Dooku

Updated.

Anthony Lane pans Revenge of the Sith in the latest New Yorker.

Lane isn't a fan of Star Wars, and even the most loyal fans, over the age of 12, have had trouble enjoying the previous three movies.  Despite all the advance buzz that this final Star Wars film is as as good as the first two, I suspect that ROTS (and there's an unfortunate acronym) benefits mostly from a collective relief that it isn't as bad as Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace and from fans' satisfaction at finally getting to see what they've been waiting to see since Empire Strikes Back, which is the story that should have been the basis for Episodes I and II but which Lucas put on the backburner while he played around with his new digital tools---Anakin Skywalker's seduction by the Dark Side.

Lane, not being caught up in the story, couldn't care less.  That leaves him out in the cold, all by himself, stuck actually watching the movie George Lucas made instead of the pop myth summoned up out of the collective not quite unconcious of millions of obsessed fans.

And, however highly you might rate Lucas' abilities as a moviemaker, the movies' fans' collaborative talents as mythmakers are much greater than his talents as a storyteller.

But Lane leads off his review with a curious complaint.  He doesn't like the names Lucas has given to his creations.

Sith. What kind of a word is that? Sith. It sounds to me like the noise that emerges when you block one nostril and blow through the other, but to George Lucas it is a name that trumpets evil. What is proved beyond question by “Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith,” the latest—and, you will be shattered to hear, the last—installment of his sci-fi bonanza, is that Lucas, though his eye may be greedy for sensation, has an ear of purest cloth.  All those who concoct imagined worlds must populate and name them, and the resonance of those names is a fairly accurate guide to the mettle of the imagination in question. Tolkien, earthed in Old English, had a head start that led him straight to the flinty perfection of Mordor and Orc. Here, by contrast, are some Lucas inventions: Palpatine. Sidious. Mace Windu. (Isn’t that something you spray on colicky babies?) Bail Organa. And Sith.

He forgot the absolute worst name.

Princess Leia Organa.

I have to say, though, that Lucas' poor naming technique is the least of the problems caused by his cloth ear.

By the way, Lane's using the phrase cloth ear instead of tin ear is a reminder that he's English and so it may be that the names that sound silly to him don't sound quite so silly to an ear like Lucas' which was trained in the laid-back inflections of Southern California.  Anyway, I think Mace Windu is a cool name.

As Lane says, coming up with names for people and places in an imaginary world is tricky.  It's tough even when your imaginary world is meant to be a close approximation of this one in this time.  How many contemporary novelists have truly inspired names for their characters?  Lots of sci fi and fantasy writers have tried and failed at this task, but it hasn't done real damage to their works.  George R. R. Martin barely bothers inventing names in his Song of Fire and Ice series.  Although his stories are set in a world as fantastic as Middle Earth, he has main characters named Jon and Ed and Dany (Ok, Eddard and Daenerys, but come on).  The characters with those names and the world they inhabit are so compelling that it doesn't matter what they're called.  That Luke Sykwalker lives on a planet with a name that sounds like a combination of a sneeze and a spit and a giggle, Tatooine, and has an aunt named Beru, a mother named Padme, and a grandmother named Schmoo---sorry, I meant Shmi---is mildly amusing if you think about it, but also pretty easy to forget once you get caught up in Luke's story.

Where Lucas' tin or cloth ear does the most harm is in his dialogue.  He's notoriously bad at giving his actors lines they can work with.  In fact, his dialogue is so bad that it turns good actors into bad ones.  They have to struggle so hard to make a speech sound like it makes sense that they have to forget about infusing it with anything like emotion or character.

All the movies have worked best when their narratives are taken over and driven by their visuals---I don't mean the moments when Lucas gets carried away with his visual effects.  I mean the moments when the story can be told through images instead of dialogue.  You can watch most of the original with the sound off and follow it right through to the end, and I suspect that's what's going to be good about Revenge of the Sith.

