Alberto Chimal on Star Wars: The Eternal Reign

I must admit that I am one of those who watched the first Star Wars movie in the seventies. In Mexico it was titled La guerra de las galaxias (War of the Galaxies): it arrived in late 1977 or early 1978. The movie was unprecedented in my life because I was a child, and not because I sensed how successful and influential it would become.

The TV commercials had piqued my interest, I remember, and also the lightsabers: they were the most popular toy of the time and were made out of a simple flashlight, attached to a translucent plastic tube. The light was colored by putting a piece of cellophane inside the tube, near the lightbulb. Some kids already had their sabers when my mom took us to the old Cine Hollywood theater to watch the movie. We went with a friend of hers and her children, and all of us watched in envy as those other kids ran around the theater with their swords glowing red, blue, or at times white, if they already had lost their cellophane.

In the end, everyone, us and them, came out singing John Williams’s theme, firing imaginary guns, thrilled by film quotes we rarely recognized as such and by the truly original moments, brilliant in their innocence and speed and beauty, made by George Lucas and his many contributors at Lucasfilm.

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Later on I got my own lightsaber, which didn’t last long; later on I got other toys: we didn’t have anything like a free trade agreement with the U.S., but action figures, ships and other items were imported or manufactured in Mexico, imitations of those authorized by Lucasfilm. Later on the other films followed: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983).

And then life went on. Now it seems we’ve lived in the constant presence of the “saga” since 1977, but that’s not true. In the eighties, Star Wars’ influence was seen mostly in other movies, which continued the blockbuster movie trend initiated by Lucas and his colleague Steven Spielberg, and which by now seems synonymous with Hollywood itself: the desire for tent-pole movies and franchises that has marginalized every other way of filmmaking. Outside of the Indiana Jones series, Lucasfilm didn’t make any other memorable movies during that time, and the best of its other projects (or of those which were known in Mexico) can perhaps be found in a handful of episodes of the children’s cartoon series, Ewoks, which revived the fantasy, fairytale-esque trappings that were central to the movies’ appeal, in spite of their space opera appearance.

To the Mexican middle class of that period, fascinated by the ideas of progress associated with American culture, Star Wars was a part of the “quality entertainment”: any media content imported from the U. S. However, it didn’t become the basis of a mythology until the late nineties. The three initial films had become by then something doubly remote: an artifact from the third quarter of the 20^th century and a reminder of the life of those who were children at that time. The few faithful fans, lifelong collectors and consumers of Lucas’ stories, were part of a closed and largely derided ghetto. The word geek connoted nothing but ridicule, immaturity, and excessive enthusiasm.

It took the release of the re-edited original trilogy, a new wave of videogames, comics and novels—in large part publicized via the internet—, and the second movie trilogy (1999-2005) for Star Wars to once again become a global phenomenon.

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The force of Lucas’ inventions stems from their similarities to the mythologies of other eras (as he has said for decades), filtered through contemporary sensibilities and desires (as he rarely says). That afternoon in the eighties, what united all of us kids at the Cine Hollywood—big and small, with or without lightsabers—was a shared fascination with the story’s events, as well as an interest in its characters, but also the way in which all of them were presented to us. That fictional world was at the same time new, extraordinary, and familiar in many ways. The famous, seemingly unending shot of an enormous Imperial ship, both imitates and exaggerates an analogous shot from Kubrick’s 2001; I didn’t know it then, but any Kubrick buff would have recognized the homage; as for me I had no trouble recognizing a later reference, when we see an escape pod detaching from another ship in the exact same angle used for the module and rocket stage separations in the NASA footage seen on TV. We also noticed many other echoes: the trash compactor sequence, with its cheap-looking monster and its closing walls, harkened back to countless B movies; lost in the desert planet Tatooine, the droids R2D2 and C3PO (whose names, in Mexican Spanish, were rendered for decades as “Arturito” and “Citripio”) looked dirty and exhausted, like actors in an adventure film or TV show; to us, members of the “TV generation”, Princess Leia’s hologram could be a product of some advanced technology, but it also looked a lot like our daily lives: we had seen those scan lines and bluish white many times on our black-and-white TV sets… The texture of those images, loaded with meanings and allusions, was as important as the quick editing, the musical score, or the plot itself. The impact of movies is visceral, and the mental state they induce is dream-like, but to the moviegoers we were then Star Wars was also deeply rooted in the present. A present that suddenly opened itself to show images and stories beyond anything we had ever seen before.

Later on, as we grew older, even adult hardcore fans have been able to rationalize their feelings and speak about subgenres and pop culture, metaphors and symbols, the purity and moral simplicity of the stories, but I suspect none of that ever mattered to us as children: the most innocent and savage part of us was simply swept away by what it experienced.

A part of that enchantment has endured beyond its time. It creates, in the end, a sense of community in those who embrace it. I asked a very young Mexican writer and fan, born in the 90s, why he liked Star Wars, and his reply, emoticon included, was, “Star Wars taught me how to imagine. :’).” However, if a narrative is to become a mythology it not only needs volume—“space” in which to invent and explore its fictional universe—it also needs room to contain as many varieties as it can of the experiences and preoccupations of the people that make it theirs. And these preoccupations change as we change as individuals and communities.

Because of this, the fact that Star Wars became a transmedia mythology (one of the first that can be studied using this contemporary term) is crucial to understanding it.

