An Open Letter to My Future Daughter About Why I Used to Love “Star Wars” and Why I Maybe Hate It Now

Dear Fiona,

You’re my daughter. Right now, as I type this, it is December 2015, and you don’t exist. Maybe you never will.

Coincidentally, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia have never existed. They will never exist. But people talk about them all the time.

Luke, Han, and Leia first appeared in Star Wars, a movie that most people insist on calling A New Hope or Episode IV or Four or Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope.

I will call it Star Wars or “the original Star Wars,” which I know is clunky and reactionary and confusing. I don’t care. A New Hope is a dumb name for a cool thing. “Star Wars” is a great perfect phrase, but most of the titles in the Star Wars film franchise are terrible. Ranked from worst to the only actual good title, as of December 2015:

8. Attack of the Clones

7. The Force Awakens

6. Return of the Jedi

5. Revenge of the Sith

4. A New Hope

3. The Phantom Menace

2. Rogue One

1. The Empire Strikes Back

The titles don’t really matter, maybe. As I type this, we are five weeks away from the release of Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens. People call it Episode VII sometimes, but in casual conversation, they just call it Star Wars.

Star Wars is 38 years old right now. Older than me, older than the majority of human beings on this planet. Star Wars is older than Harrison Ford was when he made Star Wars, and when Harrison Ford made Star Wars he thought the whole thing was pretty silly.

Maybe that’s because, back then, most people in their mid-30s didn’t take science-fiction or fantasy seriously. Or maybe that’s because Ford was always America’s old angry uncle, even before he got old.

Sir Alec Guinness was 62 years old when he played Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars — ten years younger than Harrison Ford now — and he thought Star Wars was dumb. He never said so precisely, but he said so frequently.

There’s a sequence in his memoir I never thought about before I turned 25, and now I think about it all the time.

A refurbished Star Wars is on somewhere or everywhere. I have no intention of revisiting any galaxy. I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned. Twenty years ago, when the film was first shown, it had a freshness, also a sense of moral good and fun. Then I began to be uneasy at the influence it might be having. The bad penny first dropped in San Francisco when a sweet-faced boy of twelve told me proudly that he had seen Star Wars over a hundred times. His elegant mother nodded with approval. Looking into the boy’s eyes I thought I detected little star-shells of madness beginning to form and I guessed that one day they would explode.

“I would love you to do something for me,” I said.

“Anything! Anything!” the boy said rapturously.

“You won’t like what I’m going to ask you to do,” I said.

“Anything, sir, anything!”

“Well,” I said, “do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?”

He burst into tears. His mother drew herself up to an immense height. “What a dreadful thing to say to a child!” she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.

I was that boy, Fiona, more or less. There is no time in my life before Star Wars. I mean that literally — the original trilogy ended before I was born — but I also mean that some of my earliest memories are Star Wars. Maybe most of them are. The toys, and the movies. Then, when I got a bit older, the books, the videogames, the fan magazine with a monthly column by the guy who played C-3PO.

Then, when I was a teenager: Three more movies.

“A fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.” Alec Guinness was the only member of the original Star Wars cast who saw real war: World War II, Navy, Sicily, Elba, Yugoslavia, real countries where people died. Fiona, does anyone your age know about Sicily, Elba, Yugoslavia? Does everyone your age know about Tatooine, Hoth, Endor, or Star Wars planets they haven’t invented yet circa 2015? Jesus, I’ve spent whole days of my life replaying the Battle of Hoth in videogames, and I’ve never heard of Elba.

I’m not sure when you’ll be born — probably not for awhile — but I’m guessing that, by the time you read this, World War II will be nine decades away, maybe a century. That’s as far as we are from World War I — and nobody my age knows anything about World War I. That war is too complicated; there aren’t enough obvious bad guys; there are no happy endings. And yet, everyone my age could tell you everything wrong with the Star Wars prequels.

Alec Guinness was also in The Bridge on the River Kwai, a movie about war, not really a war movie. There are more action scenes in the first ten minutes of any Star Wars movie than in the entirety of Bridge on the River Kwai. This isn’t why Bridge on the River Kwai is a good movie, but it is why most people today never watch Bridge on the River Kwai.

