George Lucas, director of Star Wars and creator of the Indiana Jones franchise, was once widely renowned as a filmmaker and a producer, but in recent years he's received a considerable amount of criticism from fans and has lost a lot of respect in the film community. Most of the backlash is a direct response to the Star Wars prequels, but I think it also has to do with the ways in which he's tampered with the original Star Wars films in his remastered editions. The most common explanation that I hear when I talk with friends about why Lucas' recent work is so sub-par is that he's been allowed more and more control over each of his projects, and his narcissism has kept him from being able to self-critique and recognize flaws in his own stories, as opposed to his earlier days where he was forced to collaborate with studios and other writers to be able to even make the films he wanted to make. Looking at his body of work, this makes sense: many of his films can be essentially reduced to a lone protagonist fighting against a faceless totalitarian regime, and this anti-authoritarian attitude can explain why he has so much trouble working with studios, and how when he does acknowledge any flaws in his films, the executives are always the first ones he blames, and while I can certainly agree that studios can often sabotage good work, I do think there's an egotism that's grown throughout Lucas' career which has somewhat earned him his newfound position as a hated director. However, I believe that despite all this, there's a lot to be said for the man's talent as a filmmaker-- which is why I'm here today to discuss what is arguably his best film yet: American Graffiti.
While some of his later works are examples of a man overestimating his abilities, American Graffiti stands to show what happened when Lucas was able to work with others self-consciously. Of course, that's not the only reason that American Graffiti works so well as a movie: the film reveals itself to be meticulously crafted shot-by-shot, both in its casting, its production design, and especially its sound editing. The dialogue is superb, reflecting the subtle motivations of each of its many characters. So, without further ado, let's examine why American Graffiti is not only an engaging film, but also an important one, and how it fits into both the evolution of American culture and the career of a contentious director.
First things first: the story. American Graffiti is one of those films which is not necessarily about one specific character, but rather, a group of characters and their individual journeys. Here, the characters are four young men and the women they interact with in a single night as they drive around town. By splitting the narrative between four different intersecting stories, the film allows the focus to shift from the characters and their concerns to the space they inhabit. American Graffiti, then, becomes not just a coming-of-age story, but more a chronicle of a time and place in recent history. Now, the film portrays events which were so close to the time in which it was made that it's easy to forget that it's a period piece. But for audiences in the early 70s, the culture of the 50s seemed like ages ago, and the film came as a harsh reminder of how the world was like this just ten or eleven years earlier; it showed people exactly how much had changed since then in terms of value, culture, and behavior. Lucas' burden, then, was not only to remind people of a world they were already familiar with, but also to immerse people in a world which they were too young to inhabit-- and it's the film's ability to construct this world that gives it such a timeless quality, so even today, people can watch the film and see it, feel it, believe it. Michael Dempsey of Film Quarterly writes:
Lucas has been amazingly thorough and technically dazzling in conjuring up this "last year of the fifties." Except for the final two sequences, the whole movie takes place after dark. Aided by his creative cast and camera crews supervised by Haskell Wexler, Lucas has spliced bits of San Francisco, San Rafael, and Petaluma into a ghost-dancing, iridescent nightgown, a galaxy of pranks, games, thrills, and lights through which the gaudy cars weave and cruise like phantoms.1
There are two ways in which Lucas does this: the first, which I've already mentioned, is the film's structure, which is itself a result of the prominence of cars in the film's narrative:
On Friday and Saturday nights in towns across the country, cars traveled a well-defined circuit in a ritual of display, a piece of performance art, called a “cruise.” Lucas himself compared a cruise to dance. Largely outside the control, or even presence, of adults, teenagers slowly followed each other for hours in order to show off the latest modifications to their cars, to exchange gossip, to announce a fight or a race, to try out pick-up lines, and to trade insults—all while moving slowly on the circuit. In the Fifties and early Sixties the cruise was a constantly moving town square. Lucas uses the cruise to provide the structure rather than the subject for his film. The endless weaving of cars through the streets of Modesto passing each other, missing each other, sometimes confronting each other gives form to the intersecting and independent stories that compose the film.2
Cars are not only an essential component of the culture the film portrays, but they're also an essential component of the story itself, giving the characters a means of agency and mobility while still keeping them confined to the same space. The second way in which Lucas constructs the world of the film is through the music. American Graffiti was one of the first films to push forward the idea of using popular music instead of classical music as a soundtrack for a movie, but it's also unique in how it uses the songs. Music has an omnipresent quality in the film: there's hardly ever a moment where a character isn't tuned into the radio. But as opposed to diegetic music, which comes from some source of audio within the film, or non-diegetic music, which can be heard by the audience and not the characters, the film does its best do blur the line between the two. There are moments of the film where the music increases in volume for the audiences' sake and then fades into the background every time any of the characters strike up a conversation. "Music doesn't come from particular places in the film's space; it pervades that space."3 In between the songs, one can hear the voice of famous disc jockey Wolfman Jack, making the film's music less like a soundtrack and more like a two-hour radio broadcast. The way that Lucas treats the past here indicates a kind of nostalgia that is unique to the twentieth century, which can be seen in many films since then. Since the invention of the radio and the television and the mass-production of commodities like cars or clothes, the culture of each decade, as we remember it, has become less and less defined by the social and political events of that era and more and more defined by the products that we consume such as music, film, television, fashion, and so on-- all connecting to some larger collective mindset.
