• Directed by George Lucas
• Written by George Lucas and Walter Murch
• Starring
  • Robert Duvall
  • Donald Pleasence
  • Don Pedro Colley
  • Maggie McOmie
  • Ian Wolfe
• Produced by Laurence Sturhahn
• Executive produced by Francis Ford Coppola

The twenty-four-year-old George Lucas who made THX 1138 as his first feature film was not the George Lucas who changed the face of Hollywood seven years later. Although he had studied Joseph Campbell in his university anthropology courses, he had not yet internalized the “hero’s journey” archetype that he was to adapt for a worldwide audience, nor did he intend to take mainstream Hollywood by storm. He spent his USC Film School days on documentaries and experimental shorts, one of which was expanded into the present film. In other words, he was not the George Lucas of “George Lucas in Love” (not that that should keep you from enjoying it).

Has Lucas not gone on to become one of the most recognized figures in entertainment history, THX 1138 would be a curiously-remembered cerebral cult flick (instead of a curiously-more--remembered cult flick), one which takes social concerns from its time period and, in the tradition of Brave New World or 1984, tries to examine them against a science fiction backdrop made expressly for that purpose. (I’m not saying that THX 1138 is of the same caliber as Brave New World or 1984, but they certainly belong on the same shelf.)

At least they didn’t have to pay the props department for the pills; they just took up a collection from the crew.

The setting for the film is an oppressive society which will be familiar to SF fans, though the details are tailored to the times: People are bald, fleshy cogs in a consumption-oriented machine, and their tractability and suitability for their roles is guaranteed by the mandated drugs they take to stifle their passions. Our protagonist, THX 1138 (a thirty-nine-year-old Robert Duvall, just making his transition from television to film) is a conforming component of this machine; he works in the android factory, lives in a sterile apartment with a mind-numbing holo-TV constantly playing, and takes his prescribed regimen of pills. The complication comes in the form of his computer-selected roommate, LUH (Maggie McOmie), who has apparently at some point weaned herself surreptitiously off the drugs (and works in the monitoring station, where she’s best able to hide her own transgressions). Now beset by the emotions which had previously been pharmacologically suppressed, she develops feelings for THX, and thus starts replacing his drugs with placebos until he, too, comes out the other side of withdrawals more alert and emotional than anyone around him. Naturally, THX and LUH discover sex, which is of course strictly forbidden in their society.

Perhaps they could have kept their illegal “perversion” hidden for a while; the society in which they live, while officially strictured and controlled, is also inefficient and beset by bureaucratic error. But LUH’s co-worker SEN (Donald Pleasence), unhappy with his own roommate, decides he would rather reside with THX, and uses his middling computer-tampering abilities to arrange a switch. Despite trying to hide his emotions, THX is distraught, and at work the next day his stresses catch up to him; he makes several mistakes that ultimately end with his apprehension.

Cue-Balls in Love!

This is the first of the three acts, and as Lucas points out in the commentary track to the 2004 edition, it’s a story of escape — one that is repeated, really, in the next two acts. Lucas also expounds at length how the story was a metaphor for the world he had grown up in, stating that “that’s how things were in the ’60s.” (I assume he meant the early ’60s.) Now, given that every story of rebellion against authority is in essence a story of adolescence, I’m not surprised that the 24-year-old Lucas drew upon impressions of the world that informed his own adolescence almost a decade earlier; from biographical accounts, he had a hard time with authority in general and his father in particular, and that vein of thematic material shows up in his most successful movies, American Graffiti and the original Star Wars trilogy. Adolescence, really, informs all of his best work.

It’s a little disappointing that the George Lucas of 1970 accepted his own teenage worldview so completely that he would present it uncritically in his first feature film. It’s a lot more disappointing that the George Lucas of 2004 would fill the commentary track he shares with co-writer and sound designer Walter Murch to present that worldview again as if it were obvious and unworthy of reflection; one would think that several decades of maturity would help him understand that, no, the pre-Hippie ’60s really weren’t like that.

Pardon me, do you have Prince Albert in a can?

