The Magic of Movies: A Star Wars Exegesis, Part Seven

Obi-Wan and Vader meeting still feels titanic after all these decades. Even minor continuity errors can’t ruin it; Obi-Wan refers to Vader as ‘Darth’ like it’s his forename and not a title, as the entire rest of the franchise treats it. I’ve seen people defend this on the basis that he’s saying it as an ironic insult, like referring to a false king as ‘Your Majesty’, but I must reject this on the grounds that no human being talks like that and even in the context of Star Wars it’s a completely unnatural inclination.

Obi-Wan’s perspective and arguments in this scene are also something I have come around on as I’ve aged. “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine,” is very simple and generic on its own, but the context of the story and my own life has given it greater meaning. The thing about the afterlife in fiction is that it’s usually very useful as a metaphor; life in fiction is comparable to a state of being in reality. Think of it as this: you being employed in one place can be seen as a life, and being fired or quitting can be seen as a state of death. I know I’ve had jobs I stayed in far past the point I really should have, where it was noble to give up. This is the attitude Obi-Wan brings to his actual life, and he willingly loses it for a greater cause. 

I’ve won arguments and conflicts in the short-term, only for the other person to be better off without me and the life we shared in the long-run, which is to say I’ve been Vader. He’s all about being the toughest, and as a result he’s stuck in a terrible state of being. Heaven, Hell, Purgatory; these are all real places, not in some concrete-but-faraway sense, but in an abstract and very immediate sense (I have been in my own personal Hell and continue to march further and further away from it).

The question is: does this make Star Wars good? Its statements are platitudes, to which I’m bringing greater depth through my own life experience. I wonder if projecting my experiences onto a goofy movie about space wizards is like projecting meaning onto fortune cookies. There have been works I’ve taken things away from; Star Wars is something I bring meaning to. I choose to believe this is a reflection of the quality of the movie – that it’s complex enough in design to remind me of the important things that happened to me. I had thoughts that were caused by Star Wars.

Obi-Wan distracting the stormtroopers long enough to let our heroes get away is a great coincidence in fiction; coincidence can be a terrible thing (one of Pixar’s storytelling rules is that coincidence can get your hero into trouble but never out of it), but it feels fair here, and I think it’s because acting as distraction is exactly, precisely Obi-Wan’s goal. After getting the tractor beam down, getting the others out is more important to him than anything else, and he’s going to pay the ultimate price for it.

For a movie famous for its naive pleasures, this is a pretty powerful ‘growing up’ moment for Luke. Obi-Wan notices him and smiles at Vader like he’s already won, and he allows Vader to strike him down. Notice that Obi-Wan doesn’t get chopped in half – he vanishes. I always loved that Vader kicks at Obi-Wan’s clothes afterwards, as if he shrank down or something to dodge the blow. Luke’s impulsiveness emerges as grief-stricken violence, only talked into saving his own ass by getting yelled at (fantastic shot of the door closing in Vader’s face).

We already grieve for Obi-Wan; this, I think, is a weak moment in the film, where it’s expressed as Luke staring at the table. It’s not that this is unrealistic, but it’s not as vivid as most of the other emotional expressions we’ve had. I’ve also seen this scene criticised on feminist grounds – Leia is the one to comfort Luke through his grief when she herself saw her planet destroyed not an hour ago, and I could criticize that on story grounds – a million is a statistic and Obi-Wan was someone we cared about – but, you know, I see that.

Luckily, we move on pretty quick, because as Han says, we’re not out of the woods yet. Speaking strictly from the perspective of a young boy playing with toys, this is one of the coolest sections of the film; I always loved the design of the TIE Fighters, and the design of the weapons stations Han and Luke are using is great, with many arcade games successfully replicating the overall design. It’s also a reflection of Lucas’s deep bench of references; we’ve had samurai movies, Flash Gordon serials, and Westerns, and now we have WWII aerial combat movies. The weaving together of old reference points into a new system is something I dearly love; it sets off a bit of dopamine in my brain that recognises something familiar, and it makes the world of the work feel so much bigger.

(I’ll also concede that the Family Guy parody of these scene has one line that made me laugh hard: “Great, kid, don’t get penisy!”)

