months of its first cinema run, about two months apart, and both times the whole place broke into spontaneous applause when the credits began to roll – something I have never experienced in a regular session since). And as the public embraced Star Wars it become at some level public property. The movie has become so woven into the childhood memories of so many people, the public as become quite proprietorial regarding the film, something that has become even more obvious in the last few years.

When George Lucas announced his intention in 1997 to touch up the old films in an anniversary release, a whole generation suddenly decided that the new versions of these landmark films could be nothing but wrong, even before they got the chance to see them. It was as if a mild kind of mass hysteria had taken root. Lucas argued that the technology of the time prohibited him from truly realizing his vision for the original trilogy, and that the technology now existed to allow him to go back to his films and present them the way he envisaged. The shrillest of his critics argued that Star Wars was already a perfect movie, and that any tinkering would only take away from its sublime accomplishment (this has since subsided into a demand for the original release versions to be made available on DVD)

I was one of a handful of people who thought the re-mastered trilogy (Episodes IV, V and VI) were an improvement on the originals. But people tend to get precious about their childhood memories. Movies, like books and albums, can encourage this by their passive nature – they are inherently unchanging, so they offer something we can measure our own change against. Which raises an interesting point of debate: at what point, if ever, does an artist relinquish their proprietry ownership of their creation?

A story in Australian Art Collector magazine - about a year ago I think - mentioned how some artists are now requiring their clients to sign an agreement not to tamper with the work in any permanent way (such as resizing a painting to fit a location). Pablo Picasso suggested that a painting is never finished, only abandoned. Expressing the same sentiment, Marcel Duchamp, after nine years of work, declared his Large Glass "finally unfinished". Sometimes the "art" can take on a life of its own. Arthur Conan Doyle was so disturbed by the popularity of his literary creation, he made Holmes into a drug adict and eventually killed him off, only to be forced to resurrect him by public demand In an age when director's cuts and special editions are as much marketing ploys as serious attempts to relate an original vision, how much ownership can a director claim over his movie? Or rather, how propriety can an adoring public claim over their favourite piece of entertainment?

The case for television

Like most people I know, I grew up in the suburbs. I went to school, I did my homework. And like a lot of people I know, my parents were too busy doing whatever it is parents do to spend a lot of time raising me. I was the youngest in my family – my brother and sister had both left home while I still counted my years in single digits. And most of the people in my street were in their fifties, their kids having already left home. I grew up alone mostly, but I wasn’t a lonely kid. For an eleven year-old whose school friends all lived too far away to visit, TV became a good substitute for friends, and in a way, for parents.

These days people like to dump on television. In the Seventies it was a convenient babysitter – I probably watched five hours of TV a night after getting home from school, and I went to bed earlier than most of my friends. These days it’s an all-too convenient scapegoat for society’s woes. I don’t buy it – if people don’t want their kids watching 24, change the channel or send the brat to bed. That’s all I’m going to say on that one. I’m not here to soap-box. Not today, anyway.

Saturday afternoons saw a young JD grow on a steady diet of John Wayne, Gene Kelly and Elvis Presley. I feasted on Rio Bravo, The Longest Day, Funny Face and The Man Who Knew Too Much. It didn’t matter what it was; I ate it up.

I grew up hoping one day I’d be able to dance like Fred Astaire. Well, that didn’t happen. I can’t ride a horse like John Wayne or sing like Danny Kaye either. But looking back on my childhood, I would have to say that television had at least the same level of influence on the development of my personality, my values and beliefs as my folks did, maybe a little more.

My parents tried to bring me up to do the right thing. The motivating forces they brought to bear in their instruction were guilt and fear, both strong motivators. And I like to think that I turned out fairly OK. I’m no kind of saint, but I don’t think I’ve left too long a trail of destruction behind me either. But the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the lessons I took away from my childhood are the ones I learnt watching movies. My ethical foundations, my sense of right and wrong owe more to James Stewart in Broken Arrow, Mr Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life than any number admonitions that I should be nice to others.

The key is the story, the narrative structure that frames the message. Every film has a story to tell, and every story has something to teach you. Stories create situations involving characters. These characters make choices and spend the rest of the story dealing with the consequences of those choices. It's like life, only you get to see the outcomes in the abstract. This is why stories are the oldest and still the best form of teaching. My parents did their best, but they only ever told me what; George Baily and Tom Jeffords and a hundred other characters showed me why.

Hi, and welcome to the Accidental Ticket-Holder - my very own film-critique megaphone. This is unexplored territory for me - my first blog. The Accidental Ticket-Holder will be devoted to movie-minutiae, notes on films, directors, writers, performances, stuff like that. Basically I'm a frustrated film-critic who lacks the time and wherewithal to actually write film criticism. Hell, these days I barely get the time to go see a movie. So, what you'll get here won't be full-blown expositions about the latest big-budget Hollywood epic or slick thriller out of France. These days I'm more interested the lost bits - the fragments that fall through the cracks.

Blogs are often full of self-indulgent waffle, and this one is probably not going to stray too far from the formula. I can be as beligerant and opinionated at the next guy, and I just know you're out there itching to read what I have to say about any old thing that comes up. Promise I'll try to stay on topic, and I'll try to keep it more-or-less intelligent. And I'll try to keep the typos down to a minimum.

It's my intention to put up a post or two a week - around eight or ten times a month. Between work, study and relationship-maintenance, I figure I can probably keep to this schedule. If anyone wants to write to me, that would be just swell. I'll even try to write back (if it doen't conflict with my busy posting schedule).

So, to kick off - Manhattan. I was thinking about that wonderful scene at the very end between Isaac (Woody Allen) and Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), when Tracy has just told Isaac he has to learn to trust people, and the camera lingers for a few seconds (it seems longer) on Isacc, looking... well, I used to think penitent ("I screwed up - I'm sorry"), but now I'm leaning toward plain-old anxious ("Yes, yes, of course you're right - now can we get back to the part where thingsweretickingalongnicelythankyou). For a guy who professes to lead such an examined life, he seems to be a little cavalier about the important things. You have to wonder if Manhattan II wouldnt have been pretty much the same story, just with Mia Farrow in the Diane Keaton role. Though maybe Tracy wouldn't have stuck around for that long.