Size Matters Not: Star Wars (1977, George Lucas)

I have lost count of how many times I have seen George Lucas’ Star Wars, whether in part or in full. Even after all these years and so many repeat viewings, the 1977 original still retains the power to entertain, amaze, and inspire like few others. The film has been so influential, and so ingrained in our cultural consciousness, that it can be easy to take the film’s virtues for granted and fix your eyes only on its faults. When I watched it again recently, I tried as best as I could to examine it with a fresh set of eyes. It was bound to be an impossible exercise on some levels, but I did discover some new elements in the storytelling, and in the filmmaking craft, that I had never fully appreciated.


Perhaps more than any other American movie, Star Wars is an exercise on mythopoeia, the conscious generation of myth. It is no secret that George Lucas consulted mythology scholar Joseph Campbell while crafting his screenplay. Campbell is most famous for his seminal text The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which analyzes the common elements of myths across cultures and lays out a blueprint for the archetypal hero’s journey. Lucas borrowed quite liberally from an even wider variety of sources: Flash Gordon serials, King Arthur legend, Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films Hidden Fortress and Yojimbo, John Ford’s The Searchers, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Lucas’ own 1950s nostalgia piece American Graffiti, J.R.R. Tolkien, The Wizard of Oz, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Freudian psychoanalysis, World War II newsreels and propaganda films, the music of composers Richard Strauss and Gustav Holst, the American Revolutionary War, and religions from both West and East. Star Wars is not merely a work of fantasy fiction, but a key intersection within a massive web of cultural storytelling, both narrative and sensory, that stretches across every direction in time and space.


It would be a mistake, however, to regard Star Wars as anything other than an original work. Few films are more imaginative than George Lucas’ seminal work, and one man’s individual personality shines brightly through the entire run-time. Even a mere glance at that list of inspirations above shows a few key insights into how the mind of George Lucas operates. Some of those works affected the film on the large scale, by informing the broad structure of his story; many of those works influenced some very specific details of his film’s production. Lucas’ main strengths as a filmmaker exist on the micro level (the invention and careful planning of thousands of different elements of his universe) and the macro level (arranging those elements into a stylistically and thematically consistent whole). He keeps a keen eye for both the big picture and the small picture simultaneously. Star Wars is a film rich with many layers of possible interpretation, but when I watched it most recently, I was amazed by the central role that size played in the film, both in the screenplay and in the celluloid.


Beginning with the very first shot, the film’s imagery conveys the artist’s unique attitude towards size relationships. After the famous opening crawl, the background of an entire universe of stars and planets fills the screen. Slowly, the camera tilts downward, to reveal one small planet on the right side of the screen and another larger one on left of the screen. Then, a third, much larger planet appears in the foreground, dwarfing the other two objects. This simple visual progression dramatically alters the viewer’s perspective on the objects, by suggesting that the first two objects are moons orbiting around the larger planet. In reality, though, the opposite could just as easily be true. Our assumptions about relative size depend entirely on the placement of the camera. As Obi-Wan would eventually say in the final film of the saga: “Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”



Next, the Rebel blockade runner enters the screen from the top right. The planetary objects provide a sense of scale, which becomes essential in creating the illusion of tremendous speed. Finally, this setup pays off in a huge way, with the introduction of the massive Imperial star destroyer following closely behind it. The object just keeps getting larger and larger in the frame for a breathtaking effect. With just a single elegant camera movement and a careful choreography of models, Lucas has introduced the audience into the Star Wars universe. The initial shot highlights the vastness of space, a backdrop of planets filled with limitless possibilities. The in-between shot focuses on the planet and moons, and plays with the relationship between perspective and size. The third set of images introduces the two sides of the conflict, with the small collection of Rebels being hunted down relentlessly by the colossal and technologically superior Empire. These visuals also hint at what will become a major motif throughout the story, and perhaps the central element of the Star Wars mythology, the relationships between very large things and very small things.