We then learn that the Imperial troops allowed the heroes to get away, leaving a homing beacon on it to track them; Leia correctly deduces this, to Han’s irritation. This whole scene brings out the childishness of the story, even more than the wacky comedy or laser swords; Han gets petty about being paid, and is so hurt by Leia’s rejection of him that he decides to mess with Luke, who is clearly attracted to her (ignore the continuity, ignore the continuity…)

When the heroes land on the Rebel Base, we get one brief little more reference: Aztec pyramids. These physical props and models are so important to the lived-in quality of the movie; not to keep banging on a point, but there’s a texture to this that’s lost in CG. There’s something for the actors to respond to and play off. Let’s face it: it’s just way cooler. The fact that everything is DIY also helps here; we’ve never seen this stuff before, and someone had to design it, and someone had to make it. The AI bubble we’ve been seeing the past few years has revealed that people don’t just want beauty; they want story, including the story of how someone made the story.

I don’t know much about military tactics, but the basic plan the Rebels lay out sounds very silly, and it’s often been criticized from multiple angles; for one thing, why would a ship that big have such a small exhaust port? I, for one, don’t actually give that much of a crap; it serves its goal cinematically, in giving us a single action that will save the entire day. Human beings are drawn to binary success/fail actions, no matter how little sense they practically make. Star Wars understands story before everything else.

(To me, Luke’s comment about bullseyeing womp rats is one of the funnier breaks from reality in this movie. Anywhere else, a teenager randomly killing small animals is a sign of psychopathy.)

One thing I never fully processed before this project was how much Luke is driven by glory, and indeed how reflexively he believes in it to the point that he’s surprised when other people don’t chase it. He snipes some more at Han for just leaving with his money (and that must a buttload of money right there, with all those cases). I do enjoy that Han is defensive and prickly, believing Luke is right; Han and Luke are each other’s Shadow, another archetype this movie makes work. And I especially love how it expresses Han’s hidden sincerity with “May the Force be with you.”

It’s really interesting to me that Leia ends up giving Luke the same advice that Obi-Wan gave him – that Han must choose his own path, just as Luke must choose his. This seems to be the main textual theme of Star Wars, underlined by the fact that everyone in this universe has their own unique history. Luke is learning to let go of controlling his own destiny, let alone everyone else’s.

We have one of the stranger Star Wars moments, where Luke meets his old friend Biggs, who seems to exist mainly to humanise the other pilots a bit and to sell Luke as a great pilot – unnecessarily, in my opinion, though these movies are filled with unnecessary but delicious filigree. To an extent, it’s the closest this movie comes to Luke going home after his adventure. I do also love that they go out of their way to keep Artoo in the main action but making him, effectively, Luke’s navigator. We even have Threepio to up the emotional stakes; despite all his complaining, Threepio loves Artoo, and we wouldn’t want to split them up with Artoo dying, right?

Leia staying behind isn’t just an unnecessary blow to female action heroes that the subsequent films would deal with; it’s a useful way of cinematically presenting the stakes. So often, whoever is left back in the War Room is just observing what happens, worried about the fighters out there are doing; Leia, on the other hand, is effectively who the Death Star is targetting. Of course, Threepio could be the victim perfectly fine on his own, I suppose.

It’s interesting that the movie goes far out of its way to humanise the X-wing fighters – the long line of “standing by” intros is fast and efficient at this. It doubles as making Luke one part of a larger tradition, too – the fact that he was just a farm boy before this even makes him look weaker and more intimidated than the professional soldiers around him. It pays off almost immediately as soon as one of them dies; I’m always a fan of seeing a bit of the explosion in the cockpit before cutting to the outside where it all blows up. 

I skipped over the little ghostly message Obi-Wan gave Luke immediately after he died, but this is where he comes back in a real iconic moment. In terms of metaphor, this is one of those moments where after someone dies, we imagine what they would say in different situations; Obi-Wan, characteristically, is asking Luke to trust his intuition.

This whole X-Wing sequence is so fantastic. I know I keep banging on about physical props, but it really does give a texture and life to these sequences that’s lost with CG. I’m really not an anti-CG person, but it’s so frustrating seeing it used as a be-all and end-all for all moviemaking problems, particularly movies defined by the size of their budget. But it does help how well it’s staged and edited; I enjoy the displays that let us know the characters are waiting for the right shot, for example – very reminiscent of the dashboard clock on Speed a few decades later.

Vader then joins the fight, and this actually makes me read him even more as a Bond Villain’s Sidekick; I’m particularly thinking of Jaws, for some reason. This isn’t an insult or anything; Bond Villain Sidekicks usually have to be visually interesting in some way and the bigger physical threat, and I’m mostly thinking from a structural perspective anyway. Like, Lucas was channelling Flash Gordon, samurai movies, cowboy movies, and now Bond films. There’s an old adage in academia that if you steal from one person, it’s plagiarism, and if you steal from everybody, it’s research; Star Wars proves that works in fiction as well.

