25 Years With STAR WARS

Observations from a fan as we await

I've been watching this movie for a quarter of a century now. Yikes – that's over half my entire lifetime. Time flies when you're having fun.

This May offers that nice round number as a milestone of achievement and reflection in the intergalactic life span of STAR WARS, so I'll take the hint to look back and look around as we anticipate the entry of EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES into the Saga. The films have changed as much as I have since 1977, and yet I (and a few bazillion other fans) can reach back into the common past when STAR WARS and we were much younger, and a quarter-century of history was yet unwritten in our lives.

At age fourteen, I was perhaps the perfect audience demographic for STAR WARS in the summer of ' 77, and the film captivated my attention and imagination like no other. It was made for kids like me, offering adventure, escape and archetypal theater unheard of in my generation. Oh, and it was just plain fun, too – also a novel approach in an era spawning some of the highest caliber "grown up" drama in modern filmmaking.

The film, by its very nature, prevented us from taking it too seriously: we were encouraged if not outright cued to boo when Darth Vader first strode into that smoke-clouded corridor, and when Han Solo dropped the Falcon's pedal to the metal and jumped into hyperspace, we cheered. Not for the special effects seen outside the cockpit windows – only because we had been whisked along with that hurtling bucket of bolts, and the fun was just beginning! It was an acceleration of the spirit, up and out of our theater seats and right into the story with some whiny farmboy, a roguish smuggler, a princess and something called a Wookiee.

Yet as lighthearted and thrill-packed as STAR WARS appeared to anyone of fourteen (or forty, for that matter), there was more to the movie than that, a hook that was both indefinable and undeniable – something worth coming back for in a second viewing. And a third. And a fourth.

And a year later. Plus ten. Twenty. And beyond.

I'll never get tired of the damn thing. Those mythic shadows never wear thin, nor do their voices weaken over time. They reach out to me the same as they first did, I just receive them with a slightly wiser mind now, and hear them with sharper ears.

George Lucas gathered an armful of filmic ingredients – space adventures from the Serial-era, less concerned with the science between the stars and more the excitement to be had upon arrival at them; classic western prairie wars between sodbusters and cattle barons, where you could spot the Good Guys from the Bad by their choice in hats; seasoned with dashes of tragic fate and foreshadowed destiny – he then stirred them into a stylistic feast which would have jaded, uninspired '70s audiences drooling for more. But this wasn't a popcorn and Jujubee dinner, indeed there was some nutritional value to the meal . . . food for the soul as well as candy for the eyes.

The farmboy was a whiny dreamer who stared at the setting suns and wished for a better life, yet he could mature into a brave hero if he got up off his sandy ass, stepped up to his destiny and swung for the fences. The petite princess, all five-foot Fisher of her, could defy an entire Empire even as its armored thug held her in his clutches. The cynical smuggler could place a higher value on friendship and loyalty than was currently offered for the bounty on his head. Walking carpets could make good pilots. Gray-bearded knights could clear seats at the bar faster than you can say, "No blasters!" But what about Darth Vader, what heart of evil beat beneath that black armor? There was more to these people, and this movie, than met the eye. A lot more, as we would find out a couple years later.

 

 

In 1980, the myth hit the fan: "No . . . I  am your father!"

Oh boy. One of the best reveals in movie history, this one scene raised the dramatic bar and launched the story line that would drive the entire Saga for the next two decades.

I was a month away from graduating high school when THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK landed in theaters. Luke had grown up a lot in the intervening years since STAR WARS, and so had I. Even the movie itself had evolved, then recently retitled EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE in preparation for EMPIRE's continuation of the Saga. The world had changed around us, and we took more active roles in it. Friends I'd known for many years were about to split up and explore their own destinies in a future full of promise and uncertainty. EMPIRE was the perfect metaphor of this time for me: take the leap and jump off into the rest of your life, not knowing where you'll land or who might catch you.

