What I Learned Watching 'Star Wars' for the First Time
I’ve never seen Star Wars. I’m not entirely sure how that’s possible, considering I enjoyed an otherwise normal upbringing, deprived of neither Happy Meals nor Muppets nor most things that gave childhood in the ’80s its contours. I was hardly immune to culture, passing entire summers in the thrall of Poltergeist or The NeverEnding Story. The truth is I probably never exactly felt like I’d missed it, having absorbed enough trivia over the years — whether by osmosis or some form of witness tampering — that, were Alex Trebek to say, “Luke Skywalker’s father,” I would immediately ring in with, “Who is Darth Vader?”
On the other hand, I did for most of my life assume Harrison Ford played Luke. Once you get me on cross-examination, the gaps are pretty staggering.
At some point, I definitely derived a certain power in resisting the Star Wars trilogy. My determination was marrow-deep, if not always logical: I once endured Slapshot because a guy I’d started dating loved it, but I still refused to sit down and watch Star Wars, which he (and every other boy I ever liked) practically worshiped. Last year, I took immense pleasure in learning that Lena Dunham had never seen the films, either, as if this somehow furthered our imagined solidarity. And to this day, a part of me resents the ease with which something that’s more closely associated with boyhood gets held up as universal — totemic, really.
But, not unlike Dunham, I am an admirer of Girls’ Adam Driver — and J.J. Abrams, Lupita Nyong’o, and others connected to the next Star Wars installment. Since it hardly makes sense to dive into The Force Awakens without a primer, I felt compelled to finally see what I had been missing. Sometimes, this is the recommended way to go about things: I envy anybody who gets to binge-watch Breaking Bad for the first time, or read The Passage, or finally see Jaws. (OK, but who hasn’t seen Jaws? I would aver that the Jaws-oblivious are living under a rock even bigger than even my own.)
So now I’m ready to begin at the beginning. Or maybe not the beginning beginning, because — as any George Lucas fanboy can tell you — the original Star Wars trilogy takes place in the middle of the saga, a point that makes for some understandable rookie confusion. Did Lucas really come up with all of the senatorial shenanigans that would become the much-loathed prequels only to start with the stolen plans for the Death Star? It will not be the last time the director’s creative decisions leave me baffled.
Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill in ‘A New Hope’ (Photo: Everett Collection)
Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977)
The first 20 minutes of this film are dense; I will cop to rewinding the opening crawl twice. It doesn’t help, of course, that there’s initially very little dialogue, and that most of it takes place during a one-way conversation between C-3PO and R2-D2. It’s kind of an impenetrable introductory scene: What spice mine? And where’s Kessel?
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The trouble with approaching Star Wars in the era of television shows like Game of Thrones is that I’ve been conditioned to expect everything will matter. It seems necessary to understand, for example, how the Mos Eisley Cantina functions. Is it like the Bronze in Buffy the Vampire Slayer — a regular watering hole for monsters and humans alike? None of this is really explained in the movies, which is why it must have been fun for longtime fans to go back and binge on this mythology — so they could learn the origins of the Tusken Raiders, or discover that the Jawas smell bad. As a first-time viewer, though, I had no idea that many of these creatures aren’t integral to the plot — which, had I known, would have allowed me to just enjoy the universe Lucas created.
Thankfully, much of the story translates visually — or so I tell myself, if for no other reason than to explain how 40 years’ worth of young children have managed to understand it. Good and evil are aesthetically defined: The polished exoskeletons of Vader and the Stormtroopers are unmistakably menacing; my sympathies immediately lay with the rusty droids, especially the neurotic one. And I was pleasantly surprised, after years of masturbation jokes at her expense courtesy of the Kevin Smiths and Ross Gellers of the world, that Princess Leia is a critical agitator in the Rebellion.
