by Gib van Ert
Just when the audience’s patience was stretched to the breaking point, the screen fell dark. Was this it? Blackness—but what would follow? When the Twentieth Century Fox logo appeared, with its famous fanfare, the crowd erupted. Then came the fairy-tale words that literally started it all: A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…and CRASH! goes the orchestra, blasting the Star Wars emblem into our chests like a paramedic with a defibrillator. The audience was delirious. While there remained a small voice inside me saying, You’re too old for this and Wait and see, I ignored it and allowed myself to be swept away. Star Wars was back. The iconic logo sped away into space and yellow text began to crawl up the screen: Episode I: THE PHANTOM MENACE. “Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.”
These two sentences startled me with their dissonance. First was their dissonance with each other—how could a dispute over taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems engulf an entire republic in turmoil? Beyond this was their dissonance with Star Wars itself. Intragalactic trade law was not the stuff of my childhood fantasies. How could an epic story start like this? I found myself doubting The Phantom Menace less than a minute after it had begun. I was not the only one. The audience around me had fallen mostly silent. This was not a rapt silence. It was a silent foreboding.
*
What followed was two hours of crushing disappointment. The Phantom Menace was dreadful. When considered as a single, stand-alone film, it was confusing, gaudy and dull. When considered (as it must be) as a chapter in the Star Wars saga, it was worse, for it did violence to some of the fundamental aspects and themes of the story.
The plot was unintelligible. Sitting in the theatre that May evening I truly struggled to understand what I was being told. Why send Jedis to resolve a trade dispute? Why does a blockade of a single planet amount to a galactic crisis? Why is this Qui-Gon Jinn fellow Obi-Wan’s mentor when in The Empire Strikes Back Obi-Wan told Luke that Yoda trained him? Why is the planet Naboo run by a sixteen-year-old elected queen who speaks like a constipated robot? Why does Jar Jar Binks go to Tatooine? Why is Anakin Skywalker an immaculately conceived slave? Why did Anakin build his mother a protocol droid to help with the housework, and what is the significance of this fact to the story as a whole? Why does the pod race happen? Why did Qui-Gon bet on the race and how did he win? Who is Darth Maul and why is he at odds with Qui-Gon? Why do the Jedi take Anakin away from his mother, abandoning her to a miserable, indentured, childless fate? What are all the parliamentary machinations in the Galactic Senate about? What is the Jedi Council? Why is Yoda so unpleasant with Anakin there? Why were the Naboobs at war with the Gungans and why did they make peace? Why does Qui-Gon hide Anakin in the cockpit of a starfighter, of all places, and how does Anakin manage to operate it? Why do Qui-Gon and Darth Maul die? (From lightsaber wounds, I know, but what purpose do their deaths serve in advancing the story?) Why does the film end when it does? What story has been told from beginning to end?
I left the theatre confounded by these questions. The poor reviews leading up to The Phantom Menace, and the disturbing innovations of the “special editions” two years before, had prepared me for the possibility of not liking the film. But I never expected not to understand it. Whether you enjoyed the original three Star Wars films or not, you could hardly complain they were too complicated. But this new film simply made no sense to me. I had other complaints, of course. The characters were wooden. The humour was puerile. The special effects seemed more important to the filmmaker than the story. The whole film seemed to take its audience for granted, as if we were bound to approve of it simply because it was Star Wars. I found myself involuntarily developing these criticisms in my mind in the days and weeks that followed. But in the immediate aftermath of my first viewing, as Pat and I made our way dejectedly past the long queue of Star-Wars-mad fans waiting to be admitted to opening night’s late showing, my principal reaction to the film was confusion.
The following night I found myself back at the cinema, this time with Andy. He knew I had seen the film the night before and asked me what I thought. I looked for a way not to answer. I hoped that maybe I had missed something, maybe The Phantom Menace was better than I had appreciated, and maybe Andy could show me its merits if only I did not poison his mind with my own prejudice before he saw it for himself. I said only that the film was not what I expected. Andy saw right through these carefully chosen words. Disappointment flashed across his face.
