A Hardcore obsession with Star Wars

As you recall, I've been reading through Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation since around the start of November. Tarantino's conversational book, a recollection of movies from the late 1960s to the early 1980s that he saw when he was too young, would not have taken me so long, except that I decided to watch all the movies I hadn't seen that he talks about in depth -- which has added eight viewings at a very busy time of year for viewings, with one still to go. I'll try to fit that last viewing in before the end of the year, and also finish the book before we roll over to January.

The penultimate film he discusses at length is Paul Schrader's 1979 movie Hardcore, which has that memed scene of George C. Scott looking increasingly distraught and anguished as the chracter watches images of his daughter in a porn movie, culminating in him screaming "TURN IT OFF!!!"

Instead of this salacious subject matter, today I'm going to discuss how many times the movie references Star Wars. 

It's three, by my count. Which seems like it must be intentional, though given the prevalance and popularity of the movie at the time this movie was made, it could have also just been that it was inescapable background material that was impossible to shoot around. 

Of course, we know that's never the truth with any filmmaker who puts an ounce of care into the movie they're making.

The first reference that I caught was when Scott's character is in his daughter's bedroom, back in Grand Rapids, Michigan, after she has already gone missing from her church trip to California. I believe this is after Scott has already contracted Peter Boyle's seedy private investigator but before that investigator has returned with the porn scene featuring his daughter. (Tarantino rightly wonders in the book how Boyle managed to find this movie, which I wondered at the time I was watching, but that's hardly his only criticism of the film. In fact he may be harder on this than any of the other films he's discussed.)

Anyway, in Kristen Van Dorn's bedroom there is a Star Wars calendar on the wall. The picture this particular month is near the start of the movie, the iconic image where Darth Vader has lifted one of the rebel soldiers off the ground and is on the verge of suffocating him. 

Then later, when her father Jake is out in Los Angeles trying to find her, the camera pans along a Los Angeles street from the building above, and catches a Star Wars billboard on its path.

But the one that really drove it home was when Jake finds himself in one of several dens of inequity searching for his daughter, and in this one, there are two half-naked women on stage, engaged in a lightsaber battle. Of course, it's not a realistic lightsaber battle, but more of a cheeky ballet in which lightsabers happen to factor in.

I decided to write this much about this post before seeing what the internet has to say about this, but I'm going to go check that right now. 

I found a video where Schrader talks about it on stage in a Q&A, and he says "I was having fun sort of tweaking George [Lucas]." And then "And years later George said to me 'I don't know why I ever agreed to that.'" Much laughter from the audience.

I guess it was nothing deeper than that.

I don't know if I will write one more Cinema Speculation post when I watch the last film, The Funhouse, but if I don't, I'll say that it has been a fun and instructive exercise to watch along with this book, but I don't think it's a standard I could maintain in any future similar scenario, while also hoping to get through the book at a decent clip.