My first reactions to Star Wars VII (at about 3.50 am last night) are available now, as a special extra for Patreon backers. An actual review will appear here in due course.
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Luke: How long til we get to the secret rebel base? Han: What, Yavin? Luke: Thanks. Mine's a pint. Very Old Joke
Close up of ninja.
We deliberately start with an image that has nothing to do with Star Wars: a teenage mutant ninja turtle. Well: a ninja, at any rate. (The Episode I trailer began with a pretty direct Kurasawa reference. Robots sneaking through long grass in the mist.)
Well, I saw a ninja. Possibly the image also calls to mind Princess Leia's disguise at the beginning of Return of the Jedi.
Ninja, climbing in the huge space of a space ship. Music in background is not Star Wars music.
About the only thing I liked about The Abomination were the opening scenes in which Kirk's dad was seen crawling around a spaceship that looked very like the TV Enterprise; but being filmed in the style of Aliens or Blade Runner. Familiar, iconic images from unfamiliar angles. If the rest of the film had been like that, I would not have hated it. It wasn't, and I did.
Showing us the Big Pointy Ship as a Big Pointy Shipwreck is a genuinely good idea.
Voice: “Who are you?”
Ninja: “I’m no-one”
We can assume from this that she is someone very important indeed.
Woman, who we can tell is the ninja by her big pointy stick, walking across sand-dunes, accompanied by spherical droid, and sitting in a tent in green fatigues.
We know that the lady is Rey and the droid is BB/Beebee. (This is not quite as cute as FE/Effie, but it's getting there.) The planet is not, in fact, Tatooine, but Jakku. Is it possible that there are two desert planets in one universe?)
These images scream “Star Wars” at us, The first ones allude to Threepio and Artoo in the opening minutes of A New Hope. The brief scene in the shelter calls to mind Watto’s shop in Phantom Menace.
Rey is “no-one”, but she’s not above dangling on ropes in huge shipwrecks. The one thing we know about her is that she is a scavenger.
Conjecture: The amateur scavenger goes on board the wrecked ship and retrieves something the value of which she does not realize. "Rebels" and "Imperials" converge on her planet to try and get it back.
What is this macguffin?
1: Luke Skywalker's lightsaber
2: Luke Skywalker himself, encased in carbonite.
3: The seeds of the Force tree from the Jedi Temple on Coruscant.
4: BBD2 itself, who is carrying the secret plans to Death Star III.
Lucasfilm logo.
Sadly, the big green Lucasfilms logo screams “prequels” to us. (In 1977 “Lucasfilms” appeared in the same typescript as the rest of the credits.) But at least they are keeping any Disney branding at arms length. I don’t think I could have faced Star Wars with Tinker Bell's palace at the front.
I know that the Twentieth Century Fox fanfare was played at the beginning of dozens of other movies; but for me, that Fanfare signifies that I am about to watch Star Wars. I hope Disney have come to some arrangement and will be able to use the fanfare in the theme tune.
Stormtroopers being addressed by leader in military uniform. TIE-fighters (with white sails) on either side. Snowy mountains in the background.
One of the things that Lucas took over directly from Flash Gordon was the single-environmental worlds. A New Hope has a desert planet; Empire Strikes Back gives us an ice planet, a swamp planet and a cloud planet; Return of the Jedi adds a forest planet; Phantom Menace throws in a water planet and a city planet...and then everything gets a bit messy. Are there snowy mountains on the desert planet of Jakku? Or is there a Tatooine-analogue and a Hoth-analogue? Or is Abrams going to settle on a planet with more than one ecosystem?
Stormtrooper (Finn) taking his helmet off.
TIE fighter exploding.
Finn looking out from a hill towards a town in the desert
Finn’s voice: “I was raised to do one thing but I’ve got nothing to fight for”.
Finn is a stormtrooper; a disillusioned or turncoat stormtrooper. He gets separated from, or escapes from, the other troopers and takes up with Rey.
Return of the Jedi ends with Darth Vader removing his helmet; but we never see a stormtrooper’s face in the original trilogy. We do see clone trooper’s faces in Attack of the Clones and the Clone Wars cartoons: they all have the face of Jango Fett. We know from Rebels that stormtroopers are not clones.
Anyone who can see Finn looking out at the settlement and not think "I bet it is a wretched hive of scum and villainy" is not a true Star Wars fan.
Long shot of baddie — Kylo Renn — on bridge of spaceship.
The scene is overwhelmingly red: the colour of evil Jedi lightsabers. As in the poster, the colour seems to be consciously used here as a symbol of evil. In some of the shorter adverts the Imperial March plays over this sequence. We do not hear Vader's heavy breathing.
Kylo Renn addressing the burned out helmet of Darth Vader.
Kylo Renn touching another character, a stormtrooper, no-one we recognize, on the head, making him scream.
Renn: “Nothing will stand in our way. Nothing. I will finish what you started”.
The first close up of Renn forcefully reminds us how much like a gas mask Ralph Mcquarrie's original sketches for Darth Vader looked. The villain is almost praying to Vader, treating his helmet as a unholy relic: as if he does not know that he returned to the good side before he died.
Question: what did Darth Vader start? The only time he expresses a personal belief is when he says that he wants to destroy the Emperor, and "bring order to the galaxy". (Anakin talks about strong leadership in Attack of the Clones.) Does Renn want to rule the universe? Or is there a more specifically Dark Sided scheme that Vader started and he wants to finish. The destruction of all the good Jedi, for example? Does anyone know what the Sith were for...
We have been introduced to the two goodies, Rey and Finn, and the baddie, Kylo, without getting a glimpse of anything specific from the original movies. The helmet ties us back to the trilogy and then…
Whoosh! Fast montage of TIE fighters chasing the Millennium Falcon through wreakage of Star Destroyer. Three classic ships from the Trilogy in one scene!
Rey and Finn together, in some kind of rebel base. Han Solo, facing them.