That May, my friends and I eagerly awaited our first look at EPISODE V, its release coinciding with a traditional rite of passage at my school: Senior Cut Day. Hardly an officially sanctioned event in our district, of course, but one that persisted year upon year with none of us knowing how it ever started or why it was a specific day. The only hitch in the plan: I had a midmorning Psychology class I could not cut, lest I lose my shot at getting an A in the course. My friends waited around for me patiently until 11:22 am when the bell rang and I was freed. Loyal friends indeed. We then piled into a car and drove over the hill to the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, where opening week madness ensued, just as we had hoped. What we saw astonished, engulfed and inspired us, yet despite repeat viewings, as the Rebel frigate wandered off in the film's intentionally vague finale, we were always left with the question, "What now?"

Our band of brothers, so united in purpose and moviegoing pleasure that day, would part ways a month later, eventually dispersing and winging off to different parts of our own social galaxy to seek our destinies, just like the Rebels. Yet EMPIRE eased this transition for us, it made sense of such life changes – it demonstrated that when you leap, you must land somewhere, and the chasm of uncertainty only seems bottomless before you jump.

June arrived and so did graduation. According to our rehearsals, I was supposed to receive my diploma-stand-in scroll, walk to center stage to meet up with another graduate, then walk down the steps to our senior class seats on the football field. Upon my turn at the actual ceremony, however, I took my scroll and spontaneously jumped off the stage instead. Funny, though I remembered the incident all these years, I never put it together with the context of the film till now.

Sometimes, you might as well jump.

EMPIRE remains my favorite film of the Saga – darker, more complex, more satisfying in its reach and grasp. Intellectually I appreciated it for the risks Lucas took in the film: avoiding a repetitious formula, splitting up the team which was so successful in STAR WARS, and raising the dramatic stakes for both the characters and the fans watching them. Emotionally I responded to its resonant tone of impending change in my own life, that destiny was not an open door through which I would step to arrive at my life, but rather a pathway amid many intersecting paths with few markers for guidance. While a destination was visible on the horizon, the landscape between the present and my own destiny obscured the road in between.

To arrive at one's destiny, you have to take that first step, whether it be off a gantry platform over a windy chasm, or a graduation platform on a football field. Either way, you never know where you'll end up. Take the leap anyway. The leap is your destiny. If you fall, that too is your destiny, as well as your landing. The journey to your destiny is your destiny – looking forward as you travel, you may feel quite lost along the way, yet looking back on the journey, the path appears obvious and intended, the choices made along the way inevitable.

No longer was my world painted in palettes of Good and Bad, or absolute color values at all. I saw shades and hues and shifting tones that brightened and darkened as the sun vaulted across the skies of that summer. Was the world different, or only my perception of it? Luke discovered the differences between knowledge and realization, training and action, learning and wisdom, as did I.

Luke ends the film battered and bruised, temporarily beaten down by the darker realities of his world and his own nature, but armed with the knowledge that would help him survive the ordeals ahead. He knew what he had to do, but no clue how he would accomplish the task before him.

Similarly, I began college.

 

 

In 1983, RETURN OF THE JEDI marked the "end" of the STAR WARS Trilogy – we had no idea to call it the Original Trilogy since we had nothing but a vague promise of the Prequel Trilogy not to arrive for another sixteen years. EPISODE VI arrived in the middle of my college years, when I was still floundering unhappily as a computer science major who was much more inspired by the English classes I took than by calculus. In effect, I carried a double major, refusing to acknowledge that I wasn't cut out to enjoy programming in code which was meaningless gibberish to me.

I was too scared to face the prospect that I was "the creative type" because it seemed such an impractical goal to pursue in the computer age. In the end, I wasted about two years of college avoiding my destiny, one foot caught in the trap of safe expectations, the other stretching to step up and out of this quagmire of unhappiness.

One could draw the parallel between my own reluctance and Luke facing his destiny as the Son of Skywalker, facing his own inner demons and doubts – but it didn't feel that way at all to me at the time. JEDI illustrated the echoing destinies of Anakin and Luke, and how we forge our own prisons of Fate by simply lacking the will to break free of them: Anakin failed to break free of his self-made enslavement until the very end, when Luke showed him that he was never more free to act than when shackled by the forces of evil. Indeed, that's when his actions would have the most impact, not the least, as he would soon demonstrate to his doomed father.