Bridge on the River Kwai is set during World War II. The movies love World War II for the same reason people love Star Wars: There’s a bad guy, and lots of good guys. Most bad guys in Star Wars are faceless: Stormtroopers, white British guys dressed monochrome, TIE Fighters with black helmets, Darth Vader with the blackest helmet of all. When you meet the Emperor in Return of the Jedi, he has no purpose beyond evil.

In real life, Fiona, villains are much more complicated. Whenever the movies do World War II, they usually focus on the attacks on Germany, because Nazis make for obvious villains. (World War II movies don’t usually focus on Japan, which is another reason Bridge on the River Kwai is so interesting.) It is much harder to make a movie about the Vietnam War, or about Korea, or the first World War, or the Spanish-American War.

What I’m saying is: Star Wars isn’t alone in peddling a hot line of bullshit about good and evil. (Sorry, Fiona, I won’t swear again.)

Let me suggest something to you, Fiona, that I will probably not tell you when you are actually born: There is no such thing as an absolute force of good. Heroes and villains are flawed human beings. As you get older, you will start to wonder if Heroes and Villains are just constructions, the result of savvy PR. This will happen right around the time you realize that your parents are just making everything up as they go along.

I hope I am doing everything in my power to teach you the difference between right and wrong, Fiona, but when you grow up, you will have to find out that the Wrong Decision doesn’t appear in front of you wearing all black and declaring itself representative of The Dark Side.

Or maybe you won’t. People stop learning when they get old, Fiona. They don’t want to, but it’s easier to believe everything you were taught when you were young. And it’s easier to believe everything was simpler when you were a kid. The truth is, things were only simpler because you were too dumb to notice how complicated everything already was.

Star Wars is for kids. That’s one of the many unconvincing arguments about Star Wars that George Lucas liked to bring up, when nobody liked his second trilogy of movies. When I was a kid, I loved Star Wars. When I was a kid, I hated Church. The reasons are so obvious: Star Wars was fun, and Church was boring.

I was raised Catholic, Fiona. Did I raise you with religion? Like every Catholic person I know my age, I have lapsed. My mother, your grandmother, was raised Presbyterian. She converted to Catholicism when she married your grandfather. When I was growing up, I can remember my Mom telling me the difference between Presbyterians and Catholics. I think she found the Catholic Mass stolid, cut off; maybe just boring. The celibate priests, preaching stonefaced wisdom spun abstractly off ancient scrolls.

It sounds strange to say this, Fiona, but even though Presbyterianism is 500 years old, it is a countercultural alternative to Catholicism, which is two thousand years old. So I was raised within a very old system, with my mom as an authority figure who lived happily within that system, but also thought a lot about the world outside of it. She was a Sunday School teacher sent me to Catholic school, and she made me skeptical about the entire apparatus of Catholicism.

Also: The Catholic Church is a very rich, very corrupt institution, responsible for horrible, horrible, horrible things. And sexist: Women have never had any of the power or rights of men within the Church’s infrastructure. You don’t even exist yet, Fiona, and I already feel angry about this on your account.

Or maybe I don’t like any powerful institutions, at all. I am from Northern California, just like George Lucas. Northern Californians do not like powerful institutions; as an act of rebellion, Northern Californians often create their own powerful institutions. Northern Californians hate Emperors, and they build Empires.

Since I don’t go to Church now, I probably won’t take you to Church. But, then again: Your grandparents told me that they only started going back to Church when your uncle Brendan was born. Maybe they needed a simple way to teach their children the difference between right and wrong.

George Lucas just gave an interview to the Washington Post. He tried to explain why he made Star Wars. Lucas has spent decades explaining why he made Star Wars. His reasons change. It was about Vietnam, or it was an attempt to create a fun fantasy world far from Vietnam. it was about politics, or it was for the kids. It was an act of revolution, or it was a way to sell toys.

(Just kidding on that last one. Lucas would never admit that Star Wars was about selling toys. And yet, you could argue that Star Wars is a successful 38-year-old toy line, with very expensive feature-length commercials occasionally released in theaters.)

