Jonathan Rosenbaum on 'Willow' (Chicago Reader, 1988)
As one of those spoilsports who actively disliked Star Wars when it burst on the scene 11 years ago, enjoyed The Empire Strikes Back (1980) even less, and happily managed to miss both Return of the Jedi (1983) and Labyrinth (1986), I can’t say that I approached George Lucas’s latest ecumenical blockbuster with expectations of much pleasure. Nevertheless, now that his latest fantasy epic has confirmed my nonexpectations, I can’t help but wonder why Willow has been getting such a drubbing from the same reviewers who responded to the early Lucas mega-hits with such enthusiasm. Is it really all that different from its predecessors?
Lucas’s reputation seems to be passing through the same sort of vicissitudes as Ronald Reagan’s: a few years of euphoric tub thumping while the future was getting steadily sold away under our feet, followed by recriminations and icon bashing, which seem motivated less by second thoughts than by certain automatic principles built into an economy of planned obsolescence. It isn’t a change, moreover, brought about by any striking evolution in public response: Willow has been performing well, if not spectacularly, at the box office, and one can safely bet that our next president will be the candidate who applies the lessons of Reagan’s feel-good salesmanship most successfully.
The analogy between Reagan’s mythmaking and Lucas’s isn’t intended frivolously. Both depend on a Disneyland view of history and culture — a denial of the present and future combined with a cozy foreshortening and leveling of the past. And Lucas’s distance from Walt Disney and Cecil B. De Mille is roughly equivalent to Reagan’s from Teddy Roosevelt and Richard Nixon — the difference between facelessness and cranky individualism, between homogenized formula and obsession. The fact that Reagan could name his ballistic missile program after Lucas’s blockbuster, describe it as a gesture toward peace, and add, “The Force is with us,” is not entirely coincidental. Both Reagan and Lucas are media “visionaries” who have built their respective empires on the principle of painting by numbers — a soothing activity that relaxes the mind.
In Lucas’s case, at least, we know from Star Wars what the preordained mixture consists of: bits of Kurosawa, The Wizard of Oz, the Old Testament, Disney, Riefenstahl, the Brothers Grimm, Flash Gordon, a few sprigs of myth scholar Joseph Campbell, and whatever else Lucas may have on hand in his well-stocked suburban kitchen — in the case of Willow, Gulliver’s Travels, Tolkien, and the hideous Speaking of Animals shorts of the 50s — all fed into a blender. What comes out has the nerveless consistency of cold mush, or nursery wallpaper…
Consider the use of foreign accents and ethnic groupings. Disney’s recourse to such stereotypes in the early 40s — from the nationalities of Pinocchio (including English and Italian villains and an American boy-hero and Blue Fairy) to the bebop crows in Dumbo — was admittedly more vulgar, but at least it had an ideological directness that honestly reflected the biases of both Disney and much of his audience. The same could be said of De Mille (Luc Moullet’s inspired gloss of the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments was: “Just a straight line, no dialectics: Ramses stands for Mao Tse-tung, and Moses for De Mille himself”). And at least Disney and De Mille gave us such abstract set pieces as the Dance of the Pink Elephants and the Parting of the Red Sea; Star Wars and Willow give us only live-action storyboards.
And how does Lucas handle ethnicity and nationality? In Star Wars he gave us both stingy Jewish merchants (the Munchkin-like Jawas) and an homage to Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda (in the final scene), and without owning up to the ideological implications of either, merely treating them as two more arbitrary ingredients for the MixMaster. In like fashion, it took Mel Brooks in Spaceballs to point out that Star Wars‘ heroine was a Jewish American Princess and a Valley Girl to boot; all Brooks did was add some healthy vulgarity and directness to Lucas’s more surreptitious styling (as well as to Lucas’s packaging and merchandising). Similarly in Willow, the issue of who is English, who is American, and who is French seems relatively unfelt and arbitrary, and the use of such varied nationalities becomes a substitute for imagination rather than a means of focusing it (as it arguably was in the better Disney and De Mille efforts).
Compare the designs of the Nelwyns’ musical instruments in Willow with the wilder inventions of Dr. Seuss in the dungeon sequence of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., a neglected fantasy of the 50s — or put Willow‘s sub-Disney castle next to the one in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy — and you start to get an idea of what distinguishes genuine fantasy from Lucas’s visual Muzak.
