It has been over ten years since the last installment in the
Star Wars saga. Tomorrow night, December 17th, 2015, the seventh
chapter will hit US theaters. My oft-written of wife got us tickets for the
Thursday night opening, so we I don’t have to wait another excruciating day to
see it. I’m dealing with a lot of feels right now about the new movie, and I
wanted to take some time and try to deal with them.
Yet another important event in my life that I have been mercifully
spared an emotional marathon of anticipation, thanks perversely to a chaotic
and seemingly endless schedule of teaching and graded. This has been the story
of my 2015: my wedding in May, my honeymoon in August, and now Star Wars in
December. These things have all been waiting at the end of the semester, always
just beyond reach, only accessibly by finishing the semester and all its
related work, like some grotesque item in an RPG that is only attainable after
hours and hours of level grinding. I’ve successfully completed all the levels,
but then, I end up being beset by thoughts and feelings all at once. That’s
hard to deal with.
Since I have been, there has been Star Wars. I truly
believed that after 2005 and Revenge of
the Sith there would be no further big screen Star Wars adventures, and
when Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012 and practically immediately announced
plans for more movies I felt my heart beat hard. The teaser trailer a year ago
literally brought a tear to my eye. I had to pull my car over this spring when
the first actual trailer came out, Han telling Chewie they were home gave me a
feeling that all was right with the world, and that all I needed to do was make
it to December. I heard that day, the first time of many, if I’m being honest,
my father’s voice in my head. He died in January of 2005, and never saw Revenge of the Sith. He would always say
upon news of a new Star Wars movie “I hope I’m alive to see it.” This became
something of an unofficial tagline for Star Wars in my still dealing with his
death mind, and when that trailer came out in the spring, I heard my father say
it again. Except this time, it was me saying it, a little shout out to my dad I
guess, who is going to miss his second consecutive Star Wars movie. I’m getting
a little teary even thinking about it.
The last time however, we knew what was going to happen. We
knew it because it had to happen, because we knew what came next.
We knew it in the same sense that you already know the
happenings of Paradise Lost, because
Milton’s genius was likewise working within a fictional universe that had to
resolve itself in some very specific ways.
This time, we don’t know. There is nothing that has to line
up or follow here; we are in undiscovered country. We have a new bunch of heroes,
and a new villain, and some old favs most likely just stopping in for an
appearance. For the record, I thought of the evil Luke idea months ago, but my
wife thinks it’s terrible. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being true,
and I gave a bunch of evidence from the Original Trilogy, verbatim naturally,
to support my claim. I am a professor of rhetoric, after all.
I realized that there is probably not a place to organically
insert the Imperial March into this new movie, and that squeezed my heart like
nothing I can describe. One of the most iconic themes in all of film, how could
it not appear in the next movie? Then, recalling the rousing martial score that
accompanied the Clones in Episodes II and III, I felt the dread being replaced
with interest as to what the new Imperial March would end up sounding like.
I’m worried because the prequels were so bad. Sure, we all
tried to act like they were fine, and that they were all the things we loved
about Star Wars and all that, but they weren’t any good, and they flat out contradicted
things and changed things that formed the basis of our universe.
I felt myself lumping enormous pressure on Kylo Ren, he who
must somehow fill the shoes of Darth Vader,
and I know that he can’t, but I’m willing to give him an honest try. I
like a lot about him, provided all the things we’ve come to know remain true. I
like that he’s basically a Sith/Empire sycophant, a guy who’s trying so hard to
follow a legacy that he wills himself into being those things he so adores.
I’m worried that when the lights go down and the crawl
starts I’m going to cry. I know, I know for a fact, I won’t be the only person
doing that, because Star Wars, like Harry Potter, is something you grow up
with. I learned lessons from the Original Trilogy that I still reflect on daily,
and there are moral and philosophical questions from the prequels that my wife
and I engage in probably once a week. I’ve been able to get my wife interested
in Star Wars, where she previously had no connection at all. I suppose it’s
fair, as all of my Harry Potter knowledge is thanks to her. This isn’t so much
a concern as it is a certainty, I think: when the crawl starts, I’m going to
cry. I’ll shed few tears and hope my
wife doesn’t notice, because she make fun of me afterwards, because that’s the
correct way to respond to someone’s emotional investment. Just like when Snape
died, and she was practically inconsolable, and I held her in the theater and
whispered to her that it was alright, and have spent years telling her that her
emotional response was and is perfectly fine and normal.
But that’s what Star Wars is. It’s something that you love
and live and learn from. It’s something that you got (probably, depending on
your age) from older people in your family, and we know, because we see it on
social media all the time, it’s something that you give to others. To your kids
and your loved ones. You grow up believing that you could be a Jedi if you
train hard enough, only to have that dream dashed by idiotic, introduced and
forgotten plot points like midicholorians. Star Wars as metaphor for American
life: YOU can do anything, and be anyone. So long as you were born into it.
Otherwise, you’ll spend the rest of your life working for a junk dealer,
complaining about sand. It’s Star Wars as the teenage experience: you grow up
idolizing the Jedi because of the tales of their heroism, only to learn that
those tales were only true from certain points of view, those same points of
view that determine and define good and evil. A person who loves you like a
brother will leave you to die in agony rather than grant you a merciful death,
only to show up at your awesome living space thirty something years later when
your son who was born on that same day is only like 18 somehow, and make it
seem like that thing that happened decades ago was all your fault, that it was
your fault he left you to die screaming on a planet that was nothing but
volcanoes.
Leading up to the day of my wedding, I kept making these
jokes about hoping my dad would show up as a Force ghost. On the day of my
wedding, right before my wife walked down the isle, I looked around real quick
to see if he did. He didn’t. I’m going to do the same thing in the theater
tomorrow night, just like I did in 2005. I know he won’t be a Force ghost, and
if he were, he’d probably steal my popcorn and make comments about the other
people in the theater. But I got the idea to look for him, and somehow believe
sincerely in my heart that he could appear as a Force ghost, from Star Wars,
the movies that made the most impossible things seem like they were just a
matter of focusing hard enough and reaching out with your feelings. If he were
there, when the crawl started, my dad would shed a tear as well.
But tonight brings us finally to a new chapter. A new set of
heroes and menace. For Generations, another chapter; a First Contact for a new
generation; an Undiscovered Country for all, but, as we know thanks to the
promise of continued movies, not a Final Frontier. As the theater descends Into
Darkness, and we move Beyond the iconic crawl, and then long after the
completion of our Voyage Home, having fought off the ever-present Nemesis of
the internet and all its spoilers and theories, ourselves mounting our personal
Insurrections filled with Searching and Wrath against out inborn fandom needs
to know about our favorite galaxy far, far away, we will have a whole new Star
Wars movie to talk about and add to the huge wealth of Star Wars. I can’t wait
much longer, and fortunately, we don’t have to.
First star to the right, and straight on until morning.
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