Lucasfilm: Filmmaking, Philosophy, and the Star Wars Universe
Cyrus R. K., Patell
New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021
280 pages
ISBN 9781350100619

Star Wars films have a fairly long history of production spanning more than forty years between the release of the first movie, Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope (dir. George Lucas) in 1977 and the last of the epic space opera, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (dir. J. J. Abrams) in 2019. The reception and the production of the Star Wars franchise has been at the center of discussions in many books on film studies since the late 20th century. Despite the amount of attention the multimedia franchise has received, discussions on its philosophical viewpoint(s) have somehow been absent from the works written on it. In this context, Cyrus R. K. Patell’s Lucasfilm: Filmmaking, Philosophy, and the Star Wars Universe (Philosophical Filmmakers) (2021) attempts to fill this gap in the research on Star Wars by pointing out the various areas in which the Star Wars universe has affected cinematic, political, and cultural theories. One of the intriguing queries of Patell’s book is whether the background of a corporate entity can be equaled with the filmmaker’s work. Besides the discussion of the role of George Lucas in creating this work, the universe of Star Wars itself is treated in this books as a veritable platform of philosophy. This book is part of a series titled Philosophical Filmmakers, alongside a number of books in the series written on Alfred Hitchcock, Luchino Visconti, Christopher Nolen, Douglas Sirk, Shyam Benegal, Kenneth Lonergan, Terrence Malick, Werner Herzog and Eric Rohmer. Each series book examines the critical engagement with the filmmakers’ works by expanding the reader’s horizon of critical discussions on filmmaking and aesthetics.

Lucasfilm: Filmmaking, Philosophy, and the Star Wars Universe (Philosophical Filmmakers) has a total of nine chapters. In the introductory part, the author familiarizes the reader with the figure of George Lucas, the director of the first Star Wars films, stating that the aim of the book is to explore the “collective approach of filmmaking that Lucasfilm embodies” (4) by highlighting the role of Star Wars in inspiring other artworks, especially films. The author also reflects on how he intends to discuss the phenomenon of Star Wars as an ongoing platform for public philosophy. The book’s first chapter touches upon several areas such as storytelling, the persuasive mechanism of films and the philosophy behind the reception of the first Star Wars film in 1977. While quoting Alvin Plantinga, who stated that the principal motivation for watching a film is to experience emotions, Patell argues that “the mechanisms of persuasion in films closely resemble what scholars working in the area of cultural studies have identified as the mechanisms of ideology” (Patell 2021, 25). Here, “The Horizon of Expectations, circa 1977” subchapter first sketches an overview about the making of the Star Wars films and points out minute details, such as the crawl technique at the beginning of the first film, calling it the key technique to the success of Star Wars. Later on, instead of a contemplation on the cinematic background and the plot of the works, Patell’s text focuses on the early marketing strategy of Lucasfilm and emphasizes that skillful marketing strategy, original music, and adequate camera work largely contributed to the global success of Star Wars. By using both an objective and entertaining tone that makes the text quite pleasant to read, the author gives a detailed overview of why he thinks the first Star Wars movies could become so successful in the 1970s and 1980s. According to Patell, creating a memorable first impression is what paves the way towards more successes of similar cinematic productions.

The second chapter of Lucasfilm: Filmmaking, Philosophy, and the Star Wars Universe (Philosophical Filmmakers) focuses on the directorial and auteurial environment of Star Wars, highlighting Lucas’s biographical background. Patell draws a parallel between mythology and the world of Star Wars, noting that the first part of the saga is a “mythologized version of Lucas’s own experience of rejecting the path chosen for him by his ‘first mentor,’ his father, George Walton Lucas, Sr” (45). This chapter also includes a broader manner of looking at Star Wars through cosmopolitanism and multidisciplinarity. According to Patell, Lucas made Star Wars a true box office success because “the special-effects pioneers at Lucasfilm” were multidsciplinary thinkers, who “used technological innovation to enable Lucas to achieve the artistic design,” (49) similar to Aristotle or Steve Jobs, who were practical thinkers employing “multidisciplinary approaches” (48). Patell then continues explaining why Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012.

