What Star Wars Means to Me
Or: A Foreword to a Review of “The Last Jedi”
I was born eight months after the release of Star Wars. My parents almost named me Luke.
The first movie I saw in theaters was Empire Strikes Back; I was two and a half years old. My parents picked me up from preschool early to watch Return of the Jedi on opening day in 1983. I collected the action figures, read the comics, and listened to the further adventures of the Rebel Alliance on audio cassette. I had the lunchbox, pajamas, bedspread, and backpack.
I was a sophomore in college when Star Wars was re-released in theaters. I waited in line for nine hours to get tickets at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C., and three more to get a seat. It was worth it. Episode I came out the week I graduated college. Some of the most enjoyable moments of becoming a parent involved introducing my kids to the world of Star Wars.
How can I put this? Star Wars is not just a movie. It shaped my imaginative and emotional life. It was the container into which my brothers and I poured our imaginations, the world that hosted our adventures, the clay that we moulded for our play. It was the raw stuff that became an extension of our creativity and our very lives.
I distinctly remember hearing rumors on the playground in elementary school that the beloved trilogy was part of a planned nine-part saga. We dreamt of the completed story, acted out our version of the sequels and prequels — my first effort at fan fiction.
As the years of my childhood went by and the rumored sequels to the original trilogy never appeared, Star Wars became something else. It became the unfinished story. Back to the Future was a completed trilogy, a tidy triptych in a contained world. Indiana Jones was (we thought) a finished story, also told within a well-defined cosmos.
But Star Wars was an expansive universe with unlimited potential for further stories — stories, we believed, that would take place only in our dreams. There was a sense of loss, but also of hope and nostalgia in the burst of a lightsaber from its sheath. We didn’t play-act Indiana Jones. That story had been told and was finished. We played Star Wars, because its untold stories begged to be told.
Star Wars, then, became myth, hope, and inspiration. There were the fabled sequels that we could dream of. There was the distant, but not very realistic, hope that they might someday be made, and the stories would carry us away again. And there was the boundless inspiration that came from playing in an unfinished but densely imagined world.
To speak theologically, Star Wars came to stand for the Kingdom yet to come, the unrealized eschaton, the future consummation of hope.
I heard the news, in October 2012, that there would indeed be an actual, living, breathing Episode VII within my mortal lifetime with something akin to delirium, panic, and dread.
It is a strange thing to contemplate the actual arrival of one’s lifelong hope. I felt five years old, boyish and alive with the excitement of the story coming alive again. When the first teaser appeared during Thanksgiving of 2014, I watched those 88 seconds again and again for thirty or forty minutes. Even my son, who adores all things Star Wars, got bored and left. When the second trailer arrived last Easter, my eyes welled up and I got quavery. “Chewie, we’re home.” Indeed.
I also felt genuinely afraid. Star Wars was present at the major milestones of my life, including almost literally my birth. Was there something portentous in its reappearance, as I, and the franchise, approached our 40th birthdays? “The circle is now complete,” I hear the Dark Lord of the Sith say. “It is your….destiny.” I am half-convinced some providential arrangement of events will usher me to my grave around the time Episode IX comes out, in 2019.
And, finally, there was dread. What if I vest my hopes in the new trilogy, and it disappoints? Will Disney do the right thing, or will they turn it into another candy-colored CGI nightmare? The prospect of new a Star Wars film every year risks cheapening the currency, lessening the myth with familiarity. And I was conflicted at the prospect of the story reaching its long-delayed conclusion. Star Wars will feel different as a finished story.
What if the Kingdom arrives, and it’s boring? What if the Messiah arrives, and he’s a loser?
Episode IX is not the apocalypse, Star Wars is not the Kingdom, and J.J. Abrams is (probably) not the messiah. It’s just a movie. In addition to delirium, panic, and dread, in my more mature moments I’ve felt a bit of conviction for idolizing a silly science fiction soap opera from the Seventies.
But movies are stories, and stories shape our lives, train our expectations, and inform our hopes. Star Wars is one of the best such stories on the silver screen — and, for me and countless millions of others, one of the most powerful. I’ve written elsewhere about what makes the original film resonate so strongly.
The new Star Wars films are good. But the new movies are naturally not as potent as the first: the first came in the midst of the magic of childhood, and took on the sheen of enchantment that covers one’s early years. Force Awakens and Rogue One were spectacular exercises in selling nostalgia and I loved them, but they worked because of the chords of memory they struck so well.
And that is why, while I recognize that The Last Jedi is very good and a well made film, it was also hard to watch. More on that in my next post.
