Star Wars Scene-by-Scene

In this new book by cultural critic John David Ebert, George Lucas’s 1977 classic film Star Wars is analyzed in a scene-by-scene breakdown. Ebert takes the reader on a semiotic tour through each of the film’s images and scenes, commenting on their significance and relevance to areas of cultural discourse such as critical theory and comparative mythology. Ebert views the film as a Tale of Two Orbs, framing the conflict between the value systems represented by the orbs of the desert planet Tatooine (as a culturally specific world horizon) against those signified by the Death Star (as an example of a globalized Anti-World). In doing so, he argues for the film as the great national American epic: a multimedia spectacle that evades the traditional problems of literary regionalism by engulfing absolutely all of American Pop. Ebert’s analysis is based on the 1997 rerelease of the film, which he tends, somewhat reluctantly, to prefer for its generally more polished, gleaming look. Just like a classic American roadster.