Past and Future Influences

I posted a version of this in a thread over in the TLJ subforum, I've altered it a bit to fit this thread as it directly relates to this tangent.

In question to the two parts of the thread:
A) What influences have I enjoyed
B) What influences would I like to see in the future

The short answers are:
A) Goodness, that would take a while for me to consolidate, but in brevity, I'd say hmm.. Billy Budd. Primarily because no one mostly realizes that influence, and that's sad because it's a great film that heavily influenced not only the visuals and scenes, but also a portion of the moral dilemma narrative of the original Star Wars films.
B) ANY! As I'll highlight below, the new films don't rephrase snippets from common cinematic culture. I don't hate the films for not having it; I do wish that they would have, but then again...as I note below, Lucas is a very talented man in this regard and it's no simple task to employ his method while also trying to manage the parallel chiasmus structure that is also embedded into Star Wars. That Lucas could accomplish both simultaneously while telling a new story on top of both of those already challenging juggling acts is what in part makes him remarkable.

So...here's the long form.


Lucas is an amazing feature in film in that he has this uncanny archive of films stored in his mind, and he can sift through them and organize them seemingly effortlessly.

Star Wars abbreviates whole emotional weights and relies on the audience to pick up the tab.
But Lucas also did something that helped in this regard; he relied on the general knowledge of cinema to convey those weights.
He would borrow whole familiar scenes from other films, rearrange them a bit, and use them in his film in a much shorter moment.
This worked out really well because the implied relationships were easily assumed by the audiance at the time because a fimiliar relationship from a previous film was already sifting around the general psyche of the public.

An example:
Let's take a look at ROTJ.
Now, in ESB we end with a relationship between Vader and Luke being aggressive. There's no real compassion hinted here. There's shock, denial, and anger.
Vader isn't seeming compassionate when he asks Luke to join him. He seems evil and trying to pull Luke from good to evil.

But in ROTJ, in the Endor scene with Vader, Lucas has mere minutes to give us their entire compassionate relationship and get us to buy into Vader and Luke both loving each other, and to make us feel sorry for Vader.
No pressure! That's A LOT to cram into ONE scene given that there's two entire movies before it that have pushed the weight entirely the opposite direction.

Lucas sticks to his method and gives us that connection in a few minutes of film.
How?

Well, firstly, let's account for children.
Generally speaking young children don't require context for emotional weight because that's just daily life to them. It's not an uncommon experience for a child to not have a clue why something's happening, but still have a need to emotionally empathize and react to what is happening to someone that they see.
They are rather accustomed to taking emotions of a person at face value. If someone looks sad; they are sad. If they look happy; they are happy.
If Luke looks sad for his Dad, Vader, then he is sad for his Dad.
So Lucas doesn't have to worry as much over the really young audience members, but how does he pull in this weight for the older audience?

Well, he resorts to his common method of borrowing scenes that are already in the public consciousness and rephrases them to suit his need.
He fast-tracks an entire connection; essentially.

So back to the ROTJ scene.
Lucas borrowed two scenes from Billy Budd and mixed them up and rephrased them into two scenes in Star Wars: the Endor scene and the throne room scene.

The two scenes that he borrowed were the shipside talk between Billy and Claggart, and the conversation just before his execution between Billy and the Captain.
The concepts are mixed around, and Lucas inserts his own spin on everything of course, but the bones are essentially the same.

Claggart is a tall Mastar at Arms dressed in full black, wearing a black tall hat, and is cruel, dark, and thinks himself evil and gone.
Billy is a bright eyed hopeful idiot who only sees the good in everyone; to a fault.

The Captain, unlike the Emperor, is compassionate and wishes he did not have to sentence Billy, however, his conversation with Billy is similar in some ways to the Emperor's conversation - he begs Billy to give into his hate and use it.
Billy starts this conversation off with something rather familiar sounding to the Endor scene, "Is there hope for me?" - in almost the same way Luke expresses to Vader.
To which the Captain responds by asking if there is hope for any man.
Flip this around a tad bit, and you have Luke's assertion that there is still hope for Vader and that he feels goodness in him (this part is from the below scene).

