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Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
Salon staffers explain why they left that distant "Star Wars" galaxy far, far behind.
May 18, 2005 | Yoda-lay-dee-hoooooo
The first moment Yoda showed up in the "Star Wars" films, my reaction was a lot like Luke Skywalker's -- incredulity mixed with a healthy dose of irritation. Idiosyncratic syntax he has, yes? Many platitudes he spouts, hmmmm? And voice of Grover, ha! Forget Jar Jar Binks. Forget, even, the Ewoks. With the arrival of the diminutive green-skinned one, the series went from mythology to "Muppet Show."
I wanted to be onboard. I was a fan of the first "Star Wars." I've always had a weakness for sword fights and blowing stuff up. I adored the feisty heroine with a Cinnabon do. I loved, in my "I was a teenage honor-society dork" way, how the themes of war, family, jealousy and the hero's quest played out like a Shakespeare story in space. And I appreciated the way Harrison Ford's Han Solo could whip my youthful libido to a theretofore-unimagined pitch. "Star Wars": smart and hot!
And then Luke had to go off to flex his force.
At the urging of the dead, yet still opinionated, Obi-Wan, the ancient, intergalactically revered Yoda takes the young Jedi under his wing -- or whatever those appendages are -- for an inevitable boy-becomes-man story arc. He instructs Luke in harnessing "the force," warns him of the seductive, easy allure of "the dark side," and makes him give him piggyback rides. It's a regimen straight out of Neverland Ranch. No wonder Luke cuts out early and hightails it back to his friends.
Yoda, with his blatantly latex body and Frank Oz voice, never assumed the scrappy humanity that even R2-D2 and C-3PO did. It wasn't just those retractable ears either, but the whole annoying personality. You'd think that after nearly a thousand years as a teacher, Yoda would have some seriously righteous wisdom to impart -- or a least a better grip on sentence structure. Instead he solemnly intones, "Do or do not, there is no try." I'd heard better motivational lines in gym class.
I got the whole weird little space-troll premise. Yoda is supposed to be 800 years old, deeply evolved, and living on a planet with no decent skin-care products. Luke initially dismisses him as just a freaky chatterbox because he doesn't yet possess the wisdom to recognize him as the legendary warrior maker he is. Greatness sometimes appears in a humble, perhaps absurd, guise. Gee, you don't say. I understood an allegory when I saw one. And I still knew -- Jedi master, my ass -- that was Miss Piggy. And moi was not impressed.
-- Mary Elizabeth Williams
Resistible force
I can't say I was ever faithful to the force.
Millions of people, including millions of science-fiction-loving kids, fell in love with "Star Wars" on its original release in 1977. I wasn't one of them. An 18-year-old bookworm who'd weaned on Heinlein and Asimov, feasted on Zelazny and Herbert, and graduated to Le Guin and Dick, I watched "Star Wars" with a sinking heart, because I knew that it would set back the cause of "real" science fiction for decades.
The problem wasn't that "Star Wars" was in itself a bad movie; it was made with love and care, it told a decent story, it passed a couple of hours entertainingly. There was nothing shameful in itself about the way George Lucas built his saga from the spare parts of a thousand serials. But in resurrecting the old Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, E.E. "Doc" Smith tradition of space opera, with its stereotypical characters, its potboiler plots and its pseudotechnology, Lucas completely bypassed the previous 20 years' worth of evolution in science-fiction writing and moviemaking.
Until "Star Wars" came along, you could fool yourself into a sort of progressive vision of science-fiction history, with TV and movie milestones like "Star Trek" and "2001" marking the progress from a mire of galaxy-saving princesses and heavy-breathing heavies toward a more grown-up universe, one in which the creators of science fiction tested new visions of human and technological possibility in the laboratory of the imagination. With the triumph of Luke and Leia and Darth, we had to face the cruel truth: For most people, space opera was, and would remain, the public face of science fiction -- and the stuff we cared about, having, for a brief spell in the late '60s and early '70s, seized the spotlight, would slink off once more to the cool margins.
Like most of my science-fiction-loving friends, I got over it, eventually, and even found some room in my heart for "The Empire Strikes Back," which suggested deeper ambitions for the "Star Wars" saga -- ambitions that, alas, each subsequent installment has betrayed. Today my perspective is more forgiving. The history of science fiction, as of anything else, isn't so linear; progress happens all the time, just not across the board. There's room enough on the planet for both "Revenge of the Sith" and "A Scanner Darkly."
But, you know, really, only one of them has a right to be called science fiction!
-- Scott Rosenberg
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