While the book attempts to embrace a wide range of ideas, it also connects them by following a chronological order. In this sense, in the third chapter, Patell associates Star Wars with Aristotle’s Poetics and to the concept of catharsis by using the Greek philosopher’s idea on tragedy, reversal, recognition, hubris and hamartia to help the reader comprehend the complexity of Star Wars. Patell argues that Lucas explicitly followed in the making of the trilogy the logic of Aristotelian tragedy and writes that “the prequel trilogy was dramatizing the downfall of a hero, the transformation of the supremely gifted Anakin Skywalker—believed by some to be the “Chosen One” of Jedi legend— into the archvillain Darth Vader” (70). Patell believes that Lucas’s main goal in producing the Star Wars saga was “to create a mass entertainment that was the late twentieth century’s equivalent for the Athenian tragedy of the late fifth century BCE” (71). Hamartia in Aristotle’s Poetics, which is referred to as “the tragic flaw,” (82) was previously discussed by Malcolm Heath, who claimed that the term means both “errors made in ignorance or through misjudgment” and, also “moral errors of a kind which do not imply wickedness” (Heath qtd. in Patell 83). Based on this, Patell claims that the Skywalker saga includes a very special kind of hamartia with the presence of Anakin Skywalker throughout The Phantom Menace (1999), Attack of Clones (2002) and the Last Jedi (2017). Patell refers extensively to the aforementioned elements of classic Greek tragedy, claiming that just like in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, exile and return are recurring motives of the Star Wars films. The application of the narrative logic of exile and return and the reflection to Aristotle’s Poetics helps audiences comprehend “why certain moments in the Star Wars saga provide narrative cruxes that resonate well after we are finished watching the films,” (89) as well as in understanding the essence of its hero and villain, respectively alongside that of the concept of free will and destiny.

The fourth chapter of the book examines Star Wars‘ uses of melodrama for persuasive reasons, beginning with the context of the melodramatic genre and Star Wars. Patell describes melodrama as “a blunt tool that enables viewers to realize quickly who the “’good guys’ and ’bad guys’ are in the world of a film,” (94) and states that melodrama is “another form in which it is easy to detect structures of praise and blame,” (94) by referring to Stephen Greenblatt’s analysis of textual dynamics, where he “asks us to pay attention to structures of praise and blame” in “panegyric and satire” (94). Patell contemplates on the use melodrama in the case of Hollywood of the 1940s, when, as Steve Neale argued, “the terms ’melodrama’ and ’melodramatic’ meant crime, guns and violence” but they also „meant heroines in peril” alongside „action, tension and suspense” but above all, „villains [who] could masquerade as ‘apparently harmless’ fellows, thus thwarting the hero, evading justice, and sustaining suspense until the last minute” (qtd. in Patell 96). Patell claims that these are characteristics of the Star Wars films as well, concluding with the thought that the original trilogy’s use of archetypes and cinematic devices associates them with “Hollywood melodrama, and the Western in particular, which enable its audiences to get ‘wholeheartedly behind’ the characters of Star Wars and, also, to understand the differences between good and bad” (108) in the movies.

In the fifth part of the book, Patell argues that Star Wars draws on the tradition of liberal individualism “within both US political thought and US popular culture” (109) by using John Rawl’s Theory of Justice or Robert Nozick’s and Michael Walzer’s work and suggests that the mentioned philosophical texts and ideas “were responding in their different ways to a set of problems about the relationship between the individual and the state” (110), similar to George Lucas’ ideas in Star Wars, who “had US politics in mind as he wrote the first draft for the first film, particularly his dissatisfaction with the Nixon administration” (110). American individualism also inspired Lucas’s filmmaking, however, his individualism is, according to Patell, “tempered by a set of communitarian ideas about the nature of personal identity that he learns from Obi-Wan and Yoda,” (113). The book’s author draws on Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985) by Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan and Ann Swidler, and on Steven M. Tipton’s The Good Society (1991) to represent mythic individualism, an individualism that provides limited vocabulary “in which Americans think and speak about their communally oriented goals,” (114) and to discuss the figure of the twentieth-century American citizens and their contemporary institutions constantly influencing them which were models for the filmic characters. Rugged individualism is the next important term discussed in the chapter in this regard. As Patell writes, President Reagan invoked the tradition of rugged individualism, “the cultural myth of the heroic loner,” associated with “the settling of the frontier in North America and in Hollywood with the genre of the Western” (118) but rugged individualism was, at the time of the films making, also connected to a special cultural mythology which is reflected on by connecting the concept to peculiar scenes involving the moments of single combat. In terms of individualism, too, the last subchapter of the fifth chapter elaborates on how Star Wars introduced new kinds of female leads to the audience: Princess Leia and Rey, who are both depicted as strong, smart, energetic and independent women. Patell here states that “the progression from original trilogy to prequel trilogy to sequel trilogy is to see a gradual expansion of the depiction of women’s power” (127).