It was months later, in the autumn of 1983, before I finally surrendered my own fears and summoned the nerve to take a shot at officially changing majors into the writing program, and I succeeded. Apparently I had the talent, the background and the drive to accomplish this task, all I required was the courage to take the step. But this was nothing like my leap into the unknown after high school; the leap was entirely perceptual, a jump to a different level of thought from the practical to the possible. I submitted my writing sample for the program, and the day results were announced, my name was on the list instead of off it. One day you struggle against your destiny, the next you embrace it and wonder what all the fighting was for.

So much time wasted battling what should have been all along . . . or was my troubled journey all part of realizing my destiny? I guess both are true in their own ways, but from it I learned to still my inner voices of indecision, doubt and sometimes panic, and heed my instincts – they do me credit, as Ben Kenobi told Luke.

I can connect these parallels to RETURN OF THE JEDI now, but they were not apparent at the time at all. By the end of the Trilogy, Luke's destiny was too specific to his own story, and hindsight plus the development of the Prequels had not yet implanted the notion that the STAR WARS Saga actually told the story of Anakin Skywalker, not his son. In short, I didn't have the Vader-as-fallen-hero angle from which to view the Saga, a perspective which deepens JEDI far beyond the technically advanced "toy box" it seemed to be in '83.

Ultimately, I didn't relate as well to JEDI at the time because it was an ending, the Saga finale . . . yet in many ways I had just forged my own beginning. Our Rebel heroes reunited to defeat Evil and restore freedom and justice in the galaxy, wrapping it up in a big hug-fest on Endor. I had no such joyous resolution in my life, in fact I had struck out on my own more than ever – while I had faced and defeated my own initial fears, victory and celebration in achieving my goals were years away, not even visible on the horizon at that point.

Unlike the movies, life was not so neat and convenient, and happy endings just weren't in the script. But the script had many pages yet to be written, it turns out.

 

1999 heralded the return of the STAR WARS Saga, once a touchstone of my youth, and two decades later an intriguing looking glass to be dusted off for a new view of my life, illuminated by reflections from the past. THE PHANTOM MENACE showed us where it all started, twenty-two years after it began. Let's do the Time Warp again.

No longer was I a fourteen year-old lad, but a man in his mid-thirties curious to see how the "new" STAR WARS could hold up against those I'd grown up watching. I got older and Anakin got younger . . . curiouser and curiouser. How would this small precocious boy become the galaxy's greatest villain, the evil Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Vader? How had I evolved from a college student struggling to find his destiny, and become a freelance writer "cutting" his day job with friends to see EPISODE I? Like the Saga, my life was folding back and overlapping itself on a bright May morning, give and take twenty years, both entities looking back from whence we came.

Having enjoyed the Luke-centered story of my childhood, I eagerly anticipated watching the saga of Anakin unfurl, to see how a sand-bitten slave would escape his shackles and begin an adventure into the heights and depths of his own soul, a journey that was destined to enslave him once again. As an adult, becoming more reflective about my own journey and life in general, I sat back in my theater seat, curious about how Lucas's now-digital brush would paint the first strokes in the pattern of Anakin's discovery by the Jedi, his rise and – most importantly – which tones and hues of this palette would hint at Anakin's eventual fall from grace.

THE PHANTOM MENACE effectively set all the required events in motion – Anakin's potential with the Force, Palpatine's earliest manipulations into power, Kenobi's reluctant involvement in the Skywalker destiny – if accomplished a bit too thoroughly at the expense of the film's dramatic momentum. While Anakin was indeed likable, a good boy who would ultimately and mysteriously turn beyond bad, he wasn't entirely enjoyable to watch. As if assembling a jigsaw puzzle, George Lucas set the framing, defining edge pieces in place, yet by definition of the premiere Episode, the heart of the puzzle and Anakin's mystery remained missing in the film.

