Today marked the first time in some six years that I had seen Episode I: The Phantom Menace. I am happy to report that it is just as good, or if you will, just as bad as I remember it being. One big surprise is that George Lucas is actually a rather talented filmmaker. The Phantom Menace is very well-shot and very well-edited. This is a real professional piece of cinny. It's even well-scored. John Williams single-handedly ruined my last viewing of Jurassic Park, but here he has successfully repressed most of his more condescending tendencies. The piece that scores the duel between Qui-Gon Jinn, Darth Maul and Obi-Wan Kenobi is transcendent and plainly awesome. His use of a human chorus brilliantly encompasses the unironic pop religiosity that makes the Star Wars films so attractive. It pre-emptively suggests the "great disturbance of the force" that was felt by Obi-Wan in Star Wars and, it seems, that we will see in the upcoming Revenge of the Sith, and as such finds a mean between the icy, elephantine Darth Vader theme and the daydreamy but hopeful Luke Skywalker theme that has become a standard in the Star Wars lexicon.

There are a number of great images and sequences. The crushed look on Queen Amidala's face as she attempts to argue against the Federation in the Imperial Senate is among one of the greatest movie moments I've ever experienced. And then there is the introduction to the underground Gungan city, which is so delicately mesmerizing that we become even more embarrassed by the very existence of Jar Jar Binks. And Lucas out and out nails the actual pod race scene and the climactic three-way duel. They are hella exciting and they work. A zoom-and-cut into the faces of all three principals right before the lightsaber duel is just so... basic and yet kinetic that you almost have to laugh just to cope with how much pleasure you're getting from it.

Lucas generally seems to be much looser with the camera than he had been with the original Star Wars. He seems to have recognized and co-opted the very thing that made The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi so great: a focus on making a visually interesting movie independent of the special effects. There is a lengthy shot in The Phantom Menace where the camera circles around Senator Palpatine's hologram as he gives a report to Queen Amidala before being disrupted, at which point we swish over from the now empty space to Amidala's stern if concerned expression. This is, as I have mentioned, good filmmaking. The movement in the shot suggests a state of chaos and instability in what would otherwise be a rather lifeless (that is to say, normal) scene of politicians talking with one another. These characters would tell you that this is a chaotic and unstable moment, but there is certainly no other way to convey that information to us except visually. We will soon learn, if we hadn't already guessed already given our knowledge of the original Star Wars trilogy, that Palpatine has a hidden agenda and basically is one of the bad guys. At this point in the film, visually is the only remotely subtle way to get us to distrust the character. But consider also the work that had to be put into this shot. It would have been easier to isolate these holographic special effects in static shots like in Star Wars, but Lucas understands that doing so would exhibit a discomfort with the universe that he has created as well as withholding the camera movement that the scene necessitates.

Well, that is all the good news. The bad news is that Lucas proves to be a particularly bad screenwriter. That is to say that he isn't very good at things like pacing, character development or dialogue. Occasionally, these deficiencies sabotage or come close toward sabotaging many otherwise very good scenes. I sort of liked a scene where three R2 units are on top of an escaping cruiser and are trying to repair its shield generator. All but one, our very own R2-D2, are shot off into space. The scene has a real intensity but little if any gravity. I mean, R2-D2 came that close to be shot off into space with the rest of the R2 units, and Star Wars history came that close to being altered forever. And yet, it is only this idea that gives the scene any sort of power; in execution, little if anything is made of this brush with oblivion.

I sort of felt that Lucas was abusing his resources; the scene felt like... emotional pornography, to borrow a phrase from the film critic Travis Hoover. Arguments could be made that the blame could be assigned to Lucas the filmmaker, but I think the problem goes deeper than that. I think that in the screenplay stage, Lucas misjudged the significance and strength of this scene and mistakenly used it as just another action sequence. The climactic duel is sort of bizarre in that Darth Maul is barely shadowed out as a character. The number of syllables that Lucas allows him to pronounce could probably be counted on one hand. Generally speaking, the only reason that we know that he is evil is because everybody else in the movie speaks of him as if he is evil.