Lucas' incompetence as a writer of dialogue must be obvious even to himself.  You'd think then he'd hire someone to do it for him.  But he won't.  It's a control issue.  But it's also a sign of his single greatest flaw as an artist---he refuses to learn from other artists.  He is unable to properly credit either the sources of his inspiration or the artists, technicians, and actors who've worked with him.  He thanks them, he rewards them well, he allows them to take the stage, but he will not ever admit that he owes them.  He doesn't need to say it, and he can say it without meaning it.  He just needs to listen and follow their lead when they know better what to do.

It was unfair of Lane to compare Lucas' fumbling with names to Tolkien's great skill at it.  Tolkien could probably have written his books in Elf or Orc if he'd had the time.  His names grew out of his talent and learning as a linguist and they have a logic and consistency that gives them the authenticity of names in the real world.

KIng Theoden's son is named Theodred.  The brother and sister who are Theoden's niece and nephew are Eowyn and Eomer and they live in Edoras---their names are more connected to the place they live than the King's, which is right, because they will inherit the kingdom.  There are the brothers Boromir and Faramir, but their father's name is Denethor, so the suffix mir could be a maternal reference.  They are their mother's sons and not their father's, which is a good thing, considering what kind of man Denethor is.  But all three, Denethor, Boromir, and Faramir are men of Gondor, which is uncomfortably close in both geography and sound to Mordor.  Good and evil live side by side in place and rhyme and the father and the brother are connected by rhyme to both places, establishing the connections and the temptations all three must wrestle with.

The best Lucas can do along these lines is name all his evil characters Darth.

But I don't think Lane brought up Tolkien just to prove that Lucas isn't a poet or a scholar.

I think he wanted to remind readers, without having to get into it, that Star Wars has borrowed a lot from the Lord of the Rings but that all the borrowing hasn't lifted the movies to the same level of artistic achievement as the books---or even the movies based on the books.

I don't know for a fact that Lucas ever read the Lord of the Rings or if he's seen the movies.  If he has he appears to have learned about as much from them as he would have by giving them the skip.

Besides learning how to have avoided naming a cool planet after what sounds like a card game---Kamino---one of the things he could have learned, and should have learned was that every single character doesn't have to fit into his main scheme.

In Lord of the Rings the greatest temptation is wanting the Ring to use its power to do good.  Power uses its possessor, that's Tolkien's lesson.  But there is in fact only one character who succumbs to this temptation, Ysildir, and he's more a memory than a character.  Boromir is tempted and comes close to giving in.  Gandalf and Galadriel are tempted for the briefest moment.  Aragorn is never tempted.  That's the sign he is the true king.  Wanting power, even to do good, is the sin.

This, as it turns out, is the sin that corrupts Anakin.

Unfortunately it is also the sin that corrupted Count Dooku, apparently, which makes Dooku---another really stupid name---merely a double for Darth Vader.  So of course we're not surprised that Anakin and Dooku face off in a duel in front of the Emperor in a scene that looks exactly like Luke and Vader's duel in Return of the Jedi.

Oh, look, Lucas is doubling.  How mythic!

How boring.  Lucas has taken a potentially interesting character and turned him into a cardboard cutout.

In Lord of the Rings there are plenty of other ways for characters to lose their ways and their souls than putting on the ring.  Putting on the ring doesn't do the same thing to every character who wears it either.  Hobbits, for instance, get cranky and pathologically anti-social.  But Saruman doesn't care a fig about the Ring.  He doesn't need it.  He's already got the power he needs; what he wants, apparently, is worshippers.  He talks of sharing power with Sauron, but he probably thinks he can get rid of Sauron when the time comes.  Saruman wants to be a god on earth and he sets out to remake the world by destroying it.  How neo-con of him.

Denethor goes mad because he can't let go of past glory not because he covets power.  He can't step aside although he knows that his time has passed.  The reason he favors Boromir over Faramir is that he sees Boromir as an extension of himself.  Faramir is too much his own person.  (One of the failures of the movies is the way Farmair as a character is weakened.  His only motivation is to gain his daddy's love.  In the books, he angered his father by spending all his time running after Gandalf and Aragorn.)  Denethor's undoing is his vanity.

Theoden ends a hero, but when we meet him he is almost lost to his despair.  He has the same trouble Denethor has facing the fact that his time is over---Tolkien doubled with the best of them---but instead of resisting in anger like Denethor, he gives in to sadness and self-pity.

