[May 25th
will mark the 40th anniversary of the release of the first Star Wars film (it wasn’t
titled A New Hope at that
point!). So this week I’ll offer a few ways to AmericanStudy the iconic series
and its contexts and connections. Share your own different points of view for a
force-full crowd-sourced weekend post, my fellow padawan learners!]
Two of the
things this AmericanStudier loves most about the first film in the new Star
Wars trilogy, and one that worries me a bit.
I initially wrote
about the “transnational force” at the heart of the Star Wars saga more
than five years ago in this space, long before John Boyega and Daisy Ridley
had been cast as the leads in a new trilogy (and Lupita Nyongo’o had been
cast in a role that, without spoiling too much, could be called the Yoda of
that new series). I stand by my argument that the films have always been
cross-cultural in important ways; but at the same time, there’s no disputing
that the world of the original trilogy was extremely white (smooth-talking
space pirate Lando Calrissian notwithstanding). Moreover, while Carrie
Fisher’s Leia was certainly an impressive heroine in
many ways, she was also, quite literally, the clichéd princess in need of
rescue whose plea for help set the entire first film and trilogy in motion. So
to sit next to my 10 and 8 year old sons in December 2015 while they watched a
Star Wars movie in which Boyega and Ridley were the unquestionable, kickass,
and entirely equal leads was, to put it mildly, a wonderful experience for this
AmericanStudier. Take
that, haters!
I watched The Force Awakens that first time with
not only my sons, but also my Mom and Dad, and that multi-generational viewing
experience was just as inspiring. While once again trying to avoid spoilers
(for the three people who haven’t yet seen Force
Awakens—get on it before
December, folks!), I’ll note that the new film is deeply and powerfully
focused on the relationships between the past and the future, including an
emphasis on family bonds but also and most centrally through its pitch-perfect
balance (in casting and character arcs, script and storytelling, plot and
action, and much else) of the familiar and the new, of callbacks to the
original films and fresh directions for the saga. In a world where my boys’
favorite toys (the Skylanders) were
both created within the last ten years and utilize an
innovative gaming technology I could never have imagined as a kid (and which
has spun off into app games that they play on an iPad, about every detail of
which ditto), to have a cultural text that can so fully and successfully unite
1977 and 2017 is nothing short of incredible. To paraphrase E.B. White’s
great “Once More to the Lake,” I wasn’t entirely sure, sitting in that
theater, whether I was myself, my sons, or my parents—and that’s a feeling we
should all get to experience!
My only problem
with that Force Awakens theatrical
experience had nothing to do with the film itself, and yet represents the one
thing about it and Star Wars in 2017 that worries me. Before the movie began,
there was the usual 10 minutes of commercials (before the usual 15 minutes of
trailers), and I would say that about 9 of those advertising minutes featured
Star Wars tie-ins. It felt at the time (and again this past December when Rogue One was released) like a roughly
similar percentage of the TV and radio ads I encountered were part of the
film’s merchandising
empire. Star Wars has always had its share of associated products (writes
the AmericanStudier who literally had a deal with a local store’s toy
department to get a call every time a new Ewok figure was released), but it
feels to me that Lucasfilm’s purchase by Disney has amplified those commercial
and marketing campaigns many times over. I want to be clear that I’m extremely
grateful that the company has made this new series of films (and all those aforementioned
positive effects) possible. But I do worry that this all-out marketing blitz
has the potential to make Star Wars into just another product, rather than the
cross-cultural, multi-generational story that has endured so potently for
nearly half a century.
Next
StarWarsStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Star Wars contexts you’d highlight?
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