The original Star Wars is not exactly a Western. But it likes to dress up as one.
George Lucas’ film (also known as Episode IV: A New Hope), released in 1977, is a bricolage of iconographic and generic references. As many critics have noted, Lucas was a visual pack rat, taking bits and pieces from numerous other films. Everything from the distinctive wipe screen transitions to widescreen composition to the female lead who gets to fight was lifted from Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress. The serial adventure structure came from early space adventures like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. The Mos Eiseley cantina on Tatooine, a “hive of scum and villainy” nestled under the nose of an authoritarian regime, is borrowed from Casablanca. So is one of the movie’s most important character arcs; like Humphrey Bogart’s Rick in the 1942 film, Harrison Ford’s Han Solo is introduced as an amoral ruffian who, by the end of the film, is committed to battling the authoritarian regime.
Most of these lifts, allusions, and references aren’t exactly meant to be noticed as such. They are incorporated into Star Wars because Lucas loves the source material and thinks they are useful and exciting storytelling devices in their own right. Film buffs may smile and/or wince when they recognize Kurosawa or Casablanca, but enjoyment of the movie doesn’t rest on recognizing how Lucas has been true to or altered the material he’s borrowed. In some cases, in fact, knowing where Lucas got his ideas makes the movie noticeably less enjoyable, as in the infamous final scene of the film, in which the good guy Rebellion’s military awards ceremony is framed with bafflingly straight-faced visual references to Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will.
There are a couple of exceptions to this rule. The stormtrooper fascist references to the Empire are clearly supposed to give depth to the bad guy’s evilness. Another example is Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia during the escape from the Death Star: She memorably refuses to be passively rescued, grabbing a blaster from her surprised would-be white knights and insisting on commanding the escape from the Death Star herself. The fun of the sequence depends in part on familiarity with fairy tale and Hollywood tropes, which Leia doesn’t deign to follow (to Luke’s delight and Han’s exasperation.)
Even more than it relies on your knowledge of what princesses aren’t supposed to do, Star Wars relies on viewers’ conscious familiarity with the Western. Lucas takes some ideas and imagery from specific Westerns—the scene where Luke discovers his Uncle’s gutted farm is famously lifted from John Ford’s The Searchers. But he also references and uses the genre as a whole. The dusty landscape of Tattooine, with small hard-working farmers menaced by marauders (the Sand People used as a fairly offensive stand-in for indigenous peoples) exists in the same imaginative space as many a John Wayne or Clint Eastwood picture. Ford’s Solo wears a variation on a Western vest and has a distinctly Western swagger; his under-the-table shot at Greedo could have come out of a Sergio Leone movie. Even the Star Wars blasters with the heft of six-guns seem more akin to Western movie weaponry than to later rapid-fire weapons of military films, or the compact pistols of the spy genre.
Critics, when the film was released, certainly picked up on the references. Charles Champlin in his contemporary review called the film a “space Western” and enthused about its new variation on an old formula.
The sidekicks are salty squatty robots instead of leathery old cowpokes who scratch their whiskers and “Aw, shucks” a lot, and the gunfighters square off with laser swords instead of Colt revolvers. But it is all and gloriously one, the mythic and simple world of the good guys vs. the bad guys (identifiable without a scorecard or footnotes), the rustlers and the land grabbers, the old generation saving the young with a last heroic gesture which drives home the messages of courage and conviction.
Champlin is wowed by the way Star Wars connects the past and the future, making space adventure retro. And he correctly notes that the time slip is accomplished in large part through Lucas’ leveraging of the Western genre. This is (again as Champlin notes) partially done via elements of plot and character.
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But perhaps even more importantly, it’s accomplished through atmosphere. Science fiction on screen before Star Wars was defined by Star Trek and 2001—the future was professional, clean, and up-to-date. Star Wars, by contrast, was sprinkled with frontier grit. Those robot sidekicks may not have been leathery, but they were covered in grime and dust and scorch marks. The shaggy Bantha are a kind of amalgam of horse and cattle—thick, hairy, and mountable. The Millennium Falcon is a bashed-together jumble of angles and plates, as ramshackle as Uncle Owen’s sand-blasted desert farm. Even the Empire’s high-tech Death Star somehow has a worn and weathered look—and one of the film’s most memorable scenes is set in its garbage system. Only Lucas takes you across the universe to a distant galaxy in order to show you space sewage.
Star Wars isn’t exactly interested in careful worldbuilding. You never learn much about the command structure of the Empire in the first film, much less its ideological commitments, and the Clone Wars are little more than a cool name to gesture at vaguely. But while the universe of the first Star Wars movie doesn’t feel carefully constructed in some ways, it does feel lived in. And the place it’s been living is the Western. It’s the Western that gives Lucas’ film its scruffy texture and its enjoyably edgy vibe. And it’s the Western which makes the Star Wars universe feel unstable and thrilling and lawless, despite that authoritarian empire—like the whole galaxy exists on some wild, only sporadically policed frontier.