Lucas doesn’t know why he made Star Wars, I think. Maybe, if you read the Bible closely, you figure out that God doesn’t know why he Created. But here’s what Lucas tells the Washington Post:

Lucas wanted to make a movie that would teach children the central ethic of right and wrong, good and evil. “I want[ed] to see if I can bend their lives at a particular point in time when they’re very vulnerable,” he recalls, “And give them the things that we’ve always given kids throughout history. The last time we had done it was with the Western. And once the Western was gone, there was no vehicle to say, “You don’t shoot people in the back” and such.”

So maybe the creator of Star Wars thought it could be a source of instruction — the “moral good” that Guinness mentions, in those fussy grampa tones. This is interesting for a lot of reasons, not least the implication that Lucas has a pretty boring taste in westerns. (All the boring ones are about good guys and bad guys. The great westerns make you wonder if those terms make any sense.)

It’s also interesting, because it means Lucas was trying to accomplish with Star Wars what my parents were doing with Church: Teach me right and wrong. Star Wars never happened. But coincidentally, Fiona, some of the things I learned in Church weren’t “true” in the “actual” sense. This is something anyone who reads the Bible from the start has to accept. The Book of Genesis begins with two different Creation myths.

(People have fought wars over the Bible. Nobody has started a war over Star Wars yet. Maybe that is an improvement.)

So, I didn’t like Church, but I loved Star Wars. We had the original three movies, on videotape. We had two more movies: Caravan of Courage and The Battle for Endor, spinoffs featuring no characters from the trilogy besides the Ewoks.

I loved the Ewoks then. We had Star Wars toys, and I still remember the Ewok village. Now, grown up, I think Ewoks are stupid. Who’s right? Me as a kid, or me for the rest of my life? Most people today would probably say: “Me as a kid.” People like to be sentimental. (It’s easier than being honest.)

I can remember seeing Heir to the Empire at Lucky’s, a local supermarket. The book was released in 1991. It was an immediate bestseller: A sequel to Return of the Jedi, with pictures of Han and Luke and Leia on the cover, and Chewbacca, and a man dressed in white, and someone who looked like buff Obi-Wan Kenobi.

I didn’t read that book immediately. It was a grown-up book, with no pictures. But there were books for kids, and then I got older. By the time I went to high school, two shelves on my bookcase of Star Wars. I could tell you their names off the top of my head: The Krytos Trap, The Crystal Star, Darksaber, Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina, Tales from Jabba’s Palace, The Courtship of Princess Leia, The Lost City of the Jedi.

There were guidebooks, encyclopedias of vehicles and vessels, planets, weapons, characters. There were comic books. There were videogames. I didn’t have the right console for some of those videogames. I can remember buying the strategy guide for TIE Fighter, which let you play as one of those bad guys dressed all in black. I never played the game, but I read the strategy guide.

I was never just a fan of Star Wars, Fiona. I loved Star Trek and The Hobbit, Discworld and Lone Wolf. My family always loved bookstores, and I always went straight to the science-fiction and fantasy sections. There are books I never read, but I saw them in a hundred bookstores, and I remember their names: Midshipman’s Hope and Red Mars, Sword of Shannara and The Mists of Avalon.

Star Wars started all of that. It was my way in. It was my first cultural obsession. When I was a kid, I was the only person I knew who cared so much about Star Wars.

Now, everyone cares. Or that is how it seems. People my age care, older people care, children born twenty or twenty five years after me care.

Why don’t I care, Fiona? Why do I feel upset every time I think about the new movie, the new series of movies? Why do I hate Star Wars now? Why am I scared that, someday, you will love Star Wars — that, when you are reading this, you will think me writing “I hate Star Wars” will be some kind of attack on your very soul?

Do I even hate Star Wars? Not the first movie. Not Empire Strikes Back. Not the parts of Return of the Jedi that I can justify as pure eye candy — and yet, those parts are also the parts I hate, the parts that remind me that it only took a couple movies for George Lucas to be less interested in character dynamics and more interested in things that could become toys. I used to love those toys — but now, as an adult, I see how loving those toys means loving every bad instinct that made Return of the Jedi a bad movie.

