It’s conventional wisdom that the 1977 release of Star Wars: A New Hope was the dawn of the modern blockbuster. And indeed, director George Lucas’ innovative emphases on world-building, special effects, and outsized adventure revolutionized the industry, making way for today’s franchise-heavy film landscape. But over the past few years, it seems to me that the influence of another film has surpassed even A New Hope as the most influential of all blockbusters.
That film is A New Hope‘s immediate sequel: Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Unfortunately, I don’t mean that the general filmmaking of The Empire Strikes Back has increasingly influenced contemporary filmmaking. That would have been a welcome development, since The Empire Strikes Back has a darker tone, more complex character development, and a more interesting plot than its predecessor.
But instead, my thesis for this essay is that one specific scene in that movie has had such a disproportionate impact on contemporary moviemaking that it has essentially become a multibillion-dollar industry in itself. The scene, of course, is this one:
I would’ve warned for spoilers, but this is probably the least spoilable scene in the history of movies; even the most Star Wars-naïve are familiar with its content. If you’re not in a video-friendly environment, here’s the often-misquoted dialogue:
Darth Vader: Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.
Luke: He told me enough. He told me you killed him!
Darth Vader: No: I am your father.
Luke: No…no… That’s not true… That’s impossible!!
In context, this scene is unquestionably a gut-wrencher. The hero of the series discovers that his foremost adversary, the most charismatic villain in the universe, is in fact a blood relative; and not just any blood relative, but his presumed-dead father. It’s a horrifying clash of two ultra-relatable human drives: the drive to discover and cherish one’s lineage, and the drive to uphold one’s principles. Consequently, it puts Luke in a terrible bind, hence his despairing reaction. What will he do? Fight his own father? Turn to the Dark Side??
It’s also completely unexpected. The fate of Luke’s father hadn’t been dwelled upon in the first or second movies, and Vader’s masked appearance and filtered voice had obscured any resemblances to Luke, as well as his age. The setup is perfect. And the result is such a shocker that director Lucas is comfortable with it effectively ending the movie, leaving viewers rabid for the last film in the trilogy.
All of these were certainly his aims, and he succeeded. But I detect another, perhaps unintended appeal to the scene. It’s difficult to describe, but I think the best way is to observe that the revelation of Luke and Vader’s familial bond, in a very abstract way, connects things in the Star Wars universe. Before this moment, Luke and Vader are adversaries improbably thrust together by their opposing goals, as heroes and villains typically are. After “I am your father,” though, things suddenly aren’t so improbable anymore. The hero and villain are destined to fight one another; they’re part of a more compact web than before, a juicy family web rather than the loose, giant web of general humanity.
Why is this appealing for viewers? Well, it seems to me that it can’t be reduced further than to say that there’s an aesthetic tidiness about it. It simply feels good for us to know that things onscreen connect and circle back so thoroughly. It allows us to wrap our brains around everything that’s occurred: whereas loose ends are inscrutable and unknowable, the discovery of family linkages ties up these loose ends, and that feels good for us. Luke’s dead dad used to be an irrelevance; now there’s one fewer irrelevance. The Star Wars universe after the Vader reveal has become pleasurably cleaner in this way, regardless of the impact it has on Luke’s character and on the story.
By examining the next forty years of blockbuster adventures, we can deduce that this final, unintended appeal to Lucas’s great twist—the Tidiness Appeal, let’s continue to call it—was, in fact, the most compelling one. Look no further than the very next installment of Lucas’ trilogy, Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983), where Lucas reveals that Princess Leia, the main female lead, is actually Luke Skywalker’s sister.
Well, then!
This twist, unlike the first, isn’t very important to the story. In terms of tone and drama, it doesn’t really matter that Leia is Luke’s sister. The revelation from Yoda doesn’t put Luke in a dilemma, or engender really any emotion at all from Luke, or for that matter Leia; it’s just revealed, and that’s it. Later in the film, Darth Vader catches on about Leia—and he, also, barely reacts at all. If anything, the twist functions as a rather convenient escape hatch, dampening character emotions by dissolving what was previously a tense, interesting love triangle between Luke, Leia, and Han Solo.
