Steal This Book is, in a way, a manual of survival in the prison that is Amerika. It preaches jailbreak. It shows you where exactly how to place the dynamite that will destroy the walls. The first section--SURVIVE!--lays out a potential action program for our new Nation. The chapter headings spell out the demands for a free society. A community where the technology produces goods and services for whoever needs them, come who may. It calls on the Robin Hoods of Santa Barbara Forest to steal from the robber barons who own the castles of capitalism. It implies that the reader already is “ideologically set,” in that he understands corporate feudalism as the only robbery worthy of being called “crime,” for it is committed against the people as a whole. Whether the ways it describes to rip-off shit are legal or illegal is irrelevant. The dictionary of law is written by the bosses of order. Our moral dictionary says no heisting from each other. To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.
Community within our Nation, chaos in theirs; that is the message of SURVIVE!
We cannot survive without learning to fight and that is the lesson in the second section. FIGHT! separates revolutionaries from outlaws. The purpose of part two is not to fuck the system, but destroy it. The weapons are carefully chosen. They are “home-made,” in that they are designed for use in our unique electronic jungle. Here the uptown reviewer will find ample proof of our “violent” nature. But again, the dictionary of law fails us. Murder in a uniform is heroic, in a costume it is a crime. False advertisements win awards, forgers end up in jail. Inflated prices guarantee large profits while shoplifters are punished. Politicians conspire to create police riots and the victims are convicted in the courts. Students are gunned down and then indicted by suburban grand juries as the trouble-makers. A modern, highly mechanized army travels 9,000 miles to commit genocide against a small nation of great vision and then accuses its people of aggression. Slumlords allow rats to maim children and then complain of violence in the streets. Everything is topsy-turvy. If we internalize the language and imagery of the pigs, we will forever be fucked. Let me illustrate the point. Amerika was built on the slaughter of a people. That is its history. For years we watched movie after movie that demonstrated the white man’s benevolence. Jimmy Stewart, the epitome of fairness, puts his arm around Cochise and tells how the Indians and the whites can live in peace if only both sides will be reasonable, responsible and rational (the three R’s imperialists always teach the “natives”). “You will find good grazing land on the other side of the mountain,” drawls the public relations man. “Take your people and go in peace.” Cochise as well as millions of youngsters in the balcony of learning, were being dealt off the bottom of the deck. The Indians should have offed Jimmy Stewart in every picture and we should have cheered ourselves hoarse. Until we understand the nature of institutional violence and how it manipulates values and mores to maintain the power of the few, we will forever be imprisoned in the caves of ignorance. When we conclude that bank robbers rather than bankers should be the trustees of the universities, then we begin to think clearly. When we see the Army Mathematics Research and Development Center and the Bank of Amerika as cesspools of violence, filling the minds of our young with hatred, turning one against another, then we begin to think revolutionary.
Be clever using section two; clever as a snake. Dig the spirit of the struggle. Don’t get hung up on a sacrifice trip. Revolution is not about suicide, it is about life. With your fingers probe the holiness of your body and see that it was meant to live. Your body is just one in a mass of cuddly humanity. Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines, and in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them. The duty of a revolutionary is to make love and that means staying alive and free. That doesn’t allow for cop-outs. Smoking dope and hanging up Che’s picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps. A revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power. We are not interested in the greening of Amerika except for the grass that will cover its grave.
******************************************
For better or for worse (probably for worse), this passage had a big impact on me when I first read it at age 18. I was unfortunately influenced by some of Abbie Hoffman's outrageous pronouncements like:
To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.
...which at the time caused me to think it was okay to steal from a supermarket if you could get away with it. (Sigh, what an idiot I was.)
During my college years, I was fond of quoting this section. My email archive reveals that on December 2nd, 1996, I actually copied this out into an email I wrote to a friend. I included this introduction at the time:
Here’s some food for thought for you. It is a passage from Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman (Yippie founder, and one of the Chicago eight--but you probably already knew that.) Take note—I don’t agree with everything he says. I am in total agreement with him when he points out the problems in American society (or Amerika as Abbie puts it, but I’m not sure what the unconformist spelling stands for) however I part ways from him regarding his violent solutions. Here it is:
....and then I proceeded to quote the entire above section.
I also quoted a line from this section in my Chimes article on the Death Penalty from 1999 (see here and here):
“Murder in a uniform is heroic, in a costume it is a crime.” -- Abbie Hoffman.
....which I now also look back on with embarrassment. For one thing, quoting Abbie Hoffman in a political article only encourages people not to take you seriously. But even beyond that, this quote wasn't really about the death penalty. Abbie Hoffman was talking about the difference between killing in war and killing in peacetime. In my mind, it was related to the death penalty because I equated "murder in a uniform" to a uniformed officer executing the death penalty, and "murder in a costume" to the person receiving the death penalty. But I think I was stretching things a bit too far.
But put a pin in all of that for right now. When I finish this book, and get around to reviewing it, I'll talk more about the politics of it. For now, I want to forget about the politics, and focus on how effective this prose is.
I was taking a freshman English class at Calvin College at the time, and every week we had to bring in a piece of writing that we liked to share with the class. I brought this piece in. I edited it slightly. I cut out the meandering parts and just kept in the punches. And, because this was Calvin College, I changed "we will forever be fucked" to "we will forever be deceived". If memory serves, my edited version was something like this.
We cannot survive without learning to fight and that is the lesson in the second section. FIGHT! separates revolutionaries from outlaws. The purpose of part two is not to change the system, but destroy it. Here the uptown reviewer will find ample proof of our “violent” nature. But again, the dictionary of law fails us. Murder in a uniform is heroic, in a costume it is a crime. False advertisements win awards, forgers end up in jail. Inflated prices guarantee large profits while shoplifters are punished. Politicians conspire to create police riots and the victims are convicted in the courts. Students are gunned down and then indicted by suburban grand juries as the trouble-makers. A modern, highly mechanized army travels 9,000 miles to commit genocide against a small nation of great vision and then accuses its people of aggression. Slumlords allow rats to maim children and then complain of violence in the streets. Everything is topsy-turvy. If we internalize the language and imagery of the pigs, we will forever be deceived.
Until we understand the nature of institutional violence and how it manipulates values and mores to maintain the power of the few, we will forever be imprisoned in the caves of ignorance. When we conclude that bank robbers rather than bankers should be the trustees of the universities, then we begin to think clearly. When we see the Army Mathematics Research and Development Center and the Bank of Amerika as cesspools of violence, filling the minds of our young with hatred, turning one against another, then we begin to think revolutionary.
Surprisingly (this was Calvin College, after all), the professor actually liked it. After I got done reading it aloud, she commented, "A very powerful piece. And what makes it so powerful? It's that parallel structure."
And, I think I agree. If you read the above passage aloud, and you emphasis the words dramatically, and get into the rhythm of the parallel structure, then it can be a very effective piece of rhetoric.
Sidenote: In the sentence:
A modern, highly mechanized army travels 9,000 miles to commit genocide against a small nation of great vision and then accuses its people of aggression.
...I was never sure if "its" was meant to refer to the army or the small nation. That is to say, I wasn't sure if "it's people" was supposed to mean "its own people" (i.e. the people of the country that the army is from, or in other words, American citizens) or if "its people" is the people of the small nation. Back in college, I thought it meant the former, but rereading it now, I think it's probably the latter.
So, if we're scoring this passage on its prose style, maybe take off one point for an ambiguous pronoun.
Since I've been revisiting He-Man and the Masters of the Universe recently (see here and here), I've been trying to collect my thoughts on the franchise.
One of my memories as a kid is that near the end of the original franchise, the toys associated with the franchise became more and more diverse, in kind of a weird way. I mean, the toy franchise started out fairly normal--you have a bunch of people who are good, and a bunch of people who are bad. But near the end, you had toys that were animals who could turn into rocks.
As you can see above, there were 10 of them. 5 good ones, that were on the side of He-Man and friends, and 5 bad ones, that were on the side of Skeletor.
As a kid, I remember seeing these in the toy shop, and thinking to myself, "Wow, it's been a while since I watched the He-Man cartoon. I guess the story has expanded a lot since I last saw it. Now they've added these meteor rock animals into the story. I wonder what kind of stories they are telling about them."
Being naive, I had no idea as a kid that the toyline was driving the story rather than the other way around. I assumed that the writers of the TV show had created these Meteoroids for the purposing of expanding the story, and that the toys just came afterwards. (In fact, by the time these toys came out, the He-Man show had already stopped making new episodes, and was in reruns, but I didn't even realize that. I just assumed that new episodes must still be coming out, even though I personally had stopped watching.)
I never actually saw these Meterorbs portrayed in any of the Masters of the Universe media, but as a kid I trusted that they must be part of the story somehow, and for many years after, in my mind they were emblematic of the endless creativity of this series, and how it kept expanding its story outward in new directions.
As an adult, however, it's easy enough to research this stuff on the Internet, and discover that the Meteorbs never appeared on the He-Man TV show. Two of them apparently appeared in one episode of the She-Ra show. (Even though the packaging material on the toys clearly advertised them as allies of either He-Man or Skeletor.)
And in fact, a little bit of further research shows that they were not originally Masters of the Universe toys at all, but were originally a Japanese toyline of transforming eggs from Bandai called Tamagoras, and Mattel just repackaged them as Masters of the Universe toys, and assured us kids that they fit into the storyline somehow.
...which, yeah, kind of makes sense, given that both are rocks that transform into some sort of creature.
The Rock People were another toyline which were advertised as being part of the He-Man world, but apparently only ever appeared in the She-Ra show, because the He-Man show had already stopped production when these toys came out. As a kid, I had one of the Rock People action figures (which I must have gotten as a gift on Christmas or my birthday). As with the Meteorbs, I had never seen the Rock People in any of the cartoons, so I didn't know how they fit into the storyline exactly, but I assumed that they were in the cartoon somewhere, and I just hadn't seen the episodes.
I also had two of the Meteorbs, Ty-Grrr and Crocobite, which I think I got for stocking stuffers one Christmas morning.
Anyway, the point of all this is to try to convey the fascination that the Masters of the Universe franchise could have on a child. As an adult, of course, I recognize that the Meteorbs were just a cynical and lazy cash grab to milk just a few more dollars out of a dying franchise by repurposing Japanese toys, and then trying to convince kids that they were really He-Man toys.
But as a kid, you looked at all these bizarre He-Man toys in the toyshop, and thought, "Wow, is there no end to all the magical creatures that are contained within the story of He-Man."
