The documentary The People vs. George Lucas, with all its jokes about Ewoks and midi-chlorians, is perhaps destined to be enjoyed most by Star Wars superfans. However, it raises a series of intriguing questions about creativity and control which extend far beyond a certain “galaxy far, far away.” Who “owns” a film or work of art, especially in this digital age? The auteur director? The writers or producers? The corporations that underwrite big-budget films? Or do all creative expressions come to belong, in a sense, to the audience, especially – as in the unique case of Star Wars in the Internet age – when this community takes pains to produce and disseminate their own copies (“interpretations,” “versions,” “clones”) of the saga?
Star Wars is not just a set of movies but a full-blown cultural phenomenon which played a formative role in the childhood experience of millions of people around the globe. As such, lifelong fans of the film have often thought of the “original films” as sacrosanct. However, we all remember a few years ago when Lucas produced a “special edition” of the original 1970s trilogy, under the auspices of perfecting his unique vision. This revisiting was about a lot more than colour correction. A liberal application of CGI technology to the films, resulting in new effects, characters, scenes and even musical numbers gave the films a kind of digital sheen which many lifelong fans felt rendered the beloved films soulless. For Lucas, these revised versions were now the complete, canonical “original” films; in fact, the non-digitalized versions have become harder and harder to get hold of, and it is possible the “original” negatives have in fact been destroyed. The new “copy” is the “original”; arguably there is no “original.”
These were followed by three new films, almost universally deplored by the first wave of Star Wars fans, but embraced by a (much) younger one… kids under the age of 12 love Jar Jar Binks, pod-racing and the dreaded midi-chlorians, while fans of the “original trilogy” have produced their own multiple versions of the new films which edited these new, revisionist elements out. The documentary raises a pointed question: is George Lucas allowed to tinker with his own franchise? Can he do whatever he wants with the universe he created, an all-powerful auteur who can create and destroy at will? Or, now that his vision has passed into culture and into a multiplicity of copies and alternate versions, has it moved “out of his control,” having a separate, autonomous existence independent of his own authorial intentions?
For a series of films (particularly the new trilogy) about evil clones, it is perhaps ironic that Star Wars has engendered so many competing “copies.” We can think of all of the different circulating “editions” – VHS, DVD, some “special,” some containing one or another “original version.” Yet perhaps even more intriguingly, as the documentary attests, there are literally thousands of fan-made “versions” of the films, ubiquitous in the age of affordable video editing technology and YouTube. Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Chewbacca are portrayed by adolescent boys, family pets, stop-motion action figures, beer bottles with masks, eggs, crude animated stick-men; Tattooine is someone’s backyard, basement, school playground, and so on. Perhaps more interestingly, creative fans insert characters from the films into new narratives, some serious, but mostly bizarre: in one famous Internet fan film, Storm Troopers have their own “COPS”-type police procedural. This abundance of appropriative creativity speaks to the malleability of the original films – they provide a vocabulary for a universe of creativity, a template for interpretation and re-interpretation – something Lucas could perhaps not have envisioned but has at least partially embraced, in the form of a “fan-film” competition. And yet these multiple “copies,” some hilarious, some transgressive, others aiming to “perfect” Lucas’ own creative vision, are still not part of the “canonical” Star Wars franchise… the movies, books and now animated TV series that are continually generated by Lucasfilm itself.
Marcus Boon writes of “fan fiction” in his book In Praise of Copying:
Such appropriations have a long history in literature – from oral folk traditions, where local embellishments enhance a shared repertoire of stories and songs, to Renaissance theater, where Shakespeare and Marlowe continually lifted plots, characters, and dialogue for their own works.
Boon’s larger interest is in the ontology of copying and mimesis, and the question of whether it is possible to “identify an area of human activity outside copying,” built as it is into all our forms of cultural transmission and creativity. Copying is even part of our physiological makeup (eg. the replication of DNA, the basic act of “cloning” at all levels of our genetic existence). Multiple “versions” of the Star Wars saga, “appropriations” which carry forward the story of the Skywalker family, highlight the film’s own status as a copy – of Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress, for one, but also of archetypal characters and narratives, mythological tropes and ur-narratives… often related to twins, “mirroring” (Luke has a dream where he sees his own face under the Darth Vader mask), and light/dark dualisms. George Lucas has created a universe, and he can change it, but so can everyone else – the unresolvable battle for a “definitive” Star Wars is an endless war of clones, of copies, circulating, conflicting and expanding in a strange dialectic of creativity.