The most incredible article about the Star Wars trilogy you'll ever read

I

"The story, when you actually put it into words, is only so-much nonsense to hang a great visual experience onto." 

Mark Hamill, talking in 1978

Star Wars is a 1977 rite-of-passage movie. It concerns the adventures of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), usually described as a farm boy but actually depicted as a sulky James Dean teenager who likes nothing more than wasting time with his friends and fooling around with vehicles called T16s (or skyhoppers). Luke’s journey from boy to man is represented by a pair of interlocked quests: to identify and rescue the beautiful woman (Carrie Fisher) who’s cry-for-help he has stumbled upon; and to be initiated into a legendary order of warrior monks by retired hero Ben Kenobi (Alec Guinness). Despite talk of princesses and Emperors the action takes place neither in a fairy tale kingdom, nor feudal Japan, but in a vaguely imagined but compelling visualized space-opera future. An oppressive Empire rules the entire galaxy; mile-long space-ships are swallowed up by battle-stations as large as planets; and a hop between stars is treated like a stagecoach ride between two outposts. Luke forms an alliance with the charmingly amoral Han Solo (Harrison Ford) who is described as a pirate but heavily coded as a cowboy. 

The action runs the gamut of screen-genres: Arabian Nights, Wild West, Perils of Pauline, and the Dambusters are all referenced. The uniforms look vaguely manga, and one of the anonymous fascists at a baddies’ council of war actually claims to be searching for a hidden fortress. The heritage the film explicitly lays claim to is the Germanic-English fairy tale tradition (the rather arch opening caption tells us it’s happening "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away…") and Flash Gordon (an anachronistic scrolling text telling us "the story so far".) But by far the most memorable figure in the movie is Darth Vader (David Prowse / James Earl Jones) whose role is at this stage undefined but who seems to act as stand-in for the unseen Emperor. He sports a black helmet, black armour, and a fantastically impractical black cloak. The film’s centerpiece is a ritualized duel (with laser weapons rather than swords) between him and Luke’s mentor: so the overarching genre is probably Arthuriana. 

Just as each space-ship is dwarfed by the size of the next, so the moral volume of the action is turned up throughout the movie. Our whining rebel-without-a-cause becomes a rebel against the evil Empire, and ends up putting his T-16 flying skills to good use on a suicide mission to save the revolutionaries from being wiped out by Vader. The moment Luke destroys the Empire’s Ultimate Weapon is also the moment he becomes a Jedi Knight and therefore the moment he becomes a man. It’s also, incidentally, the moment that the cynical Han Solo develops a moral conscience: a masterpiece of economical plotting. 

The films ends with all the heroes getting a medal and living happily ever after. People queued round the block to see it in 1977 and some of them experienced it 6 times in a single week.

Star Wars was followed some three years later by a wholly unnecessary sequel, branded, not as Star Wars II (this was the era of Jaws II and Rocky III) but as "Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back". This  not only turned Star Wars in to "Star Wars Episode IV" but implied the existence of three other films which no-one had ever seen. Until 1999, this seemed like a very good joke.

The second film featured all the main characters from Star Wars — even Ben Kenobi gets a cameo, despite being dead. It gives us our first glimpse of the Evil Emperor, introduces us to giant four legged tanks known imaginatively as "walkers" and a floating city straight out of Flash Gordon and the Hawk Men. But the tone of Empire Strikes Back had nothing whatsoever in common with the tone of Star Wars. The fairy-tale structure — indeed, any structure whatsoever — is abandoned. Instead, we are asked to follow two separate, highly episodic plot threads. In one, Luke Skywalker receives cod-philosophical instruction from a swamp dwelling Muppet who we are supposed to believe mentored Alec Guinness; in the other, Han Solo and the Princess are chased by Darth Vader through fields of asteroids, swallowed by a giant space worm and end up taking refuge with one of Han’s barely trustworthy associates. 

Producer George Lucas obviously had more money to throw at this movie, and much of it remains visually breath-taking even thirty five years later. But nothing in it has any of the charm of, say, the dwarfish second-hand robot-dealers or the alien-filled outpost from the original movie. 

The film’s impact depends on the revelation that Darth Vader has been Luke’s father all along. Nothing in the Empire Strikes Back foreshadows this; and it actively contradicts everything we were told in Star Wars. The revelation is so stunning and so emotionally charged that the film doesn’t so much end, as merely stop after this point. Since the climactic battle, which the good guys lose, is place at the beginning of the movie, some people have speculated that Lucas wanted to recreate the feelings of a schoolboy sneaking into the cinema and catching the second half of one movie and the first half of a different one. It is inexplicably regarded as the high point of the sextology, although in 1980 it was universally regarded as a baffling disappointment. 

Sometime during the filming of Star Wars, George Lucas encountered the mythological snake-oil salesman Joseph Campbell, and became convinced that Star Wars was a version of the "journey of the hero" and Skywalker an avatar of the Hero With a Thousand Faces. Since Campbell’s universal key to all mythologies amounts to the assertion that mythical heroes tend to go on a journey, encounter obstacles, and in the end achieve something it is quite hard to see how it could have failed to do so. By 1983 Lucas had swallowed Campbell’s bullshit hook, line and sinker and spent the third Star Wars movie retrofitting the first two to fit in with some of his ideas. 

Return of the Jedi feels like the culmination of a trilogy. Themes, musical and visual, are revisited. Jabba the Hutt and the Emperor, who were only talked about in the first two films, finally come on to the stage. We do the climax of the first film (many little ships against one huge battle station) all over again, twice as big and about half as fun. We re-do the land battle from Empire Strikes back, only smaller, and with teddy bears.

After some preliminary loose-end tying in which the charming Tunisian sequences from Star Wars are re-imagined as a computer game and feminist princess Leia gets to dress like the cover girl of a Gor novel, Luke-the-farm-boy commits fully to the role of Jungian Archetype. He surrenders to Darth Vader; who takes him before the Evil Emperor who tries to turn him to the Dark Side of the Force. Vader, who has spent the last three movies torturing princesses, blowing up planets and strangling underlings draws the line at watching his son being zapped by evil lighting bolts, and decides, literally at the last moment, to turn good and destroy the Emperor. 

So the film ends with the teddy bears — furry alien primitives with bones through the noses and a marked tendency to put white people into cooking pots — celebrating a Great Victory. The Emperor is dead, Vader is redeemed, the Empire is defeated, and they all lived happily ever after.

And there, for 16 years, the matter rested.

 "Oh, dear."

"Why 'oh dear'?"

"You are in love."

"Is that bad?"

"For a monk, it does present certain practical problems."

Name of the Rose

If Star Wars is the story of how Everyboy became Everyman then Star Wars "episode IV" is a stand-alone movie with an entirely satisfying beginning, middle and end. Luke doesn’t need wilderness training from a Muppet to become a Jedi Knight: he became one the second he trusted to the Force and destroyed the Death Star.

If, on the other hand, Star Wars is the story of how a group of peasants with bows and arrows defeated a huge technocracy by virtue of their innate goodness and spirituality (apocalypse when?) then Return of the Jedi barely counts as an ending at all. Sure, they’ve blown up the Death Star again and sure, they’ve killed Darth Vader’s boss, but isn’t this meant to be an Empire which extends across the whole galaxy? How much difference is the assassination of one politician and the destruction of one weapon likely to make? Several comic-book and paperback "continuations" show our heroes waking up the morning after the party and resuming the battle against the remains of the Empire, which rather spoils the Ewok victory dance.

Return of the Jedi can only be thought of as a conclusion if you turn the trilogy on its head and make the villain the hero — if Star Wars is not "the adventures of Luke Skywalker" but "the redemption of Darth Vader". And between 1999 and 2005 this is what George Lucas set out to do, ploddingly re-working the back story to this affect through a trilogy of monumentally misjudged "prequels".