Do I just hate Star Wars? Is it okay, to hate something that you used to love? Wouldn’t it be weirder, Fiona, if I still loved the same things that I loved when I was a kid?

Or do I hate the people who are excited about Star Wars? Am I some kind of prelate, who thinks that those people love Star Wars the wrong way? Am I a reactionary, someone who misses the old way of loving Star Wars?

The old way: When I was a kid, Fiona, I was a geek. Or a nerd. Those words used to mean something. When I was a kid, “geek” and “nerd” were not considered positive words. To be a geek was to be other, somehow. To be a nerd was to be focused on things that, no matter their many obvious benefits, that did not make you cool.

I went to a Catholic elementary school, from grades 1–12. As far as I can remember, I was the only kid who read Star Wars books. Certainly, I was the only kid who brought Star Wars books to school to read them. I was not the only kid who cared about Star Wars. I can remember making a new friend at the start of fourth grade, when I talked to Greg about Star Wars spaceships.

Greg told me that the Millennium Falcon’s design was based on a pizza, or maybe it was a hamburger, and the design of Boba Fett’s ship, Slave One, was based on an upside-down street lamp. I was friends with Greg through eighth grade. I remember that conversation better than any other interaction we ever had.

I can’t ever recall talking to Greg, or anyone else, about Mara Jade or Corran Horn, about Davin Felth or Wraith Squadron, or any of the other characters introduced in the Star Wars books

But I guess I should clarify that kids my age — this was 1993, 1994, 1995 — did know about Star Wars. I can remember one girl — circa sixth grade, she was already some kind of model — expressing some disgust when I showed up to school with a lot of Star Wars books in my backpack. But maybe that was not Star Wars-specific disgust. It was towards the end of the year, and most kids had empty desks because we were finished with our schoolwork. What the hell was I doing, showing up to school with more books than I could humanly read in a month, and putting them in my desk?

Maybe she was just disgusted in general, with me, with most of the young dudes. She was a cool kid. I can see them in my mind’s eye, right now: Every recess, every lunch break, they would sit on a couple of benches. The benches were pressed up against the windows of our classroom. They would sit facing away from the classroom. The girls sat on the bench seats, and the boys would sit on the table, their feet millimeters away from the girls’ skirts. I always wondered what they were talking about. I never wanted to catch their eye.

Here’s something funny, Fiona. Or, not funny. Last month, a woman named Katherine Timpf went on Fox News and talked about how she never liked Star Wars. “I have never had any interest in watching space nerds poke each other with their little space nerd sticks,” she said. “And I’m not going to start now. You people are crazy. You Star Wars people are crazy. Yesterday I tweeted something, and all I said was that I wasn’t familiar with Star Wars because I’ve been too busy liking cool things and being attractive. People threatened my life.”

I’ve never heard of Katherine Timpf before, but she looks shockingly like that girl from my elementary school: Blonde hair, thin, either so confident or so desperate that she doesn’t mind saying that she is “attractive.” I kind of feel bad for her: Anyone who specifically needs to say that they like “cool” things definitely isn’t cool. Online, a few people told her to “die.” I wonder if those people were like me, in grade school — if they had their own little blonde girl, who told them they were weird. I like being weird, but a lot of people prefer to be normal. Or: They want society to love the weird things they love, and they want critics to declare that the movies they love are perfect.

Maybe most people want everyone to love the things they love. Maybe most people aren’t as interesting as they think they are.

Star Wars was the most popular movie ever made, when it came out. By the time I was a kid, it was an old movie, by kid standards. By the time I was in junior high, to be a Star Wars fan meant to be a fan of things that were not exactly popular — at least at St. Simon’s School. I read Star Wars books, and played Star Wars videogames at a time when most people weren’t playing videogames. (Also, I didn’t like sports. Maybe things have changed in schools now, but when I was a kid, it was hard to be bad at sports.)

These new Star Wars movies, Fiona, are not aimed at people like me. They are not aimed at people who loved Star Wars in the long years when loving Star Wars meant loving something weird. They are aimed at people who remember when Star Wars was popular: The biggest movie of all time, the biggest franchise ever. The trailers have the original music, the Millennium Falcon, Han Solo, Chewbacca, X-Wings: Everything people remember from movies they saw years ago, or decades ago.