Voice of Rey: There are stories of what happened.
Voice of Han Solo: It’s true. All of it. The Dark Side…The Jedi
In the first film, the point of Han Solo was that he was a relatively young guy who didn’t believe in the Jedi or the Force. It will be nice if in this one, he’s the old veteran who has to deal with the fact that none of the young dudes believe in the age of heroes.
Millennium Falcon in hyperspace
X-Wings flying over a body of water.
Kylo Renn with followers in darkness and driving rain.
Stormtroopers in ruined building.
X-Wing pilot ducks under the wing of his ship, sees Finn, taps him lightly on the shoulder, and walks on; the camera spins around as if Finn is staring at him.
For some reason, this was the one moment in the trailer which induced a proper tingling of the spine. I suppose because X-Wings, even more than lightsabers, are the central icon of the first movie; because the whole trajectory of A New Hope is a journey from Tatooine to Yavin; because it somehow only fully becomes Star Wars in that last quarter, when Luke becomes a rebel pilot. And obviously, because what Andrew Rilstone, chief Jedi Knight of East Barnet school, really wanted was to go to Yavin and be given his own X-Wing.
X-Wing and TIE fighter dog-fighting. TIE-fighter crashes.
Rey and Finn running from explosion.
Han leads Rey and Fin into ancient flag-bedecked building:
Is this the big ziggurat which the rebels used as a base on Yavin?
I think that Abrams is deliberately using imagery which calls to mind scenes from Star Wars: I very much doubt if we will actually see Hoth, or Tatooine, or anywhere else familiar, in the movie.
Figure with metal hand reaching out to touch Artoo Deetoo.
Everyone assumes this is Luke, because they can’t think who else it can be.
Stormtroopers emerging from one of those three-winged Imperial shuttles, led by grand stormtrooper in cloak.
Kylo Renn wielding lightsaber
Rey looking sad.
Han, Chewie and Finn having apparently just surrendered.
Beebee and Poe in an X-Wing: long shot of X-Wings and TIE fighters battling above an ice planet (the same mountains where we saw the stormtroopers assembling at the beginning?)
I am actually quite surprised that that implies that Han and Chewie are going to feature in an “action bit”. I’d wondered if General Solo might be limited to a minor cameo.
VOICE: The Force. It’s calling to you. Just let it in. This is being used as a substitute for “May the Force be with you” on one of the “retro” posters. You’d think the Force would be calling to Finn; but the voice is the same one that was asking Rey who she was at the beginning of the trailer. Could it maybe be that Finn has a lightsaber, wants to be a Jedi, but that Rey is the one with the actual power?
Stormtroopers disembarking.
Angry Rey shooting.
Stormtroopers in ruins.
Kylo Renn turns round, ignites lightsaber, and makes Forcey gesture into camera.
Millennium Falcon and TIE fighters in wrecked stardestroyer again.
Han embracing Leia.
This is the only look we get at Leia in the trailer. The implication is that something bad has happened. Someone has died. Someone has gone over to the Dark Side. One of the shorter spots has Accented Voice saying "Hope is not lost today" which you would only say if there had been a serious catastrophe.
The word Hope is specifically associated with Luke -- in the first film he is "a new hope" and in the second one he is "our last hope".
Final Image: Finn, looking scared, igniting blue lightsaber and defending himself from Renn.
This is what we are meant to be left wanting more of. The title of the film is “the Force Awakens” after all. And Kylo Renn thinks there has been "an awakening".
So the big climax has to be a bad Jedi fighting a good Jedi, or at any rate, a good wannabee Jedi.
It took Luke two movies to go from being a farm boy to being able to have a go at facing Darth Vader: Kylo Renn must be a bit of a wuss if a stormtrooper can already stand up to him in part one of the trilogy.
It was in the last days of the second millennium. The gilt hadn’t quite rubbed off Tony Blair. The Dome hadn’t quite become a national joke. The only thing I knew about the World Trade Center was that King Kong had climbed up it.
It was the last time I felt properly excited about Star Wars.
Symbols.
Symbols are almost like letters of the alphabet. We know what they mean without consciously seeing them. But don’t assume. The other day a colleague asked me if the Jews had a Bible of their own. ("Is it called the First Testament or something?”) A thing that everybody knows can become a thing that nobody knows, overnight. There are people old enough to drink in pubs who have never heard of Bagpuss.
The die-hard fan sees a symbol: everyone else sees a picture.
They see sand. We see Tatooine.
They see a dome-like Tunisian house. We see Mos Eisley.
They say “hang on, is there some kind of exposure error, there seem to be two suns” we hear the binary sunset theme in our head.
They read “Episode One” in small letters: we see Star Wars Episode I, the moment that has been implicit since the first seconds of The Empire Strikes Back. The moment that many of us thought would never come.
Yes: we can say that the prequels were a colossal disappointment.
But we can also say that, in 1998, we went to the Bristol Odeon, very possibly to see Star Trek : Insurrection and were confronted by the Episode One teaser poster for the first time.
The long, thin version, on the big cardboard standee.
Back view of little boy in slightly Jedi-ish clothes, walking past Luke’s house, or Ben’s house, or just a house.
Shadow of Darth Vader cast behind him.
One word on the poster: “Episode One”.
My spine has never stopped tingling.
Nothing has ever looked as Star Warsy as the original posters. The strange, far-away ones with Luke holding his lightsaber above his head while Leia curls up at his feet; the beam throwing a cross across the poster. The montage one, painted by someone who’d seen the movie, with Luke firing directly out of the image, Leia shooting to the left, Han to the right, and Vader wielding his saber, splitting the poster into three.
The Force Awakens posters evoke, without quite quoting, those 70s images. A crowded montage is quite retro for a modern film: blockbusters nowadays prefer single motifs (like Captain America’s shield or Batman’s bat) or else a striking image from the movie itself.
