Friends... these days it's tricky

cee134 wrote: »

OP!!!! DON'T DO MEETUP.COM! I did that once and I’m going to assume you know nothing about Star Wars. I’m going to assume, furthermore, that you may very well have negative associations with Star Wars. There is nothing whatsoever cool about Star Wars, after all. With neither the redeeming social messages of Star Trek nor the cult exoticism of Dr. Who, it instead reaffirms conventional family values and appeals to the lowest common denominator with whiz-bang special effects. The whole package, finally is gilded with populist New Age philosophical tripe.

Yet it lingers. It stuck. It stuck with aficionados and the general public. Even people who hate the movies know them. Most movies are disposable. Even a great director will only be remembered for a handful of truly great films, and most directors struggle their entire careers to find just one. Lucas will be remembered as a filmmaker long after most of his influences have been forgotten. Star Wars is ubiquity. The films will linger after much of the twentieth century is dust. They are the hegemon.

It’s different now. Star Wars was always going to be more than George Lucas intended. It’s never going to be the same, much as Spider-Man was never quite the same after Steve Ditko left. But Spider-Man lingered far past his expiration date due to being a popular idea owned by people who want to make a great deal of money.

I used to think it was important to specify that Star Wars wasn’t science fiction, and that it had little to do with science fiction other than the setting. It’s fantasy, so goes this argument. There’s no attempt to use the technology and environments in the films as anything other than tools and backdrops, to the degree that the same plots could be applied to any setting and remain legible. That’s intentional. Outer space works because it defamiliarizes the audience. We are told in the very first few frames, with those same ten words everyone knows by heart, that we are a long way from home, and that the events in this world have no possible resonance with our own. The existence of magic, then, takes the events one step further even from the already unfamiliar. We are in myth.

Go one step further, though: we are told to suspend our critical faculties. We’re safe. No ideology here.

But follow me a moment: what if I was wrong? Accept the premise that the setting of Star Wars does matter. The setting is centrally important. It’s not incidental. Everything you need to know about galactic culture can be extrapolated from the attitude that galactic citizens have towards technology and history. In turn, everything you need to know about Star Wars can be extrapolated from understanding this galactic culture – including why the story has lingered in our culture when so much else falls away.

So, how do the characters within Star Wars feel about science and technology in their universe?

No one cares. No one stops to gawk at technological marvels. There is little scientific exposition. No one stops to explain how something works to another character – no attempts are made to provide the same kind of authentication devices that other sci-fi reflexively peppers into dialogue. What little there is describes immediate cause-and-effect – press a button and something happens. Power converters convert power, it can be assumed from context. Assumedly that’s a useful function.

Han Solo fixes the Millennium Falcon the same way car guys work on old cars: spitballs and bailing wire, whatever gets it on the road. If you asked him to explain the ins-and-outs of how his faster-than-light drive works he’d probably be able to tell you about as much as the average gearhead about the chemistry of the internal combustion engine. Maybe some, but it’s hardly a priority.

No one who sees the Death Star marvels at the incredible scientific acumen required to construct a mobile battle station so big. Everyone in the galaxy is accustomed to a high degree of scientific accomplishment as a fact of daily life. It doesn’t need to be interesting, it just needs to be scary. No one cares about the how, which leaves the story free to focus on the question of why.

The beauty of Star Wars is that so much care has been spent making the universe onscreen appear normal for the people who inhabit it. No one is awkwardly walking around a sci-fi movie set because it’s the future and in the far future people are stiff and self-conscious. People are sitting down to family dinner, hunched around an awkward meeting table and getting yelled at by the boss, playing video games with dirtbag friends in their basement apartment. Everyone has technology but most can’t afford the good stuff – or at least the new stuff – so things break. Such very specific details paint a picture of a lived-in world, a world where people have hobbies, listen to music, go to sporting events, and take drugs. People in Star Wars get drunk, talk *kitten*, and are generally quite racist – even the good guys.