C-3PO and R2-D2 in ‘A New Hope’ (Photo: Everett)
Also surprising? Star Wars is depressing. Luke endures a lot of death: his aunt, his uncle, his mentor. I’ll come back to the eternal sadness of young Skywalker later, but here, Luke rebounds remarkably fast. I wonder if I would have done so if I watched A New Hope as a child. (I mourned Atrayu’s horse in The NeverEnding Story to a distracting degree.) Anyway, I was blindsided by the loss of Obi-Wan. His Alderaan eulogy was chilling, coming as it does in the middle of the otherwise jocular Chewie chess scene: “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”
The Force. Having watched A New Hope, I could no more explain what it is now than I could articulate God, but sure: A belief system to which those who subscribe are automatically special and magical is pretty appealing. Maybe it has a fanatical bent in that it shades things in black or white — a simplicity adults should no longer abide — but it’s great to finally have context for the infamous expression.
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On a lighter note, though, what I’m going to appreciate about A New Hope is not the trash-compactor scene, nor the destruction of the Death Star, but the fact that the gang’s all here: Ben, Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, the robots. Each pairing has its buddy-comedy moments, which if I had to choose a favorite would be C-3PO and his perpetual punching bag, R2, or else Solo jawing with just about anyone. “That was a boring conversation anyway,” he mutters after some ill-advised small talk with the Stormtroopers alerts them to his chicanery, forcing Han to shoot up the communications panel. Ford is a conduit for the adult viewer: His sarcasm is a mask for his incompetence, plotwise, but isn’t he also saying, “This is kind of tedious”?
A New Hope ends abruptly, with our heroes being feted in a ceremony that would suggest they could all live happily ever after; cue the iris slow wipe. But what about Han’s debt to Jabba?! … is something I never wondered. Like so many seemingly tossed-out references in this movie, it felt like a detail that likely wouldn’t resurface again.
Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
I won’t pretend I went into the sequel unaware of the prevailing opinion — that it’s the best Star Wars movie and also the darkest. Luke is the most fascinating character to me from this point on, because his days with his friends are pretty much over. And whether he’s just acting duty-bound, or whether it sort of sucked to be stuck on Dagobah with R2 and the giddy Yoda for company, I sensed his isolation and despair. The price of Luke’s heroism already appears to be unhappiness — and he hasn’t even been unhanded by his father yet.
Other Empire observations: The Wampa looks like the Rankin/Bass Abominable Snowman after a bender. Cloud City reminds me of my least-favorite Super Mario Bros. level, but the duplicitous, charismatic Lando Calrissian is a great addition to the cast. Oh, and speaking of which: More humans, please! R2 and Chewie are fine, but that’s about all I can really tolerate in the speechless-creature department (though I was touched by Chewbacca’s concern for an akimbo C-3PO).
Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford in ‘The Empire Strikes Back’
The most galling aspect of Empire is that Han let all this time pass without repaying that debt to Jabba! Yet his devil-may-care approach did lead to Ford’s famously ad-libbed response to Leia’s “I love you” before being submerged in carbonite:
I commend the whole “I love you”/”I know” exchange only because Leia will get to flip the script on him in Jedi, and by then it will be pretty much the only cool thing she gets to do.
As for Leia: It’s probably time I mention the one element of Star Wars that has long piqued my curiosity. For many years, I assumed Luke and Leia were the trilogy’s romantic heroes, until one day an appalled college friend said, No! They’re brother and sister! A brief pause, and then: Well … but they don’t actually know that, so they kiss once.
Wait, what? Fans often dismiss this incestuous detail, if they even remember it at all, so I figured Star Wars didn’t exactly satisfy V.C. Andrews’s standards. But while I agree that the chemistry between Leia and Han is more palpable and deliberate, Luke definitely has the hots for Leia, and Leia definitely kisses Luke on the mouth for an unsisterly several seconds after the Wampa attack:
This is the type of kiss that siblings who didn’t know they were siblings would later be profoundly disturbed by (yet Luke and Leia won’t be!). Sort of twisted, but I like it, mostly because I think we were less hysterical about messaging back in the early ’80s. Not that I endorse incest, obviously, but I appreciate that it unfolds in such a way that allows us to later say, “Gee, that’s messed up,” much like we might casually consider other weird circumstances of our childhood as we get older.