There is no single character dominating the picture. The closest to the center is actually a small figure of Threepio, possibly because the droids are the viewpoint characters of the whole saga. If anything, the fascistic military parade of stormtroopers are the focus of the poster. There's a cluster of familiar faces -- Han, Leia, Chewie, and also a fella in an orange jump suit who we know to be Dameron Poe, but who rather functions as an iconic Luke Skywalker substitute in the poster.
The biggest figure is Kylo Renn. (The face of Darth Vader presided over both the 70s Star Wars posters.) He is looking to the left, wielding his big red lightsaber. Finn has his back to Renn, wielding his blue lightsaber to the right.
The whole poster is split into red and blue, the dark side and the light: a very striking motif that has not been used before. There are ranks of stormtroopers pointing in both directions. Could this possibly mean that there is a proper civil war, with the white-armoured fellows fighting on both sides? Curiously Rey is on the red side of the poster, her pointy stick at the same angle as Kylo's lightsaber. Could this signify that she will be tempted by, or go over to, the Dark Side? Or is there some other connection between them? Mind you, there are X-Wings in the "dark" section so it may just signify that the two lightsabers are lighting up the scene.
I like the X-Wings best. Whatever else goes wrong, the presence of those original space ships -- the real space ships -- will make me happy. I like the fact that we are looking at paintings, not stills. Painted X-Wings have a dynamism that models never quite manage.
One of the trailers seemed to have X-Wings skimming the surface of a big space ship. But most interestingly and not otherwise hinted at, in the background of this poster, large and threatening, is something which is quite clearly a Death Star.
These are curious. Obviously, I want to love them, because they evoke the spirit of 1977. I don't think I saw them at the time; I don't think "Coming to your Galaxy this summer" was ever used in the UK. There was a slight whimsy to the advert; redolent of 2000AD costing 20p "earth money". We aren't sure how to market this thing; it's sci-fi, definitely, but it's not a classic space movie. ("A story of a boy, a girl, and a universe" was tried in the original cinema adverts.) "A Long time ago in a galaxy far far away..." has some of the same archness to it.
Some people have said that "galaxy" is code for "cinema". Not only is Star Wars coming to your "galaxy", but it is the kind of film you would have seen in a "galaxy" far far away when your dad was a kid and there was a newsreel with every movie. In which case the Star Wars comics are curiously tautological. "Beyond the movie. Beyond the movie house."
It was a nostalgic way of promoting a film in 1977. Now, it is meta-nostalgia, nostalgic for the nostalgia of punk and jubilee. Not many people even have grandparents who remember seeing Flash Gordon at the cinema; a few of those who were there when the credits rolled on Star Wars already have grand-children.
Do these posters declare their fidelity to the '70s vision of Star Wars? Or are they trying to usurp it -- from now on, this will be the movie you think of when you hear the 20th Century Fox trumpet blast?
No-one but us Star Wars fans will understand the joke.
Rey's poster is brown. She is slightly freckled. Her hair blows about in the wind. She is coded as wild, vulnerable, but determined. It isn't clear what she is holding. (From the trailers, we know that it is a pointy stick.) She has been hurt by the world. Stoical: a friend of heroes, rather than a hero herself? Androgynous: on the basis of this poster I might have thought she was a boy.
We do not know her surname. "Rey Solo" is a plausible sounding name. If Jedi are celibate, then it is hard to see where we would get a Rey Skywalker from. Assuming that Han the Leia got together after Return of the Jedi, she could be Darth Vader's grand-daughter.
Finn's poster is black. Finn is unshaven and sweaty. He looks bemused rather than grim, as if he has fallen into a plot he doesn’t understand. The lightsaber blade is the only light in the picture. A blue blade, telling us that he is one of the good guys. A smooth blade, telling us that it was properly constructed. Perhaps it was given to him: perhaps it is Luke's lost weapon? Although he is a Stormtrooper, he is definitely not the clone of Jango Fette.
Are audiences sufficiently colour-blind that Finn could be Leia's son? Or is the whole point of the racial difference to make it clear that he has a different heritage?
It is a well-known fact that there is no paper in the Star Wars universe. Less well know is the fact that there are no razor blades.
This poster isn’t about Han Solo. It is about his gun. I remember this gun. It is one of the few guns that appears consistently through the movie. Luke has a blaster (taken from a stormtrooper) but I can’t picture what it looked like. I can picture Han's gun. There was even a toy in the second or third wave of merchandising.
So Han in the new film will have the same gun as Han in the old film. Somewhere between a ray gun and a cowboy pistol.
This is Han from the original movies; the same guy, the same clothes, the same gun. But older. His face is unreadable.
Leia is green and black. Everyone else's face is bisected by a weapon: she is surrounded by those see-through heads-up displays from Empire Strikes Back. A serious face, authoritative but with something hidden beneath it. Grim. There is none of the inventive glamour of the old films, and certainly no earmuffs. This woman has seen a lot and lost a lot.
The hardest poster to take: would I know this was the Princess if you had not told me? Leia was the single most important thing in Star Wars. I hope that this Leia will not be a relic, or a stuffed shirt.
Kylo Renn is red and black. This tells us the least. We can hardly see that we are looking at a face. The original sketches of Vader made the mask look almost like a gas-mask: this seems a throwback to that. In the days before Phantom Menace, it was possible to believe that Darth Maul would be some kind of replacement for Darth Vader; he was actually barely more than a cameo. Abrams says that Renn is not a Sith: he has gone to the Dark Side and not taken the title Darth. His lightsaber is wobbly, jagged. Presumably he has made it himself, without Jedi training, and made it badly.
The absence of Luke is the most interesting thing about the movie until we see it. Once the reason is revealed, it will be something everybody knows, and has always known.
But the habit of various protestant sects of plastering the
landscape with religious slogans about the Blood of the Lamb is a
different matter. There is no question here of doctrinal difference:
we agree with the doctrines they are advertising. What we disagree
with is their taste. Well, let's go on disagreeing but don't let's
judge. What doesn't suit us may suit possible converts of a different
type.