If anything, I found EPISODE I suffered more from its own time, and the time which had passed since the Original Trilogy, and less on its own merits. I won't attempt to illustrate in how different a world we lived during May 1999 than we did in May 1977, most of us have lived the history ourselves and the contrasts are obvious. Instead I'll narrow the focus in Saga-specific terms: during the 70s and early 80s, being a STAR WARS fan was very simple, and consequently, perhaps much more enjoyable; whereas by the late '90s, our culture created something unheard of two decades before: the Professional Fan.

In the earliest days of STAR WARS, fandom was anything but organized, and even the Official participation in the phenomenon possessed a "homemade" small scale personality. Anyone from my era who received that "typed" letter of induction to the SWFC, knew that Maureen and crew were pedaling as fast as they could to keep up with fan demands for more STAR WARS. Issue 9 of Bantha Tracks from Summer 1980, announcing the premiere of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, spanned a whopping four pages of articles and features – that is, the entire issue was a single one-fold sheet! Simpler times provided simpler enjoyment of the Saga: aside from a few models, toys and posters, all fans had to enjoy the movies were . . . the movies. So we did.

Pre-analyze the next STAR WARS movie for months – even years – prior to its release on the Internet? Who even HAD a home computer back then, let alone one capable of instant, worldwide communication?! Artifacts from a time-lost analog world vs. our boundless digital global community: as the movies advanced light-years beyond their beginnings, so did fans. Eyes and minds once inhabiting enthusiastic teen fans had grown into sophisticated (for the most part), critical organs of evaluation and judgment, wielded by enthused-yet-scrutinous adults who had two decades to ponder and absorb all the intended and purely inferred subtleties of the Saga. Most fans took it all in stride with their lives, some – as they did twenty years before – embraced the return of STAR WARS to the point of suffocating it.

I would argue that the Internet era of STAR WARS accomplished as much in sustaining the Saga through its dark and filmless years as it did in turning the phenomenon from an social event into a cacophonous cottage industry. In short, by 1999 scores of people made a "living" from STAR WARS who had absolutely nothing to do with its renewed production. Many fans somehow turned the pastime into a vocation, often lacking in any true entrepreneurial content themselves . . . working day in and out discussing the discussion, propagating the propaganda, and conceiving rumors to keep their particular pots boiling.

Still it was fan interactivity, to be sure, but it also exposed the strengths and weaknesses of a culture undreamed of in the summer of 1980. Back then, fans connected via a pen pal service, not fan forum bulletin boards – similar intents with vastly different results. Of course, if you wanted to enjoy the movie (or review it), you had to lay your money down at the box office, you couldn't pop in the video (at least not for a few years) and watch it till the image wore off the tape. If you wanted the latest scoop on the next installment, you tapped your foot until the next Bantha Tracks appeared in your mailbox, and few those spoilers were! In no way could a fan upload a bootleg script of EMPIRE for the world to access within a few minutes of its arrival.

Throughout the Original Trilogy years, the movies belonged to the theaters – home entertainment remained what you conjured up during the three years between films. By the arrival of THE PHANTOM MENACE, the films had long since belonged to STAR WARS fans, and this is the crucial difference between eras of the Saga, both in its filmmaking and its fan participation. While still technically the property of George Lucas (as witnessed by the Special Edition releases), the old STAR WARS films lived at home with fans now who kept them a vital franchise during the Saga's hiatus, and thus the hierarchical structure of participation in them had been flipped upside down.

We had become a culture that owned movies and viewed them on our own schedules, and what we didn't own we could now make ourselves, thanks to home video and computers. "Hardware Wars" to "Duality" in less than one generation. Fans like me who grew up devouring those early issues of Cinefantastique and Cinefex with awe and wonder at this exotic, technical wizardry which cost millions to produce, could now produce digital animation and effects on our desktops if we had the goods. The magic, and more importantly, the mystery of movies had come home, an egalitarian toolbox available to the masses, which in no small part was due to the very technological renaissance which created the STAR WARS Saga itself.

