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.
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