Star Wars dons cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat as a kind of stylistic, cinematic dress-up. And as with any dress-up, the point is for the costume to be recognized. Lucas wanted critics and fans to recognize and react to the Western references because he wanted his film to have that Western swagger, so you could hear the clank of spurs as the stormtroopers stomp through Tatooine, and the smell of gun smoke drifting up from the blasters. You can argue about whether Star Wars is technically a Western, or whether it’s a homage. But it’s undeniable that part of the pleasure of the film comes from the fact that while you watch his galactic space adventure, Lucas has you thinking about the quick draws, outlaws, and tumbleweeds of The Wild West.
Noah Berlatsky is the author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics (Rutgers University Press).
Way back when, western tales were called horse operas. Daytime dramas sponsored by soap companies were called soap operas. And some wise guy decided to call science fiction stories that read like westerns space operas. If you could take the blasters and replace them with sixguns, and replace spaceships with wagons and stagecoaches, and replace aliens with Native Americans, and the story would still be intact, that would be a space opera. The term space opera is used a lot less derisively today, and Star Wars is one of the reasons why. The movie showed that SF doesn’t have to be serious; sometimes it is OK just to be fun and have an adventure.
Star Wars is a medieval samurai western WW2 film pulp sci-fi serial etc. And all the films have a different feeling.
Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bbllzznaj, a tiny planet seven billion light years from Sol. He cut out his super-hyper-drive for the landing . . . and at that point, a tall, lean spaceman stepped out of the tail assembly, proton gun-blaster in a space-tanned hand.
“Get back from those controls, Bat Durston,” the tall stranger lipped thinly. “You don’t know it, but this is your last space trip.”
Hoofs drumming, Bat Durston came galloping down through the narrow pass at Eagle Gulch, a tiny gold colony 400 miles north of Tombstone. He spurred hard for a low overhang of rim-rock . . . and at that point a tall, lean wrangler stepped out from behind a high boulder, six-shooter in a sun-tanned hand.
“Rear back and dismount, Bat Durston,” the tall stranger lipped thinly. “You don’t know it, but this is your last saddle-jaunt through these here parts.”
Sound alike? They should—one is merely a western transplanted to some alien and impossible planet. If this is your idea of science fiction, you’re welcome to it! YOU’LL NEVER FIND IT IN GALAXY!
HL Gold, 1950…
And some wise guy decided to call science fiction stories that read like westerns space operas.
Obligatory reminder that “Star Trek” had the original pitch “Wagon Train to the Stars”… and, before it came along, “trek” was an Afrikaans word meaning referring mainly to wagon trains of settlers. The Great Trek is the founding event of Afrikaaner culture; the Voortrekkers were their Pilgrim Fathers.
I wonder if the Mirror Universe series reflects this?
Space: humanity’s new territory. (Or “Xinjiang” if you prefer the Chinese version.) These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to conquer and settle new worlds; to bring human civilisation to the savages of space; to extend our rule to worlds where no man has gone before.
@3 I remember that ad!
Has anyone ever brought together so many influences as Lucas? In addition to the aforementioned “medieval samurai western WW2 film pulp sci-fi serial”, he places it into the plot of The Lord of The Rings; innocent youngster is handed the secret to destroying an evil empire led by an off-camera figure of overwhelming power who is represented by a faceless right-hand man dressed in black. The hero is helped by a good wizard (who’s guidance is lost after his death) along with a diverse cast of elves/hobbits/dwarves/robots/Wookies including a disposed monarch. In the end, the hero must go into enemy territory accompanied only by his trusted Sam/R2 and use the secret to win the day and restore the monarch.
Probably the all-time mash-up. I saw this in theaters when I was 13 years old and it blew my mind.
A critic would say Lucas copied shamelessly from others. A fan would say his work is full of loving homages…
(Hey, comments are finally working for me again!)
The thing I keep noticing about the Original Trilogy is that it spans three distinct sub-genres:
There’s the world of the Fringe (where we find people like Han Solo, Lando Calrissian, Boba Fett, and Jabba the Hutt), full of rugged outlaws who are mainly concerned with money, survival, and personal power, and don’t have the time or privilege to care about grand political shifts, moral philosophy, or legal minutiae.
There’s the world of Politics (where we find Leia, Moff Tarkin, and Mon Mothma), full of well-educated people who’ve obviously never worried about where their next meal is coming from, and for whom the grand epic of Republic to Empire to Rebel Alliance is the only thing worth caring about.