PS--I was inspired to do this little dive into the history of fringe Masters of the Universe figures because of reminiscing brought on by this video HERE. But I'll wait to post that until I've finished my complete review of Masters of the Universe: Revelation.
*******************
Check out Masters of the Universe #2 (The Coming of the Meteorbs! Falling Stars, Vol. 1) on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3ZCxFDJ
(This is an Amazon Associate's link. If you buy anything through that link, I get a commission.)
Well, as long as I've started allowing Steve to get me to reminisce about old Star Trek books I read in 5th and 6th grade, I might as well continue.
Steve mentions Diane Carey again (although the specific Diane Carey titles he mentions were ones I haven't read.)
But other than Diane Carey, the only other titles and authors I recognize in this video were Yesterday's Son and Time for Yesterday, both by A.C. Crispin, which I read back in the day.
Like the Diane Carey books, this was yet another series I read out of order because I didn't know any better. I read Time for Yesterday first because that was the book that I found in the bookstore. And only realized as I was reading it that it was a sequel to another book called Yesterday's Son. So once I finished Time for Yesterday, I ordered Yesterday's Son through the mail.
As Steve mentions, these books were really good. (Steve doesn't care for the sequel as much, but I remember enjoying them both when I was in 5th grade.)
As Steve explains in the video, Time for Yesterday is a sequel to Yesterday's Son, and Yesterday's Son is in turn a sequel to the original Star Trek episode All Our Yesterdays, which was also really good.
As I mentioned in my long post on Star Trek years ago, for much of my late teens and 20s (when I was desperately trying to be cool) I was ashamed of how much time I had wasted on Star Trek in my adolescence. But I also acknowledged in that post that it was the perfect entertainment for a young boy.
And you know what, looking back on this stuff, I'm going to double down on that statement. This kind of stuff hits the sensibilities of a 5th and 6th grade boy exactly right. And intellectually, I think it's just about the perfect level for that age as well. I shouldn't be ashamed of my young Star Trek obsession. This is exactly the kind of stuff you should be reading and watching when you're that age.
What caught my ear on this video in particular was the mention of Diane Carey. Watch the video from 5:36, when Steve is talking about his favorite Star Trek writers:
of course Diane Carrey who I consider to be the best Star Trek writer, a writer who never phones it in and who never insults the the intelligence of her readers and who also understands nautical matters which almost no other Star Trek writers do, has spent time on the open ocean
Diane Carey was my favorite Star Trek writer when I was in 5th grade. I read Battlestations! and absolutely loved it. Then I read Dreadnought! next. (Dreadnought! was actually the first book in the series and Battlestations! the sequel, but I read Battlestations! first because I didn't know any better initially, and then circled back to read Dreadnought! once I realized Battlestations! was a sequel.)
I actually did my 5th grade oral book report on Dreadnought! I had to make a poster and talk about the plot of the book. I must have done a good job of selling it, because afterwards several of my classmates were looking for the book in our school library, and I had to explain that our school library didn't actually have it, and I had gotten the book from a bookstore. "What, did you just choose a book outside of the library just to frustrate us, so nobody could find it?" one of the girls said to me (only half-jokingly).
My memories is that I liked Diane Carey for her plots, and not for her prose. I found her prose hard going back in 5th grade, but I loved the way the action of the book kept steadily escalating and escalating and the screws kept getting tighter and tighter on the main characters.
I want to say I've read one or two other Diane Carey books back in my adolescence, but I can't remember which ones they were. Looking at her Wikipedia Bio, I don't recognize anything else. Possibly I read Ghost Ship, although I don't have any clear memories of it.
Update:
Steve Donoghue was kind enough to respond on Twitter:
These two are very, very enjoyable - if you can overlook the 800-pound Mary Sue in the room!
I was just looking this up on Wikipedia, and apparently even the cover art is based on Diane Carrey and her husband. But I am 100% willing to forgive it all. https://t.co/hpOwxHg3pj
I don't have a Disney+ subscription, but I did grow up on the Disney Channel in the 1980s. (Back in the 1980s, the Disney Channel had a different format. It was largely just a place to re-run old Disney content.) And I have TONS of nostalgia for these old Disney movies.
So, here are my thoughts on io9.gizmodo's list:
1. The Black Hole (1979)
Oh, man! I love The Black Hole! I remember this got played on the Disney channel when I was in second grade, and I was so obsessed with it!
2. Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959)
I totally remember watching this off the Disney channel when I was young. I love Darby O'Gill and the Little People 3. Escape to Witch Mountain (1975)
Loved this movie when I was a kid. This one and the sequel as well!
4. The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969)
Absolutely loved this movie when I was a kid. Still love it. I love the whole Dexter Riley trilogy.
5. Return to Oz (1985)
This is a bit of strange one, but I do remember seeing it as a kid on the Disney channel and have fond memories of it.
7. The Black Cauldron (1985)
I've got tons of nostalgia for this movie. As I mentioned here.
8. Flight of the Navigator (1986)
Oh man! I remember my grandma taking me to see this in the theatres back in 1986. I absolutely loved this movie!
9. Fuzzbucket (1986)
Hmmm.... I don't think I remember this one actually...
10. The Cat From Outer Space (1978)
I've got vague memories of seeing this on the Disney channel when I was younger, but I don't remember anything about it. It must not have made much of an impression on me.
On the bus ride to Philadelphia, I met other protesters who did not seem to be entirely in touch with reality. One couple tried to tell me that Marlboro cigarettes was affiliated with the KKK because their were hidden Ks on the box. When I asked them why they were going to the protest, the guy in the couple began, "Well, I was at this Pink Floyd laser light show…" The story ended up being that he was on magic mushrooms at this show, and on the way out he passed a tree, and somehow he knew then that he was supposed to fight for justice everywhere.
That same week, another incident happened at an organizing meeting.
The people not in affinity groups were told to pick an affinity group and chose a spokesperson. One of the girls nominated herself as spokesperson, but nobody chose her. She claimed it that she wasn't picked because she was a woman, and that it was discrimination. The facilitator of the meeting (who was also a woman) questioned her right to speak, at which point the self-appointed spokesperson became very emotional and called the facilitator a dictator. She raised such a fuss that the facilitator let her stay "fine, you can be a spokesperson and represent two people." Later the facilitator made mention of that argument, and the woman became so enraged at being singled out that she started screaming and yelling and tried to attack the facilitator. She finally left after a lot more crying and yelling. She later believed she would be singled out by the police for arrest because of the outburst, and again tried to attack the facilitator.
Anyway, the point is that for whatever reason, Leftist activist meetings tend to attract a lot of mentally unstable people.
Which makes it difficult to do any serious organizing work.
What to do about this problem, however, is a difficult question.
While researching information on Voltairine de Cleyre (for the previous post), I came across a 4 part publication detailing the history of anarchism in Grand Rapids. See here.
I looked in vain for the author's names, but couldn't find it. Apparently whoever wrote it wanted to be anonymous. But I've got a strong suspicion I know who it is--one of my former comrades from the Media Mouse days.
Should one wish to go a bit further back, Emma Goldman once visited Grand Rapids and actually loved it. She gave a speech at which she was very well received. She writes about her trip briefly in her autobiography, and at the time she gave a brief write in mother earth magazine http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/goldman/ME/mev6n1.html#17
The author, though, was way ahead of me on this one, and responded:
@Joel:
Way to go with knowing my two favorite bits of Grand Rapids anarchist history! There was actually a hilarious article in one of the newspapers of the time when Emma Goldman was in town that basically expressed surprise that she wasnt an actual monster, it was pretty ridiculous.
There was also a very active IWW branch in the early 1900s.
So I said:
Ah, so I see I'm not the only one who knows this little tidbit then. I actually learned about it a few years ago, in Japan of all places, when reading through Emma Goldman's autobiography. Id be curious to know where you first heard about this. Is it common knowledge in West Michigan progressive circles, or did you have to dig around a bit?
I've not seen the newspaper articles though. Were these from the Grand Rapids Press or its equivalent of the time? And again, how did you stumble upon them? Are they publically available?
In her autobiography Emma Goldman also talks about William Buwalda, a US soldier from Hudsonville Michigan, who was court martialled and imprisoned for the crime of shaking hands with Emma Goldman.
And the author responded with:
I came across the bit about Volteraine de Cleyre while reading her biography.
As for the Emma Goldman bit, I actually searched around a bit in the Grand Rapids Public Librarys local history room to find the articles. They were in whatever the Grand Rapids Press equivalent was back then, although there were actually multiple newspapers. I cant remember what one they were in. To find the dates I believe I cross referenced with a tour itinerary from another source.
I dont have access to the notebook with the references right off hand, but Ill try to find it. Maybe Ill see about scanning or retyping the articles sometime, just for curiositys sake.
Someday Id like to do a piece looking at radical history in Grand Rapids, so this would certainly fit.
So, I suspect that he's the same author of this extensive 4 volume history of anarchism in Grand Rapids.
I was an active member of the group Media Mouse--whose history is briefly covered in volume 4 starting on page 30.
Since I like to wax nostalgic on this blog, I'll jot down a few reminiscences here from my Media Mouse days. This can be read as a supplement to the history of Media Mouse that you'll find Volume 4 of the History of Anarchism in Grand Rapids.
I wasn't one of the founding members of Media Mouse, but I started hearing about them through the Calvin College Social Justice Coalition (which I was actively involved in at the time). With several members of Calvin's SJC, we attended the April 17, 2000 Breaking the Bank Protest (which is mentioned in on page 31 of the history). The Media Mouse video of which can be viewed here.
By the summer of that year, I started attending Media Mouse meetings regularly.
There were a lot of people in Grand Rapids who were vaguely interested in Media Mouse, but there were only about 5 of us who attended the regular meetings with any consistency. And I was one of those 5. I didn't have any valuable skills to lend to the group--I wasn't particularly smart, or creative, and I usually just went along with what the other members suggested. But I was dedicated--I never missed a meeting.
In total, my days at Media Mouse lasted for slightly over a year, and then I left for Japan in August 2001, and that was the end of my activism days.
(Much to my regret--it all seemed like a big adventure at the time, and I was sorry to give it up. But it was impossible to stay involved in grass roots politics in America and live in the Japanese countryside at the same time. So I had to choose one of the two adventures, and I chose travelling. But I've always wondered about the road not taken.)
My own personal recollection is that Media Mouse itself, as an organization, was non-doctrinal. (I don't remember anyone referring to it as an anarchist group at the time). But I think all of us regular members self-identified as anarchists, so in that sense it was an anarchist organization.
