Does the cinema make you dumb?

“Unlearn what you have learned.” The infantilization of the cinema audience: How do the thematic elements of The Empire Strikes Back depict the relationship between adulthood and youth and what are the implications for the cinema audience?

One of the major underlying themes of the original Star Wars trilogy is the exploration of the Skywalker family and especially the redemption of Darth Vader by his son Luke. The Empire Strikes Back is one of the most important of the films in exploring this theme; through the unfolding drama we come to explore the darker side of Luke’s past and juxtapose this relationship with the larger plot of the film and the context of the changing practices in Hollywood cinema. Following the victorious defeat of the Empire in A New Hope, we see the Rebels camped on a remote ice planet desperately hiding from an undeterred and relentless Empire led by the obsessional Darth Vader. After swiftly defeating the Rebels with overpowering force, the Rebels retreat and the heroes of the film are split up. Luke ventures alone to pursue his quest for knowledge and the force, after inspiration from a ghost like Obi Wan Kenobi, the others are hunted by Imperial forces in a dilapidated vessel until they find sanctuary with one of Han Solo’s old friends. This friendship however is a betrayed and they are handed to Darth Vader and the bounty hunter Bobba Fett. Sensing the danger, Luke abandons his training to rescue them and confront Vader in a devastating fight that leaves him crippled and hopeless. Meanwhile Han has been frozen and handed to Bobba Fett by Vader. Luke is left with a devastating revelation, the Rebels are left on the run and Chewbacca and Lando set off to rescue Han. In The Empire Strikes Back, Irvin Kershner explores the nature of the relationship between youth and adulthood by presenting the complicated dynamic of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader’s father/son dilemma. This relationship is thematically central to the plot of the film and allegorically reflects the struggle of maturing youth as well as the changing approaches toward film making practices in the New Hollywood.


The polar juxtapositions of good and evil are a hallmark of the Star Wars saga. The simplistic exploration of these themes is essential to the popularity of the series and is prevalent, although less simplistic in The Empire Strikes Back. This theme is a major aspect of the New Hollywood blockbuster style, taking its cues from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. In the film we see the continued struggle of the Rebels against the onslaught of the Empire. This ruthless, driving mechanical force is best presented in the scene of the attack on Hoth, where the monolithic walkers devastate the Rebel compound and in space we see the once seemingly huge star destroyers dwarfed by Darth Vader’s impossibly large flag ship. These two forces represent the theme of good verses evil in a grandiose way whilst the conflict is also acted out between the key characters in the film. In many ways the Rebel Alliance and the Empire are representational of the conflicts that surrounded George Lucas when he was originally constructing the film and its predecessor. Here we can see the rebellious youth and the counterculture of the 1960’s and 1970’s allegorically juxtaposed with the highly armed expansionist American war machine under the Nixon and Johnson presidencies and later (for the context of Return of the Jedi and the VHS release of The Empire Strikes Back) the Reagan Administration. It is the youth that the Rebels and Luke signify, and who the saga is generally targeted at. Significantly Luke is portrayed as innocent and pure, as are his fellow rebels in contrast to the elders of the film who are either evil or misleading, even Obi Wan turns out to have been misinforming Luke, and Yoda initially conceals his identity. This can be seen as representative of the general mistrust of parental authority following Watergate and the Vietnam War, that lead to the youth rebellions the 1960’s and 1970’s.


The film establishes a complex set of character relationships and conflicts as the linear narrative unfolds. Centrally we have the quest by Luke to follow in the footsteps of his supposedly virtuous, powerful and deceased father, who in a startling revelation is revealed to be Darth Vader, the ultimate manifestation of evil in the film. This relationship is further added to by the grandfather figures of Yoda and Obi Wan, on one side, and the Emperor on the other. Obi Wan starts Luke down his path to saving his father by initiating his Jedi training so that he might overcome Vader and redeem his own failing, whereas the Emperor is assertive that “the son of Skywalker must not become a Jedi” for this express purpose. As Peter Biskind affirms in “The Last Crusade”, “The trilogy creates an alliance of son and grandfather against the generation of fathers”, this is a central theme of the film one which leads towards the redemption of the father in the final installment, however there is a deeper implication of this narrative strand; the generational gap in the film reflects the thematic basis of the Star Wars trilogy, with Lucas (as well as Spielberg and others) reinventing the cinema experience by aligning themselves with the older generation of cinematic styles that exhibited clear cut heroes and villains as well as linear and uncomplicated narrative strands. Here Lucas circumnavigates and in many respects undermines the artistic exploration of the Hollywood renaissance to return (redeem) the classic Hollywood structure that had all but disappeared. In Star Wars we see the return of the primacy of narrative and the binary oppositions of good and evil.
These two forces conflict for the direction of Luke’s maturation, conversely Luke, in a sign of growing maturation decides upon his own path, both refusing to finish his Jedi training with Yoda by confronting Vader but also not being seduced by the dark side of the Force and joining the Emperor, despite the lure of ultimate power. It is knowledge that is represented as the potent symbol of maturity; knowledge of the force and of his lineage are the two primary powers that Luke wishes to posses, the comprehension of which will complete his maturation from youth and ignorance to maturity and knowledge. We see this in Return of the Jedi where he has come to terms with his parentage and completed his training, only then he becomes less reckless, more mature and able to confront his destiny. In The Empire Strikes Back, his recklessness is symbolic of his immaturity and is punished repeatedly, for example when he goes off alone on Hoth, fails to follow Yoda’s teachings about the force and most poignantly when he impetuously abandons his training. Ironically it is his father who is the most severe punisher of recklessness and impetuousness, as he repeatedly executes senior Imperial officers for their mistakes and ultimately deconstructs Luke physically and mentally when he is confronted by the overconfident youth.


