My Only Hope

STAR WARS

Reviewed by Matt Brown
May the 4th, 2005

Let's not talk about myth. Let's not talk about why something is great, or enduring, or a classic; how it changed this or broke that or fixed whatever. Let's not talk about hommage or pastiche or regenrefication. It's no longer our place, and it's no longer necessary; it's all been done, and done to death, and then done some more. Magazines were sold, books hit the bestsellers charts, 10,000 people stood outside in freezing rain overnight to hear one man talk for 22 minutes. Let's not continue the cycle. Let's just try to figure out why, at 28 years of age, I still can't get enough. Let's talk about why no matter what else happens in my life, there will always be an 8-year-old in me who would rather be there than here - who feels the blade in the palm of his hand, and the starfighter at his back, and all the heavens open in front of him, as pinprick stars become screaming lines of speed.

When I was a baby, my first word was "light," and my first memory was Star Wars. They're the same thing. To paraphrase Daniel Cockburn, I've been born twice - once in 1976 at Women's College Hospital, and once again, at the moment when this long stream of consciousness actually seems to begin. It begins in a big black starfield, and the immediate arrival of a starship that filled the screen with such definitive authority that I remember (only a baby at the time) looking heavenward, searching for the source, trying to see if this ship was actually flying over my head in the movie theatre I was sitting in. A real Star Destroyer, roaring above us all, in an infant understanding of film that did not yet include the notion of two-dimensionality. Star Wars taught me about three-dimensional space, and how movies are just an illusion of it. And people still joke that Star Wars is "cardboard," a two-dimensional film. Well, yeah! Aren't they all?

That must have been one of the re-releases, that afternoon at the movies with my dad when I was a baby... 1978, I suppose, or 1979. Star Wars played fairly regularly until the release of the sequel; maybe that's important, too. Maybe it's the first film that the audience wouldn't let go of, kept calling back onto the screen like a demented concert audience demanding a sixth encore. Three years of a movie trumping all the newer content that Hollywood could hastily churn out in its wake, as we all waited for the next chapter.

Star Wars pulls. It drags us through linear space, through narrative. The opening crawl pulls the Blockade Runner onto the screen, which in turn pulls the Star Destroyer into frame, too big to be believed. The Star Destroyer fires, and the droids are pulled into the movie; we follow them past a door, and through it comes Darth Vader, who (we already somehow know) is pulling the entire saga. We follow the droids to the princess, and maybe she was a dream, there and gone without a word, but glimpsed in some secret communion with the dumpy trashcan on wheels. Threepio doesn't know what the hell is going on, and neither do we, but we're along anyway, pulled behind them into a cramped escape pod and fired out into space.

And then it happens, the greatest pull of all. That big, gorgeous vista of stars and a great, yellow planet roaring into view, as the escape pod tumbles down, guided by what John Williams' music is telling us is nothing short of the hand of Destiny itself. It was, and remains, true - for a saga with more beginnings than one can actually count, it actually all begins there. Two robots in a can of soup, falling towards the desert.

It had to be the desert. It will always be the desert. The most populous, most fantastical desert of all time, a desert that defines, and is defined by, the sheer multitude of those who live in it: the farmers, the savages, the scavengers, the pirates, and (most importantly, to me anyway) the wily desert rat. The desert isn't a place, it's an idea; it's a world of its own (naturally, all Star Wars planets are ruled by single ecosystems). And even though he's only a visitor, only a watcher, it's Ben's world. It's Obi-Wan's world. Everyone else lives in reaction to it; Ben lives in harmony with it, keeping the magic safe.

The droids lead us to Luke, and Luke leads us to Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan leads us to Han, and Han leads us back to Leia, and the movie continues like this, pulling from one character to the next until the "travelling squad" is all in place and blasting its way out of the Death Star. Because of course there's a Death Star. Was there a time in the world before Death Stars? Before that one ultimate weapon that spells badness for an entire generation of my kind, a big spherical hell-ball that is the final statement of doom (and affordable military superiority)? Who doesn't want their own Death Star? Sure, it's mutually-assured annihilation; there isn't much good ruling a planet if you have to blow it into tiny pieces to do it. Alderaan figured that out, and so did we. But who cares? The Death Star is the point, and a big one. From the moment we see it, we know it: this thing has to go. And that's going to be hard.

Who's gonna do it? Not me, and not you, and sure as hell not that pasty-faced kid, the annoying little bastard who's whining more than he's talking, and whose misplaced sense of morality drags poor Han and Chewie into a dead man's stalemate in the cell bay. What's a boy to do? Get a girl, of course. This princess needed to be rescued, but she'll do her share of rescuing straight back, and solve the deadlock with decidedly lateral thinking that leaves the space pirate shaking his head. Why didn't I think of that?

Because you're a space pirate, dummy, and relative height notwithstanding, you've got a ways to go before you're a man. Your time's gonna come, too, but until then let's play cops and robbers with the big walking carpet, and go hollering off after armies of clones without so much of a hair's breadth of a plan. And if you survive that, then it's a game of space invaders on the mad rush away from the Death Star. And if you're just lucky enough, and while pretending not to care the whole time, you'll get everyone safely to Yavin.

Well, almost everyone.

Ben won't be there. Ben, who's the first person to tell us about the Force, the first to tell Luke the truth (albeit truth nested in a gigantic pack of further lies), the first to pull an innocuous-looking cylinder of metal out of a drawer somewhere, and conjure up a sword made of light itself. The first person to understand the true nature of the threat, and to know that the road will be deadly to him, and to know that it must be taken nonetheless. The only person in the whole forsaken galaxy who has to suffer the indignity of knowing what Luke is actually committing to when he says "I want to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like my father." And he swallows it. He keeps it. He holds it in himself and does the job anyway. Ben's a liar, he's a nut, he hid out when the going got tough and bided his time... but damned if he isn't the true meaning of hero for me.

With Ben gone, everything fails; we see his ghost everywhere - a thousand bearded Rebel sages all trying to do what's right, and all failing. And so it's up, up and away in that space battle, and suddenly cinema really has been changed, because we're slinging and zinging across the screen, through starfields and a riot of green flame, and everything's moving too fast, and machine after machine after machine is bearing down on us, roaring like wet pavement and wounded elephants. And wouldn't you know it - it's going to be that kid after all, that kid who - alone among his betters - understands in a heartbeat that the only way to win is to turn all the machines off. The droid's toast, the other starfighters are dust, the targeting computer's just a big dumb block of plastic anyway, but if you're moving almost faster than light, certainly faster than thought, you can feel the Force around you, and it's just down and to the right with that control stick, and....

"ahhhhhhhhhhhhh."

Luke pulls in the big sigh of relief, and so do we. We didn't know we were holding our breath.

BOOM.

There will always be something happening here, between minute 0 and minute 1:57, that will call me back with the siren song of family, of foundation, of fundamental self. Something began here, something that can never be undone; it unspools in front of me on viewing 300 the same as it did on viewing 1. Brief moments when the illusion becomes real, the experience becomes transcendent, and I understand in a single flash of light that movies are both entirely conjured, and the realest things we'll ever see.