Star Wars on Trial (4 page)

... until The Empire Strikes Back. Then, wow, did I change my mind. And so did millions of others. Suddenly, thrilled by the deep script of Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, and Irvin Kershner's tight direction-and deeply moved by a wondrous John Williams score-many of us simply sat and stared as the final credits rolled by, unable, unwilling, to move. This wasn't just fun anymore. It felt ... important.

I know I left the theater ebullient after watching TESB. Perhaps a little pompously, I told everyone that we had just witnessed the addition of something truly worthy to the Western mythological canon. With any luck, the rest of the saga would be even better.

That wasn't just fannish appreciation. I was at that time in the process of making my own transition from science fiction amateur to professional writer. So I wanted George Lucas to succeed with his grand epic for another reason... to prove, once and for all, that meaning can coexist with adventure, and thought can accompany fun. And in movies, even, where there is so little time or room for the kind of extended ponderings that an author may insert in a novel.

What we saw in films like TESB-and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan-was growing confidence in a kind of science fiction that could take on issues (amid spectacular space battles) and ponder human existence (between dramatic laser sword fights).

Moreover, George Lucas clearly agreed. As I intend to repeat whenever anybody says "they're just movies," Lucas clearly and openly believes in the important effects of storytelling. Touting works of the late Joseph Campbell, he has often spoken of The Power of Myth. Campbell's books, like Myths to Live By and The Hero with a Thousand Faces, maintain that the biggest legends, those that penetrate the most hearts and fill the most lives, are also powerful in helping to direct those lives. Even diverting the path of whole civilizations.

In any event, there is one conclusive answer to "it's only a movie."

That answer is: You've already bought a book whose whole purpose is to discuss meaning and consequence in the Star Wars universe! Everybody who contributed, from accuser to defender, believes there is something worth arguing about. We'll do it because the topic matters, or because it's fun to argue, or because we're being paid to argue. Most likely, all three.'

Indeed, one point that I intend to make later on is that this civilization likes to argue. Openly and democratically. Alas, in the Star Wars universe, nobody knows how. At least nobody who matters.

But that's for later. The purpose of this introduction was to set the stage. And now that's done. The participants in our drama-our moot "trial"- were all hand-picked by BenBella Books to participate in something fun. They are standing by, ready to begin yet another entertaining riff on George Lucas's epic masterpiece. A journey into the dark heart of meaning that some of us believe must lie beneath, under all the glossy surfaces.

If stories and myths reflect who we are, and where we're headed ... what does Star Wars say about us?

Where does it say we should be going?

NLIKE SOME FOLKS 'round these parts, I'm only going to make one Star Trek reference.

Dammit, Jim, I'm a storyteller, not an essayist.

So:

Saturday afternoon, June 1977, Danville, Illinois. Danville is a little industrial town buried in a tangle of railroad tracks and cornfields three hours south of Chicago; in those days it had a GM foundry and some meatpacking plants, a sheet-aluminum producer and some big grain elevators and a fifteen-year-old me, a week out of ninth grade with five bucks lawn-mowing cash in my pocket and a blue Schwinn English Racer, and some goofy flick called Star Wars playing at the old Fischer Theater a mile and change downtown. A kid named Jeff Masters showed up at my front door a little after one o'clock with his own bike (also a Schwinn-an Orange Crate, I think) and asked if I wanted to check out this goofy flick, and I'd seen a grand total of one commercial for it (on late-night TV out of Terre Haute, Indiana), but it had lots of shooting, a guy swinging over a chasm with a girl in his arms, spaceships, Peter Cushing and Alec Guinness, and the temperature was already over ninety and our lone window-unit air conditioner was on the fritz, so I said, "What the hell."

That's an exact quote.

I'm not here to talk about the experience of coming to Star Wars on the big screen entirely by surprise. I'll leave that to your imagination. Suffice it to say that even the memory of putting the words "A novel by Matthew Woodring Stover, based on the screenplay by George Lucas" on the title page of Revenge of the Sith is still enough to give me a bit of the shakes.

I'm here to talk about the experience of Truth.

By the time I found myself in that Saturday matinee in 1977, I was already an experienced SF geek, though that term had yet to crest our common horizon. My brother Tom, ten years older, long gone to college and off into his career, had left behind a huge library of paperback SF that I had started reading about the time I learned to read, and so when Star Wars rolled around, I'd been through just about every then-published work by Heinlein, Asimov, Anderson, Williamson, Pohl, Niven, the various Smiths (I could fill my word count just with a list of all the authors) ... as well as the Big Old Guys like Verne and Wells. Tom-an engineer by temperament as well as by profession-had a prejudice in favor of the hard SF guys, as well as the space opera types; Leiber and Zelazny, Disch and Moorcock and PKD showed up mostly by accident, in magazines or collections he'd bought for other people's work.

This is relevant because of my experience during one particular scene in what is now known as A New Hope-the scene in Obi-Wan's cave, after he has rescued Luke from the Sand People, where he gives Luke what we all now know is Anakin Skywalker's lightsaber, and begins to tell him of the Jedi Knights....

I sat in the dark, in that theater, breathless, blinking, trying to listen harder, to hear more than was being said-

Because I knew, then, that here-not just in this moment, but in this story-was something True.

This was not a literal truth. Not factual truth. This was not a delusional moment that blurred the line between fiction and reality.

I was skimming the surface of a Truth that is not expressible in direct language. There is no way to say it other than the way it was being said: in the metaphor of a fantasy.

For make no mistake: Star Wars is, at its heart, fantasy. Knights with magic swords, talking animals, kindly wizards, evil sorcerers, mystic ships that travel in the blink of an eye beyond the ken of mortal man-

But don't take it too hard.

All science fiction is a subset of fantasy. Star Wars just happens to be honest about it.

In fact, all literature is a subset of fantasy. Fantasy is the child of myth; the foundation of fantasy is the heroic epic-which is what Star Wars is-and the heroic epic is the initial form of literature in nearly every human culture. Every succeeding literary form comes into existence by limiting itself: by carving away chunks of the possibility that fantasy represents.

By cutting off, one might argue, pieces of Truth.

I recognized that breathless unfolding of Truth inside my chest, because I had felt it before. I'd come across it once or twice in Leiber (at the bitter end of Ill Met in Lanhhmar, for one). I'd found it when reading of Aslan's sacrifice in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and of Theoden's sally at Helm's Deep in The Two Towers; I would find it again in later years, as I read of Beowulf's weary stand against the dragon, of the Green Knight picking up his severed head and stalking away from the Round Table, of High Lord Elena speaking the Word of Command in The Illearth War....

I would find it in 1980, when a certain someone of our mutual acquaintance said (again, for me, entirely unexpectedly), "No, Luke. I am your father."

This is an experience I never got from those hard SF guys. Except for Heinlein. And that was Glory Road. If you read it, you'll understand why.

Science fiction is usually, quite properly, about what may be. What we might become. (Heinlein himself, for example, is justly legendary for prophesying in, "Solution Unsatisfactory," the development of dirty bombs.)