The Phantom Menace (Episode I) is a kind of protoevangeleum, showing us Darth Vader when he was a starry eyed child named Anakin (Jake Lloyd). Much mumbo-jumbo is spoken over him: he is "the chosen one", "conceived by the midi-chlorians" who will "bring balance to the force". Young Darth himself wanders about the set, blundering into spaceships, winning chariot races, saying "yippee" and generally being as un-messianic as it is possible to imagine. We are left with no hint as to why this likable moppet became cinemas most iconic super-villain. The film works best if you try to ignore the Darth Vader angle and just see it as the adventures of a spunky little slave-kid. 

Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith (Episodes II and III) depict Vader (Hayden Christensen) between the ages of 19 and 23 and offer various reasons why he became evil: anger against the savages who killed his mother; hubris because he thinks he’s a better Jedi than his master; fascist theories about authoritarian rule; belief that the Dark Side could resurrect the dead; fury and grief when he causes the death of his lover Amidala. The religion of the Jedi Knights — in Star Wars, merely a non-threatening, non-specific polytheism — becomes explicitly Buddhist: emotion, and attachment in general, are now paths to the Dark Side. The Jedi are revealed to be celibate and Anakin’s love for Amidala is the ultimate cause of his fall. The child Anakin’s "sin" was that he loved his mother; the teenaged Anakin’s offense is that he lusted after Natalie Portman, as which of us can honestly say we haven’t. [*]

In the background, we see the machinations by which someone called Palpatine gets himself elected President of the Galaxy, votes himself an invincible army of clones, and declares himself Emperor. This, it transpires, is part of a longer and much more evil game: Palpatine is in reality Darth Sideous, the last in a long chain of evil Jedi Knights called the Sith. Palpatine becoming Emperor puts the embodiment of ontological evil in charge of the Universe. Vader is, of course, Palpatine’s anointed successor.

The three prequels are not, in fact, anywhere near as bad as people sometimes say. If you treat them as six hours of space opera, replete with gladiatorial arenas, chariot races, capital ship battles, dog-fights and martial arts confrontations, with an undercurrent of galaxy-wide diplomacy, Faustian pacts and machinations at the center of government,  they are a lot of fun. They are probably much closer to what George Lucas intended Star Wars to be than Star Wars itself was. But there is an underlying silliness of which comedy Jamaican fall-guy Jar-Jar Binks is only the most egregious example. Jake Lloyd nor Hayden Christensen are poor substitutes for Mark Hamill, and instead of Harrison Ford’s witty, cynical side-kick we have an endless stream of portentous Jedi preachers. The films somehow manage at the same time to be too silly and not nearly enough fun.  

But they served their purpose. They redefined what Star Wars is all about. The evil of the Empire flowed from, and only from, Emperor Palpatine. Darth Vader was Palpatine’s apprentice; Luke would have been Vader’s. With Palpatine and Vader dead, the infection has been cured. The funeral pyre in the woods really was the end of the story.

And there, once again, the matter rested.

[*] When Ben told Luke "I was once a Jedi Knight, the same as your father" Luke did not reply "Don’t be silly, the Jedi didn’t marry."






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The Skywalker Saga - I

IV 

A Farm Boy intercepts a message from a Captive Princess. He is trained in ancient mysticism by a Veteran Hero, and fires the shot which saves the universe in the final battle. 

IV-VI 

A Young Man, the son of an Ancient Hero, is trained in ancient mysticism, but recklessly confronts the evil Dark Lord before he is ready. He discovers that the evil Dark Lord is in truth his father. He tries to bring his father back to the light; and seems to fail. But when he is brought before the Dark Lord's Master to be killed, his father has compassion, turns against his Master and slays him. The Young Man is reconciled with his father and lays him to rest. 

I - VI 

A long prophesied child, the Chosen One, is discovered and trained in ancient mysticism. But a parallel, evil stream of ancient mysticism is working behind the scenes. The Chosen One is initiated into the evil cult; he wipes out the good mystics and helps the head of the evil cult become ruler of the universe. The Chosen One's children are hidden from him. But when they grow up, the Chosen One's Son confronts his father, and causes him to turn back to the light and to kill the leader of the evil cult. The Chosen One and his Son are reconciled, and the Son lays the Father to rest. The long prophesied child has ended the evil cult; the prophecies have come true, after a fashion. 

I -IX 

A long prophesied child, the Chosen One, is discovered. He is initiated into evil mysticism by the Dark Lord, and he helps the same Dark Lord rule the universe. But he has two children of his own, a Son and Daughter. The Son confronts his father and causes him to turn back to the light, and to kill the Dark Lord, at the cost of his own life. But the Dark Lord soon recovers from his death, rejoins the rest of his evil cult, and starts building a powerful, non-mystical army. The Chosen One's Son tries to create a new order of good mystics. The Chosen One's Daughter has a son of her own, who joins the new mystical order. But the Dark Lord corrupts him. He too turns evil; and slaughters the new order of mystics. The Chosen One's Son, now the last of the mystics, runs away, intending that the teaching of the mystics dies with him. But the Dark Lord had a consort; and children; and one of his children had a child of his own. The Dark Lord's Granddaughter has inherited his mystical powers, but seeks to use them for good. She finds the Chosen One's Son, in his exile, and persuades him to train her in good mysticism. The Chosen One's Evil Grandson tries to turn the Dark Lord's Granddaughter to evil; while the Dark Lord's Granddaughter tries to turn the Chosen One's Grandson back to the light. The Dark Lord intends that his Granddaughter should replace him. But at the very last moment the Chosen One's Evil Grandson comes back to the light; and gives his life to save the Dark Lord's Granddaughter. She kills the Dark Lord (with the help of the spirits of every good mystic who ever lived). The evil cult, and all the children of the Chosen One are dead; but the Dark Lord's Granddaughter takes on the Chosen One's name in memory of him. 

The opening seconds. 

The logo, shrinking into space. The fanfare; the march, so heroic it is almost whimsical. The scrolling text, slanted away from the audience, slowly receding into space. The music quietly going "twinkle twinkle" in front of a screen of black stars.

Someone must paint them, I suppose. That could be a job on What's My Line? "I'm the guy who paints the stars in Star Wars." And then a space ship flies across the screen. This time we start with the baddies. 

That's what they all have in common; all nine films. Doctor Who doesn't have the same title sequence it did when I was a kid nor even really the same theme music, and that makes me sad. Every Star Wars movie starts like every other Star Wars movie, and so did many of the computer games and this makes me happy. This is the last time we will ever see a Star Wars movie with exactly this beginning and that makes me old. 

We start with Kylo on a quest to find the Emperor. We see him cutting people down with his lightsaber. And almost immediately, while we are still in a prologue, we see the Emperor. 

Not dead. Lit in such a way that the theaters have to warn epileptics to stay away. And in a sentence the last two movies are overwritten. I was worried about Snoke. The guidebooks and novels said he was some kind of baddie. Not a Sith. Some other kind. 

My friend thought that should be enough for me. He's a baddie; that's all you need to know. But I thought that the first film set Snoke up as a mystery; and a mystery needs a solution or else it's a cheat. 

"I made Snoke" is an explanation and a back story but it changes everything and not for the better. It removes something from the Force Awakens that was rather clever. The First Order were wannabe baddies, Nazi cosplayers with some big ships to back them up; keeping the Empire going even though they knew it had lost. Kylo Ren was a tragic kid with impostor syndrome who wants, slightly ludicrously, to be the new Darth Vader but realizes he'll never be good enough to be that evil. But the First Order is now the Emperor's pet project; Kylo Ren is now the Emperor's special pawn. 

In the Last Jedi, Kylo is said to have turned to the Dark Side because Luke Skywalker recklessly drew his lightsaber when he perceived his pupil's potential for evil. That was interesting; unexpected; challenging: a failure of the Light gives birth to the Darkness. "The clone Emperor's puppet put a mole in Luke's Jedi school" is just that little bit more obvious. 

