Both of these speculations fundamentally ignore the most prevalent form in which the "Star Wars" cosmology has been transmitted: namely, film. Curiously, we find a conception of the classical film medium that resembles Obi-Wan's and Luke's vague exposition of the Force (perhaps unconsciously) in the writings of Stephen Heath, an influential "apparatus" critic of the 1970s. In his seminal essay "Narrative Space," Heath contends that film "moves in all sort [sic] of ways and directions, flows with energies, is potentially a veritable festival of affects." Any fan will immediately recognize the resemblance of this phrasing to Obi-Wan's definition of the Force in Episode IV: "the Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together."

From this seemingly inappropriate or cursory resemblance, we can conclude a couple of things. First, "Star Wars" is really a parable about cinema. The Force is a metaphor for the way in which the narrative cinematic apparatus links together disparate spaces in an apparent continuity grounded in character and plot. In other words, when Leah senses Luke from the other side of Cloud City in "The Empire Strikes Back," it is not just an exposition of the uncanny power of the Force. Rather, the Force is being used as a kind of narrative justification for the cinematically "wild" juxtaposition of the spaces of Cloud City's waste-disposal underbelly and the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon without a change in scenes or even sequences. (If we take a psychoanalytic vein here we can detect a fantasy of the "phallic mother" -- in the cockpit -- coming to violate the anus of the child -- hung helplessly from the waste disposal's mechanized sphincter).

The second thing we can conclude from the similarity in Heath's and Obi-Wan's words is that all Hollywood filmmakers are really Jedi. It takes the Force to construct a viable and coherent Hollywood product. Hence the later reinscription of the Jedi Knights as a secret society with their own agenda and initiation rights in Episode I. Anyone can see that Yoda is really supposed to be Danny DeVito. Likewise, Darth Maul is clearly the post-blacklist Elia Kazan. We might even continue to speculate that Jabba the Hutt, who exhibits his innate Hutt resistance to "Jedi mind trick" in Episode VI, might be a representation of Francis Ford Coppola -- a figure at the margins of the directorial/Jedi economy who resists aspects of its seductive power even as he manipulates it. In which case Jabba as Coppola also represents an abjection of the mentor/father when viewed from the perspective of Coppola's student Lucas. And so the overt Oedipal drama of "Star Wars" ressonates in other, refracted ways even informing the conditions of characterization and mise-en-scene.

Copyright (C) 2000, Post-Collegiate Malaise.