The movie does not feature any references to Mara Jade. Have I told you about Mara Jade, Fiona? She is so much more interesting than Princess Leia. No offense to Princess Leia. Well, maybe some offense to Princess Leia? People like to say that Princess Leia “up-ends stereotypes,” that she isn’t a damsel in distress. Here is her role in the first three movies:

1. Get captured immediately, spent the first two acts imprisoned, rescued by Han and Luke.

2. Funny-flirt with Han, get captured on Cloud City, get rescued by Lando Calrissian.

3. Get captured by Jabba, get freed by R2-D2, get rescue-captured by Ewoks, gets shot.

That’s unfair, I know. She gets to be “in charge” of things, in some vaguely defined way. She is “tough,” insofar as she never really mourns the loss of her entire planet. She strangles Jabba the Hutt — maybe my favorite part of Return of the Jedi, and a potent symbol of a woman killing an extremely phallic alien being — but only after Jabba puts her in a shameless golden bikini designed to show off everything about Carrie Fisher besides her acting ability. She doesn’t take Han’s crap — until she falls in love with him and they both get boring.

Somehow, though, Leia always feels so locked out of the climaxes of her movies: Watching a battle from a command center, watching Lando and Chewie fly off to search for Han, watching the Ewoks win the war, never having some final moment with the man who turned out to be her father. She is a strong character with a weak arc, you might say.

Let me tell you about Mara Jade: You will never hear about her from pop culture. Mara Jade was introduced in Heir to the Empire, the 1991 book written by Timothy Zahn, designed as a sequel to Return of the Jedi. When we meet Mara, she is a smuggler, second-in-command to a massive crime operation. But we learn that she wasn’t always a lawless, stateless power. She fought in the Rebellion — on the wrong side. She was a special agent for the Emperor: His assassin. After the war, she still wanted to kill Luke Skywalker: She gradually comes to understand that she was fighting for the wrong side. She’s kind of like Jason Bourne in Matt Damon’s Bourne movies. Timothy Zahn later said: “She’s a strong female character (which were few and far between in the Star Wars movies) but she’s also flawed and searching and — dare we say it? — human.”

Right now, the media is falling over itself to praise JJ Abrams and Daisy Ridley for the creation of “Rey,” a lead female protagonist in the new Star Wars movie. Nobody has actually seen the movie yet, so all we have been really talking about is marketing. In the marketing, “Rey” is the Luke Skywalker figure. She lives in a desert; she seems to have no parents; she dreams of some kind of better life among the stars; she meets a cute little droid. Golly, it’s almost like JJ Abrams just took everything people loved about Luke Skywalker and said “But now it’s a woman!” and we’ve all decided to call that “original” because we don’t have anything else to say about a movie nobody has ever seen!

Mara Jade was more than just a Female Luke. She was a new kind of someone in the Star Wars universe: Someone who was evil, was portrayed in the act of becoming good. Coincidentally, that also seems to be the character arc of the new character, Finn, played by John Boyega. Is this why I don’t like the new Star Wars movie, Fiona? Is it just because I am upset that everyone who didn’t read Heir to the Empire thinks all these things are brand-new? Am I just angry that all the people who like Star Wars when it is popular didn’t pay attention to Star Wars when it was less popular? Have I become that horrible kind of fanboy: “You might like what I like, but you don’t like it the right way, and you haven’t earned the right to like what I like?”

Mara Jade is dead now. She was killed in a book called Sacrifice. Years after Return of the Jedi, she was married to Luke, and they had a kid, and her nephew Jacen turned Evil. Jacen was the son of Han Solo and Princess Leia. Jacen kills Mara Jade. But that doesn’t matter: After Disney bought Star Wars from George Lucas, Disney declared that everything that happened in the comics, in the videogames, in the books I grew up reading — all of that didn’t happen. It would not be in the canon of the new movies.

