The Repurposed Future of Star Wars

George Lucas' Space Opera Mythologized the 20th Century

I'm not a gearhead. Describing myself as "not mechanically inclined" might still be a slight exaggeration of my competency in that domain. My interest in cars and trucks and things that go dropped off precipitously after an early infatuation during my Richard Scarry-reading childhood.

And yet I love the machinery of Star Wars.

(I realize a fascination with the Millennium Falcon and landspeeders and the like might not actually be all that at odds with not knowing the difference between a car's timing belt and fan belt, but I'm going treat it as a fun and quirky contradiction, so quiet, you.)

I especially love the old machinery of the Star Wars universe. The grimy, battered, pre-owned, retrofitted, warranty-voided, scratch-and-dent vehicles, hardware, and environments of George Lucas' future-past. Sure, the Death Star and TIE fighters may be cool and all, but I'll take a dark sandcrawler cargo hold full of old droids and scrap over the antiseptic, shock-and-awe technology of the Empire any day. There's something about the junky, spit-and-baling wire, obsolete tech of that universe that speaks to me. So much so, that back during COVID lockdown, I built my own droid. I may not be mechanically inclined, but I can still make stuff, thank you very much.

FT-05. Everybody should have their own lockdown droid.

When the original Star Wars debuted in 1977, its "used future" (okay, yes, technically a future from a long time ago) aesthetic was something film that had not seen before. Up until then, the science fiction worlds depicted in film and television had mostly been visions of clean, sleek, and unified futurism seen in Star Trek or 2001: A Space Odyssey, or grim near-future dystopias, like Soylent Green, or full-on post-apocalyptic hellscapes in various states of decay, as in Omega Man, Planet of the Apes, or A Boy and His Dog. Or in the case of Logan's Run, a combination of the above.

(As a sidenote, what was the deal with Charlton Heston being in so many progressive science fiction allegories?)

There were a few antecedents in the "used future" department, most notably Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running, its weathered robots an inspiration for Lucas' droids. But that film, a space-set dystopia about the human world winding down, had much more in common with socially-conscious movies like Soylent Green than the escapism Star Wars.

Whether optimistic or pessimistic—and spoilers, they were virtually all pessimistic—movie and TV science fiction worlds were pretty much exclusively looking ahead to speculative futures.

Star Wars broke the mold by being both forward and backward-looking. By setting his story a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, George Lucas had deliberately divorced his story from a tradition of Earthbound science fiction films. He wasn't interested in making another dystopian socio-political allegory, as he had with THX 1138.

Star Wars was less science fiction than it was a fairy tale with a science fiction veneer. Even so, it took its science fiction trappings a lot more seriously than most science fiction films had up until that point.

Star Wars brought us to a galaxy that was a wildly varied hodgepodge of cultures and technology, a collection of worlds that already had a long history by the time we joined the story. It was a lived-in and often hard scrabble place with all the wear-and-tear, repairs, and modifications you'd expect. This was realized in part by using real locations in Tunisia and (briefly) Guatemala; there being the understanding that there were far more "out of this world" places on our own planet than had been seen in film and television science fiction to date. The visible history of the settings, gear, spacecraft, and so forth brought a sense of reality, depth, and tangibility that was new. But also old.

One of the keys to Star Wars power is in its retrospection. It's an incredibly pop culturally literate film that repurposes, reconfigures, and recontextualizes countless elements from the past. It's genius was in the way it made everything old new again.

John Dykstra, Star Wars special effects supervisor, inspects an X-wing model.

In his website Kitbashed: The Origins of Star Wars, Michael Heilemann aptly compares George Lucas' way of recombining his creative influences to kitbashing, the modelmaking technique of repurposing parts from off-the-shelf model kits to create new custom miniatures.

Although the practice predated the production and had been employed by film and television crews for some time, kitbashing would come to be forever associated with Star Wars. The modelmakers at at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the team of artists, technicians, and engineers Lucas assembled in 1975 to work on the production, did a considerable amount of literal kitbashing for the film's 360-some miniatures.

ILM didn't invent "kitbashing", but they did coin the term "greebles" (or "greeblies") to describe the doodads and gewgaws borrowed from model kits and used to add visual interest and a sense of scale to miniatures, like this filming model of the Millennium Falcon.

But the kitbashing spirit of Star Wars went beyond just the model building.

By the standards of the time, Star Wars' $11 million budget was fairly substantial (and contrary to legend, not low), but what Lucas was intent on pulling off something that had never been done before. Despite being decently funded, the production's ambitions challenged the budget. So the little-engine-that-could reputation was not unearned. Lucas and his team were creating entirely new worlds from the ground up. They were also inventing a new form of visual effects. There were no complete off-the-shelf solutions. So, resourceful problem-solving was the name of the day. When Roger Christian, the film's set decorator, discovered that the budget wouldn't cover fabricating set dressing from scratch, he had truckloads of airplane scrap brought in to dress the interiors and exteriors.

