Tim Kreider, What if ‘Star Wars’ Was Just a Movie?, The NYTimes, December 20, 2019, The premise:
The release of the latest, and allegedly last, installment in the “Skywalker Saga,” comprising the canonical triad of trilogies in the eternally expanding “Star Wars” universe, seems like an appropriate time to pose a wistful little thought experiment: What if “Star Wars” — the original 1977 film — had performed at the box office about as everyone expected, in the range of a ’70s Disney film, earning, say, $16 million? Let’s imagine that some film historian or revisionist critic circa 2019 were to rediscover this forgotten gem, an oddity of ’70s cinema buried among all the Watergate-paranoia thrillers, demonic horror films and disaster blockbusters. Can we, with 40 years’ retrospect, evaluate it as a film instead of a phenomenon?
Before “Star Wars” became a commercial behemoth, most critics found it a charming diversion: The Times called it “the most elaborate, most expensive, most beautiful movie serial ever made.”
What we got:
“Star Wars” is ultimately a religious film [...] It’s a caution against allowing your humanity to be effaced: The storm troopers and Vader are masked, robotic, like the police and surveillers in “THX 1138.” Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” novels (an influence on “Star Wars”) describe how, when people lose faith in science, it must be presented to them in the guise of religion to get them to accept it again. “Star Wars” did the opposite, selling religion and traditional values back to people disenchanted with the church in alluring, futuristic packaging.
Whether the message or the packaging prevailed is hard to gauge. The generations raised on “Star Wars” did not exactly heed Obi-Wan’s advice to turn off their computers (and dread “catching feelings”), but the religion Lucas invented, based vaguely on ’70s West-coast Zen, is now an official one: Jediism received tax-exempt status in the United States in 2015.
Perhaps, far away in the future:
There may come a day, a long time from now, after Disney’s vampirically extended copyrights have expired and all the accumulated cultural detritus has eroded away, when people will have forgotten “Star Wars,” and can finally see it again. Seen anew, much of its imagery is surreally beautiful: the vast plated underside of an armored starship sliding on and on forever overhead; the dreamlike tableau, seen through a scrim of smoke and framed by concentric portals, of a girl shrouded in white furtively genuflecting to a robot; a golden android waving for help in a desert by the skeleton of a dinosaur; a convoy of space fighters opening their split wings in sequence, like poison flowers blossoming.
Perhaps its most iconic image epitomizes its genius for making the corniest clichés strange and new: a bored kid stuck in a nowhere town looking to the horizon, yearning for better things, no different from Dorothy in dusty Kansas or the teenagers in Modesto, watching the setting of a double star.
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