Thoughts on the book by Ursula K. Le Guin
With additional notes on Star Wars: Episode VI –
Return of the Jedi
"If the yumens are
men, they are unfit or untaught to dream or act as men. Therefore, they go
about in torment killing and destroying, driven by the Gods within, whom they
will not set free, but try to uproot and deny. If they are men, they are evil
men, having denied their own Gods, afraid to see their own faces in the dark..."
- The Word for World is Forest (1974) by Ursula K. Le Guin
I've read three books already this year and I'm
currently mid-way through a fourth. To say that "The Word for World is
Forest" by Ursula K. Le Guin is the very best
of them would be an understatement. It's one of the very best books I've ever read!
What I loved about the book, first and foremost, was its humanism. This might
sound incongruous given how the focus of the story is partially centred on a
race of forest-dwelling alien creatures, but the subtext, and the way the
aliens become a kind of stand-in for any indigenous race that has faced
prejudice, hostility and extermination, allows Le Guin to
explore ever-pertinent themes of racism, war, slavery, deforestation, the destruction
of the eco-system, capitalism and friendship.
Apparently written in response to America's
involvement in the Vietnam war, "The Word for World is Forest"
focuses on the efforts made by Earth colonists to run a logging company on the distant
planet of Athshe. The Athsheans are a peaceful race and take a passive view of
the humans (or "yumens", as they're known
in the book), despite the loggers causing irreparable damage to their
environment. It's only after a military presence brought in to safeguard the
company's interests begins enslaving, imprisoning and eventually abusing the
planet's indigenous population, that tensions boil over into an all-out war.
The book is written from several different
perspectives and does well to capture the individual voices of those on either
side of the discussion. Le Guin balances the perspectives, moving between
characters that are enlightened and sympathetic, to characters that are
consumed by prejudice and hate. It's complex and never one-sided, but always
clear in its sympathy and support for the Athsheans, and
in its lamentation for the violence and destruction caused by humanity in the
pursuit of profit and power. A short book, "The Word for World is Forest"
could probably be described as a novella, however, it nonetheless succeeds in communicating
its themes, politics and positions in a clear and concise approach that would
make it suitable for young adults, who might still be susceptible to its lack
of cynicism, and its image of a world both defined by and in tune with the
hymns of nature.
The Word for World is Forest [Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974]:
Many have seen the book as an early forerunner to director
James Cameron's blockbuster adventure film, Avatar (2009). Some online
commentators have even accused Cameron of actual plagiarism. While there are
obvious similarities between the two works, including both narrative and
thematical preoccupations, including a concern with anti-war and
pro-environmentalist messages, as well as an obvious attempt to connect the
presentation of the alien creatures to the supposedly primitive and mystical
tribalism of actual Native cultures, I'd still argue that Cameron's film is
leaning more towards the story of Pocahontas than it is to the more recent
influences of Le Guin and her work.
That said, there is at least one cinematic descendent
of Le Guin's book that immediately stands out. In "The Word for World is
Forest", the Athsheans (known as
"Creechies" by the human characters) are depicted as pacifist,
forest-dwelling creatures, forced into a war with an invading military presence
that has turned their home planet into an occupied territory. They're described
as being like tiny bear or monkey-like beings covered in a thick green and
black fur, wearing only hoods and belts.
The image of these characters and the way Le Guin describes their later war with the "yumens" put me in mind of an earlier but
no less lucrative science-fiction fantasy, Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of
the Jedi (1983), and more specifically the presentation of the Ewoks. There's
even a city in Le Guin's book called "Endtor", which is remarkably similar
to "Endor", the Ewok home world. So far, I haven't been able to find
any genuine confirmation that the filmmakers involved in "Return of the
Jedi" had read Le Guin's book or taken influence from it, so I suppose we
chalk this one up to coincidence or "inspiration"?
Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi [Richard Marquand & George Lucas, 1983]:
Co-written, produced and by all accounts co-directed
by George Lucas (albeit, uncredited for the latter), "Return of the
Jedi" remains one of the weakest of the Star Wars sequels. Re-watching the
film for the first time since childhood, there were several obvious sequences
and images that I remembered, most of them relating to the scenes with
slug-like gangster Jabba the Hutt. However, it was surprising how
inconsequential and unfocused the rest of the film felt, especially considering
that its predecessor, Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980), is
such a masterpiece, and arguably the film that broadened and strengthened the
saga to such an extent that filmmakers are still able to build on its influence
even today.
While "Return of the Jedi"
succeeds in bringing to a close the themes of fathers and family that run
throughout the saga (prequel trilogy included), it's still a film that feels as
if the screenplay was being written around specific set-pieces and character
designs created for no other reason than to sell toys.
