What I Love About The Prequels: J. Reeves «

"There's an obscure word I would like to extend to the PT and its richness of form and content: concinnity (meaning "a harmonious or elegant arrangement of parts"). In my view, the PT shows much concinnity, ranging from its nervy ambiance of character names and places, drawn from a vast array of human cultures and histories (themselves deeply intertwined), to the panoply of costumes, cloaks, boots, belts, weapons, etc. (a whole language of cinema unto itself), to the skillful conjugation of body language (an oft-unheralded aspect of the minimalist direction of George Lucas) — repeating looks, gestures, poses, etc. — to the polyphonic creation and cornucopian promulgation of sounds (go back and watch the Tatooine scenes in TPM sometime), paired with the sensationally ebullient sweep of John Williams' "endlessly compelling" music, to the tight interweaving of themes, motifs and ideas (literary and otherwise), all within a masterfully controlled visual field, with generous Kurosawa-like wideshots one moment, and acute Scott Bartlett-like flashes of shapes and colours the next (if not, indeed, within the same frame). It's this gargantuan compression and condensation of formal constructs and wordless notions on these various levels, told with vigorous, pulpy alacrity, that gives Star Wars — and the PT, where Lucas' sizeable visual skills are harnessed to their fullest — an intensely expressive quality unique in the cinematic arts (its colour symbolism, alone, is "off the charts", to use Obi-Wan's coinage as he looks at a blood-red display in a chrome-plated, cream-interiored ship), allowing it to unfurl in the mind's eyes of cosmic travelers big and small, from the unbridled (or unburdened) imaginations of small children, to the relentlessly verbal, neurotic, encrusted minds of adults (where and when the child and its innate curiosity still lives).

Lucas' deftness was in evidence from the opening moments of the original Star Wars movie, or what is now called "A New Hope" (an allusion, among other things, to the washing away of the prequels' giddy excesses). Watch the playing with colour, the rapid blending of visual forms, and the first characters we're introduced to: robots, not humans. Straight away, a startling moment of subversion. These films are deeply entrenched in perception: how we gain it, how we lose it, how we may lack it entirely, how we always mistake the external for the whole. The prequel trilogy is a detailed elaboration on this visual manifesto and playful critique of human nature. It takes us deeper into the rabbit hole. History is shattered, ripped up, run over, slagged and bagged. But not cruelly or sadistically. There is much beauty here. For all the visual weirdness (and Star Wars is much weirder than we have yet gotten to grips with), there is also a kind of homespun charm; a straightness; an economy; a plaid-shirt-like humility to its tone and presentation. It can be detected all over. It doesn't need to be detected. It's here, there and everywhere, from the simple exchanging of a gift between a slave boy and a queen in disguise, to the way one character calls another character "slime" and eggs him into combat. We are not perturbed by the strangeness of Star Wars: we embrace its eccentricity as drama, as comedy; as familiarity, as honesty; as pastiche, as cheese. The prequels enlarge the canvas of Star Wars by enlarging the stakes: visual, aural, musical, dramatic. Everything is brought up a level, so that it can be brought down and begin anew. It bequeathes a refreshing, cyclical quality to the saga. One can start at the PT, go into the OT, then start again. Or one can start at the OT, journey to the PT, go back into the OT, etc. In religious art, this is the Ouroboros: a serpent eating its own tail.

