Defending Star Wars®

It's rare, but there are people who've never seen a Star Wars® movie. I call these people “twenty-somethings”, and the older I get, the more I meet. There are even those in my decade and older who've either never seen the movies, or came to the game late. I found myself reading a discussion about someone who fell into the latter category, who saw the movies recently and just didn't get it.

Geeks get lumped together, but there are subcategories and class divisions. We all like a little bit of the same things, but we also have favorite things that define us, just as a sports fan might embrace a specific team. My particular initial poison was cartoons, Transformers most of all, and this was the gateway addiction that led to a solid eight years of collecting comic books, that led to an adult who watches each new comic book movie with nostalgic glee and reads Newsarama several times a day. I grow old but not up as I keep peering back into a world that once consumed me.

I don't get Trekkies anymore than I get the fat guys who go shirtless to football games and paint the colors of their favorite teams on their faces and stomachs. “Fan” is short for “fanatic”, and in many cases proves to be a literal description. I've been to my share of comic book conventions, and I'm heading to one next month, but I've never gone in costume. I can't say that makes me any less of geek than the people brave enough to show up in robes, armor, or face paint, and I'm definitely entertained by all those photo opportunities.

So what is it about Star Wars®? Why has that endured, and why is everything measured against it? How do you explain it to an adult seeing it for the first time in this golden age of computer generated special effects. How do you defend the horrendously bad acting? Mark Hamill may well have been the ‘70s version of Hayden Christensen, although in Hamill's case his acting improved in the sequels. And the boy who whined about picking up power converters grew up to be the man that voiced the definitive Joker.

I think we take special effects for granted. Computers can generate anything. Shows like Battlestar Galactica can easily portray a massive space battle as though it were being recorded by a shaky handheld camera capturing a war documentary. Stargate can make you believe a metal ring has generated a wormhole event horizon that resembles a shimmering pool of water. We accept what we see, and it's not as remarkable as it used to be. But in the ‘70s, many people were seeing giant ships on a big movie screen for the first time. Back then, ILM was just George Lucas dangling a toy ship in front of a matte painting of stars. People didn't know that, and it didn't look like that. It looked good. We believed a tiny ship was being chased across the screen by a massive one, and we watched this from the best possible perspective to feel dwarfed ourselves.

Star Wars® has a lot going for it. It borrows from various religions, martial arts epics, and fantasy archetypes. Inspired by the best of these influences, it forged a mythology of its own. It was a phenomenon that couldn't be duplicated, even by itself. The prequels don't hold the same mystique, reverence, or nostalgia of the originals. We remember the first time we see The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, or The Usual Suspects. In the grand scheme of time, movies like The Others, Identity, and Hide and Seek won't be remembered. Twists become clichés. The first time people saw the big twist near the end of Empire must have been huge, and I wish I'd seen it in theaters instead of hearing about it from my fellow third graders with less strict parents and no notion of the concept of spoilers. Even so, my mouth hung wide and I half thought they were making up an outlandish rumor. “Luke's father is WHO?”

The thing is, once we've seen a few of these twist endings, we start looking for them. I bet this character is dead. I bet that one is imaginary. I bet those two are related. We lose some of the magic of the experience. When Star Wars® did it it was brand new and fresh to many people. So, in the end, I guess it all comes down to when you see things. If you see Star Wars® after you've seen films with twists, and good acting, and great special effects, then it doesn't seem all that new and fresh. You wonder how the merchandising could have been so successful, how it could inspire yet another fanbase of costume wearing escapists. Whether it's Transformers, Star Wars®, or The Lord of The Rings, Harry Potter, or Narnia, we all have another world we escape into. Maybe it's comics or sports or video games, but everyone has an obsession that's special to some individuals and questioned by others. You can defend it, and you can explain it, but the experience personal to your introduction cannot be duplicated.