Last month I found myself thinking, as one does, about lightsabres — my lightsabre, more specifically; well, one of my lightsabres, to be more specific still, since I’ve owned several.
Those who rolled around with me back when the prequel trilogy was coming out — an era of peace unrivalled in Star Wars fandom, one which to this day recalls the parliamentary decency of a bygone age!! — might recall that at the end of it all, when the “last” “Star Wars movie” “ever” was released, I decided to splurge on one big, “last” “Star Wars collectible” “ever” to mark, and close, the entire experience.
We all know how accurate those “lasts” turned out to be. For my part, I really did give up Star Wars collecting around 2007 or 2008, although I really just migrated to even more expensive collecting by going hard-hog into Hot Toys’ then-nascent Pirates of the Caribbean line, which was kind of like swapping out methadone for heroin and calling oneself clean. (I eventually arced back to Star Wars too, except on a Hot Toys scale, because… well, love costs. It costs a lot.)
And a couple years after that, the “last Star Wars movie ever” turned out to be … uh. The last one George Lucas would ever make, probably?; but otherwise, we’re gonna be surrounded by new Star Wars till long after I’m deep in the ground. That is the way of things. The way of the Force.
Anyway. The collectible I chose to mark the end of my Star Wars career was a replica of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsabre in the purported last Star Wars movie ever, Revenge of the Sith, for the then-“holy shit are you crazy?” price of $369. It made sense: as much as Luke was my guy when I was a kid, Obi-Wan was my guy in the second era of Star Wars in my life, and owning (as close as one can) a piece of the end of his story had a nice, “sealed with a kiss” vibe to it.. A lot of things were ending simultaneously for me; I was leaving my self-started small business, ending a relationship, moving to a new home… growing out of my twenties and on into real life.
And you need to understand that I really did approach that “second” era of Star Wars with the mindset that it would be “second and final,” and therefore an opportunity — now as an adult — to enjoy the thing as deeply as I could, before letting it go and moving on. With one heavy stainless steel and brass paperweight to mark the occasion, if I ever got nostalgic about it all.
In 2011, I sold that lightsabre replica on eBay. For… I dunno, maybe $425. (There wasn’t, and generally isn’t, much of a growth market in used/unboxed Star Wars collectibles.) The meaning of the lightsabre had become lost on me — a persistent problem, even today, of hanging on to the “why” of things — and I was going through another series of endings and changes and movings-on, and figured my time with that thing was done. I lost sight of it and tossed it away. (Hey… who does that? Who tosses away a lightsabre?!)
I know I’m not the centre of the galaxy and therefore I know that the next thing is not true, but, you gotta admit, as a karmic let-the-genie-out-of-the-bottle sort of a scenario, me getting rid of that lightsabre and then George Lucas selling Star Wars to Disney (what felt like) an hour later felt kind of like a providential rejoinder. Like, I brought that lightsabre into my life to commemorate the end to my relationship with Star Wars. I sent it out of my life… and Star Wars came roaring back in, like an ex who wasn’t good for you, but really knew how to fuck.
(Also: Master Replicas closed down at roughly the same time, and nowadays that lightsabre, even unboxed, is worth north of $3K. Cool cool cool)
So here we are, ten years later. There have been a lot of Star Wars. And like anyone who is gazing askance at the output in the Disney era — good, bad, and otherwise — I’m having a moment with “what is my relationship to this thing, which has defined so much of my life up to now, but has changed pretty significantly from that which did so?”
I think that’s why I was thinking about my lightsabre, circa one month ago, and all the things it was supposed to mean, and probably did, for a little while anyway.
I like (Ob)i(-Wan) Ke(nobi)
I am enjoying Joby Harold and Deborah Chow’s Obi-Wan Kenobi series quite a bit. It’s hilariously clunky in its efforts to present Star Wars scale on a television budget (which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, given that its budget is enormous, none of which can be seen on screen). But McGregor is adding such resonance to his every gesture and line as a broken, over-the-hill, prequel-vintage Obi-Wan that the mechanics of plot and setting almost don’t matter. I very cautiously say such things, because generally speaking, they always matter; but, suffice to say, I tune in to Obi-Wan every week to see all the lovely, very-un-Star-Wars-y emotional nuance built into the passing of trivial time with Obi-Wan Kenobi and (pint-sized) Leia Organa; and I care significantly less about why we’re going to what planet, to fight what bad guy, when. I like Reva a lot and hope they give her something resembling a complete story instead of (as of Part IV) what seems like just the motivation for one. I think the small scene of Ben and Leia talking about unremembered (biological) families, in Part 3, might be some of the most moving performance in any Star Wars filmed property I’ve ever seen.
