Tag: Star Wars

I love the fact that stories make my real life look like the dim cousin with snot on his cheek. Things that happen in stories don’t happen in the real lives of real people, and that’s kind of the point. Stories are so unreal we can sink into them without squirming. Come on, nobody wants to be told about real life when they have a real life of their own to deal with.

We don’t live in stories. We’re not going to bring down a corrupt government with nothing but our pistol and a three-day beard. We’re not going to get seduced by some leather and lace vampire prince crime lord saxophone player assassin. We don’t wield magic swords that sweaty fan boys buy replicas of to wear with their fake chainmail and cheap boots. These things are not going to happen to us. We’re going to update spreadsheets, build houses, mow the yard, eat junk food, chase our kids, watch bad TV, go to the bathroom, and sleep. Maybe we’ll drink a margarita. And die. Not from the margarita I hope.

Stories resemble our real lives in almost no way at all, but still we want to understand our lives through stories. Life is big and scary, but fun little stories unfold in familiar ways. Stories strip the detail off our flabby lives and leave us with the polished bones.

Let me demonstrate. I’ll summarize the well-known tale of Luke Skywalker in the very first Star Wars film.

Normal Life. Luke’s a whiny, reckless farm boy on a boring planet hot enough to melt all George Lucas’ Oscars. He wants adventure and glory more than anything else, so he bitches about his chores and drives his uncle insane.

The Adventure Begins. Luke meets wise but scruffy Obi-Wan, and then the evil Empire turns Luke’s family into medium-rare lawn art. Luke makes his first decision. He joins Obi-Wan and right away gets into trouble in a bar. It’s all he can do to avoid tripping over dismembered arms.

Loyal Friends Appear. Luke flees the planet just ahead of the Empire, courtesy of cynical Han Solo and his wookie friend, Chewbacca, who’s like a huge, psychotic shih tzu. We find out that wookies tear off people’s arms, and that Obi-Wan can be given a migraine from a hundred light years away, even when he’s in hyperspace. Luke gets to show he can use his mystical powers to outsmart levitating D&D dice.

Bad Decisions and Worse Results. Luke has recklessly followed Obi-Wan and is rewarded by getting sucked into the arms of the evil Empire, particularly the villain Darth Vader. Then, like a moron, Luke recklessly decides to save the princess. That results in:

  • being trapped in a room with a dozen maniacs shooting blasters
  • almost getting crushed after some garbage monster humps his leg
  • getting stuck on a ledge with storm troopers shooting at him, or at least at the walls near him, and being saved only by heroic wire work and an incestuous smooch.
  • seeing Darth Vader murder the beloved Obi-Wan, producing a disappointing lack of gore.

Setting Up the Big Fight. Luke escapes from the Death Star after a two minute space battle that could have been replaced by footage from any film about WWII air combat. However, he’s leading his enemies right back to the rebel base. Luke’s crappy decisions have now endangered the base and the entire rebellion made up of every white male extra in Hollywood. What does Luke do? He rolls up his sleeves and does some determined moping. Luke and his friends reach the rebel base, and the rebels plan the ultimate assault on the Death Star, which all the pilots agree is pretty much doomed.

The Dark Moment. The assault goes poorly, if getting 95% of your force wiped out can be considered a poor showing. When the rebel base is seconds from annihilation, when the deadliest villain in the galaxy is about to give his son Luke the ultimate time out, when things could not possibly get any worse, and it’s all Luke’s fault—Luke grows up. Rather than recklessly relying on his targeting computer, he trusts his instincts and obeys the disembodied voice of a dead man. Luke fires an awesome sci-fi torpedo into a port the size of a wamp rat. I still don’t know how big that is, but it blows the Death Star into a jillion cheesy 1977 special effects bits.

Wrap Up. Luke gets a shiny medal from a cute princess with whom he has an ambiguous relationship, and about 5,000 rebel soldiers watch while wondering what the mess hall is serving for lunch. And hoping it’s not wamp rat. Luke gets adventure and glory because he changed from a whiny, reckless youth into a confident man with mystical powers and a badass black wardrobe in the sequel.

The story is clear and structured and non-threatening. It’s a nice way to understand things. But here’s my take on real life for Luke Skywalker.

Real Life. Luke’s a whiny, reckless farm boy who wants adventure and glory. He works on his uncle’s sand farm, until the sand market crashes and they go broke. They move to the city where Luke sells deep fried wamp rat on a stick. He does well, opens his own wamp rat stand, and then opens a few more.

Luke meets a girl who can stomach the aroma of wamp rat, she marries him, and they crank out some kids. He recklessly opens a blue milk smoothie franchise, and he loses everything except one broken down wamp rat stand. He recovers by adding grilled wamp rat and wamp rat fingers to the menu.

