Remembering The Phantom Menace
25 years later, Star Wars Episode I - The Phantom Menace is back in theatres and our contributors and editor reflect on the much-maligned blockbuster prequel.
THIS IS MY DECOY: Padmé Amidala’s Costumes in Phantom Menace
by Gabrielle Marceau
The Handmaiden is active and approachable. She wears a utility belt and clothes that allow her to kneel down and speak to the boy, her tone is safe and playful like a babysitter’s. The Queen on the other hand is formal and intimidating, when she speaks her voice is low and flat and the things she says are unequivocal.
A friend told me that while watching Episode I - The Phantom Menace as a child, she assumed Padmé’s extravagant costumes—the sculptural headdresses that looked like horns of an extinct animal, floor-length cloaks with lanterns sewn into their folds, sheet-white face paint—were what she would wear when she grew up. I suppose I did as well. But I was still a kid, and at that time, in my world, the worst thing you could be was girly. On one hot day, a group of kids watched as I stuck my sneakered foot into the compost bin. I had a hot pink t-shirt, low-top Converses and I wanted to prove that I was no girl. The Handmaiden is a tomboy, but warm and flirtatious. The Queen is commanding and cold, but hyper-feminine.
In Trisha Biggar’s overwhelming costumes, Padmé’s small stature (Natalie Portman was a slight, still boyish, 16-year-old when she played her) is a little joke, like two kids under a trench coat, but one that was lost on me at 10 years old when I painted little red dots on my cheeks and a red slash on my bottom lip, just like her. I did not know that these were a riff on traditional Korean bridal makeup or that her looks were culled from the ancient wardrobes of decidedly grown-up women; Geisha’s kimonos, Mongolian imperial wedding deels, Elizabethan courtly costumes... one gown repurposes the pearl panel from an antique burlesque dress. Another dress is inspired by a picture of Genepil, called the last queen of Mongolia, who was married for a second time at 19 to the middle-aged Bogd Khan, already fading and only a figurehead, as their monarchy crumbled around her. Another outfit is taken from a photo of the Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna, daughter of Alexander III, wearing an embroidered crescent-shaped headdress worn by married women in Russia (Xenia had also married at 19), at a costume party two years before revolution and war.
Padmé’s costumes held maybe more than they could bear (and more than their wearer could bear too. Portman suffered migraines from the weighty headdresses, and eventually, a pulley system was devised to hold them up in between takes). One gown, the astoundingly beautiful “Peacock” dress in blue and purple silk taffeta, is paired with a headdress that mimics dreadlocks, cost $60,000 and required two months of a team’s dedicated, full-time labour to produce. Its scenes were cut.
Another dress combines medieval crispinettes with a Hijab-like headdress, over an Art Nouveau-inspired gown fashioned from black, spider-like lace (made by hand stitching a pattern onto a base fabric which is then dissolved in water). This spectacular dress is not worn by Portman, but by her handmaiden and decoy, Sabé (played by a 12-year-old Keira Knightley). Sabé takes Padmé's place at moments of great risk so that if she were felled, the real queen would live on. This charade works because of the dress, like it itself were queen and not the woman in it.
In Episode II - Attack of the Clones, Padmé’s clothes take a decided turn, no longer as extravagant or royal. Her headdresses were lightweight (no more migraines, no more pulley systems), the shapes more form-fitting, and the outfits geared not towards intimidation but towards seduction and ultimately romance. Even her wedding dress communicates love and domesticity: it was repurposed from an antique Italian bedspread. Biggar noted this shift in Padmé: “She wasn’t having to be so formal or elaborate. She wasn’t as serious. And, she was falling in love.” It seems that Queen Amidala was a decoy too, one that dissimulated a normal, flesh-and-bone woman. In Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, some of the costumes look downright haphazard, like they draped a piece of chiffon over her pregnant belly, topped it with a belly chain, and called it a day. It seems once Padmé was living the life of a grown-up woman, there was no longer any need for dress-up.
Gabrielle Marceau is a writer and critic.
“Yippee!”: Phantom Menace Memories
25 years later, filmmakers Adrian Murray and Marcus Sullivan unlock core memories from Star Wars Episode I - The Phantom Menace.
A: What’s your most quoted Star Wars line?
M: I say “do or do not, there is no try” to myself a lot, like a motivational mantra. After that, it’s “Yippee!” Specifically how Anakin says it that one time.
A: I can hear it!
M: You can say it whenever something goes well. It’s great.
A: Similarly “It’s working, it’s working!” is a good one when you do something that works.
M: Yes, Little Anakin is so optimistic.
A: My most quoted line though is probably “the blockade” as made famous by Nute Gunray. I quote that with shocking frequency.
[LAUGHS]
M: Every line of The Phantom Menace is burned into our minds.
A: 25 years of repeat viewings will do that. Since the movie itself has been picked apart for decades, I was thinking we’d just talk about what it meant for us. Do you remember your first experience with it back in 1999?
M: I was a big Star Wars kid even before it came out, but my first memory of Episode I in particular involves a bag of chips. My dad worked for Frito-Lay, so we got all the prototypes of their Star Wars tie-in merch. He came home one day with a big box of chips and was like, “Marcus you’re going to love the new Star Wars Doritos.” So I opened the box and pulled out a Doritos bag: and it's got Darth Maul on the front.
A: Wow, he’s perfect for those. He’s extreme in the way that Doritos are extreme.
