Luke Skywalker Can't Read

by Ryan Britt

  More interestingly, the fact that comic books do have a composite narrative means they’re more accessible to a larger group of people than any other type of narrative fiction, ever. Most people don’t think Batman = Bob Kane or Batman = Christopher Nolan. Most people think Batman = ME. The public thinks it owns Batman, which is how mythology works. Who is the author of the Greek myths? It’s not exactly Homer. Because we are the ones who have kept the myths alive over centuries by retelling the stories in a myriad of different forms.

  So what else might bother someone about the reboot phenomenon, other than misplaced dislike of millennials or superhero bigotry? Probably money. If you hate superhero movies because you see them as cynical money grabs from the studio, I can understand where you’re coming from, but would implore you to think about that critique a little bit harder. Just because something is a moneymaker does not automatically make it “trash,” and just because something is “trash” doesn’t mean it’s not culturally relevant. The very first issue of Captain America was sold in 1940 and featured Cap punching out Hitler.* This was a political statement because it was a full year before the United States entered World War II. It was also a great idea for a moneymaking comic book, too.

  The current superhero boom is the future of human storytelling unfolding in front of us, but because we’re at the beginning of something new, it’s hard to see the overall anthropological impact. I can’t convince you of the long mythological tradition of superheroes as effectively as Grant Morrison can in his book SuperGods or the way Margaret Atwood opines in her book In Other Worlds, but I am urging you to try and think about the reactions you might have to superhero movies with a little more gentleness and with eyes toward the future rather than the present or past. Have you ever read the reviews of A Christmas Carol? A few were similar to articles I’ve read about The Avengers. What about Moby-Dick? It was about as well liked as Spider-Man 2. We’re not going backward, nor are we out of ideas. For a culture that tells stories, superheroes don’t represent stagnation, nor anything to get alarmed about. Instead, like the superpowered people themselves, we’re entering a new evolutionary stage of narrative development. And we’re doing it in a way we’ve always done: by telling our favorite stories over and over and over again.

  The Fans Awaken

  Everyone tells you that the best way to be nice to yourself and have a fulfilling life is to never have regrets, or if you do, to never focus on them. This advice is fine, but it also exclusively applies to you thinking about yourself when you are by yourself. A regret is a thing you think might have been a mistake, but a mistake is a thing that other people know is a mistake. If we group both regrets and mistakes into the same phylum—let’s call that phylum “hypothetical trigger moments leading to more preferable alternate universes”—then we can begin to understand why it must be so hard to live each day if you are George Lucas. Even if he doesn’t think he has any regrets, there’s a whole world of people who are more than willing to point out his mistakes. So, The Force Awakens is practically here. What kind of Star Wars fans are we going to be?

  In 2006, during the early days of online personality quizzes like “Which Sex and the City Character Are You?” (Samantha) or “Which Spice Girls Song Is About Your Life?” (“Wannabe”), I took another quiz over and over again, hoping to get a different result. The quiz was “What Kind of Star Wars Fan Are You?” and the answer I got was “You’re a Hater!” Not only could I not post that result to my Myspace.com account with any kind of arch glee; I was also depressed by what I perceived to be an online-quiz mistrial. How could I be a hater? I loved Star Wars! Just because I knew better than George Lucas which way Star Wars should have gone didn’t make me a hater. But it was true enough, precisely because I certainly complained about Star Wars more than I praised it. Not only was being a Star Wars/George Lucas “hater” something I often did; it was also, apparently, a real thing. And because it was something someone had thought to put as a result in a Myspace quiz, it meant being accused of being a hater was worse than just a surprise. It was common.