C.S Lewis
Most people think of Thought for the Day as a religious homily plonked anachronistically in the middle of
a current affairs program. But it's really much more like a panel game. Contestants are challenged to give a three minute speech explaining
why two randomly selected concepts are, “in a funny way” (or "a very real sense") quite
like each other. Without hesitation, deviation or repetition...
“And
you know, the Great British Bake Off is very like the Eucharist,
because…”
“It may seem odd to be burning Guy Fawkes on the Feast Day of St Joannicus, but in fact…”
I had been rather looking forward to writing a funny
take-down of Rev. Prof. Steven Wilkinson’s contribution to the genre,
which showed that in a funny way Jesus is quite like Luke Skywalker. But I was careless enough to listen to the piece before writing my critique, and it turned out to be disappointingly good. The reverend
professor shows every sign of both liking and understanding the Star
Wars movies and, more surprisingly, of liking and understanding God.
So, waiting for a new film to come out is a bit like
the Christian season of advent: well, yes, in a funny way, it is.
Studying the trailers for hints about the new movie is a bit like
studying the scriptures for signs of the Messiah: yes, up to a point,
it is. The films are about how something intangible like the Force is
more powerful than the baddies' big machines; which is like saying that the spiritual is more important than the material. Yes, definitely. Rev. Prof. even manages to work in a twenty word defense of the prequels. They are making
a deep point about “How evil can develop from an obscure trade
dispute to take hold of political and military structures on the
largest scale. And how easy it is to be tempted and seduced by power
even when trying to battle for the good.” Well, yes. Yes they are.
I particularly respect the fact that he doesn’t
press his text too hard. Star Wars is not a Christian allegory. It
was a good joke for Alec Guinness to reply "And also with you" to a fan who had said “May the Force be with you” precisely because blockbuster
movies are, in a funny way, quite unlike the liturgy.
So. Having no excuse to talk about Thought for the
Day, I had better talk about something else.
There is a long-standing tradition that the Church
of England’s Christmas advertising campaign should create some sort
of stir or controversy. There was the stupid “call center in
heaven” one; the impenetrable “bad hair day” one and the
incendiary “fetus Jesus” one. I doubt if anyone is ever persuaded
to go to church by this kind of thing. “Short, interesting talk about the Nativity Story by
someone you’ve vaguely heard of. Free mince pies” would do far better.
This year, their holinesses thought it would be a
wheeze to make a cinema advert and pay for it to be shown directly
before The Force Awakens. The advert consists of lots of different kinds of
people saying the Lord’s Prayer in lots of different contexts,
ending with the message “Prayer is for everyone”. In a funny way, this is a lot like a film about a happy
family mealtime which happens to mention that Mum used a particular
stock cube to make the gravy; or showing lots of English pubs full of happy yokels, and just happening to mention what brand of ale they are all drinking. Present
people with a lot of positive images of churches — cute school
children, chirpy black people, wedding days, an evangelical baptism, remembering a loved one in a churchyard — and they’ll
come out feeling well-disposed towards God, Church and Oxo cubes. Sell the
sizzle, not the sausage. I see nothing wrong with the Church using the expertise of an advertising agency in this way; in the same way I see nothing wrong with a Vicar asking a public speaking expert how to put more zing into his sermons.
It turned out – and you wonder why no-one checked this out in advance – that the advert can't be shown because the UK cinema chains have a general policy
against religious and political advertising. A general policy
against all religious and political advertising. Which is to say, they do not accept
advertisements from any religious group or political party. Put another way, that means that whichever church or political party had asked to
place an advert in the cinemas, it would have been turned down.
Seems like quite a sensible rule to me. Religion and
politics are out of place in entertainment venues. I wouldn't be quite comfortable with a Hindu prayer, because I wouldn't quite know what I was supposed to do. (Stand up? Bow my head? Cross myself?) I'd be even more uncomfortable if someone said a Christian prayer and I bowed my head but other people talked through it or heckled. Not "get out my gun and start shooting people" uncomfortable. Just "shuffle a bit and spill my popcorn" uncomfortable. Miss Manners still
advises us to keep off sex, religion and politics in casual conversation, because people hold strong views abut them and you don't want people getting cross and heated at your dinner party.
Some of you may remember how, in 1997, Birmingham
Council promoted a series of municipal events between
November and January under the general brand-name Winterval. And some
of you may remember how the extreme right invented a lie that
Birmingham Council had banned Christmas and replaced it with a
politically correct festival of their own invention. However many
times the true story is told; and however many times you produce the original
Winterval poster, with the Word “Christmas” and a Christmas tree
prominently displayed, the story still circulates. Everybody knows that councils have banned Christmas so as not to offend the Islams. Poor Colin Baker was circulating the story only this week.
The story of how the Church of England
had foolishly wasted its money on an advert which it could never
show has transmogrified into a new myth. According to the myth, the issue wasn't that cinema chains
had a policy against religious or political adverts. It wasn't that they were enforcing their policies inflexibly, or even that they'd given the Church of England the impression that they might be prepared to relax the rules and then changed their minds. The myth says that this particular advert has been singled out for prohibition, because the Lord’s
Prayer is too offensive and shocking for movie audiences. Pundits
queued up to condemn the fictitious ban. Boris said that the prayer shouldn’t
be banned because it was very old and informed our whole culture. [*] Steven Fry said that it was
“unfair” to treat the Church of England the same as everyone
else. Richard Dawkins sneered that if anybody was offended by the
prayer they deserved to be offended. Giles Fraser did one of his
somersaults: he pretended that he thought that cinemas had said that the Lord's Prayer itself was upsetting and offensive, and then affected
incredulity that anyone could find a prayer more shocking than an 18 rated
movie.