However, there's one aspect of the film, apocryphal as
it may be, that makes the experience of it, at least from my own perspective,
all the more necessary. Attempting to find a link between "Return of the
Jedi" and the book in question, I came across a piece of trivia that
suggested scenes depicting the battles between the Ewoks and Storm Troopers
were modelled on unused ideas and visual set-pieces that Lucas had devised for
his version of Apocalypse Now (1979) when he'd been attached to direct the film
prior to the success of Star Wars (1977). Hypothetical or not, it was an
earth-shattering bit of trivia, and something that made me want to go back and
look at the film again.
Apocalypse Now [Francis Ford Coppola, 1979]:
Apocalypse Now has been one of my favourite films
since as far back as I can remember. It was a key text in broadening my
understanding of what cinema could achieve as an audio-visual medium, and how a
talented and ambitious filmmaker could take a text that was almost a century
old – Joseph Conrad's colonialist novella Heart of Darkness (1899) – and
transpose it onto recent history, elevating it at the same time through a
restless experimentation with the cinematic form.
Today it's impossible to think of the film without
recalling the surreal, drugged-out, psychedelic insanity of director Francis
Ford Coppola's incredible stylizations, from the vivid opening montage of
images – which connect the forest as an
almost supernatural entity to the central character, drifting in clouds of war
and insanity; transposing the outer-landscapes of south-east Asia to the
inner-landscapes of American rock music, drugs and turmoil – to the final
sequence, with its scenes of ritual sacrifice, thunder and lightening, and
half-glimpsed explosions of primal violence against expressions of genuine
poetry. However, there's another version of Apocalypse Now that we never got to
see. The one that George Lucas had been attached to direct since the early
1970s.
Working from a screenplay by the American writer and
conservative John Milius, Lucas's vision for Apocalypse Now was to shoot the
film in a rough, docudrama approach, in black and white 16mm and with
non-professional actors. It would've been a marked contrast to the baroque,
hallucinogenic approach eventually favoured by Coppola, and would've drawn on
the influence of other political films, like The Battle
of Algiers (1966) by Gillo Pontecorvo and Culloden
(1964) by Peter Watkins.
Culloden [Peter Watkins, 1964]:
The Battle of Algiers [Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966]:
Obviously, the style of these more radical films from
the 1960s doesn't necessarily mesh with the images from "Return of the
Jedi" as it exists in its current form, but that's not to say we can't
still infer some of Lucas's intent for how the battles of his Apocalypse Now
might've played out.
Like "The Word for World is Forest", the
scenes set on the planet Endor are quite clearly meant to recall something of
the realities of the war in Vietnam. What these scenes depict is a rural,
apparently primitive or, at the very least, unprepared society, forced into
combat with an occupying power that is attacking them with military hardware
and weaponry far more advanced and destructive than their own. By using their
knowledge of the forest to their advantage, the indigenous, supposedly
primitive society, is able to repel the advanced military forces, scoring a
victory that is seen as unprecedented.
The fact that Lucas recasts these scenes of battle and
bloodshed, earmarked for a more serious or realistic project, with little teddy
bear creatures and cloned super-soldiers, shouldn't detract from the political
subtext of these sequences, any more than the fantasy elements of Le Guin's
book should detract from hers. At the very least, the Ewok sequences from the
film of Lucas and Marquand suggest something of what a film adaptation of
"The Word for World is Forest" might look like, depicting the same
proto-terrorist guerilla warfare that Le Guin describes in her book, but in a
vivid, full-colour style.
Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi [Richard Marquand & George Lucas, 1983]:
Seeing "Return of the Jedi" again in the
context of Le Guin's book helped to enrich the experience of both. However, it
was seeing the film in relation to Lucas's potential vision for Apocalypse Now
that was the real revelation. While I may have misgivings about the film,
I nonetheless remain a staunched defender of Lucas's filmmaking and rank at
least three of the six films he's directed as genuinely brilliant: THX 1138
(1971), American Graffiti (1974) and Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the
Sith (2005). Larger essay-length considerations of each of these three films
should be posted on Lights in the Dusk later in the year.
Despite having purchased a collection of the first
four "Earthsea" books a couple of years ago, "The Word for World
is Forest" marks my first proper experience reading Le Guin's work. Given
how moved and transported I was by the storytelling, its themes and its
incredibly visual way of describing scenes and events, I think I owe it to
myself to finally delve into these "Earthsea" stories, which include
"A Wizard of Earthsea" (1968), "The Tombs of Atuan" (1971),
"The Farthest Shore" (1972) and "Tehanu" (1990).
