My favorite thing about the original Star Wars movie is the fact that George Lucas very nearly made Apocalypse Now instead. He'd been trying to film Apocalypse Now for nearly a decade, in fact; Star Wars was a script he'd been playing with in the meantime, as the development process for Apocalypse Now dragged on and on and on.
Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola were close friends and contemporaries, at the time; you spoke of them in the same breath. Lucas was acclaimed for his coming-of-age film American Graffiti; his earlier movie THX 1138, which was also his first stab at science fiction filmmaking, had been critically panned and was a commercial flop. He was the kind of director you'd believe would make a movie about the Vietnam war, inspired by Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness. He was one of the auteurs.
But Apocalypse Now, which Lucas intended to direct as a black comedy, suffered through a decade of development hell; Lucas sat on it while Coppola directed The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. Eventually, things stalled out long enough that Lucas got to work on Star Wars instead; Coppola, who had only intended to produce Apocalypse Now, took up the reins as director now that Lucas was busy.
What's fascinating is that Star Wars fits perfectly into this lineage of 1970s filmmaking. Watch it back-to-back with American Graffiti, The Godfather, and Apocalypse Now, and it just makes sense. Lucas corrects the convoluted sci-fi pretensions of THX 1138 by grounding his story in the coming-of-age vulnerability of American Graffiti. You can still read Star Wars as a commentary on the Vietnam War a la Apocalypse Now—both films are staunchly critical of America as the Imperial Empire, with Star Wars flat-out depicting its America stand-in massacring an entire planet as a show of force. (Lucas started writing his script as the United States, at Henry Kissinger's orders, was carpet-bombing Cambodia; Star Wars was released partway through the Cambodian genocide.)
Beyond just reflecting the political climate, part of what makes the original Star Wars so fascinating is how technically it is a child of 70s filmmaking: the way that Lucas and Coppola are both inspired by the same visual styles, adopt similar shooting techniques, and think of composition and editing in similar ways. We think of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now as virtuosic examples of cinematography, but Star Wars is no less virtuosic a feat. (Ebert thought THX 1138 was overly simplistic, but called it a "visual delight"—it was clear early on that Lucas's greatest gifts were as a visual storyteller.) Its accomplishments as a film get overlooked due to how much its production influenced science fiction and pop culture as a whole—every science fiction movie has the original Star Wars baked into its DNA—but if you take it out of those silos, if you examine it as a work of cinematic craft and not just as an early sci-fi blockbuster, it's a tremendous work in its own right, as surely as Steven Spielberg's Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. (Spielberg was younger than Lucas and Coppola, but Jaws released in 1975 and Close Encounters came out along with Star Wars in 1977; one reason The Godfather and Apocalypse Now hold the nostalgic acclaim that they do, I think, is that they were some of the last examples of an earlier approach to popular moviemaking, the last vestiges of auteur cinema before the contemporary blockbuster really began in earnest.)
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Pop culture as we know it began with film. It was the first artistic and cultural medium to emerge in the era of mass media, where art could be distributed en masse across countries and continents. While music eventually supplanted it as the most dominant medium (and the one we most associate with pop culture as a whole), cinema planted the seeds; long before blockbusters dominated the landscape, well before Star Wars so much as laid the groundwork for the Marvel extended universe and the complete enfranchisement of moviemaking, movies became the world's universal language, ensuring America's cultural dominance as surely as its participation in World War II and subsequent international meddling established its political and military dominance. Godard, in his documentary Histoire(s) du cinema, claimed that the two most powerful men of the twentieth century were Hitler and Hitchcock, but that Hitchcock achieved where Hitler failed, by creating a universal international language and capturing the imaginations of an entire generation.
Godard was preoccupied with what we'd now recognize as memes: his movies, going back to his debut feature film Breathless, obsess over the ways in which we emulate the language of cinema, forming our identities in response to the culture that we consume. And Godard became the most popular and influential director of the French New Wave, developing the cinematic techniques that modernized our filmic language; Coppola and Lucas and Spielberg likely owe Godard more than they owe any other director. What Godard said of Hitchcock—that he invented specific images so timeless that they pervade even to this day—is doubly true of George Lucas, who with Star Wars created such iconic imagery that people now identify, religiously, as Jedi. We take it for granted that everybody knows what The Force is; Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker and Han Solo and Obi-Won Kenobi are a part of our cultural mythos, as surely as Zeus and Hades and Poseidon were in ancient Greece. Update Godard's claim, and you might well believe that George Lucas successfully dominated the world where Adolf Hitler failed; even today, as Nazis try to make a resurgence, it would be hard to call them more influential or more culturally pervasive than Star Wars is.
But what fascinates me about that earlier generation of filmmaking, about Lucas and Coppola et al, is that their films were perpetually in conversation with one another, and with filmmaking's past. Star Wars liberally borrows shots and techniques from earlier Flash Gordon movies; The Godfather's opening wedding scene is directly influenced by The Leopard, a 1963 Italian masterpiece which (like Coppola's film) is about the transition of power and cultural mores from one generation to another, and about the older generation's realization that the younger one cares nothing for its codes of conduct and honor. There's a conversation between movies, across countries, across decades. Filmmakers formed a society that spanned continents, of enthusiasts who were aware of each other's films, responded to one another, spoke to one another. They were omnivores, open-minded to all things new, eager to learn from anyone and anything that was doing something exciting and original and fresh.
