In about three months a new Star Wars film will arrive in theaters, just in time for Christmas. Already millions have viewed two teaser trailers released on YouTube and other online platforms.
Many fans have joined the speculations and arguments that arose as soon as the trailers appeared: a cross-hilt lightsaber? a non-clone, African-American stormtrooper? Chewbacca, un-aged? None of this minutia, though, will determine the triumph or tragedy of The Force Awakens. Instead, narrative structure will either align Episodes VII, VIII, and IX with the original trilogy — un-ruining our childhoods, in the words of The Simpsons’ Sideshow Mel — or heap them onto the junk pile of numbers I through III. The organization of the plot, specifically the spans of time and space and the number of principal characters and events, will mend or break the hearts of the franchise’s most loyal fans and attract or repel new audiences. The first and best articulation of these storytelling principles appeared here in our galaxy a long, long time ago.
Procession of the Trojan Horse, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, 1760.
According to literary accounts and archaeological excavations, the Trojan War between Mycenaean Greeks and the Hittite(?) people of Troy, a city on the coast of modern Turkey, took place around 3,200 years ago. Not long afterward, stories of this conflict between humans and deities began circulating around the Mediterranean, carried from city to city by traveling bards. These entertainers sang for their supper in the courts of royalty and at gatherings of commoners. Much like contemporary jazz musicians, they used formulaic phrases to compose spontaneously an endless number of variations on the Trojan War theme. As soon as the Phoenician alphabet arrived four hundred years later, Greeks began fixing these fluid oral performances in writing. Only the best Trojan War songs were worth the effort and expense of recording on the page, however, and inferior versions quickly faded from memory. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey survived this rigorous selection process, and they have enjoyed countless reproductions, translations, commentaries, and adaptations ever since, making them foundations of Western literature. The Iliad and Odyssey were the Star Wars of their day, and the Star Wars series has become our Iliad and Odyssey.
Homer? Roman copy of Hellenistic original, 100s BCE.
Here we may ask, what qualities made Homer’s work so superior to countless other tellings of the Trojan War? And how do the Star Wars films compare?
Aristotle? Roman marble copy of Greek bronze original, ca. 330 BCE.
The philosopher Aristotle, who lived approximately four centuries after Homer and more than twenty-three before our time, aimed to answer the first question in his Poetics. He concluded that a significant portion of Homer’s genius lay in his judiciousness. His competitors had tried to cover too much of the Trojan War in a single performance, beginning with the dispute among goddesses over the golden apple, marching through ten years of battle between mortals, then wandering the Mediterranean for another decade, as Greek heroes returned to their homes and Trojan refugees sought new ones. These expansive stories raced through time, space, and incident. Characters were so numerous that they became little more than names and brief physical descriptions. Their thoughts and feelings never emerged, and listeners failed to form strong connections with them.
Homer, on the other hand, carefully selected only a few, small bits from the sprawling Trojan War cycle and developed them to their fullest. The Iliad joins the conflict in the final year of the decade-long siege of Troy. The audience visits only three locations: the Greek encampments near the beach, the interior of the walled city, and the battlefield in between. The action transpires over a matter of days: insulted by his commander, the Greek hero Achilles refuses to fight; his beloved companion Patroclus then dies in his place while battling the Trojan hero Hector; finally, Achilles defeats Hector, signaling the beginning of the end for Troy. Homer makes brief allusions to events that occur long before and after, but he compresses the central story to the “wrath of Achilles.” In this way, a handful of principal characters have chances to become three dimensional human beings to whom audiences relate easily and deeply.
Achilles tends to Patroclus' wound from an arrow. Ceramic, ca. 500 BCE.
At first glance, the Odyssey appears more far-ranging, and for this reason some ancient critics doubted that Homer was its author. Close examination, though, shows that this tale is also an efficient one. First, we follow Odysseus’ son Telemachus, infuriated by the suitors hounding his grieving mother Penelope, as he searches for news of his missing father. We then meet Odysseus on the island of the nymph Calypso, the penultimate stop of his ten-year journey home. He spurns her advances, sets out to sea, and washes up on the island of the Phaeacians. In an anticipation of cinema, Homer then describes the fall of Troy and Odysseus’ subsequent wanderings through the flashbacks of the Phaeacian bard and the Greek hero himself. The final leg of Odysseus’ trip to his native Ithaca and the reunion with his wife and son follow. Like the Iliad, the central story moves through a small number of locations over the course of a few weeks. Audiences have ample opportunity to develop genuine concern for less than a dozen principal characters.
Odysseus and his companions escape the Sirens. Ceramic, ca. 480 BCE.