On page 31, the history mentions Media Mouse's coverage and participation in the 2001 Quebec anti-FTAA protests. For my own memory of that event, see excerpts from my journal here here. For the Media Mouse documentary of the event, see here. (The documentary contains some footage that I shot, and also contains me as part of a Media Mouse panel discussion).
One of the people tangentially associated with Media Mouse published her own Zine called "Get Up!" This is also mentioned briefly in the history on page 31.
Anarchist ideas began to manifest themselves in other venues as well. A short lived zine called Get Up! featured anarchist symbols and described itself as “an anti-racist, anti-capitalist, pro-feminist, radically-oriented publication.”
When I came back to Grand Rapids in 2006, I tried to get back into activism.
I followed the pattern I had set before--I attended all the meetings regularly, and I showed up - at - the -protests, but I didn't provide any leadership or have any special skills. And that was my history with the Grand Rapids chapter of the IWW (also mentioned in volume 4 of the history, page 31). I attended their meetings regularly for a period during 2006, but that's as much as I can claim.
Strange to think that after all these years Charles Murray is still around and still getting people upset.
I actually went to hear Charles Murray speak way back when I was 16.
He was one of the speakers of the Calvin College January series back in 1995. I was still in high school, but our 11th grade religion teacher offered us extra credit if we would go and listen to several of the January series speakers. Charles Murray was on the list.
I was largely ignorant of politics at that time, but our teacher gave us some background on Charles Murray. A few weeks before the talk, our teacher said that Charles Murray had simply collected the data, and was simply reporting what the data showed. Then, as Charles Murray got more and more in the news, our teacher later corrected himself. "I may have been too nice to Charles Murray," he said. "It's looking like some of his data collection sources may be come from questionable groups linked with white supremacy."
Going to the talk was my first exposure to a controversial political speaker.
Of course, this being Calvin College, the protests were muted. (I remember people passing out leaflets, but that's about it.)
Once the talk began, Charles Murray completely charmed the audience. (He joked about his reputation, and how he was just going to go as himself for Halloween.)
To this day, I haven't read his books, so I can't comment on anything in his books. But everything he said at his talk was very moderate, and by the end of the talk the audience was largely on board with him.
That evening at swim team practice, some of the swim team members were quizzing Jeremy about what he thought about it. (Jeremy had the reputation for being the flaming liberal on the swim team--I was still largely conservative at that age.) But even Jeremy found very little he could object to in the actual talk.
None of which is to say that Charles Murray's book is or is not racist. I haven't read the book so I can't say. This is just to comment on the speech he gave at Calvin in 1995.
Anyway, point being that people protesting Charles Murray really takes me back to high school again. Ah, what a trip down memory lane!
As for the above podcast:
I agreed with some things and disagreed with some things. But what struck me most was Charles Murray's thoughts on universal basic income. Surprisingly, he's for it, and makes some very good cases why we should have it. And this coming from a small government conservative no less! If Charles Murray can be behind a universal basic income, then may this is an idea that deservess closer consideration.
I just completed renewing my passport...which made me realize that another ten years has come and gone.
...that's right, it's going to be yet another post where I bemoan the fact that I'm getting older...
I first got my passport in November 1996 when I was 18. I noticed that it was good for 10 years, and that I wouldn't have to renew it until 2006, when I was 28.
At the time, 28 seemed so old I couldn't even fathom it. Intellectually, of course, I knew I would inevitably age just like every one else does. But psychologically, I couldn't believe I would ever really become 28.
And then 2006 came, and I had to renew my passport for another 10 years. "Huh, I guess I got to 28 after all," I remember thinking to myself. "But I can't ever imagine being 38!"
And now I'm 38, and it was time to renew the passport again. Sigh. Where does time go?
At the very least, I got good use out of this last passport. This last passport was the first passport I filled up completely (and then had to apply for extra pages at the US Consulate).*
And now I have the stamps for memories. But just in case I ever lose the passport, I'll duplicate the itinerary here.
When I first got the renewed passport in November 2006, I was living in the United States.
* And then in January 2007, I went back to Japan.
* September 2008, I went back to the United States for 2 weeks for my sister's wedding, and then back to Japan.
* January 2010 I left Japan to return home to the United States
* February 2010 I went to Australia.
* February 2011 I left Australia to return to the United States
* April 2011 I left the United States to go to Cambodia
* June 2011 I visited Vietnam for one week, and then back to Cambodia
* December 2011 I visited Malaysia for 3 weeks, and then back to Cambodia (pictures here)
* June 2012 I visited Thailand for 1 week, and then back to Cambodia
* March 2013: Attempted to visit Vietnam for a short trip on the Mekong Delta Tour, but was turned away at the boarder because my passport was full (or full by their standards--they wanted 4 completely blank pages)
* May 2013: Mekong Delta Tour second try--this time with extra pages in the pasport. Visited Vietnam for 3 days, and then back to Cambodia
* December 2014 I went home to the United States for one month, and then back to Cambodia
* April 2015 I moved from Cambodia to Vietnam
* August 2015 I went back to Cambodia for 5 days (to visit friends and pick up some luggage) and then back to Vietnam.
Total: lived in 5 countries (America, Japan, Australia, Cambodia, Vietnam), plus visited two more (Malaysia, Thailand). Not a bad 10 years I suppose.
Footnote *Although part of the reason that this passport filled up so quickly was less to do with my frequent travels and more to do with the fact that both Cambodia and Vietnam issue huge visa stickers that cover up one whole page of the passport. And then every time your visa is renewed, you get another huge sticker. Simply by renewing my visa several times in Cambodia and Vietnam, I filled up half of the passport.
Subtitle: My Review of Cinemassacre's Reviews of Classic Horror Movies
For some time now, I've been noticing that a difference in interest between me and my adolescent students.
My students are obsessed with horror movies.
But me, I'm mostly apathetic about horror movies. You might even say I'm bored with the genre. I don't keep up with any of the latest horror movies that come out, which causes me to frequently be out of touch with my students.
A frequent conversation, one that I've been having for years now, usually goes like this.
Student: Teacher, have you seen____ (name of some new horror movie)________?
Me: What? What's that? Is that the name of a movie? I've never heard of it.
Then they proceed to tell me all about the horror movie, and I proceed to completely lose interest in the conversation.
It didn't use to be like this. In my own adolescence, I was just as obsessed with horror movies as they are now. But I guess I've grown out of it.
Which (correct me if I'm wrong) is pretty much the common trajectory, isn't it? Most of us are fascinated by horror movies when we're young, and most of us get bored with it by the time we reach middle age.
(Strange that. For so long I regarded horror movies as part of the "adult world" that I never realized they were in fact actually juvenile entertainment.)
It's an interesting phenomena. I'm tempted to try to puzzle out why this is exactly, but the question is probably too big for me.
I mean, first I would have to ask: why are young people so fascinated with horror movies in the first place?
And as far as I know, there's no logical reason for any of our primal fascinations.
I'm sure there are plenty of essays out there already analyzing this question from a Freudian perspective or from a evolutionary psychological perspective, but none of those are my field, so I won't waste your time with my sophomoric attempts at psycho-analysis.
...well, okay, I will waste your time with at least one of my sophomoric observations.
Part of the reason I've lost interest in horror movies, and in movies in general, is that as you get older movies lose their magic.
When I was younger, movies seemed real to me.
It's not that I ever confused movies with reality.
My mother used to be very concerned about this when I was a child, and constantly made sure we understood the movies we were watching weren't "real". And I knew they weren't "real" in the sense that I knew they weren't part of our real physical world. But they did seem to exist in their own world, which was real in its own terms.
Nowadays, when I watch a movie, I can't help but see the hand of the screenwriter--the tired old hacks who are writing in cliches, throwing around deus ex machinas, and creating flat one-dimensional characters. I know some characters are written purely to be killed off in order to increase tension, and I know some characters will never be killed off because they are too important to the plot. I know some characters are written to be unlikable just for the sake of being unlikable, and that none of their malice will ever make any logical sense or come from realistic motivation.
But as a child, you can't yet see behind the curtain. Intellectually, of course, I knew that these were all actors, and that the story was written by a screen writer. But as soon as the movie started, you forgot all that and were transported into another world.
This ability to lose yourself in the world of the movie increases the horror of it. And, from a child's perspective, also increases the fascination of it.
I was at the same time both simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by horror movies (much like every child). At the one hand, I felt like I was too scared to watch them. On the other hand, precisely because these movies seemed real to me, I felt like I just had to know what happened to the characters. Who would survive, and who would die? These were important questions back when movies seemed to be actually real. If you didn't actually see the movie, the curiosity would consume you.
Growing up in a conservative Christian family, for a long time I wasn't allowed to watch the horror movies that I was fascinated by. At least not at first.
I think my fascination with monster movies started around 3rd grade. I wasn't allowed to watch the old black and white horror movies until I was in 6th grade.
And although time rushes by so fast now, when you're a child, those 3 years were like a lifetime. A lifetime in which those movies built themselves up in my imagination.
I read books about the old universal monsters. I imagined the movies several times over before I ever saw them.
The old universal monster movies have become so much a part of our collective culture that even someone who has never seem them knows about the conventions--the graveyard surrounded by fog, the old spooky castle up on the mountain, the clouds covering up the moon. I had dreams about these set pieces long before I actually saw the movies.
...And when I did actually see these old monster movies, I was disappointed that they were nowhere near as scary as I had imagined.
I guess after having being built up in my mind for so long, nothing could really have equaled my anticipation.
But there is also the strange and fascinating phenomenon of collective media desensitization. By all contemporary reports, these movies legitimately scared audiences in the 1930s. (People were so upset by the original 1931 Frankenstein that the movie theatres eventually started including warnings before movie). Eventually, though, audiences became desensitized to these scares, and the the movie theatres had to go more and more extreme to get the same reaction.
This filtered down into all sorts of other media, so that by the time I saw these movies in the 1990s, there was scarier stuff on afternoon TV than there were in these old horror movies.
Therefore to this day my fondness for these movies is more in the idea of them than the actual movies themselves. I'm more fond of the image I built up in my head when I was between 8-12. I still like the creepy atmosphere, the fog machines, the clouded sky, and the spooky graveyards.
However I was still young enough to be somewhat sucked in by the story of the movies. When characters died, it felt like someone really died. When characters were in peril, it felt like someone was really in trouble. I felt for the tragedy of Lawrence Talbot, and was fascinated by the moral ambiguity of Doctor Frankenstein.
And because of my nostalgia for these movies, I still maintain a fondness for them, even though I should have long ago outgrown their appeal, and even though I no longer find modern horror films interesting. (Nostalgia is another funny thing...but that's another subject for another post.)