And yet, we have to admit that there’s something strangely attractive about the discovery. After all, now three of the four main characters are related. Cool!
So George Lucas, a few years removed from leaving audiences gasping for breath at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, decided that for his series’ next surprise, he didn’t need to drop another bomb that puts the characters in difficult, human positions; instead, he decided that the aspect of the first twist that he most wanted to replicate was simply that two of his characters were related. He preferred the shell of the twist to its contextual importance.
As did, it seems, everyone else. Like a virus accidentally created in a lab, the motif of the surprise family relation spread through the movie industry, infiltrating other blockbuster franchises. And just as in Return of the Jedi, the family ties discovered in these knockoffs typically had no dramatic significance to the story.
Take The Terminator (1984), which came out just 4 years after The Empire Strikes Back and launched a major franchise of its own. At the end of this movie (spoiler), it’s revealed that main good guy Kyle Reese is in fact the father of the very resistance leader whose birth he was sent from the future to enable.
This twist could have been left out by director James Cameron with absolutely no change in the movie’s emotional tone: not only does it not affect the character arcs or dramatic tension in any way, but Reese’s character is already dead by the time it’s learned, so there’s not even any time for it to do so. The movie just ends, having presented us with its final gift: Reese is somebody’s dad. Ah, the Tidiness Appeal!
Despite blockbusters like The Terminator trying their hands at “I am your father” moments, though, the true potential of the family linkage discovery went largely untapped until Lucas, the mad scientist who unleashed it in the first place, returned to show us the way.
Enter the prequel.
At the time Lucas’s Star Wars prequels were released, they were met with disappointing, mixed reviews, with critics and viewers bemoaning the films’ unwelcome political drudgery and lack of character depth. Lost in that legacy of disappointment is the fact that, combined, the three films made over 2.5 billion dollars at the box office.
Why were these films so successful? After all, although we now think of Star Wars as a juggernaut brand assured of unstoppable success, back then it was only a highly successful trilogy trying to extend its appeal to a new generation. Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999) came out sixteen years after Return of the Jedi (1983)—plenty of time for even a massive brand to fall into irrelevance. Plus, as mentioned, people didn’t think very highly of the movies. Why, then, these windfalls of galactic proportions?
Well, Lucas knew instinctively that prequels by nature would be veritable breeding grounds for the Tidiness Appeal. Since they inherit an entire universe of established characters to reference, the opportunities for characters and families to be blood-linked are endless. Fans of Bobba Fett? Meet his clone dad, Jango Fett! He was the clone for the clone army! Hold on, C-3PO was built by Anakin? And there’s the glamorous queen—wait, she’s Luke and Leia’s mom?
A blueprint for franchise filmmaking takes shape. A troupe of new characters, even insufferably forgettable characters, is introduced, and by linking them one by one to the characters that we actually, you know, liked—we get, through the Tidiness Appeal, a somehow alluring moviegoing experience. Although a prequel inherently has no true drama, since we’ve seen the ending already, a kind of facsimile of suspense can nevertheless be brought into being by emphasizing the potential uncovering of family trees.
Consequently, prequels now rule the day. Consider the latest installment of the Harry Potter franchise, one of the few that rival Star Wars in (cultural) capital: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018). It’s the second Harry Potter prequel, and its plot centers on the quest of one character to find out who his family is.
Oh, the tantalizing possibilities! Screenwriter J.K. Rowling has already created so many beloved characters in her original heptalogy that in her Hollywood years she can opt to do this: decline to invent or create, instead lazily encouraging us to wonder in delight at which of her old characters will be called back into relevance by virtue of being related to a barely-known new character.
Remember that, again, this is a prequel of the Harry Potter series, so we all know that regardless of whom this boring person is related to, a wizard named Voldemort is going to kill Harry Potter’s parents and eventually be defeated. So it might be worth stopping for a second and thinking about why, exactly, we care about this plot point at all. Well, anyway, it turns out that he’s related to Dumbledore. Nice. It grossed $650 million.
