Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Obi-Wan stands on a storm-lashed platform on Kamino and is shown the army. Rank after rank of the same man, the same face, thousands of them, packed to the edges of the frame. Nobody in the Senate ordered them. In a few days the Senate will accept them anyway.

That shot is the film. Not the lakeside courtship, not the duel. An army with no original, discovered by a detective who cannot locate his client.

Two things are happening in it at once, and they turn out to be one thing. The story is about manufactured life. So is the image. Those ranks were multiplied by ILM's crowd-generation software out of a handful of models, and the frame around them came off a Sony HDW-F900 tape — this being the first live-action feature a major studio shot entirely on high-definition digital video. No negative. No grain, no gate weave. Lucas wanted precisely that, because grain and weave are what you fight when you marry a photographed actor to a rendered world.

The standard verdict is that the film is weightless and the acting stiff, and I won't pretend the villa scenes play. But that verdict names a symptom and stops. Deleuze gives you a way to say what the thing is made of.

Start with what Deleuze called the relation-image. Some images mean by what they do: a man raises a blaster, a man falls. Others mean only through a relation the viewer holds and the characters don't. Hitchcock was his example — the bomb under the table means nothing on screen and everything in the seat. A prequel industrializes that structure. Every scene in Clones is completed offstage, in 1977 and 1980 and 1983. Palpatine's paternal concern for Anakin is warm on its face and unbearable if you know who is speaking. The Republic's leaders vote themselves an emergency and an army, and the dossier's phrase for it is exact: they are unknowingly authorizing the instruments of their own destruction. The film generates its charge almost entirely from what you brought in with you.

Which makes its vocabulary do strange work. Deleuze has two small, useful terms here. A mark is an object that means by habit: you see it and you expect what customarily follows. The saga is a bank of marks, nearly all of them minted in 1977 by Ben Burtt out of recorded real-world sound and by John Williams out of leitmotif — the lightsaber hum, the twin-sun desert, a theme that arrives before its character does. Burtt cuts the picture here, which is the sound designer editing his own vocabulary, and Williams deposits one new mark, 'Across the Stars,' into a very old ledger. A demark is the opposite: an object that turns up out of its chain and snaps the habit, forcing you to think. Yoda. For twenty-two years a puppet performed by Frank Oz, seated, slow, speaking. Here a fully digital body that fights a lightsaber duel. Whatever that sequence did to you, it cannot be absorbed as habit, and it is the one moment in the film that makes you reconsider what a character even is.

The structure is smarter than its reputation. Deleuze splits the action film into two shapes. The large form is Star Wars 1977: an encompassing situation presses on a hero until one decisive act transforms it. The small form runs the other way — you begin with an act or a fragment, and the act discloses a situation you couldn't see. That is the detective film, and it is Obi-Wan's half of this movie: a poisoned dart, a bounty hunter, a planet missing from the archive, each step opening more world. Anakin gets melodrama and a fate the audience already knows; Obi-Wan gets a working motor. That's the real reason his scenes hold.

And the two halves converge on something Deleuze listed among the symptoms of the action-image's postwar crisis: the condemnation of the plot, the sense of a diffuse conspiracy behind the visible one that no act can reach. Clones may be the purest version a blockbuster ever staged. The detective solves his case, correctly, and delivers a war. The rescue succeeds and the Republic loses. Lucas keeps the machinery he learned from the Flash Gordon serials of 1936 and from Griffith before them — the last-minute rescue, the cliffhanger cross-cutting between simultaneous perils, the arena execution and the Jedi charge and the clone gunships stacked into one crescendo, what Deleuze called the American organic montage, separate lines converging like a body growing. The rush still works. It is the wrong rush, and the film knows it.

Now the part that makes this a landmark rather than a middle chapter. Bazin built the case for realism on a guarantee: a photograph means something had to be there, in front of the lens, in the light. Depth of field mattered to him because it kept the whole real field intact in one take. David Tattersall's images here are clean, brightly keyed, deep-focus — and the depth certifies nothing, because a great many of these shots contain no photographed physical reality beyond the actors themselves. Kamino was never anywhere. Deleuze's name for what replaces the old contract is crystalline description: description that no longer presupposes an independent object but creates it, and can erase it. Geonosis, the vertical sprawl of Coruscant, the cloning halls: the description is the object. There is no Kamino to have been shot well or badly.

So the clone becomes the film's symbol in Deleuze's strict sense, the object that condenses its organizing relation. A body produced to spec, in quantity, from one template, with no original anywhere. In 2002 that is also a description of the image you are watching. And the ranks themselves are what he called a dividual — a crowd felt as one affective unit rather than many people. These are literally one individual, divided.

The exception is Tatooine, and it's the one sequence with dirt on it. Anakin goes back to the desert, finds his mother dying, and slaughters a Tusken settlement. Deleuze's category for this is naturalism's impulse-image: a social world peeled back to reveal an originary world of raw appetite underneath, where everything runs on a line of slope, an irreversible gradient toward exhaustion and death. Tatooine has been that world since 1977 — the same Tunisian sand, the place where the boy was a slave. The whole prequel trilogy is a line of slope; we know the bottom. That's why the tragedy reads even when the dialogue doesn't.

What did the film do to film? It moved the origin of the image from the camera to the pipeline, and it did so as a demonstration, self-financed, with Lucas evangelizing the format while most theaters could only project a film-out print struck from his digital master. Jurassic Park had proved ILM's creatures could share light with actors. Terminator 2 had proved a rendered figure could perform rather than merely appear. Clones took the step nobody had dared: it re-bodied a beloved practical character in software and gave him the climax. Cinema's decade-long migration to digital acquisition is dated from here.

Watch it again for the seams. Find where the actor stops and the render starts, and notice how often a hum or four bars of Williams is carrying a scene the images have left empty. Then ask the question the film asks without meaning to: when the image no longer proves anything was there, what holds it up? Lucas's answer, whether or not he chose it, was the marks. Meaning migrated out of the photograph and into the ledger of references. We have been living in that arrangement ever since.