Stardust

The Wall, the Star, and the Home We Haven't Reached: On Stardust (2007)

Consider the scene that nobody quite remembers properly. Yvaine, played by Claire Danes with a luminescence that is both metaphor and special effect, lies in the crater she has just made in a field somewhere east of nineteenth-century England. She is angry, bruised, mortal-for-the-first-time, and faintly glowing. We are watching, whether we know it or not, a near-perfect cinematic emblem of what the old utopian tradition called the principle of hope: the moment when the not-yet falls into the now, lands hard, and refuses to apologize for being itself. A star has dropped to earth and become a woman, which is to say the future has briefly entered the visible world wearing a body. Matthew Vaughn's Stardust is, on its glittery surface, a romantic fantasy with Robert De Niro in a tutu. Look at it for thirty seconds with the right squint, however, and it becomes one of the more honest pieces of utopian filmmaking the 2000s produced.

Start with the wall. The village is called Wall because of the wall; the wall divides a sleepy Victorian England from the magical kingdom of Stormhold; the wall is guarded by a single elderly man with a stick. The joke — and it is a joke, the film knows it is a joke — is that this absurd, permeable border is also absolutely sovereign. Nobody crosses. The boys of the village stare past it the way a generation stares at a future it has been told does not exist. What I want to insist on is that this is not a lazy fantasy device. It is the architecture of bourgeois consciousness rendered as masonry. On one side: trade, marriages of convenience, a shop boy spending his last coins on champagne for a girl who is being courted by a man with an engagement ring from Ipswich. On the other side: a country where stars are people, where lightning is a commodity, where transformation is the basic verb. The wall is the line between what is and what could be, and the film's first political gesture is to show us, with mild contempt, just how stupid that line is. A boy hops over it. The old man does not even try very hard.

The second gesture is harder and stranger. Stardust takes the fairy tale form completely seriously. This needs saying because we live in an era where every fantasy property must perform a small ironic curtsy before it can do its work — a knowing wink, a meta-aside, a reassurance that we, the sophisticated viewers, are above all this. Vaughn's film winks, sometimes broadly, but it never disavows its own genre. When Tristan declares himself in love, when Yvaine glows because she is happy, when the dead princes form a Greek chorus of bickering ghosts in the corner of every frame — the film commits. It is willing to risk sincerity. There is a tradition of cultural criticism, much of it correct, which sees the fairy tale as an ideological narcotic, a way of selling reconciliation in the absence of actual reconciliation. Against that tradition stands a quieter one, which insists that fairy tales preserve, in distorted form, the only wish-images human beings have ever had — equality, transfiguration, love that is also recognition, the small person becoming the large person, the shop boy becoming the king. The point is not whether such wishes are realistic. The point is that without these stories we forget we wanted any of it in the first place.

Then there is the star herself, who is the film's most literal philosophical joke. Yvaine glows. She glows brighter when she is happy and dims when she is sad, and by the end of the film she has learned that her shining is something she gives, not something extracted from her. There is a German word that the old utopian critics liked for the way certain images in art seem to flash forward, to anticipate a state of being not yet available to history: Vorschein, fore-shining, anticipatory illumination. Vaughn has, perhaps unknowingly, made a movie in which the central love object is Vorschein in person. She is what the not-yet looks like when it falls into a meadow and demands an apology. Tristan's task — and ours — is to learn to recognize her shining as such, neither to capture it nor to consume it but simply to walk alongside it until it consents to share its light.

This is also why the witches are the film's real philosophical antagonists, not merely its scariest. Michelle Pfeiffer's Lamia and her sisters cut out the hearts of stars and eat them, briefly restoring their youth and power. They are the picture of what happens when utopian content is harvested for the maintenance of an existing order rather than allowed to point beyond it. Their beauty is borrowed, their court is decaying, their power requires the constant murder of the very thing that promises a future. There is an unmistakable critique here, if one wants to draw it out, of the way late capitalism feeds on the energies it cannot itself produce: youth, novelty, hope, love, treated as extractable commodities. Lamia is glamorous, and glamour, the film insists, is what death looks like when it has good lighting. Every time she touches Yvaine, the star dims. Tristan finally defeats the witch not by violence but by helping Yvaine shine so brightly that the predator simply cannot bear the light. This is a more sophisticated political fable than the film is usually given credit for being.

A note on Captain Shakespeare, the sky pirate who turns out to be a secret aesthete and cross-dresser, beloved by his crew who all knew the whole time. The scene where his 'secret' is forcibly exposed by Septimus, dragged onto the deck to be humiliated, and his crew shrug and say, more or less, yes, obviously, we love you anyway— this is a small comedy with a deep structure. It is the moment a hidden self, long treated as catastrophe-in-waiting, turns out to have been quietly anticipated by everyone who actually loved the person. The not-yet-conscious becomes conscious, and finds it was never as alone as it feared. De Niro plays it broadly because he was hired to play it broadly, but the structure beneath the camp is genuine: identity as something one arrives at, rather than something one was issued.

Which brings us to the ending. Tristan, the shop boy who jumped a wall, becomes king of Stormhold, lives a long life with Yvaine, and at last the two of them ascend together into the sky, immortal, shining. It is exactly the sort of ending a serious person is supposed to roll their eyes at. I will not roll my eyes. The old utopian philosopher, the one who wrote thousands of pages about hope and ended his magnum opus on the word Heimat — homeland — meant something very specific by that term. He meant the place that shines into every childhood and where no one has ever yet been. He meant the home that does not exist anywhere in the world we have made but whose absence we feel as a wound. The closing image of Stardust — two lovers becoming light, looking down at a world they have left behind but not forsaken — is a children's-bookstore version of that idea, and it is, for all its commercial gloss, more honest about what human beings actually want than most prestige cinema dares to be. We want the wall to be permeable. We want the star to be a person. We want our hidden selves to be welcomed. We want, against all available evidence, to go home to a place we have never seen. Stardust knows this. The rest of the culture is mostly pretending it has forgotten.