‘Star Wars’ is an adult colouring book
JANUARY 6TH, 2016 — POST 002
Star Wars: The Force Awakens isn’t a particularly good movie. But this isn’t going to be a review. It just took a new entrant into the biggest cinematic franchise of all time for me to get why the Expanded Universe™ (‘EU’ from here on) is the sought-after golden goose of every studio in Hollywood. Specifically, I think I get why so many people get hyped on a movie trailer for an adaptation of a comic book. “Nerd” culture is big, the biggest. This isn’t saying anything original. We all know this. What the extra-cinematic climate of Star Wars showed me was that these EU properties give their consumers an okay to create something completely their own.
The group of people I saw The Force Awakens with took up an entire row of the theatre. John Williams’ score played over the credits, we left the theatre, and like most other groups found ourselves in a circle out front talking it all over. What I was struck by was how few of the points of conversation were directly concerned with what we actually saw during the movie’s runtime. There was rampant speculation to fill in narratives that occurred between The Return Of The Jedi and The Force Awakens. There was an extrapolating out to Episode VIII, an attempt to predict where each member of the group saw narratives being carried based upon the previous seven movies. I even found myself formulating a story set entirely on one of the planets we see wiped out by The Starkiller Base, convicted in my opinion that it was more interesting than the one the movie itself chose to focus on. Like, who cares about The Force anyway?
There’s a word that encapsulates this practice and I believe to be the real reason anyone pays there $15 for a movie ticket to this movie, to The Avengers, to Batman v Superman, to any of these EU properties:
Headcanon
If what a text, or in these cases a series of texts, lays out explicitly forms a canon — i.e. these texts are genuine, sacred, and truth-holding in matters of the way the world, events, and characters they represent are — headcanon is what I might come up with to fill in the blanks. It’s not canonical for you, but it’s canonical for me. My headcanon says that on one of those to-be-wiped-out planets there was a gum-shoed private-eye who got embroiled in investigating an adulterous senator at the request of his droid wife. These discussions online about who’s progeny Rey is, about what did Han do to Leia to basically have him fall back to where we met him thirty years prior, about how Finn was even able to wield a lightsaber let alone almost hold his own against Kylo Ren — all of these are people checking their headcanon against the headcanon of others.
What the canon of any EU property really is though is the thick black outlines of a colouring book. Formulating headcanon is the colouring in. The headcanon is what completes the picture for each consumer. This is why these franchises are so popular. They are entirely personal.
But shouldn’t we have grown out of colouring when we left childhood?
“Colouring” (both in the sense of headcanon and literally spending one’s free time with adult colouring books, because those are totally a thing) is creativity on training wheels. You can’t fail at “colouring”. Whatever is done within those lines is of such little consequence that the “colourer” feels completely content to extract any mutant simulacrum of creation.
For a lot of people, genuine creativity, creativity that has the real possibility of failure, is just too scary. Most would rather be pacified by the (inarguably rich and detailed) colouring books of EU properties that say “It’s okay to create, just do it here and in this way.” This in no way is to say that society is a creative wasteland, far from it. The “colouring” of EU properties by its consumers proves precisely that individuals have the capacity to create, that they’re in fact hungry to do so.
It’s time to take the training wheels off.
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