The Force Returns: George Lucas Before the “Star Wars” Prequels

My main thought on rereading my “Letter from Skywalker Ranch,” from 1997, is how, since writing it, I’ve become a father, and that has changed how I understand Star Wars. My son was born the following year, and came to awareness just as the second trilogy of Star Wars movies was coming out, along with the attendant merchandising campaigns. He literally grew up with Star Wars. I happily indoctrinated him by watching the old and new movies together and by buying a lot of cool Star Wars toys, including Hasbro’s brilliant R2-D2 robot, lightsabres from the Sharper Image, and the Darth Vader helmet/mask that goes, “I am your father,” and “You don’t know the power of the dark side,” in James Earl Jones’s rich baritone. We built almost all the major Lego models, including the Millennium Falcon and the Death Star. He recently got Lego’s new edition of the Falcon for his seventeenth birthday. He was very relieved to see that Lego kept the younger Han Solo.

In the piece, I take the somewhat glib position that the young artist’s desire to escape Modesto, California, and his fate as the proprietor of his father’s stationery business, and to go to Hollywood and make movies, was the personal drama on which Lucas mapped his mythological space story: Luke Skywalker’s quest to become a Jedi and do battle with the imperial forces. I go on to judge that Lucas, as the patron of Skywalker Ranch, ended up becoming his father by giving the Star Wars story over to the merchandisers—I had never forgiven him for the Ewoks—and, later, by making cynical commercial products like the “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” television series.

Eighteen years later, with two kids now—my son and his younger sister, who is now seven—the situation seems a lot more complicated. Yes, you do turn into your father, to some extent, when you have kids and take on financial responsibilities. But that doesn’t mean the Empire has to win. As I wrote in the piece,

But both Luke and Lucas have had to reckon with their patrimony. There’s the famous scene on the Cloud City catwalk in “Empire” when Darth reveals that he is Luke’s father. He has cut off Luke’s hand and tries to turn him to the dark side, saying, “Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son!”: Luke responds by leaping off the catwalk into the abyss. Just as Luke has to contend with the qualities he may have inherited from Darth Vader, so Lucas, in his career after “Star Wars,” has stopped directing films and has become the successful, fiscally conservative businessman that his father always wanted him to be.

The scripts for the prequel, which Lucas is finishing now, make it clear that Star Wars, taken as a whole story and viewed in chronological order, is not really the story of Luke at all but the story of Luke’s father, Anakin Skywalker, and how he, a Jedi Knight, was corrupted by the dark side of the Force and became Darth Vader. When I asked Lucas what Star Wars was ultimately about, he said, “Redemption.” He added, “The scripts to the three films that I’m finishing now are a lot darker than the second three, because they are about a fall from grace. The first movie is pretty innocent, but it goes downhill from there, because it’s more of a tragic story—that’s built into it.”

I said that the innocence was what many people found so compelling about the first Star Wars movie, and I asked whether it was harder for him, now that he is twenty years less innocent, to go back to work on the material.

“Of course your perspective changes when you get older and as you get battered by life,” he said.

“Have you been battered by life?”

“Anyone who lives is going to get battered. Nothing comes easy.”

“Redemption.” I get it now. “Battered by life.” I get that too. Now I see that Star Wars is, in fact, as much the story of the father as it is the story of his son.

A couple months ago, my son brought up seeing “The Force Awakens” on opening night with me. I could tell that he viewed it as a solemn occasion that he wanted to share with his dad. I really didn’t want to go on opening night, and I asked if we could at least wait until Saturday. He didn’t want to wait, so he arranged to see it with his friends, and to see it for a second time when I go for the first time. So it’s still a father-son thing, but now he’ll be the father showing the movie to me.