Anyway, all of that is a long pre-amble just to say I've really enjoyed cinemassacre's review of these classic monster movies.
With the later reviews especially, Cinemassacre goes into great detail about the plot--he covers the plot holes, the continuity errors between movies, and some of the behind the scenes production issues.
As Cinemassacre details in his reviews, the series starts out great, with some genuine classic movies. (Not necessarily scary by today's standards, but still well-done pieces of cinema). The series then eventually degenerates into camp, but if you are interested in the history of pulp fiction (and I am), then it's gloriously pulpy camp, with all the great cliches.
* Dracula (1931) here. (Dracula was the first of universal's monster movies, and, unfortunately, the fact that the craft was still in its infancy is apparent. It moves painfully slowly for a modern audience. The first time I tried to watch it, I stayed up late to see it on TV, and then ended up struggling to stay awake for the whole thing.)
* Frankenstein (1931) here . (And an overview of the whole series here).
* The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) here. (As with any long running movie series, the Universal Monster series started out with great films that are still recognized by the critics today, and then degenerated into terrible films. But The Bride of Frankenstein is usually recognized by even respectable critics as a great piece of cinema art. See Roger Ebert's essay on the movie here.)
* Dracula's Daughter (1936) here. (A direct sequel to Dracula, featuring many of the same characters. But, unfortunately, not including Dracula himself. Unfortunately there would only ever be one Dracula movie starring Bela Lugosi.)
* The Wolf Man (1941) here. (The Wolfman was always my favorite movie monster, because it was the perfect intersection of my childhood love for wolves with my childhood love for monster movies. But even more than that, I always thought Lawrence Talbot's tragic story made the character much more interesting than Frankenstein or Dracula.)
* Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) here. (Actually, Ghost of Frankenstein is the only movie in this series I never got around to seeing as a kid. Not that I didn't want to see it, it just never happened to be re-run on TV when I was going through my monster movie phase. I still haven't seen this movie to date.)
* Son of Dracula (1943). Hmmm, strange, Cinemassacre hasn't reviewed this movie. The only one in the series that he's missing. Well, for the record, I saw this as well back in my adolescence.
* Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943) here . (I think this is my favorite movie in the whole series).
* House of Frankenstein (1944) here. (This was the first movie to include Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman all in the same movie. Unfortunately, the screen writers never really figured out a way to combine all three monsters on screen at the same time, so although all three monsters are in the movie, Dracula never appears with Frankenstein and the Wolfman.)
* House of Dracula (1945) here. (The second movie including all three monsters. This movie was never on TV when I was a kid. I spent years trying to track it down, and finally found it at a VHS rental store some time when I was in college. It was pretty terrible, as you would expect from a movie this late in the series. But at least it still had all 3 monsters in it.)
* Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) here. (The swan song for the series. Despite the title, this was yet another movie in which all three monsters appeared--Frankenstein and the Wolfman and Dracula. It's kind of official--it had many of the original actors--but also kind of not. I've already written about my fondness for this movie once before on this blog.)
* Wolfman Versus Dracula (unfilmed script) here. (Cinemassacre does a nice job about talking about this never-filmed movie, and why he's pretty sure it isn't a hoax. This was the video that got me hooked in, and made me re-watch all this other videos.)
Happy Halloween everyone.
Various Addenda
I've written once before about my adolescent fascination with horror films here.
I've once before mentioned my fondness for watching these the old style horror movies on Halloween here.
I've noted my teenage students' fascination with horror films once before here. (That was in Cambodia. I'm in Vietnam now, but my young students are still equally fascinated with horror. I'm pretty sure it's true the world over among young people).
I'm going to tell a story here that's not unique. You probably have had this exact same experience yourself. In fact, I'm sure everyone my age has at least 10 stories like this.
...And yet, in spite of the ubiquity of this experience, we often don't seem to learn from it. So I'm going to go ahead and write down some self-reflections.
Like I said, the story is a common one. I recently re-connected with a childhood friend via the magic of Facebook. And I was surprised to see his political opinions had completely changed.
When we were in the church youth group together, he was well-known for being the most vocal Republican in the group. He was as conservative as they came--a huge fan of Rush Limbaugh, and big proponent of evangelical Christianity. He didn't like government welfare programs, didn't like feminism, and didn't like non-English speaking immigrants. And he was known for being vocal and opinionated.
I had started off as a Republican as well. (In that environment, we all did). But somewhere around 17 or 18, I began to pivot Leftward. He and I naturally squared off against each other as debating partners, and pretty soon every time we got together we were trading jabs.
It was mostly in a good-natured way (we were both huge nerds who enjoyed a good political debate), but I also began to get more and more self-righteous in my arguments.
At first these were just spoken arguments, but then after we both went away to college, we carried on the debates over e-mail. Until the debate ran its course, and the correspondence gradually petered out.
The last time I saw him was I think in 2003. We were in our mid-20s then, and he was still as conservative as ever.
Imagine my surprise, then, to find he had gone full liberal. His Facebook wall full of links to liberal articles, and he was supporting liberal causes. (He had been a big Bernie Sanders supporter during the primary, but is now fully backing Hillary).
We started chatting on Facebook, and he told me that life and experiences had eventually altered his opinions. "...it wasn't until I saw more of the world that I realized that not everyone had the same advantages and opportunities as I did..." he told me.
My initial urge was to react by saying something like:
"Ha! I told you I was right! I finally won! All those long debates we had, and now you finally admit I was right about everything!"
I didn't actually type that of course. "It would be unnecessary to say so explicitly," I thought to myself. "He knows it, and I know it."
But then as I continued to think about it, I realized that I couldn't take credit for anything, because nowhere in our political debates had I given him any space to evolve.
Everything I used to say in those e-mails was either trying to emphasize how smart I was, or emphasize how dumb he was.
None of my insults had been at all helpful in moving him towards my point of view. And so consequently I couldn't take any credit for his political evolution. He had come around to my point of view in spite of my rhetoric, and not because of my rhetoric.
I had treated him not as a complex human being whose opinions could evolve over time, but as a caricature which I could use to contrast my own beliefs, and show how righteous I was.
And the thing was, I of all people should have realized that humans are complex and constantly evolving because I had undergone a political evolution myself. But I didn't grant this same ability to evolve to other people. At 16 I identified strongly with the Religious Right, but at 19 I treated everyone in the Religious Right like they were idiots.
I guess the point is this:
People can and do evolve politically. But they don't change their opinions because they are insulted.
At this point I'm probably boring you, because you're thinking "Well, obviously. This is all just common sense."
And it is common sense, but it's something we forget all the time. Go to Facebook right now, and read the comment thread of any political debate that's happening on any of your friends' Facebook pages. How much of that dialogue is constructive? How much of it is going to convince people to join our cause, and how much of it is just going to drive them further away?
In a democracy, the ability to persuade is power. And we on the Left have been doing a terrible job of trying to convert the other side. We just alienate and mock the other side.
And just to be perfectly clear, I say this as someone who's confessing my own sins. If you read the archives of this blog, you can see me engaging in emotional rhetoric more often than reasoned rhetoric. And I've gotten in several pointless Facebook arguments this year alone. But I'm going to try to do better. And we all need to do better. Because we on the Left are losing.
I mean it, the country's in a bad place, and we on the Left are really getting creamed. Sure, Trump is going to lose in November, but that's cold comfort. Of course he's going to lose--the thing that should shock us is that he got so popular in the first place, and the fact that he is still so popular with a large percentage of the American electorate.
And Hillary Clinton is basically a neo-conservative running as a Democrat, so her inevitable victory in November is nothing to get too excited about.
We on the Left need to adapt a missionary approach like the modern Church does.
Most modern missionaries no longer go out into the jungles and tell the natives how stupid they are. Instead, the Catholic Church, for example, sends out missionaries to work side by side with the local people and gain their respect first. They listen to the local people and find out what their concerns are.
When I think of my own political conversion, I remember a big part of it was that certain people I admired and respected had certain beliefs, and so I began to think that maybe there was something to those beliefs after all.
If those same people had insulted me instead, I probably never would have bothered to look deeper into their belief systems.
It seems hard, I know, because it seems like so much of the American Right is motivated by hate. But that's also where they're the most vulnerable. Because love is stronger than hate.
And I know that sounds like a hippy cliche, but it also happens to be true.
In my youth, when I identified with the Religious Right, I hated homosexuals, single black mothers on welfare, and illegal immigrants. But all that hatred took a lot of emotional energy. When I decided that I didn't want to hate those people anymore, and that I wanted to help them if I could, then it felt like a big burden had been lifted off from me.
Human beings naturally want to help each other. We don't want to hate. People just need to be shown that there's a better way, and they will follow. Link of the Day Noam Chomsky - Right-wing Protesters
Thursday, September 22, 2016
Oh, by the way, did I ever tell you the story about the time I got my name printed in the letter's column of the Star Trek: The Next Generation comic book?
Well sit down kids, and I'll tell you a tale.
The year was 1992. I was 14 years old. I had a subscription to Star Trek and Star Trek: the Next Generation comic books. I was a huge Trekkie back in those days. Not only did I watch the show religiously, I also read the paper back books, and subscribed to the comics.
Being a reader of the books and comics, however, was a bit thankless, because nothing that happened in the comics and books ever impacted the show in any way. It was purely non-canonical, which means it never really happened. The reset button would be set at the end of every story.
During this time, I would look enviously over to mainstream comic books, in which continuity actually mattered, and the events of one story would be real and meaningful to the characters. During the summer of 1993, I would give up Star Trek comics to make the jump over to mainstream comics.
But I digress. Back in 1992, I was still an avid read of the Star Trek comics. I had subscriptions to both Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. And everyone was waiting for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine to come out in January. But would there be a tie in comic book to Deep Space Nine as well? I decided to write to the Comic Book Publishers and ask them.
At this time, Star Trek: The Next Generation comic book was doing its best to acknowledge all of its fans by printing the names of everyone who wrote in a letter, even if they didn't have the room to print the actual letter. So I got my name printed in the back of the comic book, even though they didn't publish the actual text of the letter asking about the Deep Space Nine Comic. In parenthesis, after my name, the editor wrote "sorry, not by DC"-- meaning DC Comics would not have the license to publish Deep Space Nine comics. (The Deep Space Nine comic ended up being published by Dark Horse Comics.)
Because there was a time delay, it was several months later until the actual comic got published, and it didn't show up until the following Spring in the May 1993 issue.
And that's my story.