Of course, I'm picking on the very weakest of Lucas's indiscretions. His very most serious have been well-documented and bear repeating. The dialogue really is positively dreadful, and the characters use way too much of it. I think that I must have heard the phrase "Yippee!" exclaimed at least four times. At times, the dialogue is almost abusive to the actors. Near the end of the film there is a couplet "like in Shakespeare" spoken by Yoda and Samuel L. Jackson: "Always two there are, no more, no less: a master and an apprentice. But which was destroyed? The master or the apprentice?” That last line is Jackson's, and he doesn't seem to have any way to act it. I cringed in empathy for the poor guy.

Lucas has said that all six films should be seen in chronological order and not in order of release. The truth is, he can't decide if he wants us to see them in chronological order or in order of release. He dances around and hints at the fact that Senator Palpatine is Darth Sidious who will become The Emperor as if we were idiots who couldn't make those connections ourselves. Obi-Wan says, "I've got a bad feeling about this," a completely unnatural thing for him to say, given that the line was originally meant to signify the secularist Han Solo's induction into the religion of The Force. Having Obi-Wan say that vibrates as self-conscious homage. Of course, R2-D2 is featured in the film and even worse C-3PO, who we discover was created by young Anakin Skywalker! Lucas would have us believe that there are no accidents, but I see no reason why C-3PO and R2-D2 have to be in all six episodes. That is to say, divorced from a desire by Lucas to economize all his best characters.

Lucas's introduction of Jar Jar Binks remains to this day the most dire of the dire, the unholiest of unholies, the second worst thing that has ever happened to the Star Wars franchise. (The first? Wicket the Ewok talking.) The character was so hated among Star Wars enthusiasts that one enterprising individual cut a version of the film, christened The Phantom Edit that omitted most of his scenes. Indeed, perhaps the most obnoxious thing about Jar Jar Binks is how utterly gratuitous he is. He serves a rather limited purpose as liaison between the Jedi and the Gungans, but for the most part Lucas sees him as the "comic" relief. In the climax of the film, he destroys a number of droid troopers and tanks utterly by accident. When they finally get him at gunpoint he promptly surrenders. For absolutely no reason at all, Binks puts his head through Anakin’s pod charger right after Anakin tells him not to. For absolutely no reason at all, he steals fruit from a vendor with his long frog tongue. The "joke,” as I understand it, is that Jar Jar is stupid, clumsy, impulsive and very cowardly, the Jerry Lewis to Liam Neeson's dryly Irish Dean Martin. We laugh (allegedly -- it seems that I can't qualify it enough) because the Force isn't very strong with this one. Even if he wasn't a racist caricature (of black Jamaicans) he would be annoying.

Here's where I'm going to be wheeling out the Walter Chaw. The Great One offered that Lucas isn't really a racist, he's just a hyperpowerful megalomaniac who has surrounded himself with yesmen that ensure he will never realize how tasteless his creations really are. Charles Taylor is a good deal kinder but just as sensitive to the awfulness of Jar Jar Binks. He argues that Lucas is actually a liberal (!) and wants his universe to be representative of a wide variety of diverse cultures. If Chaw provides the how for this disaster, Taylor is able to provide the why.

Lucas, of course, got it just right in the original Star Wars. The alien races were rarely referred to by their proper name. Han Solo offers that "droids don't pull people's arms out of their sockets when they lose, Wookiees are known to do that.” Jabba the Hutt seemed to be the only Hutt on the planet; thus justifying his being called "a Hutt.” I guess there are the Jawas, who are even called "disgusting creatures" by the prim and proper C-3PO. Unquestionably, however, race is not emphasized in the original trilogy to the degree that it is in The Phantom Menace. By mentioning the alien races by name in a constant manner, the gap between them is strengthened; they are sanctioned as “the other.” When Queen Amidala goes to the Gungan chief to establish an alliance between the two cultures, the buried subtext is that the Gungans will stay in their world and this is a temporary friendship. In the Alliance of the original trilogy, few of these races were isolated from the whole; there was miscegenation aplenty.

