Nerd Love and Rage: Review of “The People vs George Lucas”

Exhibit A Pictures, 2010

Written and Directed by Alexandre Philippe

A common stereotype of a ‘geek’ is someone who sinks mass amounts of time and money into an interest that has little or no practical utility, like a fantasy, or an interest that most people find somewhat eccentric. The more this geek tries to satisfy that interest and fill the hole that drives it, the bigger the hole grows.

There’s a goofy sincerity that comes through when people throw themselves into something driven by their own imagination. I love that. At the same time, though, I feel queasy at the idea of people being overpowered by fantasies of their own making – people feeling they are the mercy of their own creations.

The geek I’m trying to describe is one of the buried themes one can excavate from “The People vs George Lucas,” a documentary about Star Wars fans and the sense of betrayal they felt in reaction to Lucas’s work on the prequels to Star Wars and the digitally souped-up remakes of that popular series.

The film explores the rift that developed between Lucas and his most avid fans. It contains excellent footage of how fans have been loyal to the brand over the years. There was footage of the costumes, conventions, toys, models and everything else that have been collected by generations of Star Wars fans. There were some hilarious footage of home movie re-creations of various Star Wars scenes acted out by fans young and old, using everything from lego pieces to household pets. Watching this, you really get a sense of the extent to which many people can be captivated by Star Wars.

Contrasting with these geeks gone wild were shots of Lucas in which he appears to be rather vacant and emotionless. It was as though the Star Wars craze had nothing to do with him. He just happened to be there, resting at the centre of it, motionless and indifferent.

The contrast between the people and George Lucas intensified when the documentary covered people’s reactions to Lucas’s announcement that he was going to make Star Wars prequels. On the one hand, we saw the mushrooming excitement of fanboys and girls who were ecstatic at the thought that Lucas was going to give them something to let them relive their love of Star Wars with renewed intensity. On the other hand, there were scenes of George Lucas rolling off the couch and getting to work.

This juxtaposition of the People and George Lucas was clearly leading to a dramatic clash of expectations, as was obvious from the title of the film. That clash occured when fans saw what Lucas gave them. Let me paint a picture of one of the scenes in the documentary, the accounts of people's reactions to the remade Star Wars:

The audience is waiting for the film to start. They are cheering and waving lightsabers in the dark. Then the screen flashes those familiar words: “A long time ago, in a Galaxy far, far away...”.  A few seconds of perfect silence. Then blam!, the brass music sounds, the logo descends, the people go wild. But soon, things change. Memorable scenes (like when Han Solo shoots Greedo) are nerfed, stupid scenes are added. There are all these distracting CGI gimmicks. It soon dawns on the fans that instead of a renewal of the films they love to love, when Lucas rolled off the couch he squeezed out something else: a stinking turd. At first there was some cautious confusion and double-takes. Maybe that turd isn’t really a turd. But slowly reality sunk in, and feelings of betrayal began to take hold.

The documentary then showed footage of nerdrage. Hella nerdrage. “Lucas raped my childhood” kind of nerdrage.

The polemics against Lucas (which applied to the prequels he made too) were funny, and people had interesting things to say about what makes a film work or fail. But underneath the vitriol there was a subtheme that I found particularly interesting (a subtheme I'm not sure the writer/director was attuned to). Lucas was like a parent whose own children turned against him after feeling betrayed by him.  But you could also say that it was the fans themselves who turned Lucas into the kind of director who would betray them. If Lucas had turned to the dark side, on one level it was his fans who drove him there.

The documentary gives us a peek at how this may be so. It tells the story of how when Lucas began his career, he felt he was at the mercy of the fat cats of the industry who funded his work. He had little creative control over his films, and he struggled hard. But once he won some independence, he was free to create the Star Wars vision that inspired generations of fans. Lucas’s success, however, was also his downfall. The work of nurturing and feeding this hungering market became all-consuming and Lucas gradually lost touch with his art. By the time it came time for him to do the remakes and prequels, he had turned into a twisted perversion of his younger more creative self. He now was a buzz-maker and sloganeer, and for him films were now about making a patchwork of superficial gimmicks rather than developing a narrative that captures people’s imagination for generations.

The ironic result of Lucas gaining creative independence and winning a legion of fans was that he degenerated into the “all business no art” kind of person he sought to avoid early in his career. And that's how it came to be that his fans outgrew him. These fans felt deeply betrayed by him when Lucas twisted the brand into a gimmicky version of itself. But you could also say that the nerdrage felt by fans was a reaction to a monster created by their own obsessive consumer demands. Just as there would be no Star Wars fans without George Lucas, there would be no abomination of the Star Wars brand if Lucas didn’t become slave to the demands of his fans for anything related to Star Wars.

If this was the case, it would mean that the nerdrage felt by fans is one some level directed against itself, not Lucas. Underneath it all, this nerdrage is really a perverse form of love: it is a rage that can only be felt by those who are deeply (if not compulsively) attached to Lucas's vision of Star Wars – despite Lucas. As someone suggested in the film, the “real” fans of Star Wars are now the ones who hate it.

It would have been interesting if the documentary put the whole industry on the couch and pressed some buttons to see where it really hurts. Unfortunately, the film ended with a lovefest for Lucas that drained the conflict and buried the question of how we would evaluate that conflict. But maybe that was a smart move for this documentary, given the target audience.