Of course it's easy to see American Graffiti as a nostalgic film, presenting a glorified past that never existed. Granted, the movie did kickstart the huge wave of 50's nostalgia that was beginning to sweep the country at the time, as exemplified by the success of the stage musical "Grease", and Don McLean's song "American Pie". The song, which many find to be intensely enigmatic, bemoans the death of musician Buddy Holly and two of his friends in a plane crash, which, along with the Kennedy assassination was one of a series of events which many people consider to have ended the so-called "golden age" of the 50s. The song, then, reflects the same kinds of emotions that are presented in American Graffiti: the 50s wasn't necessarily a perfectly innocent age, and it certainly had problems of its own, but with the advent of the 60s, there was certainly a feeling of some loss of innocence, and a loss of hope as well. No one's memory of the past is going to be exactly true to how things actually were, and the movie remains aware of this fact. It doesn't pretend to give us the full truth, but it doesn't give us some idealistic image of the 50s, either. As Roger Greenspun of the New York Times wrote at the time, "although it is full of the material of fashionable nostalgia, it never exploits nostalgia..."4: instead it keeps us hovering in this limbo between fantasy and reality, between memory and maturity. Even if you believe American Graffiti's portrayal of its time to be utopian, you have to remember that in film, behind every utopia is a dystopia:
George Lucas, twenty-eight years old, has made one previous feature. It is a good science fiction film, THX 1138, about a closed, tranquilized future society, controlled by mysterious broadcast voices, and from which there is almost no escape. For all its apparent differences, American Graffiti really presents the obverse of that world—now beneficent, familiar; but also closed, tuned in to mysterious voices, and offering almost no means of escape.5
Behind the warm and inviting small-town life of American Graffiti is all of the claustrophobia of THX 1138. This balance between longing for the past and pressing on towards the future doesn't just make for a great snapshot of an era, but it also makes for a compelling coming-of-age story.
Consider the dilemma of its protagonists. Each of the characters falls into a different stereotype: Curt is the everyman, the normal guy that we're supposed to attach ourselves to; Steve is the handsome, successful, straight-laced top-of-the-class student; John is the cool jock with the best-looking car; while Terry is the unpopular nerd. However, over the course of the film, the character begins to develop these characters beyond their stereotypes. Curt and Steve are both recent high-school graduates on last night on the town before they have to leave for college the following morning. Steve has made up his mind, but Curt is more ambivalent, and begins wondering if he should stay. He is frightened about leaving but doesn't want to wind up like John, who, despite his cool-guy appearance, is really just a 22-year old trying to remain a teenager forever. John is confronted with his own age when he accidentally winds up spending the evening with the 13-year old Carol, which is what makes their relationship one of the most entertaining parts of the film. Terry, meanwhile, discovers that he's not quite the failure that he thinks he is. Throughout the night, each of these characters travels on their own personal journeys. By focusing so heavily on the environment of the story, Lucas is able to transform 1960's Northern California into a fairy-tale setting, where the characters' ordinary struggles can be seen as modern-day counterparts to mythical archetypes of old. Though the film seems to give all characters equal time, there's a special emphasis placed on Curt. From the beginning, he is shown to park far away from all of the other characters, and he is the only major character whom we never see behind the wheel in the film. As an outsider in his own times, Curt is connected to the audience immersed in the foreign times and customs within the film, while Curt's decision of whether or not to go to college directly parallels the audience's choice of whether to remain within the world of the past or leave it to pursue an unknown future. He is the young wanderer: like Luke Skywalker, he is on a quest for truth and self-discovery. whereas the white Thunderbird is the object to be attained, the Holy Grail, or as it is called in modern cinema, the MacGuffin. "Rather than seeing it as a gimmick with the function of getting things rolling, Lucas believes that the MacGuffin should be powerful and that the audience should care about it almost as much as the dueling heroes and villains on-screen."6 When Curt first encounters the beautiful blonde in the Thunderbird, it is like a moment of divine revelation for him-- his quest to find the car and the woman inside represents his doubts about the future and his search for answers, but, as we find at the end of the film, not all of the questions we ask have answers, and this doubt is simply something that will follow us for the rest of our life: we have to live with uncertainty. In It's a Wonderful Life, another movie about the claustrophobia of small-town life, we're eventually shown that the sacrifices that the main character makes were ultimately worth it because of the sense of community that he's developed, but in American Graffiti we have no such assurance. Instead, the audience has the burden of choice; we have to choose whether or not these characters made the right decisions in their lives.
American Graffiti remains relevant today because of how it changed movies, how it paved the way for films like Star Wars and Indiana Jones to be possible, how it beautifully portrayed a chapter in this country's history, and how it presents themes of growing up which will continue to ring true even into the future. And when it comes down to it, yes, it's also a reminder of how despite his flaws, George Lucas is still a talented and respectable filmmaker.
Sources:
1Kurtz, Gary. "American Graffiti". Film Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 1, 1973, pp. 58-60.
2DeWitt, Jack. "Cars and Culture: The Cars of 'American Graffiti'." American Poetry Review, vol. 39, no. 5, Sep/Oct 2010, pp. 47-50.
3Shumway, David M. "Rock 'n' Roll Sound Tracks and the Production of Nostalgia". Cinema Journal, 1999, vol. 38, no. 2, pp.36-51.
4Greenspun, Roger. "American Graffiti". Review of American Graffiti, directed by George Lucas, New York Times, 13 August 1973.
5Greenspun.
6Windolf, Jim. "Keys to the Kingdom". Vanity Fair, February 2008.
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