M: Yeah he should have stuck around after as a brand ambassador. He exemplifies the Doritos attitude. So this was the first time I had seen Darth Maul, and I had no idea about his double-bladed lightsaber. I could see one red blade on one side of the bag, and then I saw another one on the other side. I thought it was an error because lightsabers only had one blade, to my knowledge, so I was like, “Dad this is a misprint.” But then we took another look at it and I started to understand what I was actually seeing… that his lightsaber had two blades. I remember that moment of realization so vividly.
A: I bet you could’ve pieced together the whole plot from fast-food packaging.
M: Well I didn’t get to see it opening weekend or anything, so I kind of did get spoiled before I went. In the schoolyard, my friends were talking about how Obi-Wan cuts Darth Maul in half, and they were reenacting scenes with action figures… at sleepovers we were very seriously jumping around on mattresses and re-creating the choreography. So that combined with the Doritos bags, the KFC tie-ins, and the Pepsi cans all led to a feeling like I had seen it before I actually saw it. But at 8 years old, this didn’t bother me in the slightest.
A: Even for me who didn’t have access to fast food or cultured friends like you, when I first saw it I felt like it was having a myth presented to you. It had been written for a long time, there was nothing to critique or dislike, it simply was. It felt inevitable.
M: Yeah, it never occurred to me that people couldn’t like it or that anyone was disappointed by it. It was too seismic for that. It was the fulfillment of the promise made by the fact that A New Hope was called Episode IV. A master plan could not be wrong. The feeling was it could only get better.
A: Before I saw the movie, my friend’s older brother told me that George Lucas always knew he needed to wait for the filmmaking technology to catch up so he could make The Phantom Menace. He knew he needed to start with Episode IV, then return to the beginning when the technology was right to make Episode I. This was something George knew from the beginning. It was like the Old Testament coming after the New. So when I saw it, there was this sense that these were rare and new images, that something about these images was impossible 20 years ago.
M: George Lucas was like a mythical figure then, it felt like he was omnipotent. Which is funny considering Episode IV wasn’t even originally called Episode IV, and the original trilogy is filled with obvious retcons. It’s all very obviously improvised in retrospect, but the perception at the time was that it was all going to fit together seamlessly. It never occurred to me to question that.
A: Yeah for sure—it’s like how in school you didn’t critique the plot of Hamlet or anything, you just accepted it was foundational and therefore correct. Like with Jar Jar, it never occurred to me that he was supposed to be funny. I had to be told he was comedic relief. It was the same way teachers will tell you “actually, Banquo’s hilarious in this scene,” I accepted that this was true despite it not actually making anyone laugh.
M: I used to quote Austin Powers all the time as a kid, even when the jokes went over my head. I once asked a girl if I “made her horny, baby” without any clue what I was saying. But I never quoted Jar Jar, never. I was aware he was goofy, but he didn’t make me laugh, even as a kid. That’s not to say I didn’t like him, though. When my mom gave me the option to choose any two action figures from the movie, one of the two was indeed Jar Jar Binks.
A: Yeah! Gungans were cool! I had a Lego Jar Jar and some of his Gungan friends. I liked them a lot, they looked great. For Christmas I convinced my dad to buy my mom a Jar Jar animatronic that danced when you played music. I thought she’d love it because she was a musician, so she could play her flute to a dancing Jar Jar. But the look on her face when she opened it… she didn’t have to say anything but we returned it on Boxing Day.
M: I also have an embarrassing story involving my mom and Jar Jar.
A: It’s an experience common to our generation.
M: So, my mom still had to snuggle me to sleep every night at 8 years old. Nothing would persuade me to sleep by myself. She literally had to talk to a therapist about it, and his suggestion was to break it down into incremental steps for me, and reward me with a gift after each step. So my mom took me to Toys “R” Us and told me I could pick out the presents to be given as the rewards, which was so fucking cool for an 8-year-old. So I chose that Jar Jar Binks action figure, an Obi-Wan Kenobi action figure and a Qui-Gon Jinn costume with a plastic mask and a green lightsaber. I was so excited about these that I skipped through ALL of the steps on the first night and slept completely by myself, knowing I would get to dress up like Qui-Gon and play with Jar Jar the next morning. I was cured. It’s one of my dearest memories of childhood.
A: You know, that’s sort of how Qui-Gon convinced Anakin to leave his mom on Tatooine. You get a robe, a lightsaber…
M: Yeah, funny enough it is sort of a movie about leaving your childhood behind.
A: For sure. Which brings me to 9/11.
M: Of course.
A: I really do associate this movie with leaving your childhood behind because it was kind of close to 9/11.
M: Well, I don’t know about “close,” they were two years apart…
A: [LAUGHS] My memory has closed the gap. And then with the series actually continuing and incorporating the political images and quotes of the time.
M: That’s true. There’s that George Bush-y line in the third one: “If you are not with me, then you are my enemy!” I remember that being one of the first times I understood that Bush was evil.
A: Exactly. In my life up until that point, those were the two big, global events. The only two things that everyone universally knew about and was talking about. The Phantom Menace marked the height of my childhood naïveté, and 9/11 was of course the end of it.
M: It’s crazy to think we were once basically uncritical of things. Movies, George Lucas, George Bush—we just accepted them as is, and then one day you lose that. I guess that’s what growing up is. We’ve all got to leave our moms behind on Tatooine and sleep in our own beds eventually.
A: Doesn’t mean we can’t go home again when they do re-releases. And with that, I’m off to see The Phantom Menace in theatres for the second time in my life! I think it’s gonna be great.
M: Oh, that’s gonna be great.
A: It’s gonna be great.
M: That’s gonna be great.
A: It’s gonna be great.
Adrian Murray is a filmmaker based out of Toronto.
Marcus Sullivan is a screenwriter and editor based out of Ottawa.
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