The Myth That Wouldn't Sit Still, Part 2

On May 29, 1977, a Sunday, I finally got myself down to the Loews Astor Plaza, off Times Square, to see what all the hubbub was about. If you're following the Edward Copeland-hosted Star Wars 30th Anniversary Blog-a-thon, I'm sure you'll find no shortage of memoirs and reminiscences of May 1977 and the variety of first-ever Star Wars experiences, so to cut to the chase: what I saw that day, sitting in about the fourth row, on a screen which spanned my peripheral vision, was fairly unprecedented and had no conceivable follow-up. I love Roger Ebert's summing up so I'll just lift it wholesale here: “It's... as corny as Kansas in August--and a masterpiece.”

Probably the most gratifying thing about Star Wars in retrospect was that it was oddly vindicating. It spoke directly to my particular and peculiar set of tastes, as an introverted, bookish and highly romantic high-schooler (i.e., romantic in the sense of obsessed by adventure and mystery, not yet in the adventures-with-the-opposite-sex sense). Special effects, gadgetry, pulp space opera, old-Hollywood swashbuckling, heaving full-orchestra music scores, anachronistic movie effects like wipes and iris fades, over-the-top comic book heroes and villains, Arthurian romance... somehow, as eclectic and private as it was, this guy Lucas harvested my world and showed everyone else how cool it was. He made my movie, and the best part was how uncompromisingly clunky and corny it was; I mean, what kind of title is "Star Wars” anyway? The kind you make up on a thoughtless summer afternoon when you're eight years old, playing ray guns with your best friend and you just happen to need a quick title for your improvised adventure; or the kind you make up with a little self-mocking bravado for the comic book pastiche you're drawing in your high school sketchpad, the cruddy little mishmash of Dune, Lord of the Rings, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom novels.

Clunky, corny, perfect. And in the summer of 1977, on the huge screen of the Astor Plaza, with the wonderful Ben Burrt sound effects and John Williams' soaring music in Dolby Surround Stereo, completely real. (There are hundreds of us in the audience that day, but we might as well all be huddled around a campfire in the deep dark woods, enjoying the monster tales. Princess Leia growls "It could be worse," having fallen into the Death Star's garbage disposal, and the audience titters with giddiness when something growls in response, echoing menacingly around us in six-track Dolby, leaping from speaker to speaker. “It's worse,” observes a shaken Han Solo. We burst into laughter). Apparently, however, to Lucas' mind, the movie was clunky, corny and far from perfect, and not nearly as real as the sprawling space opera in his own head. I think this is the big reason that fans take it so personally that Lucas keeps fiddling with the myth. Once upon a time, beyond all probability, it was just right; so Lucas' change of tack seems like a kind of betrayal, a denial of the original miracle. In 1977, the adventure was perfect, unique, stand-alone. It was simply, Star Wars. In 2007, the original adventure, now called Episode IV: A New Hope, sits embedded in the middle of a twisting, lumbering epic that has adopted the original no-nonsense name. It's a bad fit.

Don't get me wrong. I actually enjoy the saga, flawed as it is. The creativity and sheer invention of Lucas and his team has never flagged, as far as I'm concerned, and the story is fairly satisfying overall, I think. It's grating in the details: leaden direction of some key dramatic scenes, cringeingly bad romantic dialogue, wrong-headed plot developments (midichlorians?) and wrong-headed characters (guess who). I follow the conventional wisdom that the three best episodes are The Empire Strikes Back, A New Hope, and Revenge of the Sith, in more or less that order. But I still believe that Star Wars, the original experience, is a separate entity. Even with the changes Lucas made to it, his supposed refinements (and I'm not even referrring here to the revised “Han Shot Second” scene), A New Hope, aka Star Wars, just does not flow properly with the rest of the saga. If one watches the series in the order Lucas intends, the first two-thirds of Episode IV essentially becomes an intermission; after the increasing tension and density of the first three episodes, A New Hope is jarringly sedate and simplistic, and there are a host of plot and character inconsistencies between Star Wars '77 and Star Wars, the Saga.

One senses that Lucas would just love to scrap the current Episode IV and start from scratch, updating the music themes and digitally replacing incogruous characters (the “Darth Vader Theme,” aka the Imperial March, is very obviously missing in Episode IV, and honestly, Obi-Wan Kenobi just cannot have aged that badly in twenty years, unless he did a lot of hard living down there on Tatooine; maybe he knows his way around that seedy little Mos Eisley cantina a little too well...) Despite all the vitriol directed at the prequels by the fanboys (just read the comment threads on Harry Knowles’ Ain't It Cool News site going back to 1999 and you will see the genesis of truly vicious Internet snark), I think the real seams are between A New Hope and the other five episodes, not between the "classic trilogy" and the prequels. The moment we step onto the larger emotional and narrative stage of The Empire Strikes Back, we're in a different work altogether.