The sixth chapter examines the way in which Star Wars represents technophobia. Here Patell claims that “technology can be celebrated, but only as long as it remains instrumental” (132). In order to support this claim, the work gives other cinematic examples for technophobia such as Steven Spielberg’s E.T. (1982) or Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. series (2013). Patell also discusses the terms of luddism and cyborgs and refers to Plato’s Phaedrus and Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674) to state that reliance on technology can be dangerous, especially if it is seen in the dichotomic terms of a Manichean world:

"Star Wars seems to suggest that technology is an amplifier of human agency and, therefore, should worry us for the same reason that we worry about the way that humans act: because each human being contains the potential for Light and the potential for Dark." (133)

Patell also draws similarities between the Platonic ideas of technology and technological displays in filmmaking, comparing Star Wars to the field of technology and also to the theories of ancient philosophers and suggests that the saga embraces an even wider range of fields.

The seventh chapter of Lucasfilm: Filmmaking, Philosophy, and the Star Wars Universe (Philosophical Filmmakers) is devoted to connecting Star Wars to the contemporary phenomena of cosmopolitanism and fan culture, with the goal of explaining why fans play such a prominent role in carrying on the saga’s legacy. Patell dwells in the world of cultural heterogeneity, contemplating on the diverse cultural and historical backgrounds of the Star Wars fandom. Interestingly, this chapter does not include any theoretical approached on fandom because Patell addresses rather political events that influenced the reception of Star Wars, such as the immigration policy (The Immigration and Nationality Act 1976) and the Vietnam War. The “Toxic Fandom” subchapter, for example, discusses those splenetic fans who are, as Luke Holland puts it, a “poisonous tributary of fanboyism” (qtd. in Patell 188) with the author referring to the work of journalists like Matt Miller to demonstrate how the toxicity of certain fan opinions caused disagreement among film critics. The eighth chapter of Patell’s book examines fallibilism, a term coined by Kwame Anthony Appiah, meaning ‘an attitude towards failure,’ connects it to the Skywalker saga claiming that those who “follow the light side develop an attitude towards failure” (191). Within the phenomenon of failure, Patell distinguishes the attitude of cosmopolitans and the attitude of counter-cosmopolitans (Darth Vader and the Empire), the latter having a negative attitude toward it. The author argues that if failure is part of the human existence “we must learn how to turn imperfection from a liability into a strength” (192). Similarly to failure, imperfection has always been a crucial element for Star Wars. Fans, however, felt dismayed by the depiction of a weak Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi, accusing director Rian Johnson of betraying George Lucas’s legacy (196). Patell argues against the complaint of the fan base, claiming that,

"this contention ignores not only the increasing emphasis on failure in the original trilogy and then the prequel trilogy, but also Lucas’s own preliminary plans for the sequel trilogy, which began with the idea that Luke had gone into seclusion." (196)

The final, ninth chapter of Patell’s book serves attempts to foreshadow the future of the Star Wars visual narrative, contemplating on the relationship between the dark and the bright side, concluding that the dark side is “an ever-present part of the Force in Star Wars_” (205). Here, Patell refers primarily to the character of Rey because during an interview with _Rolling Stone magazine, when she was asked about her favorite thing about the character Rey, actress Daisy Ridley said that it was her “strong moral compass” (207). The last chapter’s title is not by chance “The moral Compass,” since it discusses those characters of the Star Wars saga who have a strong moral compass. Patell also demonstrates the existence of this morality in The Mandalorian series which draw “on a symbolic pattern […]: the importance of family, friends, and community” (214), all with a strong moral background.

Overall in his book, Patell offers an informative overview on Star Wars, focusing on the importance of storytelling combined with filmmaking and its overarching connection to philosophy. The book is primarily intended for those interested in Star Wars on a broader scholarly scale. As for the relevance of the work, Patell aims to display the way in which the world of Star Wars grew to be what it is in the present and how it revolves around different areas of film studies, philosophy, technology, historical studies, etc. Towards the end, the author brings in his own, personal stories and also his background to explain how he became a Star Wars enthusiast. The informal voice appears several times throughout the book but this informality makes the text rather comfortable for readers; the frequency of personal views and stories also suggest a subjective argument that gives the book an authentic touch. By and large, the author successfully manages to demonstrate how Star Wars remains in the minds of the masses and continues to be a part of American and global cultural history.

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