Happy Star Wars week! Have you seen it yet, the supposed last installment of the franchise? I haven’t. Is it uplifting? A downer? My first question will seem strange in the future, when I imagine more readers may be giving these entries a look than they will right now. Time will obliterate this moment of wondering. In time, as in the next week or so (an eternity in my present circumstances) I may get around to seeing Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker (think that’s what it’s called). Forty two years after the first film came out, I am far removed from the excitable state that had me seeing the first installment back in the day. Like I shall be on Christmas day next week, I am a jaded adult wanting to sleep in rather than get up early to see if Obi Wan—sorry, Santa—has brought toys.
If I’m excitable or indeed compulsive about anything then it’s about corrupting things like the Star Wars mythos with sexualizing commentary. At least, that may be the view of clients and a few others who have been on the receiving end of my associations recently. One moment a man is innocently speaking of holiday plans, a weekend outing to see the new Stars Wars movie with his kids, and soon enough there are links in the air, connecting his idle thoughts with exercise routines and sexual fantasy. A languid sharing had undercurrents of arousal, I said: the plan to visit a gym would stir energy, place him in mixed company, with thoughts of improving his condition, building up his body…for what? The man caught my drift but perhaps didn’t like the suggestion. He’d wanted to keep things light and wholesome. I can tell because a compliant but begrudging man lowers his voice, starts to sound like a grumbling bear emerging from hibernation. He doesn’t like the talk that threatens to stir something threatening and I feel a bit like a fly that might get swatted any moment. Anyway, he insisted on lighter matter, turning back to the plan of taking his kids to see Star Wars and reminiscing about the first series of films that he’d also seen as a kid. A New Hope, the first film, released in 1977, is still his favorite he declared. A gratuitous recollection of trivia followed. The first Star Wars film was actually episode four, he recounted—suggesting three prequels that would not emerge for another generation. The first film had the best story, he went on to pronounce, and the most triumphant ending.
Not like the second (or fifth) film, The Empire Strikes Back, I suggested, colluding with the sublimated flow for the time being. That’s right, he agreed, adding that despite the deeper story-line, the eloquence of Yoda as he tutors young Luke in the ways of The Force, the ending is a downer. Depressing. Luke gets his hand cut off by Vader’s light saber and the future of the rebellion is uncertain.
Bummer.
Not the happy ending of Star Wars, the first film, I remarked. Exactly, intoned the man, thinking (briefly) that we were on the same wavelength. Strange term—happy ending—I then ruminated. Strange that for most recovering (or not) sex addicts the term happy ending has been co-opted and given a sexual meaning, pertaining to manual stimulation and illicit massage parlors, even sex slavery. I detected a slight sigh in my listener as I extended my comment, pointing out that happy endings in action films are usually orgiastic. For a spell I indulged my own tangential reminiscing, thinking that such endings were few and far between in the seventies. Star Wars, if the reader recalls, has often been described as a revitalization of the western ethos, only in space. See, by the mid-seventies the western, or at least the kind of playful, serial westerns that my father will have once enjoyed, were in decline, replaced by serious, socially-conscious action fare—stuff like The Godfather, or Taxi-Driver. The remaining westerns of that era—the odd, residual John Wayne flick, for example—were tired and unoriginal. Or there were good films that were complicated or too thought-provoking, like Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs Miller. Not as much fun. Star Wars, todays’ kids won’t know, was a throw-back to a time when it was okay to like a simple action story with good guys and bad guys and not worry that Marlon Brando would tell you off for enabling stereotypes and oppression.
Come to think of it, maybe the culture hasn’t changed so much since the seventies in that respect, so maybe Star Wars still serves the same function today as it did then. Anyway, so why did I have to go and stir the pot and spoil the fun with my weird evocations of unconscious process? One moment, this poor man was having a nice moment, thinking of the happy ending wherein Han and Luke are getting medals hung around their necks by the lovely Princess Leia, with the cute and comic support characters Chewbacca, C-Threepio and R2D2 looking on, grunting or else making their funny electronic noises; then suddenly I’m making more comparisons with Empire: in the first film, the darker back-story is under the surface. As viewers of the light-hearted space western, we don’t yet know, though we might dimly feel, the Oedipal crisis that awaits Luke—that he will be tasked with fighting Darth Vader (a play on dark father, according to Robert Bly in Iron John), who will symbolically castrate Luke before finally succumbing to his son in the third film, Return Of The Jedi (the third film also resolves the near miss on the incest between Luke and Leia—whew, that was a close one, says the ego!). Then I conjure the climactic scene of Star Wars, with Luke as the lone fighter/sperm diving in his spaceship at the giant death star/egg; then he shoots his last shot, his precisely-aimed photon whatever/wad that strikes at the hard-to-get-at slot, leading to a giant blast explosion while—I swear to God—it looks to me now (okay, not so much when I was eight) that Luke hangs his head back, breathes out and pulls back like a man who has just…well, you know. But enough. I’ve surely done enough harm with my words.
“Great shot, kid. That was one in a million”, exults Han Solo, affirming the risen hero, Skywalker.
Indeed it was. Now that’s a happy beginning/ending.
Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 