The scene in the interior of the cloud city where Luke and Vader have their climactic show down is one of the most important scenes of the film. It is the ultimate irony that Luke believes he can complete his maturation process by avenging his father and killing Vader; instead we learn he is in fact Vader’s son. The scene itself acts as a Freudian metaphor for maturity with the two headstrong males battling with phallic objects for domination over each other. Whereas Luke’s maturation should be guaranteed by the resolution of his oedipal crisis he is instead literally and metaphorically castrated by his own father and left impotent and prone in the lightsaber duel added to this is the knowledge that Luke’s Saber is his father’s own, thus he is forcibly denied the act of reconciling his father’s supposed past by slaying his father’s murderer with his own weapon. The theme of following his fathers path is further depicted with Luke’s new prosthetic hand that he clutches in the final scene, here he has physically become like his father, less organic and more machine, this is a set back to his development as he wishes to emerge from his father’s shadow not become a replica of it.


This climactic duel is also the focal point of the film’s classic good verses evil theme; Darth Vader the embodiment of the dark side battles with Luke, the last hope of the benevolent forces of the galaxy. In this scene, as throughout the trilogy, color is used metaphorically to suggest to the audience the binary oppositions of good and bad; reminiscent of the classic cowboy films where the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black, here we see Vader decked from head to toe in a consuming mechanical pitch black suit, wielding a menacingly red lightsaber, an obvious visual representation of the bad guy. Luke, his opponent in light colors wields a blue saber, when he enters the utopian, white cloud city he passes from the bright immaturity of youth into the darkness of knowledge in the lower levels of the city and Vader’s trap. He is contrasted against the dark interiors of the lower levels of the city where Vader, his fears and legacy await confrontation and what is ultimately a denied resolution. His path from ignorance to knowledge is marked by this contrast in light and dark, as we see through the trilogy from his white robes in A New Hope to his black apparel in Return of the Jedi that he dons after he has learnt the ways of the force and reconciled the truth of his origins. Just as Luke is contrasted, so is Vader; in a pivotal scene where Han and Leia are captured, we see doors slide open to reveal Vader sharply contrasted with a sheer white background, framed by the table and chandeliers to emphasize his undeniable presence in the room, even among his Imperial lackeys his utter darkness is striking. This sort of visual encoding is indicative of Lucas’ reinvention of the genre movie and simplification of narrative, though the film is aimed at a younger audience; its effect on the older viewers is one of infantilization.
There are of course major implication for making a film in the way Lucas and Spielberg began to do so in the 1970’s. By returning to a mode of linear narratives and binary oppositions there is risk of over simplifying cinema and as a result infantilizing the audience. The blockbuster formula established itself with films such as Star Wars, Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark; however this formula became a staple for the film industry that came to depend on these easily constructed, high reward features. The problem with such a shift in filmmaking demographics is that of predictability and genre stagnancy that had worn out the genre films of the 1940’s and 1950’s that Lucas so admired and attempted to resurrect. The blockbuster therefore has a tendency to emphasize is linear nature to the extent that the audience is infantilized and spectacle takes the place of narrative, blockbusters have an over dependency on the mythic formula as described by Joseph Campbell in “Hero With a Thousand Faces” and, as a result, despite their individual genre, tend towards a generic formula that encompasses them all. The final scene of The Empire Strikes Back is evocative of contrasted defeat and hope, the audience has been shown that parents are not to be trusted and youths are to face seemingly insurmountable adversary in the journey for maturation which at least cinematically the blockbuster denies it audience through infantilization as Vader denies Luke the easy path to maturity.

The legacy of Star Wars into the 1980’s and 1990’s is one of blockbuster replication of a Fordian scale, where audiences are distracted from their action sequences by dialogue and character development. The rollercoaster of Star Wars, in effect, has left a theme park of repetition and predictability, unsurprising, and rarely surpassing the original.