David Brin doesn’t like the anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian message of Lucas’s later Star Wars movies, but he recognizes that even non-propaganda films have their reasons for depicting failing civlizations:
Why do almost no films ever show civilization functioning, institutions doing their jobs, democracy working? The answer is simple: laziness. A storyteller’s job is to keep his or her characters in pulse-pounding jeopardy for 90 minutes of film, or 600 pages of a novel. It’s hard to do that if they can dial 911 and get skilled professionals to come to their aid. So you see a panoply of tricks used by directors and authors to deny their characters useful aid. That’s fine, but when the trick is to simply spread the assumption that there are no decent civil servants, there are no smart cops, there are no loyal first responders out there, then that spreads a propaganda message that such things are impossible. It takes real writing to come up with a way of keeping your characters in jeopardy, despite there being skilled professionals who want to help them.
There’s a reason the Western was such a successful genre for so long — and why so many sci-fi and fantasy settings resemble Westerns.
Star Wars is crap science fiction, just like Star Trek. It’s visually intense, but content-wise? It’s crap. Utter, fatuous crap. Same with Star Trek, to be quite honest.
Lucas and Roddenberry are both examples of the poisonous fruit coming off the left-wing moonbat socialist cultural ferment that was post-WWII California, and it shows in the way they created their fantasy universes. Roddenberry wasn’t quite as nihilistic as Lucas, but when you look at the whole breadth of the Federation culture he imagines, as well as the straw men he threw up…? Wow. Neither of them did anything really worthy to deserve the notoriety and fame they garnered. Cripes, Lucas is probably one of the worst storytellers and dialogue writers in the history of the craft…
What’s really irritating is that there are a lot of people who know nothing of the genre outside of these two dreck-lords. Their work has forever warped the nature of movie and television, with regards to this genre. You’re very unlikely to see anything that doesn’t conform to the tropes they laid down, and that’s a pity. Mostly because there’s much better material out there, that won’t ever be filmed.
Lucas doesn’t realize it, but he’s probably the perfect embodiment of a new-age Leni Riefenstahl. We’re just extraordinarily lucky that he never found his Hitler.
I seriously doubt anyone is spreading any assumption about ‘first responders’ in stories. The essence of many good stories is people having to do things because they have no choice. There is no story to be told where people do nothing but pick up the phone to get someone else to do things for them.
The assumption in this nonsense is that skilled professionals are always moments away and are equipped to deal with anything. Of course it isn’t propaganda to say that someone isolated by events has to come up with answers.
One of the lasting themes of successful stories is ‘Into the Woods’ where the hero/heroine is on their own and has to use any natural resources, their intelligence and skills. It is, among other things, how we learn to do things other than dials number on a telephone.
Lucas is probably one of the worst storytellers…
And he cribbed most of it, primarily from Tolkien. Friends were laughing that Christopher Lee essentially played the same character in both franchises.
But I’ve heard the case made that all modern cinema is a riff on Tolkien.
Bomag,
I dunno about Tolkien, so much. In very general terms of “The Hero’s Journey”, maaaaybe…
From Valerian? He didn’t even bother to file off the serial numbers, first…
Preposterous. I haven’t read all of Brin’s SF, but the first three novels of his Uplift series don’t have decent civil servants and first responders either. Brin simply envies the vast success Lucas had with his vastly more conventional (as Bomag rightly points out) stories.
“It takes real writing to come up with a way of keeping your characters in jeopardy, despite there being skilled professionals who want to help them.”
Wasn’t that the central premise of 1984?