This may be the third time that a military conflict between fascists and liberals has turned out to have been part of a Sith plot to rule the universe. A third of A New Hope was given over to a thrilling battle to escape the Death Star: but it turns out that it was always Darth Vader's plan to let Leia escape so he could find the location of the Rebel's hidden fortress. We know that Luke's Jedi Dad fought in the Clone Wars. We are coming to the end of a very good 133 episode cartoon series about those same wars. But they were only ever a trick to get Palpatine elected president of the galaxy. He is in fact running both sides. 

Maybe that is the point. The Message even. Star Wars was originally going to be an oblique critique of American foreign policy, and maybe the very first film kind of was, so we are allowed to look for an allegory without spoiling the fun. In the foreground, there will always be good people fighting against bad people; blowing up space stations; swinging across chasms and falling in love. But behind the curtain, the forces of Evil are always running the show. Wars will only end when Evil itself is routed out. It is rather feeble to say "The cartoon villain from the previous trilogy was planting evil thoughts in Kylo's head." But if you flip it round and say "Kylo had terrible thoughts and urges; and he went on a quest and found those thoughts and urges personified as a scary old guy in a black cloak" it sounds a lot better. 

Scrolling text. Scrolling text slanted away from the audience. Scrolling text receding into space. "It is a period of civil war. Brave rebels, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory over the evil galactic empire". 

Even in 1977, it was incredibly anachronistic. That was the point. In the 1930s movie serials had used printed captions to bring audiences up to speed on what had happened in the previous episodes. Flash Gordon used silent-movie style captions; Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars awkwardly used panels from the original cartoon strip. But the rather ambitiously titled Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe had a slanting crawl, just like the one in Star Wars. 

It never served any particular purpose. It told us that the Empire are the baddies and the Rebels are the goodies, but we would have worked that out for ourselves -- just about at the point when the big guy in black armour walks in and starts strangling people. It tells us that the Princess has stolen plans in her possession; but Darth Vader's men are telling him that the Death Star Plans are not in the main computer from the moment the curtain rises. We would have understood Star Wars just as well if we had not been told up front that the DEATH STAR is the Evil Galactic Empire's ULTIMATE WEAPON.

But the crawl still wrong-foots us. It says to us, before anything else has happened: hey! You are coming in part way through this story. We'll try to fill you in along the way, but you won't understand everything. That's fine. You're not meant to. 

We never saw the beginning of Star Wars. We had always come in half way through. 

The opening crawl isn't there to give us information. It's there to tell us how to watch the movie. Read it as if it was a fairy tale, says the opening caption. Read it as if it was a 1930s cliffhanger movie serial says the crawl. 

Can one film be both things at once? we ask

Just wait and see! says George. 

Star Wars is full of traps and escapes. But it doesn't end on a cliffhanger. It ends on a high-note. The universe has been saved and everyone gets medals. (Nearly everyone.) This is not how individual chapters end; this is how whole sagas end. Star Wars was the final episode of a serial. We missed most of it, but we came in at the end and worked out what was going on. 

We expected Star Wars Two to start where Star Wars One ended. That's what the Marvel Comic did. Everyone steps off the pedestal and locks up their medals and Luke Skywalker flies off on a new mission to a water world and Han Solo flies off on a new adventure involving a giant green rabbit. (Beneath the Planet of the Apes began with Charlton Heston kneeling on a beach, yelling at a statue. You could watch the first two Ape films back to back as a single five-hour movie, although I wouldn't recommend it.)

But instead of Star Wars Two there was Star Wars Episode V: the Empire Strikes Back. And suddenly, Star Wars is not the end of the saga, but the middle. Lucas swears blind there are going to be twelve episodes. There is still a fanfare, a blue fairy tale caption, a yellow logo, and that all-important scrolling text.

If this were really a serial, that text would tell new viewers what they had missed; recap the plot of what-is-now-called A New Hope. Instead, it told us what we had missed: what had happened while we were away. The Star Wars universe had moved on in our absence. The Empire has forced the Rebellion into retreat; Darth Vader knows Luke Skywalker's name; there is a new base on Hoth.  It is, in short, a dark time for the Rebellion. If Star Wars made us feel we are seeing the end of a serial of which we missed the first episodes; Empire Strikes Back makes us feel we have skipped a few chapters and have some catching up to do. 

There were, incidentally, those who said that the unconventional structure of Empire Strikes Back which opens with a climax and ends without a resolution, felt a lot like seeing the second half of one film and the first half of another. And that, in the days of Saturday Morning Pictures and continuous performance was what audiences often did.

But we did eventually go right back to the beginning and find out how the story had started. Didn't we?

There is certainly a film labelled Episode I and it was definitely marketed with the slogan "Every saga has a beginning..." But The Phantom Menace doesn't stand in the same relationship to A New Hope that, say, Planet of Peril does to Battling the Sea Beast. It is not an earlier chapter of the same story. It's a different story, set in an earlier period of the same history. It shows us some of the characters when they were younger. It shows us how some of the conflicts began. But we don't come in at the beginning. Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon's mission is already underway when the film opens. The saga begins with a crawl telling us stuff which has already happened. Chaos has engulfed the Galactic Republic, apparently. And we are assumed to already know what a Galactic Republic is. 

It would be an interesting exercise to imagine how the Phantom Menace would have been constructed if it really had been released, in 1976, to a world which knew nothing of the Republic or the Jedi or the Force. My guess is that it would have been told from Anakin's point of view. We would have met the strange boy with the strange parentage on the strange planet; and marveled at the aliens and the robots and the two suns; and only learn about the Jedi Knights and the Trade Federation when Obi-Wan arrives bearing the letter from Hogwarts school. And that might have made a better movie.

And now Rise of Skywalker is the end of the saga. Kind of. 

If we were still following the metaphor of the movie serial, there should have been one last caption. After Rey takes the name Skywalker the words "THE END" should have appeared in big yellow writing on the screen. Or maybe there should have been a green slide that said "...And they all lived happily ever after." But it isn't and they won't.

All the Skywalkers are dead and all the Sith are gone, but Rey still has a lightsaber and she still has the Jedi books. Episode VIII hinted that the Jedi were coming to an end and the mystery of the Grail was going to be revealed to anyone and everyone. That has not happened. Rey either will or won't start a new Jedi school; and she either will or won't repeat Luke's mistakes; and there either will or won't be more Dark Side users for them to contend with. It may take 28 years. It may find Daisy Ridley sulking on a lost planet at the other side of the universe. But sooner or later the saga will continue.

Stories have endings. History goes on forever.

Rise of Skywalker was true to its B-Movie roots. There was quicksand and secret McGuffins and last minute reprieves from firing squads. There were cliffhangers and implausible escapes from cliffhangers. Some people were annoyed when Chewbacca was definitely killed and then turned out to be perfectly all right after all. This suggests they haven't seen a lot of Flash Gordon. But Star Wars is no longer a movie serial. Star Wars is a fragmentary future history. The nine movies would be better described as Volumes or Chapters or Scrolls than Episodes.

But the opening crawl still has a purpose. The nine films together entirely fail to add up to a single, coherent narrative. The text introductions give us a sense that we are dropping into and out of the action; seeing The Star Wars Galaxy in a series of disconnected glimpses. I dislike the timelines of history and maps of the Galaxy that you can find in some official and semi-official guidebooks. I don't want to know that there was a Sith Empire 2000 years ago or that the various planets have known locations relative to the "outer rim" and the "core". I enjoy starting in the middle. And would there have been so many comics and books and films and RPGs if there were not so many gaps to be filled in?