  Super fans are all more than willing to tell George Lucas—or any other creator of sci-fi, fantasy, or comic books—that something is rotten in Denmark (or Tatooine) and that we the people won’t stand for it. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had a contentious relationship with his readers, while William Shatner has practically made a second career out of apologizing to Star Trek fans for how much he used to mock them. The playground peacekeeping philosophy most people’s moms would recommend here is “live and let live.” If we don’t like Steven Moffat’s writing on Doctor Who or Sherlock, maybe we should just throw our hands up and say, “Hey, I can’t write a TV show. What do I know?” If George R. R. Martin is taking too long with the next book in A Song of Ice and Fire, maybe we should stop complaining and try to write our own epic fantasy novels series. And if George Lucas wants to try and ruin Star Wars over and over again, then maybe we should just be more understanding, because, after all, we didn’t make Star Wars. Wasn’t it his to ruin in the first place?

  As it turns out, no.

  These days, it looks like what the fans have long suspected has been proven true: Star Wars is ours. We don’t need to live and let live with George Lucas, because, in this ever-changing galaxy, it’s time to say live and let die. As of 2012, when he sold Star Wars to Disney, George Lucas was longer in charge of Star Wars! Now an entirely new group of people—specifically led by J. J. Abrams*—is poised to either save Star Wars from ruin or, more unlikely, ruin it further. As I write this, the zeitgeist is holding its breath as Star Wars readies itself to make a comeback with the release of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.

  Of course, in order to make a comeback, it means you need to have sucked for a while. This happens all the time with bands and musicians, except that the cultural impact of a good U2 album versus a bad U2 album is nothing compared to the mammoth relevance of Star Wars. If we looked at the most important pop events—TV, movies, music—of the twentieth century, Star Wars is certainly in the top ten. If we only talk about pop events after 1945, Star Wars is easily in the top four; I can’t think of anything bigger than Star Wars beyond Michael Jackson, the Beatles, and Oprah Winfrey. I’m not saying Star Wars is better than every other pop event of the previous century; it’s just that it’s undeniably gargantuan in how much it means to people. If a bad U2 album is a meteor, then Songs of Innocence is the kind that burns up in the atmosphere. If a bad Star Wars movie is like a meteor, then The Phantom Menace is the kind that killed the dinosaurs. But how did Star Wars get ruined and who really did the ruining? Is George Lucas the only person with regrets?

  Everything could have always almost been something else. This is true of life in a Sliding Doors kind of way, and obviously true of everything having to do with pop culture,* specifically these geeky interests that permeate everyone’s dreams and nightmares so constantly. There’s an earworm of a song by the forgettable and truly terrible band Everclear,* in which one of the lines is “like a Star Wars poster on my bedroom door.” Obviously, we know for a fact that Star Wars, and Star Wars posters, did actually indirectly create the band Everclear, because there’s no alternate dimension without Star Wars that also includes Everclear. But there are all kinds of terrible crap that more directly exist because of Star Wars,* so don’t blame it too harshly. The alternate universe blame game is both more fun and sadder than that, because even if Everclear can’t exist without Star Wars, what’s more telling about that line is that the band doesn’t only sing the words “Star Wars” but rather “a Star Wars poster.” The fandom of the thing is imbedded in everyday jargon in a way that is more important, or more revealing, than the thing itself.

  Because I came of age in the ’90s, let’s take another popular song from that era, this time a good one. In the epic rap hit “Hypnotize,” Biggie Smalls informs us of all kinds of stuff that he’s up to while a chorus of other people let us know what he is capable of, specifi
cally his ability to sometimes “hypnotize” them just with his words. One line from Biggie goes like this: “Hit ’em with the Force like Obi,” which, no matter how you slice it, is a reference to Obi-Wan Kenobi. If it was just either “the Force” or “Obi” without the other word, it would be something we might be able to dismiss. But infinitely more clever than those Everclear jokers, Biggie actually insinuates the Star Wars lineage of his lyric in another way: Obi-Wan Kenobi has the ability to “hypnotize” certain people with his “words,” meaning the Notorious B.I.G. is obviously some kind of Jedi Knight.

  Imagining a universe without Star Wars but one that does include Biggie Smalls is possible, but it’s also no fun. What is fun is the fact that just a small dip into totally innocuous pop art—forgettable and iconic alike—reveals a pervasive Star Wars fandom that is more omnipresent than any other collection of popular fiction I can think of. I mean, to my knowledge, there aren’t any references to Citizen Kane or Shakespeare in any other Biggie tracks, right?