Obviously I can't entertain too many cocktail parties with this particular yarn, and yet I've always thought it was kind of...something. These comics become collectibles, and my name is now part of a collectible somewhere.
I don't actually still have my copy of this comic book. (I got rid of it a long time ago when I was cleaning out junk.)
But with the Internet these days, there are so many websites that host digital copies of comic books, I thought I'd see if I could find it. And sure enough, here I found it.
(Website here--I should warn you that this is probably in violation of the copy right holders, but I paid good money for this comic back in 1993, so I figure I've paid my dues.)
The comic cover is below.
Letter page is below.
And my name is here:
So there it is folks. If I get hit by a bus crossing the street tomorrow, let it not be said that I didn't lead an exciting life.
[Editor's note: May 27, 2026: The following is actual several unfinished blog posts on Star Wars that I wrote in the year of 2015. I wanted to write a comprehensive post that would encapsulate all of my thoughts on Star Wars, but kept finding it difficult to do, so I kept abandoning the post and starting over. Eventually I gave up on this, and wrote on December 15, 2015:
I've been talking about writing a post on Star Wars now for close to a year now .... , but I've got so many thoughts on the franchise that it's difficult for me to sort out my thoughts into anything approaching coherence.
However, when searching through my old blog posts this afternoon (searching for something unrelated), I came across these abandoned drafts. And I remembered how hard I had worked to express myself. Even if I didn't succeed in saying everything I wanted to say, I thought I should still publish these posts here.
Because these posts are still in rough draft form, they may read a little rough in places. Also, because I kept giving up on posts, and then restarting them, there is a lot of repetition between the various iterations of this post. But for whatever it's worth, here are my attempts at talking about Star Wars.]
So, I've been meaning to write some version of this post now for almost a year. Originally, it was inspired by my re-viewing of the original Star Wars trilogy. (Following my decision to integrate movie watching into my ESL classroom, I have recently shown my students Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. Because the term was coming to an end, we didn't have time to do worksheets for Return of the Jedi, but I did show it to my students on the last day of class.)
Although I had watched these movies ad nauseum in childhood, this was the first time I had seen them in about 10 years, and it did inspire some new reflections.
...so there's that, and then, of course, there's the obvious fact that the new movie is coming out, and you can't open the Internet without reading something about it.
I've been talking about writing this post for a while now (here and here), but I had trouble sorting out my thoughts, and I procrastinated. But now we're just days away from the release of Episode VII, and I decided it was now or never. So I'm going to dive in here and try to write something up, and if it ends up being long-winded and disjointed...well, this is a blog after all. It's supposed to be a haven for long winded and disjointed thoughts.
Nostalgia, Nostalgia, Nostalgia
I suppose every Star Wars review written by someone of my generation has to take nostalgia into consideration. (And it's gotten to the point now where to even mention Star Wars and nostalgia in the same sentence is to sound cliched).
There's a funny thing that happens to most of us where somewhere along the line we lose the ability to be awed by movies. So even though the special effects have gotten better, and the action scenes more intense, movies now no longer really thrill me. They become, instead, more of a pleasant way to pass the time than an experience.
But the really funny thing is that, even though movies now can't really move me, when I re-watch a movie from childhood, I can still remember the original emotions it evoked in me, and to a certain extent even feel those emotions again.
So every time I see Star Wars, I am watching it through two different eyes. Part of me has my adult critical thinking abilities--I can appreciate this film now as part of a time piece from the 1970s--but I'm also at the same time feeling like I'm 5 years old all over again. Star Wars wasn't the first movie I saw but, it was one of the first movies. Possibly in the first 5, I don't remember. I was about four or five years old when I saw it.
I was completely unfamiliar with the rules of film and the rules of the genre. I didn't yet know it was an unwritten rule of action films that the good guys always win, or that the main character wasn't going to die. I took nothing for granted, and so I was at the edge of my seat the whole time. When Luke got pulled under water by that creature in the garbage disposal, I thought there was a real possibility he might not emerge again. When the walls started closing in on the heroes, I wasn't sure they would actually make it out in time.
Another funny thing about kids is how emotionally invested they get in movies.
Seriously, watch any movie with young kids, and see watch how upset they can get about what happens in movies.
I don't believe I was any worse than a normal kid my age in this regard, but my mother would always get concerned when I would get too concerned about what was happening on the screen.
Whenever a character I liked was in any sort of peril, I used to get really concerned about whether they would make it out alive or not, and each time my mother would take it upon herself to check and make sure I knew the movie wasn't the same as real life.
I knew it wasn't real life, of course. Many times as a child I wanted to explain to my mother, "Yes, I know it's not real-real, but it's real in the context of this fictional world, and I've allowed myself to become immersed in this world, and emotionally attached to its characters, I have a sort of emotional investment in wanting to see them escape from the danger safely and succeed in their quest."
But at the time I lacked the meta-language to adequately express my thoughts on emotional investment in fictional stories, so I never was able to tell my mother why exactly it mattered to me so much that all of these characters make it through safely.
And so, because of this, when I first saw Star Wars, I spent the entire movie absolutely on the edge of my seat, with my heart racing the entire time.
And when I see this movie on TV again now, even though I've watched it 100 times since, and even though I'm a full-grown man approaching middle-age, each scene brings back flashbacks of that intense emotional experience I had when I was 5 years old.
Right from the opening scene: the space battle, the dramatic music, the way the rebel soldiers all lined up at the door, and camera cut to each of their faces. You could see how worried they were, as this strange clunking noise sounded--at five years old, I was absolutely horrified, and yet fascinated. And then the gun battle, and most of the rebel soldiers are immediately killed. Right from the beginning, this was clearly a movie in which no one would be safe, I thought. And then there was that scene of Darth Vader breaking the neck of the captain as he interrogated him, a scene that would haunt me many nights as I lay in bed.
Am I making this sound like an awful experience? Because I absolutely loved it, in the way that children like being just a little bit scared when they watch something.
A lot of the movie I didn't even fully understand. This was, again, partly just due to my ignorance of cinematic conventions. For example, the scene in the Death Star when Darth Vader confronts Obi-Wan Kenobi: The movie shows Obi-Wan Kenobi walking down the hall. Then Obi-Wan stops. The shot cuts to Darth Vader standing at the end of the hall waiting for him. Then it cuts back to Obi-Wan Kenobi’s reaction. I remember watching this for the first time with my parents, and they said to me, “Oh, look at this, Obi-Wan Kenobi is going to meet Darth Vader now!” And I remember thinking: “How do you know they’re going to meet? The movie just clearly showed them in separate hallways.” I still had no idea of conventions of film making, and I didn’t know that these two establishing shots were meant to show Darth Vader at one end of the hallway, and Obi-Wan at the other. The assault on the Death Star at the end completely confused me. I could tell that there were a lot of space ships shooting at stuff and a lot of ships blowing up, but it was a complete mystery to me trying to keep track of which pilots were alive and which were dead, and what the connection was between the shots of the cockpits and the shots of outer-space. And much of the dialogue I had no idea what it meant. But this did not disturb me. When you're five years old, you're used to not understanding a lot of what you hear around you. Even today, when I watch this movie on TV, I can still mostly remember which parts of the dialogue I understood, and which parts of the movie I had no clue about, but could infer the character dynamics from the visuals and the emotions. The scene where Darth Vader choked that guy with the force, for example. I had no idea what anyone was saying up until "Enough of this. Vader, release him." That didn't stop me from following the visuals of the story, however. ***********************************
I was born after Star Wars.
Not that much after, admittedly. The original Star Wars hit theaters in May, 1977, only 11 months before I was born. But if something was before your time, it doesn't matter if it was 100 years before, or one day. The point is you missed it, so you can't truly understand what the world was like before it happened.
Star
Wars was one of the first movies I ever saw. I think I was 5
years old. It was on TV one
night, and my parents granted me and my sister the rare privilege of actually
staying up past our bedtimes to watch the movie.
I still remember many of my initial
impressions of that movie from my 5 year old perspective. For example, the scene in the Death Star when
Darth Vader confronts Obi-Wan Kenobi.
The movie shows Obi-Wan Kenobi walking down the hall. Then Obi-Wan stops. The shot cuts to Darth Vader standing at the
end of the hall waiting for him. Then it
cuts back to Obi-Wan Kenobi’s reaction.
I remember watching this for the first time with my parents, and they
said to me, “Oh, look at this, Obi-Wan Kenobi is going to meet Darth Vader
now!” And I remember
thinking: “How do you know they’re going to meet? The movie just clearly showed them in
separate hallways.” I still
had no idea of conventions of film making, and I didn’t know that these two
establishing shots were meant to show Darth Vader at one end of the hallway,
and Obi-Wan at the other. I assumed they
were in completely separate hallways. (Memories
like this remind us of how much of the knowledge we sometimes assume we were
innately born with actually had to be learned.
How to watch and understand movies, and understand the cuts between
different shots, is one of those things.
It’s actually a learned cultural knowledge, and not something we come
out of the womb with.)
For anyone who grew up with Star Wars (which nowadays is just about everyone under 40) it's very hard to try to give an accurate critique of Star Wars for two reasons.
The first reason is that, as with any classic film, it's hard to truly appreciate the innovations of the film if you're born after it. Any
successful film gets imitated to death. Classic films seem cliche because they started the cliches that everyone else picked up on.
The second reason is that, as with any childhood film, it's hard to separate our childhood nostalgia from the objective merits of the film.
Even
now, at the age of 36, when I re-watch Star Wars, I remember all the
emotions the film produced in me at 5 years old. I remember how scary Darth Vader seemed when
he choked Captain Antilles to death. I
remember how that terrifying opening scene put me on the edge of my seat and
set the tone for the entire rest of the movie—this was a movie where no one was
safe, I thought. I remember the thrill of the Millennium
Falcon escaping from Tatooine. And I
remember how confused I was during the final Death Star battle. (All the quick cuts between the planes and
fighter pilots completely threw me. I
could tell a lot of people were dying, and a lot planes were getting blown up,
but the reason a plane would burst into flames completely escaped me.)
When I
was in elementary school, Star Wars was the greatest movie ever.
Except
saying now, as an adult, that something was a great movie doesn’t quite do
justice to a child’s view. As an adult, there
are several movies I enjoy, and I can quite happily watch them and then forget
about them and go on with my life. But
as a child, a movie was a completely magical event. You could spend weeks being excited about
seeing a movie, and after you saw it, you could spend weeks obsessing about how
wonderful it was. At that age, movies
had the power to completely thrill you in a way that is completely lost to
jaded adult sensibilities.
