The Force Awakens: Don’t Shoot the Water Tower

• this article was written following release of The Force Awakens. The op-ed was accepted by a magazine but never saw publication due to time constraints.

“All I wanted to do was tell a story of what happened… they decided they weren’t going to use those stories.” George Lucas

“It’s true. All of it… They’re real.” Han Solo

In 1938, a broadcast of Orson Welles’ radio production of The War of the Worlds was taken literally by audiences and resulted in alleged mass panic. Newspapers reported that a group of armed townsfolk in Grovers Mill, New Jersey, went hunting for Martians and opened fire on a water tower after mistaking it for a tripod war-machine. That’s right, they shot a water tower. See, they thought the broadcast was real. They didn’t realise the story was made up. The lesson here?

Don’t take science fiction too seriously.

Well, more properly, this tale can illustrate that we should always remember that our pop culture fiction is fiction, lest we attack it mistakenly. Whether the water tower incident actually happened or not, the sci-fi panic did occur on some scale (Hitler referenced it in a speech later that year as an example of the corruption in American democracy). This moment remains an image of how we can react when approaching a piece of art without the right perspective.

While the reaction to The Force Awakens but been mostly general contentment, there has been some disturbance in The Force. Many fans have had visceral reactions to the death of Harrison Ford’s iconic character Han Solo. Others have been unhappy with the previous novels being jettisoned to make way for Disney’s new trilogy.

Self-proclaimed men’s rights groups criticised the film’s ethnic and gender diversity, (the group “Return of Kings” claimed their boycott of Star Wars cost Disney $4.2 million at the worldwide box office). There have been angry debates about whether Daisy Ridley’s protagonist Rey is a ‘Mary Sue’ or who her mysterious family might be. Some have even floated a petition for George Lucas to return to the franchise due to dissatisfaction with the film’s story. While these films are undeniably important to their audiences, there is one thing some fans have forgotten in all their reaction to The Force Awakens.

Star Wars is made up.

Indeed, Star Wars was a movie and Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were sequels. George Lucas often gives the impression that the Star Wars franchise was a prewritten saga about a father and his twin children. Rather, each film was penned shortly before filming and created in collaboration with other writers and directors. In earlier interviews, Lucas admitted that the plots were constantly evolving. Initially, the first sequel wasn’t going to follow on from Star Wars at all. Even the “I am you father” reveal was a last minute addition to the final shooting script for Empire.

That’s how Star Wars was created. Everything from the spaceships to the dialogue and the drama was made up along the way. The Millennium Falcon’s design was inspired by a half-eaten hamburger. One of the tumbling asteroids in Empire was actually a potato on a string. Harrison Ford devised that famous “I know” line on set. The idea that the characters of Luke and Leia were siblings was another last minute plot convenience. The process of improvisation is one of the elements that made the original trilogy so energetic and dynamic. It’s part of what made it fun.

Fans can often feel that the Star Wars brand is inherently unique and debate its ‘canon’, what did and didn’t happen, as if Star Wars is more real than other fictions in pop culture. Even George Lucas seems to think that his unused story ideas for Episode VII have “happened” and, by implication, Disney’s are fabricated. On the contrary, all Star Wars is made up. All art is.

The new Star Wars film is no different. The first outline of Michael Arndt’s script was discarded. J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan hammered out a new story in a Parisian cafe. The genders of some characters were switched during casting. Several scenes were rewritten as the production went on hiatus after Harrison Ford, literally, broke a leg on stage. The Force Awakens, like the best of the classic Star Wars trilogy, has also been improvised.

By all means, we should take Star Wars seriously in our reflection and criticism but let’s not make the same mistake as the townsfolk of Grovers Mill. Fans should be careful not to mistake any pop culture fiction for reality and then attack a story from the wrong perspective. We can take The Force Awakens seriously, not because it’s branded as Star Wars or because it’s ‘canon’ but precisely because it is made up and it’s this improvisation that can make it fun.

With Episode VIII slated for release next year, let’s hope fans remember not to panic about science fiction. Have fun. This isn’t real.

Don’t shoot the water tower.