That culture still exists! When Everything Everywhere All At Once became a surprise hit in 2022, sweeping the Oscars and grossing $140 million on a $25 million budget, people were enamored with the ways that it referenced Pixar movies at some points and the works of Wong Kar-Wai, the Hong Kong master of romance and aching eroticism, at others. America's most iconic Straight White Male Directors—Scorsese and Tarantino come to mind—are prominent champions of budding filmmakers around the world. (Tarantino famously championed Tropical Malady, a surreal 2004 film by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul that uses abstract, symbolic storytelling to get around Thailand's strict mores about homosexual romance. Even at the height of his popularity, just after the massive cultural phenomenon that was Kill Bill, one of the biggest directors on the planet found time to advocate for a burgeoning queer cinema movement halfway around the world.)
But that's not the way that most of us engage with cinema today, which is by design. The "cultural conversation" of moviemaking has been captured, to some extent, by the Extended Cinematic Universe. We still talk about the relationships between movies, but only within the context of a franchise; heated, passionate discussions are held about what amounts to a marketing brand. Advertisers finally figured out how to get us talking about their products for free, and it was by converting cinema itself into an ongoing advertisement of sorts. The Star Wars prequel trilogy was expressly designed to sell toys, with characters written to appeal to specific demographics and with action figures already in mind, but even that was simplistic compared to the cultural landscape of the sequel trilogy, which debuted alongside multiple TV series, spinoff movies, and games. You can view nothing but Star Wars-adjacent media and still have enough new content to fill an entire year; you can debate endlessly on social media and on Reddit about every new movie, and consume days' worth of YouTube and TikTok commentary that claims to be a critical and cultural conversation. Marvel, of course, puts Star Wars to shame on this front; Disney, which owns Marvel and Star Wars, creates live-action remakes of its own films, just to guarantee that you can experience all of their franchises in any way you'd want. Corporations have learned how to create a microcosm of film culture that exists in a vacuum: you don't have to engage with the world, you just have to engage with the brand. You won't have time to engage with anything else, if you're devoted enough to your chosen product.
When Godard made his claim about Hitchcock taking over the world, he wasn't entirely being complimentary. To him, this was an uncomfortable concept: something he feared was unavoidable. Breathless, his first film, was about the first generation of young men to grow up with cinema as their culture; it depicted a man who only understood himself in terms of movies he'd consumed, whose only sense of self came from the men he'd seen in movies. In a later movie, Pierrot le fou, the same actor finds himself at a party whose attendees can only speak in advertising slogans. Marx wrote about how the threat of capitalism is that the ones who own the means of production own a part of us; Godard, a Marxist, feared that pop culture in general, and movies in particular, might give corporations control over our language, our thoughts, our perception of the world. Where Hitler failed, Hitchcock succeeded—and now Star Wars, which started as a child of the 70s, a commentary on American imperialism, and a byproduct of an ongoing conversation between moviemakers around the world, exists largely to ensure that our memes and our language properly reflect the aims of The Walt Disney Company.
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Growing up, I read Sonic the Hedgehog comics far more than I played Sonic the Hedgehog games. I'm not entirely sure how this happened: somehow I got it in my head to read the comics, and my parents got a subscription, and for a handful of years Sonic comics were my pop-culture outlet of choice.
I was delighted to learn, checking back in with the franchise decades later, that the Sonic extended universe had come to an abrupt end in one of the most insane ways imaginable. Ken Penders, the lead writer of the series for nearly a decade and a half, had filled the comic with dozens of original characters, to the point that its lore and mythology had nothing to do with the game series and everything to do with an elaborate echidna-based realm of science fiction that was rooted, in part, around shoddily-appropriated aboriginal Australian folktales. Left unchecked—mainly because nobody at Sega thought anybody cared about the comics—he eventually sued Archie Comics over copyright claims; Archie found that it had no record of Penders signing over his copyrights to them, and was left with an EU of weird, off-putting echidnas that it no longer legally controlled. They had to terminate the entire series, rebooting it in 2016 so they could eradicate Penders' rogue contributions to the Sonic mythos. (Almost none of which, to be clear, ever made it into a single Sonic the Hedgehog video game.)
What we think of as "extended universe" storytelling originated with DC and Marvel comics, which invented the idea of a "multiverse" three-quarters of a century ago to explain the lack of continuity between their different writers' stories. There is no chronological way to read every Superman or Batman or Spider-Man story—not in a way that makes sense, at least. There's simply too much story to contain, too many contradictions, too many different writers coming in with wildly dissonant takes on what they think a given superhero ought to be.
This creative innovation has inadvertently become one of the great creative developments of the modern age. It planted the seeds for what eventually became the SCP Foundation, a science fiction universe in the form of a wiki whose entries are each drafted and edited by independent writers. In 1990, shortly before his death, Isaac Asimov attempted an earlier attempt of the same thing: he created "Isaac's Universe," a standalone sci-fi universe explicitly for other writers to create works for, though Asimov himself never wrote anything within it (by design). And long before Asimov, though well after Marvel's inadvertent invention, the Star Wars franchise served as the home to dozens if not hundreds of independent novels, which combined to form an extended universe that went well beyond George Lucas's own imagination. Before long, the novels were more in conversation with one another than they were with Lucas's original work. How could they not be? Lucas had directed all of three movies, and with childish and largely incoherent lore. He more hinted at a universe than created one. The people who lived in that universe and fleshed it out, the enthusiasts who cared to write novels about this universe, found more in each other's works than they could have possibly found in Lucas himself.
This extended universe posed a challenge for Disney, when it purchased Lucasfilms and the Star Wars franchise as a whole. They didn't want to contend with the "Star Wars Expanded Universe," as it was then known. They wanted a property that they owned and controlled—a property whose products all existed to promote one another. So they terminated it. The Star Wars Expanded Universe was retitled to Star Wars Legends, with "legends" pointedly suggesting that none of this was real or worth contending with. Fans of the Expanded Universe were pissed off about this, but what could they do? To Disney, they were hardly important people; whatever culture they had formed was not the kind of culture that Disney cared about. They wanted an empire. Anything smaller than empire-sized could be freely obliterated without a second thought.