Aristotle points out that the plots of the Iliad and the Odyssey were so focused that playwrights might have adapted each epic into one or perhaps two tragic plays, the most emotionally intense and highest form of art, in the philosopher’s estimation. Many more stage dramas would have been necessary to cover all of the material contained in the narratively sweeping, but psychologically diluted epics of Homer’s competitors.
Roman, the playwright Menander with masks, 1st century BCE - 1st century CE.
Now we may return to our second question: how do the Star Wars films match up to the ancient poems and the philosopher’s principles of effective storytelling? The original trilogy shares the virtues of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, while the Episodes I through III suffer from the same vices as the rambling Trojan War tales that proved unworthy of preservation in writing.
Consider the narrow scope of the original film, Episode IV: A New Hope. The plot moves in linear fashion through three settings: from Tatooine (including Leia’s ship flying overhead), to space flight aboard the Millennium Falcon, to the Death Star (and the Rebel base on Yavin 4 within its firing range). The number of principal characters is nearly as small and consistent with Classical archetypes: Leia is the damsel in distress; Luke, the aspiring hero; Obi-Wan, the wise, old teacher; Han Solo, the cynical vagabond; Vader, the dark villain. The droids and Chewbacca are secondary characters who provide commentary and comic relief. The events are few as well: Vader captures Leia; Luke meets the droids, Obi-Wan, and Han and resolves to save her; Luke leads the others in Leia’s rescue, but loses Obi-Wan to Vader; with Han’s assistance, Luke defeats Vader and destroys the Death Star, leaving the Rebels triumphant for the moment. All of this action transpires in a matter of days, perhaps less than a week.
As in the Homeric poems, a narrow range of time and space, a small population, and a few major events allow viewers of Hope to follow the development of the film’s characters closely. We watch Luke mature from naive, daydreaming farmboy to experienced space traveller, combat pilot, and Jedi initiate. We see Obi-wan complete his final mission as a Knight of the Old Republic, protecting Luke through the final days of his childhood and passing along his knowledge of the Force. We understand why he must sacrifice his life for Luke and the galaxy at large, sad as the gesture becomes. Leia appears to be a conventional Princess when we first meet her, impudent but powerless; she hides from Vader, pleads for Obi-Wan’s help, and becomes a prisoner of the Empire. Later in the story, though, we watch her take control of her escape, oversee the attack on the Death Star, and stand as the genuine leader of the Rebels in the final scene. “Solo,” of course, transforms from a self-centered smuggler to Luke’s strongest ally, a love interest for Leia, and a vital member of the resistance movement. In the broadest view, audiences watch the balance of power within the galaxy shift from the sinister Empire, supported by the Dark Side of the Force, to the Rebel Alliance and the Light.
George Lucas himself has emphasized the deliberate narrative economy of the first installment of the Star Wars series in numerous interviews in print and on video. Lack of financial and technological resources forced the young director to select only a few incidents from the middle of the sprawling saga that he had written to make a single film, with no assurances that others would follow. His decision bears a strong resemblance to Homer’s culling of the entire Trojan War cycle for the most compelling episodes and characters.
Even under the direction of others, Hope’s sequels remained similarly narrow in their storytelling. Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back moves from the ice world of Hoth, to the swamps of Dagobah, and through an asteroid field to the Cloud City of Bespin. The characters continue to develop along the same trajectories established in the previous film: Luke becomes more expert in the ways of the Force; Han and Leia grow closer; and the droids and Chewy continue to assist the humans and provide some laughs. Only three new characters appear in supporting roles: Yoda, Lando, and Boba Fett. The most significant change occurs in Vader, who gains new depth with the revelation that he is Luke’s father. Again, all of the action transpires in what appears to be a matter of weeks, at most. Notice too the proximity of Empire’s plot to the earlier movie; only three years have passed since the destruction of the Death Star.
Episode VI: Return of the Jedi begins almost immediately after Empire’s close, as the principal and secondary characters converge on Jabba’s lair. From this location on Tatooine, we follow Luke back to Dagobah, then join him and the rest of the gang on the forest moon of Endor and the battle above at the new Death Star. The disclosure that Luke and Leia are siblings allows her and Han, finally, to form a romantic couple. The deaths of Yoda and Vader, redeemed in his final moments as Anakin Skywalker, leave Luke a fully fledged Jedi Knight in tune with the Force and at peace with his family history. Once again, a Star Wars film follows the Homeric template: narrative economy allows audiences to become intimately involved in the development of a few main characters. In Aristotelian fashion too, Hope, Empire, and Jedi each might become one stage play apiece.