Watching
Star Wars was an event. Word
would get out at school that Star Wars was going to be on TV later on in
the week, and everyone at school would be looking forward to it all week, and
then talking about how great it was all the next week.
This
was all back in the days before VCRs became popular, and when it was a huge
event in a kid’s life when a TV station showed a popular movie.
And
then our family got our first VCR. And
the next time the Star Wars movies were shown on TV, I recorded them
onto VHS. And I watched them over and
over and over again until I got sick of them.
The
wide availability of Star Wars cheapened the experience. It was no longer something you looked forward
to all week, it was something that was always there and could be watched
whenever you wanted. And consequently it
was no longer quite as special.
But
although I had gotten sick of Star Wars, everybody else hadn’t. And so all through middle school and high
school, Church youth group leaders would show Star Wars at youth group
retreats. School teachers would show Star
Wars at school parties. My high
school friends would organize Friday night sleep overs in which we would watch
all 3 movies in the trilogy back to back to back.
By the
time I finished high school, I was more than sick of Star Wars. I was done with it. When Star Wars was re-released into
the theaters in 1997 for the special editions, everyone else in my college
dormitory was very excited about it. (Some
people bought tickets weeks in advance.)
But I initially refused to go.
“I’ve seen that movie so many times, I don’t think you could pay to get
me to see it again,” I told a dormmate.
“I’m certainly not going to buy a theater ticket for it.” (Despite all my protesting, however, I
eventually did give in to peer pressure, and the media hype, and went along to
the theatrical re-release.)
As
brilliant a cinematic tour-de-force as Star Wars is, it doesn’t hold up
all that well to repeated viewings. The
first time you see it, you’re so enraptured in the story that you don’t have
time to notice the flaws. But the 50th
time you see it, you know exactly where the story is going, and you’re no
longer caught up in the momentum of it, and then you start to notice how maybe
Mark Hamill’s acting isn’t really that great after all, or how cheesy a lot of
the dialogue is, or how it doesn’t make any sense to have a princess in the
story, because there’s clearly no sort of hereditary monarchy in the rebel
alliance.
But although it's impossible to separate yourself from childhood nostalgia completely, it is possible to get at least some critical distance with time. And that's what I've finally done.
Until recently, the last time I had seen the original Star Wars trilogywas back in 2007, 8 years ago.
But then a few months ago, I showed the original Star Wars trilogy to my students. (As regular readers of this blog already know. Following my decision to integrate movie watching into my ESL classroom, I have recently shown my students Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. Because the term was coming to an end, we didn't have time to do worksheets for Return of the Jedi, but I did show it to my students on the last day of class.)
Watching these films for the first time in 8 years enabled me to get somewhat of an objective perspective on them, and to better understand what exactly worked about them, and what didn't work about them. In addition, introducing these films to my Cambodian teenage students (who had never seen Star Wars before) helped to give me at least somewhat of a perspective on how well the movies hold up to a new generation not brought up on Star Wars nostalgia.
So, I thought I'd write down a few thoughts here about what strikes me now about the original trilogy.
My New Thoughts on the Original 1977 Star Wars
I guess the biggest thing that surprised me upon re-watching this movie is:
It's totally not an action film.
And this surprised me, because if you had asked me as a kid what I thought was so great about Star Wars, I would have said that it was so cool because the action was so great.
But my nostalgia coated memory had been playing me false. There's barely any action in the first movie.
The movie starts out with a very brief laser
gun battle. And then, in terms of action
sequences or fight sequences, there’s really not a lot for the next solid
hour. (Aside from very brief
encounters—the sand creature attacking Luke for example, but certainly no long
extended action sequences.) Then, with
over half the film’s running time over, they finally get to the Death Star.
And yes, there are some laser gun fights with the storm troopers on the Death Star, but a couple things struck me. First of all, these scenes were very brief. There's one brief shoot-out in the
detention center, and one more after getting out of the garbage masher, and
that’s pretty much all there is for action.
The second thing to note is that gun battles, the kind of battles where people just hold guns and point them and pull the trigger, have always been the lamest kind of action scenes ever. There's no choreography, no athletics, no test of strength against agility, or any of that. It's just pointing a gun and pressing a trigger. (Somehow we as a movie going audience have been tricked into thinking gun battles are exciting, but they're not really.)
Now I know that with every generation action sequences always have to get bigger and longer and better, so it's unfair to judge the 1977 Star Wars by the standards of today's action. But even back in the day it appears to have struck contemporaries as very tame in the action department. Roger Ebert wrote in back in 1977: “What makes the
‘Star Wars’ experience unique, though, is that it happens on such an innocent
and often funny level. It’s usually
violence that draws me so deeply into a movie—violence ranging from the
psychological torment of a Bergman character to the mindless crunch of a
shark’s jaws. Maybe movies that scare us
find the most direct route to our imaginations.
But there’s hardly any violence at all in ‘Star Wars’ (and even then
it’s presented as essentially bloodless swashbuckling). Instead, there’s entertainment so direct and
simple that all of the complications of the modern movie seem to vaporize.” [LINK HERE]
The action does increase with each installment. The Empire Strikes Back does have some slightly longer fight scenes. And then when we get to the last film, Return of the Jedi, then at this point the film is an all out action film. But Return of the Jedi is the only film that really qualifies as an action film.
But, Star Wars was a huge hit back in it's day, and not just with impressionable little 5 year old kids like me, but with everybody. So what was it that actually made this film so spectacular if it didn't have any action sequences to speak of?
Watching the film with my Cambodian students, who were seeing it for the first time, helped me see the film a little bit through the eyes of a new-comer, and it struck me how brilliant the story-telling was.
One of the interesting things in Star Wars is how the first hour of the movie really keeps you guessing as to where the story is going. Eventually you find out that Han and Luke are on a quest to rescue the Princess, but this plot doesn't firm up until one hour in already.
First you have this battle up in outer space. You don't know who any of these people are at first, but of course it's very easy to tell that Princess Leia is good and that Darth Vader is bad. But just when you're getting established with Princess Leia, then the action switches to follow the droids, and you follow their adventures going to Tatooine, arguing and then splitting up, and then getting captured by Jawas.
It seems briefly like the droids are going to be our main protagonists of the movie, because we don't even get introduced Luke Skywalker until the movie is about 15 minutes in. Even after it becomes obvious that the movie is going to be all about Luke, his quest doesn't even materialize until the movie is half over.
First Luke has to find out about his past from Obi-Wan, then he is reluctant to go on the mission until his family get killed by the stormtroopers. Even after he agrees to go with Obi-Wan, however, their mission was not originally to rescue the princess--their original mission was just to get the plans in R2D2 to Leia's father. It wasn't until they accidentally stumbled upon the Death Star, and got trapped inside, that the movie became about rescuing the Princess.
It's a risky move to delay setting up the actual plot of the movie for so long. This is not exactly screenwriting 101. And yet, even though the script takes a while to get where it's going, it's worth noting that it's not meandering. Everything is building up on one everything else. The audience might not know exactly where the film is going, but it's obvious that it's going somewhere.
The other thing which really jumped out at me is how little fat there is on this script. Despite the fact that it takes the first half of the film to set everything up, everything is set up very cleanly and with no wasted words. There's a real economy here--we know immediately what kind of a person Darth Vader is, and what he wants within a couple minutes of his entering the screen. Likewise with Princess Leia. Likewise with Luke, who we know within minutes what his problem is (he's stuck on the farm long after all his friends have left for adventure) and what he wants. And the same thing with Han Solo's problems and wants.
The other thing is just how brilliant the visuals and the music is. This is obvious right from the beginning, with the iconic Star Wars opening scene. The huge ship swallowing up the tiny ship. Darth Vader entering the film for the first time, a huge scary guy in a completely black suit, who towers over everyone else. (Although James Earl Jones did the voice, the actual guy inside the suit was a huge body builder, specifically cast just so he could have that towering look). And then there's the sounds: the heavy breathing, plus the ominous sounding John Williams's music.
I'm just getting warmed up over here. I could probably go on and on about how great this movie is. I haven't even gotten around to talking about the brilliant blend of fantasy with science fiction, the archetypal characters, Joseph Campbell and Kurosawa, and....
...but no, I'll stop here. Let's face it, the Internet is already filled with single males my age writing about how great Star Wars is. The last thing the Internet needs is another geek trying to explain to everyone how great Star Wars is.
So why am I writing this at all then? I guess the main things I wanted to express our as follows:
1). It's not just your nostalgia glasses talking--Star Wars really is a fantastic movie. Take it from someone who got sick of it, and then didn't watch it for several years, and then watched it again and noticed how brilliant this movie is.
2). To tell everyone that my teenage students (11-15) really seemed to dig the movie, so I to still hold up pretty well with the younger generation as well
***********************
In other hands, this kind of meandering story telling would be a recipe for disaster. But it's so well done in Star Wars, the fantasy world is so imaginative, the visuals are so captivating.
***********************
The original Star Wars hit theaters hit theaters 11 months before I was born. My story is a common one for someone of my generation.
Star Wars absolutely blew me away as a kid, but then I was born in 1978, and I wasn't sure how my young students (mostly born after the year 2000) would react to it.
[It's an interesting thought experiment to compare any relatively recent action movie to the movies we grew up on in the 1980s. Even the completely forgettable, substandard action movies of today have action sequences that just blow the 1980s out of the water. It's an obvious observation, I know, but I remember the first time this hit me, in 2007. I was watching the Fantastic Four 2(a completely forgettable substandard action movie) after having been on a nostalgia kick all that week in which I had been re-watching Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and Superman. And I realized for the first time how much action movies had changed, and just how much action was packed into today's movies compared to how comparatively little action was in the movies of my childhood. And that's just for a completely forgettable movie like Fantastic Four 2.
Star
Wars was not the first movie I ever saw (that was Disney’s Bambi). But it was one of the first. I saw it for the first time when I was 5
years old at the time. It was on TV on
night, and my parents granted me and my sister the rare privilege of actually
staying up past our bedtimes to watch the movie.
I still remember many of my initial
impressions of that movie from my 5 year old perspective. One example: the scene in the Death Star when
Darth Vader confronts Obi-Wan Kenobi.
The movies shows Obi-Wan Kenobi walking down the hall. Then Obi-Wan stops. The shot cuts to Darth Vader standing at the
end of the hall waiting for him. Then it
cuts back to Obi-Wan Kenobi’s reaction.
I remember watching this for the first time with my parents, and they
said to me, “Oh, look at this, Obi-Wan Kenobi is going to meet Darth Vader
now!”
