Silence for Greedo

On Friday, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace was re-released to theaters in digital 3D, commencing a cycle that will continue until the entire fairytale saga has been turned into an expensive laser light show minus the Pink Floyd soundtrack. To promote the release (as well as that of his production Red Tails last month), George Lucas has made one of his periodic excursions from, I assume, his secret base inside a scale replica of the Empire Strikes Back space slug to make the press rounds. Unsurprisingly, much of the words expended concern the controversies over the various alterations he has made to his mutant baby of a franchise starting with the original trilogy’s “Special Edition” release in 1997. The remark that will cut the deepest for fans can be found in this brief chat with The Hollywood Reporter and attempts to clarify the infamous encounter between Han Solo and the bounty hunter Greedo in Star Wars:

“What I did was try to clean up the confusion… It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.”

When you watch the versions side by side it seems, in fact, as if the new, digitally composited shot he added redefines the meaning of the scene. In the original, our view is so obscured by smoke that we rely on the sound effect to explain what has happened—it is indeed hard to even tell who we’re looking at when the blaster goes off—and it really does sound like one shot has been fired, although I suppose he would say that’s our bloodthirsty id talking. But regardless of whether he’s lying about his intentions or he really just filmed it wrong the first time, the implications of Lucas’s meddling in his own galaxy are kind of screwy.

Before you close the window in disgust at potential geek pettiness, know that I’ll try not to let this become some obsessive, indulgently indignant rebuttal to his claims. I’ll let his comments that “most movies when they release them they make changes” or that “Blade Runner [has] been cut sixteen ways from Sunday” or that “all art is technology” stand on their own. I just want to share some personal, nonpolitical thoughts and shed some light on the issue from a perspective that has received, I think, little of the coverage over the fifteen-year furor. (Though I’ll admit that I have not seen the feature documentary The People Vs. George Lucas, because I am an actual adult with other interests.)

In the mid-1990s, I watched the Star Wars movies countless times. I’d seen them all at a very young age—including Empire in uncut, letterboxed format, like a true film obsessive—and at some point we were lent the VHS boxed set by family friends, which we held onto for over a year and practically wore out by the time it was returned. My older brother strong-armed his preference of the inferior Return of the Jedi for most of the viewings, loving the Ewoks (he was both a nasty bully and a weird pussy, how was your childhood), so that movie’s magic quickly wore down for me, though the speeder-bike chase remains awesome. But whenever I managed to finagle a look at Empire I was swept up in its downbeat intrigue, and nothing topped the popcorn bliss of the original classic. No matter how many times I watched it in those early years of fandom, the scene in the Mos Eisley cantina always blew me away.

Much as the more urbane of Star Wars nerds would like you to believe their affinity for Han Solo was instant and forever, if you’re being honest like me, you’ll admit you identified with Luke as a kid. We like to pretend that we merely tolerated Mark Hamill’s whiny farm boy as a gateway to the coolness to come, but in reality he is a perfect hero, scrawny and doggedly noble, so ridiculously blonde and white-clothed you’d have to be an asshole not to cheer when he emerges as a rad space pilot in the final act. Han is a different story. We meet him almost incidentally and before a hint of back-story emerges we can tell that the character has been up to some shit: he hangs around in a ‘hood described by Obi-Wan as a “hive of scum and villainy,” he is friends with a giant space bear and is in possession of an awesomely fast ship that—judging by his arrangement with our heroes—he clearly procured by ill methods. So when, just before he makes his escape, he blows away the unfortunate green-skinned lackey grilling him on his debt to Jabba the Hutt, it is absolutely shocking, and wrenchingly pulls us into his story and deeper into the movie’s verisimilar folds.

That is, it used to do that. I have a distinct memory of my gut reaction to Greedo’s death both on first and repeat viewings. I was a slight, sensitive child, raised by a father who emphasized gentle compassion, and it still disturbs me to see innocent or even slightly undeserving harm come to fictional characters. Greedo, despite his reptilian look and strange buzz of a voice, isn’t a terribly credible villain—aggressive, certainly, but not explicitly sinister in the way, say, Jabba later is (it never bothered me to see him choked to death in Jedi). Despite my softness I’m susceptible to the narrative manipulations of certain killing in movies—even pistol dueling in Westerns always seems fair as long as they abide by the rules. So it must be much more than an optical misunderstanding that paints Han so callously. Greedo does train a gun at him and say he’s been “looking forward” to taking him out, but nothing in any version of the scene registers him as a real threat. Beyond the suddenness of the violence, it’s the manner of the shot that is so affecting: Han doesn’t even bother to take his foot off the table or finish the last syllable of his kiss-off one-liner before wasting the alien. Even after the contentious moment, he remains ignoble as he walks off, flipping a coin to the barkeep for the mess while Greedo lies facedown in the dive. Lucas’ desire for him to come across as genuinely good-hearted, whether originally intended or retroactively adopted, was a moot point. He’d cast Harrison Ford, a ripe decade older than the movie’s other leads, who conveyed a smirking, antisocial indifference that sold his hardened initial reaction to Princess Leia’s overtures of interest. Han’s reformation as a good-hearted friend and hero later in the film and in its sequels doesn’t contradict his initial characterization as a scoundrel—what it does is make him three-dimensional, a real person who has lived a life that brought him into the story as we see it. Simply put, it’s hard to believe he could have survived long enough to meet Luke without “shooting first” much of the time.

