A risky sequel that was always guaranteed success. A production narrative that emphasized logistical challenges while erasing the labour of marginalized creative talent. A technologically innovative, forward-looking special effects team that was grappling with the practices of the past. And so, the list of Empire’s contradictory genesis goes on, looping through a framework of visual disturbance in the form of oblique angles and canted frames, via the historical presence of viewers that disrupt cultural myths about fan identities, to land, skidding to a sideways halt, among conflicted critical discussions of the film.
The Empire Strikes Back is a movie rendered in volatility. It was produced across borders in the last months of centrist and left-wing governments as both the US and the UK made material, if already politically perceptible, shifts to the right. It publicized its military associations with war-like precision at a moment of heightened political anxiety about the outcomes of the Cold War. In doing so, it was a demonstration of ideological and national soft power that simultaneously gave the film-makers cultural capital in a critical environment unfriendly to blockbuster genre films. Yet, in spite of Lucasfilm’s reliance on capitalist mechanisms of commodification and the film’s conservatism regarding gender and race representation, Empire nevertheless recognized the dangers of climate change and ended with a white woman, a Black man, and group of alienated Rebel ‘others’ coming together to save the day. Every time you think you see the film in its entirety and fix its meaning, the light shifts and casts a shadow and Empire appears different again: it is a plot with infinite twists that is revered by both fans and more casual Star Wars viewers.
There is no single explanation for Empire’s now assured status as a film ‘classic’, as the people’s preferred Star Wars film. In her work on changing audience tastes and home viewing conditions, Barbara Klinger argues that a film’s theatrical release is potentially minimized, historically, by its ‘extensive “afterlife”’, which is created by television broadcasts, video releases, and on other formats such as DVDs that circulate in domestic space.201 Klinger also notes that as film reissues require updated and retrospective critical thinking, the discourse surrounding a movie will necessarily change over time. Hence, she observes that whereas Vertigo (1958) was advertised as a ‘classic’ on its 1980s rerelease, it was hailed as a far weightier ‘masterpiece’ for its 1996 restoration.202 In Empire’s case, its multiple reissues and critical afterlife are intersecting factors in its extraordinary popularity.
By the time Empire left movie theatres and transferred to the home-viewing market, the film had been through two theatrical rereleases, with an extended rerelease in the summer of 1981 that had around 1,200 prints in circulation.203 Following its second theatrical run and in the midst of negotiations about its television broadcast, Empire sat behind Jaws and Star Wars as the third highest grossing film in history.204 It was released by CBS on video formats in 1984, and despite Lucasfilm arguing for a lower price-per-unit, it retailed for $79.98 in a market designed for rentals rather than individual sales.205 A print advertisement reminded audiences that ‘this is one of the biggest films of all time. Don’t wait until your dealer is sold out.’ They were told emphatically: ‘Strike now.’206 The next notable moment in Empire’s exhibition history was a concurrent DVD release and theatrical rerelease as part of George Lucas’s digital restoration of the three original trilogy movies in 1997. With the archived prints of the three films in a bad state of repair – the colours had deteriorated, and the celluloid was damaged – a Lucasfilm team spent three years restoring Empire frame by frame.207 Moreover, Lucas decided that prior to the release of the digitally animated prequel trilogy, he would have the original films ‘fixed’ to produce an aesthetic that was impossible with the technology available in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Consequently, Lucasfilm rereleased a digitally enhanced original trilogy with remastered scores, some new shots, and other visual changes.
The cover of the rerelease of The Empire Strikes Back on special edition DVD, 2004
What followed was a backlash against Lucas and the updated digital versions of the films. In their research into fan-creator relationships, Michael Fuchs and Michael Philips suggest that fans perceived Lucas as guilty of tampering with artworks that were under public ownership.208 Both A New Hope and Return of the Jedi faced especial antipathy from fans owing to the substantial narrative and creative differences inscribed through the digital intervention. In the former, film-makers altered the now infamous ‘Han shot first’ sequence to make bounty hunter Greedo (Paul Blake and Maria De Aragon) the antagonist in the Cantina scene rather than Han. In the latter, an extended musical sequence appeared in Jabba the Hutt’s palace. However, while Lucasfilm added 158 new shots to Empire, none of the additional material noticeably transformed the film’s pace or aesthetic. Most of the changes were limited to inserting shots during the fast-paced battle sequences and erasing the black outlines of the snowspeeders against the white ice on Hoth that occurred in the original compositing process.209 Critic Roger Ebert noted that ‘not much has been changed in this restored and spruced-up re-release’.210 Consequently, in its digital form, Empire was the most authentic of the original trilogy films. I argue that as a result, the remastered movie’s aura – that is, its visible relationship to the original artwork – emphasizes the qualities of reproduction in the more substantially transformed Episodes IV and VI.211 Empire’s comparative authenticity has contributed to its popularity ever since.