And I remember
thinking: “How do you know they’re going to meet? The movie just clearly showed them in
separate hallways.”
I still
had no idea of conventions of film making, and I didn’t know that these two
establishing shots were meant to show Darth Vader at one end of the hallway,
and Obi-Wan at the other. I assumed they
were in completely separate hallways. (Memories
like this remind us of how much of the knowledge we sometimes assume we were
innately born with actually had to be learned.
How to watch and understand movies, and understand the cuts between
different shots, is one of those things.
It’s actually a learned cultural knowledge, and not something we come
out of the womb with.)
Even
now, at the age of 36, when I re-watch Star Wars, I remember all the
emotions the film produced in me at 5 years old. I remember how scary Darth Vader seemed when
he choked Captain Antilles to death. I
remember how that terrifying opening scene put me on the edge of my seat and
set the tone for the entire rest of the movie—this was a movie where no one was
safe, I thought.
I remember the thrill of the Millennium
Falcon escaping from Tatooine. And I
remember how confused I was during the final Death Star battle. (All the quick cuts between the planes and
fighter pilots completely threw me. I
could tell a lot of people were dying, and a lot planes were getting blown up,
but the reason a plane would burst into flames completely escaped me.)
These
vivid childhood memories always come back to me every time I re-watch Star
Wars, and they always get in the way of my more sophisticated adult
sensibilities. Which makes it very hard
to judge the film objectively. Is Star
Wars actually a good film, or am I just a victim of my own childhood
nostalgia?
Nevertheless,
despite this overwhelming childhood nostalgia, my attitude towards Star Wars
has undergone a number of metamorphoses over the years.
When I
was in elementary school, Star Wars was the greatest movie ever.
Except
saying now, as an adult, that something was a great movie doesn’t quite do
justice to a child’s view. As an adult, there
are several movies I enjoy, and I can quite happily watch them and then forget
about them and go on with my life. But
as a child, a movie was a completely magical event. You could spend weeks being excited about
seeing a movie, and after you saw it, you could spend weeks obsessing about how
wonderful it was. At that age, movies
had the power to completely thrill you in a way that is completely lost to
jaded adult sensibilities.
Watching
Star Wars was an event. Word
would get out at school that Star Wars was going to be on TV later on in
the week, and everyone at school would be looking forward to it all week, and
then talking about how great it was all the next week.
And as
cynical as we are all now about the massive toy empire that Star Wars became,
and that George Lucas sold his soul to, at the time, those toys were also part
of the experience. The Ewok Village
wasn’t something you just watched for a couple hours and then forgot about, it
was a whole toy set which you could return over and over again to for more and
more adventures.
This
was all back in the days before VCRs became popular, and when it was a huge
event in a kid’s life when a TV station showed a popular movie.
And
then our family got our first VCR. And
the next time the Star Wars movies were shown on TV, I recorded them
onto VHS. And I watched them over and
over and over again until I got sick of them.
The
wide availability of Star Wars cheapened the experience. It was no longer something you looked forward
to all week, it was something that was always there and could be watched
whenever you wanted. And consequently it
was no longer quite as special.
But
although I had gotten sick of Star Wars, everybody else hadn’t. And so all through middle school and high
school, Church youth group leaders would show Star Wars at youth group
retreats. School teachers would show Star
Wars at school parties. My high
school friends would organize Friday night sleep overs in which we would watch
all 3 movies in the trilogy back to back to back.
By the
time I finished high school, I was more than sick of Star Wars. I was done with it. When Star Wars was re-released into
the theaters in 1997 for the special editions, everyone else in my college
dormitory was very excited about it. (Some
people bought tickets weeks in advance.)
But I initially refused to go.
“I’ve seen that movie so many times, I don’t think you could pay to get
me to see it again,” I told a dormmate.
“I’m certainly not going to buy a theater ticket for it.” (Despite all my protesting, however, I
eventually did give in to peer pressure, and the media hype, and went along to
the theatrical re-release.)
As
brilliant a cinematic tour-de-force as Star Wars is, it doesn’t hold up
all that well to repeated viewings. The
first time you see it, you’re so enraptured in the story that you don’t have
time to notice the flaws. But the 50th
time you see it, you know exactly where the story is going, and you’re no
longer caught up in the momentum of it, and then you start to notice how maybe
Mark Hamill’s acting isn’t really that great after all, or how cheesy a lot of
the dialogue is, or how it doesn’t make any sense to have a princess in the
story, because there’s clearly no sort of hereditary monarchy in the rebel
alliance.
It’s
rare to find someone of my generation who made it all the way through childhood
without seeing Star Wars, but I know at least a couple people. When they finally saw the movie as adults,
none of them were impressed. And, in
light of their experiences, I re-evaluated the movie once again. “I guess you just had to see it when you were
5 years old to appreciate it,” I started saying. “Perhaps, if you don’t have the lens of
childhood nostalgia to look back on it with, it’s probably not that great of a
movie after all, objectively speaking.”
At one
point, my at the time Japanese girlfriend became briefly interested in Star
Wars when a Japanese news program did a retrospective feature on the huge
cultural impact Star Wars had had in America. (For whatever reason, Star Wars was
never as popular in Japan as it was in America, so the same cultural phenomenon
never existed in Japan. But this
Japanese news show tried to explain how huge Star Wars had been in
America.) Her interest sparked by this
reporting, she expressed a desire to watch the movie, and I rented it from the
local video store.
She got
so bored with the movie she turned it off halfway through, without evening
finishing it.
Sometime
around 2007ish, I started to get reports from colleagues who worked with
children, or worked in primary schools, that Star Wars wasn’t that
popular with today’s children.
This
was a shock to me when I first heard it.
I knew that I personally was sick of Star Wars, but that was just
because of over-exposure. I never
thought that it would go out of fashion with a whole generation of
children. (This was also one of those
inevitable life moments when you realize you are getting old. I knew movies from my parent’s generation
seemed dated to me, but before this moment I never dreamed something from my
own childhood would seem dated to the next generation. At least not yet. Am I that old already?)
The
next time I watched Star Wars, I began to see it less as a timeless
classic, and more as something constrained by its time. The film did have kind of a 1970s look to
it. The action sequences actually
weren’t all that impressive, compared to all the incredible action films that
are coming out nowadays.
I don’t
remember exactly when I last saw Star Wars, but I think it was back
somewhere around 2009ish. The point is,
I hadn’t seen it for several years, until I recently brought it into the
classroom to show my students .
It had been long enough between viewings that I was now able to view it
with relatively fresh eyes, so I thought I’d jot down some thoughts.
This...film…is…absolutely…amazing!
I had
perhaps never before in my life truly appreciated the genius of this film. I mean, I loved this film as a 5 year old,
but I didn’t have the critical faculties to realize why this film was so
wonderful—I was just transported away by the experience. And then as I got older, over-exposure had
dulled the magic of the film.
But it
struck me now how incredibly brilliant the whole film was.
I take
back everything I said before. It hasn’t
lost any of its appeal with time. It’s
still as absolutely amazing as it was when it was first released in 1977. And it’s still an absolutely amazing film no
matter what age you first encounter it at.
And I
know plenty of people who can’t dig it, and that’s fine. We don’t all have to like the same
stuff. It probably does appeal more to
male adolescent fantasies than to female sensibilities. So, girls, if you don’t like to watch all the
space battles and explosions, fair enough!
And even among my male friends, I have a couple people who just never
got into it because they don’t like science fiction. Fair enough.
It’s a genre film. If you don’t
like the genre, you don’t have to like this.
But,
for those of us who like fantasy/action/adventure movies—this movie is
absolutely amazing.
It’s
worth pausing for a couple minutes maybe to consider what makes Star Wars
so great. It’s a tough thing to put your
finger on exactly. I mean, we all love
this movie, but how do you dissect exactly what it is about it that makes it so
awesome?
To
illustrate how difficult it is to identify and re-create the successful
elements in Star Wars, one need only look at the absolutely awful
prequel movies George Lucas made later. The complete awfulness of those movies shows
that not even George Lucas, the person who created Star Wars, had a full
understanding of what made those movies great.
Since
the disaster of the prequels, there’s been a lot of revisionist history of
George Lucas’s genius. It turns out, we
are now finding out from numerous sources, that his original version for Star
Wars was a disaster, and numerous people had to re-work his original script
for him. And if Lucas had had a
completely free hand back in 1977, as he did with the prequel movies, then the
original Star Wars may well have sucked just as hard as those prequels
did.
But
whether Lucas was an idiot or a genius, it still has to be admitted that the
original Star Wars, whoever was responsible for it, had a magic that no
one else was able to duplicate.
I mean,
it’s tempting to look at the failure of the Star Wars prequels and
think: If only they had spent more time on the script. Or if only they had gotten in some better
writers in here. Or if only the people
involved with this movie had cared a bit more.
And
this is now the optimism for the new upcoming Disney movie. George Lucas is finally out of the director’s
chair. New talent is in. They care!
They really want to make this movie a success. Disney needs to have this new movie be
a success in order to justify the huge franchise plans they have built around
it. They are going to take care to make
sure this time around it doesn’t suck!
But if
just wanting a movie to be successful was enough, or just working hard enough
on a movie was enough, than every other movie studio back in the late 1970s and
early 1980s would have jumped onto Lucas’s success and made their own Star
Wars clones.
And
remember they tried. There was The
Last Starfighter, Krull, Tron, The Black Hole,
Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
All of these movies tried to emulate the success of Star Wars and
none of them could do it.
So
it’s very difficult to go back to the original Star Wars and define in
concrete terms what exactly made the film a success. If you could do this, then you could identify
a formula, and if you could identify a formula, every other studio would have
successfully copied it by now. The fact
that now one has been able to match this success, and that George Lucas himself
couldn’t even duplicate his own success, indicates the magic of the film is
locked away in a je ne sais quoi quality.
Nevertheless,
there are several things that Star Wars fans and film critics have long
ago noticed about this film.
At this late date in Star Wars criticism,
after people have been gushing about the magic of Star Wars for almost
40 years, it’s probably going to be needlessly redundant for me to point out
the positive points of the film. But
just as a personally little essay, talking about what struck me personally
about the film’s genius, I’ll jot down a few points now.