I'm not a particularly diehard reader of comic books, but I enjoy a good series from time-to-time. I owned a copy of Grant Morrison's New X-Men as a pre-teen, and had my mind blown by how bleak and brutal it was. I'd expected a fun romp with some cool characters; I hadn't expected how directly it would be about Jim Crow-era America and genocide. Morrison, who I now know is one of the most acclaimed comic writers of all time, came to X-Men to write a Grant Morrison story; they were not just lending the Grant Morrison name to the X-Men franchise willy-nilly.
That, to me, is the exciting potential of an "extended universe:" that it introduces audiences of a particular franchise to artists they'd never experienced before. But Disney explicitly does not see this as their intention: they aggressively oppose filmmakers who see their Cinematic Universes as an opportunity to create cinema. When Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi made waves and attracted controversy, Disney pulled the original screenwriter and director of its sequel film off the project, replacing them with the notorious hack JJ Abrams; the result was even less popular than The Last Jedi had been. (Johnson got his revenge by creating Benoit Blanc, and now has a hit media property that's his to do with as he pleases.)
Even so, there are occasional delightful exceptions to the rule. Andor, the spinoff Star Wars TV series by the co-writer of Star Wars: Rogue One, has been acclaimed for its depiction of fascist imperialism, and called a harrowing commentary on contemporary America. In other words, Andor is acclaimed for doing what Lucas and Coppola did half a century ago; in a sense, it's continuing Lucas's legacy better than any of the other "sequels" that have been released in his name.
I haven't, however, seen Andor. That's not due to some snobby high-minded stance or anything: I'd love to give it a go if it becomes easily watchable for me. But Andor was released on Disney+, and it's more-or-less the only Disney product I'd care to watch, so I haven't signed up for the streaming service. Disney, after all, tends to make film in a way that explicitly keeps it from being the kind of movie that I enjoy.
In the end, I think that culture can, sometimes, be created in a vacuum. Art can come out of media properties; culture can develop even in spaces that reflect only themselves. Give me Grant Morrison on X-Men, or his iconic All-Star Superman. Give me the deranged lunacy of Ken Penders turning a Sega platformer into a deranged echidna dystopia. Give me Andor, sure, why not. But even there, the thing that holds my interest isn't the franchise, isn't the brand, so much as it's how these platforms give artists tools to do the same thing they've done for centuries, but in ways that speak to new audiences. It's exciting to think of people discovering meaningful art when they weren't seeking it out, in the same way that it was exciting to see cinema become an art form in its own right. Lucas and Coppola made movies about America, about the 1970s, about Vietnam, about the world; we do them a disservice by reducing entertainment to an endless ad campaign for itself.
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"There’s no difference between magic and creativity," Alan Moore said in a recent interview. "One part of magic is changing the consciousness of other people. Writing has always been the best way of doing that... I think a lot of us have forgotten what art is for. It’s an engine of human progress. Art and culture stay with us. It’s the wars we’re ashamed of."
In that interview, Moore discusses disowning his comics Watchmen and V For Vendetta altogether. When Moore published Watchmen for DC Comics, he gave them publishing rights for what he assumed would be a limited time; instead, DC used legal skulduggery to extend their ownership of his product forever, and has used it to authorize sequel comics, a film adaptation, and a spinoff TV series of Moore's original work. Moore wrote Watchmen as a standalone story; its characters were meant to start and end within the span of its pages. Instead, Watchmen was forcibly turned into a part of the extended DC universe: in its "sequel," Doomsday Clock, Doctor Manhattan teams up with Superman. Geoff Johns, who penned it, excitedly gushed about how Doomsday Clock would "touch the thematic and literal essence of DC," forever affecting its past and future storylines; he talked less about how Manhattan is explicitly a Cold War-era critique of Superman, a Superman who America uses as a stand-in for the atomic bomb to slaughter the Vietnamese and establish Vietnam as a permanent American territory.
In my opinion, the Watchmen TV series is one of the most fascinating media properties in recent memory. Damon Lindelof, who created it, had just achieved an all-time triumph with his TV "adaptation" of Tom Perotta's novel The Leftovers; after the first season of the show, which covered the entirety of the original book, Perotta joined Lindelof on the writing team, and co-created the second and third seasons, which are genuinely astonishing, miraculous works of art. Much as Coppola's The Godfather turned a boilerplate piece of mob fiction into a legitimate masterpiece, Lindelof and Perotta took a satisfying novel and created a jaw-dropper of a TV sequel. In retrospect, the season of television that adapts Lindelof's novel is the least interesting part of The Leftovers; the two seasons that follow are absolute stunners.
But when he created the Watchmen "sequel" series, Lindelof was well aware that he was committing a sin. Nobody was more anxious about DC's pilfering of Alan Moore's work than Lindelof; he was obsessed to the point of neurosis with "justifying" his work by creating something worthy of Moore himself. Before the release of his show, he released a five-page apology on Instagram, explaining his misgivings about his own work, explaining why he felt the need to try and make a series anyway, and explaining what he intended to do to make his unauthorized Watchmen spinoff worth making.