Star Wars came forty years after Flash Gordon. Rise of Skywalker comes forty-three years after A New Hope. The children who paid a tanner each week to see the adventures of Flash and Dale at their local fleapit are nearly all dead. Even the ones who watched on BBC 2 during the 1976 Christmas holidays are well into middle-age. Story-so-far captions no longer signify that we are in the realm of Republic Serials. But they do signify that we are still in the realm of Star Wars.

Scrolling text. Scrolling text slanted away from the audience. Scrolling text receding into space. "The dead speak! The galaxy has heard a mysterious broadcast, a threat of REVENGE in the sinister voice of the late EMPEROR PALPATINE."


I'm Andrew. I like God, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Wagner, folk-music and Spider-Man, not necessarily in that order. I have no political opinions of any kind.

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Shakespeare's Second Best Lampshade.

I said:

It will be remembered that Alan Dean Foster (nodding at Frank Herbert, I am sure) inserts a little quote from Princess Leia into his Star Wars novelization right after he introduces us to the Journal of the Whills. “They were in the wrong place at the wrong time: naturally they became heroes." Foster is obliquely acknowledging how heavily the Star Wars saga relies on coincidence. But everything Leia says is completely wrong. Luke and Han and the Droids were marked out as heroes from the very beginning. That is why the Plot made very sure that they were always in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

Mike said:

I think this is a rare case where you are exactly wrong. Subsequent episodes have overwritten our perception of the original film, but looking at that film as a film -- a single, self-contained drama -- Leia's/Foster's analysis is not only spot on, it also precisely captures what's so magical about that film. There is nothing about Luke, Han, Chewie, R2D2 or C3PO that marks them out as suitable for a grand adventure. The only characters on our side with any kind of power are Ben and Leia; but he is decades past his prime, and she spends most of the film in captivity.

*

No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.

Northanger Abbey

So: the Duchess's drunken uncle and her melancholy jester decide to play a prank on the puritanical steward.

The plan is to convince him, the steward, that she, the duchess is head over heals in love with him; and then convince her, the duchess, that he, the steward, is demon-possessed. As you do.

The prank depends on the steward being unbelievably vain (which he is) and the duchess being unbelievably stupid (which she isn't). It also depends on it suddenly turning out that the duchess and her chambermaid happen to have indistinguishable handwriting.

This is a bit of a stretch even by Shakespeare's standards: so just as the steward is swallowing the forged love-letter hook, line and sinker, a bit part player chips in with the famous words "If this were played upon the stage, I could condemn it as improbable fiction."

The TV Tropes website calls this kind of thing "lamp-shading", and Shakespeare is very fond of it. It isn't exactly breaking the fourth wall: Fabian doesn't know he's in a play, and he can't see the audience. If a real person had just negotiated Malvolio into such a successful heffalump trap, there is no reason at all why they wouldn't say "I’d never believe it if I saw it in a play!” I don't think it is quite true to say that Shakespeare is apologizing to the audience for the stream of plot devices he has just subjected them to. I don't think Shakespeare's audiences expected plays to be realistic: they went to the theater to see the surprising and the preposterous. I think that what Shakespeare is really doing is reminding us that everything in the play except this plot device is perfectly realistic, or at least asking us to pretend that it is. "This isn't just a story" he is saying "And these aren't just fairy tale characters. They are people just like you and me. This kind of thing doesn't happen to them every day. They are as surprised by it as you would be."

So: when Princess Leia (in the novelization of Star Wars) says "They were in the wrong place at the wrong time: naturally they became heroes" is she simply engaging in Shakespearean lamp-shading? Is she pretty much just saying "Luke Skywalker wasn't a hero; he was just a person who this stuff happened to. He felt as out of his depth on the Death Star as you would have done. I know it's all very far fetched and unlikely, but suspend your disbelief and enjoy yourself…."

It is, almost inevitably, more complicated than that.

*

If we are going to talk about Star Wars -- and indeed, if we are ever going to stop talking about Star Wars -- we have to keep three things very separate in our heads:

1: Star Wars, a stand-alone art-house movie from 1977 which made it very, very big.

2: The Star Wars Trilogy, a science fiction epic consisting of a slightly revised version of Star Wars plus The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and The Return of the Jedi (1983).

3: The Star Wars Saga, a six part epic consisting of substantially revised versions of the Star Wars Trilogy and three more films -- The Phantom Menace (1999), Attack of the Clones (2003) and The Revenge of the Sith (2005).

It is easy to forget that these are not at all the same thing; to assume that things we only found out in 2005 were already true in 1977. I just re-read the Dark Empire comic books, and was forcibly reminded that in 1995 there were no such things as Sith or Padawans, and no such planet as Coruscant.

Alan Dean Foster's book is definitely a novelization of Star Wars, not of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Darth Vader (first name: Darth; second name Vader) is merely a treacherous Jedi, one of a number of Dark Lords, not necessarily a pivotal persona in the galaxy. Luke Skywalker's father is still anonymous; he was a friend of Ben Kenobi and notable mainly as a star pilot. The only thing Ben says about Luke's heritage is that he is  "quite a good pilot".

In this version of the story, Luke Skywalker is no-one of consequence. The arc of Star Wars is spoiled if he is. Ben teaches him the meaning of the Force while he is practicing lightsaber fighting on the Millennium Falcon. He saves the universe 45 minutes later because he remembers and puts into practice what Ben taught him. Luke destroys the Death Star because he trusts his feelings, trusts the Force and trusts Ben Kenobi – not because he inherited superpowers from his dad.

So: is he a hero?

Well, the word hero has a number of different meanings. To a tabloid subeditor, anyone who has served in the armed forces in any capacity is by definition a war hero. Anyone who has done anything brave, whether saving a cat from a tree or going up a tall mountain by the difficult route could be said to have been heroic. If I admire a sportsman or a singer, I might say that they are my hero. For Wagner, hero is pretty much a job description: Siegfried is “the young hero” before he has done anything particularly brave. Joseph Campbell overloaded the word with Jungian symbolism and Freudian baggage, but a lot of the time, "hero" doesn't mean anything more than "the main character in a story."

So: the nub of the gist is that there is nothing heroic about Luke Skywalker, and nothing marks him out as a hero at the beginning of the story.

That is to say:

Having been explicitly told that Star Wars is a fairy tale, we would naturally assume that an orphan of mysterious parentage, living with a wicked, or at any rate indifferent uncle in a remote location is going to be a secondary and unimportant person in the story. We are, on our first viewing of Star Wars, surprised when Luke ends up taking center stage. After all, it comes as a surprise to us in the actual fairy tales when the plain, adopted and ill-treated sister gets to go to the big party and marries the prince: we naturally assumed the story was going to be about one of her older, prettier and more legitimate stepsisters. We are absolutely astonished when the Wart pulls the sword out of the stone: we assumed that big brother Kay was going to be king of England and kid brother Arthur was in there for comic relief. Even in the Good Book we all take it for granted that the singing shepherd is only in their for local colour; we very naturally assume that Samuel is going to pick one of the more impressive older brothers as King of the Jews.

Because that's how stories work.

Very ordinary people are sometimes thrust center stage by dumb luck. Some are born great; some achieve greatness; some have greatness thrust upon them. Shakespeare said that. It's part of the letter that causes Malvolio to make such a prat of himself. You never planned to be a disability rights campaigner, but you were sort of forced into the role when the steamroller ran over your legs. You'd planned to spend the next five years racing pigeons, but you were 19 and it was 1942 and you kind of just found yourself helping to save the world from Hitler. Those nice kids in America are in the public eye because they happened to be in school on the day when one of their classmates blew a fuse. If the terrible thing hadn't happened we'd never have heard of them. 

None of which is to denigrate the accidental hero. No-one chooses to live in dangerous times. All we have to do is to decide what to do with the time which is given us. (I think Shakespeare said that, too.)