The conceit of Star Wars is that literally every character onscreen has a story. You don’t know that story. It entirely incidental to the plot. You probably don’t even know the character’s name. He looks like he’s been around, seen a few things. He adds nothing to the plot of the movie, but his presence sells the setting. When you watch a movie set in present day New York you take it for granted that an extra walking through the scene has a life and a story outside of the movie – obviously they do, they’re a person just like me and you. Likewise, extras in Star Wars get to be effectively interesting even covered in makeup and spray painted car parts. The camera lingers on “boring” verisimilitude that most other sci-fi doesn’t touch.

The galactic civilization in Star Wars is old enough that most people don’t need to know why technology works the way it does. Engineers are still quite popular, and necessary to design the latest ships and battle stations. But scientific breakthroughs have no immediate bearing on the story of Star Wars.

The characters are the inheritors of a very old universe. The technological infrastructure necessary to maintain a galaxy-wide civilization was constructed so far in the past that no one in these stories knows or cares. Who mapped the hyperspace lanes that allow near-instantaneous interstellar travel at speeds far exceeding “conventional” faster-than-light? No one gives them a second thought, and the lanes are regarded as a public utility. Who carved the crumbling fragments of Cyclopean masonry that dot the series? Every meeseeksanddestroy is a thespian planet in the galaxy is ancient, with tens of thousands of years of mysteries waiting to be uncovered. But the populace is so inured to ancient mysteries that they carry little interest to anyone but the locals.

There must have been a time even longer ago, before the time of the films, when the Galaxy was not yet so tightly connected. Before hyperspace it had to have been as hard to get between planets as it is for us, now. Then the galaxy became interconnected and suddenly trade was possible, massive resettlements and immigration were possible, cultural exchange was possible. War was possible. The galaxy has been what it is for a very long time.

Star Wars doesn’t do a lot of things that other sci-fi does:

It doesn’t assume that planets have only one government and culture. Planets have civil wars and competing states.

It doesn’t assume that technological advancement naturally leads to civilized enlightenment. There are peaceful isolationist races and noisy belligerent civilizations operating at roughly the same level of technology.

It doesn’t assume that inequality won’t exist. Some planets do better than others. Some races are better suited to travel and commerce than others. Some planets have really *kitten* up political situations, some seem to operate without much in the way of organized politics. A giant chunk of the galaxy is owned outright by a cartel of near-immortal xenophobic slugs that don’t even regard bipeds as fully sentient. (Probably not great for anyone else in that part of the galaxy.)

Star Wars does, however, assume that even advanced technological civilizations could never fully escape corruption and inefficiency. It assumes that history is cyclical, with devastating conflicts recurring throughout history with alarming regularly. It assumes that children are wise to be skeptical of their parents. Intelligence is no guarantor of virtue in these stories, but ignorance is punished severely.

Most races in the galaxy seem content to simply be. It’s humans who create the most problems, humans who build Imperial war machines to set the galaxy on fire to satisfy their egos. Humans don’t even have a homeworld, they’re just there, everywhere across the galaxy from Coruscant to the depths of Hutt Space, prolific breeders without much in the way of natural gifts save for their adaptability. This is a tactical advantage over many other races, and their ubiquity makes them the single most powerful species in the galaxy through sheer weight. Other races, one imagines, say unflattering things about humans when humans aren’t around.

So why is all of this important?

Immersion is the key sensation of Star Wars. Everything feels real, carries authority that makes every frame seem like a portal into another world, perfectly plausible on its own terms. A galaxy of adventure left for the viewer to explore independently. For the first two decades of Star Wars’ existence, this sense of projection was vital to the survival of the franchise.

It’s easy to forget, now, but Star Wars went away. After Return of the Jedi faded from theaters in 1983, attempts were made to expand the franchise with cheap spin-offs – the Droids and Ewoks cartoons, a pair of made-for-TV Ewok films. These didn’t take and without new movies on the horizon toy sales dried up. By the late 80s Star Wars was as dead as Star Trek had been in the early 70s. But just as generations of nerds learned Star Trek from seeing the original series on TV over and over again for decades, the Star Wars films never went away either. People loved them and watched them whenever they showed up on TV, which was a special event – but they were spoken of in the past tense. Star Wars was a thing that had happened.

Things used to go away and people took it for granted that they didn’t come back. Star Wars was very popular for a while, and then it wasn’t quite as popular anymore because it was gone. Even if everyone knew that Lucas had always spoke vaguely about the possibility of new films, no one ever seriously imagined it would happen. It was fun to talk about. Maybe someday.