Its growth was similar to that of an ancient mythology. Its main source, of course, is a company that’s been active for decades, instead of a culture that tells itself stories throughout centuries, and it is based on audiovisual content instead of literary or oral traditions. But Lucasfilm itself begun calling their movies canon when the exploitation of the Star Wars brand overtook them and a complex relationship between the film series and all other products related to it, from ebooks to blankets, began to take shape. Not only was there a constant process of influence and intertextual referencing between all the media utilized (a role-playing game, say, influenced a novel, which in turn influenced a comic series and a videogame, which went on to change details in an animated story or even a movie); also, this relationships made necessary the creation of a hierarchy of the different narrative texts being produced (film, TV, written fiction and so on), a stratification of their authority within the growing body of the Star Wars universe.

Although Lucas maintained a great deal of interest in creating stories for children, or at least for adults who remembered the original movies and shared them with their children, other, more mature themes were able to sneak into works conceived farther from the film canon. So, some later stories could afford to “grow” with their audience and distance themselves from the films’ naïveté to accommodate more adult interests. For example, a 2003 novel, Matthew Stover’s Shatterpoint, is a loose adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (or Coppola’s Apocalypse Now) set in the Star Wars universe, just in time to mirror those days’ climate of political unrest due to the Iraq war—although from a rather conservative standpoint. Other novels and comics show, in fact, the ageing of the original trilogy’s protagonists. As Han Solo and Princess Leia grow older, so does their disillusion with the responsibilities and troubles of adult life (and politics); later they have children who are often a source of grief and problems.

These tonal differences were possible because only the movies were targeted at a global audience (the most downloaded video on the planet in 1999 may have been a trailer for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace). The rest of the Star Wars narratives were created for fans and weren’t marketed beyond them, or otherwise incorporated general media trends, as was usually the case with Star Wars video games, always developed to fit within preexisting genres. Everything was always subordinate to the film canon, placed within a chronology based on that canon, presented as an expansion of it, and subject to modification or challenge when it contradicted the films.

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In time apocrypha began to be published: variations on themes from the canon’s “real” story, and also explications and exegeses of the story, which were almost always made by fans and not by Lucasfilm and intended to insinuate themselves into the narrative that united its authors, as happened to religious and mythological texts in many ancient cultures. Fan fiction, fan art, short films, and all kind of appropriations are being created even today, and in the process have faced resistance from Lucasfilm, which obviously would have preferred fans to buy the company’s content instead of creating their own. At the same time, it was fans’ interest that allowed the corporation to continue selling their own product.

Besides, Star Wars myths can be seen at their most intriguing and striking in some works made by fans, whose narrated world becomes the setting for not only a story of learning and coming of age —the proverbial Hero’s Journey— but also of many complex narrative cycles.

It must be noted how many fans detest the original trilogy’s new, modified editions, which signaled both the heavy use of CGI in the second trilogy and a dissonant presence of adult themes alongside a less spontaneous and somewhat forced sense of childish innocence. For example, in 1977 a brief scene of Star Wars showed Han Solo shooting Greedo, an alien who was threatening him. The second edition of the scene shows Greedo shooting first, so as to make Solo look less violent and treacherous, and the third one, due to complaints in the press and on the internet, makes both fire almost at the same time. Around 2005 I found a fanfic—probably lost now—whose anonymous author reasoned that the confrontation between Solo and Greedo had had no witnesses, and thus the truth about it would never be known. This turned the episode into a legend within its own fictional world and is a small stroke of genius, as the fan’s text becomes a kind of midrash. Star Wars is not a religion but its myths are powerful enough to make such reflections appear, written seriously and intended to engage their tradition and authorities in dialogue.

Another example: since the original version of the first trilogy has yet to be rereleased, some people have taken it upon themselves to “recreate” it, taking video from the best editions available and altering it (without any authorization, of course) to “erase” any changes made after the eighties and “return them” to how they looked decades ago. All of these amateur editors declare they wish to restore the “original purity” of the series and speak about Lucas almost as if he were an apostate from a shared belief.

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Following the purchase of Lucasfilm by the Walt Disney Company in 2012, the publicity around the series was intensified and a new phase of exploitation of the series in all media was announced. New films will be produced and released at Disney’s usual rapid pace: a new one will open each year. In the West we have learned to accept both corporate greed and the oversaturation of popular content. British writer Jeanette Winterson has described pop culture as an “opencast mine”: each fad and trend becomes a terrain that can and will be excavated until nothing of value remains in it.

The novelty here is that Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens and every other sequel and spinoff controlled by Disney have been advertised as related to the film series, but not adaptations of any existing story set after Return of the Jedi. If reissued, the old, pre-Disney stories will bear the brand Legends, and will be considered out of the canon. Disney seems to want more creative freedom for their contributors moving forward, and also more creative control for itself, but this can have a second meaning: Lucasfilm is no longer aiming to create materials for the films’ original fans, who may feel a great attachment to the stories they have already consumed but will not live forever. Disney intends to lure into fidelity a new, much younger audience.

Myths used to have an ending, and it was an essential part of its overall meaning, but the idea of an ending, as Alan Moore wrote in the eighties, goes against the ideal of continuous, never-ending exploitation that businesses of pop culture strive for. Tomorrow we’ll begin to see if Disney’s goal can be achieved, which is somewhat operatic or mythic in itself: the creation of an eternal rule.

Translated from the Spanish by the author and George Henson.

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