  But let’s head back to that Star Wars poster on the bedroom door. Every couple of months a geek blog (occasionally one I write for) will “discover” a cache of old Star Wars photos or concept art or unused promotional art, throw all of the art or photos onto the blog, and breathlessly declare what might have been. With the original Star Wars, there’s a ton of material that predates the release of the movie partially because Lucas hired an absolutely brilliant PR guy named Charles Lippincott, who saw the potential to get the existing science fiction and fantasy fandom excited about Star Wars in 1976, a year prior to its release. He pushed for a Star Wars presentation at Worldcon that year, as well as at San Diego Comic Con. Ralph McQuarrie’s original concept art was on display, as were costumes, and Mark Hamill was there, too! If there are any time-traveling Star Wars fans from the future hanging out at the ’76 Comic Con, they’re either taking a shitload of selfies with Hamill, or poised to make a fortune off of retro merchandise. In any case, if you don’t think having a convention presence helped solidify Star Wars’ box office success, ask yourself where all those people came from on opening day in 1977. Like all good hype machines, Star Wars was popular before anyone knew what they were so in love with.

  Some of this “original” Lippincott-encouraged press material contains references to Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.* One unused poster in particular says “First Buck Rogers, then Flash Gordon, now Luke Skywalker,” evoking science fiction heroes of yore in order to get existing sci-fi fans on board with this newfangled Star Wars product. Here’s the thing, though: that poster was almost a different poster altogether, one that didn’t say “Luke Skywalker” at all, but instead, only “Flash Gordon.” Before writing Star Wars itself, George Lucas literally wanted to remake Flash Gordon, but was unable to secure the legal rights, so it would seem he began work on something else, sometime around 1973. That thing had a lot of different names, but most sources seem to indicate it was called The Journal of the Whills and featured a guy named Mace Windy.* Countless permutations of this original outline and/or story treatment exist, but suffice it to say, it eventually became known as something called The Star Wars and featured a guy named Annakin Starkiller.* For many of you, this might all sound familiar. We know Annakin becomes “Anakin,” Starkiller obviously evolves to “Skywalker,” and in a pre–Mark Zuckerberg move, “The Star Wars” dropped its article to become “Star Wars.” At this point, let’s pause and pretend that we’re mad about all of these changes, because we are faux purists who only believe in the original version of something before it got “ruined.”

  Here’s a recap of the history of Star Wars from 1973-ish to 1976-ish with my ruining goggles in place:

  First, Lucas wants to remake (ruin) Flash Gordon, but he can’t get the rights so he decides to write his own thing, which he proceeds to ruin even as he’s inventing it. He titles this The Journal of the Whills, but changes (ruins) it to be something more commercial: The Star Wars. He drops the “the” from the title (ruining it) and then decides he wants to incorporate elements of classic Kurosawa films, which will surely ruin them by homage. Lucas originally wants to have the Death Star show up in a later movie, but decides to change (ruin) it and moves it into the first movie. Han Solo is supposed to be a green-skinned alien, but Lucas changes (ruins) that because it’s going to be too expensive, which of course is totally pathetic. Deke (or Annakin) Starkiller is obviously a way better name than Skywalker, so Lucas decides to ruin Luke and Annakin the moment he invents both of them.

  Wow, don’t you wish you’d seen The Journal of the Whills—or better yet, George Lucas’s Flash Gordon—before Lucas went and ruined everything?

  Of course you don’t.

  However, most of us are correctly angry that Lucas screwed with the classic trilogy when he released the “Special Editions” in 1997 and 1998. In the interests of letting the good work countless others have done in enumerating all the changes performed on these films speak for itself, I’ll just describe the special editions of the movies with three words: random laser bolts. I mean this both metaphorically and literally, but more literally.* Though to Lucas, the random laser bolt fired by Greedo in the special edition of A New Hope isn’t random at all. Instead, it’s an edit. Throughout the history of his Star Wars from The Journal of the Whills to Revenge of the Sith, George Lucas has constantly altered the information by making shit up on the fly. If you dig into research on how all three original films were written, directed, and edited in postproduction,* you’ll start to suspect the finality of these stories was a little half-baked throughout the entire process. If you watch just one interview with Lucas where he discusses the making of any of the three prequels, you’ll be sure of it.

