Clears throat. Professor voice:
The Hollywood Renaissance was a revolutionary period from 1967-1976 in which a group of boundary-pushing directors took Hollywood filmmaking to new levels of innovation, experimentation, naturalism, and modernity. As a bridge between the Old Hollywood of yesteryear and the New Hollywood of today, the Hollywood Renaissance was the direct result of a seismic generational shift from the boxed-in ‘50s to the antiestablishment ‘60s and ‘70s, brought about by societal and political unrest. The baby boomer audience, tired of the status quo, was clamoring for edgier content that bucked the stale norms they had grown up with, and the pop culture zeitgeist of the time reflected that.
In other words, a lot of groovy stuff started getting made in those prime hippie years, like Bonnie and Clyde and Network and everything Kubrick. What a time!
George Lucas also came out of this movement, mentored by The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola, and his 1971* feature film debut reflected his rebellious spirit.
*Lucas’s feature debut came out the same year as Spielberg’s feature debut, and these first films proved to be incredibly prophetic of the themes that would drive them. It’s just one of the many reasons these two men are intrinsically linked.
Written by famous editor Walter Murch and Lucas himself, THX 1138 takes place in an Orwellian future where human emotions are repressed and people are assigned numbers instead of names. One day, the titular THX 1138 meets a woman named LUH 3417, who helps him see that they must escape from the oppressive subterranean city where the remnants of society have been confined.
There are some very familiar beats and themes in that synopsis, right? More on that in a few.
At first glance, THX 1138 is a seemingly cold and antiseptic examination of humanity, but it actually contains an anarchistic (if subdued) call to arms at its core. Regardless, Lucas’s impressionistic approach to its story seems to have kept people at arms’ length, resulting in box office failure.
As a result, after the rejection of his avant-garde debut film and the success of his mainstream sophomore film American Graffiti, Lucas course-corrected his career to the latter sensibilities. He tapped into universal themes and archetypal characters for his next film - yes, that would be Star Wars - and found unprecedented success.
That said, even though George Lucas was aiming for something broader and more mainstream with Star Wars, his Hollywood Renaissance roots are nonetheless apparent in the directorial approach he took with that 1977 classic.
Just like with THX 1138, the acting style of Star Wars strikes a naturalistic tone most likely inspired by the influential European filmmaking movements of the era, such as the French New Wave. In addition, the imaginative production design of Star Wars achieves a “lived-in future” look, as if it were trying to evoke the feeling of a documentary set in space.
This handcrafted ethos reflects the aesthetics of THX 1138 as well. They are both “world-building” movies, throwing us into the middle of a story in progress, asking us to catch up to their plots as we observe them unfolding. And these grounded aspirations make both films feel “real,” i.e. personal, which is the defining hallmark of the Hollywood Renaissance.
With that in mind, it’s fascinating to see how Lucas begins THX 1138: He plays a clip from the 1939 pulp sci-fi serial Buck Rogers. (I’d forgotten about this when I rewatched the film recently, and it’s a wonderful touch.)
At the time, doing so was meant to be a satiric jab at the naïve, optimistic future that the establishment of the 1970s was trying to sell us, which would shortly be contradicted by the totalitarian reality that THX 1138 was warning us about.
And that warning was a torch that Star Wars - which, funny enough, was inspired by serials like Buck Rogers - would pick up six years later.
This means that THX 1138 and Star Wars are not as different as they seem to be on the surface. In fact, it’s fair to say they capture both sides of the same sci-fi coin (even though the latter is more of a fantasy, but that’s another post). Especially when you consider the aforementioned similar visuals, story beats, and themes.
Both films utilize (literal) faceless foot soldiers as symbols of authoritarianism and subjugation, for example. Not to mention that both the cavernous prison THX 1138 escapes from and the massive Death Star that Luke Skywalker blows up are stand-ins for the establishment “labyrinths” we find ourselves surrounded by in the real world.
Most tellingly of all, there are scenes in both THX 1138 and Star Wars where those same two characters find themselves looking out at a shimmering, sun-drenched horizon. THX is facing an uncertain future that he just risked his life for, and Luke is seeking an uncertain future that will lead him anywhere but where he is.
And while both of those moments happen at different points in those characters’ journeys, and the tones of both films are very different, the underlining meaning is the same: We all yearn for the freedom to walk our own paths.
Thus, at their core, both of Lucas’s landmark sci-fi films encourage us to seek out something bigger than ourselves, even if we must rebel against the systems of oppression to do it.
Pretty groovy stuff, man.