Star Wars and Me

There is no Star Wars and me really. Coming from a large rural family which viewed VCRs as an instrument of the devil, being inside and warm as sinful, and growing up before multi-channel TV, opportunities to see the films were very limited (in other childhood woe, we queued to see ET for hours until my dad got bored and made us go home, so I didn't see that until I was in my 20s). A few of my friends had Star Wars toys but I was always a reader and with six kids in the house, our toys tended to be more generic anyway. I did become a devotee of Star Trek however: being primarily a decades-old TV series it was cheap to air and easier to schedule. I gather that Trek is somehow seen as less cool than Star Wars but that's OK: as well as being enjoyably camp in some ways it introduced me to concepts such as human rights, discussion about intervention, just wars and all sorts of philosophical discussions. Given the time in which it was made and the space afforded by multiple series in episodic form on TV rather than cinema, it was always going to have the political edge over a few films which had to compete for the movie-goers' buck. Perhaps that's why the Trek films were less successful: they tried to recreate the intelligence and depth of the series rather than adapting to the demands of the blockbuster. I tend to see Star Trek as mainstream America painfully wrestling with its imperial conscience in a time of simultaneous paranoia and optimism: you can see these upstanding semi-military types coming to terms with the hippy movement for example, or moving from a pro-Vietnam War (A Private Little War) stance to an anti-War one (The Omega Glory), and its construction of the Federation Utopia is very revealing. Perhaps that's why I've written about Trek and Doctor Who rather than Star Wars.

A Private Little War: Kirk agrees to supply weapons to maintain the balance of power

The Omega Glory: a civilisation ruined by ceaseless pursuit of ideological battles

By contrast, I always saw Star Wars as a product of late-1970s American wounded imperialism. The first film appeared in 1977- not long after the deep wound of losing the Vietnam War and only a year after the Bicentennial Independence celebrations, it seems to this partially-informed commentator that it was an attempt to recreate the feeling that the American people were the freedom-loving rebels rather than the Evil Empire (to nick Reagan's later appropriation of the movies' terminology): apart from Vietnam and the middle East as usual, the US spent the 70s and 80s aiding the torture and murder of thousands in military dictatorships across South America. Like Jaws which came out not long before, the movies tried to imply that decent American values were being threatened by implacable evil, but I imagine that any Vietcong seeing Star Wars would have cheered on the Rebel Alliance. Mind you, perhaps Lucas was quietly critiquing US foreign policy: after all, it was 'a long long time ago' that the Americans were the freedom fighters against the evil British Empire. There is another interpretation available which might chime with our times more easily: Luke as the naive young man from a desert plant looking for any kind of adventure, when along comes a robed gent and a good line in mystical patter about destiny who recruits him to their band of religiously-inspired terrorists…

The first Star Wars movie I saw was The Phantom Menace, having been dragged along from Bangor to Rhyl one very rainy day (one of the worst places on earth) by obsessive fans desperate to see the latest instalment in their beloved series. Despite being adults, some of them appeared to still own various bits of plastic tat that they'd carted around since their toddler years and were transported back to their childhoods by the prospect of seeing an actual new instalment. Perhaps this infantilisation explains why we went to McDonald's on the way to stuff our faces with baby food.

Snobbery aside, it was one of the worst cinematic experiences of my life. Lacking any emotional investment in its universe, I saw a nonsensical plot, objectionable characters and facile attitudes, all rendered on a computer to look no more sophisticated than the PC game I was then playing obsessively, Civilization II. It was so awful that I couldn't even bring myself to tease my heartbroken friends. We emerged from the fleapit cinema into the cold and damp, and just stood there in silence until someone stammered out a few disappointed words. They weren't even angry, just shocked by the lazy, cynical, greedy appropriation of a world they thought belonged to them as much as to George Lucas.

After that, I didn't make any effort to watch the originals, despite everyone telling me they're 'so much better except for the one with the Ewoks'. I've caught large chunks of them while idly flicking through the multi-channel hell, and I think I've watched all of the middle one now, but my main exposure is through catching the Family Guy parodies, which at least give me an insight into the devotion people have for the originals. That doesn't seem to have changed. My boss went to a midnight screening last night, and another friend saw it at 9 a.m. this morning. the phenomenon is fascinating and demonstrates some of the arguments cultural studies and reception studies thinkers have been having for decades. I can imagine Adorno and the Frankfurt School dismissing Star Wars and most Hollywood products as machine-generated propaganda, social and cultural disinformation pumped into the cortexes of passive victims. However, my friends are happy to dismiss the elements of the films they don't like: 'that's just George Lucas, ignore those bits' they say, and no doubt they'll discount the Disney influence in the new ones, demonstrating Barthes's point about the Death of the Author. With a text this widescreen and an audience so huge and intelligent, the author's intentions and concerns are set aside in favour of the individual audience member's interpretations and the emotional personal contexts they bring to the experience. In that sense, it doesn't really matter whether the films are any good in cinematic terms, because they serve a whole range of uses beyond that.