A modest proposal: separate the twins. restore the 1977 classic edition of Star Wars to its original glory and make it available as a separate disk in its own appropriate packaging, distinct from the six-episode saga; this would then allow Lucas to further refine Episode IV to his heart's content and integrate it completely with his bigger storyline; further gripes from the fanbase would be totally without merit at that point. George Lucas (and the fans) would finally have his New Hope and eat it, too.


Next: The Saga—— An Unprecedented Event in the History of Narrative (Really)

The Myth That Wouldn't Sit Still, Part 1

Compare the picture you just shot with your Sony Cybershot S650 to the one you took last week, and to the greenish Polaroid your aunt took at the wedding in 1971, then to the cracked and dog-eared sepia shot of your grandfather as an owl-eyed kid in knickers holding a blurry dog. The immediate sense you get is that human beings have finally figured out how to nail down a moment of crystal-clear reality in all its freckled, vein-eyed, nostril-haired glory without much fuss. That we finally live in an age of transparency, of clear-eyed honesty, and that our memories will no longer be tainted by the colors and textures of whatever medium was used to capture reality in the past. Yesterday will look like today will look like tomorrow in moments eternally frozen and available on FlickR.

So why is everyone pissed off at George Lucas, one of the avowed masters of the digital age, for not being being able to keep his story straight? Is it Star Wars or is it Episode IV: A New Hope? Is Darth Vader the villain or the hero? And last but far from least: did Han Solo shoot first, or did Greedo? I'm sitting here in Warbucks sipping my coffee and typing this screed wishing I'd had the forethought to pick up a "Han Shot First" t-shirt to commemorate the date: it was thirty years ago today that a movie about flying hardware, flashing lights, bumbling robots and hammy humans came out of nowhere and changed, well, everything.


Most of the praise and criticism of the movie is centered on the way Lucas took some old Hollywood tropes and refreshed them just as they were on the verge of fading from collective memory. The young and inexperienced hero thrown into an overwhelming situation and seeing it through by tapping unsuspected reserves of valor, or fulfilling an unheard of destiny; the boy from the heartland achieving glory in a foreign land—— in a postwar, post-Vietnam era, this is powerful stuff. In commercial terms it trumped the work of the gritty, urban anti-Hollywood slice-of-lifers like Scorcese and Friedkin to usher in an era of suburban mall blockbusters. To many critics, Star Wars was regressive, sounding the death knell of smart, cynical, artful filmaking. What wasn't clear then is that Lucas unintentionally created the first mass media post-modern event, and alchemically changed our expectations of the future.

By overlapping past and future, the alien and the intimately familiar, the endlessly derivative with the unprecedented, Lucas subverted slick Hollywood fantasy with a gritty realism to come. In presenting a bored and marginalized farmboy casually fiddling with gadgets and vehicles as cool as any in James Bond's arsenal, Lucas showed us the future. Our future. In 1977, we watched Luke whine about being in trouble for losing his uncle's droid as he scans the desert through his nifty hyperfunctional night-vision binoculars, and marveled at what he took for granted. And yet, how much niftier is the laptop you now browse the known universe with, even as you whine about work schedules and catching up with the laundry.

This same technology we now take for granted is making it possible for creative types like Lucas to endlessly re-create, to second-guess themselves. When the character Han Solo first entered the collective imagination, he was a scoundrel with a highly-developed urge for self-preservation, and that was a large part of his charm. When cornered in the notorious cantina by Jabba the Hutt's henchman Greedo, he weighed his chances against a pile of cash and pre-emptively shot Greedo from under the table. Naturally. We already knew the type: James Bond and Clint Eastwood's Man-With-No-Name shot bad guys (worse guys?) in cold blood all the time. It got them out of a jam. But when Lucas found he could expand his narrative canvas, i.e., when serial chapter became modern-day myth, he recast his tough-guy archetype as virtuous hero, ostensibly to be a role model for future generations, and revised the scene digitally so that Greedo shoots first and misses at point-blank range, only then to be fried by Han; the result is awkward-looking and just plain un-cinematic. So how ironic is it that boomer dads are putting aside the new-canon version in favor of the recently-issued-on-DVD original version, to show their kids the real Han Solo?

It's still a moral lesson: "Look, son, the bad man wants to tell you a lie, but Dad remembers the truth! See? Han shot first. In self-defense, of course."


Next: That day in May, 1977.