The meta-ness was almost certainly unintentional, but the production's necessity-driven inventiveness was reflected by the world's of the story: the scavenging culture of the Jawas, Han and Chewbacca's whatever-works approach to maintenance, and the scrappiness of the Rebel Alliance.

And to Michael Heilemann's larger point, the film itself on a conceptual level is a kitbash of parts liberally borrowed from a huge variety of other media: Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials, Frank Herbert's Dune, the westerns of John Ford, the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa, World War II movies and documentaries, and too many others to list here.

Another analogy that comes to mind for Lucas' creative tendencies is custom car building.

George Lucas is a true gear head. He grew up obsessed with cars. American Graffiti was an ode to the hot rod culture of his youth in Modesto, California of the early 60s. He knew something about cars, rebuilding and modifying them, repurposing parts to build something new. Star Wars was, in essence, a flashy hot rod made out of classic parts.

To some extent, that process of collecting parts and putting them together in a new way could just be a metaphor for creativity in general. But I think it says something particular about Lucas' interests and sensibilities.

Lucas combined an afficionado's curatorial interest in film and pop culture with a maker's impulse to do something of his own with the components. Take something old—or a lot of something olds—and make them new. As Lucas himself said while making the movie, "It should look very familiar, but at the same time not be familiar at all." Nostalgia with a high performance engine and a glossy, new paint job.

It's something that Lucas has in common with Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino's movies are largely about movies, filled with borrowed elements recontextualized and remixed. Lucas and Tarantino both freely mix pieces of "high" and "low" culture, rejecting the idea that there are any clear boundaries. Of course, while Tarantino's films are exercises in post-modernism with all the attendant irony, cool detachment, and self-reference, George Lucas comes across as earnest and uninterested in drawing attention to the hand of the creator. What Lucas built with Star Wars was the first multi-genre pastiche of its kind, and in doing so he paved the way for filmmakers like Tarantino, Guillermo del Toro, and Peter Jackson. For better or worse, Lucas and his pal Steven Spielberg were responsible for unleashing the blockbuster franchise monster on the world along with the eventual mainstreaming of nerd culture.

Genres collide in concept artist Ralph McQuarrie's painting of the Mos Eisley cantina, an image that mashes up allusions to westerns, Casablanca, Metropolis, samurai, Nazi iconography, and classic fantasy and science fiction pulp magazine illustration.

George Lucas has claimed that from the beginning Star Wars had been a conscious attempt to recreate classical mythological motifs in a new context and that he had drawn inspiration from Joseph Campbell's classic of comparative mythology The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Gary Kurtz, who worked closely with Lucas as a producer (American Graffiti, Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back) until the two had an ambiguous parting of the ways during pre-production for Return of the Jedi, would suggest in later interviews that Lucas was retroactively intellectualizing his original, more prosaic intent, which was simply to update Flash Gordon-style space adventure for a new generation.

But it doesn't really matter how deliberately Lucas was patterning Star Wars after Campbell's definitions of a universal Monomyth and the Hero's Journey (which themselves have undergone something of a reevaluation in recent years, but that's another whole conversation.) It doesn't matter if he was more focused on manufacturing a piece of popular entertainment that would sell toys, or if it was some combination of the two. It doesn't matter whether he was working from a blueprint or making it up as he went along.

What matters is that the film was embraced by audiences as a modern myth.

The prologue of the past, an opening crawl from a Flash Gordon movie serial.

Whatever his original intent, Lucas combed through the toy chest of the popular imagination, picking through it in a wide-ranging and connoisseurial way for treasures that had a certain resonance beyond their source. He chose things that were familiar, even if we couldn't always place why, but the way he put them together resulted in something that was simultaneously novel and universal.  

I was tempted to write that Star Wars isn't actually about much of anything, and while I don't mean that potentially heretical take as a criticism, it's not really true either. It's probably more accurate to describe Star Wars as not having much to say. Again, that's not meant to be a slight.

Even if it doesn't has much to say, Star Wars is about plenty.

It's about the dreams of the 20th century, a dream about dreams, if that's not too grandiose for you (or even if it is). Drawing from a wildly disparate range of story sources and genres, the movie finds points of intersection and overlap between superficially unrelated points, and ends up weaving its own golden thread through through the varied fabric of pop culture of the last century. (Where the Star Wars franchise ran into trouble, which it has since navigated with varying degrees of success, was when it started to be about itself.) Even the technology, despite being advanced, is really a dream-like riff on the technology of the past, the visual and tactile appeal of machines we know freely kitbashed together into a celebration of the idea of mechanical things.

When creative repurposing works, as with Star Wars, it's a form of transformative magic. The borrowed things take on new value and meaning, occasionally transcending their origins. The way the dots connect, the parts recombine, brushes up against certain truths about being human, even if they are the truths of dream and desire. There's a reason why these symbols, archetypes, themes, and motifs recur and continue to speak to us.

For George Lucas, the past was more than prologue. It was the future waiting to be rearranged.