The Empire Triumphant

How "Star Wars" Ruined American Movies

By Charles Taylor

Jan 27, 1997 | "i felt a great disturbance in the Force. As if a million souls cried out in torment and were silenced at once." That's Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guiness) speaking, after the evil Empire has obliterated Princess Leia's home planet. Heard 20 years later, in the new "Special Edition" of "Star Wars" released this week, those lines might as well be an elegy for the most creative and vital era in American movies, a period that "Star Wars" brought to a screeching halt.

With "Star Wars," director George Lucas didn't completely kill off American movies, but he did manage to cripple them badly. Since "Star Wars," it's become infinitely harder for movies that aren't prepackaged, formulaic blockbusters to get made at all, let alone seen. American filmmakers who've tried to create something other than the next merchandisible megahit  or who've gone against the tide of retro sentimentality that's swept over movies, or who've simply tried to address audiences as adults  have become the equivalent of the "Star Wars" rebel alliance. "Star Wars" enthusiasts love to talk about George Lucas as if he were a Jedi master, ruling over his self-created universe with benevolent wisdom. Those are the terms in which Lucas is treated in John Seabrook's January 6 New Yorker profile. If it weren't painfully sincere, the piece could be the work of a wicked satirist:

"Of course your perspective changes when you get older and as you get battered by life," he said.

"Have you been battered by life?"

"Anyone who lives is going to get battered. Nothing comes easy."

I believed him. He was Yoda, after all. He had lived for almost nine hundred years. He had known the sons who triumph over their dark fathers only to find themselves in the murkier situation of being fathers themselves, and that knowledge had made him wise but it had also worn him out.

Back here on earth, Lucas seems a lot closer to Darth Vader. Lucas is the architect of an empire  the production company, Lucasfilms and special effects studio Industrial Light and Magic  determined to remake the world of movies according to his own vision. He has largely succeeded, although his legacy  an industry predicated on finding the next $100 million grosser to the neglect of all other, less lucrative, movies  may be the puniest of anyone who's ever changed the course of Hollywood. Lucas is, in the words Paul Schrader used to describe the weasely private eye played by Ralph Meeker in "Kiss Me Deadly," "a dwarf among midgets."

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