Finally, I do wish that by some miracle I hadn’t known the Vader reveal, because I can’t imagine what the cold reaction to that must have felt like. Is it as big a twist as the one in The Usual Suspects? The Sixth Sense? Bigger? The shock is unrecoverable, so while I appreciate that Empire ends with the characters in jeopardy, history has left its “darkness” feeling overstated. It’s hardly as frightening as the Nothing in The NeverEnding Story, released three four years later, and it’s preschool compared with The Hunger Games.
Hamill and David Prowse (as Darth Vader) in ‘Return of the Jedi’
Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi (1983)
There must be countless rants about the degrading treatment of Leia at the start of Jedi, but here’s one more: It’s disgraceful that the only female character began this series in such a powerful position and is now wearing a bikini and chained to a giant slug. At least she gets to strangle him.
Jedi’s reputation precedes it. I attended to some personal grooming through most of Endor, pausing only when that one Ewok realizes his little friend has expired:
Meanwhile, Luke is confronting the Emperor, and the tiny bears completely interrupt the suspense of that encounter. Again, the lack of humans is frustrating. (Yes to the return of Lando, no to Admiral Ackbar.)
But, strangely — and I don’t say this to be contrarian — Jedi actually ended up being the most entertaining experience, because it was the only story that unfolded without my previous knowledge. For example, I had no idea that Vader saved Luke’s life, or that we ever saw his face, which tragically does not belong to James Earl Jones. I don’t know if this is a well-kept secret, or only the 57th most interesting thing about Star Wars, but it complicated my feelings about him. Later, when a friend described a former boss as “Darth Vader,” I thought, Oh, so he had a heart, you just had to be aggressive about accessing it? (Only kidding. I knew she meant he was an asshole.)
Han’s not himself anymore, either. I mean that literally. He’s Indiana Jones by this point, and I preferred the droll scofflaw to the action hero. My final impression, of course, is that Leia and Luke are not nearly traumatized enough by the true nature of their relationship. In fact, Leia once again uses Luke to stoke Han’s jealousy. I certainly hope the new movies dig a little deeper into this perversion.
Fisher and foes — including Jabba the Hutt — in ‘Return of the Jedi’
Overall, I’m weary. Sequel-mania was briskly underway by 1983 — the year that gave us Jaws 3-D, after all — and Jedi feels more like a money grab than essential storytelling. The concluding celebration in the forest in no way left me with an appetite for the prequels, nor would I even be tempted to rewatch this trilogy. Simply put, Star Wars can never occupy the place in my heart that it might yours.
But not a day goes by since when I don’t think about it. That’s not an exaggeration — it’s not even intentional. Like learning a new word, only to hear it constantly, I now find Star Wars inescapable. The day I received this assignment, an NPR segment cast the Navy’s laser weapon system somewhat facetiously as real-life lightsabers. During a recent junket, the stars of the comedy The Overnight played Save or Kill between Star Wars and Star Trek (all but Taylor Schilling spared Lucas’s creation). Actually, just last night I decided to test how many times the film came up in the span of six hours. The answer? Three: A New Yorker article about the racist application of death penalty laws in Louisiana described a district attorney as “Darth Vader”; a hipster I passed on the way to a restaurant was wearing a Death Star T-shirt; and when I logged into Instagram, the first photo in my feed was Aaron Paul enthusing because “Star Wars” followed him on Twitter.
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So I get it now. Or at least I understand the vocabulary. An Ewok reference finally makes sense, whereas I used to wonder: Is that the big hairy thing or the little hairy thing? Basic stuff, but it’s just as satisfying as learning a foreign language, or discovering what words like quiddity and sedulous mean, which I did just the other day. (For all his quiddities, Yoda was able to make a sedulous Jedi out of Luke.) Unlike almost every other cultural offering since, Star Wars is more or less insulated from hot takes. It’s earned the right not to “suck.” It’s the rubric that informed other rubrics; it’s the framework that enshrines everything from faith to father issues. I hold many movies as more beloved, but I’m not sure any one of them towers over another the way Star Wars does over so many, and so in that sense, I missed out. Or maybe I would have shrugged the films off then, too. To paraphrase a certain Jedi master: Never know will I.
Watch a teaser from ‘The Force Awakens’ below:
