Luke Skywalker Can't Read

by Ryan Britt

  The Empire Strikes Back is an aberration in film history that should almost never have happened. No matter what anyone tells you (including me), all movie sequels are just ways of getting more money out of the same thing. Even direct-to-video sequels to Starship Troopers weren’t made out of a love for the characters or the franchise. So, when sequels are actually good it’s a total miracle. I say “miracle” specifically, because it almost never happens.

  Lucas can’t take all the credit for The Empire Strikes Back being as good as (or, probably, better than) the original Star Wars. Director Irvin Kershner famously altered a lot of stuff as the cameras were rolling. When Han Solo is getting ready to be frozen in the carbonite chamber, Leia can’t take it anymore and says, “I love you!” to which Han Solo jerkishly quips, “I know.” Instantly more classic than Gone with the Wind’s “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” this line was originally written by Lucas (or Kasdan or, doubtfully, Brackett) as “I love you, too.” In collaboration with Harrison Ford, Kershner changed the line on set and turned this unimaginative dialogue into a living, breathing explosion of unforgettable romance. Like many hard-core Star Wars fans who are also George Lucas haters, I used to constantly point out that Kershner (and maybe Kasdan and maybe Brackett and maybe producer Gary Kurtz) was the true genius of The Empire Strikes Back, and George Lucas was just sort of a useless man-behind-the-curtain. A non-wizard of Oz. But I was wrong.

  From a certain point of view, Irvin Kershner is actually just an accomplice to George Lucas’s make-it-up-as-you-go-along revision process. If anything, the total success of The Empire Strikes Back, thanks to Kershner’s directorial skill,* proved to Lucas that he (and his cohorts) could get away with anything. They were just like the Rebels! Don’t have a plan for how these movies are going to turn out? Don’t worry! We’ll just make it up as we go along! This kind of admirable nonsense is why The Empire Strikes Back is a miracle and not a masterpiece. Or to put it another way: it was a miracle the year it came out, but it’s a masterpiece now. And ultimately, there’s something totally rock and roll about George Lucas’s borderline dismissal of convention in making the original Star Wars trilogy. Here was someone so disinterested in this wonderful thing he’d created that he actually tried to farm out the screenplay to someone else. Like Conan Doyle before him, George Lucas, at least in the early days, clearly felt like he was above the “kids movie” he’d made, and so, he treated the process by which he made the films immaturely. This isn’t a dig. This is why he’s awesome.

  Still, we’re dealing with a process that seems like it shouldn’t have worked. And when you get to Return of the Jedi, the sad truth is, it didn’t. As a child my favorite movie (period) was Return of the Jedi. There are a lot of dumb little-kid reasons for this (the Ewoks are cute; Admiral Ackbar is a talking fish person), but I think the overwhelming real reason is that Luke Skywalker resolves all of his family’s problems and that everyone lives happily ever after. If A New Hope was a homage to an old adventure serial like Flash Gordon, and The Empire Strikes Back was a bizarre, dark hybrid of contemporary filmmaking and Shakespearean tragedy, then Return of the Jedi is a good old-fashioned fairy tale. Luke Skywalker rides into town, rescues his best friend, gets his dad to kick his bad habits, and everyone sits around the campfire and tells stories about it. Throw in some speeder-bikes and a ton of awesome monsters and you’ve got a movie that feels more like a family film than any of the other Star Wars movies, especially the prequels. When you grow up, though, you begin to detest this movie because it feels like it took one look at all the dark and twisted themes of The Empire Strikes Back and said, “Never mind.”

  For one thing, Luke Skywalker’s character seems to have developed in between Empire and Jedi. When we leave Luke in the final moments of Empire, he’s practically just recovered from crying and almost (maybe?) attempting suicide.* From his first moments in Jedi, however, he’s a total badass, a man who takes no shit and gives zero fucks as to what anyone thinks of him. How did he become this way? In addition to advice, did Yoda also give Luke some Prozac or lithium or Ritalin? Has all of that stuff just finally kicked in by the time of Return of the Jedi? We’re meant to think of Return of the Jedi as Luke’s journey toward becoming a grown-up, but the fact is, he’s pretty much this person at the beginning of the movie: calm, confident, and willing to face up to consequences. True, we see Luke being “tempted” by the Dark Side of the Force when the Emperor is making fun of him for fighting with Vader. But as many have argued, the audience never really believes there’s much for Luke to gain by turning to the Dark Side, meaning it’s a non-choice and doesn’t play that well dramatically.* Perhaps we are a little worried Luke might die, but his soul has already been saved, so as nice as it is to see him happy, it’s a little boring.