Then there's Boromir.

Dooku is introduced in Attack of the Clones as if he's going to be a Boromir.  We're told that he's an idealist who has left the Jedi order for no reason that the Jedi themselves either understand or are willing to talk about but which we can guess is that he knows evil is afoot, the Jedi are helpless to stop it, and he's gone off to find the power to combat it on his own.

When he starts explaining himself to his prisoner Obi-wan he compares himself to Obi-wan's master, Qui-gon Jinn, whom we know is a true idealist and who had also estranged himself from the Jedi Council, although without leaving the order.  Qui-gon knew something was rotten in Coruscant.  All of the Jedi seem to know in Episode I that the Force is out of balance, but Qui-gon is the only one who seems to understand that this is a problem.  It would have been interesting and tragic if Dooku understood this better than Qui-gon and had set out to fix it and in doing so had wound up doing evil himself because the problem can't be solved through an exercise of power and will but by the exact opposite, through renunciation of power and self.  That's what Luke does when he refuses to kill Vader.

It's apparently what Qui-gon had in mind.

Had Lucas allowed Dooku to develop this way, let him be a hero who goes wrong attempting to do good, he'd have have made Dooku not only a double of Anakin but also a double for Qui-gon, Obi-wan, Yoda, and Luke.  He'd have created a more morally complex universe in which we had reason to worry about those characters' souls as well as Anakin's.  There's  not a one of them who'd have been truly tempted by the dark side.  But only Luke---the story's Galahad---is above all temptation.

Except that there aren't any other temptations in Lucas' world.  We don't have to worry about the souls of the heroes, and that allows us not to have to worry about our own.

Dooku would also have been more compelling as a character if he was another Saruman, an idea that should have occured to Lucas.  After all, both characters are played by the great Christopher Lee.  Suppose Dooku didn't serve Darth Sidious but was his rival.  Then Anakin and the other Jedi could be plausibly fooled into opposing him.  They wouldn't just be dupes, they'd be fighting a real enemy, not a shadow of their real enemy.  The trouble would be that they'd be so caught up in fighting the first enemy they don't see the other.  This is sort of what happens, but not really.  Basically, Sidious pulls the wool over their eyes and all their heroics in the Clone Wars are really just puppet shows.

Sarumon is, in reality, a fallen angel.  He is Lucifer.  Sauron is not the devil.  He's just earthly evil.  That's why he has no personality.  He is the evil that men do.  Saruman is something more.  Lucas could have made Dooku a fallen angel, and in doing so given his universe another, powerful villain.  An actually charismatic villain, too.  Palpatine is supposed to be a charmer, but he's such an obvious snake in the garden, that it's actually another sign of Anakin's weakness that he prefers Palpatine's company to Obi-wan's and even Padme's, and we're distanced from Anakin even further and attracted to Palpatine not at all.

A villain who is a great warrior and leader in his own right, however, is compelling.  You can almost root for him.

But Dooku turns out to be nothing more than another evil henchman.

The Sith aren't very interesting villains.  Even Darth Vader is just an evil henchman.  They aren't evil, they just do evil.  They take orders.  They are in fact less interesting than orcs.  Orcs don't know they are the bad guys.  This gives them personality and something to talk about.  The Sith can't talk about anything but the power of the Dark Side.  Think about it.  Vader has no conversation.  All he can talk about his ancient religion.  He bores Grand Moff Tarkin to tears.

"The Jedi are extinct, my friend.  Their power has gone out of the universe.  You are all that's left of their ancient religion."

So for the love of the Force will you please shut up?

By making Dooku just another Sith and becoming a Sith the only path to the Dark Side and turning to the Dark Side the only form of evil, Lucas has let us all off the hook.

He allows everybody in the audience to say, well, hey, I'm not a Sith, I'm not angry, I'm not afraid, I'm not anybody's evil henchman.  I must be a Jedi!  What a good fellow I am!

Which is not the message he had in mind.

