tears-in-rain

(2.1) STAR WARS IS FOR KIDS
“If you look at Blade Runner, it’s been cut sixteen ways from Sunday and there
are all kinds of different versions of it. Star Wars, there’s basically one version — it just
keeps getting improved a little bit as we move forward. …” - George Lucas.[1]
“Just when the science fiction movie was heading off into a Star Wars space
opera direction, Scott brought the genre (or a part of it) back to a more nuanced
consideration of human character.” says Aaron Barlow (Assistant Professor of English,
Kutztown University of Pennsylvania)[2]. Here’s an interesting question to ask.
Is Blade Runner a more mature film than Star Wars? I’m of course talking about
the original trilogy, the ones that actually exist; the prequel trilogy is a whole other barrel
of non-existent fish to me. Blade Runner is a film about philosophical ramifications,
destruction of power, deconstruction of a system and sex and politics and all manner of
‘adult’ things, but does it make it mature? I can name countless films and video-games
which follow along the same lines but don’t give it nearly the same ‘seriousness’. Does
Star Wars follow into this camp?
Star Wars is a film series populated by Wilhelm screams, laser beams, dark lords
who are evil and stuff, a higher level of optimism than Blade Runner and all manner of
universal appeal. If we’re comparing Blade Runner to Lucas’ sci-fi opera then I think a
fairer comparison would be Citizen Kane and the work of Pixar.
Yes, they’re not entirely the same thing with Kane locked in the halls of all
manner of foreign themes to Blade Runner and Pixar barely registering under the
palette of George Lucas. What’s interesting however is how linked they are: Kane being
the true lungs of a noir soaked film industry and Pixar being the literal spawn of Lucas’
special effects team. What’s more interesting is they operate and different levels of
appeal: the adult and the universal.
Pixar manage to say different things to entirely different groups of people. With
Toy Story 3 they managed to remind old folks about their old memories, they managed
to tell parents about their child’s lives, they managed to tell teenagers that their
childhood was over but optimism never dies and they managed to tell children that all’s
well that ends well. Pixar operate on multiple levels, multiple emotional plateaus and still
manages to act with strong strides in every single direction. If you look at their entire
filmography then you see their universal appeal stretches throughout.
Kane however, and the vast majority of Orson Welles’ filmic career, is deep
within the confines of telling an adult story. There isn’t a whisker of child friendly fiction
here and I’m convinced most early teens won’t identify themselves with the story as
much. The difference that separates Kane and Pixar’s works is not how mature they are
but how they approach maturity in their respective works. I think the same is exactly true