I finally went to see Star Wars on the big screen when the Special Edition was released. I think my mother was more excited than I was, and I wasn’t quite a sophisticated enough filmgoer yet to fully perceive the significance of the re-mastering process, but I was pretty prepared, having watched the Ben Burtt-directed IMAX documentary Special Effects in which they detailed clearly integral digital additions such as, uh, the stormtroopers’ giant lizard mounts on Tatooine. But I was blind-sided by the very concept of actually changing shit that was already in the movie. When Han and Greedo’s tense council neared its end, I braced myself for the carnage, watching Han cock his blaster—I actually remember not noticing that camera shot the first time, enhancing the act’s surprise and power—and then… two shots. I was confused. Were there always two shots? Again, I hadn’t watched the first film nearly as often as the third, so my seven-year-old brain briefly allowed that I was maybe misremembering the details. But when I’d had a chance to consider it fully, there was no doubt: I’d never forgotten that blunt shock. Kids never forget the distinct trauma of movies. It wasn’t until a couple years later that I would read up on the whole story, but whatever the case I, the non-fanatic-but-still-enthralled viewer and Lucas’ professedly intended audience for his sweeping laser fantasy, was significantly affected in a weird way by his editorial decisions. Star Wars the movie, and on a bigger level Star Wars the property, was changed for me forever.

I’ll spare you further minute analysis of the scene as though it was the Mexican standoff in Reservoir Dogs (I don’t have either version in HD on hand at the moment anyway), nor will I even bother to discuss the bizarre CGI head-dodge inserted into its second edit for the 2004 DVD. What I want to do here is contemplate the circumstances surrounding this nucleus in the rift between Lucas and Star Wars fans, how it came to pass and why it still hasn’t been resolved.

When you’re talking about Star Wars as a property, it’s important to remember that Lucasfilm is not a publicly traded company. George Lucas is the CEO and chairman and answers to no one. In and of itself, that’s not such a big deal, but when you consider that the commercial success of the company—apart from its tech and publishing subsidiaries like Skywalker Sound—is entirely founded on creative content, you could see how a dude could get an inflated sense of self. Imagine Citizen Kane, except instead of running “a couple of newspapers” Kane was responsible for history’s most popular fiction next to the Bible. When you couple that absolute power with clear residual anxiety over studio interference from his early filmmaking years, a potent cocktail of neuroses emerges. Generally, I would like to submit that being the authoritative emperor of the most idolized piece of pop culture ever will do weird shit to a person’s brain.

Lucas seems tired of defending himself, and for good reason. He’s had to do it a lot. You can just sense the desperation in his voice as he bemoans the arbitrary attack on his integrity—“somehow, when I make the slightest change, everybody thinks it’s the end of the world”—as though his multi-billion dollar net worth were not compensation for his thankless activism on behalf of creators and technological tyranny (sorry, I mean “advancement”) everywhere. As that New York Times piece reports, he’s more or less had his “fuck it” moment, and after this newest round of Star Wars rehashes rolls out he’ll join his peer Francis Ford Coppola in producing tiny art movies that nobody will enjoy.

For one thing, I don’t believe that he’ll take his leave of Star Wars entirely, at least not without a solid proxy in place. If some third-tier Young Jedi Boppers novelist scribbles some lore about Zoop-Zop the Trandoshan Saucier that contradicts with some arbitrary canon he codified in the 1980s, you can bet his Holocron Keeper (that is not a joke, he employs somebody with that title) will be over that shit faster than twelve parsecs [or Other Appropriate SW Joke]. The manner in which he defends himself to the press does not bespeak an ability to just leave it all behind. In a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey, Lucas points out that, despite it all, he’s never “seen” Star Wars—Oprah, and we, immediately know what he means. He’s spent three decades on the border of the galaxy he created, trying to figure out what it means to him as we flit around on the inside. In light of his dilemma, it seems natural that his approach to the franchise resembles a pathological compulsion more than a normal creative impulse.

The most frustrating thing for me, as a Star Wars fan, is Lucas’s refusal to acknowledge that the fans—apart from being objectively correct or even owed a forum—might just, incidentally, have a point. I don’t know about everybody else, but it’s never been my intention to suggest that he has no “right” to alter his works even in some futile search for perfection. The attitude is undeniably childish and myopic, and vaguely abusive toward the goodwill of the community. But despite all his sins against integrity and historicity, and his godlike status in the creative industries, he remains a sympathetic figure to me. Or maybe that’s because, with an acute lack of company “no men,” he doesn’t really seem to know what he’s doing. After all, unless a version of Star Wars comes out in ten years where Han decides to dance and hug his way out of the jam, Greedo will always ignominiously flop down onto the table, left to rot as the smoke clears.