So by all means scrub out the idea that Luke had special powers because of his lineage; by all means scrub out the idea that Daddy was anything more than one Jedi Knight among many; and definitely scrub out the idea that Ben Kenobi is on Tatooine specifically in order to watch over the Chosen One. That still doesn't give us Luke Skywalker the accidental hero; Luke Skywalker who just happened to be in the shopping center when the bomb went off. Rather the contrary. A huge series of massively unlikely coincidences conspire to put him in the pilot's seat above Yavin at the precise moment when the entire future of the galaxy is hanging on one single proton torpedo. The more ordinary Luke Skywalker is, the more it looks as if the Galaxy, the Force or the Plot are fudging things to put him in that driving seat.

Consider:

• Luke Skywalker who is no-one of any importance is living in an unimportant settlement on an unimportant planet. By sheer coincidence, the last Jedi Knight in the universe just happens to be living a few hours drive from his front door.
• By sheer coincidence, the last Jedi Knight just happened to know both Luke's father and also his father's murderer.
   
• A Top Rebel Agent comes to Luke's planet to recruit the Last Jedi Knight to the rebellion. By sheer coincidence, she just happens to be a pretty young woman of about Luke Skywalker's age.
• The Imperials capture the Rebel Agent before she can get to the Last Jedi. By sheer coincidence, the Imperial Agent who captures her just happens to be the Last Jedi's former apprentice and the murderer of Luke's father.
• The Rebel Agent hides a message to the Last Jedi in a robot. By sheer coincidence, the robot just happens to be picked up (in the middle of a desert) by used robot salesmen.
   
• By sheer coincidence, the traders next stop-off point just happens to be Luke's entirely unimportant homestead in the middle of nowhere. (If the sandcrawler had gone somewhere else first, there would have been no story.)
• By sheer coincidence, Luke's uncle just happens to be in the market for some new robots. (If he had had plenty of robots, or been skint, there would have been no story.)
• Luke's Uncle wants to buy the Little Red Robot, but by sheer coincidence, it explodes a few seconds after he hands over the money, and Luke's Uncle takes the secret-message carrying Blue Robot instead. (This is such a stretch that at least two different bits of fan lore exist to explain it.)

Once Artoo Detoo is in Luke's Skywalker's possession, the plot develops reasonably naturally from the choices Luke makes: not too many more coincidences are needed to nudge him in the right direction. He takes out Artoo's restraining bolt because he wants to rescue the damsel in distress; he follows Artoo into the desert because of his recklessness and his bad relationship with his uncle; he volunteers to go with Ben to Alderaan because of his restlessness and wanderlust; he tries to rescue Leia from the Detention Block because he's in love with her hologram. It is however, important that, by sheer coincidence, Darth Vader just happens to choose exactly the right moment to blow up Leia's home planet. If he had delayed by even ten minutes the planet would have been intact when the Millennium Falcon arrived and the ending of Star Wars would have been much more like the ending of Rogue One. If he had lost patience with Leia ten minutes earlier, the Death Star would have been long gone by the time the Millennium Falcon arrived in the place where Alderaan used to be. The Princess would never have been rescued (boo), Obi-Wan would never have been killed (hooray) and the Millennium Falcon would not have accidentally revealed the location of the rebel base to Darth Vader.

None of this should be read as criticism of Star Wars. The film is a masterpiece of structure and form; really the only weak link is Leia's "they let us go.." moment at the end of the third act. Everyone manages to be the main character in their own story: to Luke, Leia is the damsel in distress who he travels half way across the galaxy to rescue; but to Leia, Luke is little more than an undersized country bumpkin who blunders in to her cell with no plan for getting out. Ben is an old warrior coming to the end of his tale; Luke simply the latest in a long line of young hotshots he has introduced to the Force. And Han Solo is a professional adventurer. Ten years down the line he'll be sitting in another bar on another planet boasting about that one time he rescued an actual princess from a battle-station the size of a small moon. But various plot magnets pull their stories together. Ben Kenobi pulls Leia and Artoo and Vader towards Tatooine; Leia pulls Luke and Ben and Han to the Death Star, and the Falcon leads everyone back to Yavin.

But the first half of the movie still takes a lot of swallowing. I suppose we could apply the Samwise Gamgee theory of narrative. As soon as he asks the question "Why do people in stories never turn back from their quests?" he can see that the answer is "Because the ones who did turn back never had stories written about them." So we might say "Luke Skywalker is the hero because he happens to be the person who Artoo Detoo fetched up with." Someone was bound to get the message eventually; the story might just as well have been "from the adventures of Wormie Starkiller" or "from the adventures of Camie Loneozner".

But I don't think that works for five minutes. Wormie's dad wasn't Ben Kenobi's best mate; and so far as we know he wasn't a hot pilot, certainly not hot enough to learn how to fly an X-Wing in no seconds flat. I think that The Plot is quite clearly at work; driving us to the moment when Luke Skywalker and The Guy Who Killed Luke Skywalker's Dad are chasing each other down the Death Star Trench. Luke has a personal stake in the battle between Obi-Wan and Obi-Wan's apprentice that no-one else in the galaxy could possibly have. 

So let's admit that Star Wars is massively driven by fate and coincidence and plot device. Alan Dean Foster could see this clearly; and he could also see that this was precisely what made the film so much fun. So he hung a lampshade on the very first page. 

"If this were written up as a movie novelization" says Princess Leia "You would condemn it as a bit of a stretch."

*

“Oh but Andrew,” I can hear you saying “This is far too straightforward. Why do you assume that it is Luke Skywalker who Princess Leia is talking about. She doesn’t mention him by name. And there are other heroes in the story.”

That is a very good point. Ben Kenobi is one of the heroes; but he wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time – he was summoned by Princess Leia. And Princess Leia herself is one of the heroes, but she wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time either: she’d been sent on a really important mission by the Rebel Alliance. And Han Solo and Chewie were heroes, albeit mercenary heroes, and even they weren't really in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were adventurers by profession, in a tavern waiting for a patron to hire them.

So who else could the Princess be talking about?

Once you have asked the question, the answer is embarrassingly obvious. There is indeed an innocent bystander who gets drawn into the story entirely by accident and becomes the most pivotal character in the whole adventure. Princess Leia could have entrusted her secret message and her secret plans to any one of a dozen astromech droids on the blockade runner. Artoo Detoo just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

All stories are true. Of course Artoo Detoo is the hero of Star Wars. He's the one with the secret mission and the secret plans inside him. He's the one who brings Luke to Ben. He's with Luke on the X-Wing at the end. The very first line in the film is Threepio talking to him; the very last line is Threepio asking about his welfare. So why wouldn't Leia, looking back years after the events, remembering how she unwittingly involved two lowly robots in Galactic events, say "They were in the wrong place at the wrong time...naturally they became heroes."

This makes the ret-con which said that Artoo knew Leia’s mummy and Threepio was kit built by his daddy even less forgivable. But it does give the problematic ending of Star Wars a hitherto unnoticed irony. While the humans are awarding each other medals in an incredibly overdone awards ceremony with undisguised Nazi overtones, the actual heroes are looking on from the sidelines. Doing, I suppose, the robotic equivalent of smiling wryly. And Princess Leia is in on the joke.

Path to the dark side, reading essays without subscribing to the writer's Patreon is.  

Rebel agents discover the First Order's ultimate weapon. You won't believe what happens next!

V

"A marvellous healthy innocence… Nothing unpleasant. People go bang-bang and other people fall over, but no horrors. No sleazy sex, in fact no sex at all. A wonderful freshness about it. Like fresh air... People are going to read too much into it."

       Alec Guinness on Star Wars.

