Sightlines · a reading

A Deleuzian reading of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace

1999 · George Lucas · Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace on Sightlines

Look at the parade Lucas ends on. Ranks drawn up on the plaza at Theed, the camera square to them, everything stacked along a single center line, soldiers and Gungans and children arranged for the lens. The composition has a source and Lucas doesn't hide it: it is the frontal, axially symmetrical mass formation Riefenstahl built for Triumph of the Will. The same grammar runs the throne-room framings earlier in the film. A children's adventure about the day the good guys won, staged in the visual language of a rally.

Now ask what was won.

Naboo is free. The blockade is broken. And the Republic has been walked one clean step toward the Empire by the very crisis everyone just resolved. The blockade forced a vote of no confidence. The vote produced a new Chancellor. Lucas had said for years that his subject was how a republic decays into an empire, how democratic machinery can be steered toward authoritarian ends, and this is the rare blockbuster that puts senatorial procedure at the motor of its plot and means it. The queen's one decisive political act, calling that vote, is the hinge the other side needed.

Deleuze has a precise name for this, and it is worth learning here because the film is built out of it. In Cinema 1, cataloguing the symptoms of a cinema whose action machinery has begun to fail, he lists what he calls the condemnation of the plot — his word is complot, conspiracy. The situation stops being something a hero can front up to, because the force actually shaping it is diffuse, distributed, operating through procedure, and locatable nowhere in particular. Lucas put it in the title. The menace is a phantom in the strict sense: present, effective, unplaceable. The Jedi register it as unease and can do nothing with the feeling.

Here is what makes the film strange, and why it is more interesting than its reputation. It is not a slack, drifting, postwar film. Every individual scene is a clean action-image: somebody perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the cutting serves the act. Deleuze calls the big version of this the large form — an encompassing situation, the synsign, presses on the characters until a decisive act transforms it. Lucas is one of the last great masters of that shape. And the discovery of The Phantom Menace, whether he fully intended it or not, is that you can leave the machine completely intact and reverse its polarity. Every act succeeds. Every success feeds the unlocated enemy. Griffith's converging rescue assumed the rescue mattered.

One sequence escapes this, which is exactly why it is the one everybody remembers. The podrace is lifted, openly, from the chariot race in Ben-Hur: a multi-competitor arena circuit cut between drivers, crashes, and the spectator galleries. Rapid kinetic coverage, velocity, real spatial danger. And the boy in the cockpit is somebody's property. He acts, the situation changes, he stops being that. The large form is whole there. Nothing in the ground battle works like that, because the droids are what Deleuze calls a dividual — a mass treated as one affective unit instead of a set of individuals who might each hesitate. A dividual has no interval in it, nothing that pauses between seeing and doing. That is a design choice with a dramatic cost, and Lucas pays it in the battle and collects on it in the parade, where the massed ranks are Riefenstahl's lesson industrialized.

From Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress Lucas takes the low-angle swordsman staging and the trick of telling enormous events from the vantage of bickering underlings, which becomes the droid-and-servant point of view. Deleuze's own reading of Kurosawa turns on something Lucas didn't take. Kurosawa's heroes have to sift an overwhelming situation to find out what the question even is, and his films breathe: vast milieu, then the taut line of the act, then vast milieu again. Lucas keeps the breathing. Theed's plazas, the Tatooine flats, then a duel with a choir behind it. He drops the sifting. In this film the question gets answered by a blood test and a floor vote.

The blood test is the loss people felt and couldn't name. In 1977 the Force was the purest instance in popular cinema of what Deleuze calls the absolute out-of-field: not something offscreen you could walk to, but a sense of something beyond the frame that cannot be placed in space at all. Midichlorians draw its blood and give it a number. Something real goes out of the film there. But notice what Lucas built in the same movement, because it is the better invention: the Sith. A second power, hidden, working through committees, sensed by the Jedi as a wrongness with no address. The absolute out-of-field leaves the mysticism and enters the politics. He converted his religion into information and his bureaucracy into dread.

