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The Sith, The Revenge, The End
May. 20th, 2005 09:09 amAll right. I guess this will be one of those disorganized initial posts, purely reactive, with context and streamlining later. Though no, fuck it: Here's some context.
I was nine when Star Wars came out, which is why I'm not calling it by its tacked-on subsequent subtitle. To me it was just Star Wars, coolest film I'd ever seen, or ever hoped to see--and that's how it's remained, through all of Lucas' revisioning. Here's a man with way too much money, technology and time, fucking with my formative mythology; never mind that by my own admission, I think that mythology belongs to him, and he's therefore perfectly free to do whatever he wants with it. In my mind the bluescreen is minimal, Han shot first, we don't see Jabba 'til Return of the Jedi, and I could have done without him then, too. All that.
And this is why in my mind Darth Vader, who I fixated on to the exclusion of all else for the next three years of my life, is forever an implaccable monolith whose obvious connection to Luke is the same connection that every Black Knight has to every White one: That of one paladin to another, one representation of a faith to another. The will to power made armored flesh, as unemotional and detached in his own way as Ben Kenobi is in his, albeit with bad rather than love the fuel for his perpetual motion engine. He can possibly be Luke's father, because Empire was both simultaneously better and startlingly, wonderfully different from my fantasies, but he canNOT--ever--be the ruin of a hot, talented, petulant teenager who managed to snag his schoolboy crush only to later go wonko, for overcomplicated and political reasons even Lucas himself doesn't seem to fully understand.
Obviously, my version of Lucas' story was already beginning to branch off from his by the time Return came out, and it was that movie--the one which many of my students started with, which at least one of them considered the Best Film He'd Ever Seen (Ewoks and all, y'all!)--which put the last coffin-nail in my unabashed Star Wars love. I look back on it now as being like an affair I'd never erase the memory of, but which ended up being more memorable for what it taught me to avoid than for what it taught me to seek out. I'm still more interested in villains/antiheroes than in heroes, just as I'm still wary of absolutes--and Obi-Wan's judgement at the end of Sith aside, they do seem to be pretty rife on both sides of the Star Wars moral equation).
You could say Sith is about people rewriting their own history, in a way, as much as it is about Lucas continuing to ret-con something he should have been finished with when he was fourty. When Palpatine tells Anakin about "the legend of Darth Plagueis the Wise", for example...there's your problem in a nutshell: He's presenting something that happened maybe twenty years ago as though it were totally beyond the scope of direct human experience, interpretable (and re-interpretable) as a myth. He's treating it like the battle for Troy, not the equivalent of the Replublican Gulf War. And that's sort of what happens between Sith and Star Wars, somehow--suddenly, nobody in the known universe aside from the Emperor and Ben Kenobi can remember that Darth Vader used to be hunky young Anakin Skywalker (a bit of a boob even for a Jedi, but he sure could fly spaceships!). Hell, not ever Vader seems to remember...that's certainly the only reason I can think of that he never, apparently, thinks of looking for at least the one baby he suspects Padme probably had before she died ON HIS OWN HOMEWORLD, maybe LIVING WITH HIS ONLY KNOWN RELATIVES, possibly UNDER THE NAME OF SKYWALKER.
This is pure Soap Opera logic, the kind which allows a baby to become dating-age in five years, people to completely forget their ex-wives once they leave the cast ("Wow, where did these kids come from?"), or the woman Todd got a bad reputation for raping on One Life To Live--everybody knows he has the bad rep, just not why, because Marty's been gone since 1995 or so. And you know what? Soap Opera and Space Opera ain't the same type of Opera.