Star Wars was fun. It never strayed into camp or self-parody; but there was always a sense that Han and Luke were big kids, having a great time. Bad stuff happened: planets got blown up, uncles and aunts got incinerated, princesses got tortured — but no-one really minded. Look at Leia greeting Luke in the detention cell: is this a woman who was subjected to torture a few minutes ago? Look at Luke greeting Han after the battle: is this a man whose best friend has just been blown up? Think of the garbage masher. Were you horrified at the idea that our heroes were almost certainly going to be crushed to death (or consumed by a garbage eating squid) or were you delighted that such a classic movie serial cliffhanger was being acted out on the big screen? And weren't even Han and Luke were enjoying themselves? "One thing's for sure; we're all going to be a lot thinner." I suppose soldiers do engage in gallows humour when they are seconds away from death, but surely not that kind of wise-cracking.

Furry first mates who tear people's arms off over chess games; quick kisses before swinging over chasms — utility belts containing ropes that are only of any use to you if you are planning to swing over a chasm, come to that; nervous little robots that scoot off down corridors when they see wookies. Everyone gives the impression that they are playing at being heroes and villains. This is one of the reasons why the Star Wars role-playing game was such a success.

The Empire Strikes Back is not fun. Goodies lose; death is final, and sad; friends betray you; trusted mentors lie to you; and being tortured really, really stings. Luke has his hand cut off, and Vader kills people to death, instead of just threatening to. Return of the Jedi fudges it: it seems to realize that Empire Strikes Back was altogether too dark, but instead of lightening up, it makes the main plot even heavier but counterbalances it with some comic relief. Ewoks. One of the things to be said in favour of Phantom Menace — I will repeat that: one of the things to be said in favour of Phantom Menace — is that what with Anakin winning the chariot race, and making friends with R2D2 and blundering into the front line of a battle; there is quite a bit of fun to be had even without that charming rascal Jar-Jar Binks. But Episodes II and III take us on a downward spiral of grimness.

"Let's play Star Wars! I'll be your forbidden love, and you can accidentally murder me."

"Ooo, ooo, can I be the little kids who get massacred!"

How could Lucas defend the silliness of Phantom Menace on the grounds that it was a children's movie, and then perpetrate the final half hour of Revenge of the Sith?

One of the very great strengths of the Force Awakens is that it puts that sense the fun back into Star Wars. It's by no means without dark moments — it starts with the massacre of a whole village by stormtroopers; and we distinguish Finn, the stormtrooper with a moral conscience from the others by virtue of the fact that he's got a bloody hand-print on his nice white helmet. Before long, apparent good guy Lor San Tekka has been killed and Poe Dameron is shouting "no, no not the mind probe!" But even these sequences have a great deal of joy about them. What better way for a story to start than with a hero meeting a mysterious contact in a tent and receiving a mysterious map? How right and proper for the mysterious contact to die right after handing over the macguffin!

Once Finn and Poe hook up, the fun really kicks in. They have just the kind of bravado and banter that a pair of player characters ought to have. (Template: Reformed Stormtrooper; Template: Brash Pilot.) And anyway, we're Star Wars fans. We're getting a feel of what it would be like to fly a TIE fighter. In Star Wars, the iconic fighters were little ships, the ones that came in packs and buzzed around like mosquitoes. And we scarcely ever got a look at the pilots. So of course the first set piece action sequence should be about a goody flying one of those little ships — and letting us see the cockpit, and the controls. Giving us all, in fact, a sense that we are inside the ship. Showing us, more than anything in the previous six movies, what it would feel like to be a pilot.

"I always wanted to fly one of these" says Poe. Life and death situation? Trying to save the Resistance? Could be killed at any moment?

Whee...this is fun!

If you wasted endless hours playing X-Wing on your first PC, and if you had a Brash Pilot with 8 dice Starship Piloting then you will understand that "Use the toggle on the left to switch between missiles, cannons and pulses; use the sight on the right to aim; the trigger is to fire" is the best line in any movie, ever.

Meanwhile, down on Jakku…

Rey is having a hard time; eating the Star Wars equivalent of pot-noodles; scavenging for metal; getting short changed by definitely not Jewish scrap dealer Unkar Plutt (Simon Pegg, not that you would know.) But after a brief and obligatory misunderstanding, Rey and Finn are having the time of their lives, running away from explosions, stealing broken down space ships and leading First Order TIE fighter into shipwrecks. 

Abrams is obviously very pleased that modern compositing technology allows us to see X-Wings and TIE fighters flying low over deserts and forests and seas and ice-flows where the old movies could really only show them against jet-black starscapes. It does look rather cool: but much of the Star Wars aesthetic involved ships whizzing across stars spangled backdrops. And it's less fun for X-Wings to be all-terrain vehicles. There should be X-Wings for fighting in space, snow-speeders for fighting in the snow, a new kind of half submarine half spaceship boat for fighting near the water — a cool new toy for each environment. (We don't even see any A-Wings and B-Wings and Y-Wings.) The Empire used to use totally impractical AT-ATs when attacking targets on land — the First Order just throws even more TIE fighters at them.

It would be untrue to say "so when Han Solo himself turns up, it is a surprise." But it would be fair to say that most of us weren't expect him to pop up at quite that moment. We are sufficiently engaged with Finn and Rey that he have temporarily forgotten that a class reunion of graduates from the original trilogy was precisely the thing we bought out ticket to see.  We knew Han was in it, but we weren't waiting for him.

But once Rey Solo has stolen the Millennium Falcon, the next thing which has to happen in the story is for Han and Chewie to come looking for it. This is the real explanation for the plot holes and coincidence that killjoys complain about. There could have been a caption which said "Rey and Finn traveled around the universe for some weeks, trying to find word of the location of the Resistance base…" and a map of the Star Wars galaxy with a wibbly line being drawn across it to show their route; and a cutaway to Han and Chewie hearing the rumour that the Millennium Falcon has been seen near Jakku and deciding to check it out… but that would have been boring. Han and Chewie showing up is the next thing that needs to happen in the Plot. So it's the next thing which happens, and damn common sense and logic.

So: Han and Chewie suddenly turn up; and are suddenly boarded by two different gangs of jabbas who Han owes money to. The ridiculous Mars Attacks B-movie creatures that Han is smuggling suddenly get loose and start eating people. Everyone continues to treat the whole thing as a brilliant game, even when Finn is about to be suddenly eaten alive by a carnivorous space octopus. No one is worried. We know that heroes don't get eaten by carnivorous space octopuses in the first reel. He knows it too. Whatever may be in store for old Mr Gandalf, I'll wager it isn't a wolf's belly. May the Plot be with you.

I grant that it would have been exhausting and vulgar if the film had tried to maintain this pitch for the whole two and half hours. We would have started to experience action-sequence fatigue, like we felt in the seventeenth or eighteenth hour of the battle of the five sodding armies. The tone changes noticeably when we arrive on…er…checks guide book…Takodana.

The Force Awakens is perhaps not overburdened with originality. I am happy, for the present purposes, to accept the theory that there is Only One Story. But Abrams seems committed to the idea that there is Only One Place, or at any rate, only about six places: the Desert Place, the Woody Place, the Snowy Place and the Wet Place — Tatooine, Endor, Hoth and Naboo (which also happen to be the most memorable locations on the planet Mongo.)

One of the good things about the prequel trilogy — I will say that again: one of the good things about the prequel trilogy — was the sheer range of silly and inventive settings that Lucas threw at us. Abrams seems only interested in revisiting settings we recognize from the old movies. If Rey's story was going to sort-of kind-of recapitulate Luke Skywalker's than maybe she should have been found living with her uncle and her aunt at the bottom of the ocean; or on the top of a mountain; or on a planet made entirely of cheese. But Abrams evidently feels that unless we start out with a long desert sequence we won't know it's Star Wars. 