The motives are different, because the Captain basically wishes that Billy would just not be so damn decent and ignorantly hopeful and innocent in spirit so that it would be easier to accept sentencing him to death, but the conversations are similar.


Now, Claggart and Billy have this conversation on the rail of the ship, and it's so very similar in mood and style of shots as what's in ROTJ between Vader and Luke.
Claggart basically tries to get Billy to explain why he does not hate Claggart; why does he not fear him. Asking, effectively, if Billy cannot see that he is evil, like all the men say that he is.
Billy, for his part, explains that he doesn't think that Claggart is evil because no man is truly purely evil - there's always good in everyone, basically.
Claggart finds Billy naive, but pitifully so. He tells him that he is a fool and that he will not be charmed by Billy, after a moment which seems so very close to a moment where Claggart was about to give in to goodness, but at the last second, catches himself and returns to being cold and shut off.





By the way, also...Billy is convicted by innocently (meaning, his spirit is still pure and ignorantly naive as a child) killing Claggart in the Captain's quarters in front of the Captain when Claggart antagonizes this simple-naive idiot to such an angry rise that he can't even speak and in a moment of uncharacteristic rage, lashes out and strikes Claggart, causing his death.
To which Claggart dies smiling; happy that he had corrupted the purely innocent boy. (It bothered him terribly that Billy did not fit into his world view that all men were, at their core, evil and prone to violence; it consumed his mind, as that was his internal narrative he justified his own cruelty by.)


I couldn't find a good screenshot of the throne room, but you'll all likely recall that Luke, Vader, and the Emperor were set up very similarly in ROTJ to this - just Luke and Vader are flipped in opposite positions from Claggart and Billy.



OK, so.
That's it in a nutshell, but it's more nuanced than that in the script, but I'm not going to type that all out by hand at the moment.

The point is, this had been a novel, then a play that was pretty popular, and then a movie in the 60's.
It was decently played around in the loose general psyche of entertainment.

He plays a little mash-up with these scenes to fit his narrative needs, and bam! He's got a shortcut to an empathetic connection between Vader and Luke in a matter of minutes, and he gets to re-use that connection in the same way Billy Budd does, in the throne room - reversing some relationships (Vader is more sympathetic like the Captain, while Clagger is more like the Emperor in motive and attitude, but the words are said inversely by each respectively).

Now, people don't have to think, "OH! That's Billy Budd!!" for this to work. It just has to feel familiar, because if it does, then you don't need to take as long to get to the result. Your scene is resting on the shoulders of the already established cultural storytelling language.

Lucas does this repeatedly throughout Star Wars, and it's not a matter of tipping hats; it's a way of getting a lot of information shoved into the audience in a short amount of time.


Let's go another scene: The death of Luke's aunt and uncle.
There's this film that was pretty popular in the late 50's called The Chasers. It had this guy named Jon Wayne in it, and it was directed by this guy named Ford who was basically the Spielberg of his day. EVERYONE knew Ford. Ford is even responsible for most of the content we've been watching on the History channel regarding WWII for decades.

PIcture time!
Look familiar?


Sure, there's lots of scene of burning buildings, so that's not all that convincing.
OK, alright; true. Here's a side-by-side.



Again, Lucas is playing on the communal language of what's already in the audience consciousness and at that point in time, this would have felt familiar - relatable - even if you couldn't put your finger on it, because it was already well stamped in the general entertainment zeitgeist.


It goes right down to the action as well.
Why was the Death Star scene SO emotionally compelling to mature audiences back then?
Because Dam Busters was still a fresh familiar film with a rather memorable sequence in it. It was a smash hit in the UK at its time; everyone knew that film in England.
America knew it fairly well as well; not as vividly, but still it did know it pretty well.

So, how did that work for Lucas:

As you can see, Lucas practically riffs the entire scene beat for beat down the line, and I disagree with the title of the video.
Lucas didn't "rip off" Dam Busters.