As a kid I always thought I loved Star
Wars as an action franchise. But
watching it now, I realize how little action is in the movie. The movie starts out with a very brief laser
gun battle. And then, in terms of action
sequences or fight sequences, there’s really not a lot for the next solid
hour. (Aside from very brief
encounters—the sand creature attacking Luke for example, but certainly no long
extended action sequences.) Then, with
over half the film’s running time over, they finally get to the Death Star and
start to fight storm troopers. There are
a couple of scenes of people yelling and shooting laser guns, but as action
scenes go, these aren’t very well choreographed. (Gun fighting actions scenes have got to be
the most boring of all action scenes—no athletics, no drama, no acrobatics,
just people holding pieces of metal and pressing the trigger.) And even these scenes don’t go on very
long. One brief shoot-out in the
detention center, and one more after getting out of the garbage masher, and
that’s pretty much all there is for action.
Even making allowances for the
standards of the time, Star Wars had hardly any real solid action in
it. Roger Ebert wrote in a contemporary
review back in 1977: “What makes the
‘Star Wars’ experience unique, though, is that it happens on such an innocent
and often funny level. It’s usually
violence that draws me so deeply into a movie—violence ranging from the
psychological torment of a Bergman character to the mindless crunch of a
shark’s jaws. Maybe movies that scare us
find the most direct route to our imaginations.
But there’s hardly any violence at all in ‘Star Wars’ (and even then
it’s presented as essentially bloodless swashbuckling). Instead, there’s entertainment so direct and
simple that all of the complications of the modern movie seem to vaporize.”
So whatever it was that so
captivated us as kids, it wasn’t the incredible action scenes in these
movies. It was actually the story and
the characters that must have captivated us.
Everyone else has already pointed
this out, but I was struck re-watching Star Wars how genius all the
characters were. They were all archetype
characters from the fantasy/mythology genre: the princess in danger, the young
farm boy yearning for adventure, the old wise mentor character, the
pirate-scoundrel character. The
archetypes were all there already before Star Wars got them, but there’s
a real genius in how they are mixed together.
And
then there’s how perfectly the whole thing is plotted—how we start out
initially seeing the whole world not through the eyes of the main protagonists,
but through the eyes of the droids—the minor characters. (Again, it’s not completely original. Star Wars borrowed this storytelling
technique and much of its frame plot from the Kurosawa film The Hidden
Fortress. But like
everything else it borrows, Star Wars uses it brilliantly.) The droids are sent off on this weird
adventure before the audience has any idea what kind of story we are in
for. Only when they eventually end up
with Luke Skywalker (almost 20 minutes into the movie) do we finally have some
idea of who are main character is going to be.
And then from there the twists and turns keep coming, until we end up
with the mentor, the pirate, and the flight out of Tatooine.
And
then there’s Darth Vader. On the one
hand, he is another archetypal fantasy character: the former protégé turned evil. (Another character Star Wars didn’t
create, but used for brilliant effect here.)
But with Darth Vader, the visuals are what completely make the
character—he looks completely terrifying.
He’s huge (played by a body-builder, he towers over all the other
characters). His black helmet and black
cape make him look dark and horrifying.
His deep breathing sounds make him sound terrifying. And then his deep booming voice completes the
character.
The whole character is a complete
work of genius.
Visuals and sound are a large part
of movie magic, and Star Wars has them down perfectly. It’s difficult to articulate in printed words
how incredible the visuals of the movie are, but they’re there on the screen
for anyone to see. The visual magic is
there right from the opening shot with the small little ship trying to flee,
followed by the huge space ship which completely fills up the whole movie
screen.
And then the music. Sometimes I think John Williams, and not
George Lucas, should be credited with being the real genius behind Star Wars. The music isn’t just a nice addition to this
movie—the music is really what makes this movie. There are a lot of scenes in the original Star
Wars which may have been completely forgettable if it weren’t for the
incredible musical score. The music
always sounded epic, and so it always made you think you were watching
something epic.
The first Star Wars movie is
so expertly plotted and executed, that there was always very little room for a
successful sequel. They farm boy had
already completed his hero’s journey, the princess had already been rescued,
and the scoundrel had already redeemed himself.
The original quest was over, and the heroes had completed their journey. There was nowhere really to go from here.
According to the Wikipedia page for The Empire Strikes Back, this problem seems to have
been very acutely realized by the filmmakers at the time. Which is why initially Irvin Kershner
initially refused to direct the film—no sequel to Star Wars could possibly
meet expectations. This is also why
script went through development hell with multiple writings and re-writings.
[According to Wikipedia, it appears
that some of George Lucas’s comments about Star Wars always having been
planned as a longer story weren’t completely true. In the original Star Wars movie, there
was never any plan to make Darth Vader into Luke’s father. This was a plot idea that only came out
during one of the multiple drafts for The Empire Strikes Back. Which of course makes perfect sense. It’s why Obi-Wan Kenobi never told this to
Luke directly in the first movie, and they had to go back and awkwardly cover
this up in the second two movies by Obi-Wan Kenobi giving his lame “point of
view” speech. According to Wikipedia, it
was only after this plot detail had been decided in the process of writing The
Empire Strikes Back that Lucas decided Star Wars was in fact really
episode IV, and that there were 3 prequel films that had to be made telling the
back story of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s relationship with Anakin Skywalker. And it was only in subsequent re-releases of Star
Wars that the episode IV got tacked on.
What I’m trying to say is, despite what Lucas has said in the years
since, when the original Star Wars came out in 1977, they didn’t have a
plan for what they were going to do for a sequel yet.]
By all rights, the sequel to Star
Wars should have been a disappointment.
Most sequels usually are, and the original Star Wars had left the
sequel writers very little to work with in terms of further character
development. But amazingly, against all
odds, they pulled out a sequel that worked.
And they did it by resisting the urge to try to recreate the original. Instead of sending Han, Luke and Leia on
another successful quest, they created a movie in which Han, Luke, and Leia are
on their backfoots the whole time. The
movie starts out with the Empire’s destruction of the Rebel Base (something the
Empire had never succeeded in doing in the original Star Wars), and then
shows our heroes fleeing the Empire, barely keeping one step ahead of them the
whole movie, only to end up defeated by the Empire at the end.
In the annals of movie history, it
goes down as perhaps the best sequel ever.
And yet…and yet for all that, they
didn’t quite capture the magic of the original.
It was good, but it wasn’t as perfect as Star Wars. The pacing of the movie is all wrong. It starts out with a bang, it finishes with a
bang, but there’s a big drag in the middle where not much happens. It doesn’t have the same classic story
telling forward momentum of the original, in which characters and their
respective story arcs are so clearly introduced and so clearly being pulled
forward.
Which isn’t to say The Empire
Strikes Back is a bad film by any means.
But it is to say you can’t expect lightening to strike twice, and it
didn’t. It’s a solid film, but they
couldn’t duplicate the magic of the original story.
And then there’s Return of the
Jedi. I loved Return of the Jedi
as a kid. (It was the only one of the original
Star Wars trilogy that I was old enough to see in the theaters. My dad brought me and my sister when I was
5.)
But it is clear by Return of the
Jedi that they were just out of ideas by this point. Another Death Star? That they have to blow up again with another
huge space battle? That again just has
one magic weak point that has to be hit exactly right?
Fortunately, Return of the Jedi
turns up the volume on the special effects and really increases all the action
scenes. So you don’t mind that you’re
essentially just repeating the climax from the first movie.
…but, in retrospect, it was a bad
sign of things to come. It demonstrated
that Lucas was out of ideas, and we would see this clearly years later in the
prequel trilogy, when Lucas would just try to repeat every iconic moment from
the original trilogy over and over again.
Lucas was under the mistaken
assumption that recycling plot points from earlier movies is artistic. “It’s like poetry, the stanzas rhyme,” George
Lucas infamously said at one point to explain why just about every scene in The
Phantom Menace is ripping off something from the original Star
Wars. It was perhaps an interesting
idea—deliberately plagiarizing yourself not as an act of laziness, but as an
artistic endeavor to “rhyme” your movies.
But it failed. Audiences don’t
want to see the same story repeated again and again and again. They want familiar characters, yes, but they
want these characters to go on new stories—stories that will completely blow
them away with originality, not bore them to death with repetition.
I hope, with the failure of the Star
Wars prequels (critical failures at least, if not commercial failures) that
the lesson has been learned, and the new Disney Star Wars movies will
not attempt to mimic the structure of the original Star Wars and call it
rhyming. (But if you read the Internet
rumors, there are some hints that there may be some scenes in the new prequels
that are deliberately designed to parallel the structure of the original Star
Wars. If this is true, it’s a
mistake in my opinion.)
As a child, I didn’t fully
appreciate that the entertainment I liked didn’t spring out of the earth fully
formed. When I liked a TV show, or movie
franchise, I assumed there was some inherent quality in the franchise that was
awesome. I didn’t fully realize that
there was no such thing as Star Wars, but that Star Wars was only
as good as the people who happened to be working on it at the time. And that these people might have only one
good idea in them, and then might never fully re-capture the magic of their
original idea. Or worse yet, just repeat
the same idea over and over and over again.
When I heard, in the mid 90s, that
George Lucas was finally making the long awaited Star Wars prequels, I,
and everyone else of my generation was over the moon. This was going to be awesome because it
was Star Wars. How could it not
be? It was Star Wars. We didn’t appreciate that simply sticking the
Star Wars logo on something didn’t inherently make it awesome. And we perhaps didn’t realize that the
original success of Star Wars would be very hard to duplicate. (If it could have been duplicated, then all
those other movie studios would have done so a long time ago.)
**************************************
I've had some version of this post rattling around in my brain now for about a year, but just couldn't seem to sort out my various contradictory thoughts.
A co-worker of mine in Cambodia once pointed out to me that during the various staff-room water cooler conversations, I had managed to contradicted myself wildly on Star Wars over the course of the year.
I had at one point argued that Star Wars mania was a time-period piece, and that if you hadn't seen Star Wars as a 5 year old in the 1980s, you might as well not bother, because you needed to see it in the early 1980s, and you needed to be 5 years old, or you could never truly understand it's impact.
I had, slightly less than a year later, argued that Star Wars was a timeless classic that was just as impressive to kids today as it was back in the 1977.
Until I truly make up my mind on which one it was, I'm not going to be able to write anything approaching a coherent analysis of the Star Wars phenomenon.
It's almost impossible to analyze Star Wars anyway. I know there's tons of geek red ink spilled all over the Internet attempting to do just that, but at a certain level, it's impossible to analyze why something is good.
It's possible to debate whether Star Wars is good objectively, or if it was just good at cynically manipulating audiences and selling them toys. But there's no doubt that it was successful.
Part of this is no doubt because we as human beings understand so little of ourselves, and can't rationally explain why we like what we like. Why do I like watching men people fight on a video screen? I couldn't attempt to give you a logical answer.
