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| Giving the orders: Princess Leia changes the rescue plan |
The third in an occasional series of posts about the characters of Star Wars looks at the only young woman in the galaxy.
I've said before that Luke Skywalker represents us, the audience, in Star Wars, whereas Han Solo is the character we'd really like to be.
That
does, I'll admit, imply that the viewer is expected to be a boy or a
man. And while I've met plenty of women and girls who like Star
Wars, I would have to admit that
the film really comes across as a fantasy movie for boys. In which
case, what should we make of its one major female character, Princess
Leia?
On
paper, Leia might sound like the archetypal damsel in distress – a
young royal who has been carried off to the enemy fortress and needs
rescuing. And yet the character we meet in the movie is very
different.
There
would have been at least two ways for George Lucas to depict the
story's princess. One would have been to present the kind of
screaming heroine you see in at least some vintage science fiction.
That unreconstructed approach would have been pretty feeble – and
anyway, even the Flash Gordon movie
serials that influenced Star Wars were
a bit more sophisticated than that.
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| A poster of Leia from the UK magazine Look-In in 1978 |
The
other approach would have been to self-consciously make Leia the
opposite of the shrieking victim. That attitude is all very well,
but if it's done in too knowing a fashion, you get something like the
1976 remake of King Kong,
with Jessica Lange calling Kong a “male chauvinist pig ape”.
Star Wars takes care to avoid
that kind of self-regarding tone – and in fact, Carrie Fisher
recalled that George Lucas refused to let her inject any irony into
her delivery.
Lucas
happily took an approach somewhere between these two. He created in
Leia a surprising, strong woman of action – but as with many of the
surprises in Star Wars, he did not make a big deal of it.
In
fact, surprise is one of the keys to Leia's character. She may be a
princess, but we learn in the movie that she's also a senator, so
presumably she's a royal who has decided to put herself up for
election. We know that she comes from a peaceful planet with no
weapons (or so she tells Grand Moff Tarkin) and yet this princess
from a pacifist world is secretly a leading figure in an armed
insurrection.
But
the biggest surprise about Leia is that at no point does she sit
still and behave like a victim. She stands up to Tarkin and Vader,
openly insulting them even when her life is in jeopardy. She lies to
them in an effort to protect the location of the Rebel base (earning
no thanks from whatever life forms inhabit the planet Dantooine,
presumably). And when her rescuers finally turn up, she is openly
dismissive of their ill-formed escape plan and starts devising a
strategy for herself.
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| Leia doesn't look much like this in the movie |
The
look of Princess Leia is important too. She is not the exotic,
exaggeratedly sexy character of some science fiction. In fact, she
bears little resemblance to the glamorous and leggy figure depicted
on some of the film's own posters. But neither is she a
stereotypically tomboyish character in combat gear. She wears a
white dress, plenty of make-up and a hair-do that must take hours to
maintain, but yet she totes a gun as confidently as any of the men.
While it might be going too far to take Leia as some sort of feminist
icon, she is certainly a character that doesn't correspond easily to
any stereotype.
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