Life is funny that way.

In the end, as enjoyable as THE PHANTOM MENACE was in the return of the Saga, ultimately it suffered from setup-itis: by necessity its prologue nature prohibited the film from getting to the heart of the matter, Anakin-into-Vader. Fans vociferously complained how the film lacked "the STAR WARS feel", that there was too much political posturing and not enough action, that there was Jar Jar, period. Lucas may not be the strongest writer in the world, but he's good enough that I could recognize one important facet of EPISODE I often overlooked in such outcries: it was just the beginning, and George was up to something. Whatever we fans think we know about STAR WARS, he knows more; whatever plan we see taking shape, he sees a bigger picture. He may not have all the answers yet, but he'll know them before he lets us in on the secrets. Vader breathing over the final frames of EPISODE I's credits may have been the only touch of Vader present in the film, but we all know it's coming.

That factor in the timing of how Lucas tells the remainder of the Saga is many fans' undoing – it gives many overenthusiastic analysts the false impression that they're ahead of the curve, and somehow Lucas is playing catch-up ball to what they already know. But to better enjoy the mystery and revelations ahead in these final two episodes, fans might enjoy the ride more were they to follow a wise piece of advice: unlearn what you have learned.

One month from now, George Lucas delivers the next lesson in our ongoing education. Ring the bell, school's back in.

I don't know precisely what's going to happen in ATTACK OF THE CLONES, and frankly I don't want to know it all ahead of time. Sure, I've read the rumors, seen some spoilers, and to borrow another movie line, I hear t'ings. For me, it's no longer an adolescent race to be the first who knows the story before it ever hits the screen, that race is crowded enough without my lagging entry into the derby.

As a writer, my interest lies in how George Lucas will pull off telling his saga backwards – how he can dramatize the fall of a major character we all know is inevitable, and still surprise us by weaving the tale. This backtracking narrative stands as one of the most fascinating dramatic opportunities in film history. How does a storyteller involve, inspire and surprise an audience with a tale to which they already know the ending?

If he's to succeed fully in his task, Lucas must make the journey more stunning than the destination, make the entanglement as entertaining as the resolution. We know the Why, but we don't know the How. EPISODE II could be the magician's invitation backstage where he will reveal the secret to this twenty-five year magic trick, but I strongly suspect Lucas won't pull back that final piece of black curtain for the grand revelation until 2005.

ATTACK OF THE CLONES likely will expose little of Anakin's fall, and indeed it appears that Lucas only begins the galactic chess match of the Clone Wars which eventually signals the death knell of the Republic, but no doubt Anakin's feet will finally trod upon the slippery slope down which he will plummet in EPISODE III.

As I said before, this end of the Saga – to be the middle of it, episode-wise – provides a unique storytelling opportunity: these final four hours of film must funnel down into a single point of dramatic resolution, which then must seamlessly meld into the ignition source for the Original Trilogy. Thus Anakin's fall, skillfully told, strengthens the latter tale of his redemption, and vice versa – simultaneous storytelling in two directions . . . simply amazing. At least, it has that potential. How I envy George Lucas: sure wrapping up the Saga will be a ton of hard work, but what fun to pull it off successfully!

George Lucas warns that while EPISODE II gets a bit dark in spots, it's nothing compared to the eventual pall of doom which eclipses all hope in EPISODE III. To which I say, bring it on! If Lucas handles Anakin's moral fall and spiritual betrayal as I think he will – and know that he can – Anakin could become one of the great figures in tragic drama, certainly in modern cinema history. All the dramatic assets exist in place, all Lucas needs to do is exploit them to their fullest potential, and he will succeed beyond our wildest aspirations.

This May, the Saga draws one giant step closer to conclusion, and yet the fun part is just beginning. That month I draw one step closer to turning forty, and I can only hope the fun part is just beginning for me too. I've grown up on STAR WARS, but I suspect that doing so has kept me from growing old these past twenty-five years.

Sorry 3PO – this is why I dig space travel.