He employed it and rephrased it and gave it a new context to convey the value of this really alien concept.
I mean...it's 1977.
HOW do you get audiences to actually get invested in Spaceships shooting a thingamajig floating in space when all you have are models, models, more models, and some face shots with helmets in the way of any emotive expression? Especially when everyone in the scene is just some guy we never even met or got a connection to. We're connected to Luke, but no one else in the group. It's just a bunch of people that might as well be Stormtroopers or Star Trek redshirts unless you give the audience some kind of emotional connections because we're not really given a LOT of emotional time spending with the troubles of the Rebellion and the heart tugs involved with their story - we're following Luke and he tacks on to their story, but we're definitely focused on Luke.
So how do we make everyone care about all these random people, and feel invested - pensive - hopeful, worried?

Connect it to something they ARE familiar with emotionally - WWII movies, and Dam Busters is probably the king of bombing raid films covering WWII.


The new ST films are a bit too busy riffing and rephrasing older Star Wars films to have much time to fit in rephrasing modern cinema references for emotional short-cuts like Lucas was doing.
Lucas did the same, riffing and rephrasing previous Star Wars films, but this is his style. He doesn't have to learn how to do what he's doing. This is his element, so he can shove both in there and get it done.

There's also a side consideration that the legal world surrounding films is different now. If a new Star Wars film did something like what Lucas did with The Dam Busters, for example, there would either be a price tag for licensing involved, or a law suit for not getting one. That would inflate the price of the budget even further for every little add-in.

In this respect of the craft, the new films suffer a bit, because while they do call back to Star Wars, they don't call back to any wider cultural cinematic language and that causes the films to exist inside of a cultural Star Wars tunnel vision.


This isn't to say the newer films are bad; far from it (yes, I know - some of you reading will likely immediately think "Like hell! They suck!"...a different time; in my opinion, they aren't bad at all), but it's just that in THIS way, Lucas is far beyond what normal filmmakers are (and also lucky to be within the time he was doing it because he had the legal freedom to accomplish it without soaring costs).

Again, it's really amazing how much material of cinematic history is rolling around in his mind and how he's able to rearrange it all to serve an entirely different narrative.
That, I believe, is what made Star Wars connect so well, and in a way, the newer films are attempting the same thing; just with a reduced pallet, and it's not really fair, honestly, because let's face it....there's only one George Lucas; one man who can rearrange so much content in his mind to such high level of nuance and spit out a space opera of epic proportions out of that chimera of film clips.


Consequently, as an extra consideration, this feature of sampling pieces of common stories and arranging them into a new mythical and allegorical story of Star Wars is partially what causes Lucas' Star Wars to feel like the Christian Bible, as that is the form of their narrative constituion as well.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Thanks for the article, please edit Yavin in ROTJ to Endor

 

GAH!
I do that all the time. They seem so much alike visually, lol.
Fixed it; thanks!

Cheers,
Jayson

 

The new Solo movie I think will have some American Graffiti influences. That would be awesome. Howard and Ford were in the movie and lucas ditected it. It would be full circle.

--- Double Post Merged, Feb 7, 2018, Original Post Date: Feb 7, 2018 ---

I like old serials and Samurai movies, mostly because they influenced Star Wars, so it's a good transition. I've been watching and making comparisons, doing my die diligence to figure out what elements made it into Star Wars. To be clear, a lot of "Spaghetti Westerns" were influenced by Kurosawa Samurai movies.

ANH: Mostly Kurosawas Hidden Fortress with some Buck Rogers mixed in. The Cantina Scene where Obi wan cuts off ponda babas arm was taken from Yojimbo.
TESB: A lot of the plot points were taken directly from Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe.
Prequels: They had some Buck Rogers elements throughout, especially TPM.
TFA: Obviously inspired by ANH. LOL.
TLJ: It eas leaked that Three Outlaw Samurai was an influence, and you can definitely see it. Preatorean guard fight, and DJ's character.