Lower Decks

Star Wars came into my life in all the ways it doesn’t seem like it should anymore. I was a child when I first saw the original trilogy, and I kept watching it as I grew up. I never seemed to grow tired of it. Then George Lucas released some revised editions in theaters, and then he released a new trilogy, and just as everyone started saying, all the adults, that maybe the whole Star Wars thing was over, I realized I still cared deeply for it.

It seems odd, because most people lose interest in things after a while, or their interest evolves into variations that no longer support what they once did, or they think everything that can be said, they already said, so they either stop talking about it or stop thinking about it altogether, as if it was another lifetime. They consign such things to memory, and sometimes indulge in nostalgia, but it’s never the same. They think anyone who doesn’t behave this way has become obsessive, which is nearly a kind way of saying, it’s not natural.

Well, Star Wars, whether it be the originals (‘A New Hope,’ ‘The Empire Strikes Back,’ ‘Return of the Jedi’), or the new ones (‘The Phantom Menace,’ ‘Attack of the Clones,’ ‘Revenge of the Sith’), are still a part of my life, because Star Wars ended up being a defining feature of it and there’s no natural way for me to think of it as anything else. When I say I grew up with Star Wars, this is not a figure of speech. I started watching it with my family before I could properly remember them. My mind played tricks on me. They were like adventure films and horror films rolled into one. I imagined scenes and scenarios that were never captured on film, but were as real to me as if they had been. Each new viewing in a very real way revealed something else, something I hadn’t recognized before, and I don’t mean this in that I realized subtext, but that more of the real story revealed itself, and less of what I had imagined became apparent. I watched Star Wars the way most people watched late night movies, the horror stuff like Frankenstein, the Gremlins, and ‘A Christmas Story.’ It was as much a tradition as ‘The Ten Commandments’ were at Easter, or ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ was at Christmas, except there was no schedule for Star Wars. We watched it when we watched it. I was a Star Wars fan longer and more emphatically than I was a Star Trek fan. I never understood why there was a debate. I wasn’t a fan who had chosen, but who had grown up watching both. One of them had a lot of series and a lot of films. The other had three movies, and vague notions that there were tangential adventures, Ewoks movies, TV cartoons, action figures (growing up, it was Star Wars toys, and Star Trek collectibles), and eventually, three more films, which were like a godsend.

My oldest brother eventually had a friend who had been in grade school when ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ was released, and because he saw it in theaters, he and his friends vividly recreated the Hoth sequences on the playground (which reminds me that there’s a good argument for seeing movies in the theaters, but just as good a one for discovering them later, and there’s probably a difference that could be explored quite interestingly), and we were all awed by that. By the time I was born, it was far too late, even if we had been regulars at the movie theater, to have seen or appreciated even ‘Return of the Jedi’ in its original release. Hey, I was three. I wouldn’t have remembered even if I had seen it then. It was a family tradition, so of course it was rare to find others who cherished Star Wars. It didn’t phase me that Star Wars had made so much money at the box office. It was a point of pride, really (and a source of bitter disappointment to discover that, even with so many fans there was hardly a common experience to be found, which might be considered the first steps on the road to HYGOTS, where popular things can be so unpopular).

We found nothing wrong with the fact that these films kept getting repackaged. We upgraded several times with the video releases, first when they tweaked some of the specifications, then Lucas overhauled them completely (which was just about when the cracks for everyone started to show), changing and adding things. It was a thrill to finally see them in theaters, though.

We wondered ten years before it happened if George was going to make some new ones. I wrote a column (#55) about some of the experiences that grew from learning that other people were impatient about this sort of thing, too, how he began licensing off the storytelling for comics and novels, and how for a while that was worth getting into, but try as they might, none of these projects ever felt the same. It wasn’t just about the John Williams scores or the opening scroll, familiar actors or characters, but that Star Wars was a uniquely visual presentation, perhaps one of the most unique ever filmed, which is funny because it began as an homage to similar and much older storytelling that was far more forgettable (for most people). Once he added quasi-mysticism and fancy laser swords, however, George Lucas created something that would prove timeless, and tough to duplicate. One might even say impossible. He also created three films that were actually worth following all the way through, long before (or, long after movie serials) television would figure out how to do the same thing, or authors managed to duplicate it, too. Many had written long books, but few had written series that proved to endure. (Tolkien had succeeded in obscurity, but would enjoy renewed success when his books were finally brought to film, and thus continue the tradition of attempting to find “the new Star Wars”).

It doesn’t seem so hard, but it really is. And that’s why his new films were met with such skepticism. He tracked the same story he had begun with Darth Vader to the Sith Lord’s origins, long shadowed in conjecture, and in doing so lost almost all the trappings that had long been associated with Star Wars. He asked audiences who had either grown up with his work or had experienced it as an emerging phenomenon to come back twenty years after it seemed like everything was done to do it again. Star Wars was still ready to be popular, but it was no longer new, and you can only grow up once, so this time, almost everyone seemed to think he’d goofed.

I wasn’t one of them. I tracked the story with him back to the beginning (or, ‘a’ beginning, just as it had concluded on ‘an’ ending), marveled at the wonders he envisioned, a plausible world bent on ruin, ripe for the picking, ready for a monster like Vader, and watched how it all unfolded, even how Yoda really was once an esteemed and accomplished Jedi (it’s easy to assume from ‘Empire Strikes Back’ that he was…but come on, wasn’t there some part of you that kind of assumed he could have been just some funny little survivor?), how the same story he had begun in 1977 could conclude in 2005 with something that led right back to that point, a circular, singular experience no one else had thought of, no one else could duplicate, only judge.

And judge they did. And continue to, because that’s an easy route to take, especially with something that’s not important to you. I could fill a column with all the thoughts I’ve had and continue to have just from the six films (because at this point, it’s no longer a game of ‘original’ and ‘new’ trilogies, but a single saga), but this one’s about growing up Star Wars, and how it has always been such an engaging experience. I can’t say it’s singular anymore, because J.K. Rowling finally cracked the code with Harry Potter, and there’re a couple more films (there will be eight in total, a new record for a single, popular story) yet to be released, a continuing experience to report on in this column. In the weeks to come I’ll be spending some time with Star Trek, and conclude the year with the annual QB50 report of my comics year, which includes not a little consideration of what Geoff Johns has been doing with the Star Wars of the superhero set, Green Lantern, and I very much look forward to that, but I have to spend this week stressing once again how important Star Wars has been for me, and continues to be. I still plan on a day where I watch the whole saga, in sequence, from start to finish.

Don’t tell George, but I think there’s even a way no one has thought of to continue that story. But that’s a column for another day, too.