I enjoy that the movie goes out of its way to give Tarkin some famous last words.

The sequence of the Rebels actually getting the exhaust section is really interesting in its structure; each Rebel gets closer and closer to succeeding, with the very last one managing to actually fire into the port itself but failing to get a direct hit; it’s very simple repetition teaching the audience how this works, but with the cost of lives getting hire with each failure.

Luke’s final run is where the story gets at its most mystical. Luke is prepping his run and using his targeting computer, and Obi-Wan implores him to use the Force instead. This is where the movie’s morality and possible influence is at its most interesting. The West’s relationship with intuition is messy right now, particularly in America; on the one hand, there’s a hyperrational chasing of numbers, money, and the bottom line in terms of goals, over things like family, community, or soulfulness. On the other, Americans tend to trust gut feelings and pure genius over rational processes and expertise; I recall that one major element of Stephen Colbert’s satirical conservative persona was claiming gut instinct and things that feel true over ‘so-called facts’.

Much of the current rise in fascism is tied to horribly undereducated people chasing something that feels right despite being grossly misinformed; one thinks of the staggering number of American who voted for tariffs despite not only not knowing what they are, but not knowing they would be directly, personally, and quite negatively affected by it. They’re operating on pure, messy intuition with no real grounding for what they’re doing, and it’s ruining the world.

On the other hand, I’ve been Luke before. It’s possible to overrationalize one’s worries. There’s something particularly unnerving about his decision being represented through choosing not to use a computer to solve his problem, given the current issues with generative AI; it’s been suggested at this point that reliance on these devices is genuinely making people worse at cognitive reasoning, something I find so unsettling that I’ve been pulling back on technology in all sorts of contexts, not even using calculators for simple math problems and trying to improve my memory rather than rely on my phone.

It’s not the worst thing to use a crutch when you need to, but when I see Luke putting away his targeting computer to get the final shot, I see someone taking a leap to trust their own instincts and abilities. That kind of thing is emotionally satisfying and easy to cheer on, and it’s immensely satisfying to do for oneself even in contexts where it’s hard to explain. There are even often cases where what seems like the wrong thing to do feels like the right thing, and usually those instincts are the exact ones that work out.

In the case of Star Wars, Luke’s decision to put aside his targeting computer is immediately followed up by Artoo getting shot (“I specifically requested the opposite of this!”); it’s not quite right to say that Luke caused that, although it almost feels like that in a weird spiritual way, but it does escalate the tension again. Han coming in at the last minute is, by far and away, the cheapest move this film pulls, and it works 100% to carry us into Luke saving the day.

After this, there’s only two scenes: one to show our heroes personally celebrating, and one to show them publicly celebrating. This efficiency fascinates me; it feels like movies take forever to finish these days, possibly influenced by the long-assed endings of the last Lord Of The Rings film. As a rule, people tend to remember movies and shows as taking longer than they actually do, and I wonder if this has filtered down into blockbusters stretching out their emotions under the impression that this intensifies them, when in practice the opposite is true. On the other hand, Marsha Lucas does emphasise the pride and joy Luke, Han, Leia, and even Chewie feel as medals are handed out. My conclusion would be the same as it often is in these situations; keep the action simple.

It’s hard to believe Lucas based Star Wars on the Hero’s Journey specifically because of this ending. One of the major points of the Hero’s Journey is that the hero ends his journey by going home and changing the world with what he learned. From a strictly formalist perspective, Luke should be going back to Tatooine and defeating gangsters and improving the farms or whatever with his Force powers and, more importantly, confidence and self-knowledge. It’s more accurate to say that Luke advances his social position; like the country boy moving to the city.

That said, the movie does hit the point of the Hero’s Journey, if not the exact formula. A weak and naive boy goes out into a fantastic world, learns new skills and ways of thinking, and ends it having matured in some way, improving the world around him. Whatever its weaknesses philosophically, I always appreciated that Star Wars was about that last part; Luke gets his personal glory, but as a result of helping people. The weaker Star Wars ripoffs were about personal empowerment and the gaining of power; Star Wars has always rejected that for community and connection.

See you guys again next Star Wars Day, when I’ll write about Empire Strikes Back!