And finally, there’s the world of the Force (where we find Obi-Wan, Yoda, Vader, and Palpatine), which is concerned with vast cosmic/spiritual forces, and sees wealth and political power only as useful tools.
Luke’s arc is a journey through these worlds, as he goes from an impoverished subsistence farmer (the Fringe) to an Alliance soldier (Politics), to a Jedi knight (the Force).
The narrative itself represents the blurring of the lines between these realms, and how it’s that interdependence that effects actual change, while the Fringe, the Political sphere, and the Jedi all ended up trapped in their own destructive cycles by looking inward (as the Jedi demonstrated in the Prequels, never even realizing that the political sphere could be weaponized against them).
#8
Excellent analysis!
I don’t know what Lucas himself admitted to ~borrowing from, but I wonder how much of what people find in this movie depends on personal context. (For reference: I grew up when there were still a lot of Westerns on TV — but I only watched them to keep company with my grandfather; I was reading lots of SF not long after we got a TV. I did not see A New Hope as a Western at the time.) There are many settings for universal stories; for instance,when this came out I remember the byplay between the droids also being attributed to some specific Japanese film rather than the cowboy-movie tradition. The lived-in look was what comes after the bold explorers of Star Trek or 2001 rather than specifically dry-plains. (The Riefenstahl-esque finale did get questioned.) There were also learned-sounding remarks about Joseph Campbell’s description of the hero’s journey — although ISTM that ANH didn’t check as many boxes as obviously as, say, Willow did for the hero’s rise.
ISTM that connecting Rick’s to the cantina is a stretch; the latter echoes seaport bars (used by transients, avoided by most locals) in its shadiness, rather than being a place where the oppressed can kick back a little. (What’s the Empire-era equivalent to “La Marseillaise”, and can you imagine anyone in that cantina singing it?) Aliens-in-a-bar was so much a trope that (according to the introduction in Dealing in Futures) Pournelle claimed everybody had written one before A New Hope came out; Haldeman, feeling left out, wrote “A !Tangled Web”.
ISTM @6 is correct in describing it as an all-time mashup; it’s not just one genre being “researched” (cf Tom Lehrer).
@8 – hah, I love this. Which I think is part of the fun and why the EU used to be able to have such varied stories. You can read about smugglers or X-wing pilots or the clones or what have you. I admit I was always much more drawn to reading and writing about the Force :)
I’ve never been able to totally get into Westerns though…but I do love the Mandalorian, fwiw.
8 is really good, but I would conclude slightly differently from this:
Luke isn’t the only person moving from realm to realm, and it doesn’t turn out well for the others. In the Fringe, Lando gets drawn into Politics and ends up losing his operation; Jabba comes up against the Force and ends up being strangled. In Politics, the conference room scene shows very early on that Politics is nothing compared to the Force. Instead it’s more of a hierarchy; the Fringe types think they’re doing fine, but they’re really just bit players in the game the Politics types are playing, and, similarly, the Politics players are really just an epiphenomenon of what’s going on with the Force.
The lived-in look was what comes after the bold explorers of Star Trek or 2001 rather than specifically dry-plains.
It’s really striking how similar the lived-in look – in fact, a lot of the set design – of Alien (1979) is to that of Star Wars (1977). The cockpit of the Falcon isn’t too different from the flight deck of the Nostromo.
CHip @@@@@ 10
I remember the byplay between the droids also being attributed to some specific Japanese film rather than the cowboy-movie tradition.
That would be Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, which also features a feisty young princess. Lucas was explicit about acknowledging the influence of the bickering peasant-adventurers Tahei and Matashichi on the R2D2-C3PO pairing, and the technique of telling significant parts of the story from their point of view.
That said — what Lucas actually did with it is, I think, an interesting example of T.S. Eliot’s dictum that “mediocre poets borrow, great poets steal” (this is often attributed to, say, Pablo Picasso talking about “artists”).[1] I don’t mean to say that Lucas was any kind of consistent “great artist”(!), but in this particular case he did more than just borrow the characters. In The Hidden Fortress, Tahei and Matashichi are pretty much two peas in a pod: they’re both greedy, cowardly, short-tempered, treacherous, and sentimental (they’re played by physically dissimilar actors, which helps distinguish them a bit). Lucas changed this by 1) making R2D2 into a more heroic character with an actual mission (C3PO remains much closer to the character of the two peasants); and 2) making R2D2 non-verbal, so that we only get hints of what he thinks and says, largely because of C3PO’s dialog and translations (and the emotional coloring of R2D2’s beeps).
[1] The basic idea being that “mediocre” poets/artists may borrow some idea or technique without really changing it, while “great” poets/artists will alter, remake, and transform what they borrow so that it becomes something new and (at least partly) their own.