Luke grows up, stops making reckless decisions, and saves his money, even though there’s nothing worth a damn to buy on this stupid planet. As the kids grow, they take family vacations to the planet’s other squalid cities. Things seem really good.

The kids leave home, and Luke turns the wamp rat business over to his son. His wife gets tired of hearing his stories about the droids he owned when he was a kid, and he spends more time in the garage rebuilding classic land-speeders. He breaks his leg in a horrible bantha accident, and he never dances again. The city raises the taxes on his mud brick hovel, and his idiot son runs the business into the ground. Luke and his wife move to a small sand farm and rarely see their kids. Not only does Luke never leave the planet for adventure, he ends up back where he started, on a sand farm. I could go on, but you see where I’m headed with this.

Luke’s story and Luke’s real life both contain lots of references to wamp rats, so they’re alike in that way. Also, Real Luke and Story Luke both learn to stop flailing off to rescue every princess that comes along, getting their mentors killed and/or sending their blue milk smoothie franchises into bankruptcy. The difference is that Story Luke takes 121 minutes to learn that, while Real Luke takes half a lifetime. That’s a lot fewer trips to the bathroom, even with 64 ounces of Dr. Pepper inside you. Of course, Real Luke doesn’t get any medals, or mystical powers, or a light saber, but restoring land-speeders is probably fun.

If Real Luke saw Story Luke’s tale, would he understand more about his real life? Would it help him grow up and stay away from schemes involving blue milk? Would it convince him to stop wasting his time on land-speeders and go have some adventures? I think it might, but I could be wrong. I guarantee one thing though. It would convince him that you should never let anything bigger than a beagle hump your leg.

After seeing these cute babies, how could you eat wamp rat? Well, maybe with some Ranch dressing…

Photo by Bradypus

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These are times of identity crisis for vampires. Human beings envision us in so many ways that on occasion we become confused. The “tortured undead creature” identity has gained popularity. Vampires have long been considered romantic, but this entity is deemed a safe boyfriend even for troubled young girls. He may even bring corsages, or appear embarrassed by flecks of blood on his collar from a recent victim.

The “appalling fiend” vampire remains a popular identity. Through him, humans fantasize about inflicting wicked but non-specific pain upon employers, rude tradesmen, and annoying relations. This identity provides men a visceral image of the Undead Lord, without forcing upon them any awareness of the geysers of blood or internal organs hurled about during the murder and devouring of human prey.

The traditional “vicious, throat-tearing monster” has fallen out of favor in this diluted, watercolor world of people who tremble lest they violate a rule. This creature is a being of gore and terror, and humans fear to embrace him as once they did. One cannot expect better of a culture in which meat arrives in tidy, prepared packets, so that people may pretend the animal was not ripped apart so that they could eat it.

I, Baron Yörg, heap contempt upon all these images. I do not embrace an identity, for I am a vampire drenched in tradition. I am a faith-shattering rapist of the human soul, and I visit annihilation upon any creature that dares not recognize my full horrific being. Put starkly, I am a vampire of the ancient mark. And I really love movies.

Today I shall review one of the most beloved films of the past 50 years—Star Wars. I refer to the initial film, which has subsequently been recast as “Episode Four: A New Hope.” The filmmakers of course did not explain the movie’s episode number when it was released. Had they done so, I suspect it would have been, “Episode 4: I Hope to Christ Someone Pays to See This Retread of Every Hero Story Told Throughout History So That I Don’t Lose My Ass.”

Allow me to begin with the central character, Darth Vader. Some might object that one of the punier, insipid characters serves as protagonist, but such assertions merit nothing but scorn. Vader appears first in the film. Vader propels the entire story—without him Luke and the rest might as well remain in the cantina drinking and vomiting for the balance of eternity. Vader is the only one who dresses with a solitary shred of dignity. Of course he is the central character.

Vader carries with him an admirable presence, and one may readily identify with his motivations and goals. I myself once obliterated five thousand uncooperative and malodorous peasants. I thus understand Vader’s annoyance with an entire populace of rebels flitting about in spacecraft like flies around a heap of excrement. And I almost smiled when Vader choked that surly insect of an officer, though I did experience disappointment when the man’s head failed to fly off and roll about on the conference table.

Yet Darth Vader somehow falls short of truly visceral menace of the type that promises imponderable obliteration to all his enemies. I am convinced that the problem is the Force. It has a flavorless and pathetic name. It puts one in mind of names such as Norm and Abner. To say that Vader uses the “Dark Side” fails to resolve this. “The Dark Side of the Force” sounds no more threatening than “The Dark Side of Abner.” And in fact Vader’s powers seem rather lacking. Yes, he can choke an obsequious and obviously impotent soldier, and he can sense the presence of a geriatric Jedi, but how would Vader fare when attacked by 500 rabid bats with a wolf dangling from his manhood?