So it is no particular surprise that Abrams should want to recapitulate the iconic saloon scene from Star Wars. And, it is no surprise, given 30 years of technology and thinking time, that the aliens in this cantina are far more imaginative and realistic than anything Lucas offered — doubtless each with a well-thought out back story that we'll have to buy the action figures and read the Visual Dictionary to find out about. It is no particular surprise that, somewhere in Abrams' iteration of the Star Wars universe there should be a wise-old-person who knows the Ways of the Force and can dispense cryptic plot-information in a strange dialect. And definitely no surprise that she is a diminutive CGI alien.

I was, however, quite surprised that Abrams chose to mash-up those two elements: to make this season's Yoda analogue the barkeeper in this season's saloon.

The Star Wars cantina (doo de dooby dooby doo, do, dooby do) is ordinary; just another rough place in a rough part of town. Luke lives in a world where meeting flatworms and walruses in a pub is only like bumping into a Chinese guy and a native American by the docks. Maybe doesn't happen every day, but nothing weird about it. But this tavern; this a place of power. There are holy relics in the basement. If anything, it's standing in for the Swampy Place. Rey's vision when she touches the lightsaber is the equivalent to Luke's vision at the Tree. It's a test.

One wonders, in fact, if Han knew exactly what he was doing when he brought Rey here. He says that Maz Kanata will help them get their droid home, something she shows absolutely no interest in doing. 

Abrams now lays his cards on the table. While the fun stuff with the octopus was going on the baddies have been engaged with the Dark Side of the Plot. Kylo Renn has done his big reveal: Han Solo is my father. We've met this movie's Emperor analogue, and discovered that he's constructing this movie's Death Star analogue.

The Starkiller base is the one really weak idea in the movie. Star Wars was about the Death Star. It was the centerpiece of the film. To all intents and purposes, the Death Star was the Empire. It may not have made total logical sense to imprison the Princess inside the Ultimate Weapon that she's stolen the plans for; or for the planet-buster to come complete with a detention block and conference suite; but it makes terrific dramatic sense for all the baddie scenes to happen in one place. It's the thing which holds the film together. 

Starkiller, on the other hand, seems tagged on as an afterthought, basically to give Dameron Poe something to do in the second half; and to give us an excuse to cut back and forth between Jedi Stuff and X-Wing Stuff. The scene in which the rebels sit round a conference table with a white board and brainstorm how to destroy the Ultimate Weapon is the one genuinely silly moment in the entire movie. It lampshades the problem that Star Wars baddies always seem to design their weapons with easily accessible self-destruct buttons too blatantly. It makes the audience say "I know this is fantasy, but puh-leaze..."

From Takodana onwards, we know where we are. Han and Leia did not live happily ever after: they had a son; he turned evil; they broke up. There is an Ultimate Weapon coming to kill everyone. It is Rey, not Finn, who Luke's lightsaber calls out to: she's the Jedi, the Force-person, the Hero of this trilogy. From then on, we're into the grim, dark, serious, mythical round of lightsaber confrontations on bridges and in forests, Son against Father, maybe Sister against possibly Brother, no final resolution, and the whole thing ending on a dying fall.

I don't know quite what it means for the Starkiller base to suck in a sun in order to power its hyperspace capable planet-buster rays. I don't know if it travels, Galactus-style, from solar system to solar system; eating stars and chucking their energy at planets that have annoyed it; or if somehow a side effect of a fantastically efficient solar energy converter is that it causes an artificial but temporary eclipse. I suspect Abrams doesn't know either. But it does make for a fantastically cool moment when Kylo Ren comes on stage in the final act and everything literally goes dark. (The very first scene in the movie is a stardestroyer eclipsing Jakku's sun.)

It's like we've squashed the happy go lucky victory of Star Wars and the grim sordid defeat of the Empire Strikes Back into one movie.

I like space knights and space dragons and duels and confrontations and no-Luke-I-am-your-father. I said that I thought the dominant genre of Star Wars itself was the Arthurian legend. Of course the new chapter should include desperate confrontations on bridges and terrible duels in dark forests, and awful tragedies. And of course, one of the veterans from the last trilogy needs to die on Starkiller, just like Obi-Wan died on the Death Star.

But oh, I do wish The Force Awakens could have stayed funner for longer.





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More than one person has told me that they like Star Wars but that they don't like "the fan fiction"....

More than one person has told me that they like Star Wars but that they don't like "the fan fiction".

They mean that they like the Trilogy but not the Prequels; or that they like Episodes I - VI but not Episodes VII, VIII and IX; or that they like the movies but not the cartoons, or that they think the Mandalorian contains too many inside references for its own damn good.

One old friend in the Twittersphere says that there is only one Star Wars film ("it is called Star Wars") and that everything else is fan fiction.

Well, from a critical point of view, this is not a million miles away from my own position. The 1977 movie "Star Wars" -- the one now known as Episode IV, A New Hope -- had a unique flavour, and nothing since has come anywhere near recapturing that flavour. As Star Wars critic and theorist Andrew Rilstone once said, the Empire Strikes Back doesn't extend the Star Wars Universe; but it is just about possible to retrofit Star Wars into the universe created in Empire Strikes Back.

But "everything else is fan fiction" is a really, really odd way of expressing that thought.

"The Book of Boba Fett is fan-fic" is a snarky way of saying "The Book of Boba Fett is not canon". Which, in the first place, isn't true. And in the second place, is unnecessarily demeaning to the folk who actually read and enjoy fan fiction.  And in the third place -- well, why does it matter if it is canon or not?

Sometimes, when I watch Star Wars -- a New Hope -- I choose to watch it as if it was a stand alone fairy tale set in space. As if Obi-Wan told the truth, and Darth Vader really murdered Luke's father. As if there was nothing incestuous about Luke and Leia's kiss.

 

You might say that I am pretending that no such movie as The Empire Strikes Back was ever made. You might say that it does exist as an artefact, but that it didn't really happen. That it doesn't have secondary reality. That it is only a story. That is belongs in Box Four. 

Or, if you absolutely insist, that it is fan fiction.

Sometimes when I watch Star Wars Episode IV I choose to watch it as if it were one component of a vast space saga stretching from The High Republic to the Rise of Skywalker and beyond. I like that kind of thing: Dune and the New Gods and the Thanos saga. Star Wars is bigger and more fun than any of them. In which case you might say that I am treating The Empire Strikes Back (and the Force Awakens, and all hundred and something episodes of the Clone Wars, and all fifty something issues of Doctor Aphra) as if it were canonical. As if it "really happened"; as secondary reality; and belongs in Box Three.

I suppose most of the time we hold both readings in our head. Obi-Wan is both lying and telling the truth; Leia is both Luke's lover and Luke's sister. See Threepio is both a droid and a man in an uncomfortable metal suit. The desert is both on Tatooine and in Tunisia. Wherever you go in the universe, there is a loud orchestra playing, but Luke and Han and Leia don't seem to be able to hear it.

I don't see how any of this is clarified by saying "fan fiction".

You could take the line that the only Star Wars Universe is the one George Lucas created. J.J Abrams ideas about how Han and Leia's marriage turned out and what they named their son has the same status as a piece of Han/Leia erotica on a Star Wars word-press blog. (Tash is no more than Aslan.) 

That would be an intelligible approach. I believe that fans of the Other Franchise used to say that only episodes Gene Roddenbury had a direct hand in were canonical. 

I myself am sometimes inclined to think that the first decade of Marvel Comics -- say from 1962 to 1973 -- are the only "real" Marvel comics. The primary text is the text that Stan Lee directly created; everything else is other writers riffing on his material. Some of them were very good writers; some of them produced very good riffs. But none of them was Stan Lee. But on this definition it would be deeply odd to say that The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith -- three films over which Lucas had complete artistic control -- are "only fan-fic". Fan-fic is pretty much the opposite of what they are. The Clone Wars TV series is probably as close as we can get to George Lucas's original, unadulterated vision of how he wanted Star Wars to be. The true identity of Luke's father wasn't in George's original notebook: but the Midichlorians decidedly were. 

