In the decade since the first edition of Brooker’s Star Wars for the BFI Film Classics series was published, there has been a much wider breadth of discussions about the picture, both in print and online, so Brooker’s book is no longer unique. However, what he presents as his main premise—that George Lucas was “rooting for both sides” in the battle for the galaxy—would surely remain one doozy of a novel argument.
Brooker drops this premise like a bombshell, but his explanation is less incendiary since he discusses it more in terms of Lucas’s approach to filmmaking than the text. That Lucas demanded a near-imperial level of order on the set is not news, nor is the fact that he depended on his actor’s ability to go off-script to infuse his picture with rebellious warmth. But again we’re in making-of rather than textual territory here, so I felt that Brooker did not quite achieve what he set out to do both in terms of analyzing the text above all else and developing a premise that the story does not take a clear stance on who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. That would have been exciting, especially since Brooker points out that Star Wars tends to get dismissed in the realm of film studies because it is such a simplistic depiction of clearly defined good against clearly defined evil.
The only textual evidence Brooker provides to support the idea that Lucas was actually ambivalent about the Rebellion’s struggle with the Empire stems from a discussion of the prequel trilogy rather than the specific content of the 1977 film. This is at odds with another statement Brooker makes in his introduction in which he insists that he will exclusively deal with Star Wars in that original, pre-prequel, pre-“A New Hope” state. That he makes the strongest argument for his main premise by leaning on the prequels feels a bit like cheating.
Brooker’s sturdiest and most interesting argument is that the true conflict in the film is between technology and nature, rigidity and creativity. Here he aligns the initially aristocratic and prim Princess Leia and the shiny, pompous C-3PO more with the buffed-to-a-shine baddies than the grungy, always improvising heroes Luke and Han. Booker also tracks how Leia loosens up enough to switch sides in Star Wars (C-3PO doesn’t really get there until he’s able to preside over story time with the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi).
The only new material in the new edition of Star Wars (BFI Film Classics) is a four-page introduction that weaves the sequel trilogy into that main argument about how Star Wars’ bad guys and good guys reside in a sort of grey area. Again, this pulls the argument out of the specific film Brooker is supposed to be discussing. While I don’t really think Star Wars is the mindless movie its detractors have long insisted it is, I can’t say Will Brooker did much to reinforce that opinion.
