The release of the latest, and allegedly last, installment in the “Skywalker Saga,” comprising the canonical triad of trilogies in the eternally expanding “Star Wars” universe, seems like an appropriate time to pose a wistful little thought experiment: What if “Star Wars” — the original 1977 film — had performed at the box office about as everyone expected, in the range of a ’70s Disney film, earning, say, $16 million? Let’s imagine that some film historian or revisionist critic circa 2019 were to rediscover this forgotten gem, an oddity of ’70s cinema buried among all the Watergate-paranoia thrillers, demonic horror films and disaster blockbusters. Can we, with 40 years’ retrospect, evaluate it as a film instead of a phenomenon?
Before “Star Wars” became a commercial behemoth, most critics found it a charming diversion: The Times called it “the most elaborate, most expensive, most beautiful movie serial ever made.” They were bemused to see such high production values — state-of-the-art special effects, a full orchestral score — lavished on subject matter previously associated with cardboard props. It was, unlike all the tragic masterworks of American cinema of that decade, innocent good fun.
Had innocent fun not become a cynical commodity and conquered the multiplex, George Lucas would still be remembered as a lesser member of the Movie Brats, and his third feature as a curious synthesis of his first two: “THX 1138,” a pessimistic future dystopia, and “American Graffiti,” a nostalgic homage to a bygone era. At the very least, “Star Wars” would be remembered as an interesting, if eccentric, children’s film, a subversive sleeper like 1971’s “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”
It’s dispiriting to recall the dismal crudscape of children’s entertainment in the 1970s, the indifference and contempt with which most of it was produced: Disney at its nadir, “Benji” movies, a lot of Saturday morning TV made by people on drugs. “Star Wars” was made with evident care by master craftsmen — Ralph McQuarrie, John Dykstra, Ben Burtt and John Williams, among others. There was humor in the film, but it took its world, its ethos and its audience seriously. As almost every film that is not “Star Wars” demonstrates, it’s extremely difficult to strike this balance between treating your subject with respect but not too solemnly, being self-aware without condescension or camp.
Mr. Lucas’s interests as a filmmaker were initially abstract and formal, his ambitions avant-garde (watch his student film “Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB”), so his reversion to traditional, mythic plotting and what David Foster Wallace called “single-entendre values” was so unfashionable as to be radical. His dialogue is as deliberately over-the-top as John Williams’s comic-opera blasts of sinister brass whenever we see the bad guys.
Like the other filmmakers in his cohort, Mr. Lucas crammed his films with allusions to the 1960s pantheon of auteurs, from Kurosawa to Ford, and some grad student might revisit “Star Wars” as a postmodern mash-up of American film genres — Western gunslingers and World War II dogfights, Flynn and Rathbone dueling, Tarzan and Jane on the vine. As Umberto Eco said of “Casablanca”: “It is not one movie. It is ‘the movies.’”
Now that it’s one franchise among many, “Star Wars" seems timeless, but the original is very much a product of the 1970s: Mr. Lucas began writing it while American troops were still in Vietnam and Nixon was being consumed by his dark side. It’s remembered now as a proto-Reaganesque, reactionary backlash against the morally ambiguous cinema of the ’70s, but it’s also a countercultural, anti-fascist fable about shaggy young outsiders fighting a revolution against the faceless, armored henchmen of a military technocracy. The Empire is comfortably identified with our favorite movie enemies, the Nazis, which helps disguise the fact that they are also, metaphorically, the imperialist invaders of Vietnam, confident in their devastating firepower to crush an ill-equipped insurgency. This subtext got a lot less subtextual in “Return of the Jedi,” in which the occupiers’ superweapons are thwarted by the guerrilla tactics and crude booby-traps of a pretechnological people.
By the time James Cameron’s “Avatar” made this allegory painfully overt, it felt uncomfortably weird watching American audiences cheer fantasies of indigenous peoples defeating capitalist invaders bent on exploiting their resources, even as our own battle droids were blowing up insurgents in oil-rich Iraq. You could imagine Al Qaeda or Timothy McVeigh identifying with Luke blowing up the Death Star — plucky underdogs destroying symbols of invincible power with dollar-store equipment and an audacious, suicidal plan. How did we end up on the wrong side of this story?
