Star Wars and the Rise of the Image

The impact of the image on our society is undeniable. From paintings and sculptures to television and movies, the image has changed alongside our culture to remain a media capable of disseminating ideas and instilling meaning into art and communication. As time passes, however, the image is slowly superceding the written word as our primary method of communication. As books become a dying vestige of the past and movies become the literature of a new age, we are forced to ask ourselves: is this a bad thing? The rise of the image heralds an exciting new age for our culture, for the image can convey information in a way that print simply cannot. A prime illustration of this point is Star Wars, George Lucas’s epic movie saga, filled with sights and actions at the pinnacle of the image’s ascendance over the written word. But in truth, the influence of Star Wars is much greater than simply outdoing writing. The first trilogy inspired a generation, reshaped our culture, and gave our society classic images which we cannot forget. Both trilogies, though, reflected the culture in which they were conceived, and drew on our collective perceptions of good and evil to both reinforce cultural assumptions and to craft characters who were both memorable and easy to identify with. Ultimately, Star Wars changed the standard for what movies should be, and stands as a testament to the power of the image over the written word.

One might claim that all the visual information that Star Wars endows to us would be the same if the entire saga of Star Wars were merely a novel. I cannot agree with this. The truth is that there is too much intricacy to the image to be properly converted into words. This sentiment, though more generally, is in fact one of the main arguments of Mitchell Stephens in his analysis of the image’s ascendance, The Rise of the Image and the Fall of the Word. He observes that “print took the world apart and reassembled it in straight, regularly shaped, black-and-white lines. The problem is that not everything can be made to fit.” (210). The fact is, simply, that most of Star Wars relies on visual stimulation which cannot be made to fit into text. A perfect example is that of the many lightsaber duels which occur throughout the films. The fights are fast: twirling displays of lights, sparks, and acrobatic maneuvers more akin to ballet than a fight, and certainly not deserving of the drab lifelessness which print conveys. Stephens remarks that “events – even at their most terrible, sensational, unfathomable, tempestuous – tend to display a certain calm, orderly clarity when portrayed in print” (211). Regardless of how eloquently a passage is written, a textual lightsaber duel cannot progress at a pace any faster than the words can be read; a visual lightsaber duel, however, can progress as fast as the eye can see.