Four-Colour Commentary

The one, the only, Star Wars

Lucasfilm has put up a shot-by-shot breakdown of all the changes made to the Special Edition of Star Wars (though I'd still like to know which bloody Special Edition). I just today realised the philosophical inconsistency in how Lucas et al. have handled the whole fiasco.

There are many, many examples of different versions of 'great works' of literature in which none of the extent copies are the 'true' or 'real' version. There are four different King Lears and three Hamlets. There's are two different final chapters to Great Expectations. There's an extra chapter at the end of Clockwork Organge that wasn't published in America until about ten years ago. The list goes on and on and on. Modern art history and literary criticism has become comfortable with the idea that these mulitple editions exist, and in many cases, especially with Shakespeare, we can't say which is the 'real' version. In most cases, they're just multiple takes on basically the same text. I would be happy to treat Star Wars the same way, to say that the Special Editions are a slightly different version of the same story, but treat all of the versions as having a certain validity, the originals because they're the ones that first grabbed audiences and the updates because they're what Lucas always wanted to do.

What I cannot abide, though, is the insistance that now that the new versions exist, the originals must be eradicated, and all hyperbole aside, that is what Lucasfilm is trying to do. It's very difficult to find the original cuts anymore. The on-line community has fallen back on the old LaserDisk editions from the 80s. What Lucas is trying to do is make new versions of Star Wars, thus displaying the flexibility of film as an art form, especially so since the advancement of computer imaging, while at the same time implicitly insisting that there is only one true version. Either update it and let us decide which one we want to watch, or leave it the Hell alone. You don't get to have it both ways, George.