Former Archbishop Rowan Williams' column in the London Evening Standard went beyond parody. He claimed that the
pretend ban was part of a plot by “cloth headed persons” to
“avoid the terrible threat represented by mentioning the
Christian origins of Christmas”. These
cloth-heads were trying to “protect”
the “delicate and sensitive public” from this
“appalling truth”. Never mind that there are so many school Nativity plays that shops report an annual tea-towel shortage. Never mind the neon baby Jesuses spinning above every German Christmas market. Never mind rampaging mobs of carol singers and Carols From Kings live on the BBC. Or the Head of State's religious message to the nation on Christmas day. The rejection of this
one advert amounts to a
general ban on mentioning Jesus in December. [**]
This kind of thing is pathetic when it’s Colin Baker moaning about “political correctness gone festive” in
his local paper. When it’s an educated college lecturer writing in a
national paper, it’s plain dishonest. He knows that it’s a
stretch to talk about the Christian origins of Christmas. Some
bits, like the nativity play, are clearly Christian; some bits, like
Christmas trees, are pretty obviously pagan; some bits, like Turkish bishops flying through the air on luminous reindeer, are a bit of both. It’s
even more of a stretch to say that we owe the whole idea of peace and
goodwill to the story of the shepherd and the angels.
Williams is a clever man and a scholar. He knows perfectly well that the angels did not say
“peace on earth and goodwill towards men”. What they said was
“on earth peace to men on whom God’s favour rests” or “peace
to those with whom God is pleased”. But he chooses to base his whole
argument around the folk version which everyone knows. Then again, he claims that the
Christmas story is “the story of a human life in which unlimited
generosity and mercy were at work” and that that life is
“a vision of what humans might be”, which is almost the exact opposite of what mainstream Christians believe.
I don’t, in fact, think that Rowan Williams is a pelagian. I think he believes as the Church believes, that Christmas is about God coming to earth in
human form. I think he’s offering up a heresy because he thinks
that his readers would recoil from the orthodoxy. I think he is, to coin a phrase, trying to protect his readers from the terrible threat of knowing the appalling truth of what Christmas is all about.
He's also weird on the actual Lord's Prayer. There is a story in the Bible about what happened when Jesus’ followers asked him how they ought to pray. Jesus tells them, in essence, to keep it simple. Don’t say long complicated prayers. Don’t pray
in market places or cinemas where people can see you. Just ask God for what you need. And he gives an example. In the
New International Version of the Bible it runs to some 30 words.
Father
Hallowed be your name.
Your Kingdom
come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins
(for we also forgive everyone who sins against us)
And lead us not
into temptation.
But this isn't complicated enough for the ex-bishop. He says that the prayer is important because it“contains the hope that there will be food and
well-being for all”. Does it? I think it contains a
very simple request that we should have what we need-- and a
little bit more, so we don’t have to worry.
He says the prayer
tells us “that we may learn not to think all the time in terms
of what is owed to us but of what we might do to release others from
guilt and debt”. Does it? I think it contains a very simple
request to God to forgive us when we do bad things, and a promise
that in return we’ll forgive other people when they do bad things
to us.
The Lord's Prayer is, he concludes "a philosophy shaped by the conviction that we are
most human when least obsessed with defending and promoting our
self-interest and when recognizing our shared human needs.” No: no it really isn't.
It's clear enough what's going on here. Williams is trying to claim that the Lord's Prayer contains a set of ideas and an ideology that everyone can sign up to, whether or not they believe in God. Because he thinks that his readers will be shocked, embarrassed and offended if he tells them what he really believes: that we can all address God as "Father" and ask him for stuff we need.
Williams concedes that religion has done bad things,
but says “We tend to forget that much the same is true of
politics, capitalism, socialism, science, alcohol, sex and football.
None of these seems to be a rival candidate for being excluded from
the public eye.” Yes they are. Politics, capitalism, socialism and indeed sex are all on the list of things you can't advertise in cinemas. Liquor adverts are okay at the movies; but they are banned from the TV. This does not mean that the television companies have a "whiskey ban" or a "Jack Daniels ban": there's just a general policy of not accepting paid adverts for alcohol. And you never hear Jack Daniels moaning about the exclusion of whiskey from the
public eye. And Jack Daniels doesn’t even get to run schools, or have 26
guaranteed seats in the House of Lords, or a ring-fenced three minute
slot on the Today Programme.
Williams thinks we need religious advertising in
cinemas to counterbalance the adverts and movies which promote
a materialistic message. Everything else in the cinema is an advert for Mammon, so we need adverts for God as well. (He doesn’t
say if he also thinks that all-you-can-eat buffets ought to carry
adverts promoting fasting, or Spearmint Rhino should have stern
posters warning you that if you play with it too much it will drop off.) He goes so far as to claim
that when he visits the cinema he “has to sit through an
assortment of adverts actively and aggressively promoting a set of
values and myths that I find mostly incomprehensible or alien.”
Really? The Archbishop doesn’t understand
why anyone would want pretty clothes, a smart motor car, delicious
food, a big TV and possibly a bottle of posh whiskey? I get that he
thinks we should suppress our desire for those things and aim at a
simpler life, and maybe he’s so holy that he isn’t tempted by
that stuff at all; but is he really saying he finds it weird that
some people prefer the good life over the hair shirt?
He also claims that modern films are very expensive
and promote myths about power. Well, some do, some don’t. There are
big violent films like James Bond and little sweet ones like the Lady
in the Van. You even get religious films once in a while. I watched the Hunger Games trilogy right through and was impressed by how moral (and morally complex) it was.
The Vicar/Professor on the wireless has it much more
right than the Druid/Bishop in the paper. Star Wars isn’t about
incomprehensible, alien values. In a funny way, and a very real
sense, it’s sort of kind of vaguely a bit Christian. Whether
there’s an embarrassing prayer video before it or not.
