Star Wars · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

For about a minute, Star Wars stops. Luke stands at the edge of the Lars homestead while the twin suns of Tatooine sink together, and he does nothing. The binoculars he was just using hang forgotten. There is nothing in the frame he can act on — only a horizon, a yearning, John Williams's horns rising under him. For one breath the film hands you a pure optical situation: a watcher, not an agent, a feeling with nowhere to discharge. Then the second sun drops, and the machine starts again.

That single held moment is the key to everything around it, because everything around it is its opposite. Deleuze's two big books on cinema tell a story in which, after the war, film loses its nerve for action. The hero who sized up a situation and changed it gives way to someone who can only look and endure — Rossellini's drifters, Antonioni's stranded couples, the seer in place of the doer. Deleuze calls this the passage from the movement-image to the time-image, and by the mid-1970s it was the prestige direction of the art. Star Wars is the great counter-revolution. Right when the watcher who cannot act had become cinema's most serious figure, George Lucas built a cathedral to the one who can.

The engine of that cathedral is what Deleuze names the action-image in its large form: the sensory-motor circuit at full power, where a vast situation bears down until one decisive act transforms it. He diagrams it S–A–S — Situation, Action, new Situation. Star Wars may be the cleanest large form the cinema has ever produced. The Situation is a whole galaxy under tyranny; the Act is sixty seconds of a proton torpedo down a thermal exhaust port; the new Situation is the Death Star gone in a flash of light. Nothing is ambiguous, nothing stalls. Perception leads to action and action resolves the world.

For that circuit to fire, the encompassing milieu — Deleuze's synsign, the situation that calls action out of a character — has to feel real enough to demand a response. This is exactly where Lucas's specific invention lives. He called it the "used universe": every surface, ship, and robe shows wear, repair, accumulated history. Set that against the antiseptic geometry of 2001 and you see the trick. The wear is not decoration; it is what makes a fairy tale operable. A galaxy that looks lived-in can press on a farm boy hard enough to make him move, and we believe the pressure. The encompasser becomes physical.

The film also gives Deleuze a textbook binomial — force against force — but stages it almost entirely through design rather than speech. The Empire is clean angles, symmetry, monochrome ranks; the Rebellion is entropy, mismatch, grime. The medal ceremony quotes Riefenstahl precisely: massed troops in receding geometric rank, the lone figure raised on a platform. Deleuze would call those ranks a dividual — a crowd rendered as one affective unit, a single mass of order. Fascism here is a compositional fact before it is a plot point.

And then the trench run, which is the organic-American montage distilled: convergent parallel cutting toward a last-minute rescue, the schema lifted wholesale from The Dam Busters — cockpit, targeting readout, anxious controllers on the ground, the outcome withheld until the release beat. What the editors (Hirsch, Chew, Marcia Lucas) added was to cut not to dramatic logic but to the score, so the rhythm is musical. Deleuze's term for its spatial breathing is respiration-space: the sequence alternates the vast surface of the Death Star with the taut single line of Luke's approach, the milieu opening wide and then clenching to a thread. That oscillation is the pulse of the whole genre Lucas was about to father.

There is one moment that reaches past the action-image toward something looser — the Mos Eisley cantina, where the camera moves through the room as if encountering its aliens rather than exhibiting them, a dense out-of-field pressure of a world continuing beyond the cut. But Lucas always pulls back to the circuit. The cantina exists to get Han, and Han exists to fly the rescue.

What this did to filmmaking is hard to overstate, and cinephiles have undervalued it precisely because it ran against the grain Deleuze admired. The time-image was the avant-garde's future. The action-image was supposed to be exhausted, a postwar casualty. Lucas proved it wasn't dead, only dormant — and then re-industrialized it. The Dykstraflex made the moving spacecraft photographically coherent; Ben Burtt gave the fantasy a found-world body; Williams restored the Korngold fanfare so an audience could read feeling through brass alone. He inherited the screen-wipe and the bickering low-status duo from Kurosawa, the morally charged desert doorway from Ford, the leitmotif from Robin Hood, the geometry-versus-underground from Lang. He fused them into a template the next fifty years would copy, the dossier admits, "with diminishing returns."

So the question the binary sunset leaves open is the one worth carrying back into the film. For a minute Lucas shows you he knows how to make a seer — and then chooses, deliberately, gloriously, to make a doer instead. The whole modern blockbuster is the size of that choice.