Me and the mister are doing a rewatch of the key movies for the holiday, and I had some deep thoughts. It’s almost like I’m about to hit some kind of milestone and I’m all introspective or something, but who knows.
I’m a Gen Xer, 80s kid, all that.. and growing up, these movies were our everything. We were Luke and Leia and Han when we played. It was thrilling to think that Luke and Leia were just kids, not that much older than we were, and they were heroes that changed the shape of their whole world. Fighting against the monolithic Vader, who wore that mask that meant he could be anyone we needed him to be.. and he could lose. It made us feel powerful, gave flight to our imaginations, made us feel like we, too, could change the world.
We grew up a little more… the prequels hit when we were just beginning to consider that we might be adults. Like that time, they were messy, confusing, and explained things that we had already taken on faith. But hey, it was more story in the Star Wars world when we’d thought that time in the world had passed.. and they still held magic for us.
And then we got the rest of the Skywalker Saga.. and while I can’t speak for all of the fans, I can definitively state that I did not expect to see the rest of the story on the screen in my lifetime. I went to the theater on opening night with everyone I could round up to share it with. I thrilled to the opening crawl, sniffled when Han and Chewie boarded the Falcon, and cried out in disbelief when Han fell into the patch of blue sky. I loved Rey and Poe and Finn, as well as seeing my heroes, older, but still fighting.
And there’s the real key, I think, to why there was such backlash to these movies. They arrived at a time when we’ve all felt like we haven’t won our battles.. when we feel like failed heroes. We weren’t prepared to think that Luke, Leia, and Han had ended up this way.. bitter, beaten, having laid down the fight for Luke and Han. Misogyny and racism were just convenient targets, because admitted how betrayed we felt, by life, by those heroes we’d held in our minds for so long… too hard to admit to ourselves, let alone accept.
Sometimes a story is just the story… and we should always remember to keep writing our own stories. Yes, we need heroes to dream on, but I tell you that we also need to believe in ourselves, because from time to time, we all need the example of what we don’t want to be to find our way.
#GeneralLeiareportingforduty
Curiouser and Curiouser 