Identity Politics in George Lucas' Star Wars by John C. McDowell

Author:John C. McDowell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2016-03-11T05:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Vivian Sobchack claims that “despite all their ‘futuristic’ gadgetry and special effects … the Star Trek films [of the 1970s and 80s] are conservative and nostalgic, imagining the future by looking backward to the imagination of a textual past.”128 Science fiction in general has been a male dominated genre, and the ways it constructs and represents gender can express a nostalgia for gender coding and gendered flows of power in favor of male domination. Yet, according to Patricia Melzer, “significantly, it is within science-fiction film and literature—a genre usually understood to be predominantly male, that we seem to reimagine gender relations most radically.”129 With the space operas of George Lucas, however, the issue of gender has been particularly noticed by, and remained controversial among, numerous commentators. There had, of course, been a disagreement over the planned ending of Lucas’ 1973 movie American Graffiti, with the male-only conclusion leading him to be accused of male chauvinism by influential film critic Pauline Kael.130 Lucas vehemently disputed this on the grounds of cinematic pragmatism: “It’s a movie about the four guys.” According to Pollock, for instance, “Lucas vehemently rejects the chauvinist label—it upsets and hurts him. He does not go around saying that the female of the species is inferior, and he has given women more management positions than most Hollywood studios.”131 In an interview in September of 1977 the director of SW revealed something very significant concerning how the redirecting of his vision of the heroine was forced upon him by the criticisms of others: “The first version [of the script] talked about a princess and an old general. The second version involved a father, his son, and his daughter; the daughter was the heroine of the film. Now the daughter has become Luke, Mark Hamill’s character. There was also the story of two brothers where I transformed one of them into a sister. The older brother was imprisoned, and the young sister had to rescue him and bring him back to their dad. But this posed some horrible problems. Nobody would believe it, it wasn’t realistic at all.”132 SW’s intertextual references to the likes of the Flash Gordon serial adventures and to the swashbuckling and Arthurian legends certainly display a nostalgic cinematic appeal. However, in this context, the envisioning of Leia is a move with no little radical possibility, contesting, among other things, the power-relations and ideological constructions of specifiable gender differences common to pulp science fiction. Here is an act of what Darko Suvin has famously called the operation of cognitive estrangement that provides a critical reflection on contemporary socio-political orders.

Nevertheless, by no stretch of the imagination can Lucas’ subsequent SW saga be called a “feminist text” or a racially emancipatory text, or to adapt Edith Wyschogrod’s term a “saintly” text.133 For good or ill, its energies clearly are too focused elsewhere. “Ultimately,” Cavelos stridently maintains, “Leia is unconvincing both as an action hero nor as a passive victim. The coherence of her character has been sacrificed to the story and the male characters.

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