  Similarly, in Return of the Jedi after Han Solo is rescued from the vile clutches of Jabba the Hutt, there’s not much tension for that character either. No longer as roguish or as funny,* Han Solo is given the rank of general and spends most of the movie playing second fiddle to Luke. In Empire, Luke, Han, and Leia felt more like an ensemble, as they did in the first film, only more so. But in Jedi, Leia and Han are mostly just there to support Luke and the basic “plot.” Harrison Ford has said repeatedly in interviews that he wanted Han to get killed in Jedi to bring the character’s arc to a more tragic conclusion. There are also indications from Kasdan that it would be a good idea for Lando to get killed by the Sarlacc toward the start of the movie to let people know that particular monster was “for real.” True or not, this seems to all have been shot down by Lucas in an effort to demonstrate that the good guys were all going to win and that, just this once, everybody lives. In a sense, even people who die get to live. At the end of the film, the last thing we see are the ghosts of Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Anakin, meaning that the only people who really died in the movie were either minor characters (those poor Rebel pilots) or bad guys.

  Leia, sadly, has the least amount of character development other than discovering she’s Luke’s sister, which makes her ability to pick Han as her boyfriend a little easier. If this was truly the end of a three-part story about these three people, you’d think Leia and Han would have been able to do more soul-searching, the way they did in Empire. This is doubly strange because even though we learn Leia is Luke’s sister (and therefore a member of the Skywalkers) she doesn’t use the Force or do anything coolly reminiscent of having Jedi powers. I attempted a full rewrite of Return of the Jedi many times when I was in my early twenties, but for me it comes down to one thing that could have easily been changed. When Han, Chewie, and Leia are all on Endor captured by the Empire, they are saved, we discover, because the Ewoks rise up and throw some rocks on the Stormtroopers. Why did the writing go in this direction when the story has Leia sitting right there?

  Imagine this instead: the Empire has everybody cornered, Han is out of ideas, Chewie is shitting his non-pants, and C-3PO, for once, is speechless. The Ewoks are obviously no match for the Empire, and as their little furry bodies are burned, Leia kneels down to surrender to the commander of the Imperial troops. But then, as she rises, she also brings her hand up, Vader-style, and Force-chokes the lead bad guy. Then, in a display of godlike power, Leia uses the Force to throw around a few Stormtroopers in midair. Han’s blaster levitates back into his hand and he starts blowing away the bad guys.

  “I never knew you had that in you, sweetheart,” Han says.

  “You know,” Leia says, panting, exhausted but resolved to win, “neither did I.”

  There’s never a real on-screen payoff dealing with Leia being Luke’s sister and in the slapdash way these movies were obviously written, it seems like a massive oversight. Plus, it would have been so cool to have given Return of the Jedi’s title added meaning by demonstrating the dominance of Luke, the redemption of Vader, and then, ultimately, the rise of Leia. It was all right there waiting to happen. Instead, the lasting impression of Princess Leia in Retu
rn of the Jedi was of her in a bikini outfit from the beginning of the movie. Even Barbarella had more agency. And she was naked in her first scene.

  Up until the sale of Star Wars to Disney in 2012, I think, in Lucas’s mind he was still revising The Star Wars, even after everything had been released. Despite everything that I’ve argued for in this essay, and throughout this book, Star Wars is “just” a movie, meaning we can’t get as angry with it as we do with real people. Or, to put it another way, if we do happen to get that angry, we should at the very least think about why. If video killed the radio star, then Star Wars fans are what made Star Wars sacred. We took Star Wars away from George Lucas (and from all the actors, too!) and we were 100 percent successful. Saying Star Wars is a victim of its own success is an understatement on par with “The teachings of Moses are popular,” or “There are decent acoustics in Carnegie Hall.”

  In 2004, my friend Brittany had a problem. She was taking a George Lucas/Steven Spielberg film studies course and one of the assignments was to “write a story treatment for either a sequel to Return of the Jedi or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” Brittany was (is) a big fan of Indiana Jones, but wasn’t as into Star Wars. “Can you help me, Britt?” she asked. And so I said, “Sure, let’s write a sequel to Return of the Jedi that is also a prequel to all the Indiana Jones movies.” What we came up with can only be described as “Raiders of the Lost Dinosaur Planet.”

