I like the moment in The Empire Strikes Back where Han and Leia finally kiss. They are suddenly interrupted by C-3PO, who cheerfully tells Han about the repairs he made for the ship. "Thank you, thank you very much!" Han snarls. Not very attuned to the sarcasm in his voice, C-3PO gushes, "You're very welcome!" What I like the most about this scene is that there it's really about Han and Leia and not about C-3PO. C-3PO is entirely peripheral to the central business of the scene, which is evolving the Han and Leia romance.

In a recent interview with Cinescape magazine, director Irvin Kershner talks about how trashy he thought the original Star Wars was, and how he had no interest in "pictures with special effects.” Kershner had even rejected Empire Strikes Back for a month, believing that it would be impossible to make a good film. In the interview, he explains why Empire Strikes Back stands out above the other Star Wars films: "My intention was to humanize the characters and get as much humor as possible, and that is what we worked on in the script for a couple of months. I kept pushing, 'We've got to humanize, we've got to make them real people, contemporary people that we identify with.'" I think he has picked up on why critics like this film the most of the Star Wars films. Kershner keeps going back to the idea that a good film needs to have good characters, human characters.

There is a temptation to call him a "hack,” in that he isn't an auteur as much as somebody who has worked in the industry for a long time (it is generally agreed upon that he hasn't done anything as good as Empire Strikes Back before or since). This background works well for The Empire Strikes Back, however. His attitudes toward good filmmaking are classical, for lack of a better word, stemming from the humancentrism of literary and theatrical tradition. He's "old school.” I sense that Kershner explicitly distinguishes C-3PO from Han Solo and Princess Leia. Leia and Solo are human beings. C-3PO is a machine. Human beings are more interesting to Kershner than machines, and so he accordingly places the human beings in the foreground. This is considerably evolved from George Lucas' Star Wars where Solo and Leia were as broadly drawn as the androids. The problem with Lucas isn't as much that he is fascinated with machines over people, but rather that he is fascinated with concepts over people. Star Wars, or for that matter American Graffiti, are not at all cold films, but they are certainly anti-human, anti-intellectual, and focally experiential: all heart, no brains or soul. There's nothing particularly wrong with experiential cinema in itself (I did list Kill Bill Vol. 1 as the best film of 2003 for succeeding on those terms), but Lucas is not a man of great imagination or great courage. Star Wars is very careful to not challenge or otherwise alienate its audience (quite unlike Kill Bill Vol. 1 really, which often legitimately and effectively sold misogyny and feminist empowerment in the very same breath). Star Wars is made to be a crowd pleaser, and indeed, it succeeds marvelously. But it feels limiting; as I believe I wrote in my review of the film, one of the pleasures of a deep movie love is exclusionism, the ability for filmgoers to form their own associative groups.

Kershner's humanization of the Star Wars saga injects some soul into the all-heart creation. I can't say that The Empire Strikes Back is any smarter or more intellectual than Star Wars. I don't think that it really rewards reflection or discussion, nor is the film at all exclusionary. On the other side of that observation however, The Empire Strikes Back is an even greater crowd pleaser than the original Star Wars. The attraction of the first Star Wars was held through its optimistic worldview, its non-threatening religious content and its endless energy. The Empire Strikes Back retains all of these things (even the optimism in a way) and adds human characters that we can sympathize and identify with. We’re affected by the plot, of all things, and by the way that these people interact with one another. The cast (Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Billy Dee Williams) is uniformly marvelous. They seem to spin gold out of straw, providing depth and motivation to their characters that simply doesn’t seem to be there in the script. We never really detect why Han and Leia fall in love, but we believe it all the same. It is the same with Luke; there is a psychological background there, a set of expectations and beliefs of who and what his father is that we will see crushed at the end of the film. But it’s all buried under the surface; the actors seem to be doing all the work. The gap between their quality here and in the first Star Wars could probably be attributed to Kershner. While Star Wars was an early film for many of them, I detect that Kershner trusts them as actors in a way that George Lucas did not. He seems to find it very important that they give strong fleshy performances, and so he puts a lot of work into making sure that his actors have found out where the characters have been and where they are going.

Writing this I almost feel as if I am praising The Empire Strikes Back for simply being competent. Competence, in the manner in which we use the term, has come to be a rather rare virtue however. This film is every bit as deeply satisfying as Casablanca, and satisfying in the same way. It's a wonderfully slick commercial product: exciting, romantic, funny and spiritual. While both Casablanca and The Empire Strikes Back contain non-controversial spiritual truths that we can all agree on, they contain them all the same, lending the two films some substantial weight. They stick to your bones. You cannot use the phrase "manipulative" when describing either of these films because it earns your every response through sheer hard work. I actually like Empire better than Casablanca actually, simply because it's more potent. Early in the film, I found myself looking at the Rebellion pilots getting into the ships and realizing, "Christ, this really is, at its core, a 1940s movie serial. And it's drilled its way into our collective cinematic consciousness!" That, I believe, could be credited exclusively to this film. I'm not sure if we would regard Star Wars as being a film classic had The Empire Strikes Back never been made. The film perfects the 1940s movie serial; it wants to make a 1940s movie serial that will just wipe you out.