[*] What do you mean, we, kemo sabe? [**] The fact that a particular student counselor was told not to express personal opinions to clients is also said to be evidence that some universities think that students should be protected from opinions of any kind. But he must know that non-directive counseling is a fairly standard way of helping people think through their problems?
Darth Vader is standing on the bridge of a Star Destroyer, looking out into space.
Boba Fett enters from behind. “I lost him” he says.
"This is most disappointing" replies Vader.
One of the great things about Darth Vader is that, while he is in some ways the personification of anger, he always speaks in calm understatements: "I find your lack of faith disturbing"; "The Emperor is not as forgiving as I am"; "No. I am your father." Not everyone writing Darth Vader after the fact gets this right.
Vader has hired Fett to track down the boy who destroyed the Death Star. He thinks he encountered the same boy, armed with an oddly familiar lightsaber, on Cymoon 1. Fett has traced Luke to Tatooine, where Luke is trying to retrieve Jedi relics from Ben’s old home. Blinded by a flash grenade, Luke trusts to the Force (doubling all his attributes for one round) and manages to deflect Fett’s blaster fire with his lightsaber.
Vader asks if Boba Fett got anything at all of value. “Just his name” he replies. “Skywalker.”
This time, Vader doesn't speak at all. He just clenches his fists, and the Star Destroyer’s windows shatter. You can more or less imagine the heavy breathing sound effect and the Imperial March playing in the background.
Marvel's current Star Wars sub-imprint has a nice line in parallel plotting and intertwining narratives. Vader's discovery of Luke Skywalker identity occurs in issue #6 of Jason Aaron's Star Wars series; but the same scene is shown in #6 of Kieron Gillen's Darth Vader title. Gillen's version is somewhat decompressed: we are much more inside Vader's head. Between Boba's words and Vader's reaction are inter-cut a series of flashbacks — Amidala telling Anakin she is pregnant; the Emperor telling Vader that she is dead; her funeral; the Death Star Trench; Vader fighting Luke on Cymoon. A New Hope, Revenge of the Sith, and earlier issues of this comic are all equally canon, equally part of Darth Vader’s memories. It seems to fit together. Beneath the mask, Darth Vader is still Anakin Skywalker, with Anakin Skywalker's memories and Anakin Skywalker's feelings.
Ben wasn't even telling the truth when he said that Anakin Skywalker no longer existed.
In Kieron Gillen's version, he looks out through shattered glass. “I have a son. He will be mine. It will all be mine.” This doesn't work quite as well as "This is most disappointing". It's too ranty; too much the kind of thing a Marvel Comics Supervillain would say. ("Ha-ha. This is merely a temporary set-back. Soon the world will hear from me again.")In one of the Extended Universe novels, possibly Shadows of the Empire, Vader is seen using the Dark Side of the Force to completely heal his body so he can survive without the black armour. But he doesn't quite have the strength to do so; his love for Luke means he hasn't fully given himself over to the Dark Side. This struck me as pure Doctor Doom and not at all Darth Vader.
In A New Hope, Vader refers to Luke merely as "this one" -- an anonymous pilot who is somehow strong in the Force. By the beginning of Empire Strikes Back he is "obsessed with finding young Skywalker". We have all asked the question "what did the Dark Lord know, and when did the Dark Lord know it?" Aaron and Gillen provide an answer. Vader was completely unaware of Luke at the time of A New Hope (he could not sense his presence and it never occurred to him that anyone would hide his son on his own planet); he guessed the X-Wing pilot was someone important; he only found out what had happened when the bounty hunter discovered the pilot's name. It seems that although Uncle Owen hated the memory of Luke's father and Obi-Wan knew that secrecy was vital it never occurred to either of them to raise the orphan as Luke Lars.
There had to be one particular moment when Vader found out; the equivalent of Luke's moment on the bridge on Bespin. What we read in these two comic-books is exactly what we would have imagined that moment to be; exactly what we would like to have happened in a movie. It feels right.
And of course they made it up. Our of their heads.
It is possible for a scene, or a story, to be so well-imagined that that this doesn't matter. For a scene to achieve instant canonicity, not because a man with a mouse says so, but because we feel it can stand alongside Obi-Wan and Vader's duel, or Luke looking out at the binary sunset, or any other iconic moment. It's that level of iconic canonicity that The Force Awakens has to achieve if it is going to justify its existence.
Some texts force us to have faith in them by sheer force of imagination.
This book is a work of fiction. I made it up. Neither novels nor their readers benefit from attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species. I appreciate your cooperation in this matter.
The Fault in Our Stars
“Don’t get me started” said the man in Forbidden Planet “On the Star Wars books. I read hundreds of them, and now bloody Walt Disney says they are not canon any more.”
So I didn’t get him started.
I meditated instead on Uncle Walt issuing ex cathedra commands from that block of carbonite beneath the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. I wondered how the Great One’s judgement affected my friend’s book collection.
When he heard that J.J. Abrams had been commissioned to make Star Wars VII, did he honestly believe he was simply going to take the first “extended universe” novel — Heir to the Empire — and adapt it into a movie? Or did he imagine that Abrams would create a new story, but somehow feel bound to make it consistent with that novel? With all the novels? With the literally hundreds of novels?
I can see how you might be disappointed that much-loved characters like Jacen Solo and Ben Skywalker are never going to appear on the big screen. Twenty-four years is a long time to be reading pulp novels. Picking up a shiny new Kevin J Anderson book in Borders may be a magical memory for him, just as surely as handling the first ever issue of Star Wars Weekly is a magical memory for me.
I know people who read the 61 Virgin Doctor Who novels and the 73 BBC Doctor Who novels in the years when Doctor Who was off the air. What is for me a slightly interesting collection of spinoffery is for them the Real Thing, the thing they first fell in love with. (Don’t laugh. There are now plenty of Avengers fans who have never read a comic, and even some Lord of the Rings fans who have never read the book, or indeed any book.)
