Avid fans wait in impatient lines that zigzag around blocks outside movie theatres. Television broadcasters hover around queues of people that disrupt the flow of movement along city streets. Advertisements, on-set photographs, and talent interviews are emblazoned across the pages of magazines in a blitzkrieg media campaign; Darth Vader glares out from the cover of Time. A production legendary for its near-impossible location shoot and challenging visual effects has wrapped, and the industry waits, watching, as the film-makers launch that tricky thing – a sequel – on a trajectory to hoped-for box-office success. Deviating from its wildly popular predecessor in style and tone, no one knows what to expect. It is 21 May 1980, and suddenly there is a disturbance in the Force. The cinema doors open at long last. The first lucky viewers are admitted and scramble into their seats…
The Empire is about to strike back.
What began life as a risky sequel to the 1977 blockbuster hit Star Wars is now just one film in a canonical saga that encompasses three trilogies, two spin-offs, five television shows, numerous arcade and console games, theme park rides, comics, novels, documentaries, and innumerable toys and merchandise. Yet forty years after its first theatrical release, The Empire Strikes Back (henceforth, Empire) is now widely regarded as the best Star Wars film. The movie regularly tops polls and critically curated lists in newspapers and on fan websites.1 It appears in popular culture from music to television shows.2 It’s the first sequel ever included in the BFI Film Classics series. And – something of an aside but nevertheless an important feature of my analysis throughout this book – I love every second of this dark, messy, glorious film. Full of unexpected twists and turns (which might depend on both your age and ability to avoid forty-year-old spoilers), Empire propels viewers into fantastical worlds with evocative textures. There are the crystalline snowscapes of besieged ice-planet Hoth; the murky, twilight swamps of the deluged Dagobah; and the magnificence of the sun-speckled art deco city sitting high in the dusky atmosphere above Bespin. There are unexpected heroes, with a white woman, a Black man, and a cast of aliens and droids leading a rebellion against the evil Empire. Fantastical visual effects send asteroids spinning towards the screen. It is a film that continues to entrance and excite me even after countless viewings over close to three decades.
The icy snowscapes of Hoth are visible in the promotional poster for The Empire Strikes Back, 1980
But what is perhaps surprising, especially given Empire’s prominence in popular culture, is that it tends to be neglected in serious critical and scholarly writing about Star Wars. Prior academic work has focused on the saga’s industrial contexts, its fandom and remediation, and in some cases, textual analysis of the movies and other screen media.3 Possibly as a result of the franchise’s commercial success and mass appeal, it hasn’t received the kind of archival investigation that tends to elevate discussions about other major cinematic texts (for example, the Bond franchise). Consequently, this book maps Empire’s social and political history, and focuses on the US and the UK as the two powers most heavily involved in the film’s production. Over the next six chapters, I excavate the connections between Empire and its cultural contexts over the course of its lifetime, beginning with its genesis in November 1977 and ending with its classic status in the present day. In doing so, I delve into archives in LA and London, looking at the distributor’s market research, as well as scribbled continuity sketches in homemade folders. I scour Lucasfilm trade publications to read between the lines of carefully constructed narratives of public record. I sort through stacks of digital and paper articles from the trade and daily press for reviews, news reports, and Empire-themed features. By drawing together the ephemeral traces of Empire’s production, exhibition, and ongoing reception, I propose a new and historically oriented direction of travel for critical writing about Star Wars. It is a film that has touched people’s imaginations and daily lives through shared cultural reference points for over forty years; now, my aim is to make its past tangible to both new and nostalgic viewers alike. It may have been a long time ago, but by recovering and discussing its material history, The Empire Strikes Back doesn’t have to feel so far away.
Weaving back and forth between my primary archival sources and broader histories of the 1970s and 1980s, I argue that Empire is a film about disruption. From its off-piste production to the oblique shapes and diagonal perspectives of its design, it’s a film that disturbs the certainty of the status quo. Where Star Wars relies on stillness and stability, with static cameras and ships moving across screens in straight lines, Empire throws everything up in the air and leaves viewers guessing as to how it will all fall down. Characters bounce around inside ships; unstable landscapes tremble; cameras pan, tilt, and track. Off-screen, the film’s journey to release navigated the Cold War and the 1978–9 Winter of Discontent, which saw trade unions in conflict with the UK government about pay and working conditions across sectors that impacted the film industries. Empire emerged amid furious debates about equality for women and people of colour, which resonated both in front of and behind the camera. And, following a chaotic production beset by fire, avalanches, and personal disputes, the film appeared in 1980 in an increasingly conservative political environment. Thus, this book addresses a broad range of possibly unexpected but nevertheless interconnected topics. There is militarism, trade unionism, and national identity; feminism, Black Power, and queer politics; colonialism and climate change; and the rise of New Hollywood. No matter what the angle, Empire is a turbulent film with a history rocked by conflict.