Which is all a complicated way of saying that I should stop being such a snob and wish my Star Wars-loving friends a good weekend in the endless queues.

Intruding on private grief…

My usual two hours of shouting abuse at the radio edition of the Daily Mail (a.k.a the Today programme) reached a peak this morning when the producers decided that Disney's purchase of Lucasfilms and decision to flog a horse so dead that its carcass forms the major ingredient of tinned dog food by promising an endless succession of lazy Star Wars sequels merited more coverage than the Coalition's determination to replace our planet-destroying arsenal of nuclear weapons with even bigger nuclear weapons. You know, the nuclear weapons that kept us out of all wars since 1945. As long as you don't count Northern Ireland. Or Suez. Or the decolonisation wars. Or the Malvinas/Falklands conflict. And the Gulf War. And Gulf War 2. Oh, and Afghanistan. Plus the bombing of Libya.

But that's beside the point. I could understand if the Disney takeover merited a mention in the business news headlines, but there's no way that a faded commodity deserves the attention it's getting. I would propose that Disney is the Empire, except that George Lucas's cynical outfit hardly fits the role of heroic upstarts, unless you think doing violence to people's childhood memories in exchange for billions of dollars is a subversive act.

I should admit from the start however that I have not a scintilla of emotional attachment to Star Wars. Unlike most of my friends, I'd never heard of it until I went to university. I guess school chums must have had the toys but I don't recall any discussion of them. My first proper exposure to Star Wars was accompanying friends to a cinema in Rhyl (quite painful enough) in the depths of a freezing winter to sit in a smell cinema and endure the first of the 'prequel' movies. I was bored beyond tears and found the graphics reminiscent of Civilization II, the computer game which filled my supposed study time. Even without being familiar with the original movies, I could tell that this was jaded hack work and as we emerged from the foetid swamp of late adolescent bodies, my friends had the look of veterans who'd seen their comrades die in the trenches for nothing. Their childhoods had been sullied, their faith in Hollywood destroyed. Mine not so much - my parents virtually never took us to the cinema. We queued for ET until my dad got bored, so I only saw that in chunks if I happened to catch it on TV. Cinema was somewhere I went on other people's birthday treats. Particularly horrific are my memories of Howard the Duck - awful, but notable for the first topless scene I'd ever witnessed, albeit a topless duck - and whatever that Michael Jackson film was called. Moon-something?

I should confess too that I'm a (critical) Star Trek fan, particularly of the original series. It's essentially a liberal (though not reliably so) retelling of the exploration of the American West with a side-salad of Cold War politics: early episodes of the show explicitly supported the Vietnam War, while later ones became anti-imperialist. Until we got to the execrably Next Generation, Liberal Interventionism In Space with a slathering of New Age bullshit in the shape of Ship's Counsellors and all that bullshit. It's not enough to Explore: you've got to Emote. Christ. For me, the original Star Trek used familiar plots to explore current political and social concerns in interesting ways. I'd also like to draw the jury's attention to my enjoyment of Space: 1999, a surprisingly gritty European SF drama, to the camp pleasures of Buck Rogers, and above all to the original Battlestar Galactica, which depending on who you're listening to, is either Wagon Train in space, or Virgil's Aeneid in space, which is both ambitious and impressive. I haven't seen the 'rebooted' Battlestar, but I gather that it has 'boldly gone' into the realms of political commentary - especially about the Iraq war - which is exactly what good science fiction does.

Since that awful day in Rhyl, I've caught most of the major scenes of the original films, though I've not seen a single cel of the other prequels, nor would I ever want to. Star Wars: A New Hope dramatised exactly Walter Benjamin's theory of the reproducibility of art in the mechanical age, and Jean Baudrillard's concept of multiple-order simulation. The 'original' Star Wars re-enacted the American myths of the war of independence as a way to recoup that nation's fantasy that it is the eternal underdog battling for truth, justice and freedom ('the American Way'). The Vietnam War, the Cold War and the Watergate saga, plus the United States' enthusiastic support for every fascist state in South America, Africa and Asia were making a few Americans wonder about whether they'd lost their way after 200 years.  In fact, some of them felt a bit like this:



So Star Wars isn't, for me, a joyful celebration of America's natural rebellion: it's a deeply conservative appropriation of liberal values for the purpose of making an Empire feel better about itself. The real rebels - and perhaps you could read Star Wars in its context like this - are the North Vietnamese.

So Disney's plans to treat Star Wars as yet another commodity to be ground at is both unsurprising and not particularly interesting. In Baudrillardian terms, each film is a more faded photocopy of the original, each one trying more desperately to capture the essence and passion of the original, and each one fated to be less and less artistically successful. No doubt rabid fans will turn up in droves, and the publicists will hail each film as a 'reboot', but the concept has long since moved from the category of art to commodity, if there is indeed any separation between them in a capitalist economy (thinking of you, Damien Hirst). I doubt the new films will even have the political significance of the first Star Wars films.