And Lindelof's Watchmen was a critical triumph. It's nowhere near as facile as Geoff Johns' hacky dreck: it revolves around the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, around America's sordid history of racism, homophobia, and overseas imperialism. Like Moore's actual Watchmen, and like Star Wars itself, it addresses the Vietnam War, and from the perspective of a Vietnamese woman who holds no fondness for America in her heart. It digs deeper into the right-wing nutjob Rorschach—Moore's scathing interpretation of Batman-style vigilante justice—and correctly concludes that Rorschach's admirers would be white-supremacist nutjobs, a modern update to the Ku Klux Klan, rather than anything heroic or indeed just.
In other words, Lindelof stayed true to his aims, and tried to make a work of art that was worthy of Moore's own masterpiece. At the same time, though, Lindelof's Watchmen couldn't help but try and change Moore's work. It interprets Moore's late-80s English work from the perspective of an American circa 2019. It completely reworks the implied backstory of a pivotal character, changing him from a Hitler-loving Russian strongman to a gay Black man who masked himself to keep his skin color from being noticed. And according to DC, who still owns Watchmen as a media property, this revision is canonical: if you believe in their institutional right, then Damon Lindelof changed this character not only in his own story but in Moore's thirty-year-old graphic novel. (Wikis dedicated to Watchmen and to DC Comics differ in their handling of this, with some taking care to differentiate between Moore's character and subsequent interpretations, and others flat-out eliminating the line between the two.)
I've met people who can't understand Alan Moore's virulent opposition to adaptations of his work. Prominent comic book artists, including Grant Morrison, have criticized Moore for his position. They see it as snobbery, as some form of elitist artistic pretension. But Moore has been clear that what he wants, more than anything, is for his stories to exist for their time. If his characters are timeless, it's not because they exist as blank slates for other writers to impose their visions onto: it's because there is something so authentically human about them, so insightful about the world Moore put them in, that they remain relevant to this day. When the V For Vendetta movie updated his story about Thatcher-era Britain to make it a commentary on Bush-era America, it fundamentally changed the work's political ideology and the dynamics between its characters: "updating" it to keep it "relevant" meant flat-out destroying the thing that Moore actually cared about.
It's all-but-impossible to see the original Star Wars as it existed in the 1970s. Thanks to George Lucas, that's true literally, not just figuratively: Lucas, at some point, revisited his original movies, injecting a slew of unnecessary CGI and re-editing scenes to outright change the order of certain events. The original Star Wars can no longer be acquired and viewed by legal means, though Disney has plans to screen the original unedited films in theaters next year, to commemorate its 50th anniversary. (Lucas is not alone in revising his movies this way: Coppola has revised Apocalypse Now so many times that there are now arguments about which version of the movie is the "authoritative" one. It's just like what would have happened if Lucas had directed the film to begin with!)
But beyond the literal changes Lucas made to the film, it's just hard to think of Star Wars as a one-off film 1977, the contemporary of Apocalypse Now and The Godfather and Spielberg's early hits. Michael Corleone was still appearing in new movies circa 1990, but the Michael Corleone of 1972 will forever live in 1972; Quint might be an iconic character, but he forever lives in 1975. You can't really divorce Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, on the other hand, from the half-century of enfranchisement that has immortalized and entombed them. Star Wars: Rogue One used CGI to recreate Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, as he appeared in the original film. Carrie Fisher, who died shortly before the film's release, "appears" in Rogue One, seemingly the same age as she was in '77. How can you possibly watch Star Wars as if you're witnessing the birth of original characters—characters who, for a moment, only existed in this particular moment and not eternally, undyingly? How can you watch Luke Skywalker as a contemporary of Michael Corleone? How can you watch Darth Vader appear on screen without thinking "that's Darth Vader?" How can you appreciate the artistry and model figurines of the original Millennium Falcon or Death Star, now that we've had decades of digital Millennium Falcons painstakingly recreate the original physical models, now that there's a life-sized Millennium Falcon ready to be boarded at Disney World?
In Alan Moore's recent interview, he reveals that Damon Lindelof wrote him directly to apologize for his Watchmen spinoff, and in elaborate fashion. "There was a TV series called Watchmen and my only connection with that was receiving a parcel with a powder blue barbecue apron bearing the hydrogen symbol and a letter that began, 'Mr. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying Watchmen…' I wrote back a brief letter, saying that this work has been stolen from me so, as far as I’m concerned, it is unauthorised." To Moore, that's all there is to say, no matter how much work Lindelof put into Watchmen—and it's awkward even to refer to Lindelof's Watchmen like that, with a standalone title, when even the name itself was stolen. There are fascinating ways to critique Lindelof's series, ways in which he simplifies or flattens certain characters into moralistic parables, ways in which his ethos and Moore's contradict so badly that the mentality which made The Leftovers transcendent instead makes his Watchmen banal. But even that critique is unworthy of Moore himself. It's the natural byproduct of DC Comics' attitude that Watchmen was never a work of art to be appreciated, just another franchise. It doesn't matter whether it's Damon Lindelof turning Watchmen into a commentary on white supremacy or Geoff Johns asking whether Doctor Manhattan and Superman would have been friends. Either way, the timely timelessness of Moore's work has been shattered, replaced with a "timelessness" that castrates the original work's relationship to time and place altogether.
In a superbly ironic bit of punctuation, Damon Lindelof announced that his Watchmen series would be a one-off miniseries, not the start of an ongoing show. DC said they would consider replacing him with other directors, but the series ended on such a definitive final note that they decided against it. Lindelof's Watchmen ended with Damon Lindelof. It is a self-contained story, a time capsule of Donald Trump's first presidential administration, a document of both right-wing and left-wing attitudes towards race. (Lindelof unintentionally captures the somewhat blithe ways that the mainstream American left treated racism as something to take an easy stand on; imagines the sort of fairytale hopeful happy ending that perfectly captures liberal America circa 2019.) Moore's Watchmen will be forced to endure spinoff after spinoff, but Lindelof's Watchmen will never have a sequel.
Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola were close friends and contemporaries, at the time; you spoke of them in the same breath. Lucas was acclaimed for his coming-of-age film American Graffiti; his earlier movie THX 1138, which was also his first stab at science fiction filmmaking, had been critically panned and was a commercial flop. He was the kind of director you'd believe would make a movie about the Vietnam war, inspired by Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness. He was one of the auteurs.
But Apocalypse Now, which Lucas intended to direct as a black comedy, suffered through a decade of development hell; Lucas sat on it while Coppola directed The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. Eventually, things stalled out long enough that Lucas got to work on Star Wars instead; Coppola, who had only intended to produce Apocalypse Now, took up the reins as director now that Lucas was busy.
What's fascinating is that Star Wars fits perfectly into this lineage of 1970s filmmaking. Watch it back-to-back with American Graffiti, The Godfather, and Apocalypse Now, and it just makes sense. Lucas corrects the convoluted sci-fi pretensions of THX 1138 by grounding his story in the coming-of-age vulnerability of American Graffiti. You can still read Star Wars as a commentary on the Vietnam War a la Apocalypse Now—both films are staunchly critical of America as the Imperial Empire, with Star Wars flat-out depicting its America stand-in massacring an entire planet as a show of force. (Lucas started writing his script as the United States, at Henry Kissinger's orders, was carpet-bombing Cambodia; Star Wars was released partway through the Cambodian genocide.)
Beyond just reflecting the political climate, part of what makes the original Star Wars so fascinating is how technically it is a child of 70s filmmaking: the way that Lucas and Coppola are both inspired by the same visual styles, adopt similar shooting techniques, and think of composition and editing in similar ways. We think of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now as virtuosic examples of cinematography, but Star Wars is no less virtuosic a feat. (Ebert thought THX 1138 was overly simplistic, but called it a "visual delight"—it was clear early on that Lucas's greatest gifts were as a visual storyteller.) Its accomplishments as a film get overlooked due to how much its production influenced science fiction and pop culture as a whole—every science fiction movie has the original Star Wars baked into its DNA—but if you take it out of those silos, if you examine it as a work of cinematic craft and not just as an early sci-fi blockbuster, it's a tremendous work in its own right, as surely as Steven Spielberg's Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. (Spielberg was younger than Lucas and Coppola, but Jaws released in 1975 and Close Encounters came out along with Star Wars in 1977; one reason The Godfather and Apocalypse Now hold the nostalgic acclaim that they do, I think, is that they were some of the last examples of an earlier approach to popular moviemaking, the last vestiges of auteur cinema before the contemporary blockbuster really began in earnest.)
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Pop culture as we know it began with film. It was the first artistic and cultural medium to emerge in the era of mass media, where art could be distributed en masse across countries and continents. While music eventually supplanted it as the most dominant medium (and the one we most associate with pop culture as a whole), cinema planted the seeds; long before blockbusters dominated the landscape, well before Star Wars so much as laid the groundwork for the Marvel extended universe and the complete enfranchisement of moviemaking, movies became the world's universal language, ensuring America's cultural dominance as surely as its participation in World War II and subsequent international meddling established its political and military dominance. Godard, in his documentary Histoire(s) du cinema, claimed that the two most powerful men of the twentieth century were Hitler and Hitchcock, but that Hitchcock achieved where Hitler failed, by creating a universal international language and capturing the imaginations of an entire generation.
Godard was preoccupied with what we'd now recognize as memes: his movies, going back to his debut feature film Breathless, obsess over the ways in which we emulate the language of cinema, forming our identities in response to the culture that we consume. And Godard became the most popular and influential director of the French New Wave, developing the cinematic techniques that modernized our filmic language; Coppola and Lucas and Spielberg likely owe Godard more than they owe any other director. What Godard said of Hitchcock—that he invented specific images so timeless that they pervade even to this day—is doubly true of George Lucas, who with Star Wars created such iconic imagery that people now identify, religiously, as Jedi. We take it for granted that everybody knows what The Force is; Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker and Han Solo and Obi-Won Kenobi are a part of our cultural mythos, as surely as Zeus and Hades and Poseidon were in ancient Greece. Update Godard's claim, and you might well believe that George Lucas successfully dominated the world where Adolf Hitler failed; even today, as Nazis try to make a resurgence, it would be hard to call them more influential or more culturally pervasive than Star Wars is.
But what fascinates me about that earlier generation of filmmaking, about Lucas and Coppola et al, is that their films were perpetually in conversation with one another, and with filmmaking's past. Star Wars liberally borrows shots and techniques from earlier Flash Gordon movies; The Godfather's opening wedding scene is directly influenced by The Leopard, a 1963 Italian masterpiece which (like Coppola's film) is about the transition of power and cultural mores from one generation to another, and about the older generation's realization that the younger one cares nothing for its codes of conduct and honor. There's a conversation between movies, across countries, across decades. Filmmakers formed a society that spanned continents, of enthusiasts who were aware of each other's films, responded to one another, spoke to one another. They were omnivores, open-minded to all things new, eager to learn from anyone and anything that was doing something exciting and original and fresh.
That culture still exists! When Everything Everywhere All At Once became a surprise hit in 2022, sweeping the Oscars and grossing $140 million on a $25 million budget, people were enamored with the ways that it referenced Pixar movies at some points and the works of Wong Kar-Wai, the Hong Kong master of romance and aching eroticism, at others. America's most iconic Straight White Male Directors—Scorsese and Tarantino come to mind—are prominent champions of budding filmmakers around the world. (Tarantino famously championed Tropical Malady, a surreal 2004 film by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul that uses abstract, symbolic storytelling to get around Thailand's strict mores about homosexual romance. Even at the height of his popularity, just after the massive cultural phenomenon that was Kill Bill, one of the biggest directors on the planet found time to advocate for a burgeoning queer cinema movement halfway around the world.)