I shall now proceed to the other characters. While in themselves they seem somewhat pedestrian, they do provide effective foils against which Darth Vader may strive. As a group they mesh well, in the manner of a band of tawdry street performers that I observed juggling and dropping their breeches for  bread crusts in Prague two centuries ago. Princess Leia exhibits the greatest spirit. I shall not deign to address her hair. That has heretofore been done by thousands, even by reviewers capable of no more than uttering obscenities and sucking breakfast from their teeth. Leia exhibits rudimentary leadership qualities, and she might have led her cohorts to accomplish greater things had she better material with which to work.

Han Solo drips with the sort of arrogance I have seen hundreds of times, the type that invariably thrusts its owner into an untimely, shallow grave, thence to be exhumed and devoured by the unclean beasts of the forest. The fact that Solo survives until the end of the film provided the greatest assault upon my suspension of disbelief, more so even than otherworldly life and interplanetary travel. Should I ever meet Mr. Ford, I fear I must slay him forthwith merely to preserve my sense of order in the universe.

I find Obi-Wan Kenobi to be a tiresome character. The mountains and deserts of our world writhe with such wise hermits migrating about seeking gullible farm boys. They cultivate mysterious ways of speaking, grow beards that would embarrass a diseased yak-merchant, and adopt unpronounceable names to seduce the unwary into expeditions from which they rarely return. As it is on Earth, so it apparently is on Tattooine. When Vader vanquished Obi-Wan on the Death Star I grinned, and my henchman Nodwick chortled until he blew popcorn out his nose.

The wookie, Chewbacca, inspired sincere enjoyment in me. I found his impassioned groaning rather compelling, and reminiscent of a team of oxen as they are beaten by a drunken gypsy late for the Feast of Wine and Cheap Trinkets. For thirty years I pondered the concept of replacing my wolves with such creatures, but I ultimately dismissed the notion. There is simply no good way to groom them.

From a sense of obligation to the concept of completeness, I feel compelled to mention the “droids.” I find them profoundly disgusting. Could I erase them from the memory of man, surely I should do so. Not a drop of blood between them. Appalling.

This leads us to Luke Skywalker, whom some fools claim to be the prime figure in this tale. Luke whines. Luke is short and dresses like a dead Frenchman in a gutter. Luke listens to voices in his head and kisses his sister in a more than familial manner. I need say nothing further about this repellant toad of a farm hand.

The Star Wars special effects seem primitive when ranked beside today’s films. Yet when Star Wars was released, audiences had never seen anything like it. When Obi-Wan entered the cantina, Nodwick thought he saw three of his cousins. The star destroyers appeared staggeringly huge. The light sabers looked unbearably foolish, but they were so entertaining that one did not care. The area under Luke’s speeder on Tattooine looked as if it had been rendered by the eraser on a herculean pencil, but I concede that is a quibble. On the balance, anyone unmoved the Star Wars effects in 1977 should have returned to watching Petticoat Junction reruns and eating Cream of Wheat.

One cannot discuss Star Wars without mentioning the climactic battle around the Death Star. I could not wish for a lovelier array of carnage. Rebel pilots are smashed and incinerated on all hands, first by the Death Star itself and then by the ugly little Imperial fighters. When Luke and his fellow malcontents descend into the trench they are quite properly obliterated one after another. I found myself nodding with satisfaction, especially when Vader arrives and prepares to hurl a bolt of laser fire directly into Luke’s brain.

As an aside, Princess Leia and her cronies at this juncture are observing a technical display that shows how soon their own destruction shall arrive. That display appears a bit primitive. In fact, I have seen more sophisticated piles of gravel. The filmmakers exerted themselves to make the Death Star appear 500 miles across. One would think they might have spared an hour to make this display look better than something Howdy Doody might wear on his wrist.

I make no objection to Obi-Wan speaking to Luke from beyond death. In my experience, this sort of thing happens upon occasion. When he tells Luke to trust his feelings and turn off his targeting computer I do not feel surprise. This is precisely the sort of advice we should expect from charlatan of Obi-Wan’s ilk. But when Luke follows this laughable advice and still annihilates the Death Star, against every shred of reason that the human mind can encompass—well, let us say that I left the theater downcast, and that Nodwick had a rather bad time of it for the next few days.

When all things are brought to conclusion, how shall I assess this film? Despite the merest of limitations, Darth Vader earned my admiration as the prime mover of this tale. I feel he is one of my few fellow purveyors of evil whom I might not destroy out of hand should our paths coincide. His foes, the Circus of Fumbling Dimwits, collectively provide him a counterpoint and demonstrate how Vader is powerful in all the ways that they are inept. I cannot love them for it, but I can despise them marginally less. But ultimately we must admit that any film in which millions of voices suddenly cry out in terror and are suddenly silenced, is a film to be savored. I therefore am gratified to render unto Star Wars four unholy violations of the sacred heart of man, out of five.