In hindsight Star Wars really didn’t stay away for long. The property regained traction in the early 90s, expanding into a popular series of novels and returning to comics. There were a few years in the late 80s where the only new Star Wars material being produced were role-playing sourcebooks from West End Games. These books helped fan the waning embers of Star Wars fandom, ensuring there was still a core audience of die-hards left when Lucas ramped up production of new material set in the now defunct Expanded Universe.

I wasn’t paying much attention at the time. I didn’t care that there were new Star Wars novels on the shelves. I didn’t read Star Trek novels, and at the time I liked Star Trek better. There was a lot of Trek in the 90s. It fit the times. The 90s were optimistic. Everything was rotting under the floorboards but people were nevertheless pretty happy. In hindsight I wish I’d spent more time reading Star Wars paperbacks than watching Star Trek reruns.

The line I heard I few times when I was younger – not so much these days, I think, but definitely in the days when the first three films were the only canon that counted – was that Star Wars was about good and evil, and that good and evil is pretty basic. No nuance. Joseph Campbell and the Hero of a Thousand Faces – myth and superstition for an irreligious age. I heard it so much that I even tricked myself into believing it.

My opinion changed. I grew older. Rather than sharpening the nuance of my moral calculus years of hard luck simplified it, instilled the lesson that good and evil do exist. I see the proliferation of evil, evil beyond measure – but I also see a profusion of goodness, of hope despite the times. Cruelty is real. Kindness, too. We live with these facts as daily realities. They don’t lack nuance.

I think one of the reason the Prequels resonated so strongly with me was that the movies fixed the parts of Star Wars that had never sat well. It added a bunch of new stuff to the simplicity of the first three films. Some of it worked and a few things didn’t but overall every new addition to canon complicated, rather than simplified, the core ideas around which Star Wars coalesced. What the Prequels did that moviegoers could never forgive was make the main characters murky and complicated and even unpleasant, rarely defeated in open battle but undone by their own arrogance, ignorance, and corruption.

The newer movies had the temerity to point out that the classic good and evil set-up of the original was . . . not the whole story. Good and evil is what they tell pumped-up farmboys from Tatooine when they send them off to kill their fathers. What Yoda and Obi-Wan don’t talk about so much is how they worked closely alongside the Emperor for decades, helped him consolidate power, even saved his life dozens of times. They helped build the Imperial war machine. They have a lot of blood on their hands. Good and evil are real and solid things, and the people who have to navigate between them are small and fragile.

subcounter wrote: »

cee134 wrote: »

krislizbuff wrote: »

cee134 wrote: »

krislizbuff wrote: »

jenibethbu wrote: »

Do you go to the gym? Perhaps some group classes to find others with similar interests?

No gym, I walk and bike. Great suggestion if I went to the gym.

I'm trying to be your friend and you just ignore me. That makes me sad. I'm sad.

Dude sorry. I'm really confused by the star wars talk. But my star wars nerd boyfriend would probably get it. I honestly have no idea what the heck you were even saying. I've not even watched all the star wars so I'm afraid our friendship hasn't started yet. Lol

What's to be confused about? See I was saying Star Wars creator George Lucas has reiterated that the saga is centered about the rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker. In a grand, galactic struggle between good and evil, Skywalker is transformed from bearer of light to the very embodiment of darkness, and is ultimately redeemed before his death. His son, Luke, undertakes a similar journey himself, in the shadow of his father's descent into darkness. Interpreting the Star Wars chronicle from a mythological standpoint, Anakin Skywalker is personified as the archetypal fallen protagonist in a story that can be easily categorized as the archetypal hero's journey.

As in various cultures' folklore and mythology, such as the Christian tradition, Anakin's birth was prophesized long before its occurrence. An old Jedi prophecy spoke of a Chosen One who would arise and bring balance to the Force. More than forty-one years before the climatic Battle of Yavin, Tatooine slave Shmi Skywalker suddenly found herself pregnant, although, as she told Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn nine years afterwards, "There was no father." It was possible that the child had been conceived by the Force itself, a mystical, all-encompassing energy field that "surrounds", "penetrates", and "binds the galaxy together" (Obi-Wan Kenobi, A New Hope). Paralleling the belief in a being whose creation occurred through the will of a higher power, followers of Jesus Christ believe that Christ arose through immaculate conception.

