Waiting for Skywalker

Table read for The Force Awakens. How bored was Mark Hamill?

I have written a lot about Star Wars on this blog, far more than I expected. The second thing I wrote for it was a long "preaction" to The Force Awakens that was originally a Facebook note, but which was so long and unwieldy in that format that I decided to make a blog to house and similar thoughts. In the years since, I've defended The Force Awakens, made the case for my casting as Han Solo, attempted to predict what Episode VIII, what became The Last Jedi, would be like, and even defended that movie despite its straying from many of my expectations. There have been other things as well; you can peruse them all, if you like.

In all that time, though, there is at least one thing about Star Wars I have not noted, perhaps because it is a trifling observation that may not even be worthy of transcription. But it's my blog, so you will not stop me. Take another look at the picture at the top of this page. This is the table read for The Force Awakens, the first time the cast members for that 2015 movie read through the J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan script for the first Star Wars movie since 2005, and the first to move the story forward since 1983. This was, if I recall correctly, the first production image for the movie. We had no idea what to expect of it then. What a heady time it was!

We know a bit more now. And one thing we know specifically about The Force Awakens is that Mark Hamill, who portrays original trilogy hero Luke Skywalker...does not actually have any lines in that first new movie. He appears at the very end, wordlessly staring at the lightsaber presented to him by new trilogy hero Rey. And then...the movie ends. Given that he was actually present for the entire table read of the new movie, I have begun to wonder: How bored was he, just sitting there, waiting, as everyone else said lines? Who knows. But that's it. Now that that's out of the way, I've nothing left to say about Star Wars...

...I'm kidding. Of course I do. Everyone does. Nowadays, it's just one of those things you're expected to have an opinion about. How Star Wars reached this status, I'm not exactly sure. You could call it a consequence of the conquest of pop culture by nerds, or by nostalgia, by both, or a variety of other things. But in no way can I pretend to be immune. I grew up watching the prequel trilogy, the true extent of whose badness I did not fathom until after my childhood. Before them, I saw the original trilogy, though I think for some reason that the first one I saw was Return of the Jedi. And if anything, my fandom was cemented by many hours wasted playing Star Wars: Battlefront on PS2 both in my basement and the basements of many friends. I was successfully propagandized into Star Wars fandom years ago, and was, as a result, one of many people who eagerly bought tickets for The Force Awakens in 2015.

My ticket to The Force Awakens

But the place of Star Wars in popular culture has become a complicated thing since then, adding a new wrinkle to a fandom that hasn't really been completely happy since 1980. The Force Awakens, though one of the most popular movies of all time, quickly came under criticism for being derivative, which I thought was a bit unfair; I became a defender of the movie. And in 2017, The Last Jedi became one of the most controversial movies in recent memory. Why exactly this was, I'm not sure; I more or less enjoyed it, despite not being a huge fan, and after not knowing exactly what to make of it after my first viewing. If I had to guess why The Last Jedi has been so divisive, I'd say it's that the movie's decision to attack or alter some fundamental aspects of Star Wars, such as they are, made people more open to seeing the flaws that had been present in every movie.

And so The Rise of Skywalker, the concluding entry in this new trilogy, enters theaters under a cloud of skepticism. Star Wars fans once again feel like they can't trust the people making their movies, which is an oddly familiar feeling for a supposedly venerable franchise. I will be seeing it tomorrow, and I genuinely have no idea what to expect. But before I do, I want to attempt to make sense of this new trilogy's reception, and of Star Wars more generally and its place in popular culture.

In certain ways, the first Star Wars movie, now known as A New Hope, was truly groundbreaking in 1977. Its popularity changed the movie industry, maybe forever. And many people who saw it then, as well as subsequent generations of people who saw it as children later, wrapped up their youthful conception of the movie inextricably with childhood itself. Some people of my generation have come to regard The Phantom Menace and the prequel trilogy similarly, though this is a bit more dubious. (Don't let anyone tell you those movies are good. They're not. Nor are they somehow more worthwhile because they attempted to do something new; they didn't.) Either way, though, Star Wars has come to mean a great deal to many people.

A long time ago, all the way back in 1977...

It was many of these people, the ones who were children when the original movies first came out, who have reacted most strongly against this new trilogy. Some part of their inner self holds these movies to an impossibly high standard, and rebels against the very idea that anything could possibly be as good as what they knew when they were younger. For these and other people, this new trilogy probably never would have been good enough. Make the movie too familiar, and they'd decry its lack of originality; make it too unusual, and they'd say their childhoods had been ruined. This specific sense of ownership of Star Wars by its fans likely accounts at least partly for why many have "criticized" the new movies by supplying the fan fiction they would have rather seen filmed instead (something you could accuse me of doing, but I wrote mine before the movie came out, and did my best to judge what was ultimately released on its own terms). For now that someone other than the original creators is working on the movies, they don't see the need to respect what is on screen, and perhaps imagine that they could do a better job "playing with the toys" than some Hollywood rando. This is not to say the new trilogy has been perfect, or to excuse its faults. But I question the possibility that it could have ever truly satisfied everyone's idea of what Star Wars should be.