But as Spock once said in a movie that is otherwise almost unfathomably horrible,
“That being said…”
I am becoming aware of a problem with all of this, which is less of a “law of diminishing returns” than a sense that the returns, by design, are inherently set at diminution. They aren’t intended to reach the heights (or depths, if you like) that our past experiences with Star Wars have reached, because doing so, frankly, would be bad (or at least, unsustainable) product design.
Part of me even knew this, in a Screen Anarchy column that I wrote in 2015, which people (who may not have entirely read it) found so hilarious that copies of it were taped to my desk at the office. I sensed then that the ubiquity of the product in the Disney era would necessarily dilute my emotional relationship with the thing, and that the requirements of Star Wars’ place in Disney’s product line wouldn’t just encourage that dilution but would likely require it.
My assertion was immediately complicated (and thereby, temporarily negated) by the initial array of shiny new objects that Star Wars fans were greeted with as Disney began to roll out its new films. For pretty much exactly two spectacular years there — from December 2015 to December 2017 — it looked like, regardless of how well the individual pieces worked or didn’t work on their own terms, Star Wars would now be made for Star Wars fans by Star Wars fans… and more importantly, Star Wars fans who had a point of view on what Star Wars was, and a lot of resources and firepower at their disposal, and who would be given a wide, rich opportunity to explore a piece of the mythos of their own choosing.
Rogue One is the perfect example (it was released right in the middle of that golden period: December 2016). It has a lot of story problems and doesn’t ever really work as a complete movie; but it has such a take on Star Wars, and on what piece of the Star Wars mythology it wanted to break open, that (taken a year after The Force Awakens, which also has a take on Star Wars; and a year prior to The Last Jedi, which has the most intentional and audacious take on Star Wars yet), Rogue One served as a second proof-point that Star Wars in the Disney era was going to be thoughtful, robust, experimental, and entirely dedicated to digging into the nooks and crannies of this thing, in a good-faith* effort to mine depths we’d never seen onscreen before but always knew were there.
The Force Awakens was, for the most part, the same thing: a movie littered with almost as many ass-backwards JJ Abramsisms as the Star Trek example quoted above but which, unlike Into Darkness, seemed to have a genuine (and, again, apparently good-faith*) interest in interrogating the mythology it was built upon. It presented itself, both visually and textually, as having an interest in asking what Star Wars means, to the people who grew up on it. The Last Jedi flawlessly, and now tragically, improved upon that artistic principle, by interrogating deeply some of the core assumptions of the Star Wars myth, while simultaneously daring to advance the new characters’ emotional realities in a meaningful, story-first, and entirely modern way, which set up (by my admittedly napkin math), a trillion possible story directions by the time the last of the Resistance is huddling in the belly of the Millennium Falcon, wondering what to do next.
*And another word on this, because I think it is important: the premise of “good faith.” Look, fool me once, fool me twice, fool me as many times as you like, but the initial Disney Star Wars movies really seemed like their intention was to make the canvas wider and better through thoughtfulness and intent, and not just to wank off identifiable Star Wars clichés for an audience of masturbating monkeys who will clap their hands at anything that they can visually identify as similar to something they’ve seen before.
And the worst thing about any of the above is that, I think, it was all either a fluke, or a design error, or a temporary granting of creative latitude, or all three. And regardless, I also think, five years later, that we can definitely say that it ended.
Hey: I liked Solo. I love The Bad Batch. I loved Visions. I enjoy The Mandalorian for the most part, and I’m enjoying Obi-Wan Kenobi. The only Star Wars projects since The Last Jedi that I think are outright creative failures — real negations of the opportunity to tell stories in this universe — are The Rise of Skywalker and The Book of Boba Fett.
But: and it’s a big but: with every passing piece since Episode VIII, it’s starting to feel like maybe those first three films — The Force Awakens, Rogue One, and The Last Jedi — were way off model, and not actually representative of the Star Wars project we’re in right now. A project which, let’s be real, is ultimately built around only one thing: ensuring that there is consistent value extracted back from the expensive Star Wars brand to its parent company, every year forever.
Which is why people like me need to start thinking about our lightsabres.
A Crash of Fate
Look, the fact that Star Wars will never mean as much to me as it did when I was seven is just part of my operative reality of living in the world. (“No movie will ever mean more to you than your favourite film from when you were seven.”) I say all this less out of any discontent with whatever Disney is doing (besides how long it took them to directly address the racist and misogynist toxicity of a loud portion of the fanbase; but that’s an essay for another time). It’s more to fully acknowledge that this used to be a real thing, for me; rightly or wrongly, Star Wars meant something significant, in multiple stages of my life. And no matter how many times I thought I’d put it in the acrylic box on the shelf and moved on, it was always going to be a big part of who I am — as a person who loves, sometimes makes, and definitely still enjoys writing and writing about, films.