Well, except the Ewoks, but that was legitimate; it seemed that they hadn't even heard of the Empire or the Rebellion, quite unlike the Gungans who are savvy about politics but are incompetent and ineffectual nigger frogs. The Ewoks were a primitive race, but they were not incompetent or ineffectual. Their log traps were effective in destroying the Imperial walkers and their talents in getting into mischief served as an excellent distraction for the stormtroopers guarding the entrance into the shield generator. Compare with the Gungans who destroy Federation robots mostly by accident and then only finally win the battle when the human child Anakin Skywalker destroys the robots' power source. The Ewoks were not less than the humans in being a primitive culture; quite the contrary, they were elevated to the level of Rousseauian archetypes. They were virginal, untouched by the industrializing influence of the outside world, and fighting quite effectively against the upcoming encroachment. Not so with the Gungans. They are made to stand side by side with the Naboo-ians and are found lacking. Their primitiveness cannot be explained nor idealized as a lack of industrializing influence. They had the same chance as all others, and their failure as a military force could then be explained as a cultural if not racial deficiency. Either they actively refuse to get with the program, or they are genetically predisposed against it.

Mentioning C-3PO's "filthy creatures" line, I'm reminded of just how scorchingly gay C-3PO is. I mean, that gold plating is as queer as they come; he looks like he's getting ready for a Mardi Gras parade. But why do we accept C-3PO as a gay caricature, or at least buy into jeering him on those terms, but the black Jamaican caricature of Jar Jar Binks strikes a dissonant chord? In addition to being gay, of course, C-3PO is British and a racist. C-3PO is not a homosexual icon; his homosexuality is just one more building block toward his true identity: that of an aristocratic icon.

While I hate that Lucas tells us in The Phantom Menace that C-3PO was created by Anakin Skywalker, after gradually being able to accept the fact I see that it manages to flesh out both characters. C-3PO's association with the Empire is cemented; he was after all created by what will soon be one of their head generals. In being created by Anakin Skywalker, we see that, having been born and raised a slave, Anakin has aspirations toward great socioeconomic power. He wants a piece of that aristocracy, a fact that also explains his desire (very early on) for Queen Amidala. Getting back to what I was saying, hating or belittling C-3PO for his homosexuality we are really hating and belittling him for being one of the Rotten Richies. Jar Jar Binks, however, is being hated and belittled for being black, an attribute that can again be traced to a more basic class-based social group: that of the common man.

That's probably the most crippling thing about the Star Wars prequels. The original trilogy was populist, but this is certainly elitist. If George Lucas is a racist, he's a country club racist; the wealth accumulated from Star Wars changed his political identity for good. He now doesn't think twice about crushing the little guy under his thumb. Anakin is called a "human" by the other inhabitants of Tatooine, labeling him as “other.” The humans are the slave race on the planet, but it is not because they are good for nothing else. Amidala protests that the Republic has outlawed slavery, but as Anakin's mother angrily snaps back the Republic is not on Tatooine. While it isn't until Episode II that Mom gets the ever-living shit raped out of her, the film seems to suggest that the alien races on Tatooine wish to defile their human subjects through slavery as payback for years of neglect by the humancentric Republic. The humans are measurably better than the other aliens. Anakin is a near-genius mechanic and pod racer and while that could perhaps be justified in that he is strong with the Force (a chosen one-like Messiah figure), the sagelike wisdom of his soft-spoken mother can not be attributed to anything other than an innate racial superiority. Lucas doesn't emphasize the kinkiness or the anger behind that defilement of the upper class; rather, he emphasizes entirely with Anakin and his mother. I may be projecting a great deal about the causes behind the slavery of humans on Tatoonie based on just one line and how educated and intelligent Anakin and his mother seem to be, but of course I haven't any choice as Lucas does not show the humans’ slavery in any sort of historical context.

Princess Leia was barely a princess in the original films, of course; that princess stuff was just a hook. By Return of the Jedi, she even donned military fatigues, the spoiled white rich girl joining the rebellion against the Man. Queen Amidala on the other hand is decked out in beautiful fancy robes and Kabuki/Queen Elizabeth I style whiteface make-up. Her planet Naboo is modeled after Venice. It's high culture. Lucas is unquestionably fetishizing aristocracy.

