Not so far, far away
This week, millions will find out why Luke Skywalker is the last Jedi, how he’s related to his newly arrived apprentice Rey, and whether one of them turns to the dark side. Whether or not “Jedi” is plural or singular may remain among life’s unresolved mysteries, for now.
My nephews and I will have to wait until late next week, when their Christmas break starts, to watch “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” I’m eager to find out what Luke first tells Rey (Daisy Ridley) after their meeting on that cliff, where the actor Mark Hamill pulled off one of the most dramatic slow turns in the history of movies. But if anyone on my Facebook feed should ruin the suspense with spoilers, I shall wish him (or her) more hair in inconvenient places than Chewbacca.
Will Luke turn out to be a villain? That’s one topic that fans have been speculating about, because Skywalker looms in the background of the movie poster, the spot reserved for the likes of Darth Maul, Darth Vader, and Kylo Ren. A recurring theme in the Star Wars saga is that of choosing between using one’s power for good or using it for evil. How much violence can good people inflict, before they cease to be good themselves?
For now, it’s not the Big Questions that draw my nephews, at 12 and 9, to the “Star Wars” movies. They enjoy the chase scenes in deep space, the battery-fed replicas of light sabers and the Millennium Falcon, and the chance to ask questions about the movies’ plots and history. It’s a rich history, too, with controversial themes such as genocide, patricide, planet-killing weaponry, and emergency powers for politicians.
Of course, part of the franchise’s success comes from clever marketing and the calculated build-up of anticipation. But it’s not just that. There’s the passing on of enthusiasms from one generation to the next. Many of those who first saw “Star Wars” as children in 1977 have relished, in these last two years, the chance to introduce the stories to their children. When “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” opened two years ago, the movie audience I was with began clapping the moment the opening text crawled across the screen. (Some of the children clapped, too.)
When George Lucas first imagined this “galaxy far, far away,” did he have any idea how well it would endure? By the time he sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012, for US$4.1 billion, “Star Wars” was more than a set of movies. It was a pop culture phenomenon that encompassed toys, books, games and other merchandise, as well as theme parks, an animated TV series, and virtual reality attractions. Serious fans have built wikis (websites that are written and edited collaboratively) on the minutiae of “Star Wars” characters and events. These are the sort of passionate fans who know Anakin Skywalker’s midichlorian count, the origins of the Knights of Ren, and how Darth Vader’s suit keeps him alive.
I do wonder about those midichlorians, too. In “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace,” Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) explains that midicholorians are tiny life forms that live in the cells of living things; those who host plenty of it can sense the Force and, with training, learn to use it. Was Lucas suggesting that an individual’s potential for greatness was encoded in his or her cells?
What makes “Star Wars” work isn’t that it reveals something new. The heroine who flirts with villainy is an archetype, and whether or not she goes over to the dark side is a choice that other characters have struggled with before on the page or screen. What “Star Wars” does is trick you into believing you’ve escaped from hard questions and reality’s grip. Yet Lucas and the saga’s other storytellers made us think about artificial intelligence long before it made us anxious; they led us to embrace the different long before identity politics took the stage. Forty years after Lucas let us into his universe, we haven’t run out of things to love about it.