Do I even care about that? I’m not going to stand up and say, like, Heir to the Empire is a great work of literature. If it were published today, I wouldn’t read it. I like history books now; I’ve become your grandfather, and I’m only 30. And yet: Isn’t there something a little monstrous about that, to just declare that the fictional history of a generation didn’t happen? Isn’t that like Disney just wiped out a whole galaxy? It’s as if billions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

You love Disney, I know it. When I was a kid, I loved Disney. Everyone everywhere loves Disney. To say that you don’t love Disney is to say that you don’t like being human. If I say “I don’t like Disney,” I am dooming myself to a lifetime of living by that statement. At some point, I will take you to Disneyland, and one or all of my friends will make some kind of snide remark about me going to Disneyland.

Can we agree for a moment, Fiona, that even good things have their dark side? Can we, perhaps, take a moment to list all the things I don’t like about Disney?

1. Disney built its brand off of taking fairy tales and making them less interesting.

In the original “Snow White” tale, the Queen is still alive when Snow White marries Prince Charming, and she goes to their wedding not realizing who Snow White is, and for punishment she has to step inside of burning iron shoes and dance until she dies. In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the Queen accidentally kills herself, because no good people in a Disney movie can ever kill anyone on purpose.

In Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, the Sea Witch gives the Mermaid legs, but only after promising that walking will be constant torture: She will always feel as though her toes are bleeding. The Sea Witch also cuts off the Mermaid’s tongue. She falls into the friend zone with the Prince, who marries another woman. The Sea Witch tells the Mermaid that she can become a Mermaid again — if she kills the Prince. Instead, the Little Mermaid kills herself, which instigates a surreal ending that kind of vibes like Siddhartha and 2001.

That sounds so much more interesting to me as a grown-up. As a kid, I guess that would be scary. Maybe kids should be scared? Disney didn’t think so. Disney invented the idea of taking fairy tales and making them safe for everyone — making them Christian, you might say. Now, in 2015, everyone takes offense at everything: There is a generation in college who has turned outrage into a kind of art form. Maybe we have forgotten how to feel offended. Maybe that’s not Disney’s fault, but maybe Disney didn’t help matters.

2. Disney now is a company that runs almost entirely off of the idea that you can keep selling the same thing over and over.

Disney movies now are movies based on comic books written forty years ago, and live-action versions of Disney cartoons made fifty years ago, and movie versions of theme park rides. And Star Wars movies. I don’t only value originality — god help me, Fiona, I love every Fast & Furious movie — but to the extent that I do value originality, how can I value Disney? The best Disney movies are Pixar movies, and even Pixar has started making sequels. They are threatening to make Toy Story 4. By the time you come along, they might be onto Toy Story 9. Which reminds me:

3. Disney represents everything we are not supposed to like about consumerism.

Do you know, Fiona, that Disney selling you things since the very first time you watched one of their products? Are you old enough to care? How many Christmas presents, birthday presents, off-season presents came from Disney? Did they make you feel happy? How long did that happiness last? What is true happiness? I don’t know. I don’t think we should be happy about spending money, but I also know that someday soon, you will be alive, and we will love you, and we will get you Disney shit just to shut you up, sorry.

Do you know that everything in a Star Wars movie now is product placement — has maybe always been product placement? Do you know that once upon a time, there were movies that were not designed to sell you anything — that were only designed to be movies? Does this seem weird to you? In whatever virtual reality device through which you experience entertainment, is it possible to buy everything you see? (The other day, I said out loud that I would really like to buy the jacket John Boyega is wearing in the trailer for The Force Awakens.)

There are complaints that people have about Disney. I will repeat them now, for posterity. Disney’s gender norms are terribly old-fashioned. Women are princesses, or evil queens, or if they’re lucky dead mothers. Maybe we should be happy that that is changing now: That Maleficent is a more feminist version of Sleeping Beauty, that Inside Out is about the inside of a little girl’s mind, that the rip-off Luke Skywalker character in The Force Awakens is a human female. Maybe by the time you’re alive, Fiona, Disney has advanced to some wild new social frontier where like one person isn’t heterosexual. Wow!