The Empire Strikes Back is not quite the greatest film ever made, but it's an artifact of when cinematic greatness was within our reach. The two greatest decades for American film were the 1950s, where genre cinema (the melodrama, the epic, the musical, film noir, science fiction) had reached its pinnacle, and the 1970s, where personal films about people were made with great freedom from external sources. Post-Star Wars, the environment was such that the two could become consolidated. It seems unfathomable that a film like The Empire Strikes Back could have been made five years previously or five years afterwards. After the film school kids broke into the system, American cinema would become infantilized, as lamented by Pauline Kael in "State of the Art.” I couldn't fucking stand The Empire Strikes Back when I was seven or eight. As I wrote in my Star Wars review, I found Star Wars to be somewhat childish at the time, and Empire Strikes Back to be too mature. (Return of the Jedi however was just the right mix of the childish and the mature.) Too mature is much worse than too childish, of course, and too mature is a death sentence for an industry dictated by seven- and eight-year-olds (or at least audiences with the emotional capacity of seven- and eight-year-olds).

The humancentrism of The Empire Strikes Back is responsible for its considerable emotional pull. You can't help but be shook up by the end of it. But it also has the curious secondary effect of strengthening the power of the special effects. Kershner's greatest talent is really in parceling out responsibility and trusting his cast and crew to do great work. As Kershner doesn't take any responsibility for the film's special effects, he never ogles over them to show us how much work and expense has been put into the film. The special effects are pushed into the background so that the characters and story (which Kershner does take responsibility over and cares deeply about) may take the foreground. And in the background these special effects simmer and simmer over a low boil until they evaporate to form a dense atmosphere. The Empire Strikes Back contains one of the most subversive and complete alternate universes in all of cinematic history. It seems to exist independently of Luke, Han and Leia, a setting ripe for exploitation by video games, fanfiction and pen-and-paper RPGs.

Charles Taylor argues that "method acting" is not about "being" your character as much as it's simply forming a strong internal logic for the character, a motivation for their every action. If the acting in The Empire Strikes Back is "method,” then so is everything surrounding the actors. I had an astronomy professor a few semesters back who said that she laughed at the scene in this film where the Millennium Falcon flies through an asteroid field to try to dodge some Tie Fighters. The asteroids in asteroid fields are very far away from one another and only look close when we look at them on Earth! There is relatively little stuff in outer space, really. The vast majority of it is just, well, empty space. This little meme kicked in while watching this sequence in the film. And yet it still worked. My response was slightly flavored with campy condescension, much like it was when I saw the dogfighters get into their X-wing fighters, but I bought into it. An alternate universe or, better yet, an alternate reality is the best way to describe where The Empire Strikes Back takes place. Literally, we accept that in the Star Wars universe, the asteroids in asteroid fields will typically fly close to one another. Both our universe and the Star Wars universe have asteroid fields, but they operate under separate sets of rules. A scene where Luke is resurrected from the cold in the safety of the rebel base contains some of the most ridiculously goofy dialogue that I have ever heard in a motion picture. Leia insults Han with phrases like "laserbrain" and "stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerfherder.” When Chewie laughs at Han, Han calls him a "fuzzball.” Sure, it’s not Shakespeare, but in a roundabout way this dialogue is so shitty it's practically Elizabethan. Yes, it is childish. But it doesn't feel affected; it feels, indeed, like the verbiage of an alternative universe, contributing, again, to the film's maintained sense of deep reality.

Frank Oz's Yoda is often praised for giving one of the best performances in the movie. (The statement is not meant to be a knock against the other actors in the film.) The performance was so good actually that George Lucas unsuccessfully campaigned for a best supporting actor Oscar nod for Oz. (Before you start to think that Lucas was already batshit crazy at this point, let me remind you that a similar campaign was taken for Andy Serkis for Lord of the Rings.) There is a scene where, while telling Luke about a cave where the Dark Side reigns strong, he doodles in the dirt with his walking stick. Actors are frequently given some kind of business to do with their hands. As they are focused on an action peripheral to the scene it relaxes their delivery and makes them seem more natural. And why would a puppet be doing this? Well, of course because we are not meant to believe that he is a puppet, rather an alien who was hired to act the part! It's akin to adding a camera flare to a purely computer-generated shot. The special effects crew strives beyond perfection and toward imperfection.