Lots of critics pointed out that the coda of “Star Wars,” when three heroes march up a corridor between columns of massed soldiers, is a visual quote of the wreath-laying at Nuremberg in “Triumph of the Will,” but everyone seems to assume this is a random allusion, devoid of historical context. It’s not as if Lucas was oblivious of the source. His film is full of fascist iconography — all, up until this moment, associated with the Empire. Assuming this final image is deployed intentionally, it might be most hopefully interpreted as a warning: Don’t become the thing you’ve fought against. The intimation of a hidden kinship between our hero and his enemy was right there in Darth Vader’s name all along — the dark father.
The ostensible moral of “Star Wars” is anti-technology, pro-“feelings” — a very ’70s sensibility. The Empire is a rigid, militaristic hierarchy, obsessed with its high-tech weaponry. But underlying it is an older tradition, represented by Darth Vader, that’s religious, mystic. The “technological terror” is obliterated, but Vader escapes: Like Sauron, he can’t be destroyed, only driven out. It’s a prescient parable for our own governing technocrats, who thought they were exploiting atavistic fanatics to do their bidding, only to learn too late that the force of hatred was more powerful, and they’d been its servants all along.
“Star Wars” is ultimately a religious film — one of a wave of them in the decade of the Jesus Movement, films as disparate as “The Exorcist” (1973) “Oh, God!” (1977) and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977). It’s a caution against allowing your humanity to be effaced: The storm troopers and Vader are masked, robotic, like the police and surveillers in “THX 1138.” Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” novels (an influence on “Star Wars”) describe how, when people lose faith in science, it must be presented to them in the guise of religion to get them to accept it again. “Star Wars” did the opposite, selling religion and traditional values back to people disenchanted with the church in alluring, futuristic packaging.
Whether the message or the packaging prevailed is hard to gauge. The generations raised on “Star Wars” did not exactly heed Obi-Wan’s advice to turn off their computers (and dread “catching feelings”), but the religion Lucas invented, based vaguely on ’70s West-coast Zen, is now an official one: Jediism received tax-exempt status in the United States in 2015.
The success of “Star Wars” has obviated a lot of its original virtues. Much of the fun of watching the film for the first time, now forever inaccessible to us, was in the slow unveiling of its universe: Swords made of lasers! A Bigfoot who co-pilots a spaceship! A swing band of ’50s U.F.O. aliens! Lucas refuses to explain anything, keeping the viewer as off-balance as a jet-lagged tourist in Benares or Times Square. We don’t see the film’s hero until 17 minutes in; we’re kept watching not by plot but by novelty, curiosity.
Subsequent sequels, tie-in novels, interstitial TV shows, video games and fan fiction have lovingly ground this charm out of existence with exhaustive, literal-minded explication: Every marginal background character now has a name and a back story, every offhand allusion a history. But Mr. Lucas’s universe just doesn’t have the depth of Tolkien’s Middle-earth; it was only ever meant to be sketched, not charted. Sequels and tie-ins, afraid to stray too far off-brand, stick to variations on familiar designs and revive old characters, so there’s nothing new to discover.
Mr. Lucas continued to pursue avant-garde ambitions and a subversive ’70s agenda: The only other films he ever directed, the prequels, are the most depressing blockbusters of all time — kids’ adventure films whose boy hero ends up a baby killer. The only other American movies comparable to them, in this regard, are the “Godfather" trilogy, made by Mr. Lucas’s mentor, Francis Ford Coppola.
We literally can’t see “Star Wars” anymore: Its control-freakish creator won’t allow the original version of the film to be seen and has stubbornly maculated his own masterpiece, second-guessing correct editing decisions, restoring wisely deleted scenes and replacing his breakthrough special effects — historic artifacts in their own right — with ’90s vintage C.G.I., already more dated than the film’s original effects.
There may come a day, a long time from now, after Disney’s vampirically extended copyrights have expired and all the accumulated cultural detritus has eroded away, when people will have forgotten “Star Wars,” and can finally see it again. Seen anew, much of its imagery is surreally beautiful: the vast plated underside of an armored starship sliding on and on forever overhead; the dreamlike tableau, seen through a scrim of smoke and framed by concentric portals, of a girl shrouded in white furtively genuflecting to a robot; a golden android waving for help in a desert by the skeleton of a dinosaur; a convoy of space fighters opening their split wings in sequence, like poison flowers blossoming.
Perhaps its most iconic image epitomizes its genius for making the corniest clichés strange and new: a bored kid stuck in a nowhere town looking to the horizon, yearning for better things, no different from Dorothy in dusty Kansas or the teenagers in Modesto, watching the setting of a double star.
Tim Kreider is the author of two collections of essays, “We Learn Nothing” and “I Wrote This Book Because I Love You.” He writes a regular column at Medium.