Straha wrote: ↑2019-08-07 12:51pm
I realize I am picking this back up after a while, but... well, whatever.
Look, just on a basic level, that's not symbolism. Symbolism is the way that non-textual visuals are used to create and craft ideas and readings of the story. So, to just use Star Wars, the way that Vader is shot in shadows and in the dark in the ESB fight scenes helps to create this sense of him as a super-natural force who is just fucking with Luke until the final moments when, suddenly, everything is in full-light on the catwalk. Then Vader doesn't just use his force powers but just mercilessly beats Luke down before revealing himself as Luke's father. Before he was a hidden figure, now in the light he is revealed as what he is both in terms of strength and position re: Luke.
The RotJ fight scene is, maybe, the high point of symbolism in the OT. Vader goads Luke by discussing his sister, Luke snaps and turns into a murderous killing machine until he cuts off Vader's hand, looks at the cybernetics, looks at his own hand, and turns off the lightsaber. The message is told entirely without dialogue: Luke is an emotional character driven by empathy, when he imagines his sister turned he flips, when he makes the empathetic connection to his father he engages in self-reflection and realizes what he's done, and finally (fully) embraces the Jedi message of wars not making one great. All of that is shown, not told.
There is no symbolic messaging in the Dooku/Yoda fight scene. No extra-textual message, it's just... a fight. We can attempt to read meaning into that story, but it's not symbollism but a retroactive justification for how the fight changes our reading of the story. Ditto your explanation of the Maul/Obi-Wan scene. In the shooting of the fight Obi-Wan doesn't change. His fighting style before and after Qui-Gon's death is the exact same, the shooting style (bland wide-angle shots with occasional closeups) doesn't change, no story is told beyond the bare essentials.
You're too focused on the significance shots of a fight scene, and perhaps ignoring the importance of the fight choreography. A lot of westerns like to be snobbish about flashy fight choreography but the fight choreography are very often framed in a way to tell a narrative of its own. Chinese wushu choreography is very much a form of a narrative in the form of a dance. It was in the prequel era that we saw the creation of official dueling-style in Star Wars, but that's because the prequel movies actually featured choreography that reflected the personality of the characters in different way.
I'm very used to seeing fight choreography as a story of its own because of my experience with wushu (I formally practised it for a short while when I was quite young, namely Peking Opera wushu), so I am very used to reading the choreography of a fight scene. I think westerners, because of the different cultural context, aren't taught to read fight choreography as a narrative of its own.
How much can one read into the symbolism of a fight scene is debatable and subjective to a person's experience. So while I think American and western audience might overlook certain aspects of symbolism that comes from the choreography of a fight scene, I think I can read more into their symbolism.
How Yoda chose to fight Dooku and how Dooku fought against Yoda is itself a story with a fair bit of meaning. Yoda was the aggressive duelist, while Dooku was the elegant and slower duelist. I can read the fight as an inversion of the battle between light and dark siders. Yet despite all of Yoda's aggression, he could not put a stop to Dooku. All of Yoda's skills and abilities are ultimately fruitless against a darksider willing to take the extra step to win. Dooku was losing the fight, but he got what he wanted by escaping because Yoda will not let Obi-Wan and Anakin die. The compassion of the Jedi Order was used against them by the Sith.
I don't think I can convince you with my arguments, but I think that's because I am rooted from a fundamentally different perspective from yours. You want symbolism to be far more explicit, with nicely framed shots that can be used to symbolise deeper meanings. I tend to read the movement of a scene as being more important that certain nicely framed shots. A film is not a painting or drawing. A film is a bunch of moving pictures. So the movement that the characters made is just as important as a nicely framed still shot.
Luke's story in TLJ certainly recaptures the meaning of the Jedi as told in the OT. The value of friendship that was a hallmark of the OT and barely present in the PT is absolutely back in the Sequels. We can quibble about whether or not this truly recaptures the OT as a whole, and I don't think it necessarily does, but it's certainly there.
I don't think the theme of friendship is the core theme of the OT. It is certainly an important hallmark, but to call it as important when Luke was separated from Han and Leia most of the time is making it to be a far bigger deal than it actually is. I think the theme of the Star Wars franchise has always been about the ability of an individual to achieve "enlightenment" in some form or another.
