THX-1138

Like most people my age and older, I still remember seeing Star Wars when it came out theatrically, in an ancient movie house in Vancouver when I was six, sharing shouts of approval with the enthusiastic Canadian audience. Several years later, I went to with a friend and his parents to a screening of Lucas’ first commercial release at Fairhaven College, the counter-culture counterpart to the state university in my hometown. I don’t recall much from that original exposure to the film other than the final 15-minute action sequence that synched well with my prepubescent sensibilities and still stands as a memorable milepost in 70s cinema. The rest was a blur of unintelligible imagery and sound. Since then, the title has repeatedly fallen through the fissures in my film consumption. I have read several commentaries about it over the years, but for some inexplicable reason have never revisited it. A Director’s cut DVD copy checked out from the library recently changed that.

Much has been written about the film’s sci-fi plot and visuals, particularly the context of the director’s subsequent success with the highest grossing franchise in film history. The nameless numbered protagonist, here played by a young Robert Duvall, and his gradual awakening from a pharmaceutical-derived stupor to the horrors of his homogenized and dehumanized world has now almost become clichéd in the genre of science fiction. One of the most effective scenes illustrating this reality involves two unseen techicians monitoring Duvall’s imprisoned character via video screen. One is training in the recently transferred other and their ensuing dial twiddling and flip-switching leads to severe psycho-physiological trauma for the otherwise clueless Duvall, undercut with more banal banter and techno babble. It’s a sequence both disturbing and darkly humorous and one that runs directly at odds with a clip from a vintage Buck Rogers serial that prefaces the film and imagines the future as an arcadia teeming hi-tech wonders. The script is actually riddled with this sort of pseudo-technological and religious doubletalk, presumably to further the impression of a society so bureaucratized and faceless that the human element is all but lost. But its presence is so abundant that it soon starts to feel overwrought.

Lucas has long been derided for his handicaps concerning character development. Those impediments are not much of an issue in this setting, where even a modicum of original thought and expression separates the individual from the sheep. Duvall does a decent job depicting THX-1138’s transformation from chattel to dissident, mapping an emotional ping-pong pattern from confusion, to fear, to anger, to tenderness and back. Other character actors in the oddly eclectic cast include Donald Pleasance, as a creepy voyeur desperate for companionship who, despite his protestations and rationalizations to the contrary, finds himself just as institutionalized as his compatriots, Sid Haig, who would go on to become an icon of 70s and 80s schlock cinema, and Johnny Weissmuller, Jr., son of MGM’s Tarzan, as one of the proto-Stormtrooper robot sentries.

Despite the dated nature of some technology, Lucas’ dystopian world holds up pretty well. Most of the populace is parceled into highly dangerous drone-like manufacturing work where triple-digit on-the-job fatalities are factored into monthly production quotas. Downtime consists of the numbing trifecta of mandatory consumerism, drug intake and holographic entertainment either erotic, violent or monotonous in content. A menu of pills and interactive medicine cabinets are part of the daily routine. Everyone is assigned a white jump suit and maintains a shaved cranium to discourage individualist impulses. All are familiar futurist tropes, given an early-70s spin by Lucas and co-screen writer Walter Murch, who also shows off his fledgling genius for sound editing and design with complex montages and splices throughout the film. Lalo Schiffrin’s largely electronic score completes the aural side of the equation, mixing interludes of poignancy with passages of overlying ennui. It’s the sort of thing he would go on to perfect in later films like The Conversation and Apocalypse Now.

As with his Star Wars trilogy, Lucas went back to the original film cut and augmented various sections with Industrial Light & Magic upgrades for the re-release. Some, like various large-scale city shots and a concluding sequence obviously employing new millennial CGI, are easy to spot. Others are less so. None really adds that much to the picture and the most striking imagery still lies in the scenes describing Duvall’s imprisonment in the antiseptic white cell seemingly without walls. It’s a concentration camp in the literal sense of the phrase, where recusants are sent to reflect at length on their transgressions. The ease of Duvall’s eventual initial escape also points to the pervasiveness of the conformist worldview. The surveillance guards are so anesthetized by the status quo that they simply allow him to walk out. When realization of his departure does register, a special budget is assembled to finance his recapture and a running tally records its depletion. In the end, his freedom hinges solely on the cost-effectiveness of venture. It’s a set of circumstances with sharp metaphorical corollaries to the economic shift from studio to corporate ownership occurring in the American cinema of the era and the succession artistically stultifying side effects that came with the switch.