Exegesical updates:  Raoul Vega catches me in a big mistake about Saruman.  As he points out, Saruman was interested in the Ring.  He just couldn't find it.  My fault for remembering the movies more clearly than the books.  But it's still true that Saruman creates his own path to evil---he's undone by his intellectual arrogance without having to touch the ring.

Raoul also makes an interesting point about the characters of Theoden and Denethor, another case of doubling.

Meanwhile, Jaquandor is a more forgiving fan of Lucas than I am.  Not an uncritical fan, just more inclined to focus on what's good in the movies.  He has written many posts about Star Wars and you can start on his front page and make your way through his archives.  Or you can go here and here and watch him deal handily with the blockheaded Right Wing intellectual-types who refuse to let Star Wars be just a movie and insist on seeing it as an anti-Bush allegory.  As Jaquandor says, this makes:

Lucas a friggin' genius. I mean, this filmmaker from Modesto was so prescient that he was able to start laying the groundwork for an allegorical space-opera polemic about our current President, over twenty-five years before our current President was ever elected!

Comments

[burritoboy]

Well, I'm not entirely certain that that message isn't what Lucas had in mind. As you mention, it's not hard to find villains in literature or art who are led to villiany by wanting to do good and getting misled (whether through character flaws, miscalculation, extremism of one kind or another, etc.).

A big part of the Spielberg/Lucas project was to remove precisely any moral ambiguity within their films or even to have hints that moral questions existed in the universe. That's why they revived the prior cinema and art of boys' novels, low-grade sci-fi, low-end horror movies, etc. The official excuse was that such precursors were "exciting". The problem is that these precursors were "exciting" nearly exclusively for technical reasons - manipulation of the timing of schocks and thrills, technical craftsmanship, etc. Lucas and Spielberg took this type of cinema to a new level of profitability by using unprecedented amounts of cash budgets.

Lucas and Spielberg intentionally avoided the equally (if not more) "exciting" cinema of Anthony Mann, Robert Aldrich, Sam Fuller and so on - which relied more about the internal excitement generated by the plots and the director's creativity - partially because they wanted to avoid the moral ambiguity of that school of cinema.

[sfmike]

When the title was announced some months ago, I misheard it in my mind as "Revenge of the Sissies" which could be a very funny little film. C'mon, creative geeks, I want to see that Quicktime movie on the internets.

[Jaquandor]

Lucas has always sought out help with his dialogue. He doesn't give screen credit to his script doctors some of the time, but he does use them. On the very first Star Wars, Lucas's old friends Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz helped out (the writers of "American Graffiti"); then he brought in Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan for TESB; Kasdan returned for ROTJ. For TPM, Frank Darabont and Carrie Fisher helped doctor the dialogue. Lucas brought in a full-fledged co-writer for AOTC, Jonathan Hales, and it's recently been confirmed that Tom Stoppard pitched in for ROTS.

Now, maybe he's picked the wrong people and followed the wrong advice they've given or whatnot -- as vocal a defender of STAR WARS as I am, I certainly would never advance dialogue as a strength of these films, although I also would never claim that dialogue is as big a flaw in them as many people think -- it simply isn't true that Lucas won't ask for help with his dialogue. If anything, the man has always been up front about his shortcomings in that department.

[Lance]

Jaquandor, I didn't know about the script doctoring by Carrie Fisher. And that's great about Stoppard's helping out with ROTS. Is it true that Stoppard was fired from the His Dark Materials adaptations?

The first two movies were so much better written than any of the next three that I have to think that whatever help Lucas got for the later movies was more in the way of advice and a few good lines here and there. If he'd had real help Anakin's infamous sand line in AOTC would have ended before he got around to comparing sand to Padme's skin. It was actually a good line up till that point. But I think it was you who wrote in one of your posts that Anakin's awful dialogue is actually in keeping with his character.

The dialogue isn't as big a flaw as people think, you're right, because the movies, when they work, are driven by visuals. They are like the best silent films that way.

Burritoboy, I meant that I didn't think Lucas wanted the message to be that none of us has to worry about turning to the Dark Side. I think that behind that confused anger leads to hate, hate leads to fear, or fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, or hate leads to etc., however it goes, is the idea that we can all be undone by our passions, but I think that Lucas gets so caught up in the easy formulation and how EVIL is personated that he makes it easy to ignore his own point. You're right that moral complexity is something he has consciously avoided.