And he does so in a morally clean way. Of course, the film has some superficial parallels with Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth from the previous year: both feature young women newly in power struggling to maintain a strong front, and both feature devious political advisors who seem to have their own agenda. But of course Kapur’s film ends with the Queen slaughtering all those conspiring against her, an admitted cinematic and philosophical homage to Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. The message is that with great power comes the moral authority to use it; there comes a time when it is necessary to go on a slaughtering rampage to fix the problem for good. The Godfather and Elizabeth are neither elitist nor populist pieces, of course; rather, they are complex. The Phantom Menace is hardly that developed. Queen Amidala is never asked to make any hard decisions, and thus the occasional mournful look in Natalie Portman's eyes is effective only in its form and not in its meaning. There is little for her to be truly conflicted about. Even in establishing the early stirrings of an Empire, which always had its own sense of formalist perfection anyhow, Lucas seems reluctant to assign any moral ambiguity to the concentration of wealth among the few. I know that it's quite an understatement to say that The Phantom Menace ain't Shakespeare, but Lucas doesn't even set the groundwork for exploring the grey zones of political power.

Turning around to actually praise The Phantom Menace, one of the few common complaints that I would actually defend is the testing of Anakin's blood for midichlorians, microscopic organisms that have symbiotic relationships with their hosts and are responsible for the Force. This explains everything but it explains nothing. We can see parallels with the Creationist science movement; it's an attempt to place spirituality in the realms of the scientific. The midichlorian testing is completely and utterly junk science, and how great is that! Consider that Lucas intended Star Wars as his "Vietnam" film, the Alliance being the Vietnamese and the Empire being the United States! (Source? Walter Murch in Karl French 's invaluable Bloombury Movie Guide for Apocalypse Now).

At this point, I must stress, Lucas was hyper-populist. Not political enough to be a card-carrying member of the Communist party, what he loved about the Vietnamese side of the war was that they were this small band of villagers and they were kicking our ass! He was cheering for the little guy. (Of course, we can ask the question about why Lucas wasn't cheering for those poor kids plucked from Buttfuck, Missoura or some ghetto in Detroit to be drafted in that bullshit war. Dante and Randal sure wondered aloud about it.) Hilariously, pop historians now read the film as a Cold War allegory with the Empire now representing the right bad guys, a simple extension of sci-fi movies from the ‘50s rather than a hippy-dippy perversion of them. (Yeah, right, the "Imperialists" are communists and the good guys have an Eastern-based religion.)

This new reading was of course fostered by Ronald Reagan, a stupid man who was fortunate enough to be stupid in the exact same way as the American public. According to Peter Biskind, Reagan's critics termed his defense plan "Star Wars,” meaning that it was far-fetched and unrealistic. Reagan then sold this defense plan as "the Star Wars defense plan" to the public, understanding that they simplified the already fairly simple Star Wars pictures as being about nothing more or less but the battle between the forces of "good" and the forces of “evil.” Anyway, getting back to that issue of the blood testing. It occurred to me that this kind of junk science could only foster in a theocracy. A theocracy. Sort of like the Taliban! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! I'm sure that Lucas would have loved the Taliban as well; talk about rooting for the little guy.

I mean, there is no doubt that this is a theocracy; the Jedi Council has great power with the Republic and they are not elected but rather appointed according to "tests" and the intuitions of the Council (headed by a little green elf, I remind you). So if the Jedi are the Taliban, then who is the Empire? Well, secular forces like the United States, Great Britain, and Iraq under Hussein. Israel, too -- I know that that is a religious state, but that is almost a technicality; aesthetically speaking, they have a modernity that ties them in with the secular world, to say nothing of their associations with secular governments.

I honestly don't mean any of this as criticism on Lucas's part, I think it's great! There is something titillating to me about spirituality in religion, and especially with the idea of the state bending for it instead of the opposite, as is the case with the United States. (Despite being a "born-again Christian,” Bush certainly doesn't live his life or govern as Christ did.) Even more than that, I think it's a shit and a giggle to see people like Michael Medved praise these movies without being savvy at all to the subtext. Granted, The Phantom Menace was released in summer of 1999, a good two years before September 11th. But you would have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to notice parallels with post-September 11th America (particularly in the passing of the Patriot Act) in Episode II. Intentionally or not, consciously or not, Lucas has laid the groundwork for a simultaneously blatant and subversive anti-American film franchise. A new one, for the post-Cold War era, that sure enough fits snugly with the seemingly very different anti-American sentiments of the original trilogy. George Lucas may have lost his marbles, but he has managed to keep at least a few of his balls.