My second viewing of the film in two nights did nothing to lessen my confusion about its plot. Beyond this, I grew angry with George Lucas over parts of The Phantom Menace which contradicted aspects, whether express or implied, of the original films. By far the most disappointing break The Phantom Menace made with the original trilogy was its elucidation of the Force. The earlier films wisely avoided explaining this mystical phenomenon in any but the broadest of terms. Viewers were left to define, or leave undefined, the mystery of the Force for themselves. In a baffling about-face, The Phantom Menace supplanted mystery with quasi-science, explaining the Force as a by-product of the presence of microscopic lifeforms—the so-called midi-chlorians—said to live symbiotically within the cells of other living creatures. The more midi-chlorians inhabit you, the more Force-y you will be. While, in the original trilogy, command of the Force could seemingly be attained by anyone who devoted himself to it, in The Phantom Menace Anakin’s degree of Force sensitivity was determined by a blood test.
The consequences of this innovation for the moral framework of the Star Wars story were, to my mind, ruinous. If, in the original trilogy, the Jedi were an extinct elite, they were nevertheless a meritocratic one, earning their former status through a combination of innate ability and dedication to their discipline. Even a farm boy from the galaxy’s outskirts could make himself into a Jedi. Though the extinction of the Jedi had left almost no-one in the universe practising the Force, in principle it remained available to all. This changed with the introduction of midi-chlorians. In The Phantom Menace, the Jedi passed from paragons of virtue to freaks of nature. Like a player’s avatar in some simplistic video game, one Jedi would be superior to another based on how many midi-chlorian points she had. The analogy to the Christian concepts of salvation and predestination is imperfect but hard to ignore: in the original films, salvation was available to all; in The Phantom Menace it was the preserve of an elect few. The effect of this shift in dogma was, in my mind, to dehumanize the Jedi almost entirely. What made Yoda a master was no longer his wisdom, his patience, his determination, or any other virtuous quality of his (as The Empire Strikes Back had led me to believe) but merely an excessive presence of microscopic parasites inhabiting his little green body. Seen through the prism of midi-chlorians, Obi-Wan’s description of Jedi knights in Star Wars as “the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic” now seemed rather sinister. I could not help but wonder whether this race of supermen had appointed themselves to their vaunted role.
This second viewing of The Phantom Menace proved a turning-point for me. My first viewing left me confused, doubtful and perhaps even in faint denial of what had happened. I looked for some way out of the reality of the situation, namely that George Lucas had made a Star Wars film I did not like. Leaving the theatre with Andy on that second night, however, I experienced a glimmer of clarity. Star Wars was over for me. It might live on for others—in particular the children Lucas now seemed to be exclusively aiming for—but for me it was passing back into memory. This was nearly the same feeling I had had in the summer of 1991 as I packed away my boxes of toys and memorabilia and prepared for university: fondness for a treasured childhood story now retired to my past. There was one difference now, namely that the new Star Wars had sullied my pristine old Star Wars in a way that I could not forget. Frustration and disappointment over what might have been now tinged my happy recollections. Retiring to a quiet pub after the film, Andy and I indulged our disgruntlement
over The Phantom Menace for several pints. It felt good, curative even. But I had no desire to replace my childhood Star Wars infatuation with an adulthood Star Wars enmity. Brooding would do no good. I had said goodbye to Star Wars years ago. The opportunity of welcoming it back like an old friend had gone horribly wrong, but I had to let it go. I had to say goodbye to Star Wars again.
*
Mentally, that is precisely what I did. Yet circumstances compelled me to see The Phantom Menace two more times. My third viewing occurred when I went home for a brief visit to my mother. She had not seen the film and asked me to go with her. I could not recall my mother ever refusing to take me to see Star Wars, so I could hardly fail to return the favour. I spent the better part of the film’s running time thinking to myself, I can’t believe I’m seeing this again. A month or two afterwards, the girl I was dating asked me to take her. I really did not want to go that time, but she was tall and blonde and born in 1980—after Star Wars, nearly after Empire!—so I agreed. It was a matinee, we were nearly the only people in the theatre, and I fell asleep about two-thirds in. (She thought it was alright. I considered explaining why it was not, but decided against it.)