Which brings up the thing that explains why arguments about this film never settle. Deleuze's third kind of image is the relation-image: meaning that isn't in the shot but in a relation the audience holds, the viewer as a knowing third party. The Phantom Menace may be the first blockbuster built almost entirely that way. Every scene with the child has a second floor under it the film never shows. We know he wins the race and loses the galaxy. It is an origin story haunted by foreknowledge, and the boy is its symbol in Deleuze's exact sense: the single figure condensing the whole organizing relation. A blessing spoken over him plays on screen as a blessing and in our heads as a sentence. If you hold that relation, half the images carry a weight you can feel and can't point at. If you don't, it's a kid waving.

The technique tells the same story. Tattersall's photography is bright, even, often a foundation layer waiting for digital extension, which gives long stretches a plate-like flatness. Deleuze described in Syberberg a cinema where the image becomes an information-space, a surface things are projected onto instead of a place bodies live in. Syberberg meant it as a position. Lucas arrived there by pipeline, which is arguably the more consequential route: this is the film where the shot stops being a location and becomes a layer, where a performer works in a blue room with nothing to react to, where a fully computer-generated supporting character holds extended dialogue beside live actors. The four-front climax — ground battle, space assault, palace infiltration, duel — revives the American convergent montage Lucas himself revived in 1977, now multiplied until it delivers momentum and thematic rhyme instead of tension in any single strand. Convergence has become rhyme. Four lines echoing rather than tightening one knot.

So watch it again for the procedure. Watch the wipes he took from the Flash Gordon serials, a form of cut that promises there is always a next episode, running through a film whose whole subject is that the next episode is a catastrophe. Then the open question: if a prequel's images can only mean what we already know, did Lucas fail at making a movement-image, or did he find the one thing a prequel can be?

Concepts in play

condemnation of the plot — The plot engine is trade blockade, senatorial procedure and a vote of no confidence, with the Sith 'covertly re-emerging' and Palpatine seeding intrigue — a force shaping the situation that no character can locate or confront. The title names it.
action-image: large form — The podrace: a slave boy acts under pressure and his situation is transformed. The one place in the film where the perceive-then-act circuit still pays off, staged on the Ben-Hur chariot-race template of a cross-cut arena circuit.
the encompasser (synsign) — The blockade-and-invasion of Naboo functions as a global encompassing situation calling forth action, with the Galactic Senate behind it as a second, larger encompasser.
the mental / relation-image — The dossier's 'origin story haunted by foreknowledge': the film's dramatic irony is held by the audience, who know Anakin's fall, so the child's scenes signify through a relation no shot contains.
symbol — The child Anakin as the single figure condensing the relation between this film and the tragedy it prefaces — every scene of his innocence read through what he becomes.
absolute out-of-field — The midichlorian material localizes the Force in the bloodstream as a measurable count, while the hidden Sith operating through senatorial procedure become the film's new unlocatable beyond-the-frame presence.
dividual — The droid army in the Gungan-droid ground battle as a mass with no individuated hesitation, and the massed ranks of the closing Naboo victory parade quoting Riefenstahl's axially symmetrical mass formations.
organic (American) convergent montage — The four-front cross-cut climax — ground battle, control-ship assault, palace infiltration, lightsaber duel — echoing the 1977 parallel finale but, per the dossier, privileging momentum and thematic rhyme over tension in any single strand.
respiration-space — Alternation of vast ceremonial milieu (Theed's plazas and Caserta interiors, the Tatooine flats, Coruscant's tiers) with the taut line of the duel — the Kurosawa large-form breathing inherited from The Hidden Fortress, minus Kurosawa's demand that the hero extract the question from the situation.
binomial (the duel) — Force against force reduced to pure duel: Anakin against Sebulba in the arena, the Jedi against Darth Maul with 'Duel of the Fates' behind it, staged on Kurosawa's low-angle samurai framing.
projection / information-space (Syberberg regime) — Tattersall's bright, evenly lit, plate-like photography built as a foundation layer for digital extension, with actors performing against bluescreen and unfinished CG environments — the image as a surface to be composited rather than a milieu.

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