Sound and Fury

I had some hopes for the latest extravaganza in the "Star Wars" saga, Bush. I went to see it yesterday, buoyed by favorable reviews, and in the expectation of some good escapist fare. I'd heard it was the best in the series since the first "Star Wars", the only other one I'll confess to having seen--though I do have some vague recollection of having seen the second, perhaps on a television rerun. Was that "The Empire Strikes Back"? Anyway, unless your tastes run to the truly juvenile, I'd suggest you give this one a miss in the White House screening room. (Try renting "The Corporation" instead. You'd get a kick out of that one, Bush!) To quote the Bible, as you're fond of doing, this one is "all sound and fury, signifying nothing."

I was as seduced as anyone by the first "Star Wars", and its struggle between good and evil which managed to be both titantic and engagingly whimsical all at once. So what if it seemed a tad simple-minded? It had the broad, symbolic sweep that epics are supposed to have. It had a touch of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey", a touch of the "Song of Roland" and "Beowulf": heroic humans, locked in the battle for the survival of a people against the deadly forces of evil oppression. So what if the Force seemed a tad New Age-y, and the Empire a bit neo-Nazi camp? The spirit of the thing seemed young, energetic, enthusiastic, optimistic. The foot soldiers--whether animalistic or robotic (I'm piling up a lot of "tics" here, Bush!)--had the charm of freshness, and seemed the product of a truly original imagination.

Alas, they're a tired bunch nowadays, Bush. We barely got the beginnings of a smile out of Artoo Deetoo (sp?) and C3PO (again, sp?) this time around. The antic, semi-human creatures from the animal world and the mutant kingdom have none of the freshness of the original Chewbacca (returning here in barely more than a cameo appearance, along with an army of superfluous clones) and those fantastic denizens of the space bar. Forget about the pragmatic skepticism of a Han Solo. This time around, the humor pales beside the preachiness, and that gently ironic twist in the values of good and evil gets sacrificed to deadly seriousness. The battle scenes--always the mainspring of the epic, whether literary or cinematic--are endless and, worse, routine. Even the special effects, once so wondrous, seem only drearily spectacular. Space ships collide and crash land, explosions happen hugely, everywhere, great rivers of molten lava flow as the backdrop to the action of light-saber wielding knights--and all for what?

Sadly, for me at least, nothing. Good and evil, which provided the moral core of the earliest "Star Wars", have somehow lost their energy and meaning here. The Force, as the old joke had it, has truly become the Farce. There is, as Gertrude Stein (a great American, if ever there was one, Bush: a true ambassador) famously remarked "no there there." The truth is, I cared nothing for a single one of the characters. It was all head--that is, it was all concept--posing as heart and soul. Even those tentative thrusts toward a contemporary political relevance and weak feints toward your current administration (with talk about the distinction between "republic" and "empire", and the dangers of the unchecked power)--even these fell flat. In all, it was a dreadful disappointment. Coming back home, I was glad to find "The Last Samurai" on TV, and watched it to remind myself what a pretty darn good cinematic epic looks like. Even on a small screen, and with a minimum of special effects.

What's truly sad about this flop is that, to judge from reviews and attendance figures, we seem as a country to be feasting on this pablum. At the performance we attended yesterday, the trailers promised at least another five such vacuous, concept-driven, sound-and-fury epics for the summer. Are we all so benumbed with violence and war that it becomes our primary source of entertainment? Are we all so bereft of critical acumen?