The medieval mind of George Lucas page 1, 2

Lucas' visionary way of working has ancient antecedents. In the Middle Ages, the illiterate masses received and stored their information in complex visual signs, or icons. In pictures of the saints, every detail had some prescribed meaning -- the color blue for the Virgin, a dove for the Holy Ghost. The Dark Invader, Darth Vader, is an icon, too -- an effective visual sign, instantly familiar from our own cultural catechism, black and caped and evil. In this way "Star Wars" proceeds iconographically, its characters straight out of stock, figures from ancient ritual and matinee melodrama, recloaked in every age. The Kid, the Girl, the Hero, the Sidekick, the Evil Counselor, the Wise One, the Ultimate Villain -- we know them in advance.

Also familiar to medievalists is the main "Star Wars" theme, the questing knights in the Evil Empire. Though Lucas draws on our century's pop culture for his raw material, his grand vision arises from that other epoch, from the romantic, adventurous, moral, magically effective medieval world, where Malory and Spenser, the pre-Raphaelites and Tennyson and Errol Flynn have gone before. The place Lucas takes us -- never mind the spaceships -- is the Middle Ages.

Medieval times have provided a screen upon which each succeeding epoch projects its fantasies. For our own fantasy myth of the Middle Ages, we've imagined a place where we are still the center of the universe, where will -- human or divine -- still rules everything, often in the form of supernatural influences and inspired heroic deeds. No tree falls without significance in this cosmos, created expressly for human beings and ruled by a deity quite like them, only better and more powerful. Though it may or may not have anything to do with the actual epoch, this mythic Middle Ages has everything to do with our feeling that we are not quite at home in the current moment. And in the face of this unease, the systematic, good-over-evil "Star Wars" universe is comforting.

Like the medieval world, which rested on the collective memory of the long-gone past, the "Star Wars" universe is a recombination of old and familiar elements. "Star Wars" is Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. It's Fritz Lang and Walt Disney, Kurosawa and Castaneda, Oedipus and E.T. Reprised in its footage are the cliffhanger sci-fi serials of the '30s and '40s and the aerial sequences from "The Bridges of Toko-Ri" and the Battle of Britain. We find Tolkien's hobbits in Lucas' ewoks, Castaneda's Don Juan in Lucas' Obi-Wan.

Lucas' postmodern zest for appropriation may seem ironic, given that his vision itself is a complete throwback to knights errant and ladies in waiting, wizards and dragons and a universe with a personality. As a work of art, "Star Wars" shares something with the famous Watts Towers in Los Angeles, cathedral spires of whatever --- hubcaps, freeway guardrails, balcony railings, all kinds of recognizable modern stuff welded together by a single driven man and raised in Gothic tribute to the sky.

"It's not important how you do the shots," Lucas instructed the special effects crew on "Star Wars." "It's important what they look like." As a filmmaker, Lucas is a synthesizer, prizing effectiveness above all. He has the hot rodder's love of blending the various rough inputs exactly and minutely to produce a smooth and singular charge. This may be part of his attraction to myths and icons, which, first and foremost, are effective. Icons are supercharged images, each bearing its own significance -- there's none of that messy, Chekhovian getting-to-know-you about meeting Han Solo, say -- and thus combining efficiently and speedily in a narrative.

So helping actors embody complex emotional realities was never Lucas' intention. Rather, it was his job to withhold the actors from their full meaning. Real live actors generally make bad icons; the ones who are great at it, like John Wayne, are almost wholly one-dimensional in their acting. Managing this restraint was Lucas' backbreaking labor on the "Star Wars" set; he had to turn the actors into ciphers for the formula: Mark Hamill into "The Kid," Carrie Fisher "The Girl."

As befits a neo-medievalist, Lucas cares everything for the vision and not a whole lot for the means of expressing it. "I don't think, as a craftsman, that my films are extremely well made," he has said. "They're kind of crude." This could be false modesty, certainly, though as a visionary and a perfectionist Lucas would tend to focus on the ways in which the product doesn't come up to the prototype. In the medieval world view, too, the actual manifestations of a vision are always unworthy, flickering shadows that can never fully re-create the dream. "The moving image isn't any more truthful than the cave paintings," Lucas said in Premiere. "The artist finds the truth behind the 'truth.'"

That's why, though he has been described as the avatar of high-tech filmmaking, Lucas' attachment to technology is more evidence of his readiness to employ whatever works in the realization process -- be it computer graphics or C.S. Lewis. "I'm not that keen on technology," he said in Premiere. "I'm a storyteller, but to enable me to tell my stories, I've had to develop the necessary technology."

Lucas' reliance on classical mythology is similarly an item in his tool kit. His version of the hero's journey may have supplanted its precursors for the generation of viewers who saw "Star Wars" in their formative years. Yet what Lucas sought from the classics was first of all a stripped-down way of telling stories, a distillation intended to reveal a narrative formula for his iconographic characters. What Lucas lost in nuance, he gained in immediacy.

What this describes is bigger than "Star Wars," of course. In part it is the Zeitgeist at work. We are in many ways neo-medieval. In our historical moment, visual icons have once again become the predominant means of relaying information. We too live in a present deeply referenced to the past (to 1977, say) and deeply apprehensive about an apocalyptic future. We too have spent much of our epoch recombining elements, placing the age-old icons in new, deracinated contexts. Sure, we have technology now, though postmodern culture has given us the benefits of the Enlightenment without its technical underpinnings. We illuminate things like Merlins, flipping light switches. It's one big special effect. Once again, effortless will appears to rule. Magic seems to be everywhere.

George Lucas has shown a genius for encapsulating all of this and giving it back to us as myth. He's been able to anticipate the popular mind of our time, and has been richly rewarded for it. George Lucas, guy from Modesto, Calif., has become Saint George, iconmaker for the era. Lucas has worked hard to achieve this, but make no mistake: George Lucas is us and we are George Lucas. Complaints that instant iconography and sound-bite mythology amount to a starvation diet might just as well be directed toward the culture as a whole.

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