Does ret-con necessarily destroy one's appreciation of the original source? Not necessarily. But though I enjoyed many things about Sith, though I was crying during the final sequences, I know I'll never get that first impression of/reaction to Star Wars back again, ever, untainted by Lucas' tinkering. It's done for Star Wars what Alien3 did for Aliens...become something I have to feel around in my mind, a blank spot, canon I "have" to treat as an A/U in order to enjoy what I used to enjoy wholeheartedly, with no apologies. And yes, that sort of continues to suck. And it probably always will.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
I was nine when Star Wars came out, which is why I'm not calling it by its tacked-on subsequent subtitle. To me it was just Star Wars, coolest film I'd ever seen, or ever hoped to see--and that's how it's remained, through all of Lucas' revisioning. Here's a man with way too much money, technology and time, fucking with my formative mythology; never mind that by my own admission, I think that mythology belongs to him, and he's therefore perfectly free to do whatever he wants with it. In my mind the bluescreen is minimal, Han shot first, we don't see Jabba 'til Return of the Jedi, and I could have done without him then, too. All that.
And this is why in my mind Darth Vader, who I fixated on to the exclusion of all else for the next three years of my life, is forever an implaccable monolith whose obvious connection to Luke is the same connection that every Black Knight has to every White one: That of one paladin to another, one representation of a faith to another. The will to power made armored flesh, as unemotional and detached in his own way as Ben Kenobi is in his, albeit with bad rather than love the fuel for his perpetual motion engine. He can possibly be Luke's father, because Empire was both simultaneously better and startlingly, wonderfully different from my fantasies, but he canNOT--ever--be the ruin of a hot, talented, petulant teenager who managed to snag his schoolboy crush only to later go wonko, for overcomplicated and political reasons even Lucas himself doesn't seem to fully understand.
Obviously, my version of Lucas' story was already beginning to branch off from his by the time Return came out, and it was that movie--the one which many of my students started with, which at least one of them considered the Best Film He'd Ever Seen (Ewoks and all, y'all!)--which put the last coffin-nail in my unabashed Star Wars love. I look back on it now as being like an affair I'd never erase the memory of, but which ended up being more memorable for what it taught me to avoid than for what it taught me to seek out. I'm still more interested in villains/antiheroes than in heroes, just as I'm still wary of absolutes--and Obi-Wan's judgement at the end of Sith aside, they do seem to be pretty rife on both sides of the Star Wars moral equation).
You could say Sith is about people rewriting their own history, in a way, as much as it is about Lucas continuing to ret-con something he should have been finished with when he was fourty. When Palpatine tells Anakin about "the legend of Darth Plagueis the Wise", for example...there's your problem in a nutshell: He's presenting something that happened maybe twenty years ago as though it were totally beyond the scope of direct human experience, interpretable (and re-interpretable) as a myth. He's treating it like the battle for Troy, not the equivalent of the Replublican Gulf War. And that's sort of what happens between Sith and Star Wars, somehow--suddenly, nobody in the known universe aside from the Emperor and Ben Kenobi can remember that Darth Vader used to be hunky young Anakin Skywalker (a bit of a boob even for a Jedi, but he sure could fly spaceships!). Hell, not ever Vader seems to remember...that's certainly the only reason I can think of that he never, apparently, thinks of looking for at least the one baby he suspects Padme probably had before she died ON HIS OWN HOMEWORLD, maybe LIVING WITH HIS ONLY KNOWN RELATIVES, possibly UNDER THE NAME OF SKYWALKER.
This is pure Soap Opera logic, the kind which allows a baby to become dating-age in five years, people to completely forget their ex-wives once they leave the cast ("Wow, where did these kids come from?"), or the woman Todd got a bad reputation for raping on One Life To Live--everybody knows he has the bad rep, just not why, because Marty's been gone since 1995 or so. And you know what? Soap Opera and Space Opera ain't the same type of Opera.
Does ret-con necessarily destroy one's appreciation of the original source? Not necessarily. But though I enjoyed many things about Sith, though I was crying during the final sequences, I know I'll never get that first impression of/reaction to Star Wars back again, ever, untainted by Lucas' tinkering. It's done for Star Wars what Alien3 did for Aliens...become something I have to feel around in my mind, a blank spot, canon I "have" to treat as an A/U in order to enjoy what I used to enjoy wholeheartedly, with no apologies. And yes, that sort of continues to suck. And it probably always will.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
