Thoughts on the film directed by George Lucas
Watch it as you might watch a "Star Wars"
movie; as an adventure populated by alien cultures and customs that are
fascinating to us precisely because they're so different from our own. The past
here is not a foreign country, but a distant planet drifting in orbit. The
planet Americana.
Against a twilight blue sky, the neon lights of Mel's
Drive-In restaurant take on the appearance of a flying saucer. A vast space
station giving refuge to weary rebels battling, not across the stars, but along
the two-lane blacktop of suburban California. They stop here to refill and
refuel, making connections, getting into fights, before climbing back into the
leather-lined cockpits of their supercharged land cruisers, to speed away into
the night.
American Graffiti [George Lucas, 1973]:
Like Lucas's later film, Star Wars (1977), American Graffiti taps into something mythical. The
story, a loosely connected series of character-based vignettes set over the
course of one night and the following morning, is slight; its characters not so
much having to grow and develop, but merely overcoming a particular obstacle
that in its own way will have a profound impact on their still young lives. However,
it's also loaded with symbolic connotations relating to the idea of
"home"; to the themes of responsibility, honour, heroes and disillusionment. The kind of disillusionment
that only comes with age and experience.
Many consider the film's perspective on the 1960s to
be a symptom of nostalgia. I'm not sure I agree. While Lucas and his
co-writers, Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, present the time and place without
criticism, they don't sugar-coat the period in expressions of sentimentality.
By using documentary techniques, observing and recording the interactions
between characters as if creating an anthropological study on a culture facing its
inevitable extinction, Lucas allows the toxicity of the period to settle on the
surface. The sexism and crass dismissal of sexual harassment, the one-upmanship
between men and the general ignorance of social, political or environmental
issues facing the wider world, are not endorsed by the filmmakers, but merely
observed. They're symptomatic of the culture and environment that Lucas is
evoking, and a key reason why this world that the film depicts and preserves,
frozen as it is here in time, has subsequently vanished.
It is in this aspect of the film that American
Graffiti once again parallels the experience of Star Wars, and why Lucas's
depiction of 1960s Californian adolescence feels as alien to many of us as
scenes taking place on the planet Tatooine, or on the observation deck of the
Death Star. Even by 1973 when Lucas directed the film, he could recognise that
the culture he was depicting had already disappeared into memory. Changing
attitudes, war, cultural revolution, technology and other factors, had brought
an end to the kind of lifestyles and experiences that American Graffiti depicts.
In this sense, the film is as much about the
destruction of a universe as the interplanetary space-battles of the "Star
Wars" saga. Because the world depicted here is the universe in
miniature; its impending destruction is evoked throughout by the small moments
of desolation and emptiness that Lucas depicts; the kind of apocalyptic,
void-like existence of the small town and the lives trapped in cycles of
repetition broken only by moments of madness. The air of encroaching tragedy
that awaits not just these characters but the country itself, is reflected in
the dead-end presentation of the world - the way nothing seems to exist outside
of the perimeter of this town and its main street, highways and surrounding
scrublands - and in the cynicism of those closing title cards, which end the
film on an intentional note of disappointment.
American Graffiti [George Lucas, 1973]:
At no point does the world of the film feel connected
to the wider world that exists outside it. Televisions provide a literal window
onto current events, but beyond this the characters are preserved within the
void, as if like relics to a forgotten civilisation, trapped beneath the glass
of a museum-piece display.
Lucas's career as a director is defined by two individual
trilogies. The second is the "Star Wars" prequel trilogy, consisting
of the films: Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999), Star Wars:
Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002), and Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge
of the Sith (2005). Here, Lucas weaves a self-contained saga that nonetheless
connects back to his earlier films, but can be watched individually. Seen
without wider context, the three films tell a moving, intelligent and cohesive
story about innocence corrupted and destroyed, about political manipulation and
abuses of power, about the manipulations and machinations that lead to war and
about the destruction that war brings to civilisations trapped within the cycle
of it.
The first trilogy however is not sustained but is
spread out across three separate films that each maintain a thematic
connection. This "trilogy", in the loosest sense, begins with Lucas's
debut feature-length film, THX 1138 (1971), continues through to American
Graffiti, and ends with the original Star Wars (later subtitled "Episode
IV – A New Hope"). Each of these films is about the end of innocence (or
more specifically the end of ignorance), about the growing consciousness of the
world and what the world really is, and about characters imprisoned by the
worlds that they inhabit.
The characters in Lucas's early work are oppressed but
often don't realise it until much later in the film. They yearn for escape, but
also recognise that they've become so enmeshed within the fabric of their
society that the choice to remain or flee becomes something close to life or
death. From here, the films, each with their own style and their own appeals to
individual genres, go off in different directions, but they're united
throughout by the struggle of each character to survive. For the character of
THX and for Curt in the film in question, survival is simply getting out; finding
the wherewithal to cut the ties that bind, to strike a blow for freedom and
emerge into the blinking sunlight of the following day.
However, there are also several smaller but no less
important details that connect these films and reinforce the idea that each of
these narratives are now depicting alien worlds divorced from the everyday
reality that we live, creating a kind of echo that perpetually reverberates from
the past into the future.