  It went something like this: The opening credit crawl tells us there’s been a great famine in the galaxy. Everyone is starving to death and the only solution, it seems, is to actually leave the galaxy where everyone lives and go somewhere else. In a Battlestar Galactica–esque move, Luke, Han, Lando, and Leia pack up everybody they like into a giant unused prototype of the Death Star, which they’ve painted white and renamed the “Life Star.” It’s the size of a small planet, and it will take them across the galaxies to their new home.

  Meanwhile, living inside of a volcano, a bunch of zombie Sith Lords awaken and decide they want to leave the galaxy, too. They follow the Life Star across space until it rolls up on a lush, beautiful planet in a great solar system. It’s Earth! But it’s Earth during dinosaur times. Luke and company head down to the planet to think about settling it Terra Nova style when the new Sith attack.* Luke has a bunch of other Jedi Knights in training now, so there’s a small army of folks with lightsabers. The Sith are similarly prepared. And everyone is ready to ride some dinosaurs. Meanwhile, did I mention Leia is pregnant?

  While dinosaurs and lightsabers are gratuitously featured in an awesome battle scene that includes five chase sequences and Lando riding a pterodactyl, Leia is fighting a different battle on the Life Star against Sith stowaways. Han is fairly useless, because at this point, Leia’s lightsaber skills are totally badass. But suddenly, Leia is about to go into labor. Things are looking pretty bad for the good guys, so Han decides that they’ll freeze the baby in carbonite as soon as it’s born. That way, no matter what happens, the baby will be safe.

  Depressingly, everything does go downhill, and because I’ve watched Beneath the Planet of the Apes too many times,* the superlaser of the Life Star accidentally gets set off and zaps the atmosphere of Earth, killing the dinosaurs and everyone else. Luckily, just before this all goes down, Han and Leia’s child is tucked away into a cave, safely encased in carbonite, an immortal infant. Like Captain America, only a baby from space. The coda of the movie would reveal archaeologists, circa the early 1900s, excavating a weird cavern only to discover a newborn baby. Suddenly, a young Sean Connery would appear (CG, obviously) and hold the baby before softly saying, “Junior.” The movie ends with the baby a little older, a toddler now, playing with a big sheepdog that Sean Connery calls Indiana.

  I’m not actually sure if Brittany ever ended up using that story treatment, but I do know she passed the class and is, to this day, a real live working screenwriter. I also, of course, never believed there would be a sequel to Return of the Jedi until now, which is why, when asked to create one, I dreamt up a joke. Like all of you, I thought Star Wars belonged to me. Even during the prequel era I was right: everybody loved Boba Fett so much that George Lucas put Boba Fett’s dad in Attack of the Clones in 2002. See? We’ve been getting our way with Star Wars more than we care to admit. Now, even though we were told we’d never get to see a sequel to Return of the Jedi, we’re somehow living in an age where that is happening, too. And these guys, unlike me, are taking it seriously. Star Wars has often been accused of being a new kind of cultural mythology, and like superheroes, I think that’s relatively true. But, up until right now, it was never actually passed down to a new generation. What’s been “ruining” Star Wars all these years, and what sometimes continues to “ruin” it, is its insistence on looking backward. Collectively, both the fans and George Lucas knew the classic trilogy could never be topped, so instead, we got the special edition and a glorified backstory in the form of the prequels. To actually make a sequel to Return of the Jedi, and by extension the “real” Star Wars movies, is much riskier and requires everyone to actually move on and leave the baggage of the old stories behind. The prequels and the special editions inherited the emotional baggage of our childlike love of the original films, and so, we didn’t like them, and in fact, hated them. Hate, we’re told by Yoda, leads to the Dark Side, which is probably why Star Wars has been perceived to be in need of this comeback.

  Smartly, Obi-Wan Kenobi intentionally lets Luke Skywalker take over the heroic narrative of the story in A New Hope. And ever since then, fans around the world have longed to have that lightsaber passed to them, too. With Lucas leaving and letting younger people like J. J. Abrams and Rian Johnson actually make real Star Wars movies, it’s sort of like that has happened in real life. I’m closer in age to J. J. Abrams than I am to George Lucas. J. J. Abrams and Rian Johnson are possibly bigger fans of Star Wars than George Lucas. This is a good thing. Things are really starting anew. The exciting thing about Star Wars is that it perpetually reminds us that everyone can have new beginnings. Everything can change; everyone can be redeemed. And now that the father of this insanely important pop event has allowed a different generation to take over, maybe the rest of us can do the same.