Is Attack of the Clones a good movie? No, it is not. 

Is Attack of the Clones a good Star Wars movie? No, it is not. 

Do I think that Anakin's massacre of the Sand People is going to be a major plot point in the forthcoming Tatooine-set Obi-Wan TV show? Yes, I do.

Okay then. You could simply say that you really liked the prologue to Return of the Jedi, in which Boba Fett met an ignominious end in the Pit of Sarlacc, and really dislike the way the Mandalorian changed the story and said that he survived. 

There is nothing wrong with that. Where there are two versions of one story, it is quite natural to prefer one to the other. In Pygmalion, Eliza leaves Higgins and opens a florist shop with Freddie. In My Fair Lady, she goes back to the Professor. The original ending is better, in my opinion: the musical comedy version feels like a cop-out. Both exist; both were approved by the Author, who recognised that movies and stage-plays had different rules.

"Did you really just reference Jabba the Hutt and Eliza Doolittle in the same paragraph, Andrew?" 

Yes. I am rather afraid that I did.

But in preferring "Boba died" to "Boba survived" we are not comparing two versions of one story. We are not talking about Return of the Jedi. Return of the Jedi is a film. It's the same film in 2022 that it was in 1986  (give or take a Haden Christensen and a couple of gub-gubs.) We are not talking about The Book of Boba Fett. The Book of Boba Fett is a TV series about space gangsters, which some of us liked and some of us didn't like. We are talking about some third thing, which doesn't exist in any particular text, but which is out there, in idea-space, in our collective imagination, in fan discourse. We have tacitly agreed that what we talk about when we talk about Star Wars is The Star Wars Universe. We approve or disapprove of Boba Fett and the Last Jedi and the Bad Batch because of what they do, or what they do not do, to that conceptual non-thing.

If everything was an imaginary story then you wouldn't be complaining about the pit of Sarlacc. You care about the change because you think that all the different bits of Star Wars fit together into one enormous story. It's that one enormous story you think the Book of Boba Fett has spoiled. You are only saying that it is fan fiction because you don't believe that it is fan fiction. 

I agree that Star Wars has taken some missteps. I think that Star Wars is irreducibly a comic-strip world of people in black hats and people in white hats. I think that once you start giving the scary savage natives their own culture and their own way of life, then the very thing which was fun about Star Wars goes away. But that's an artistic judgement. A political judgement, too, if you think that "cowboys and Indians" is a racist trope. Some of the novels and comics have gone so far as to say that The Jedi and The Sith are not forces of good and forces of evil locked in perpetual manichean opposition; but two different but perfectly valid ways of looking at the world. The Dark Side is Dark, not because it is evil, but because it is hidden. I think that this is a really bad idea. I think that Star Wars is about goodies and baddies or else it is about nothing. But I wouldn't frame this in terms of canon and fan fic. 

I will never love anything in the way that I first loved Star Wars. But I like the composite fix-up universe of which Star Wars: A New Hope is one component very much; enough to be rewatching all 150 episodes of The Clone Wars and trying to keep up with Marvel's infinitely extended War of the Bounty Hunters "event". I like baroque, complicated, fictional worlds. I particularly like the way in which sleazy space saloons; mystical space-monk retreats; honourable space-knights in space-armour; and thrilling space opera all fit together into one story. I think this is one of the things that The Clone Wars cartoon does very well. It's slightly bloated, ensemble format showcases the scope of the Star Wars Universe. 

There are some really interesting out-takes on Disney Plus. There's a clip of Harrison Ford meeting a fat human called Jabba the Hutt; and a clip of Mark Hamill talking to a man with moustache about the nationalisation of the shipping lanes. They offer a really strange lens to look at Star Wars through. A universe almost, but not completely unlike the one we are familiar with. 

Fan fic? Canon? Stories? Things which George Lucas wrote on the back of an envelope and crossed out. 

Shall I tell you a secret? I even slightly don't hate the Holiday Special, because it takes me back to my pre-Hoth world where Star Wars was just a movie.

 

The TV franchise -- from The Clone Wars to Obi-Wan and beyond -- treats Star Wars as a place and a history. It assumes that we want to know who took over on Tatooine after Jabba died and are interested in who the first students in Luke's Jedi school were. How much we care it depends on our degree of engagement with the franchise. If you have even the vaguest idea of what a Star War is, then you understand questions like "What was Obi-Wan doing on Tattooine in the years of his exile?" and "Had Luke met Old Ben before that day in the Dune Sea?" If you regard Star Wars: Rebels as being in the same category as Droids and Ewoks then "Where is Ezra Bridger?" is pretty much devoid of meaning.

I think David Filoni is doing a pretty good job of bringing balance to the franchise. Mr Canon Freak gets to say "That was a Lothcat, wasn't it? I'm pretty sure it was a Lothcat", while Mr I've Never Seen Star Wars can still get the gist of what is basically a  spaghetti western with ray guns. If you haven't seen Rebels, you can still grok that Ashoka is a former Jedi and a person of some importance; but if you have seen it, you smile knowingly when she mentions she’s an old friend of Luke’s family.

Some people like this stuff on general principles. Some people object to it on equally general principles. I am lawful neutral. I like fantasy worlds. I like the illusion of the Star Wars universe being "out there" and that it would carry on being "out there" even if no-one was telling any stories about it. I am not intrinsically thrilled when a baddie from one of the cartoons appears in one of the live action series; but I don’t run away whimpering “fan service, fan service, get a life, get a life, fan fiction, fan fiction” either.

Mr Ultra Hard Core Canon Freak likes internal continuity and hates it at the same time. He spends three months saying “Squee! Squee! That gangster who kid Boba used to hang out with a series two of ther Clone Wars is going to be in the live action series, squee! squee!”. But once they see the episode in question, they are like “You did it wrong! He didn’t look right! You changed it! You have raped my childhood!"

Star Wars can't be an imaginary world and at the same time not be an imaginary world. You can't add to the setting and leave the setting unchanged. You can't pretend Tatooine is a real place and avoid mentioning dewbacks and krayt dragons in case someone thinks you are a sad case who needs to get out more. If I point out that a female of Yoda’s race (named ‘Yaddle’) was a member of the Jedi Council in Phantom Menace, and wonder out loud if perhaps she is Grogu’s mother, then Filoni might very well say “Nice thought, but no, they aren’t related...” But he would be unlikely to say “Phantom Menace is only a film; Female Yoda was both on the council and not on the council because the council was made up out of George’s head and anyway Episode I was shit, get a life, this is an imaginary story, aren't they all”. On the other hand, if I were to ask what happened to Jaxxon the giant bunny he would naturally say “That was stuff that Roy Thomas made up for a 1970s comic book, before Empire Strikes Back even came out."

Unless, of course, David Filoni decided that a giant green leporine bounty hunter was exactly what the Galaxy needed. In which case he might very well write a new story which happened to have Jaxxon in it. Star Wars "legends" material continue to exert a gravitational pull on the new, post-Disney canon. Comics, books and novels and cartoons and computer games are being treated as a vast melting pot of tropes from which characters and storylines can be scooped. Ashoka mentions that she is hunting down an ex-imperial officer named Thrawn. Thrawn was the main villain in Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars novels: he was the eponymous Heir to the Empire who tried to keep things going after Vader and the Emperor were killed. That’s all been retrospectively de-canonised: but Thrawn -- a blue skinned alien, like an evil Sherlock Holmes crossed with an evil Mr Spock -- turned up as a villain in Rebels. Because he’s fun. Perhaps someone will decide that Jaxxon the Rabbit is fun as well.  

Disney has not retrospectively re-canonized an entirely different post-Endor history. But neither had it flipped Baby Yoda into a different part of the Multiverse where Ben Solo was never born, the First Order never arose, and the Starkiller project never occurred. The Star Wars universe remains resolutely singular. 

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