  The Star Wars prequel trilogy—The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith—offends purist fans of the original trilogy for the exact same reason the special editions do. And that’s because both smack of revisionism after the fact. In the original release of Star Wars, we think Han murders Greedo in cold blood, but in the special edition, Greedo “shoots first.” The meaning of the scene was changed and so we all got super-pissed. But the prequels are the same. We thought the Force worked a certain way in the old movies, but then Liam Neeson tells us something different about little critters living in our bloodstream who talk to the Force in The Phantom Menace. Leia says she remembers her mother in Return of the Jedi, but then, in Revenge of the Sith, Natalie Portman dies before she can even coo at the just-born Leia baby. Lucas revised the origin story of Leia, but still left the original scene in the special edition of Return of the Jedi.* If Episodes 1–6 of Star Wars were not a series of films but, instead, a single novel, that one scene with Leia—among many other maddening problems—would be a serious continuity error. Still, in his (kind of) defense, if Lucas had made Revenge of the Sith before he’d released the special edition of Return of the Jedi you can bet he would have messed with the part where Leia talks to Luke about her mother. Hell, there may have even been a digitally inserted thought bubble above Carrie Fisher’s head featuring Natalie Portman crying or, even worse, brushing her hair while talking dirty to Anakin. But there isn’t and he didn’t because George Lucas’s revision process of the entire Star Wars saga is beyond postmodern. If we extend the idea of Episodes 1–6 as composing a single novel, it would be a novel that was constantly being revised by a time-traveling author who hadn’t bothered to reread the parts of the manuscript that he was changing. If we think of Lucas as a time-traveling novelist working on a sentence level, and Episodes 1–6 were each a sentence, then the episodes would be sentences that only sort of go together. In at least one documentary about the prequels, Lucas described aspects of Star Wars as “poetry,” which abstractly might be more accurate, but somehow also insulting to real poets. All of this can make you angry, but it also does prove George Lucas is a mad genius.

  Still, if you think this hop-skip-and-a-jump story-revision bullshit began with the special editions and co
ntinued through the prequels, you’re about as wrong as Luke was when he fantasized about having sex with his sister. We tend to forgive Lucas for revisions that take place after the fact, provided of course that those changes work. No one complains about the improved, cool-looking X-Wing dogfights in the special edition of A New Hope for the same reason nobody complains about Darth Vader being Luke Skywalker’s father or Leia turning out to be Luke’s sister. All that stuff works. Which doesn’t change the fact that both Darth Vader being Luke’s dad and Leia being Luke’s sister were elements of the story that were worked out during Lucas’s revision process, which, as we now understand, is a revision process that doesn’t operate under the normal rules of linear time.

  In the late ’70s, the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back was initially commissioned as a work-for-hire to be written by the excellent fantasy novelist Leigh Brackett. Though it looks like she and Lucas collaborated a substantial amount on this, there are a lot of elements of Brackett’s screenplay that obviously didn’t make it into the final movie, most notably a scene in which the ghost of Luke Skywalker’s father is not a bad guy, but just another ghost who talks to Luke. Yoda is called “Minch”; Lando might have been a clone left over from the Clone Wars; a secret crystal hidden in Luke’s lightsaber gives him a secret message; and so forth. When Leigh Brackett sadly passed away, George Lucas and his Raiders of the Lost Ark screenwriting buddy Lawrence Kasdan took over finishing the script for Empire. For those of us who are really serious about this stuff, this is the real moment when George Lucas starts to truly care about Star Wars in a way that actually creates the larger mythology. Here, he invents his wackado revision process: “Sure, Darth Vader is Luke’s father, always has been.” And what’s totally brilliant about this is that, broadly speaking, his retroactive continuity worked so well that it redefined a global phenomenon that was already a global phenomenon!