status. Indeed much of their success may be due to
the way they plug into something much larger then
themselves; a world that fans and enthusiasts can explore
independently. Let’s take a look at some classic examples:
Star WarsStar Wars (dir: George Lucas 1977) borrows heavily from other textual worlds. For example, the Jedi can be seen as an order of medieval warrior knights wielding swords of light instead of metal. Luke is a young King Arthur, and Obi-Wan Kenobi his Merlin. Han Solo is a brash Lancelot, and Princess Leia a feisty Guinevere – until we discover why marrying Arthur is quite out of the question! On another (perhaps less conscious) level R2-D2 and C-3PO are a bickering Laurel and Hardy double act; one twittering but endearing, the other pompous and bossy.
More specifi cally the narrative point of view and the use of frame wipes as transitional devices were directly inspired by an Akira Kurosawa fi lm, The Hidden Fortress (1958). Whereas the climax, the pinpoint attack on the weak spot in the Death Star’s defences, is infl uenced by British war fi lms such as The Dam Busters (dir: Michael Anderson 1955) and 633 Squadron (dir: Walter Grauman 1964).
But the deepest infl uence on the fi lm (and arguably the source of its unparallelled popularity) is the work of the scholar Joseph Campbell, whose comparison of ancient mythology in The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949) describes a universal spiritual journey – a psychological initiation of trial and empowerment, which underwrites what some regard as Lucas’s own modern myth.
Blade Runner
Possibly the greatest sci-fi movie ever made, Blade Runner (dir: Ridley Scott 1982), is a modern re-working of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818). Blade Runner’s ‘mad scientist’ (Tyrell) has made a whole class of beings, known as replicants, now in search of their creator. Whereas Mary Shelley’s ‘Monster’ was a failed experiment cast out because of his brute ugliness, Ridley Scott’s robotic life forms are threatening precisely because they are perfect, and perfectly indistinguishable from the human beings they crave to be.
The Matrix
The futuristic chic of Blade Runner also inspired the dystopian vision of The Matrix (dir: Andy and Larry Wachowski 1999), which is a veritable encyclopaedia of literary, cinematic and cultural intertextuality.
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Verbal allusion is made to Alice in Wonderland (1865) and The Wizard of Oz (1900), while the movie’s eye-catching violence upgrades the ‘bullet ballets’ of director Sam Peckinpah and the martial arts movies of Bruce Lee. The world of liquid pods owes something to the rings of Hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy, while the simulated reality of the Matrix itself is an infi nitely expanded version of the Star Trek ‘holodeck’.
A great deal of the fi lm’s glamour comes from associations outside movie-dom. The Matrix is full of references to religion (oracles, messianic Christianity, Zen Buddhism), philosophy (Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Descartes’ deceiving demon, thought experiments about brains in vats) and modern anxieties about the internet, cyberspace and virtual reality.
These (and many other) associations lend gravitas to the fi lm’s glossy surface, and fl atter the audience that can recognise and play with these abstract ideas. If we know our Plato or Lewis Carroll, the text immeasurably expands in signifi cance. If we spot the references to other fi lms, we feel included in a way that rewards our attention and keeps us engaged long after the movie is over.
A ll u s io n > Cult fi lm > G e n re The Matrix
(dir: Andy and Larry Wachowski 1999)
The whole concept of ‘The Desert of the Real’ (shown here) derives from two books: Aldous Huxley’s futuristic satire Brave New World (1932) and Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1985), a book that literally appears at the beginning of the fi lm when Neo uses it to hide his illicit software.
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Inter te x tualit y Primary plots
Some movies are straightforwardly based on other texts. Casablanca is a fi lm adaptation of an unpublished stage play entitled Everybody Comes to Rick’s by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, and Blade Runner actually adapts Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). Similarly, fi lms such as Ghandi (dir: Richard Attenborough 1982), Titanic (dir: James Cameron 1997) and Saving Private Ryan (dir: Steven Spielberg 1998) have their origin in real documented events.
But even more fundamental than literary or historical sources are primary story-patterns; these are the narrative foundations upon which all stories are built. These primary plots refl ect the basic experiences of every human life – we grow up, face challenges, go on adventures, face various temptations, win things, lose things, fall in and out of love. These are human universals – hence our interest in seeing them acted out in books and fi lms. Tapping into this common core of experience, a fi lm-maker is engaging with an audience in a potentially powerful way.
The suggestion that the infi nite abundance of narrative is generated from a few basic plots may seem unlikely, but it bears the test. As we saw in Chapter 2, precisely what these stories are is a subject of debate, but with a certain amount of imagination any fi lm can be described in one or more of the terms in the box opposite.
Watching old movies is like spending an evening with those people next door. They bore us, and we wouldn’t go out of our way to see them; we drop in on them because they’re so close. If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to fi nd out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago. Like Lot’s wife, we are tempted to take another look, attracted not by evil but by something that seems much more shameful – our own innocence.
Pauline Kael, fi lm critic
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A ll u s io n > Cult fi lm > G e n re