[Geoduck]

Just to nitpick, in the LofR novels, Boromir and Faramir's mother was named Finduilas. (She died when they were young, and is only mentioned in passing.) Guess that means she's related to Legolas.

And while it's true that in the movie version, Saruman didn't show much if any interest in the Ring, in the original novels he was hunting for it just as hard as Sauron. That's why Marry and Pippin were dragged off alive by the Orcs at the end of The Two Towers; being hobbits, Saruman was hoping they'd have the Ring, or at least information about it.

As for Sauron being the Devil or not.. you may be right thematically, but technically, he's the Devil's last surviving arch-fiend, after the Devil (aka Melkor) has been long cast out of the world into the Void.

[Lance]

Geoduck, Yeah, I blew that one. I was thinking of the movies more than the books and when I saw the movies I thought that Saruman was chasing the Ring for Sauron not himself.

[dave]

actually, the name finduilas is taken from a
elf character in the silmarillion.
i believe she was the unrequited lover of the
man, turin turambur.

[grishaxxx]

I'll get to the rest at my place, a bit later, but, first, Fuck Anthony Lane. His problem with this one - as it is with most of what he is forced to write about - is its vulgarity, about which he moans in his last paragraph. Well, mate, you're in the wrong business.
Lane's problem as a writer about movies (as opposed to being a critic) is that he seems to feel they are beneath him. I fell out with him a long time ago when he started a review of "The Age of Innocence" by complaining that Michelle Pfeiffer's hairdo reminded him of Lucille Ball as Lucy, and - well, after such an association, it was all too silly. Asshole. I have a movie buddy who reads him regularly, never agrees with his judgments, but, "likes the jokes." I wish I did, but for all the cleverness, they're empty and mean, and they burn me up.
By the way, as you highlight Lane's making fun of Lucas's goofy namings, I wonder what he thinks about Henry James: Fleda Vetch, Lambert Strether, Hyacinth Robinson - there are many more at that level. The Master - that Old Vulgarian.

[grishaxxx]

I should add, for those who don't know, that "Hyacinth Robinson" is a guy, in "The Princess Casamassima", and that he's a member of a terrorist cell. Go figure.

[grishaxxx]

O - and for a genius at the naming thingy: Nabokov, with - just in "Lolita" - Clare Quilty, Charlotte Haze, Vivian Darkbloom, and, of course, Humbert Humbert. Thomas Pynchon (his student, btw), caught VN's attention with Dewey Gland, Benny Profane and Mafia Winsome, just from "V". "V" - that must have stood for "Vulgar"...or something.

[burritoboy]

"I meant that I didn't think Lucas wanted the message to be that none of us has to worry about turning to the Dark Side. I think that behind that confused anger leads to hate, hate leads to fear, or fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, or hate leads to etc., however it goes, is the idea that we can all be undone by our passions"

Whether that's Lucas' intention or not (and I'm not entirely certain it is), it's so poorly and crudely expressed, again, that's it's actually less morally interesting than even much of children's literature - you have to seek out pulp children's books like Doc Savage to get to Lucas' level.

[Bryant]

In my Episode III, there are two story arcs: Anakin is being slowly corrupted by Palpatine, but at the same time, Dooku is being slowly redeemed by Yoda. Without, mind you, ceasing to be a Separatist. Anakin puts on the armor early: his sacrifice, to bring himself to Dooku's level, to attempt to equal the best lightsaber duellist of all time. It's tight-focus, none of these instantaneous travels from planet to planet. Anakin and Obi-Wan chase Dooku through the galaxy.

In the end, they catch up, and Dooku contemptuously disarms Obi-Wan, and Anakin and Dooku duel. Dooku wins. But... what now? If he loses, Palpatine wins. If Dooku wins, he'll shatter the Republic. He doesn't really want that any more.

So he dons the armor himself, and settles in to begin decades of lies, waiting for the time when he can complete the circle and help his enemy's son rid the universe of the Emperor. Any other Jedi would be incapable of such a grand falsehood. BUt Dooku went to the Dark Side a long time ago.