You Star Wars fans can regain your dignity quite easily. Just refuse to acknowledge the existence of the  new films. Behave as though George Lucas is dead to you. He's a greedy old man who cares only for the green. He is, in fact, Han Solo without the redemption, or even Jabba the Hut. He's encased your culture in carbonite (is this right?) and he's sold the corpse to the Emperor - and he's not sorry.

Cherish your childhood memories and seek out pastures new.

Sooo cute

Everyone's going on about how adorable that Star Wars VW advert is. So here's an even cuter one.

Occasional Sarlacc

One for the Star Wars fans: the weather refracted through the Star Wars universe.

For The Dark Place, we get:

It's like Endor out there. Temperate, but grey and cloudy.

Stick around and you may get your own animated series.

I find your lack of faith disturbing.

I'm not a Star Wars fan.
I haven't seen the one this reproduces.
I still like it a lot. We need more frivolity.



Meanwhile, amaze children:

May the farce be with you

I never really 'got' Star Wars. I've seen most of the original three films, but I've never sat through them from beginning to end. The only one I've seen all the way through was the first of the 'new' prequels because a 'friend' made us go to Rhyl on the opening day. It was one of the worst cinematic experiences I've ever had. A plot to rival Balamory (seriously guys, if you're stealing the basic outline of the fall of the Roman Republic and birth of the Roman Empire, surely you can make it interesting) and graphics reminiscent of Civilization II, which I was playing a lot then.

There are two anecdotes about the films which spring to mind: Spielberg or Lucas telling whoever played Leia that 'there are no breasts in Star Wars' as they bound her tightly, and Harrison telling Lucas that 'you can type this shit George, but we sure as hell can't say it'.

So if you've never seen Star Wars, here's a two-minute synopsis of the originals. In Lego. I'm not sure if they're fans or not.

Hailing Frequencies Open

I guess, as a man with a blog, that my attendance at Star Trek last night was somehow predestined. Despite being a bit rushed, and depending heavily on Oedipal themes (wit elements of The O. C. and 'bromance'), I loved it. There were plenty of in-jokes without excluding new viewers, the plot was suitably familiar but still well done, the action and effects were impeccable. I've long dreamed of a decent space opera on the big screen (some Iain M Banks? M John Harrison?), and this is the closest I've seen for a while.

I also particularly liked Hikaru Sulu, who volunteers for a mission demanding personal combat skills. Once on board, he confesses that his skill is fencing (though his fight showed little grasp of the discipline, partly because a good fencing bout is over in seconds without any blade contact, while a film fight demands clashing, to-and-fro etc.).

However, I received a considerable degree of ridicule, even from fellow nerds, for professing my preference for Star Trek over Star Wars. I certainly wouldn't want to defend Deep Space Nine or The Next Generation and haven't seen Enterprise, but the original series, some of the films and perhaps Voyager and all the themes tackled are so much more grown up and culturally significant than Star Wars.

Partly this is because Star Trek was a TV series, though it didn't last long. It could respond to current affairs that much more quickly than a film series, and it appeared in a tense moment in history. Through the two series of the TV show, you can detect themes of international relations (hence the presence of Sulu, a recent enemy for Americans and Chekhov - a current one), race (Uhura - black space secretary who gets kissed by Kirk) and war. Star Trek dealt with Vietnam while the war was going on - moving on from being reluctantly in favour to eventually strongly against. Sometimes the franchise has been plain wrong, at other times embarrassing - TNG was horribly touchy-feely bollocks, and sometimes interestingly countercultural (capitalists look very old-fashioned in Deep Space Nine), but it's never claimed that anything is simple and clearcut.

Which brings me to Star Wars. Appearing in the late seventies, you'd be forgiven for thinking that plucky rebels fighting a crushing, technologically superior Empire led by a corrupted leader was a parody for Vietnam with the Rebel Alliance being the North Vietnamese and the Empire being the US, lead by disgraced Nixon and the other presidents.

But no: it's an attempt to kick the Vietnam Syndrome by recasting the Americans as leaders of a disparate band of freedom fighters, looking back to the only time this was even vaguely true, the American War of Independence. There's something in the American psyche that clings on to this despite all the evidence piling up that it is an Empire in the mould of (but even more powerful than) the British and Roman versions. Having had their bottoms kicked by the peasants in Vietman, Spielberg appropriates the Vietnamese narrative to help the losing side feel better about itself.

In doing so, the universe is reduced to the moral equivalent of an old-fashioned Western of children's parable. Nobody ponders their actions, nobody possesses shades of grey - they're Good or Bad, give or take the odd deathbed repentance (which itself is desperately hackneyed). Say what you like about Star Trek's hokey liberal idealism, characters face difficult choices, often fail, and have to come to terms with the ramifications of their actions. This film lives up to those ideals (and has genuinely good jokes)

Given the choice between America as Star Wars and America as Star Trek, I say Beam Me Up.