How do you solve a problem like George Lucas? The card-carrying Boomer gets my generation to act all Boomeresque -- pissing and moaning, rending garments; lamentations about how things were better back in the day -- every time he fucks with his Star Wars series. What to do?
Give up? Publicly? And pitch a piece to your editor to that effect? (Which, frankly, comes off about as convincing as threats to move to Canada if one's candidate does not prevail at the polls.)
Repurpose memorable Star Wars dialogue as an opportunity for comics and actors -- Bill Hader does a helluva dying Tauntaun -- to goof on them to "stand up to cancer," which I guess would be the dark side of the Force, then?
Got me. But I suspect one good place to start might be with J.D. Connor's recent Post45 piece about another instance of stomping-all-over-my-childhood-classics travesty, the film version of Where the Wild Things Are. The whole of "We'll Eat You Up We Love You So" is just tremendous, and you should read it all. But also let me include an excerpt here that begins to get at what I think this latest Blu-haha has unleashed. Check it:
There are, famously, ten sentences comprising 338 words in the original book, and none of them are in this trailer. Those sentences are definitive, and what they define is the experience of having this story read to you. Over and over. Which is to say, those words are the words of a mother, or a father, or a grandmother; those are some of the words by which you come to language in safety.
So the experience of this trailer is the experience of the absence of that voice. The voice of your grownup, your protector, your absolver. This is the voice that gave you a world: “and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max” (Sendak). Every time you had that book read to you, or you read it to someone else, that voice—ultimately your voice—became that private boat.
However, until you have actually had the experience of losing that sheltering voice, the trailer does not strike you with the force of a cataclysm. Seated among children watching it with their parents or grandparents or trusted older brothers or sisters, I saw them not get it, and they didn’t get it because the cure for unprotected silence was in easy reach. They nuzzled up; they reached into a lap for popcorn; they breathed in deep and smelled their way back into a sort of shelter. This is, of course, how Sendak brought Max back from the land of the wild things—not with a touch, or a voice that would compete with the voice that was reading the story right then, but with the smell, and warmth, of dinner: “and it was still hot” (Sendak).
So a better title for this post might well have been "His Master's Voice," perhaps.
But why should you trust me? I lost Princess Leia's gun in the woods behind the house the same day I got her (donut 'do and white cape model. Nerds!). After that, I gave up on the "action figures." Too many little bits to keep track of, which were always going astray. Kind of like the movies. But that's OK.
Which reminds me. I came across a bit from an Umberto Eco essay on the Internets today or yesterday that I've assigned my students in the past. The quoted text read, "Two cliches make us laugh but a hundred cliches move us because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion." Eco goes on to say something more apt for the moment we find ourselves in:
Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime.
Nobody would have been able to achieve such a cosmic result intentionally. [emphasis mine] Nature has spoken in place of men. This, alone, is a phenomenon worthy of veneration.