This is in part because I have come to believe that Star Wars has never really been great. At its best, the movies have themselves been derivative, of things like Flash Gordon, the World War II bomber movie The Dam Busters (from which the much-ballyhooed climax of the first Star Wars movie steals much of its dialogue word-for-word), of Akira Kurosawa and David Lean, of Frank Herbert's Dune, and much more. Indeed, before the original trilogy was even over, it was already being derivative of itself, what with another Death Star, returns to Tatooine and Dagobah, etc. This is to say nothing of Star Wars' creator George Lucas' insistence that his prequel trilogy "rhymes" with the original trilogy, or the extent to which the original movie itself would have been a mess if not for studio-enforced discipline and editing. Hence I question how much one can really say that Star Wars ever really was great.

I also question how much scope for truly interesting things there actually is in this universe. So far, virtually the entirety of Star Wars has dealt with a roughly 60-year period in a civilization thousands of years old. And even in the now-decanonized expanded universe stuff, the things that happen both before and after this narrow sliver of Star Wars history ultimately recur in a cyclical pattern that just keeps resetting. The good guys rule. Then the bad guys come in, mess everything up. Then the good guys come back against long odds and win again. Then then good guys rule. Then the bad guys come in, mess everything up. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Until Darth Jar Jar comes along, that is. 

Things may never change in Star Wars. But they have in my life. Since 2015, when The Force Awakens came out, I have done, watched, and read many things. But the two most relevant for this discussion are two book series I have read, one for the first time in a while, and one for the first time ever. In the fall of 2018, I reread The Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time since 2003 (I was a nerdy kid, I'll admit it). Doing so, I noticed again all of its wonderful world-building detail, and reminded myself that, for a few years, I was much more of a Lord of the Rings nerd than a Star Wars nerd. And I was also reminded how much more depth there was to that series, both in book and movie form (though the two are more distinct than I remembered). I think this has made Lord of the Rings return to primacy in my inner hierarchy of fandoms.

But if it's not Lord of the Rings, then Frank Herbert's Dune and its first three sequels now reign supreme for me. I had known about Dune for a while, but only in the summer of 2016 did I actually get around to reading it. I was immediately plunged into an immersive, mystical world, featuring a millennia-old quasi-religious sect attempting to manipulating events to its end on a grand cosmic scale, sandworms, a desert planet, a tribe inhabiting it, and a young hero who goes on an epic quest, learning great powers along the way, and ultimately defeating a great evil. Further books introduce elements such as a pair of twins with psychic powers, a worm with a human face, an evil organization attempting to manipulate events to its end on a grand cosmic scale, and...okay, all right, surely you get the picture by now. Dune came out in 1965. Star Wars came out in 1977. I can't accuse George Lucas of outright plagiarism, but...come on. Even better, Dune is immensely more complex than Star Wars, despite attempts by some to make Star Wars more intellectually sophisticated than any legitimate reading of its universe can sustain. All of this is to say that next December, when a new adaptation of Dune comes out, I will be insufferable, and ready to forget Star Wars completely.

Pictured: Better than Star Wars. 

In the meantime, I will still see The Rise of Skywalker. I may like it, or I may not. But I will not be angry if it is a bad movie. Nor am I closed to the possibility that it may be a good one. These are just movies, in the end. They not need be psychologically-charged affairs, whose perceived failure is some great affront to people's childhoods, or a sign that society is decadent, or any number of things that too many adults have read into movies ultimately made for children. Star Wars has never really been anything more than a Dune ripoff monomyth story with some good cinematography. And the reaction to the movies that have come out in the past few years, more than the movies themselves, have made me tired of these movies, and of anyone believing they ought to be more than they are. Disney, one of the world's biggest corporations, doesn't need me to defend Star Wars. But I will also not be dragged into the world of Internet hyperbole in attacking them. If this means I am a hypocrite for abandoning what some could sensibly perceive as a recent Star Wars obsession, or one with a greater vintage, then so be it. Because people who are waiting for a Star Wars movie, of all things, to make them happy will be waiting for Skywalker for a long time.

In closing, I think again of what Alec Guinness reportedly thought of Star Wars fans after his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi made his later years quite comfortable. They are words that are worth recalling as yet another generation produces its takes on Star Wars:

In the final volume of the book A Positively Final Appearance (1997), Guinness recounts grudgingly giving an autograph to a young fan who claimed to have watched Star Wars over 100 times, on the condition that the boy promise to stop watching the film, because, as Guinness told him, "this is going to be an ill effect on your life." The fan was stunned at first, but later thanked him (though some sources say it went differently). Guinness is quoted as saying: "'Well,' I said, 'do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?' He burst into tears. His mother drew herself up to an immense height. 'What a dreadful thing to say to a child!' she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities."