Photo: Wikimedia user KAMIKAZON. Original logo by Suzy Rice.
by Alice McIntyre
When one thinks of Star Wars, the mind perhaps wanders to the realm of lightsabers and pioneering special effects, to action figures and Lego sets, or to epic battles acted out on a playground hillside, cut short by a ringing bell.
Mine flashes back to my childhood bedroom. It’s roughly 2006, and I have a VCR hooked up to the small tube TV which served as my portal to worlds beyond the imagination. It was a truly enchanting experience—theme song blaring, intro text scrolling, magnetic tape blurring the cropped image and forming the atmosphere of youthful fantasy.
I recently had the opportunity to see Star Wars (1977) in its near-original cut, the way I did growing up. Han shot first, no CGI; the same Star Wars my father watched. In the animatronics, puppeteering, and visuals of days gone by I saw a Star Wars which was unmistakably human in a way the masterful gloss of recent additions to the franchise cannot possibly convey. This version is one with the atmosphere that birthed it—the post-psychedelic seediness of the 1970s preserved in the static grit of tangible film, a Star Wars donning bell-bottoms and riding high off the victory of the Viet Cong. A mythic tale conveyed through performances which themselves have become a popular legend in their own way, perhaps the most naked expression of the archetypal hero’s journey we slept through in the 10th grade. We see ourselves in Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), the eternal rebel-from-nowhere. We see our other selves or perhaps our close friends in the roguish Han Solo (Harrison Ford) or the take-no-shit Princess Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher). John Williams’ score coaxes from us a primordial call to attention, a universal yearning for the struggle against the Big Bad.
In attaining its iconic, universal status as an expression of popular culture, Star Wars: The Mythology of Freedom has been subject to the laws of capital accumulation. It has become Star Wars: the Merchandise, the Enterprise, the Wookie Slippers, the Star Wars which could fertilize Spaceballs. Maybe it was always that way. Perhaps the magic is lost when we aren’t the child losing our mind in the theater when we see the Millennium Falcon, excusing ourselves from the dinner table early to whack the living hell out of our siblings with expensive pieces of plastic that made us feel larger than life.
In that moment we may become the jaded nostalgist, projecting their yearning not only for a youth which has passed by but for a future that never was. Nobody became Luke Skywalker. We didn’t die like Uncle Ben, either. We stepped out to buy those power converters and never came back, not because we didn’t want to, but because it was impossible. Every successive attempt to return to that place, huddled in a Snoopy blanket in front of the TV and having your mind blown, will be more and more disappointing. We take up that struggle against the Big Bad by deeming the new the Big Bad—a drive emerges to destroy what reminds us of our inability to be a kid again, what reminds us that our primary struggle is not against a singular Emperor Palpatine but the crushing weight of the metaphorical Empire, of the realities of our existence.
Fuck the prequels though, am I right?
Verdict: Broken VCR/10. We can never stop rewinding, rewinding, rewinding…
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