film: November 2005 Archives

If there is a curse that afflicts Generation X-- Okay, if we're going to be honest, there are probably many curses that afflict Generation X, but the one I'm thinking about here is our tendency to see everything as a put-on, even the things we love. It's very postmodern, I suppose, to see the joke behind it all, to not only not be able to ignore the man behind the curtain but to laugh at him while also thinking, Hey, how cool is that man behind the curtain, anyway?

Let's call it Schrödingerian metaphysics: I can see the cat as simultaneously all funny and all serious. (And yeah, if you know who Schrödinger is, you're definitely a geek.)

To wit: I am highly intrigued by this in a devoutly geeky way, and I simultaneously find it utterly hilarious in a totally GenX-ironic way:

As Star Wars works to make us aware of its own narrative structure, other odd things about the films start to come into focus. Most significantly, we start to notice that the films are an elaborate meditation on the dialectic between chance and order. They all depend upon absurd coincidence to propel the story forward. Just what are the odds, in just one of near-infinite examples, that of all the planets in that galaxy far, far away, the droids should end up back on Tatooine, in the home of the son of the sweet (if annoying) boy who had built C-3PO decades before? Throughout all six films there are scenes of crucial serendipity. Such dependence on unlikely coincidence isn't unique to Star Wars. As literary critics have long pointed out, the arbitrary yoking together of events in the service of storytelling is one of the fundamental characteristics of all narrative. R2-D2 needs to hook up with Luke on Tatooine, just as Prospero's enemies need to wash up on the shores of his island, and Elizabeth Bennet needs to marry Mr. Darcy, for the narrative requirements of those stories to be fulfilled. The audience's willing surrender to narrative coincidence is demanded by the story's need to conclude itself.

Just go read the whole damn thing -- it's at Slate, and it's by Aidan Wasley, who says he was eight years old when he saw Star Wars in 1977, which makes him my twin brother. His deconstruction of the series is brilliant in every possible way.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is out on DVD today, and it’s a bittersweet feeling I’m dealing with. The supreme myth of Generation X is done, finished, over. It is no more. It has ceased to be. It is an ex-cult.

Not really, of course. The arrival of this last DVD means we can now gobble up the entire saga at home, and oh, you know that will be happening -- Star Wars parties, at which the entire sexogy is shown, will now become staples of geek entertainment. As Forbes freakin’ magazine noted today:

Mission completed. At just under 13 hours, the entire six-part saga of Star Wars can now be viewed from start to finish on a single sitting.

It’s true that Star Wars is part of what helped geekiness go mainstream, made it sorta cool to be into science fiction (though of course we still haven’t gotten past the idea that it’s weird to dress up as Obi-wan Kenobi but not weird to paint your naked torso in team colors and display your decorated beer belly in a football stadium in subzero temperatures). But it’s only the true geeks who will be spending some weekend this holiday season with a few true-geek pals sitting on the couch and dissecting the whole series frontward and backward, having fun but being totally, solemnly serious at the same time.