But that's not the way that most of us engage with cinema today, which is by design. The "cultural conversation" of moviemaking has been captured, to some extent, by the Extended Cinematic Universe. We still talk about the relationships between movies, but only within the context of a franchise; heated, passionate discussions are held about what amounts to a marketing brand. Advertisers finally figured out how to get us talking about their products for free, and it was by converting cinema itself into an ongoing advertisement of sorts. The Star Wars prequel trilogy was expressly designed to sell toys, with characters written to appeal to specific demographics and with action figures already in mind, but even that was simplistic compared to the cultural landscape of the sequel trilogy, which debuted alongside multiple TV series, spinoff movies, and games. You can view nothing but Star Wars-adjacent media and still have enough new content to fill an entire year; you can debate endlessly on social media and on Reddit about every new movie, and consume days' worth of YouTube and TikTok commentary that claims to be a critical and cultural conversation. Marvel, of course, puts Star Wars to shame on this front; Disney, which owns Marvel and Star Wars, creates live-action remakes of its own films, just to guarantee that you can experience all of their franchises in any way you'd want. Corporations have learned how to create a microcosm of film culture that exists in a vacuum: you don't have to engage with the world, you just have to engage with the brand. You won't have time to engage with anything else, if you're devoted enough to your chosen product.
When Godard made his claim about Hitchcock taking over the world, he wasn't entirely being complimentary. To him, this was an uncomfortable concept: something he feared was unavoidable. Breathless, his first film, was about the first generation of young men to grow up with cinema as their culture; it depicted a man who only understood himself in terms of movies he'd consumed, whose only sense of self came from the men he'd seen in movies. In a later movie, Pierrot le fou, the same actor finds himself at a party whose attendees can only speak in advertising slogans. Marx wrote about how the threat of capitalism is that the ones who own the means of production own a part of us; Godard, a Marxist, feared that pop culture in general, and movies in particular, might give corporations control over our language, our thoughts, our perception of the world. Where Hitler failed, Hitchcock succeeded—and now Star Wars, which started as a child of the 70s, a commentary on American imperialism, and a byproduct of an ongoing conversation between moviemakers around the world, exists largely to ensure that our memes and our language properly reflect the aims of The Walt Disney Company.
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Growing up, I read Sonic the Hedgehog comics far more than I played Sonic the Hedgehog games. I'm not entirely sure how this happened: somehow I got it in my head to read the comics, and my parents got a subscription, and for a handful of years Sonic comics were my pop-culture outlet of choice.
I was delighted to learn, checking back in with the franchise decades later, that the Sonic extended universe had come to an abrupt end in one of the most insane ways imaginable. Ken Penders, the lead writer of the series for nearly a decade and a half, had filled the comic with dozens of original characters, to the point that its lore and mythology had nothing to do with the game series and everything to do with an elaborate echidna-based realm of science fiction that was rooted, in part, around shoddily-appropriated aboriginal Australian folktales. Left unchecked—mainly because nobody at Sega thought anybody cared about the comics—he eventually sued Archie Comics over copyright claims; Archie found that it had no record of Penders signing over his copyrights to them, and was left with an EU of weird, off-putting echidnas that it no longer legally controlled. They had to terminate the entire series, rebooting it in 2016 so they could eradicate Penders' rogue contributions to the Sonic mythos. (Almost none of which, to be clear, ever made it into a single Sonic the Hedgehog video game.)
What we think of as "extended universe" storytelling originated with DC and Marvel comics, which invented the idea of a "multiverse" three-quarters of a century ago to explain the lack of continuity between their different writers' stories. There is no chronological way to read every Superman or Batman or Spider-Man story—not in a way that makes sense, at least. There's simply too much story to contain, too many contradictions, too many different writers coming in with wildly dissonant takes on what they think a given superhero ought to be.
This creative innovation has inadvertently become one of the great creative developments of the modern age. It planted the seeds for what eventually became the SCP Foundation, a science fiction universe in the form of a wiki whose entries are each drafted and edited by independent writers. In 1990, shortly before his death, Isaac Asimov attempted an earlier attempt of the same thing: he created "Isaac's Universe," a standalone sci-fi universe explicitly for other writers to create works for, though Asimov himself never wrote anything within it (by design). And long before Asimov, though well after Marvel's inadvertent invention, the Star Wars franchise served as the home to dozens if not hundreds of independent novels, which combined to form an extended universe that went well beyond George Lucas's own imagination. Before long, the novels were more in conversation with one another than they were with Lucas's original work. How could they not be? Lucas had directed all of three movies, and with childish and largely incoherent lore. He more hinted at a universe than created one. The people who lived in that universe and fleshed it out, the enthusiasts who cared to write novels about this universe, found more in each other's works than they could have possibly found in Lucas himself.
This extended universe posed a challenge for Disney, when it purchased Lucasfilms and the Star Wars franchise as a whole. They didn't want to contend with the "Star Wars Expanded Universe," as it was then known. They wanted a property that they owned and controlled—a property whose products all existed to promote one another. So they terminated it. The Star Wars Expanded Universe was retitled to Star Wars Legends, with "legends" pointedly suggesting that none of this was real or worth contending with. Fans of the Expanded Universe were pissed off about this, but what could they do? To Disney, they were hardly important people; whatever culture they had formed was not the kind of culture that Disney cared about. They wanted an empire. Anything smaller than empire-sized could be freely obliterated without a second thought.