And hey: I even got a bonus round! If Star Wars, when I was a kid, was just my favourite thing in the world; and the Star Wars prequels, when I was a young adult, was the return of that experience for a victory lap that I got to absorb in a different way; then the first years of the Disney era were like that time, when I was a kid, that my parents, for absolutely no reason at all — not connected to any birthday, anniversary, or achievement of any kind — bought me Snake Mountain. They just gave me a present, for fun, to make me happy. (And it did.)
The trick that I fell for with Star Wars, though, was that those early bits of the Disney era felt essential. They reversed my own internal reservations on there even being an Episode VII in the first place, by giving proof points around story and theme that seemed to suggest that yes, this generation needed a Star Wars trilogy just as much as the prior generation and the generation before that.
Pretty much exactly since Solo, though — and I do not think Solo is anything more than an unhappy starting point for this chronology, not a particular representative of it — Star Wars has not felt essential. Even if you extract the outright-fuckin’-bad entries from the average, the inessential-ness of all this seems to hold. Even the good ones have been colouring diligently within existing lines, painting over existing paint, supplying answers to questions no one has asked. It all feels skippable.
Or put another way, if I had never seen The Last Jedi, I do genuinely think my relationship with this overall canvas would be diminished. (I know The Last Jedi is the one that we aesthetes hold up as such, so, feel free to sub in TFA or R1 on your end if you like.) I can also say that, five full years later, if I had never seen my favourite episodes of The Bad Batch, or the magnificent bit of poetic weirdness that is “The Village Bride” from Star Wars: Visions, no single element of my relationship with Star Wars would be different. I’d feel exactly the same about all of this as I did that night in December 2017 when I walked out of the Silver City with my brother and got shawarma after the premiere screening of The Last Jedi: that it’s possible to do extraordinary things with this framework when you apply imagination and diligence and take the myth seriously, but that also lightsabres are cool and Rey is the best.
Star Wars, for most of my life, was bottled imagination — an invitation to reach a hand starward. I just didn’t know that that night in 2017 would have been the last time I felt that way.
How we live now
None of this should be taken as a surprise, merely a calibration: when Disney bought Star Wars, it was not interested in making new, better Star Wars; it wanted to make Star Wars the same. This is not, in any way, un-obvious, and I feel like a fool for falling for it at any point. The nearest, equally obvious, corollary is Marvel, a brand that has done an exceptional job at quality-controlling an outcome so that, with only a handful of exceptions, every single product out of its pipeline hits the same average quality marker: 3.5 out of 5. A solid B. They’re not even aiming for an A. They’re aiming for “consistent.”
All that this means for me is that post-Saga Star Wars should be approached, and judged, on roughly the same metric scale as that with which we judged The Ewok Adventure when it spun off from the original trilogy in 1984. It’s not meant to be as good as, or certainly as purposefully creative as, the source material. It’s a regurgitation of the brand. Of course there will be good bits in there (Battle for Endor? Rules.). But to expect anything better than that is a waste of emotional energy. Baby Yoda isn’t an idea, after all. He’s a Muppet Babies regurgitation of an idea. (So is Obi-Wan Kenobi’s take on Leia. I love her, I’d lie down on train tracks for her; but I see the three-card-monte game they’re playing on me.) I’m sure another example will be along shortly: Muppet Baby Jabba? Muppet Baby Bossk? Muppet Baby General Veers? Do your worst, Disney+.
I loved the Muppet Babies when I was a kid, by the way. Watched it every week. But it’s telling that The Muppet Babies, as a series, was the last Muppet-related thing to happen in Jim Henson’s lifetime. He’d made a variety show, and three feature films; and the Saturday morning cartoon felt like a whole hell of a lot of “fuck it, here’s this” to me.
You can watch The Muppet Babies on Disney+. New version, anyway. “Fuck it, here’s this.”
Anyway: I reached out to the guy who bought my lightsabre. Yes, that’s actually how this story ends. I figured there was a minor chance that this dude still had it; and an even smaller chance that he was now as careless with it as I was in 2011. But, those small chances didn’t mean no chance. So I figured, I should at least inquire as to whether he’d be willing to sell it back to me, at (what I presumed would be) a significant loss on my part.
No such luck. He’s still got it, and politely declined any opportunity to part with it. It’s part of a wall of Star Wars lightsabre hilts that he’s spent a decade building and caring for. I’ll never get it back, but at least I know it’s with someone who never lost sight of how meaningful it was.