Of course, there are other factors at play. Audiences responded well to the film in 1980, and by 1997 – seventeen years later – a new generation of film critics who had perhaps enjoyed Empire as children had begun to replace those reviewers who were ambivalent upon its release. As Fredric Jameson suggests, Star Wars ‘satisfies a deep […] longing’ to experience the films over and over again.212 He writes that ‘children and adolescents can take the adventures straight, while the adult public is able to gratify a deeper and more properly nostalgic desire to return to that older period and to live its strange old aesthetic artefacts through once again’. The popularity of the original trilogy, therefore, relies on adult nostalgia for childhood simplicity and the simultaneous urge to complicate the films. Moreover, its cultural significance is widespread and extends far beyond online polls and magazine surveys. For instance, Emma Pett’s examination of the immersive theatrical experience Secret Cinema observes that its staging of The Empire Strikes Back in 2015 enabled the company to access ‘subcultural branding’, which aligned Secret Cinema with consumers’ expert knowledge of the Star Wars franchise and the popularity of Episode V.213 In doing so, the nostalgia generated by the event crossed generations and spoke to a new wave of fans with different cultural sensibilities who were nevertheless eager to participate in a historic fandom.
Yet it is the attentiveness to authenticity that prevails in critics’ responses to the digitally enhanced films and offers the most tangible explanation for Empire’s cultural status. For example, Variety assured potential viewers that obvious changes to the film were minimal, suggesting that ‘this Irvin Kershner-directed sequel is pretty much the same film audiences flocked to 17 years ago’.214 In the Hollywood Reporter, Empire was ‘unquestionably the best instalment’ of the trilogy and ‘arguably the crowning achievement of the fantasy-adventure genre’.215 The revelation that Vader is Luke’s father – a plot twist that left many critics in 1980 colder than a frozen tauntaun – had by 2002 become ‘a counter thrust that lifted the film into movie history’.216 Thus, through a kaleidoscope of shifting cultural tastes for authenticity, nostalgia, and critics’ childhood familiarity with the source material, Empire has become the viewers’ canonical, favourite Star Wars film.
Change, it is our destiny
The impact of The Empire Strikes Back on US and UK culture is undeniable. It continues to inform film programming, online discourse on social media platforms, and debates about the quality of more recent franchise films. Now, as younger generations of critics and scholars emerge that grew up with the prequel and sequel films as their Star Wars origin stories, I look forward to observing changes in taste and the canonical reification of the movies in future. I anticipate that the prequel films, so often dismissed by older fans and critics owing to the movies’ lack of photographic realism, will generate nostalgia among younger viewers who recall the familiar – and authentic – aesthetic of the digital at the turn of the twenty-first century with fondness. Perhaps it will be the CGI second episode of the prequels, Attack of the Clones (2002), or the contentious but critically acclaimed second episode of the sequels, The Last Jedi (2017), that will top the polls in twenty years’ time.
I for one hope that young people’s love for their childhood trilogies does shape the cultural landscape in future. It doesn’t matter that their ideas reject the wisdom of the Star Wars elders; they should depart from Dagobah with a spirit of adventure and optimism that is respected by the older generation. As Henry Jenkins argues, fans are ‘rogue readers’ that ‘reclaim works that others regard as “worthless” trash, finding them a source of popular capital. Like rebellious children, fans refuse to read by the rules imposed upon them by the schoolmasters.’217 Eventually, young fans grow up to be critics, teachers, academics, film programmers, archivists, librarians, and cultural tastemakers. They get to change the rules. Of course, I also hope that we are still talking about Empire in twenty years’ time and debating the myriad aesthetics, ideologies, and material histories that inform the franchise. Paraphrazing Irvin Kershner in a phrase echoed by Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) in The Last Jedi, it’s possible to debate because you love, not just because you hate.218 My final hope for this book, then, is that in critiquing The Empire Strikes Back – from its (anti-)queer aesthetic to its astonishing effects and everything in between – I have demonstrated the potential in all of us to love complicated and emotionally charged films while simultaneously recognizing their flaws. For even as Empire deviates from my personal politics, I remain invested in its characters and narrative. And even as new generations change the language and direction of Star Wars debate, I have no doubt that The Empire Strikes Back is a force that will remain with us all for a very long time.