Lucas made two more prequels, Attack of the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005). I know I saw them. But in telling contrast to Star Wars, Empire, Jedi and even The Phantom Menace, I have no specific recollection of going to see either of them. I must have seen them both in Vancouver, for I moved there in the summer of 2001 and, apart from a year-long stint in Ottawa in 2003, have lived and worked there ever since. When Clones came out I saw it without enthusiasm and thought it was awful, but beyond that all is blank. My impression of Revenge of the Sith was that it was marginally better than the other two prequels, but that is the faintest of praise. (I was—and remain—particularly baffled by the film’s howling continuity error: in Return of the Jedi, Leia tells Luke that she remembers her mother being “very beautiful” and “kind but sad”, while at the end of Revenge of the Sith Leia’s mother dies in childbirth. This from the same man who re-edited the 2004 DVD release of The Empire Strikes Back to dub in a New Zealand accent for Boba Fett.)
Despite this and other grumbles I had about the later two prequels, they faded from my mind almost as soon as they entered it. After the disappointment of The Phantom Menace I had made an uneasy peace with the new Star Wars. My expectations for the rest of the prequels were subterranean, such that the disappointment they engendered was relatively mild.
Allowing for these two passing exceptions, and also for the six Marvel Star Wars comics I framed in glass and hung on the wall of my bachelor pad some time around 2002, the first decade of my twenty-first century was mostly Star-Wars-free. I turned thirty, then thirty-five. I worked, fell in love, married, bought a condo, welcomed our first child, sold the condo and bought a house, welcomed our second child, and generally got on with a typical grown-up life.
*
Star Wars marched on without me. Despite the low opinion that I and thousands (millions?) of other thirtysomething men and women had of the prequels, they succeeded in relaunching the Star Wars brand. A new generation of children was invited to join the ranks of Star Wars fanatics, and a large number seem to have accepted. My sense is that this second wave of Star Wars mania was on a smaller scale than what I had known, but I am speculating—the comparative depth of the two phenomena is hard to measure, and in any case I was not paying attention.
Increasingly, however, one did not need to pay attention. With the arrival of the prequels, followed by the Clone Wars animated film and television series (neither of which I have ever seen), the early twenty-first century reincarnation of Star Wars saturated our popular culture again. Much of this is due, of course, to Lucasfilm’s boundless (some would say shameless) devotion to the commercialization of its products. These efforts now went beyond the merchandising and tie-ins with which I was on intimate terms throughout my childhood. In the prequel and post-prequel era, Lucasfilm has become far more willing than previously to hire out Star Wars characters as spokesmen (and spokessith and spokesdroids) for other people’s products.
Thus in 2010 Darth Vader starred in a Japanese ad campaign for Samsung cellular telephones. Vader’s likeness was employed again in early 2011 by Volkswagen to promote its new sedan. Although audience enthusiasm for the dark lord is not restricted to vanquished Axis powers, one might have expected businesses from these particular countries to hesitate somewhat before associating themselves with the most infamous villain in the history of film. Turning to the light side of the Force, Yoda has recently featured in a Japanese commercial for instant soup. He uses his midi-chlorian magic to levitate a giant kettle of boiling water over his own head, then blesses his target market with the words, “May the Force be with Japan”. Yoda is also the star, or rather the goat, of a recent UK mobile phone advert in which he accosts a couple in a sushi joint about how to transfer contacts from an old phone to a new one. The attractive young woman looks on incredulously, nearly rolling her eyes at the Jedi master, while the goofy-looking man politely tells him to fuck off. These are only a few examples of George Lucas’s distressing willingness, in recent years, to rent out his intellectual properties—who happen to have also been my boyhood icons—to the highest bidder.
