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?