A Long Time Ago...

Possibly summer 1977, though I don't remember for sure, and haven't consulted with other family members, all of them currently being away out of town.

My parents loaded us into our red and white Volkswagen seven passenger bus and drove downtown to the Capitol 6 on Granville Street to see a first-run "family film." To put things into perspective, in my family, the chances of this happening were about as good as the chances of a small asteroid ploughing into Georgia and Granville at rush hour.

Packed theatre. Lots of hyperactive kids. Still not too clear on what kind of picture we were about to see.

Twentieth-Century Fox searchlight logo. John Williams' sweeping score. The crawl. And then my first glimpse of an Imperial Star Destroyer, emerging from the top of the screen, and continuing on and on, its dull grey hull studded with windows, lights, communications gizmos, pod bay doors, etc.

A spaceship as long as West Vancouver? Mental crack for a socially maladjusted seven year old.

Repeat viewing (six or seven times, including the re-release with a not totally credulous SGB a few years back). Comic books. Kenner action figures (Storm Troopers; Boba Fett; C3P0). The Story of Star Wars narrative 33 1/3 record. A pretty convincing imitation of Darth Vader's creepy breathing (in the Volkswagen's back seat, on the way to elementary school, too many times to count). And lots of bad handmade "science fiction novels" (6-8 pages of double spaced handwriting, cardstock covers, stapled or bound wraps, pencil crayon cover art), though to my credit these weren't stories about the Star Wars characters, nor even thinly-disguised substitutes, but original stories, albeit ones as poorly plotted and characterized as the movie itself, thus proving that the distance between George Lucas' imagination and that of a bright, creatively unfocused seven year old boy wasn't so far at all.

SGB and I saw the first two prequels on video, with varying degrees of patience (none whatsoever for CGI-generated Walking Racial Stereotype).

I lined up last night on Granville Street in the rain, with Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye.

The logo, soundtrack, and crawl gave me goosebumps, but the rest of the film left me strangely unaffected. CGI effects, CGI effects, terrible stiff dialogue, exposition, exposition, establishing shot of spaceship dropping into CGI landscape, Jedi knights, Senate, civil war, dark side of the Force, Yoda, robots, spooky prophecy, backstory, backstory, CGI effects, robots, dark side of the Force, foreshadowing, foreshadowing, yadda yadda yadda.

The New Yorker's Anthony Lane really, really hated this film. His review in this week's issue is spectacularly bad-tempered and abrasive, an excellent bad review, marred only by his unwillingness to see that the object of his scorn is not a film per se, but a cultural phenomena, which is perhaps exempt from criticism in the same way that legends are, or glaciers.

Lane says:

"Whether the director is aware of John Martin, the Victorian painter who specialized in the cataclysmic, I cannot say, but he has certainly inherited that grand perversity, mobilized it in every frame of the film, and thus produced what I take to be unique: an art of flawless and irredeemable vulgarity. All movies bear a tint of it, in varying degrees, but it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which actions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which style is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ironic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed. It is a vision at once gargantuan and murderously limited, and the profits that await it are unfit for contemplation."

Which is pretty accurate, so far as it goes.

What Lane doesn't consider is that this stuff is perfectly appropriate for a seven year old imagination, and may inspire better stuff in turn (I'm not the only person my age whose initial impulse to make things -- stories, drawings, films -- was motivated by Lucas' unwieldy franchise). I think the path from bad art to good art -- George Lucas to Georg Lukacs, say -- is an honest and straightforward one, one walked more frequently than my friends in the academy might admit (I also wonder if some of them might have Boba Fett drawings of their own in the closet, and, if so, how much fun they had making them. Not much, is my guess).
- posted by cjb @ 9:22 AM