Lots of people are complaining right now, Fiona, that Disney isn’t making action figures for girls — no Rey action figures, no Black Widow action figures. But you know what? Maybe that isn’t Disney’s fault. Maybe it’s stupid that so many smart people are spending so much of their time thinking about movies that aren’t that smart. Maybe we’re all dumber than we used to be. Maybe everyone doesn’t realize that Star Wars was specifically invented to be a much simpler and dumber world than the real world of the 1970s — that, maybe, a lot of people wanted to go far away, to a world where they didn’t need to think about women’s liberation or Civil Rights or Gay Rights, to a place where the bad guys wore black and the good guys are young and cute.

But there’s nothing wrong with escapism, Fiona! Nothing at all! Nobody needs to justify liking what they like. You, least of all. Just for clarity’s sake, here are my favorite movies of 2015, the year I am writing this, in no particular order.

Tangerine

Slow West

Brooklyn

Furious Seven

Inside Out

Amy

The Tribe

Mad Max: Fury Road

Magic Mike XXL

Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation

The Gift

The Hateful Eight

Straight Outta Compton

Spotlight

Anomalisa

At least three of those movies are dumb as a box of pet rocks. Possibly the dumbest is Furious Seven, and I saw it four times in theaters. FOUR TIMES. It is the least defensible movie on that list; I’m guessing you will probably hate it, that’s how much I love it. It is so completely my classic rock that I have to assume it will inspire you to flee into your punk rock. It is the seventh movie in a series, like Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

What makes it different? Is it okay for me to say that, in the very specific way we talk about “original” when we talk about endless franchises, Furious Seven feels more original than The Force Awakens? The trailers for Episode VII are specifically selling something old. It is as if JJ Abrams made a list of the ten things everyone loves unequivocally about the original Star Wars….

1. X-Wing fighters

2. Lightsabers

3. Han Solo

4. Chewbacca

5. Desert planets

6. Battles on snowy planets

7. TIE Fighters

8. Bad guys in black robot outfits

9. Darth Vader’s helmet

10. Desert robes

…and then put those into a trailer. The Furious movies don’t have signifiers like that, Fiona. Oh, they have actors, and they have the promise of cars doing things cars don’t usually do. It has tropes. But those tropes aren’t LEGO blocks.

You are a unique person, Fiona. An original creation. Star Wars was an original creation once, too. There had been things like it before. Lucas was influenced by old movie serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. He was also influenced by Akira Kurosawa, a Japanese film director who made a lot of movies. None of them are as fun as Star Wars, but at least four of them are better, because not everything has to be fucking fun all the time, sorry.

Have I shown you any Kurosawa movies? Do you like foreign films? I loved Seven Samurai when I was younger, but it’s four hours long, and almost everyone dies. I loved Yojimbo when I was a kid, but I tried watching it recently and found it slow: I much prefer the rip-off starring Clint Eastwood, A Fistful of Dollars. I just recently finally watched Throne of Blood, an adaptation of Macbeth. It is a beautiful film, a dark film, a haunted film.

Is Throne of Blood so different from The Force Awakens? Is a “reinterpretation” just another reboot? But isn’t Macbeth a much more interesting story to reboot than Star Wars? Isn’t it weird that, forty years ago, George Lucas made Star Wars because he was so inspired by so many movies, and now JJ Abrams is making Star Wars because he was so inspired by Star Wars?

“Who is JJ Abrams?” is what I’m assuming you are asking, Fiona. Or maybe you don’t have to ask that. Maybe that would be like someone asking me today: “Who is George Lucas?”

JJ Abrams is one of the most powerful and influential people in Hollywood today. He has made five movies counting Star Wars VII. His first movie was the third film in a franchise based on a TV show from the ’60s. His second movie was the eleventh film in a franchise based on a TV show from the ’60s; his fourth movie was the twelfth. In between, his third film was an homage to the movies a Steven Spielberg made in the ’70s. Steven Spielberg is maybe the most famous director of the last half century.

If I can psychoanalyze for just a moment: There is a very big difference between someone who makes a movie as an homage to Japanese cinema and cheap forgotten movie serials, and someone who makes an homage to the most famous director of the last half century.