  It’s time to get over ourselves. We can stop being haters by letting go of our hate. There’s still good in us. I can feel it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Something like this doesn’t happen without tons of friends, colleagues, and robots-in-arms. If you feel like I forgot you, I’m sorry. I’ll write your name in when I see you.

  Big guns first: thanks to my agent Christopher Hermelin for believing in this book and me on nearly blind faith. To Ryan Harbage and his Fischer-Harbage Agency for making it happen. To Matthew Daddona, a brilliant editor and my favorite Rebel general. And thanks to everyone at Plume and the empire of Penguin at large. It’s good to be here.

  Thanks to the editors of publications where many of these pieces originally appeared or to any editor who has had the misfortune of dealing with me at all: Will Doig, Pete Smith, Neil Clarke, Cheryl Morgan, Choire Sicha, Matt Buchanan, James Yeh, Lincoln Michel, Josh Perilo, Joel Cunningham, Melissa Albert, Janet Manley, and Claire Evans.

  Thanks and apologies to the early adopters who put up with me when I was a fake writer and/or a fake person: Jason Meyer, Mike Strahan, Pat Trusela, Marsha Morris, Damon Moss, Alissa Cherry, Andy Borowitz, Vicki Lewis Thompson, Dan Kennedy, Alissa Quart, Simon Navarro, Mel Olsen, Suzanne Konig, Daniel Power, Craig Mathis, Dana, Kelly, Britt, everyone at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, Erin Harris, Seth Fishman, Sara Barron, Lyndsay Faye, Vito Grippi, Travis Kurowski, Etgar Keret, Kirsten Sorensen, Andy Christie, Ishtiaque Masud, and Asa Yappa.

  Thanks to those colleagues and mentors who pushed me (knowingly or not) to be better than I am: Julia Fierro, Victor LaValle, Dani Shapiro, Michael Maren, Lev AC Rosen, James Hannaham, Jim Shepard, Karen Shepard, Hannah Tinti, John Wray, Penina Roth, Ben Greenman, Paul P
ark, and Lev Grossman.

  A giant thank-you and some hugs and kisses and high fives and rounds of drinks go to my sci-fi family of many years, those who occupy the rocket ship of Tor.com and its related fleet; Irene Gallo, Greg Manchess, Bridget McGovern, Bridget Smith, Emily Asher-Perrin, Kelsey Ann Barrett, Sara Tolf, Patrick Nielsen-Hayden, Ellen Datlow, Carl Engle-Laird, Theresa DeLucci, Pritpaul Bains, Mordicia Knode, Diana Pho, Leah Schnelbach, Natalie Zutter, Patty Garcia, Fritz Foy, Jenny Tavis, and Chris Lough. Obviously this wouldn’t exist without any of you.

  To my students: So many of you have meant the world to me, but you’re too many to list. My favorites know who they are. If you’re reading this, you are one of my favorites.

  Thanks to my friends who by just existing over the years have kept me either sane or insane depending on what we’ve both needed: Syreeta McFadden, Brittany Hilgers, Mike Stuto, Tracie Matthews, the Spirit of the Hi-Fi Bar, Shelly Oria, Michael Irish, Jessica Noven, James Scott Patterson, Rob Ventre, William Irwin IV, Ted Dodson, Melissa Febos, Rebecca Keith, Jenn Abbotts, Mike Baptist, Colleen Kinder, Leslie Jamison, Emily Wunderlich, Andy Reynolds, Gabriela Vainsencher, Hugo Perez, Emily Stowe, Sam Brewer, Julie Messner, Diana Spechler, Karen Thompson Walker, Casey Walker, Leigh Stein, Robert Silva, Nathan Ihara, Hannah Labovitch, Artie Niederhoffer, Hal Hlavinka, Irene Plax, Jenny Blackman, Emily Kate O’Brien, Amanda Hess, Jenn Northington, Amanda Bullock, Justin Taylor, Adam Wilson, Janet Turley, Brett Saxon, Karen Russell, Lena Valencia, Ryan Spencer, Lindsey Skillen, Carter Edwards, Chris Togni, Anne Ray, Nelly Reifler, Teddy Wayne, Ophira Eisenberg, Jonathan Baylis, Cici James and everyone at Singularity & Co., Matt Mercier, Allegra Frazier, Stefan Merrill Block, Liese Mayer, and Justin Lemieux and the Lemieux Brood: Lucy, Caroline, and, of course, Katy.