Star Wars [George Lucas, 1977]:
In Star Wars, the journey of Luke Skywalker
effectively begins when he sees a beautiful young woman relay a message that he
can't understand. In attempting to find this woman, he's caught up in an
adventure far greater than himself.
American Graffiti [George Lucas, 1973]:
The same thing happens to Curt in American Graffiti,
although the context is slightly different.
Star Wars [George Lucas, 1977]:
The aerial procession of the X-Wing fighters as they
drift through the blackness of space seems a logical continuation of...
American Graffiti [George Lucas, 1973]:
...machines of a different nature, where lines of cars
cruise through the night-time streets in search of adventure. Also: note the
licence plate on the hot-rod and its obvious nod to Lucas's previous film.
In each of these three films, Lucas is interested in
the theme of disillusionment; in the way the myths and traditions that we
accept and embrace as part of our early experiences eventually turn out to be
deceits or manipulations. The way Star Wars breaks apart its mythmaking is too
complex to go into here, unfolding as it does across its two subsequent
sequels, Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Star Wars:
Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (1983), but think about how the very
foundations of Luke Skywalker's life and the conception of who he is and where
he comes from is completely turned around by the course of the trilogy.
In both THX 1138 and American Graffiti, it's more a
pulling back the curtain to reveal the truth behind the legend; something
reminiscent of a certain scene in the eternally influential The Wizard of Oz
(1939). This is most apparent in Curt's visit to the radio station and
interaction with the mythical DJ "Wolfman" Jack. Throughout the film,
the teenagers speculate on the origins of the mysterious Wolfman, who becomes a
symbol of generational identity, authenticity, the counterculture and rock and
roll rebellion. However, as Curt wanders into the radio station after hours,
he's confronted not by the myth, but by the reality. Not a legend, but a man
like any other.
The Wizard of Oz [Victor Fleming & King Vidor,
1939]:
In The Wizard of Oz, the revelation that the wizard is
not some all-knowing supernatural overlord but a flesh and blood human-being
manipulating events via the use of a machine, resonates with the ultimate
unmasking of the villainous Darth Vader; revealing how the legend or mythology
surrounding the character had been carefully cultivated in order to instill
fear, authority and control. We see a prelude to this in the scene between Curt
and the character eventually revealed to be "Wolfman" Jack.
While much of American Graffiti bursts with a restless
energy, buoyed throughout by an almost constant soundtrack of 60s pop, doo-wop
and rock music, the scene between Curt and the "Wolfman" has an eerie
stillness to it. It allows the film to slow down, to step back from the hot
rods and the hijinks, the comic misunderstandings and the larger than life
vignettes, and take a moment. By allowing the pace to slow and the atmosphere
to become silent with anticipation, the scene immediately strikes the viewer as
significant, and it is. It represents a coming of age moment for Curt; the
yellow brick road has led him to this apparent Emerald City situated on the
edge of town. He wants to meet the Wizard, to ask him questions. But getting a
glimpse behind the curtain to the reality of who the character is, awes him. The
mythology is gone, chased away like shadows by the rising sun. The dream is
over.
Here, Lucas and his camera operator film Curt as a
reflection on the glass surface of the recording booth. At this point his own
transparency and the transparency of the rock and roll myth that he and his
friends have constructed is revealed. We're able to see through Curt, literally
and figuratively. We see through his insecurities, his fear of leaving behind
this world that has defined his life and his sense of self since birth, as well
as leaving behind the state of innocence, or ignorance, that the town and its
isolation from the wider world has instilled.
American Graffiti [George Lucas, 1973]:
Looking back on 1962 from the perspective of 1973,
Lucas knew that the potential future of this world was bleak. From here, the
hermetic naiveté of the American dream (let's not call it a state of
"innocence", as many of these characters are toxic, their attitudes
unsympathetic) was about to be exploded by the realities of presidential
assassinations, Government corruption, a groundswell of support for African
American activism, the women's movement, and opposition to America's
involvement in the war in Vietnam.
In American Graffiti, the distillation of the country
and culture was able to manifest itself in the depiction of a small American
town. By the 1970s however, this was no longer the case. The world
became bigger, more complicated, presenting not just one experience, but a
multitude of experiences from people of different races, cultures, genders, backgrounds,
persuasions and histories. The planet Americana would cease to exist. We start
to see this shift occurring in Star Wars, with Lucas acknowledging that the
hermetic worlds of both THX 1138 and the film in question were being replaced
by something bigger, less homogenous, less defined by a solitary cultural
identity. To put it plainly, the future of Star Wars only reinforces the
perspective of American Graffiti as something belonging to the past. Even by
1977, the writing was on the wall.
It's here where I think the implications of the title
become clear. By titling his film American Graffiti, Lucas is equating both the
film and the period it depicts to a hieroglyph; something that has been
expressed by a previous age, generation or cultural epoch, that exists now as a
remnant scrawled or scratched onto the brick wall of history. As the world
continues to grow and develop, changing so much through advancements of
technology, through debasements of war, through travels and settlements, the
vanished world of American Graffiti seems small.
Fired like a distress beacon from a planet facing
obliteration, the film, like primitive cave paintings, Egyptian pictograms,
street art or initials written in once-wet cement, seems intended to say that
this generation was here; that they existed.