I'm not a particularly diehard reader of comic books, but I enjoy a good series from time-to-time. I owned a copy of Grant Morrison's New X-Men as a pre-teen, and had my mind blown by how bleak and brutal it was. I'd expected a fun romp with some cool characters; I hadn't expected how directly it would be about Jim Crow-era America and genocide. Morrison, who I now know is one of the most acclaimed comic writers of all time, came to X-Men to write a Grant Morrison story; they were not just lending the Grant Morrison name to the X-Men franchise willy-nilly.
That, to me, is the exciting potential of an "extended universe:" that it introduces audiences of a particular franchise to artists they'd never experienced before. But Disney explicitly does not see this as their intention: they aggressively oppose filmmakers who see their Cinematic Universes as an opportunity to create cinema. When Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi made waves and attracted controversy, Disney pulled the original screenwriter and director of its sequel film off the project, replacing them with the notorious hack JJ Abrams; the result was even less popular than The Last Jedi had been. (Johnson got his revenge by creating Benoit Blanc, and now has a hit media property that's his to do with as he pleases.)
Even so, there are occasional delightful exceptions to the rule. Andor, the spinoff Star Wars TV series by the co-writer of Star Wars: Rogue One, has been acclaimed for its depiction of fascist imperialism, and called a harrowing commentary on contemporary America. In other words, Andor is acclaimed for doing what Lucas and Coppola did half a century ago; in a sense, it's continuing Lucas's legacy better than any of the other "sequels" that have been released in his name.
I haven't, however, seen Andor. That's not due to some snobby high-minded stance or anything: I'd love to give it a go if it becomes easily watchable for me. But Andor was released on Disney+, and it's more-or-less the only Disney product I'd care to watch, so I haven't signed up for the streaming service. Disney, after all, tends to make film in a way that explicitly keeps it from being the kind of movie that I enjoy.
In the end, I think that culture can, sometimes, be created in a vacuum. Art can come out of media properties; culture can develop even in spaces that reflect only themselves. Give me Grant Morrison on X-Men, or his iconic All-Star Superman. Give me the deranged lunacy of Ken Penders turning a Sega platformer into a deranged echidna dystopia. Give me Andor, sure, why not. But even there, the thing that holds my interest isn't the franchise, isn't the brand, so much as it's how these platforms give artists tools to do the same thing they've done for centuries, but in ways that speak to new audiences. It's exciting to think of people discovering meaningful art when they weren't seeking it out, in the same way that it was exciting to see cinema become an art form in its own right. Lucas and Coppola made movies about America, about the 1970s, about Vietnam, about the world; we do them a disservice by reducing entertainment to an endless ad campaign for itself.
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"There’s no difference between magic and creativity," Alan Moore said in a recent interview. "One part of magic is changing the consciousness of other people. Writing has always been the best way of doing that... I think a lot of us have forgotten what art is for. It’s an engine of human progress. Art and culture stay with us. It’s the wars we’re ashamed of."
In that interview, Moore discusses disowning his comics Watchmen and V For Vendetta altogether. When Moore published Watchmen for DC Comics, he gave them publishing rights for what he assumed would be a limited time; instead, DC used legal skulduggery to extend their ownership of his product forever, and has used it to authorize sequel comics, a film adaptation, and a spinoff TV series of Moore's original work. Moore wrote Watchmen as a standalone story; its characters were meant to start and end within the span of its pages. Instead, Watchmen was forcibly turned into a part of the extended DC universe: in its "sequel," Doomsday Clock, Doctor Manhattan teams up with Superman. Geoff Johns, who penned it, excitedly gushed about how Doomsday Clock would "touch the thematic and literal essence of DC," forever affecting its past and future storylines; he talked less about how Manhattan is explicitly a Cold War-era critique of Superman, a Superman who America uses as a stand-in for the atomic bomb to slaughter the Vietnamese and establish Vietnam as a permanent American territory.
In my opinion, the Watchmen TV series is one of the most fascinating media properties in recent memory. Damon Lindelof, who created it, had just achieved an all-time triumph with his TV "adaptation" of Tom Perotta's novel The Leftovers; after the first season of the show, which covered the entirety of the original book, Perotta joined Lindelof on the writing team, and co-created the second and third seasons, which are genuinely astonishing, miraculous works of art. Much as Coppola's The Godfather turned a boilerplate piece of mob fiction into a legitimate masterpiece, Lindelof and Perotta took a satisfying novel and created a jaw-dropper of a TV sequel. In retrospect, the season of television that adapts Lindelof's novel is the least interesting part of The Leftovers; the two seasons that follow are absolute stunners.
But when he created the Watchmen "sequel" series, Lindelof was well aware that he was committing a sin. Nobody was more anxious about DC's pilfering of Alan Moore's work than Lindelof; he was obsessed to the point of neurosis with "justifying" his work by creating something worthy of Moore himself. Before the release of his show, he released a five-page apology on Instagram, explaining his misgivings about his own work, explaining why he felt the need to try and make a series anyway, and explaining what he intended to do to make his unauthorized Watchmen spinoff worth making.
And Lindelof's Watchmen was a critical triumph. It's nowhere near as facile as Geoff Johns' hacky dreck: it revolves around the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, around America's sordid history of racism, homophobia, and overseas imperialism. Like Moore's actual Watchmen, and like Star Wars itself, it addresses the Vietnam War, and from the perspective of a Vietnamese woman who holds no fondness for America in her heart. It digs deeper into the right-wing nutjob Rorschach—Moore's scathing interpretation of Batman-style vigilante justice—and correctly concludes that Rorschach's admirers would be white-supremacist nutjobs, a modern update to the Ku Klux Klan, rather than anything heroic or indeed just.