[LondonLee]

I am so tired of people banging on about the "mythology" of Star Wars. Lucas is no master storyteller, they're simple good/evil movies for crying out loud, your average B-movie Western has the same level of complexity. And what kind of master storyteller starts his story with Chapter III?

Al Roker on the Today Show this morning actually cracked a funny joke about the word "Sith" said by Sylvester the Cat.

[K.M.]

I found Lane's to be one of the most deeply satisfying reviews I've ever read; the last 600 words or so are a riot (and plenty thoughtful). Then again, like Lane, I lack the profound spiritual attachment to Star Wars that seems to possess so many folks; I just see a series of decreasingly interesting movies that underpin the true Empire--that of the marketeers. As to the apologists for Lucas's dialogue as not being what the movies are "really about," well, yeah, we all know these pictures weren't written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, but, alas, the characters DO talk, which obliges their creator to give them something at least nominally interesting to say and in a manner that doesn't leave the listener cringing.

I haven't read the Tolkien books--too many other wonderful things in this life, it seems to me--and had avoided the nine-plus hours of movie on the same principle. (Ditto the Potter express/merry-go-round.) At last, though, strong-armed by a Tolkienaphone girlfriend, I submitted to the first Lord movie, the endless director's cut no less. Let's just say I'm cutting my losses.

(Ok, now I've pissed off 90% of humanity. Sorry, friends! But here's a final thought.)

It seems to me that the Star Wars, Potter, and Tolkien movies are enterprises driven so much more by self-importance and commerce than by the logic of an outward-looking art. I mean, how is it that films like Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, Kurosawa's Ran, Lean's Great Expectations--numberless grander, more interesting stories--can be told, from start to finish, in no more than a third of the time that the Star Wars, Potter, and Tolkien sagas arrogate to themselves?

[tWB]

I'm not entirely sure that the intent of "Star Wars" was to "remove ... any moral ambiguity within their films or even to have hints that moral questions existed in the universe." Lucas is a smarter storyteller than director (or scriptwriter), and he drew heavily not just from Campbell, but from his interest in philosophy and ethics. In the total SW arc, as fumblingly and poorly-told as it is, there's a conflict between the deontic ethics of the Jedi and the teleological outlook of the "dark side."

A "close reading" of the SW arc leads us to see that, (A) the Jedi's ethics are insufficient to stop the Republic from crumbling and the Empire taking hold; (B) the teleological ethics of the Dark Side are, perhaps inevitably, perverted into a lust for control, with the ends justifying the worst means; and, (C), Luke's actions in RotJ show a path out of the deontic/teleologic trap through virtue-based ethics.

Or, to put it another way, if the Jedi are "good," why does Luke basically disobey every order given to him by Yoda, and still come out as the hero? Because, according to Lucas, deontic ethics are insufficient to prevent undesired outcomes, while teleologic ethics are not ultimately grounded on a necessary moral base. Only personal virtue can bridge that gap and, as we are incessantly reminded by Lucas' characters, "restore balance to the Force."

[The Heretik]

Here's a link you might enjoy, Lance.
Tolkien Sarcasm

[grishaxxx]

Finally got an LOTR commentary (I hope appropriate to this post and to other things) up -
http://ratboyxx.blogspot.com/2005/05/grey-spectrum.html

I continue to be interested in the pull of this kind of thing. I can't get Frye's "Secular Scripture" out of my head, especially when you show how shallow Santorum's readings are. Grrrrr!

[Rosie Powell]

Dude, do you really expect me to believe that the characters in the LORD OF THE RINGS Trilogy are more complex and ambiguous than those in the STAR WARS saga? Because if you do, you'll be holding your breath until you drop dead. Out of all the characters in the LOTR trilogy, the only one who really had any sign of ambiguity was Boromir and Faramir's father - Denethor. Everyone else was either affected by the Ring . . . or not.

Your essay is a joke.

[Rosie Powell]

"as fumblingly and poorly-told as it is,"

You criticize Lucas' writing and yet, praise the philosophy in his movies? Now I know that human beings are capable of great hypocricy. As if you could do better. Which I doubt.