Thus George Lucas, the accidental inventor of the Tidiness Appeal, is also responsible for distilling it into the pure, potent form in which we consume it now. We started with “I am your father;” now we’re here: we trace fictional genealogies backward into infinity; we speculate endlessly on the parentages of characters so bland that they barely have names. Story and drama are second; connecting the dots is first.
That’s my lengthy introduction to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019). With Lucas now out of the picture, having sold his property to Disney for a clean $4 billion, JJ Abrams up to bat, and he’s the second best thing, as he always is. As a professional corporate reviver of dying franchises, he knows what the Star Wars faithful are here for. They want parents. And siblings. And every character accounted for on a one-page guest list of invited families. They want, in short, Tidiness.
Abrams understood from the beginning that the Tidiness Appeal had come to overshadow in importance the sizable merits of the original Star Wars trilogy. His first crack at a Star Wars film, Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), gave us as practically its only significant new pieces a villain who’s Han and Leia’s son, and a heroine who’s the daughter of…well, guess you’ll need to watch the next two movies to find out! The movie was beloved by fans.
But when Rian Johnson, director and writer of the following film, had the impudence to decide that the heroine’s parents were “nobody,” fans revolted, the movie’s box office fell a whopping 68% in its second weekend, and Disney brought back Abrams to correct the error.
And correct it he does. Rise of Skywalker’s screenplay is devoted almost entirely to hyping and then solving the mystery of trilogy heroine Rey’s origins, with an obligatory final battle ensuing. It erases virtually every new plot point from the previous installment and casually makes up capabilities of the Force with insane implications totally inconsistent with Lucas’s movies. The purpose of these jarring walk-backs is to bring back to life a character who was definitively killed in Return of the Jedi and reveal that—wait for it—he’s the heroine’s grandpa.
I won’t say that I predicted this, because I didn’t give it much thought at all, but I venture that a Star Wars fan who hadn’t seen the movie or any spoiler information would stand a decent chance of logically predicting the reveal, since, of the characters from the original trilogy, the only significant ones who hadn’t already been explicitly ruled out as Rey’s relatives were Obi-Wan (possible), a black man, two droids, a wookie, a giant slug—and this guy. It’s this guy.
Let’s now be frank: we are being manipulated. Rise of Skywalker is a lousy excuse for an adventure movie: its story is elementary, its characters are mechanical, even its action sequences are awkward and lame. The one thing it has to offer is the resolution of the intriguing situation, hatched by its dollar-savvy director two films ago, that the main character hasn’t yet been identified as anyone’s long-lost something. And after four weekends, it’s projected to easily clear 1 billion at the box office.
George Lucas may responsible for creating and hooking us on the Tidiness Appeal, and lazy writers like Rowling and Abrams for perpetuating it, but we, ultimately, are responsible for seeking out its increasingly absurd applications. Is this really how we want to spend our time and money? Shoring up the family trees of fictional individuals? Have we forgotten what a true twist feels like?
To that end, I’ll finish this piece by returning to the climax of The Empire Strikes Back. We remember Vader’s pivotal delivery, but it seems to me that we’ve forgotten its equally important follow-up, unfortunately never quoted or even misquoted:
Luke: No… No… That’s not true… That’s impossible!!
Now that’s what a movie moment feels like. The shock! The anguish! When will Hollywood give us another pop culture milestone like this one?
I suppose it’ll be when we start demanding from the Disneys and the Abramses of the world not mere echos of classic moments, neatly wrapping up oddities and loose ends for our dopamine-hungry pleasures, but rather new stories that channel the inventive spirit that enabled those old moments. I wonder whether we’re not secretly a little averse to a great reveal like Darth Vader’s: maybe the emotion involved is a little too painful to us by proxy, maybe it would bring down some of our Christmases if the Dark Side were to score another blow like that.
If this is indeed the case, let’s all make a New Year’s resolution to ask more from our entertainment and steel ourselves to the truly unexpected, even if it shakes us; after all, in the words of Luke Skywalker himself: “Confronting fear is the destiny of a Jedi.”
–Jim Andersen
For more on disappointing franchises, check out my criticism of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
You must be logged in to post a comment.