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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
I lost it freshman year
I had never been that enthusiastic about "Star Wars" but understood the appeal of the original trilogy. My freshman year of college, I fell in love with a fellow sci-fi fan -- and fell out with "Star Wars" soon after. He took me to "The Phantom Menace" on opening weekend. He saw the opening of an epic; I saw just another Hollywood action flick. We had our first real argument that night, sitting in the dorm hallway, one of those long, ugly fights that reveals a chasm. We misunderstood each other and grew angry at the misunderstandings. I liked to explain myself with analogies to my previous experiences, and he accused me of telling long stories with no point. I wonder how he feels about George Lucas now.
-- Sumana Harihareswara
Cold-hand Luke
"Star Wars" has never lost its appeal for me, unless you count the time -- in 1986, when I was 12 and rewatching the trilogy -- that I realized that I hated Luke. My back tensed when he'd whine about how bored he was on Tatooine, or when he'd pipe up with some high-voiced braggadocio about how he "used to bull's-eye womp rats ... back home." I thought it was creepy how he looked at Leia in the first movie, given that she'd turn out to be his sister, and I didn't think he was really warm enough with the Ewoks after all they did for him. Also, he totally took Yoda for granted.
Now, it never occurred to me that any of my complaints might have had to do with Mark Hamill's wooden acting, or with the fact that George Lucas can't write dialogue to save his ass, or that he might have made teeny-tiny plot missteps within the narrative of his masterpiece. It was that I genuinely had issues with Luke Skywalker, the man.
I understood -- even at 12 -- that Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher were actors in these movies. I was very savvy about Hollywood as a youngster; a charter subscriber to Premiere, I was a classic-movie addict and devoured every book about old Hollywood I could get my hands on. I even knew that Fisher was Debbie Reynolds' daughter, and I'd seen Alec Guinness in "Kind Hearts and Coronets." I also knew that the voice of "Yoda" was also the voice of "Grover."
But none of that film-business sophistication helped me to understand that "Star Wars," "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi" were not absolute gospel-truth stories that happened somewhere long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away. The universe in which "Star Wars" took place was for me as real as Narnia, as Zuckerman's farm (home of Wilbur, Charlotte and Templeton), as the Hundred Acre Wood. It was one of my personal foundation myths.
I was never a "Star Wars" geek, exactly. Couldn't tell you the names of the drafts of the scripts or how many parsecs to a light-year or whatever. I just knew the story -- like I knew the story of the American Revolution -- backward and forward. In truth, I knew it much better than I ever knew the story of the American Revolution. Maybe it was the authority of that scrolling historical prologue that lent the thing credibility, but in my young mind -- never mind what I rationally knew about filmmaking -- "Star Wars" wasn't something that had been shot and sound-mixed and written and rewritten. It had merely happened and been faithfully recorded by an agile cameraman with a good seat on the Millennium Falcon. Tatooine, Dantooine, the Dagobah system, Alderaan, Hoth, Cloud City, Endor. Mos Eisley, the Death Star trash compactor: They were all real places where the story of three people, two droids and a Wookie played out over and over and over again.
When I was a senior in college and the films got re-released on the big screen with gussied-up special effects, I went with a bunch of friends on the "Star Wars" opening night -- a geeky thing to do, yes, but we had so much fun. It was simply revisiting one of the oldest stories in my life, actually, a childhood home of sorts.
The last two movies? Well, I don't care so much about them. They've been fun, in their way. Who doesn't like badass flexible Yoda? But they have about as much to do with "Star Wars" as Demi Moore has to do with Hester Prynne in the 1995 film that was "freely adapted from the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne."
Look, I would love it if this new "Star Wars" movie turned out to be great. I would love to see some shadow of the real story -- the true story -- up on that screen. But if I don't, how disappointed will I be? Not at all. I've never been a fan of historical fiction.
-- Rebecca Traister