In other words, Lindelof stayed true to his aims, and tried to make a work of art that was worthy of Moore's own masterpiece. At the same time, though, Lindelof's Watchmen couldn't help but try and change Moore's work. It interprets Moore's late-80s English work from the perspective of an American circa 2019. It completely reworks the implied backstory of a pivotal character, changing him from a Hitler-loving Russian strongman to a gay Black man who masked himself to keep his skin color from being noticed. And according to DC, who still owns Watchmen as a media property, this revision is canonical: if you believe in their institutional right, then Damon Lindelof changed this character not only in his own story but in Moore's thirty-year-old graphic novel. (Wikis dedicated to Watchmen and to DC Comics differ in their handling of this, with some taking care to differentiate between Moore's character and subsequent interpretations, and others flat-out eliminating the line between the two.)
I've met people who can't understand Alan Moore's virulent opposition to adaptations of his work. Prominent comic book artists, including Grant Morrison, have criticized Moore for his position. They see it as snobbery, as some form of elitist artistic pretension. But Moore has been clear that what he wants, more than anything, is for his stories to exist for their time. If his characters are timeless, it's not because they exist as blank slates for other writers to impose their visions onto: it's because there is something so authentically human about them, so insightful about the world Moore put them in, that they remain relevant to this day. When the V For Vendetta movie updated his story about Thatcher-era Britain to make it a commentary on Bush-era America, it fundamentally changed the work's political ideology and the dynamics between its characters: "updating" it to keep it "relevant" meant flat-out destroying the thing that Moore actually cared about.
It's all-but-impossible to see the original Star Wars as it existed in the 1970s. Thanks to George Lucas, that's true literally, not just figuratively: Lucas, at some point, revisited his original movies, injecting a slew of unnecessary CGI and re-editing scenes to outright change the order of certain events. The original Star Wars can no longer be acquired and viewed by legal means, though Disney has plans to screen the original unedited films in theaters next year, to commemorate its 50th anniversary. (Lucas is not alone in revising his movies this way: Coppola has revised Apocalypse Now so many times that there are now arguments about which version of the movie is the "authoritative" one. It's just like what would have happened if Lucas had directed the film to begin with!)
But beyond the literal changes Lucas made to the film, it's just hard to think of Star Wars as a one-off film 1977, the contemporary of Apocalypse Now and The Godfather and Spielberg's early hits. Michael Corleone was still appearing in new movies circa 1990, but the Michael Corleone of 1972 will forever live in 1972; Quint might be an iconic character, but he forever lives in 1975. You can't really divorce Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, on the other hand, from the half-century of enfranchisement that has immortalized and entombed them. Star Wars: Rogue One used CGI to recreate Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, as he appeared in the original film. Carrie Fisher, who died shortly before the film's release, "appears" in Rogue One, seemingly the same age as she was in '77. How can you possibly watch Star Wars as if you're witnessing the birth of original characters—characters who, for a moment, only existed in this particular moment and not eternally, undyingly? How can you watch Luke Skywalker as a contemporary of Michael Corleone? How can you watch Darth Vader appear on screen without thinking "that's Darth Vader?" How can you appreciate the artistry and model figurines of the original Millennium Falcon or Death Star, now that we've had decades of digital Millennium Falcons painstakingly recreate the original physical models, now that there's a life-sized Millennium Falcon ready to be boarded at Disney World?
In Alan Moore's recent interview, he reveals that Damon Lindelof wrote him directly to apologize for his Watchmen spinoff, and in elaborate fashion. "There was a TV series called Watchmen and my only connection with that was receiving a parcel with a powder blue barbecue apron bearing the hydrogen symbol and a letter that began, 'Mr. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying Watchmen…' I wrote back a brief letter, saying that this work has been stolen from me so, as far as I’m concerned, it is unauthorised." To Moore, that's all there is to say, no matter how much work Lindelof put into Watchmen—and it's awkward even to refer to Lindelof's Watchmen like that, with a standalone title, when even the name itself was stolen. There are fascinating ways to critique Lindelof's series, ways in which he simplifies or flattens certain characters into moralistic parables, ways in which his ethos and Moore's contradict so badly that the mentality which made The Leftovers transcendent instead makes his Watchmen banal. But even that critique is unworthy of Moore himself. It's the natural byproduct of DC Comics' attitude that Watchmen was never a work of art to be appreciated, just another franchise. It doesn't matter whether it's Damon Lindelof turning Watchmen into a commentary on white supremacy or Geoff Johns asking whether Doctor Manhattan and Superman would have been friends. Either way, the timely timelessness of Moore's work has been shattered, replaced with a "timelessness" that castrates the original work's relationship to time and place altogether.
In a superbly ironic bit of punctuation, Damon Lindelof announced that his Watchmen series would be a one-off miniseries, not the start of an ongoing show. DC said they would consider replacing him with other directors, but the series ended on such a definitive final note that they decided against it. Lindelof's Watchmen ended with Damon Lindelof. It is a self-contained story, a time capsule of Donald Trump's first presidential administration, a document of both right-wing and left-wing attitudes towards race. (Lindelof unintentionally captures the somewhat blithe ways that the mainstream American left treated racism as something to take an easy stand on; imagines the sort of fairytale hopeful happy ending that perfectly captures liberal America circa 2019.) Moore's Watchmen will be forced to endure spinoff after spinoff, but Lindelof's Watchmen will never have a sequel.