The Audience Versus George Lucas

All right, I lied yesterday. I'm going to talk about love tomorrow and Friday, but with throwing a whole lot of details about the Author's responsibility to the Audience, and vice versa, I want to go into great detail about a case where both parties failed to live up to their responsibilities. George Lucas, and Star Wars.

I'm not going to pull up any videos of people insulting George Lucas because in my old age of 26 I've taken a step back from my disappointment and actually considered what happened during the production of episodes 1-3. If you want to see some high quality analysis of the problem, I suggest checking out the film The People Vs. George Lucas, which is streaming on Netflix, as well as Red Letter Media, who does some very in depth reviews of the movies. But my goal here isn't to go into whether or not the Star Wars prequels were failures. My goal is to talk about why they were doomed before they were even made.

Star Wars: A New Hope changed everything for Science Fiction, and not just in terms of storytelling. Because storytelling wise most highschoolers these days are going to learn about how the plot of Star Wars is basically the old heroic arch and there's nothing wrong with that. There are no new ideas. But what Star Wars did that had never been done before was that it took the universe out of the movie and brought it into your home.

The amount of action figures, lunch boxes, sheets, buttons, etc. from the first movie alone is daunting. By the time Return of the Jedi hit the market and the ensuing product line followed, there were video games being produced and more actions figures which meant more worlds to imagine. When Lucas began to create The Phantom Menace his universe had been expanded by books to the point where the Galaxy far far away was not a mysterious place filled with an untold promise of worlds, it was a fleshed out and heavily populated mythos which had already told a plethora of stories after and before the happenings of the first three movies.

There's a problem with all of this though.

You cannot create a product line of action figures, scenes, dolls, shirts, videogames, books, all branching out from your created universe and expanding upon it and allowing people to make up their own stories within it and then turn around and try to tell a story about the characters that people themselves have already created stories for. The problem comes not in telling the origins of the characters, the problem comes in the fact that never providing them we, the audience, already made up the origins!

What I'm trying to say here is that by the time Lucas set about creating episodes 1-3, it was too late. The universe was no longer his. This itself could turn into a discussion on fanfiction and the like, but it's not really applicable here. Lucas gave his universe to us. It wasn't in his films that he did this, it was in the excessive at points level of marketing. You cannot give people the tools to create their own stories and then try to insert your own story over it. It just doesn't work. People get upset. And that's what happened.

After almost thirty years of envisioning their own ideas of the hinted at history of Ben Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker in a mysterious period called the Clone Wars, no one needed to hear the story anymore. The Audience had done the work themselves, as they will do with any story that leaves details untold. We fill in the blanks and we're happy to. That is a huge compliment to an artist, in fact, that their work inspires us to create our own details filling in the blanks. If we didn't like it we wouldn't care.

So is the fault all Lucas's? Absolutely not.

I hate Gungans. With a fiery passion. But there's nothing Lucas ever presented me that doesn't leave the possibility for them open. After all, if I could tolerate Ewoks, why not Gungans? There's nothing that says he doesn't have the right to work within his universe even despite all of the arguments I made above. It's his universe, he made it! And there's nothing that says he has to tell the story that his fans wanted to hear. If artists did only what their fans wanted J.K. Rowling would still write Harry Potter books, Metallica would only keep recreating their first album (which some might argue is what Death Magnetic is), and every year we would have sequel upon sequel upon...oh wait...that part is partially true.

But what I'm saying is that Lucas had every right to make those movies how he did. And we as fans must do the following. We must accept the vision, or we must approach it from a completely distant perspective, which is what Red Letter Media does a great job of doing in his review. He talks about the movies as movies, not as movies from the perspective of a fan, but just as they are, movies. We have to do some honest critiquing of them and we have to be willing to admit what is good in them.

However this isn't a critique so I'm once again not going to get into that. Go watch those reviews. Go!

What I'm trying to say is that as an audience we can't have our cake and eat it to. We shouldn't be so upset when an artist does something and we don't love it. It's their right. And maybe, if you don't like it, you have to step back and ask if you're the target audience in the first place. There is a great scene in The People vs. George Lucas where an adamant hater of the prequels discusses how his young son LOVES them. And for all we can detract on the films, if they are meant for kids and not us as adults, should we get so upset or maybe wonder if George Lucas cares about the cliché geek who can recite the names of every Rogue Squadron member?

As this post has hopefully shown, rarely is the question of Artist vs. Audience as simple as my example from Monday with the Joseph Gordon-Levitt quote. It's not always clearly laid out what the artist wants nor what the audience wants. Which is why we have reviewers, why we as an audience are free to decide where to spend our money, and why an artist who has no interest in the ultimate fame doesn't have to include sparkly vampires in order to support themselves.

Now then, tomorrow there will be love, because I promised it. So much love you'll possibly hate it. Muah ha ha ha ha. Take care audience, hopefully you got what you wanted today. And if not...