Episodes I, II, and III, however, depart from the Classical models and become messy and shallow. In each, we travel back and forth between many locations over several weeks or months. The characters are so numerous and fleeting that we have little opportunity to see their personalities develop and we quickly lose interest in their fates. A greater number of action scenes and more sophisticated visual effects only exacerbate these problems.
The Phantom Menace’s troubles begin with its locations. At first count, they seem to be few: Naboo, Tatooine, and Coruscant. Yet these worlds are more complex than the settings in the original trilogy. Naboo consists of five smaller areas: the Trade Federation ships orbiting above, the rainforest surface, the underwater city of the Gungan, the capital city of Theed, and the grassy plain where the planet’s united inhabitants battle the droid army. The look of each of space is so distinct that audiences likely treat them as different and new, expanding and complicating the narrative. The podrace on Tatooine stands apart from the rest of the action there in a similar way. Likewise, Coruscant divides into the chambers of the Jedi Council and the Galactic Senate. The broad settings of the original trilogy also broke down into more discrete areas, like the open desert, Luke’s home, and Mos Eisley spaceport on Tatooine in Hope, but their consistent terrain, color palette, and decoration give viewers a more unified sense of place and a simpler mental map.
More problematic is the route we take through the locations in Menace: from Naboo, to Tatooine, to Coruscant, and back to Naboo. This circle is fundamentally dissatisfying: we travelled across the galaxy on screen and sat in the chairs of the theater for more than an hour just to return to the place we started? The films of the original trilogy move audiences inexorably forward in space, giving their stories a palpable sense of progress. Homer’s Odyssey begins and ends on Ithaca, but the first visit finds the island in turmoil without its hero. His return is a genuinely new development in the story. In Menace, we watch Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan arrive, leave, and return; too much space-faring, too quickly, and too roundabout for one narrative.
A larger, more disappointing circle forms with Menace’s inclusion of Tatooine. Hope began on this galactic backwater, providing Luke with his rural innocence and dreams of escaping to pursue a greater destiny elsewhere. Here is the ambition of so many young Americans, and people the world over, including so many ancient Greek shepherds who thrilled at the stories of boys like themselves departing for the Trojan War. No wonder that the first Star Wars film has enjoyed such international success since its release in 1977. Incorporating Tatooine into Menace undoes this characterization of Luke and the broader theme of an adventurous coming-of-age by suggesting that the desert planet has played a crucial role in the fate of the galaxy from the very beginning; rather than a backwater, it is the birthplace of the strongest exponents of both the Light and Dark Sides of the Force. The original trilogy also implies that Obi-Wan chose Tatooine as the hiding place for the infant Luke because of its obscurity; it was so remote and sparsely populated that even Vader and the Emperor were unlikely to detect their presences there. If Tatooine was Anakin’s home as well, it ought to have been the last place that Obi-Wan would have taken Vader’s son for protection. The only gain in Menace’s loop back to Tatooine seems to be the chance to insert C-3PO and R2D2 more deeply into the saga by making them inventions of young Anikin. To recycle fans’ affection for these secondary characters, Menace must take pains to explain the memory loss the droids must have suffered so that they could arrive on the barren world again at the beginning of Hope, ignorant of the previous generation of heroes and villains. In all of these ways, returning to Tatooine in Menace gives the prequels a narratively incestuous feel and shrinks the Star Wars universe dramatically. Menace ought to have taken Luke’s advice as he departed Tatooine: “I’m never coming back.”
The multiplication of Menace’s characters is a greater sin against narrative efficiency. There are at least two candidates for protagonist, maybe three: Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, and young Anakin. The lead female role expands into Amidala and her handmaidens and ultimately Padme. Other characters on the side of right include Chancellor Valorum, Yoda, Mace Windu and the rest of the Jedi Council, Naboo’s Governor and Chief of Security, and Anikin’s enslaved mother. Villains pile up too: Darth Sidious-Chancellor Palpatine, his apprentice Darth Maul, the corrupt Trade Federation leaders, the slaveowner Watto, and the podracer Sebulba. There are even two types of battle droid. Comic relief comes not only from R2 and 3PO, but also Jar Jar Binks, the jowl-faced Gungan leader, and the two-headed podrace announcer. So numerous are the characters that the distinction between principals and secondaries becomes difficult to discern. “Follow the white people” becomes the ugly default practice for viewers. Even these humans do not enjoy enough screen time to develop beyond flat, one-trait types with little audience appeal.
