Star Wars and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy Series) - Kevin Decker [94]
“I Thought They Smelled Bad on the Outside”
This background of parallels only highlights the differences in attitude, and nowhere more clearly than in Lucas’s theme of humanizing technology. The theme builds gradually so that through the course of the film the technological marvels—at first so vast and various in this strange new galaxy—seem finally as familiar and indispensable as the family car. Indeed, Han and Chewbacca spend much of their time acting like mechanics tinkering with spaceships as if they were jalopies parked in the driveway. And, like real driveway mechanics, their grease-monkey antics often end in comic frustration and failure.
The function of these comic moments is to give the objects of their tinkering a sense of the familiar and the ordinary. In the film, familiarization promotes acceptance of this futuristic technology, which ushers in an actual humanizing of its products, achieved with spectacular effect in R2-D2 and C-3PO. No longer simply handy pieces of technology, they become more than robots; sometimes Mutt and Jeff comic figures, sometimes endangered and unsuspecting children, they arouse feelings at one moment of amused affection and at the next of concern. Apparently programmed to meddle and fret, C-3PO engages the audience’s emotions in the very act of being an annoyance. It’s as if technology has breathed the breath of life into its products, and not only in the robots. From a distance, what appear to be approaching monsters turn out to be AT-AT walkers, the elephantine troop-transports of the Imperial army. Even their destruction has a curious animal quality as they resist the most sophisticated rocket assault, only to be tripped up at their metal ankles and fall heaving and shuddering on the ground.
With the AT-ATs, technology imitates nature; in the robots, technology evokes responses enabling it to replace the flesh and blood of organic nature. Technology fills the vacuum created when real, living nature gets dramatically shoved aside early in the film, in a scene in which Han Solo, mounted on a tauntaun, rescues the wounded Luke Skywalker.
Realizing that without heat, they won’t survive the night in Hoth’s frozen waste, Han sacrifices his mount by slicing it open so that Luke can use the creature’s body heat by nestling in its opened guts. The sudden unexpectedness of Han’s slashing into the animal’s flesh seems brutal, yet the act is presented as necessary for survival and perfectly proper that man sacrifice beast to save a human life. This attitude accords with Aristotle’s hierarchy of the natural order.
The incident offers a possibility for making a dramatic use of the tradition of great steeds from classics to cowboys—from Alexander the Great’s historic Bucephalus to the Lone Ranger’s fictional Silver. Such horses are justly seen as objects of admiration, and their riders would be saddened to lose them. Yet, Han expresses a curious lack of feeling toward a living thing, and one that has served him without fail. His only response is sarcasm as he slices open the animal’s belly, remarking, “I thought they smelled bad on the outside.”
At this point, the film turns away from creaturely flesh to the wonders of technology. How different is this view of animal flesh from that of Aristotle, who acknowledges that “there are some animals which have no attractiveness for the senses” and that “it is not possible without considerable disgust to look upon the blood, flesh, bones, blood-vessels, and suchlike,” but who, nonetheless, encourages the study of all animal life, “knowing that in not one of them is Nature or Beauty lacking.”146
“Luminous Beings Are We . . . Not This Crude Matter”
The disdain for creaturely flesh and blood illustrates a view that repeatedly crops up in Lucas’s film: the display of an absence of value placed on physical life or on