Of course if there were no demand for Vaderwagens and Yodafones none of this would happen. The descent of Star Wars from modern legend to marketing dreck is a two-way street, and it is not the five-year olds who mistake the prequels for decent films that advertisers are trying to reach by working Yoda into their mobile phone campaigns. My generation participates in the devaluation of Star Wars through its tolerance, and even encouragement, of this sort of solicitation. My instinctive reaction is to resent this trivialization of Star Wars and its original audience’s complicity in it. I must admit, however, that the strength of my response betrays the attachment I still feel to the first three films. Despite all my protestations of having grown out of Star Wars and moved on, I am not indifferent to what has become of my childhood fantasy. I don’t like seeing Star Wars this way.
The obvious solution is not to look. I have already noted that ignoring Star Wars is not as easy as it might seem, given the near-constant din of advertising and promotion it generates. But there is a greater problem: children. Were I childless, the unravelling of Star Wars at its author’s hands would still annoy me, even pain me. But I could disregard it much more easily. The sole reason why Star Wars has made yet another sally into my consciousness in recent years is the births of my daughter Beatrice in 2008 and my son Zachary in 2010. Zachary’s arrival was more consequential, from a Star Wars perspective, than Beatrice’s, for I, and much of the rest of the world, still consider Star Wars to be chiefly a boy’s interest. I acknowledge that this is demonstrably wrong in specific cases, and I certainly have no objection to girls (or women) taking an interest in Star Wars. I very much hope Beatrice does like Star Wars—by which I mean the real, old, good Star Wars of my own childhood and not the broken-down, misconceived Star Wars of the moment. Before Zachary’s birth, I had given some thought to how I might hide the truth about Darth Vader’s relationship with Luke Skywalker from Beatrice until she was old enough for me to show her The Empire Strikes Back. I would hate for her to have that film’s climax ruined by loose talk on the playground. But no one ever gave my wife and me any hand-me-down, Star Wars-emblazoned toddler clothing for Beatrice to wear, and it never occurred to either of us to decorate her room using my framed Marvel Star Wars comics. Both these things did happen once we learned that our second child would be a boy. As Star Wars made its continued presence felt through my son, I found myself thinking about it more deeply than I ever had. The question was no longer simply, How do I avoid the biggest spoiler in the history of film? I now began to consider the sort of childhood I wanted Zachary to have, and to what extent mine was a good model for it. Of course Zach might turn out a rabid Star Wars fan whatever I do. But should I encourage his interest in it at all? The or
iginal films were a source of excitement and pleasure for me for years, and the thought of sharing them with my children delights me. But Star Wars was not just a film, or even just three films, to me. It was an obsession. I do not say it was a particularly negative obsession. But is obsession ever healthy in a child, whatever it may consist in? Would I not prefer my children to have a wide variety of interests, without single-mindedness about any of them? And if my children are fated to adopt some childhood obsession—and their current infatuation with Dora the Explorer and Go Diego Go! suggests they may be—should it not be an interest they came to themselves, rather than something their father administered to them like Children’s Tylenol?
None of these reservations has prevented Zachary’s bedroom décor from taking on a distinctly Star Wars theme, but this was not entirely by design—or at least not by my design. It was my wife’s idea to dust off my framed Marvel Star Wars comics for hanging in the baby’s room (once we knew we were expecting a boy). Then, shortly after Zachary’s first birthday, my wife suggested I select a few Kenner action figures from my collection for display on a shelf she had cleared for this purpose. I began dreaming up an elaborate diorama of Vader’s duel with Obi-Wan, complete with a TIE Fighter in the hangar bay and Luke watching helplessly from afar. Mercifully, my wife shot that idea down. “This is meant to be cool not nerdy”, she explained. I opted instead for a simple line-up of ten of the original twelve figures. My wife then combined these with three small, funky robot paintings she had picked up in a local shop. The effect was quite nice, although at this point I was well into work on this book and had begun to have reservations about how much Star Wars to cram down my children’s throats. But it was only one corner of his room, I told myself. Two months later, on Christmas morning, I helped Zachary open an enormous present. It was a Wampa floor rug from my sister-in-law. I had come across it online while researching this book and pointed it out to my wife only because it was funny. Unbeknownst to me, she decided she liked it and asked her sister to get it for Zachary for Christmas. So now we put our son to bed each night in a Star Wars shrine. The poor bastard doesn’t stand a chance.