The thesis of the ST movie is about how Luke didn't actually achieve true enlightenment after ROTJ. That to me is a biggest mistake of the ST era as a whole. And the main reason for this was because Western writing remained quite fixated on the need for conflict to tell a narrative. In order for Luke's story to generate interest, the default assumption is there must be some sort of new conflict for him to go though.
This is not necessarily the only way to tell a story. Maybe for a western audience used to the concept of a 3 act structure, and are taught from young to expect conflict in any story, this is how you experience story-telling. But I think there are certainly different ways you can go about crafting a narrative.
"The significance of plot without conflict" is a different way of telling a narrative.
https://stilleatingoranges.tumblr.com/p ... t-conflict
In the West, plot is commonly thought to revolve around conflict: a confrontation between two or more elements, in which one ultimately dominates the other. The standard three- and five-act plot structures–which permeate Western media–have conflict written into their very foundations. A “problem” appears near the end of the first act; and, in the second act, the conflict generated by this problem takes center stage. Conflict is used to create reader involvement even by many post-modern writers, whose work otherwise defies traditional structure.
The necessity of conflict is preached as a kind of dogma by contemporary writers’ workshops and Internet “guides” to writing. A plot without conflict is considered dull; some even go so far as to call it impossible. This has influenced not only fiction, but writing in general–arguably even philosophy. Yet, is there any truth to this belief? Does plot necessarily hinge on conflict? No. Such claims are a product of the West’s insularity. For countless centuries, Chinese and Japanese writers have used a plot structure that does not have conflict “built in”, so to speak. Rather, it relies on exposition and contrast to generate interest. This structure is known as kishōtenketsu.
Kishōtenketsu contains four acts: introduction, development, twist and reconciliation. The basics of the story–characters, setting, etc.–are established in the first act and developed in the second. No major changes occur until the third act, in which a new, often surprising element is introduced. The third act is the core of the plot, and it may be thought of as a kind of structural non sequitur. The fourth act draws a conclusion from the contrast between the first two “straight” acts and the disconnected third, thereby reconciling them into a coherent whole. Kishōtenketsu is probably best known to Westerners as the structure of Japanese yonkoma (four-panel) manga; and, with this in mind, our artist has kindly provided a simple comic to illustrate the concept.
While you can certainly made an argument that Star Wars as an mainly American franchise cannot abandon the need for conflict in its storytelling because this is expected from its Anglo-American audience, I think this limits the potential of storytelling opportunities for a franchise like Star Wars, and you will be forced to go against the central themes of the prior SW movies. Which is the idea that a character's personal conflict can have an endpoint if the character achieved some sort of enlightenment and move past endless conflict. It might certainly sound boring to you and possibly most western audience, but I think boringness if underrated in western story-telling.
Yeah, not to go all Death of the Author but going by the prequels and his changes to the OT I don't think George Lucas understood the full meaning of Star Wars post-ANH.
Whether he fully understood it is beside the point. I think he still had a vision for what SW is about, and I prefer his vision ( which is subject to change over the years, but it still retain a degree of consistency). I think the fandom as a whole is not much better than George Lucas in understanding the meaning of the Star Wars franchise. If anything, I think most fans in general are terrible at articulating why they like Star Wars. I think what happened with the new movies is that they can superficially resemble Star Wars ( see "updated visuals" and retelling the exact same narrative in EP 7), but fundamentally misses the deeper themes and meanings of Star Wars.
George Lucas had very, very odd vision of what Star Wars is about, in contrast to the expectation of most fans. I think most fans are still too blinded by the sheer fun they experienced in watching the OT as a child to fully articulate why they really enjoyed the Star Wars franchise. For example, while a bunch of fans might bitched endlessly about how the prequels were horrible and a waste of time, a whole new generation of fans got into Star Wars via the prequels. So even if the OT fans hated the PT, George Lucas still created something that could engage the interest of young audience and get them interested in Star Wars and stayed on as fans.
While it is fair to say a number of fans didn't enjoy the changes Lucas made to the franchise, I still think Lucas' vision of Star Wars will remain the most attractive part of the franchise to some fans like me. I enjoy the uniqueness and quirkiness of George Lucas over the vision of fans who seek to recreate the OT.
I find the desire to remain orthodox to particular portrayal of the Star Wars universe in the OT boring and stale.
Humans are such funny creatures. We are selfish about selflessness, yet we can love something so much that we can hate something.