As a child, Anakin exemplified the characteristics of one whose future was filled with promise. From an early age, Anakin exhibited extraordinary talents. Enslaved to the greedy Toydarian shopkeeper Watto, Anakin showed early promise as a brilliant mechanic. He dreamed of leaving the barren desert planet and journeying among the stars. This is a common thread in storytelling - a youth with extraordinary talents is born into bleak circumstances, and dreams of escaping the wretchedness of his life. It is these tales of conquering the status given at birth - that is, defying destiny's diktats - that have inspired us and awed us since the beginning of time. To satisfy his thirst for adventure and excitement, Anakin turned to the dangerous, illegal sport of podracing, where he proved himself to be the only human capable of handling the vigorous speeds. Passionately devoted to his beloved mother, he was an empathetic, selfless youth who once nearly sacrificed his life that he might prevent the slaughter of a herd of banthas. This compassion is rendered all the more ironic when his eventual fate is revealed.

Destiny's hand began to reveal itself when Anakin's footsteps crossed with those of Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn, who was, at the time, serving as bodyguard for Queen Padm? Amidala of the Naboo. Qui-Gon told Shmi Skywalker of his encounter with her son, "Our meeting was not a coincidence. Nothing happens by accident." Thus occurred the introduction of the young hero's guide in his journey, often depicted in mythology as a wise, elderly man, such as The Lord of the Ring's Gandalf or The Sword in the Stone's Merlin. Having never had a father figure, in the short time that Anakin spent with Qui-Gon, he immediately formed a strong bond with the Jedi maverick. As in any bildungsroman, a significant step in the young hero's journey is the separation from his mentor. Qui-Gon Jinn perished in the Battle of Naboo at the hands of the Sith lord Darth Maul. Despite reluctance form the Jedi Council, Anakin was able to take up his Jedi training under Jinn's former Padawan, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Their partnership was marked by an uneasy start; Kenobi, it seemed, took Anakin as Padawan learner only to fulfill a promise to his late Master, not out of his own willingness. Later on, Obi-Wan would relate to Anakin's son Luke, "I thought I could instruct [Anakin] ... I was wrong."

Ten years after the Battle of Naboo, Anakin was reunited with Padm? Amidala when assassins threaten her life, now a senator for her planet. Against the background of an increasingly turbulent galaxy, they fell in love. Although the Jedi Code expressly forbid marital union, as is in his increasingly rebellious and aggressive nature, Anakin gave little thought to consequences. Allowing his fervors to direct his actions, he let the ends justify the means, and the darkness within began to rise. Prompted by recurring nightmares, the Jedi learner returned to Tatooine to find his mother, only to arrive in time to witness her death in captivity by the fierce Tusken Raiders. The last strands of his former life as a slave had been suddenly and brutally eliminated. There was no longer anything to hold him down. Enraged, Anakin lashed out and massacred the entire Tusken camp - men, women, and children. He explained distraughtly to Padm? in a line that chillingly echoed his future, "I killed them. I killed them all." Against the Jedi practice of diplomacy and defense, Anakin took the position as aggressor. Fueled by ferocity, rage, and hurt, he slaughtered an entire community unhesitatingly. It was the turning point, the point at which the shadows that had been cast upon his life began to loom longer and longer.

At the same time, the struggle within the young Jedi was paralleled by the roiling tensions in the galaxy, which had reached their boiling point. On the red-rock planet of Geonosis, the battle forces of the Republic clashed with the dissenting Separatists. As the battle raged, the head of the Separatists, the Sith Lord meeseeksanddestroy is a thespian Count Dooku, engaged Obi-Wan and Anakin in a heated lightsaber duel. Upon landing in the deserted hangar where Dooku (also known as Darth Tyrannus) waited, Obi-Wan advised Anakin to advance cautiously. Heedless of his mentor's words, Anakin rushed forward to attack Dooku. Once more, his aggression and fury were revealed, in direct contradistinction with the Jedi Code that taught peace and serenity. Dooku succeeded in severing Anakin's right arm, in a theme of ritual dismemberment that would repeat itself several more times throughout the Star Wars saga. Blinded by fear, pain, doubt, and anger, Anakin turned once more to Padm?. The two were secretly married by a Naboo Holy Man. Marriage should have been a joyous event in Anakin's life, but it was only another step to his eventual fall and destruction. In the cycle of the hero's journey, Anakin's period of initiation, darkness, and suffering far overshadowed the preceding and succeeding events.