Those with an affinity for such things may also enjoy the bolting on of religious references and motifs within the films themselves, ranging from the hellish environment of Mustafar (also, of course, a mere mining facility, for every locale in Star Wars is a mixture of form and function), to Obi-Wan casually threatening a vagabond with the idea of being blasted into "oblivion". Or Qui-Gon's shawl (recalling the Shroud of Turin and other items). Or references to classic paintings and sculptures (e.g. Michelangelo's Pietà in AOTC, "The Abyss of Hell" by Sandro Botticelli in ROTS). Or fleeting film trinkets (e.g. a pod from "2001: A Space Odyssey" in Watto's junk shop; the Maltese Falcon in Senator Palpatine's apartment). Or tips-of-the-hat to classic novels and films in even the movies' working titles (TPM was called "The Beginning", which references the opening sentence of Frank Herbert's "Dune"; AOTC was called "Jar Jar's Big Adventure", which riffs on "Pee-wee's Big Adventure", Tim Burton's first feature-length film). Or nods to classic and contemporary spectator-based entertainment (e.g. the pod race in TPM; the arena scenes in AOTC — with visual palettes that cleverly overlap). Or blended wink-nods in the direction of James Gurney's "Dinotopia", "Flash Gordon", royal sculptor William Theed and even the rival Californian film campuses that Lucas and his his peers attended in the 1960s (i.e. Naboo). Or the tributes to kabuki and theatre arts (e.g. Darth Maul). Or even visual assimilations made in surprising, abstracted ways to filmmaking friends (e.g. again, Darth Maul — his face paint recalls the opening titles of Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ"). Or the impressionistic conjuring of old cinema (e.g. the animated film scratches searing across the red laser gates in the lightsaber duel in TPM; the raining ash representing flecks of dirt on a negative in the Anakin-Obi-Wan duel in ROTS). Or Queen Amidala and her successors looking like they've been ripped from the pages of National Geographic. And could I, in good conscience, leave out another completing of a circle? Let us spare a moment for Christopher Lee's magisterial turn as Count Dooku, mirroring the presence of his Hammer counterpart, Peter Cushing, as Grand Moff Tarkin, in the earlier trilogy. What we have here is a world. More than a world: worlds within worlds, wheels within wheels, jewels within jewels.

What's also compelling is the prequels' expanded, self-conscious sense of mythopoeia: that classic rubbing together of the big and small, the mundane and the sublime. Jar Jar is the perfect totem for this. An outcast, a freak, an annoyance, a menace, a wanderer, a child: a shrewd embodiment of all that is most precious, shunned through hubris and fear (recalling a time-honoured Japanese saying: "the nail that sticks out gets pounded down" — or torn out and thrown away). His orange-yellow skin with speckled patterning, his eye stalks and duck bill, his Sphinx-like ear flaps fanning out in glorious waves behind his head — purely from a visual standpoint, this character, this creature, is amazing. Perhaps he is something that humans could transfigure themselves into one day: a hint of Star Wars' futuristic outlook, even as it circumscribes the past and the present. And Jar Jar's loneliness, his impertinence, his sincerity, his exuberance — all these things are mightily endearing for those willing and able to appreciate them. Of course, for some, this character ran slipshod over their inner dreams and fantasies, crashing, bashing and trampling their personal desires for Star Wars with gangly abandon. The sadist in me can't help laughing about that. This, then, is almost a character that shouldn't exist. Not by common decree. And maybe not even by George Lucas' own instincts until he set to work on the prequels, refining his notes, his screenplays, and via the casting of Ahmed Best, who may just have breathed more life into this singular Gungan than even Lucas could have predicted, hoped or imagined. And then we have Jar Jar's quiescence: an exotic, provocative combination of human performer, one-hundred-thousand-dollar suit and cutting-edge CG, animated by a diligent, exacting team. Just as this character bridges gaps between people in the story, so he is an amalgam of old and new film-making techniques, exemplifying the duality that permeates the length and breadth of these films. Then go back to the character within the films and think how Jar Jar contrasts with the lofty pretensions of the Jedi, the chilly stoicism of Queen Amidala, the portentous worry-warting of Yoda, the oleaginous scheming of Palpatine, even the mannered witterings of the droids. Yet he has a hidden, latent sagacity: as, for example, when he speculates, without disdain or irony, that the reason the surface-dwelling Naboo dislike his Gungan brethren is because the Gungans possess an army. Jar Jar cannot be easily placed within a box; he is an irresistible force like no other. And he has a home in this trilogy — and this saga — in a world of frayed hopes, guarded secrets, sententious rebukes, villainous entreaties, scorn, hatred and betrayal; which is also a world of triangles, squares, rectangles, circles, spheres, diamonds, hexagons; a world of brass, silver, plastic, sand, granite, marble, steel, glass, mud, water, lava, trees. It's all here, someway, somehow, in an epic far, far away, and as we're constantly reminded in the real-world locales cleverly mixed with digital and chemical dreamlands, as well as the plight of its protagonists, and the grandstanding of politicians and the blindness of citizens, not so far far away; not so far, far away at all. "

Tags: What I Love About The Prequels This entry was posted on May 15, 2011 at 10:04 pm and is filed under What I Love About The Prequels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.