In fact, I was a little surprised that, after explicating the genesis of the world in which THX works as an analog to the “oppressive” world in which he grew up, Lucas doesn’t give the next obvious interpretation of the second act of the film. Here, THX has been sentenced to reform, and his prison is a small collection of cots in which he and a handful of other inmates (SEN among them) repose and wait in the middle of an extensive white nothingness. There is a tendency among the other inmates to talk — and talk — and talk — about escape and reform and such (or rather, they talk about nothing with an escape-and-reform aftertaste) until THX, having sat silently for who knows how long, finally decides to leave. Simply, to leave. To walk into the whiteness until he reaches an exit or an edge. The other inmates are shocked to speechlessness at the audacity, as they had grown comfortable sitting in incarceration with their endless thoughts of rebellion; only SEN nervously tags along.

If the strictured workaday world is an analog for the monolithic culture against which young Lucas rebelled, it seems reasonable to me — even obvious — that the collection of high-falutin’ social rejects who are more comfortable rehashing their philosophies of revolution in the depths of their self-enabled confinement represents just as strongly the Counter-Culture, which, as another writer has put it, talked endlessly about changing the world but couldn’t even change their underwear.

The accommodations may not look like much, but the acoustics are to die for.

The third act is the honest-to-goodness chase scene, in which THX, SEN, and the third traveler they picked up on their way out of the whiteness, SRT (Don Pedro Colley, whom you probably recognized from Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)) — who claims that he’s a hologram that decided to become real — find themselves back in the “real” world and try to escape the chrome-faced android policemen. Escape really isn’t too hard for a few able-bodied, non-drugged men in a world of chemically-enforced sedation and bureaucratic apathy — but is there really somewhere to escape to? SEN quickly gets separated from the other two, and without THX’s resolve, he finds he really doesn’t want to escape; he wants the world to make sense. Even, the subtext is, if it’s a lie. He falters; THX is the hero, we understand, because of his dedication to escape.

The plot isn’t much for originality or depth; the only real novelty is the era-specific details added to the “oppressive regime” story template (if the whole “We invented sex” idea wasn’t obviously counter-culture enough for you, how about the android policemen who intone, “Are you now or have you ever been” several times). Where this film truly excels isn’t in the story, but in the story telling. Lucas here shows a knack for creating or finding shooting contemporary locales and backdrops which, without any modification, take on the otherworldly character of a disconnected future. Even now, almost forty years after it was shot, there are only rare moments in which the outmoded technology on display (teletype machines, for instance) seem anachronistic. By shooting in hotel lobbies, unfinished subway stations, and nuclear plants, all tied together with scores of shaven-headed extras in white pyjama suits, Lucas creates a series of tableaus which seduce even the viewer unsatisfied with the narrative, while still making the audience work to understand what exactly they’re seeing. It’s almost impossible not to compare the young Lucas with the more recent one we’ve come to know and despise, the one who throws millions of dollars of CGI eye-candy on-screen and yet achieves less in terms of believable reality than the younger version of himself did with $700,000 and barely any special effects.

THX takes a side-trip to Cold Fusion Media Central…

But the George Lucas who released the recent “director’s cut” version of THX 1138 is the more recent one, so naturally he gussied up his original film with — surprise! — CGI intercuts that expand the workings of the self-contained city. Not only does this betray the ethic of creating a futuristic narrative convincingly from wholly contemporary means, but by expanding the backdrop and giving us admittedly interesting visuals, the later Lucas works hard to destroy the sense of banal claustrophobia which the earlier Lucas so painstakingly set up. (And the CG mutant creatures who live in the “outer shell” of the city are just piss-poor.)

As a parting shot on the 2004 commentary, Lucas gives the impression that he was somehow shanghaied into commercial blockbuster moviemaking; he says that experimental cinema is where his heart lies, and someday he’d like to get back to it. I think this “updated” version of THX 1138 demonstrates that today’s George Lucas wouldn’t know where to begin. He would certainly prove to be poor competition for his long-gone twenty-four-year-old self.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 65 (granted, most of those are off-screen)
• breasts: 5
• pasty male butts: 1
• explosions: 3
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 3
  • Ian Wolfe (“PTO,” the most philosophical of the inmates) played “Septimus” in the classic episode “Bread and Circuses,” and “Mr. Atoz” in the classic episode “All Our Yesterdays”
  • Sid Haig (“NCH”) played “First Lawgiver” in the classic episode “The Return of the Archons”
  • David Ogden Stiers (the voice of Announcer #8, credited as “David Ogden Steers”) played “Timicin” in the TNG episode “Half a Life”