The thing about the dialogue of the PT, quite simply, is that, apart from sounding slightly otherworldly, it has hidden depths -- a fact I was reminded of just now after alighting on the following comment:
From underneath the following video:
The dialogue in the PT constantly hints at other things and is in a process of constant subversion and self-destruction.
In a quote I posted to Naberrie Fields
the other day:
If the PT has a strange and brittle style, that's the point. It started that way in the OT, and all Lucas did in the PT was crank the starchy, declarative style up another notch or two, in-keeping with the "Golden Age" epoch of the Old Republic.
Indeed, it's when Anakin and Obi-Wan are fighting on a raft -- over a flowing river of lava, no less -- that the dialogue reaches a point of absurdity, anticipated earlier in the film with such exchanges as:
PADME: Something wonderful has happened. Ani, I'm pregnant.
ANAKIN: That's, ah... that's, that's wonderful.
PADME: It's only because I'm so in love.
ANAKIN: No, uh-huh! It's because I'm so in love with you.Padme even teases him on this doe-ish repetition:
PADME: So love has blinded you?
ANAKIN: Uh-huh-huh-huh. Well, that's not exactly what I meant.Later, this good humour takes a darker tone:
PADME: I'm not going to die in childbirth, Ani. I promise you.
ANAKIN: (almost shaking her) No, I promise you!When Palpatine and Mace clash for supremacy of the Republic, they also get into the repetition game (in front of Anakin, too):
PALPATINE: He's a traitor!
MACE: *He* is the traitor! Argh!The machine-like repetition is almost broken in this poignant rebuke, suggesting some meaningful insight at last:
OBI-WAN: Padme, I need your help. He's in grave danger.
PADME: From the Sith?
OBI-WAN: (sadly) From himself.Obi-Wan here might have been inspired by some cautiously optimistic words of Yoda's as they decided to head back to the Jedi Temple:
YODA: Suggest dismantling the coded signal, do you?
OBI-WAN: Yes, Master. There is too much at stake.
YODA: I agree. And a little more knowledge might light our way.This is a good example, in many respects, of where you start "interacting" with the PT, searching for synaptic connections between the "nodes".
Anyway, the brittle back-and-forth returns with a vengeance when Anakin and Obi-Wan reach the lava river:
OBI-WAN: Anakin, Chancellor Palpatine is evil!
ANAKIN: From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!Nope. There's gonna be no way out of this echoic carapace now. All the characters may as well be wearing Vader suits.
Two visuals perhaps encapsulate the spiritual crisis of the entire trilogy best; as found one apiece in the final duels -- that most metaphorical form of clashes/reckonings, where words truly become superfluous and a more elemental "exchange" of ideology takes the stage:
There's a wall of "Force" that exists between the characters -- instead of listening to each other ("This war represents a failure to listen"), the characters go to their graves, literal and metaphorical, by steadfastly sticking to their cold metallic guns, refusing to budge or retreat; unwilling (through fear, hubris, and that most depressing of maladies: a lack of imagination) to look within and find another path.
Note that Lucas also amusingly characterises the spoken-film era (in the "raft" quotation) as the "talking-head era". There are some puns to this end in the prequels. For example:
Palpatine's deceptive form distorts and breaks up in his "first" scene:
Qui-Gon tries to get rid of Jar Jar (on the opposite end of the moral landscape to Palpatine) by telling him, "The ability to speak does not make you intelligent":
Padme, the real queen, interrupts the "decoy" queen when she tries blandly explaining to Boss Nass the "reason" for her entourage being there:
In AOTC, Anakin and Obi-Wan pointlessly bicker and almost come to blows over Palpatine (who else?), as Padme is almost killed by deadly bugs:
As Anakin and Obi-Wan descend to ground level in their pursuit of Zam and almost start arguing again, argumentative ad-board heads can be seen recommending a product or service and "bopping" each other out of the way on a display screen (framed inside a gear-form, too):
And in maybe the film's best riff on the whole theme, Threepio undergoes an "out of body" experience, helplessly babbling away as he is marched into battle, and then saved by Artoo, with his complaining amounting to nothing:
Furthermore:
The visual masterpiece "Koyaanisqatsi" left a big impression on George Lucas. He helped fund and produce the sequel, "Powaqqatsi", and his mentor, Francis Ford Coppola, performed the same duties on the first one. In 1997, Lucas even made reference to "Koyaanisqatsi" as a film very much in his wheelhouse (versus the type of films people might expect him to make or be interested in):
The films' director, Godfrey Reggio, once gnomically explained why "Koyaanisqatsi" lacks any spoken dialogue:
It's interesting that the phrase "from my point of view" also worked its way into Anakin's dialogue. While it's clearly meant to be Anakin repeating the "wisdom" of Palpatine from earlier in the film ("Good is a point of view, Anakin"), and while it also functions as an obvious call-back (or call-forward) to Obi-Wan's famous "point of view" rationalisation to Luke in ROTJ, there's this other discernible link here. Reggio's utterance derives from a documentary short on "Koyaanisqatsi" called "Essence Of Life", released on DVD in the United States in September 2002 -- around the time that Lucas began tackling the script for ROTS (although the exchange on the lava river was not written until reshoots/additional photography in 2004). Did Lucas hear that and did it land in his mind a certain way?
Imagine the exchange between Anakin and Obi-Wan reworked as follows:
OBI-WAN: Anakin, Chancellor Palpatine is evil!
ANAKIN: From my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live.That would have made a far more philosophic rebuttal. But Anakin would have first needed to embrace his melancholy and anxiety and then become an artist. In a rather telling moment in AOTC, when Anakin and Padme are beginning to strongly bond, Padme tells Anakin that her first boyfriend "went on to become an artist". In another life, perhaps Anakin became the GFFA's Picasso or Monet -- or maybe George Lucas.
In any case, I hope I've shown that the dialogue not only "is the way it is"; but rather, couldn't really be any other way. At least, as it stands, the dialogue works remarkably well to convey a sense of dissatisfaction with the vicissitudes of consciousness as expressed through spoken words; instead, the dialogue is infused with a kind of cheeky koanistic quality, where bland phrasing hints at entire rivers of unglimpsed meaning. In other words, Star Wars is written the way it is with conscious intent.
"Machines making machines. How perverse."