It's Calling to You

I don't have a great memory of most of my childhood up to about fifth or sixth grade. There was a lot of moving around (not, like, fidgeting, but from domicile to domicile. If someone told me I did my fair share of twitching during that period, I wouldn't fight 'em though) and some familial chaos, so I figure I've either a) blocked it out or b) it didn't really register. As I know from being a father of three kids myself, the capacity for children to identify a situation--no matter how patently absurd or straight-out fucked up--as "normal" is without boundary. Part of that is the unavoidable and blissful naivete of a lack of comparable life experiences in which to build a competing context. The other part of it is likely a default defense mechanism for having parents who are, to varying degrees of course and with differing levels of consistency or commitment, assholes.

I do remember 1983 though, nine years old, street-lights already out, standing at the top of a cul-de-sac in an absurdly safe south Orange County bedroom community* in the company of a clutch of similarly aged boys, ones I normally felt conspicuously Inland Empire around, sharing thoughts about how we felt about Return of the Jedi. In retrospect this was not us at our most critically objective or motivationally pure, which was something of a missed opportunity given that Jedi provides plenty of stray threads to pull at. In the moment, though, I believe the delimiters of the discussion group lie in deciding which parts of the movie were awesome vs. the parts that were the most awesome. To our credit, though, I don't think anyone was pointedly or explicitly enthused by the presence of Ewoks.

While there may have been camps formed around championing this sequence ("...and then? At the end? Darth Vader? Threw that bitch emperor down a well!") or that design choice ("...and Jabba? The worm dude? Had a pet tyrannosaurus!") in singalong cadences of declarative uptalking, we all easily agreed: Star Wars was the best thing. Across all categories, not just of film or entertainment, but of all things including food or relationships or our planetary position relative to the sun. Earth could be a dim, cold, lifeless rock on a meandering ovoid orbit skirting the weak edges of a star's gravitational effective range and there would still be no denying the potency of Skywalker.

I don't know that any of us expected it as it certainly felt like the end of the story, but I know we all wanted there to be more. And, to be fair, there was. I made a point of being very good friends with a kid who had all the goddamned Kenner toys, so we could set up and animate canonically accurate extensions of story and action.** I read Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy extending the story sometime in the mid-1990s. There were more books and comic books and TV shows and (mostly poor but a couple of extraordinarily good) video games, not to mention (and I try to rarely do so) three whole prequel films.

[Look, maybe the prequels were OK and they only suffered from the bad luck of coming out when I was old enough to compare them to... anything good. But my kids are all 16 and under and they know they suck too.]

I set up my DVR to record a fairly shitty Monday Night Football game between two teams I have a combined interest in, on a scale of one to 10, of minus-1,000 because I wanted to see the premiere of the trailer of Star Wars Episode VII. And right as it ended, I was surprised to find that I was--JUST A LITTLE BIT--teary eyed. Note please that I am a 41-year-old adult very aware that what I'd just seen was less a cultural event and, much more blatantly, a crass act of corporate synergy between ESPN, Lucasfilm and likely many other branches of the entire Disney corporate family.

But for all the Star Wars I've consumed over the last 32 years, it really kind of hit me in the moment as I thought about what the fuck was happening (and it's not that odd for old dads to cry at commercials really, so it could have been encroaching elderliness) was that none of that content had or could possibly give me what I wanted: the next film of this story about these characters. And their crew of multiethnic friends? FUCK YES, all them too.

I'm clinging on to the roof of the Advertising Car of the Hype Train, on purpose. Knowing that it might be terrible, because I'm old enough to have been excited for Phantom Menace as well before volunteering to experience that dick-punch. And knowing that J.J. Abrams has weird tendencies, like writing and directing space movies where the goddamned space ships are always tooling around in the atmosphere of planets, even when they're called Star Trek, and always making the MacGuffin a Giant Red Ball of Power.

But the trailer looks fantastic. Not a flat, lifeless CGI cartoon like the prequels. And the new leads are proven, solid actors like John Boyega (watch Attack the Block) and Oscar Isaac (watch... lots of things, but especially recently Show Me a Hero) and Daisy Ridley (watch... uh... OK, I've never seen her do anything, but from the 15-20 seconds of work I've seen in the trailers, I know she's a vast improvement over poor Hayden Christiansen). I'll ride the train as far as it will take me. It also helps to know that if this fucker derails like the last one did, it's unlikely I'll actually die.


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*visiting family. Most of the places we actually lived through that age were not of the out-after-dark variety.

**OK, mostly action. The TIE fighter's wings popped off with the push of a button. Nobody was exploring relationships, except for the occasional Han/Lando shipping.