A couple days ago I opened Bluesky to see a post by user @owendanes.bsky.social, which consisted of the text, “Pretty crazy how important the blockade of a trade route is right now,” along with a very nice photo of George Lucas with his arms crossed, looking smug.

It was a good post! And while it got me thinking about current events, it also, perhaps for sheer escape value, got me thinking about Star Wars, storytelling technique, and the balance between political drama and space wizards. So I committed a thread, as I used to do regularly over on the Bad Place, focusing on the prequels, and their writing. It took a lot of time that I would have usually used for writing a post for this very newsletter—but it occurred to me that in writing the thread I had in a way already written a post for this very forum. Also re-writing it for you all would allow me to correct a few of the more glaring typos and infelicities that plague any online discourse produced in the heat of the moment, at least by yours truly. So, without further ado:

Above a copy of the original post, which you can see here, I wrote:

Look so this isn't really the original poster’s point, but one of the weirdest things about the prequels even at the time was the disconnect between their relatively astute politics & big-picture work on the one hand and their clunky writing & scene-work on the other.

They were action wizard stories written for seven-year-olds, about the polycrisis collapse of an ostensibly liberal republic due to pervasive institutional rot exploited by honest-to-god bad guys. And they weren't even particularly well-written or directed action wizard stories for seven-year-olds!

But, hell, "oliigarchic institutional rot and elite capture have left this society vulnerable to exploitation by Actual Evil Wizards who want to do Actual Evil Wizard Things" is a better political analysis than 95% of what I see running around out there, on the internet or off it.

We're ten or so years into this & STILL I see people shouting "stop talking about the Evil Wizards who are Doing Evil Wizard Stuff, this is really all because of the rotten institutionalists" and "stop saying the institutions need pervasive ground-up reform, this is all the Evil Wizards' fault.

Now if it had ended there I could have made, perhaps, more productive use of the morning, but naturally I saw a question float by in the replies concerning what I meant by ‘clunky writing.’ The smart thing would have been to let it go. But it seemed like a decent teaching moment, so I committed another thread, which I think did go to some useful places, beginning as follows:

To give a little side-craft lesson about what I mean here when I say 'clunky writing'—let's say this is your goal, to write a space-wizard-action serial for kids (& kids-at-heart) with real political depth (for the genre). This is a subtle and interesting and worthy task! So: how?

The hard part is that (almost) every scene needs to do at least two things, and each movie needs to add up to at least two movies! You need the space wizard action serial tripping along, AND you need the slow creeping unease of the political drama. BUT you can't have too many Political Drama scenes, because not enough pew-pew-pew! So you need tools that can be used to convey what people are thinking, not saying— which means, in film, you need to think a lot about your angles, about business (what you're giving your actors to do vs say), about subtext and interiority and background material.

I think this is the problem behind the problem folks are talking about when they talk about 'green screen' / 'bad CGI' — while green screen and CGI seem to create options, really they remove actors' and directors' options when it comes to spontaneously embedding characters' cognition in the scene. To tweak an example of Mary Robinette Kowal’s, if you have two people talking alone in a room, and one of them picks up a knife off a shelf and starts toying with it, even / especially if there is no active stabbing on offer, if it doesn't come up in conversation at all, you know something about the char's inner state.

In prose, particularly in close 3rd, this is where you the writer mention a sensory detail in the environment that ties into the character's inner state, ideally without hammering the character's sensation or interpretation of that detail—it gives the reader a sense of what the character can and can't see in this moment, about what her mind is shaped to notice.

In a well-dressed set, or on location, there are many opportunities for the director and actor to find key bits of business, details with which to occupy themselves. You don’t even need big load-bearing props like the knife on the shelf. The way a great screen actor sits in a chair or opens a door can be revelatory. In a fulll green-screen sequence, neither the actor nor director have the opportunity to find these little bits of external thought; they have to be pre-planned (so easy to come off as ham-handed) or come entirely from inside (which rewards practiced stage-acting, not late-90s cinema training). The prequels suffer from early-adopter tech problems in addition to their storytelling problems: no one had ever made a movie quite like this before, so acting and directing technique had not yet caught up.

And, because you're going to be doing a lot of the political plot on the QT, you need pretty clear nonverbal and verbal language to identify the bad guys—little lines, beats, actions that can be used to betray loyalty—so the astute audience can pick up on it.

I hate to use a Marvel example here, but Captain America: Winter Soldier does a great job of building an action blockbuster around Three Days of the Condor. They even cast Robert Redford to give the game away to the old heads in the audience. Any adult paying attention in the first reel should see What's Going On, but the action-plot chugs along and carries those who don’t notice—and, critically, if you don't see the turn coming, it feels like a horrifying surprise, an exciting escalation. We’re really in it now! To support that slow building dread, the film builds a whole language of glance and gesture (not to mention 'hail hydra') that rewards future viewings.

A prequel trilogy could have showed us—carefully, subtly—the structure that will emerge to support the Empire and has been growing in the Republic like a tapeworm—CorpSec oligarchs who want to be let off the chain, human-separatist fash, a security establishment rankling at Jedi intrusions, the mob wanting to do more mob stuff... And done this in the background of space wizards fighting duels. And this can be done! Dumas does it! The Three Musketeers books are full of adorable charismatic lunkheads fighting duels while caught up in Politics beyond their Understanding. Think about Count of Monte Cristo! Seven-year-olds don't need to understand what's going on with Napoleon to get that Dantes is a decent guy who does not deserve to be thrown in prison, and that once he gets out he will naturally want to take vengeance on these chucklefucks.

(As an aside, we are gonna have a hell of a Monte Cristossaince in a few years here. To a certain degree it's already under way, but that's another thread.)

"Simply be Dumas, skill issue" is perhaps not useful writing advice however.

To sum up: The Prequels needed to be written & directed to give the actors a lot of room to express interiority—intentionally decorated sets, clear business, camera work, careful information release, clear signaling of affiliation through the resolution of conflicts among the "good guys.” What they had was a first-draft-y script, conventionally shot, against a green screen in the days before actors knew how to play against them and directors knew how to push them, which left the edit to work with limited, flat footage (compared to what we know those same actors can produce).

Now, telling this kind of story well is not easy! But I bet a really deep scene-by-scene rewrite—keeping more or less the same structure—could make the movies sing.

And that’s what I have for this week, friends. Take care of one another. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings. Lord knows we all need it. Happy reading, and I’ll see you next week.