A Thousand Stars: Episode II, Part 9
Jan. 19th, 2023 12:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matrilAs Anakin embarks on his first solo assignment as Padmé's bodyguard (and you can bet that Palpatine was cackling with delight at all the possibilities of that arrangement) Obi-Wan begins his investigation of the mysterious bounty hunter. And where do we start? In a curiously humble location.
Thus far we've seen Coruscant as a city of enormous skyscrapers. But here's a cozy one-story diner, right at street level. And it's here that Obi-Wan will find a wealth of information about the origins of the bounty hunter. I suspect this knack for finding sources outside typical Jedi circles is something he would have learned from Qui-Gon, and it's a reminder to us all that we should never dismiss anyone or anything simply because it's small or obscure or of low rank.
Of course, there's a meta reference here as well. Let's go back to 1972, when a young filmmaker was looking to portray a certain era of his own adolescence with a movie he gave the odd title "American Graffiti." His theatrical debut THX 1138, an ambitious expansion of his student film, had been released in 1971 and turned out to be a commercial failure. Now he had a shoestring budget and a very limited shooting schedule. Yet after this beleaguered production, the film proceeded to become a box office smash. Nostalgia for a pre-Vietnam sixties was apparently a huge draw for audiences, but you can't discount the unique structure of the film and its clever use of diegetic music to set the mood of each scene. Finally, George Lucas had real clout as a filmmaker. And that clout allowed him to garner enough studio goodwill to make his epic space adventure.
Dex's diner is a wink to Mel's Drive-in, a humble setting that reminds us of Lucas's humble cinema origins. He hasn't forgotten where he came from.
Next time, shifting perspectives....
Thus far we've seen Coruscant as a city of enormous skyscrapers. But here's a cozy one-story diner, right at street level. And it's here that Obi-Wan will find a wealth of information about the origins of the bounty hunter. I suspect this knack for finding sources outside typical Jedi circles is something he would have learned from Qui-Gon, and it's a reminder to us all that we should never dismiss anyone or anything simply because it's small or obscure or of low rank.
Of course, there's a meta reference here as well. Let's go back to 1972, when a young filmmaker was looking to portray a certain era of his own adolescence with a movie he gave the odd title "American Graffiti." His theatrical debut THX 1138, an ambitious expansion of his student film, had been released in 1971 and turned out to be a commercial failure. Now he had a shoestring budget and a very limited shooting schedule. Yet after this beleaguered production, the film proceeded to become a box office smash. Nostalgia for a pre-Vietnam sixties was apparently a huge draw for audiences, but you can't discount the unique structure of the film and its clever use of diegetic music to set the mood of each scene. Finally, George Lucas had real clout as a filmmaker. And that clout allowed him to garner enough studio goodwill to make his epic space adventure.
Dex's diner is a wink to Mel's Drive-in, a humble setting that reminds us of Lucas's humble cinema origins. He hasn't forgotten where he came from.
Next time, shifting perspectives....
