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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Brackett was also adept at other genres. Her first novel, "No Good From a Corpse" (1944), was a mystery story couched in hard-boiled prose so convincing that director Howard Hawks told his secretary to contact "that guy Brackett" to help on his adaptation of Raymond Chandler's "The Big Sleep." Even when he found out she wasn't a guy, Hawks liked her work well enough to use her on several other films: "Rio Bravo" (1959), "Hatari!" (1961), "El Dorado" (1967), "Rio Lobo" (1970) and "Man's Favorite Sport" (1962). When not writing screenplays, Brackett cranked out a stream of novels: Westerns and mysteries as well as science fiction. Prior to signing on with Lucas, she scripted Robert Altman's 1973 version of "The Long Goodbye" and wrote one episode of a short-lived television series based on Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer mysteries.
Brackett died of cancer shortly after submitting her first draft of "The Empire Strikes Back." Though the film's credits list her as screenwriter along with Lawrence Kasdan, Pollock says Lucas had to throw out her draft and start from scratch with Kasdan's help. This is hard to swallow, bearing in mind that Lucas and Kasdan also co-wrote "Return of the Jedi." The strengths of "The Empire Strikes Back" echo those of Brackett's own work as surely as the mediocrity of "Return of the Jedi" matches that of Kasdan's subsequent films, all built from secondhand materials: Chandler-lite for "Body Heat," warmed-over John Sayles for "The Big Chill."
"The Empire Strikes Back" is the film that makes obvious the paper trail linking George Lucas to literary science fiction; ironically, it also marks the beginning of Lucas' unheroic journey from honest entertainer to galactic gasbag. The first recorded blats are to be found in Time magazine's May 1980 cover story. Associate editor Gerald Clarke, who had praised the original flick for its lighthearted refusal to offer anything like a serious message, now finds "a moral dimension that touches us much more deeply than one-dimensional action adventures can." A sidebar, ponderously headlined "In the Footsteps of Ulysses," cites everything from "The Odyssey" to "Pilgrim's Progress" before concluding that the "Star Wars" films "draw from the same deep wells of mythology, the unconscious themes that have always dominated history on the planet."
The long and noteworthy career of Leigh Brackett, needless to say, figures in none of this; her links to a despised genre made her invisible to the pop-culture savants at Time. Lucas himself, who had guardedly acknowledged three years earlier that he enjoyed science fiction, now offers a carefully pruned reading list. "I wanted 'Star Wars' to have an epic quality, so I went back to the epics," he says. "Whether they are subconscious or unconscious, whatever needs they meet, they are stories that have pleased or provided comfort to people for thousands of years." Not only that, they aren't protected by copyright laws.
Better still, "the epics" make for an infinitely classier set of influences than stories rooted in what remains one of the most stubbornly down-market literary genres America has produced. Would an eminence grise like Bill Moyers want to be seen trifling with spaceships and ray guns? Would film buffs who pride themselves on knowing every nuance of a silly Western like "The Searchers" stoop to analyze a lowly science fiction movie? Certainly the New Yorker would not have sent John Seabrook to profile Lucas for its January 1997 issue if people thought there were nothing more than sci-fi thrills going on.
Seabrook's profile signals the completion of the papier-mâché Parthenon that Lucas erected around his series. "One can go through 'Star Wars' and almost pick out chapter headings from Campbell's 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces,'" Seabrook writes, helpfully listing them as "the hero's call to adventure, the refusal of the call, the arrival of supernatural aid, the crossing of the first threshold, the belly of the whale, and a series of ordeals culminating in a showdown with the angry father."
Campbell specialized in treating religious imagery as a set of metaphors divorced from historical context, a method that allowed him to talk, for example, about the Crucifixion as symbolizing the tree of life in an agrarian society, when in fact it was a very concrete reference to a particularly atrocious form of execution, rooted in a very specific period. Campbell's ability to generate whirlwinds of cross-cultural references makes his chatter sound tremendously erudite -- his disarming style reduced Moyers to an awestruck supplicant in the "Power of Myth" series -- but once the dust settles it's hard to grasp the point of it all. So it's no surprise that these alleged correspondences between mythical themes and "Star Wars" get a tad slippery when one tries to nail them down.
