The Empire Strikes Back by Rebecca Harrison

The Empire Strikes Back by Rebecca Harrison

Author:Rebecca Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing


5 Critics Strike Back

A ‘new standard for technological wizardry’.166 A ‘slam-bang and poetic space extravaganza about the Getting of Wisdom’.167 Or a ‘morally ambiguous psychodrama that simply cannot be sustained by the still cartoon-like characters and plot’?168 While audiences voted in favour of the film, which, like Star Wars, had extraordinary box-office returns that were bolstered by repeat viewings, professional critics were conflicted. Whereas today critics and audiences alike laud Empire as the ‘best’ Star Wars movie, in 1980 its critical reception was uneven, with reviewers’ positive responses to the movie’s aesthetics disrupted by their negative reactions to its mass appeal and lack of narrative closure. By examining Empire’s reception in the daily press and trade papers, my goal is to draw attention to the politics of class, education, and identity that informed its cultural status. I begin by contextualizing the film’s criticism within debates about cinema such as genre, blockbusters, and audiences. Next, the chapter analyses which elements of the movie critics praised or censured, and why. And finally, I consider who was writing about the film. I propose that Empire’s reviews, written almost exclusively by white men, excluded people with more marginalized identities from discussions about the film and so contributed to the masculinized gatekeeping of Star Wars more broadly.

Class wars

Science fiction and other genre films have not always enjoyed critical attention or success, and today disagreements continue over the merits of blockbuster films and their status as cinema. As Bradley Schauer argues, the avant-garde, autuerist branding of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) worked to legitimize the science fiction genre alongside ‘[a] new generation of critics who grew up watching 50s science fiction films, and began to explore their sub-textual meanings, making a case for them as intriguing cultural artefacts’.169 Star Wars, though, had an uneasy relationship with New Hollywood due to its family-friendly pop narrative and focus on merchandise. Its big-budget, blockbuster sequel, then, was always likely to meet with doubt from reviewers who were middle class by profession and guardians of good taste by design. Scholar and critic Robin Wood, for example, wrote a notoriously elitist analysis of Star Wars that discounted the possibility of any deep engagement with the texts. He claims that the ‘satisfactions’ of Star Wars are merely ‘repeated until a sequel is required: same formula, with variations. But instead of a leap, only an infant footstep is necessary, and never one that might demand an adjustment on the level of ideology.’170 His criticism of the original trilogy is rooted in his own classist thinking, which wrongly assumes that films with mass appeal only have value as signifiers of broader political concerns and do not have any intrinsic value within the text.

Wood’s discussion of the franchise in 1986 demonstrates much of the cynicism that informed Empire’s reviews in 1980. For instance, while Variety called the movie a ‘worthy sequel’ to Star Wars, the trade paper also noted that owing to the film’s position in a growing franchise, the ‘only box office question is how many earthly trucks it will take to carry the cash to the bank’.



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