Now Abrams, is making the seventh film in the Star Wars franchise. All this is to say that maybe we don’t really value originality anymore. Or maybe I should say, instead: Anyone who likes JJ Abrams can never complain that Hollywood doesn’t make enough original movies, because liking JJ Abrams means fundamentally buying into the system that produces sequels and spinoffs and reboots of things you used to love when you were young.

So, fine. JJ Abrams was originally the kind of person who didn’t have mainstream success but was beloved by a few people. He made a TV show called Felicity, about a woman going to college in New York city, and a TV called Alias, about a woman who is secretly a spy. Lots of people love Felicity, although most people agree that it starts strong and then gets worse as it goes along. Lots of people love Alias, although most people agree that it starts strong and then gets worse as it goes along. Abrams co-created Lost, one of the greatest TV shows ever, but he had almost nothing to do with the show after the first season. (God how I love Lost, even the terrible parts, but a lot of people agree that it starts strong and then gets stronger but then ultimately gets worse as it goes etc.)

But Abrams helped to invent Lost — all the great stuff that came after he left could’ve only happened because of him. Coincidentally, lots of people say that the best Star Wars movie is the movie that George Lucas had the least to do with, The Empire Strikes Back. Abrams also co-created Fringe, a show that got much better after he left. He was a key producer behind Cloverfield, a movie that most people loved when it was a trailer and hated when it was an actual movie. Abrams is very good at selling people things they are very excited about — very good at selling things people don’t like, once they’ve actually paid for it.

Have you been to Disneyland yet, Fiona? I hope I’ve taken you there. Every kid should go — just like, maybe, every kid should be raised with a religion they can rebel against someday. Let me tell you, Fiona, there is nothing worse than waiting in line for a ride at Disneyland. Nothing. You are in the happiest place on Earth, and it is impossible to not get bored, to feel miserable. And yet, you wait. You wait because you think that the ride will be worth it: The best thing ever. You pay Disneyland hundreds of dollars to wait 85% of the time. Then you go on the ride. Then you get off. Maybe you like it? Or maybe you have invested so much time in waiting that you convince yourself that you like it?

People have been waiting for this new Star Wars movie for three years, or thirty years: How can they not like it, when they have waited that long?

I am about to see the new Star Wars movie, Fiona. When I started writing this letter, it was weeks away. Now it’s here; today; everywhere. When I started writing this letter, I tried to keep a running tally of all the times Star Wars came up in my life.

I gave up quick. I asked a barista at The Coffee Bean if they controlled the background soundtrack inside the café, and he joked that he wanted to program “The Imperial March” to play when his shift ended. I was in the Chicago O’Hare airport, and I saw a kid pulling a suitcase shaped like Darth Vader’s face. I saw an old college friend for the first time in years; we talked about Force Awakens. (He has a theory about Luke.) Every media organization applied their own unique brand perspective to the task of dry-humping Star Wars for every possible pageview. I started playing the new Star Wars videogame. 30 years old, and I’m still replaying the Battle of Hoth. Star Wars was on my Twitter feed every day: Some new corporate tie-in. Star Wars was on the radio, selling Dodge.

I guess none of this matters, unless you believe that Star Wars used to matter for all the reasons that things get to matter WHEN THEY AREN’T SELLING FUCKING CARS, sorry, sorry.

There is another Star Wars movie coming out next year, Fiona. Three more after that, officially scheduled. Many more, unofficially. It’s possible that, when you are born, there will be a new Star Wars movie twice a year, or more; and TV shows; and comic books; and videogames. It’s possible that you will play with Star Wars toys made from characters they haven’t invented yet.

Do I accept that? Do I teach you all the dumb lessons as a shortcut to the profound ones? Do I give you Ewoks, and hope you someday learn to hate them as much as I do? Do I show you all the Star Wars movies, bad and good, and hope you learn to recognize the difference between originality and shameless nostalgia? Do I give you Star Wars toys, and hope you learn someday that Star Wars toys ruined Star Wars? Do I make you love Star Wars movies, and hope you learn someday that Star Wars directly-indirectly ended a whole era of grown-up movies?

Do I give you Star Wars, and hope that, someday, you learn how to leave Star Wars behind?

We never did, Fiona. Turns out we never even tried.

Love,

Dad