From Force conception to fall to the Dark Side, Anakin Skywalker's path in the Star Wars prequel trilogy traversed the first stage of the archetypal hero's journey. In later years, as told by the Episodes IV-VI of the original trilogy, Anakin would make the transformation into Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith, half man, half machine, instigator of doom and destruction. This tale of a man who began life with such extraordinary potential, only to use his powers for infinite evil, and ultimately redeems himself at the end of his quest, is a poignant, mythical rendering of life as we see it - the marriage of rise and fall, light and dark, good and evil, within a single entity.

See, I get that.

Being a Jedi sucks, and it sucks because under normal circumstances you’re taken from your family as an infant and raised by strangers to regard attachment of any kind as anathema. We even see, at a few points, Jedi taking Force-sensitive children from their families, taking them out of their mothers’ arms before they can even speak. It’s hard to regard them as heroes after that.

What is it like to grow up believing emotions are dangerous, that repression is healthy, that falling in love and forming deep bonds of friendship are harmful? That’s why the council rejects Anakin: he’s already too old. He has already learned to love, and that makes him extraordinarily dangerous to an Order founded on the eradication of love as a necessary precaution against allowing passion to override reason and restraint.

Poor Anakin, he never had a chance.

What did people want? Did they want Anakin to be a grand and noble warrior brought low by – what? Pride? Trickery? Some sort of noble impulse betrayed? Anakin’s a kid. He’s a kid with the power of an atom bomb in his heart, desperate for some kind of education in how to be a man, how to be a husband – hell, just how to be a responsible human being. He gets by because he knows how to fake it just enough to get by, but no more. He’s smart as a whip and can pick up the surface tricks of peoples’ behaviors just enough to seem like he knows why he’s supposed to say jokes at certain times, or express affection in certain ways. He learns how to kill, but he doesn’t understand why.

Anakin fails because he’s a vulnerable kid who happens to fall under the sway of the most dangerous man in the galaxy, bent on grooming the child into a weapon. It’s not glamorous. It’s quite sordid and disturbing – but what do you expect from the embodiment of evil? That’s not some kind of fake space war conflict, that’s real life *kitten*: insecure kids from broken homes are easy prey. Anakin needed a dad, he found a monster. Abused children often become abusers in their turn.

Evil is real, but it isn’t simple.

Darth Vader is a mass-murderer and a thug. He’s irredeemable by any measure – and, very important, I’ve never believed that turning against the Emperor at the last minute was any kind of real redemption. He turned the rage and loathing he had directed at himself for two decades as a result of the Emperor’s abuse outward, to the one person in the universe who deserved it. He goes out on a high note, but it’s not enough to erase anything.

The paradox of the Prequels is that, after decades of actively encouraging fans to tell their own stories, to put their own imaginations into his vehicle, his own answers could never compare to whatever fans had imagined themselves. His version was unbearably sad. It was a story about failure and fear, about good men brought low by hubris and weak men broken by circumstances. Seeing Anakin snap and begin killing children seemingly at the drop of a hat – it’s hard to watch. But it doesn’t come out of nowhere, or at least it shouldn’t for anyone paying attention. The Force isn’t a beneficent extension of the Godhead, it’s a dangerous power that warps and breaks the people who are unfortunate enough to have been “blessed” with a high Midichlorian count. When Anakin finally cracks in the final act of Episode III, it seems to come as a relief. The power broke him, and he gives in to his absolute worse impulses with the enthusiasm of a recovering alcoholic throwing away ten years of chips to get *kitten* faced. He fought as long as he could. He wasn’t strong enough because the tools his elders gave him were insufficient to the task.