While the idea seems obvious to those used to watching films, audio commentaries, featurettes and the like, I still can't help but find something rather profound about the idea. First, simply in the sense that the fourth wall of deep reality needs to be teased in order for it to be maintained, that if we were suddenly aware that in the making of this film there were no actors or they were not photographed, the whole thing would strike us as artificial. Secondly, in the idea that the attractiveness of imperfection runs deeper then that of perfection. I have been constantly amazed at the beauty of Catherine Zeta-Jones. She's gorgeous, but completely asexual. Beautiful like you would say a sunset is beautiful. I am reminded of Richard Chamberlain's observation that in high school he realized that he wasn't attracted to women in the same way that his friends were. Meaning that he was still very attracted to them, but in a different way. Does sexual attraction rely on imperfection, I wonder. The beauty of Catherine Zeta-Jones could be objectively measured, I believe, but it has little use for most of us. The connection of sexuality relies on something human and accessible, as opposed to something perfected and, well, celestial. I think that imperfection also lends to the concept of "elitist forgiveness"; the imperfections will exclude those unwilling to accept or even those unwilling to fetishize them, leaving the audience that feels the piece the most deeply.

An anthropologist of religion once told me that religion exists because people tend to want to humanize natural phenomena. There is certainly a sense in which the warm, imperfect folksiness of The Empire Strikes Back serves this purpose then. We understand, intellectually, that the Force doesn't exist in our own environment, but in the brief two hours in which we inhabit the Star Wars universe we can feel that we have the mystical and otherwise inexplicable within our grasp. I could be the first person to compare The Empire Strikes Back to Schindler's List. My post-modern take on Schindler's List is that it is basically "Leni Reifenstahl meets the Marx Brothers.” It is the work of inarguably one of the cinema's most talented visual filmmakers who is also deeply Jewish. As a result, the picture fetishizes both Jewishness and the filmic aesthetic perfection of the Nazi state. There is a distinct Yiddish sense of humor in a scene where a family is forced to relocate into the ghetto. Looking around the survey the small apartment they are forced to live in, the patriarch is told that it could be worse. "How could it possibly be worse?!" he exclaims. Just then it gets worse: another large family files in to share the room with them. The Jewish characters are rather categorically warm, funny and human, a fact that I can see could get Spielberg in trouble (it's not anti-Semitic, of course, just simplistic and denies the characters a sense of individuality. They are considered, and consider themselves, all Jews in a collective sense of the word). We sympathize strongly with them. And yet at the same time the film is also visually stunning; in gorgeous black-and-white, Spielberg can't help but lend glamour to the perfectly formed Nazi marches or the still-drop-dead-gorgeous-even-with-his-beer-belly Ralph Fiennes. Jewish humanism and formalist Nazi beauty all blend together in the famous liquidation sequence, which is simultaneously dazzling and gut-wrenching to watch. The simplicity of Schindler's List is the very thing that lends it a sense of complexity. Jewishness is "good,” but Nazism is "good" also. They are conflicting senses of "good" obviously; the Nazis believed that the Jews needs to be exterminated. But both Jewishness and Nazism serve an important need for their members. Nobody would be a Nazi unless there was something attractive and useful about it, would they? Despite scenes in Schindler's List which suggest it being a simple case of exploitation, much of the imagery point to the Nazi effect as reaching much deeper needs.

The Empire Strikes Back really develops among similar lines. While the film always looks great, there is something clean and elegant about the cinematic style inside of the Death Star. It's beautiful here; we can understand the attraction of the Empire, of the Dark Side. We can understand why Darth Vader made the decision to do what he did. There is something to be said about becoming the cog of a very well-oiled machine. It's perfection; the crinkles and foibles of humankind have been thoroughly ironed out. Among the most evocative shots in the film is a push-in of Vader "hatching" from a mechanical egg. While we get a glimpse of Vader's pasty white head during this sequence and while this is the film where we learn that Vader is subservient to the evil Emperor Palpatine, this is not the pathetic creature of Return of the Jedi. This metallic womb signifies a life cycle made efficient and clean, sanitized of the messy sexuality of human biology. (Darth Vader may be one our baddest movie villains, but he's also one of our least sexy.) I suppose that I'll save deeper discussion of what exactly is the attraction of "the Dark Side" for Anakin Skywalker once we arrive at Lucas' massively flawed Attack of the Clones. (I'll probably also end up coming back to Empire Strikes Back when discussing the character of C-3PO in greater depth in that future review.)

But in a broad sense we can see how The Empire Strikes Back codes the Empire as the attractive but false spirituality of secular nationalism. Vader finds a sense of belonging here. Consolidating into the machine, it satiates the pain of his loneliness in the cosmos. But of course, he really belongs with the Light Side of the Force, humbled along the same wavelength and frequency as Obi-Wan and Yoda: a spiritual sense that transcends that of our sanitized mortal institutions. The film retains its hippy-dippy edge in other words, giving the finger to fascism and Republicans. The Empire Strikes Back is a perfect film in its own way, a rich thick tapestry of sloppiness, leftist and anti-formal while avoiding Dadaist aesthetic nihilism (a la Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism). The movie is the definitive reaction to Kubrick's intentionally incomprehensible and hyper-formalist 2001: A Space Odyssey, and is perhaps equally brilliant. Its groove in our collective cinema has been well-earned.