The events in Menace present two problems. First, a nearly continuous stream of action sequences gives the narrative a choppy feel and strains the audience’s attention. In the opening scenes on Naboo, we see a fight between lightsabers and laser guns, a droid invasion, a hazardous undersea voyage, and a narrow escape by ship into outer space. On Tatooine, we watch the high-speed pursuit of the podrace and witness the Jedi draw their lightsabers again in their first encounter with Darth Maul. When we return to Naboo, armies meet on the open field, a strike team penetrates the capital city, lightsabers duel for a third time, and space ships blast away at each other once more. Audiences have little time to rest with the characters and process all of these chases and battles. Where the films of the original trilogy had clear peaks and valleys in their action, Menace tries to present one high point after another. The result is an elevated, but flat line that viewers cannot follow very far before becoming fatigued and dropping off. The relative ease, low expense, and high quality of CGI effects may have tempted Lucas and other members of the production team to up the ante of the action this way. The general increase in the pace of storytelling and editing in the post-music video era of filmmaking might have been a contributing factor as well. Whatever the causes, the effect is deadening rather than heightening.
Faster pacing also creates some difficulty measuring the passage of time within Menace. Unseen travel between distant planets plus the number and variety of events that we do observe suggests a duration of at least weeks, maybe months. Certainly Menace’s story is longer than the films of the original trilogy and the Greek epics.
The few scenes in Menace that allow us to pause from the action pose another problem. Here the dialogue usually turns to galactic politics: taxation on trade routes, the Federation’s embargo, shifting loyalties within the Senate, the corresponding responses of the Jedi Council, and the shadowy plots of the Sith. All this talk of enmeshed systems aims to be sophisticated and grand, but the result is simply confusion and boredom. Worse, these matters shrink the characters in significance; the deeds and demise of any individual amount to little in this larger scheme. Qui-Gon dies, for example, but Obi-Wan is there to take his place as the hero of this episode and the sworn mentor to Anikin in the those to come (undoing the the original trilogy’s suggestion that Obi-wan’s hubris created Vader; a simpler, Classical device). Even without Obi-Wan, Menace has already introduced an entire Council of Jedi, including Yoda, who might do just as well or better than Obi-Wan. Darth Maul’s death at Obi-Wan’s hands is even less meaningful; to viewers, he is no more than a devilish face and twin-tipped lightsaber. Count Dooku takes his place in the next episode, he dies too, and audiences remain unaffected, since we hardly knew him either (only fans of the iconic horror and fantasy actor Christopher Lee sigh with disappointment). These characters are just cogs in a machine whose operations few of us bother laboring to understand. The deaths of Obi-Wan and Vader-Anakin in the original trilogy, by comparison, are crucial turning points in the plots of Hope and Jedi and culminating moments emotionally.
Like Menace, Homer might have treated the Trojan War as a case study in the interplay of complex systems. Some historians have argued that a trade dispute between powers in the eastern and western Mediterranean was the likely source of the conflict. Instead, Homer makes the war deeply personal from the start by identifying the abduction of Helen as the root cause of its human dimension. Likewise, gods and goddesses do not appear as members of some distant, inscrutable bureaucracy in the Iliad and Odyssey. Rather, these super-personalities clash with one another and with mortals, driven by similar, but more intense feelings than human love and hatred. So Achilles, son of a divine mother, and Odysseus, favorite of Athena, are not simply cogs in a machine; the special efforts of each adventurer are greater than the sum of the actions of lesser men. Only heroes overcome obstacles and defeat foes of supernatural villainy. They may receive assistance at critical moments from secondary characters, but the final victory belongs to the champion, not the network. Thus, the Iliad and Odyssey are not egghead exercises in systems analysis that tilt toward socialist solutions; they are stories of the triumph and tragedy of individuals with heart and guts. So are the episodes of the original Star Wars trilogy.
Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith proceed to violate the principles of narrative economy in similar ways. Both race through more time, space, characters, and incidents than audiences care to manage. Clones becomes even more mired in galaxy-wide schemes than Menace, but Sith manages to claw a bit of its way back toward the personal interest of the original trilogy as Anikin becomes Vader.
Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith proceed to violate the principles of narrative economy in similar ways. Both race through more time, space, characters, and incidents than audiences care to manage. Clones becomes even more mired in galaxy-wide schemes than Menace, but Sith manages to claw a bit of its way back toward the personal interest of the original trilogy as Anikin becomes Vader.
So Homer and Aristotle may help explain audiences’ continuing affection for the original Star Wars trilogy and their fading interest in the prequels: IV. Hope, V. Empire, and VI. Jedi keep the scale of their stories small, allowing their characters and our attachments to them to grow; I. Menace, II. Clones, and III. Sith sprawl outward, leaving few emotionally high or low points. The success of The Force Awakens and the two episodes to follow may also rest on the lateral tightness and vertical depth of their narratives. Lucas, J. J. Abrams, and other directors in the franchise may do well to look less into future of visual effects and more into the enduring tales of the ancient past.
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