The next sequence introduces the audience to the story’s first characters, R2-D2 and C-3P0 (and then Princess Leia soon after). The little astromech Artoo enters as the smallest and most insignificant element of this movie universe, but he becomes the focal point around which the whole story revolves. In a small compartment, inside the smallest droid, in the halls of a tiny Rebel starship, trapped within a huge Imperial ship, near a massive planet, somewhere in a wide galaxy; there resides the information upon which the fate of all of those planets depends. The Empire captures every Rebel onboard, and only the two droids can escape, because they are small enough to avoid detection. Darth Vader, the biggest and strongest character in this battle, with the might of the Empire at his disposal, is undone by the efforts of the two little droids and the young princess. As their escape pod drifts away, C-3P0 comments on the battle: “That’s funny. The damage doesn’t look as bad from out here.” The audience will not hear Obi-Wan’s initial explanation of the Force for another thirty minutes. Well before that explicit explanation, the film has already offered the first of many illustrations of the film’s philosophy.



“The Force is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.”

Both the visual power and the narrative power of Lucas’ film reside in its ability to shift the viewer’s perspective on size. If you examine the smallest characters in the galaxy (little R2-D2 and young Luke and Leia) from up close, then they appear larger than life. If you look at the biggest elements of the universe (Vader and the Imperial war machine) from far enough away, then they appear small enough to be beaten. If you compare both the Rebellion and the Empire against the vastness of space, then the difference between them seems pretty insignificant. The film’s entire narrative arc can be seen as an epic struggle between two machines: R2-D2 and the Death Star. Common sense would dictate that the Death Star is a much more significant element in the universe than R2-D2, but in this story, the opposite proves to be true. We can conceive of the Star Wars galaxy as one giant organism, in which the Death Star functions as a cancerous growth that threatens it, and R2-D2 and the rest of the Rebellion serves as an immune system to protect it. The story does not necessarily serve as an allegory for good and evil (and this idea becomes even more apparent in Lucas’ prequel trilogy), but instead a story of small things overcoming large things.



As the script unfolds, its preoccupation with size becomes even more apparent. R2-D2 soon finds himself captured by a band of Jawas, creatures even smaller than himself. The message inside him contains a hologram of Princess Leia, which delivers life-altering orders from her miniature form. Artoo goes off to find Kenobi after Luke supposes, “I guess you’re too small to run away from me”. Obi-Wan quite ironically warns the alien thugs in Mos Eisley that “this little one [Luke] is not worth the effort”. The Millennium Falcon successfully escapes capture from two Imperial cruisers, only to be lured into a trap by one tiny TIE fighter, which is “headed for that small moon”. The heroes eventually escape the Death Star, but the Imperials rely on a hidden tracking device. The Rebels attack the Death Star with one-man fighters, small enough to avoid the barrage of large-scale defenses, and target a 2-meter exhaust port. The mighty Imperials can only defend themselves by resorting to even smaller fighters, the smallest and deadliest of which is piloted by Vader. Again and again in the story, the smaller elements of the universe prove to be the most significant.



Lucas conveyed this recurring motif of size relationships not only through the screenplay, but also with his filming technique. This effect is more obvious in space, but it also applies on the ground. Specifically, he used different camera placements to affect the size of characters in the frame, and then he used the size of the character in the frame to convey its relative importance in the story. The best way to maximize the physical size of a character on screen is to shoot a tight close-up, from a lower angle, with the actor centered. Throughout the film, four characters receive the greatest number of such shots: R2-D2, Leia, Luke, and Obi-Wan (although Vader receives quite a few himself). This choice creates a twofold effect. First, it establishes a strong sense of empathy and intimacy between the audience and those characters. More importantly, though, this visual cue serves as a symbol for the metaphorical size of these figures, a measure of their courage and their high ideals.





A few scenes in particular illustrate the almost-subliminal effectiveness of this technique. When Luke and Obi-Wan first meet Han Solo in the Mos Eisley Cantina, the two sides of the bargaining table are filmed differently. Luke and Obi-Wan repeatedly appear in the center of the frame, from a low angle, and up close. Han is frequently shown from a more mid-range distance, from a higher angle, and offset to the left side of the screen. Chewbacca towers over him on the right side of the screen, and makes Han appear even smaller in context. At the same time, the dialogue of the scene highlights the differences in their motivations. Han’s materialism and self-interested behavior contrasts against the idealism and altruistic behavior of the two Rebels. The physical size of the characters in the frame depicts the difference between their worldviews.