I hardly know who Mara Jade is. For some people she is almost as real as Princess Leia. Although I can’t help thinking that she must have sunk into a sort of quantum half-life the moment we saw the posters for Attack of the Clones.
But there is a sadder possibility. Perhaps our friend never really enjoyed the books very much to begin with. Perhaps he was reading them as a kind of crib sheet because they were providing him with information about what happened in the Star Wars galaxy. And now Uncle Walt has declared they aren’t even that. So he totally wasted his time reading them.
I once heard one of those atheists saying that the reason people resist de-conversion is that they can’t face the fact that all the hours they spent reading the Bible was a waste of time. Because obviously those are the possibilities. Either a literal account of how Noah herded brontosauri onto his ark, or a waste of time. If a story isn’t true, it doesn’t have value.
Everyone agrees on that.
*
I heard vintage folk hippy Donovan playing the acoustic tent at Glastonbury. He sang about Atlantis and hurdy-gurdy men. People were coming to Glastonbury to listen to music and celebrate the spring long before the modern festival, he said; since the days of King Arthur, at least. I wrote this song about Queen Guinevere, he said.
Well, I say I wrote it, he said. I mean it came through me. Then he threw flowers into the audience.
I am not angry that Walt Disney has declared that Han Solo never went to Aduba-3 and teamed up with a giant green rabbit named Jaxxon. I never really believed he had. But I do feel sad, genuinely sad, almost bereaved that George Lucas pitched treatments of Episodes VI, VIII and IX to Walt Disney and Walt Disney turned them down.
Some fans will not understand that. Some fans hate George Lucas, hate the prequels, hate Return of the Jedi and Clone Wars and Ewoks and Midichlorians and Han shooting first and Princess Amidala and the idea that there are only ever two Sith and the fact that the Emperor was playing both side of the Clone Wars. Those fans made a big thing, a big play, of cheering when the Sequels were announced. “Hooray!” the said “Hooray! George Lucas won’t have anything to do with it, so it might actually not suck!”
I heard an old man who used to be Bob Dylan in the Cardiff Arena. Even his most die-hard fans who long ago accepted that Blowin’ In the Wind was a waltz and you aren’t supposed to be able to hear the words of Hard Rain found it hard not to, well, shuffle a bit when he started the seventh Frank Sinatra cover of the evening.
But still. This was Bob Dylan. People have been shouting "Judas!" at him for a very long time. If he did what we expected him to do, he wouldn’t be Bob. And his rendering of The Night We Called It a Day was genuinely beautiful.
God knows, Lucas has made some questionable decisions. But weren’t they his questionable decisions to make? Star Wars came through him.
*
A very long time ago, I believed in Father Christmas.
My earliest memory, one of those memories that may only be a memory of a memory, is of a stuffed toy (a gollywog, since you asked) poking its head out of a Christmas stocking. It was hung on the end of a baby's cot, so I must have been less then two years old. In my conscious memories, the excitement of getting new toys and presents at Christmas was secondary to the slightly scary prospect that, on one day of the year, subject to special rules and conditions, while I was asleep, Father Christmas would visit my house. Letters and grottos I didn’t care about nearly as much. A Father Christmas you could talk to or draw pictures of wasn't really Father Christmas because the point of Father Christmas was that no-one ever saw him. The magic of Christmas is bound up with the fear and excitement of preparing the house for the arrival of this supernatural being.
And baby Jesus, of course.
I don’t think I ever believed that Father Christmas existed in the same way that my baby sister, John Noakes, or Mrs Bolter from the Co-op existed. And, with all due respect to the sky fairy fraternity, believing in Father Christmas felt entirely different from believing in God.
It's more like a game than an act of faith. Everyone in the family agrees to behave as if a magical elf is going to visit you in the night. No-one is deceiving anyone else: Mum and Dad and the big kids enjoy role-playing a world where elves from the North Pole cross North London on magic sledges just as much as the little ones do.
But the moment anyone says out loud that Mum and Dad put the presents under the tree and always have done then the game is over and Santa disappears like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor's imaginary son. It's the saying, not the knowing, which ends the story.
In fact — and I am going to propose this to the University of Life as the basis for a Doctorate in Made-Up-Ology — isn’t the whole reason for playing the game that you know that at some point the game is going to come to an end, in the same way that the whole point of having guinea pigs is that guinea pigs don't survive very long? The parent who tries to replace the ex-guinea pig with a new guinea pig with similar markings has missed the point of guinea pigs, and anyone who tries to convince a child that Santa Claus really exists has missed the point of Santa Claus. Pets are there to ever-so-gently introduce children to the idea of death (and the other thing, the thing which can result in cages full of baby guinea pigs). Father Christmas is a rite-of-passage: a mechanism which allows children, at their own speed, to say "I don't want you treat me as your baby any more."
Miracle on Thirty Fourth Street and that god-awful letter miss the point entirely.
I don’t read nearly enough novels, particularly considering I am a librarian. But the ones which I do read consume me. The last one was John Williams’ Stoner, which is just as good as everyone says.
Reading a novel is a matter of trust. When I read a book I am very consciously putting myself in the hands of the writer. I accept that the writer is going to try to fool me: try to make me care about situations while simultaneously admitting that he made them us. I am interested in how this particular writer is going to play that particular trick on me; what techniques he is going to employ. Of course, writers, even very good writers, make mistakes. I don’t really swallow an academic department splitting over such an obviously hopeless student as Walker. But I don't cast the book aside, crying "you have exploded the illusion, and moreover, raped my childhood" nor do I necessarily try to construct a different book in which the mistake makes sense. I just accept that this is a story, not real life, and that even good writers sometimes make bad calls.
The last good book I read before Stoner definitely wasn’t The Fault in Our Stars and I definitely didn’t cry all the way through it.
For nearly forty years I have had a vivid image in my head of the elderly Luke Skywalker, years after his adventures are over, sitting on a throne as King or Emperor or President of a new, more benevolent Empire or revived Republic.