Luke hangs upside down in the wampa cave on Hoth; a low-angle shot and canted frame puts everything at odd angles as Han fixes the Millennium Falcon at the Rebels’ Echo Base; Leia is destabilized by a tremor inside the exogorth
My perspective on the movie is informed by a particular set of experiences, too. I am a white, queer, cis, left-wing, feminist film historian and cultural critic. I am a trade unionist. I am also a lifelong Star Wars fan. As a child, I enjoyed the contentious Ewoks, which are often disparaged by adult fans (I still do enjoy them, really, and know all of their names). I am the kind of person who ordinarily doesn’t get to write about Star Wars because even though I have the privilege of whiteness, I am not a man. But even as I question Empire and its politics, I maintain a love for the film and the franchise, which are inscribed in every word of this book. It is possible to occupy two positions at once and we are all, like our cultural artefacts, complicated and contradictory. Gregory E. Rutledge’s work is exemplary here in laying out the challenges he faces as a Black scholar writing about racism in the Star Wars movies, even as he remains a fan.4 And it is important for all of us, where we can, to acknowledge our biases if we are going to make meaningful contributions to the world-building process of writing about the past.5 Consequently, I draw on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s argument that society is built on intersecting oppressions such as gender, race, and class to help unpick how narratives about Empire have been shaped by subjective biases that underpin fandom of, and scholarship and criticism about, the film.6 History, I argue, does not look the same either at or for all of us.
I therefore write this book from my position as under-represented in authorship about and in the fandom of Star Wars (as a queer woman), while also recognizing the privilege manifest in my identity as an academic and critic who is white, cisgender, and non-disabled. It is my hope that writing this book will have three outcomes: first, that it will speak to other viewers who feel left out of Star Wars narratives.7 Second, that people traditionally centred in writing about the franchise and its fandom will read the work with both generosity and curiosity and try to see from another point of view. And third, that it will create space for readers more marginalized than myself to respond to, build upon, challenge, or improve my arguments from their various subject positions. As bell hooks suggests, ‘it is only as we collectively change the way we look at ourselves and the world that we can change how we are seen’.8 Consequently, my small act of rebellion in this book is to resist oft-repeated claims about George Lucas and auteurism.9 Instead, I focus on stories about the collective endeavours of film-makers and viewers so that others can more easily see and write about themselves in Star Wars criticism.
The following six chapters are organized chronologically to correspond with the life of the film. Chapter 1 offers an overview of the Star Wars franchise and Empire’s position within it, while also addressing its historical context. In Chapter 2, I explore the challenges of the film’s production history. Chapter 3 is the soul of the book; here, I offer an analysis of Empire that draws together all of the book’s historical and thematic concerns. Chapters 4 and 5 investigate the film’s exhibition and reception among viewers and reviewers, while also considering the ruptures that the film generated in distribution models and criticism. And finally, in Chapter 6, I conclude by interrogating how the second-ranking box-office entry of the original trilogy, which was met with critical ambivalence and cynicism, became audiences’ favourite Star Wars film. Referring to scholarship on taste, and thinking also about perceptions of the prequel and sequel films, I consider what Empire tells us about the changing status of entertainment franchises in popular culture.
The Empire Strikes Back, then, is a restless and uneasy movie that is full of contradictions and subject to shifting interpretations over the course of its history. My ambition in writing about the film has always been (if you will excuse the paraphrasing) to light sparks that stoke fires that broaden conversations about the film, its creators, and the diverse community of fans and viewers that continue to give the saga life.10 And it is fitting, I feel, that my narrative should seek to disturb narratives about Star Wars. As another ephemeral presence in Empire’s afterlife, this book, too, will contribute to the film’s ongoing, if ever-changing, history of disruption and resistance.