Lucas maintains this pattern in subsequent philosophical conversations between Obi-Wan and Han. When the two characters debate each other inside the Falcon and on the Death Star, Obi-Wan features prominently in the foreground while Han is marginalized in the background. (During the first scene, Obi-Wan comments that Luke has “taken [his] first-step into a larger world,” despite Han’s pessimistic influence.) Over the course of the film, the mercenary Solo is usually filmed from a more distant perspective than the Rebels, and thus made to seem smaller. He appears in more mid-range shots, frequently off-center, or turned to the side, hunched over or leaning back, and very often with a larger background characters looming behind him. Of course, this trend eventually breaks down as Solo evolves into a Rebel. When Han returns to rescue Luke in the Death Star trench, the camera shows him larger than ever before, as the visual and ideological equal of Luke and Leia.




Another primary character in the story, Governor Tarkin receives a similar visual treatment. Tarkin serves as the secondary villain in the story, but he is first in command on the Death Star. Tarkin can be seen as the film’s chief emblem of military power, in control of what appears to be ‘the ultimate power in the universe.’ Despite this status, he remains a relatively small visual object in the camera lens. It is almost impossible to find a frame in which Tarkin’s face occupies the center of the screen. In most of his scenes, the mystic Darth Vader towers above him with a dominating presence (in the same way that the noble Chewbacca overshadows Han). One of my favorite shots in the entire film occurs just before the destruction of Alderaan: Tarkin stands before a massive viewing screen, looking out at a vulnerable blue planet much like our own. Tarkin at once appears quite large in relation to the planet but quite small relative to our screen. The image conveys the tremendous destructive power of man, with the smallness of mind that accompanies it.




Perhaps even more powerful images, though, can be found in the mirroring scene in the climactic battle. The Death Star appears far into the background on the left of the frame while the Falcon and three other Rebel fighters race towards the camera. As the ships move closer, they also dominate more space in the frame, one-by-one growing larger than the Death Star itself. The camera cuts to a brief shot of Tarkin’s profile, peering off-screen, pensively awaiting his “moment of triumph”. In contrast with the massive, centered close-ups of Han and Luke, Tarkin’s last breath suggests powerlessness and the failure of his vision. The film cuts back to the Death Star, now zoomed even further away. The station assumes the same space occupied by Tarkin’s face in the previous shot, conflating the two figures, just before the two detonate.






Lucas’ Star Wars is often accused of being a childish film, and many people treat it as a scapegoat for the transition from the dark and serious American films of the 1970s into the commercial blockbusters of the 1980s. On the surface level, it is true that the film’s form makes it accessible to viewers of all ages. Mythology scholar Roland Barthes argued that truly successful myths operate through second-order signals, coded messages that become our assumptions of truth about the world. The Star Wars myth conveys its own particular worldview in precisely this manner. To a large degree, the film reflects many of the most serious issues that America faced in the late twentieth century.


Advances in science and technology make our world smaller and larger at the same time. As Americans and Soviets raced to the moon, photographs from space transformed people’s perspectives about exactly how small, fragile, and interconnected out planet really was. Star Wars extended this idea into an entire galaxy of life forms intimately tied together in the same fashion. During the Cold War, our planet was struggling to adapt to the reality of nuclear annihilation, the world’s supreme destructive force derived from elementary particles. Star Wars again shifted this realization outward, with the Death Star serving as the ultimate symbol of escalating military force. Over the previous decade, though, America itself had received a harsh lesson about the limits of technological superiority. The same U.S. military that had defeated Germany and Japan with conventional and atomic weapons in World War II proved to be no match for the power of human will in the jungles of Vietnam. Americans understood exactly what Vader meant when he warned his fellow Imperials: “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.” We may be accustomed to seeing ourselves as the Rebellion, but in reality, the Empire might serve as the more accurate mirror. (The sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, explores this concept more fully.)


George Lucas was a visionary filmmaker on many levels. He imagined an entire galaxy from the largest planets down to the smallest creatures. As a craftsman, he intuitively understood how to use the camera to shape human perception. He knew how to make the smallest objects appear to be colossal, and to make the largest objects appear to be insignificant. This understanding not only informed the technical aspects of his work, but it also became a central aspect of his art. At one point in the film, Obi-Wan Kenobi instructs young Luke: “Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them.” The visuals of Star Wars depend upon our acceptance of countless optical illusions. The mythology of Star Wars, however, asks the audience to distrust our own limited senses in favor of a larger perspective on the forces at play in our universe.