In my dream, his throne is on some sort of pedestal or plinth, picked out by a single spotlight, his old friends clustered around him, but somehow at a Shakespearian distance. The Droids have moved on; it seemed important that they had had owners before Luke and will have other owners after him. I don’t know whether in this original version Luke married the Princess and had children. I think he probably did. Marriage is the proper way for a fairy tale to end, and it is hard to see how you could swing across a chasm with a lady and not end up marrying her. Unless you nobly renounced her like Tarzan, and there wasn’t a sequel. I don't recall there being a little prince, a Luke Skywalker Jnr. But I am pretty sure that King Luke welcomed members of the East Barnet School Jedi Knights Club (chairman, A Rilstone) to his re-purposed Life-Star and gave them light-sabers and sent them off on Arthurian romances....
And now I read that someone called Abrams, the Abrams who entirely failed to understand Star Trek, has gone away and in a matter of weeks and without asking George, decided what really happened.
Why is his version more valid than my version?
Because Walt Disney, the same Walt Disney who ruined Forbidden Planet Guy’s collection of Star Wars novels, says so.
And why does Walt Disney have the power of binding and losing?
Because Walt Disney bought Star Wars for three billion dollars, enough money to bomb Syria for almost a fortnight.
And where did Walt Disney get all that money from?
That is the secret mystery of fiction. To determine what happened to Luke Skywalker; to impose your image of Old Luke over George Lucas's image, and more importantly, over mine, you first have to co-create a cartoon mouse.
*
There is a very easy answer to the question "Why does John Williams get to decide if Bill Stoner's marriage was a success?" or "Why does John Green get to decide if Hazel's cancer goes into remission"? Because they're the ones writing the book, that's why. The characters wouldn't exist if not for them. They not merely the writer. They are the Author. The Author. It sounds even better if you say it in French.
The great ones, Luke Skywalker and Doctor Who and Captain America do not have Auteurs. Oh, someone dreamed up Captain America to begin with, but he's dead and hasn't written an episode in 40 years. Since about when Star Wars came out, come to think of it. And, of course, each episode is created by a writer. And fans do sometimes talk as if each writer, the tenth or fiftieth to write about Captain America, is unveiling or disclosing sections of a story that were conceived nearly a century ago. "In this episode" they say "It is revealed that Captain America's parents were Irish immigrants" where what they actually mean is that some writer made it up.
I think that faith in the canon -- faith that your collection of Star Wars novels describe events which really occurred, faith that Luke Skywalker is person to whom things can happen -- is what we acolytes of the great ones have instead of an Author. We can't say "It's true because the Author says it's true". We have to say "It's true because it's true."
If we don't have faith in the Author, we have to have faith in the text.
But that faith is the kind of faith we had in Father Christmas. It's a "let's pretend" faith, not something we really believe. Let's pretend that what we are going to see on December 18th is what really happened to Luke and Leia and Chewie and Threepio and Artoo and Landau. Let's all agree to keep the pretense going. Because the moment someone says "it's just something which Abrams wrote on a napkin", Father Christmas will stop calling on us.
*
That's why I have always found the prequels so easy to forgive. When Carrie Fisher said “General Kenobi, years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars...” George Lucas was (I assume) standing just out of shot, imagining General Grievous and the the Clone Army and Ahosoka being expelled from the Order. At any rate, he knew that the Clone Wars were kinds of Wars in which those kinds of stories might happen. When Peter Cushing said "the Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us", George Lucas was (I am pretty sure) standing back stage imagining a dome the size of a city with little floaty platforms for planetary representatives to stand on. When Mark Hamill smiled at Sebastian Shaw and Alec Guinness, George Lucas was (we can be certain) smiling back, secretly knowing what was going to happen next, and knowing that it wasn't yet time to reveal it.
From the moment I first went into Ben (Obi-Wan) Kenobi’s hovel with Luke Skywalker, I wanted to hear the story of how he fought in the Clone Wars alongside Luke's father, and how his apprentice betrayed them. I do think that it should probably have been a story, not a film in its own right: Alec Guinness, speaking to Luke and Threepio, out beyond the Western Dune Sea. Some people think that Ben and Luke’s Father were contemporaries, fighting alongside each other; but that doesn't fit with Luke's Father following Ben on a damn fool idealistic crusade. And Ben is a lot older than Uncle Owen. So I think that Ben had two pupils Luke's Father and Darth Vader, one good, and one evil.. But maybe that's a comic-bookish idea; something that wandered into my personal Star Wars from Doctor Strange?
That's okay. Until Ben starts talking, both stories exist.
Instead we got a different story, a very good story, called The Empire Strikes Back; and probably nothing in Ben's story would have been as gut wrenching as that moment on the bridge when Luke tells Darth Vader that he knows he killed his father...
Mourning a story is probably quite silly. Mourning a story that was replaced by a story as good as The Empire Strikes Back is very silly indeed. Silliest of all is mourning stories that do exist, that you are free to re-read whenever you want, but that the Wicked Frozen Uncle has declared non-canonical.
But still, I swear. That panel in the comic when Blue Leader (who was Red Leader in the film) turns to Luke and says "The galaxy'll be a lot better off when the sons of the original Jedi Knights are back on the scene!" If I look hard enough and long enough, maybe I can find the ghost of that other story there?
Star Wars; Journal of the Whills; The Adventures of Luke Skywalker — the twelve part generational saga that Lucas planned to tell. That was obliterated when the cameras rolled on what turned out to be called Episode V. Before that: when George Lucas met Joseph Campbell and Luke’s Father ceased to exist. But to know that Walt Disney has seen the back of Lucas’s original envelope and was offered the chance to tell that story, Lucas's story, the true story, the one about Luke’s grandchildren — and turned it down in favour of allowing J.J Abrams to makes something up.
The last remnants of the old order have been swept away...
