Happy Star Wars Day! Last month we were able to look forward (via the very nifty movie trailer) to the upcoming movie. Set to be released on Christmas Day. Seven months from now. To get me through the next (checks the calendar) 228 days, this week I chose a book that looks back on several decades of Star Wars.
Newly released in e-book format, A Galaxy Not So Far Away features seventeen essays by prominent writers, all of them about how much (or little) Star Wars means to them. When this book was first published back in 2002 most of the writers had already seen The Phantom Menace, a few had seen Attack of the Clones, and all of them try to reconcile their disappointment (or smug “I told you so”) with a phenomenon that, love it or hate it, changed everything.
Don’t expect any “OMG, Star Wars is teh awesome!” entries. For most of these writers (the ones who actually seem to like the original trilogy), Star Wars has the glow of nostalgia, in some cases with a little bit of “the heck was I thinking?” thrown in. Jonathan Lethem’s essay “13, 1977, 21” details how in the summer of 1977 he watched the Star Wars: A New Hope twenty-one times, and he’s not entirely sure why. For him, Star Wars was more than an event, it was an accomplishment. And Kevin Smith in “Married To the Force” likens his loyalty to the original trilogy with a long-ago love affair, “the cinematic equivalent of a prepubescent first marriage.”
“Pale Starship, Pale Rider: The Ambiguous Appeal of Boba Fett” by Tom Bissell is one of my favorites in the collection. It’s a fascinating exploration of the rabid fandom surrounding a character who had a total of four lines. Period. In the entire trilogy. Bissell had only seen The Phantom Menace by this point, so the below line from the essay is a lot more poignant than he probably intended:
Episode II: Attack of the Clones will, reportedly, clear up many such questions and feature a long sequence of Boba Fett as a child, revealing his human identity.
So much hope. A shame…
There were a few writers for whom Star Wars became a symbol of the strength they would like to have. Erika Krouse in “The Chrysanthemum and the Lightsaber” briefly touches on her very difficult relationship with her father (and how much of a chord it struck with her the first time she saw Darth Vader), but mostly focuses on her need to take on more and more damage, to become that character filled with pain because those are the kinds of characters who can handle the pain in the first place, the better to dish it out later. And Elwood Reid essay tells of how Star Wars was the critical ingredient he needed to take on the worst of the worst in his childhood spent in the truly wretched hive of scum and villainy: Willoughby, Ohio.
Sometimes I think this collection might have worked better if I’d read just a couple of essays here and there, rather than cram all seventeen of them (and one intro) into the space of three days. Several of the writers didn’t even seem to like the series all that much; the introduction mentions critics from the 1970’s who thought Star Wars wasn’t just a bad movie, it was bad for the entire film industry, and maybe our entire culture. Even the writers who did like the series spent a lot of time pointing out just how much was wrong with it, not just in the clunky lines or two-dimensional characters. Some of it is hard to argue with; the fact that most of the main characters are white-white-white unless they were a robot or an alien is a little cringeworthy. Elvis Mitchell writes an in-depth tribute to Billy Dee Williams and his role as Lando Calrissian, but even Mr. Williams was something of an afterthought by George Lucas.
Different people can also interpret the same three movies in completely different ways. Joe Queenan writes an extremely uncomfortable essay arguing that our current culture’s love of successful businesses and our “the only people who worry about round-the-clock surveillance and police brutality are the people who have done something wrong” mindset means we should obviously be rooting for the Empire in the Star Wars movies, because the Empire is cool, and it gets things done, and that’s a lot more important that some naive good intentions, right? Right?
Tom Carson gets the award for writing the most out there interpretation in “Jedi Uber Alles”. Equating Luke’s dismay at finding out Darth Vader is his father with deep-seated fears of miscegenation? That’s a reach, Mr. Carson. And you completely lost me when you referred to Princess Leia, who’s been the epitome of female beauty since I was four years old, as having a “bland pie-face”. The very idea…
If you’re looking for something a lot more fun, I can definitely recommend Webster Younce’s contribution, “It’s a Wonderful Life Day, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Star Wars Holiday Special.” Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the now-disowned piece of Star Wars lore, and then some. It’s brutal, and absolutely hilarious.
There weren’t any Star Wars geeks back then because in 1977 the words “Star Wars geek” and “little kid” meant the exact same thing.
If there’s one essay that sums up the love, loyalty, embarrassment, hope, and disillusion of being a Star Wars fan, it’s Todd Hanson’s “A Big Dumb Movie About Space Wizards: Struggling to Cope with The Phantom Menace.” Todd was a fan of Star Wars the way everyone his age was in 1977. It was only the coolest thing ever, it was the dream of every child in his class to own every single item that George Lucas could slap a price tag on. It reached the point where the very best Christmas present in the world was a cardboard stand specifically designed to hold the Star Wars toys that wouldn’t even be available until months after Christmas because they hadn’t even been made yet. The letdown from The Phantom Menace was only just equal to the grim determination to love The Phantom Menace. Star Wars has been a treasure since childhood and by God, good or bad Episode One wasn’t going to tarnish that. Much.
And that’s pretty much where I stand on the whole business. There’s so much to complain about with Star Wars, and yet somehow I’m still writing a review at midnight just so I can have it ready in time for May the Fourth. I’ll gleefully point out to anyone and everyone the goof in A New Hope – the bit where a Stormtrooper clonks his forehead on a rising door in full view of the audience – which was inexplicably left in the final cut, never mind that I had to have the same goof pointed out to me in college because I’d never noticed it in the dozen or so times I’d already seen the movie. And confession time, I actually own a copy of The Phantom Menace. Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon Jinn remains one of my favorite of the Jedi; I’d waited sixteen years to see a real Jedi Master in action, and it was everything I’d hoped it could be. Even Jar-Jar Binks couldn’t ruin that.
I still won’t be re-watching The Holiday Special though. I knew that one was a half-assed, badly-written bantha-dropping that all the nostalgia in the world wouldn’t be able to polish from the moment I first saw it. And I was five.