RHETORICAL CRITIC

I know that Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star.

No. He didn’t. I know that. He’s a fictional character in a fictional story played by an actor in a film in 1977.

Emotionally, though, I know Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star. I saw him do it. I was there. I felt it. In some ways, I blew it up myself.  

I know this as certain as my memories of the day I met my wife and when I was married and when our sons were born and when I earned my Ph.D. and every other major and minor life event. It is right up there, as it is the closest thing to straight-up myth that has ever come out of American storytelling.

Nobody thinks the events of The Godfather or Casablanca or Citizen Kane happened. Those are works of art and are clearly not real. Ditto Huck Finn and Grapes of Wrath and Beloved. They are all the tiniest of shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave compared to what, say, Disney’s Frozen has accomplished in terms of making images and sounds on film becomes something realer than real.

But today’s kids will never think the events of Frozen happened on an emotional level. Star Wars is the rare entry to a mythical category that even if you take all the works of narrative in human existence, only a few have reached. The Odyssey. The Bible. All five seasons of The Wire. Ok, maybe not the Bible. 

I remember asking an old Arizona roommate watching our college basketball team play on TV why he kept referring to the team as if he was playing. “We” scored two points, “we” needed to play better defense, when “his” ass was clearly sitting on “our” couch drinking beer. His instant answer impressed me: “Well, I’d be playing with them right now if I could!”

He wanted to be there. And in a way, he was there, even though he wasn’t, and couldn’t play basketball worth a flip. Likewise, if Luke hadn’t pulled the trigger on the Death Star, I was ready to hop into an X-wing and do it myself, and I know millions felt the same way.

Star Wars offers a world where friends are always lifelong and brave and true, and evil is both dastardly and easy to identify. Our world is monstrous, uncaring, and gray. Star Wars is only a gray universe in the sense that no one seems to wash their spaceships regularly save the Empire, which marks them as completely evil and makes Finn’s janitorial background in Awakens apropos.

Heroic journeys in such a universe have a narrow set of reasonable plots. You can take away the hero’s strength and have them prove themselves without it. You can make them doubt themselves so they can regain faith and resume their quest. You can threaten the people they love so they can save them. Or, in the least interesting variant, you can give them a worthy opponent to defeat. Or you do all of these at once, which Star Wars does.

Good myths allow straightforward and uncomplicated tests of virtue. We like to identify ourselves with a cocky kid from a farm who would climb into a spaceship we’ve never flown before and fly a suicide mission to save people we’ve never met and do it with one second left with our first shot only with the help of true friendship. The Russians never built a Death Star, but the most pacifistic American would have blown it and its tens of thousands of employees to smithereens in the 80s had an X-wing been available.

It was never a tough call. It still isn’t. And it’s all very silly.

Emotionally, though, it’s quite real. And it’s not silly. Not at all. Not because there are no Death Stars or X-wings, but because in the real world, Death Stars and X-wings are far harder to identify. They can take almost any form, and most disturbingly, the people sitting in the Death Stars think they’d make that trench run, too, not thinking about how they are far closer to a comfortable bureaucrat like Moff Tarkin than any honest rebel scum.

As for the ones sitting in the cockpit of an X-wing, they usually don’t have Red Squadron backing them up, and so they never get the nerve to make that trench run when it comes time. There are moisture farms to maintain, droid-free bars to tend, profitable mining operations to supervise and deals to make with the Empire. You know how it is. You can’t change the world, right?

Subtracting these two catatonic groups leaves only the shady criminal underworld that seems to be 90% of the Star Wars galaxy population. That’s probably why Jabba the Hutt passes for the leader of the free world these days. And of course, he thinks he’s Luke Skywalker.

But he’s not. Luke Skywalker is the guy who blew up the Death Star. Or, rather, he was the guy who realized he could blow up the Death Star and did, with a little help from his friends. Self-actualization is part of everyone’s dream.

Sure, call it space opera, puerile escapism, a childish thing that should be put away, the new ones not up to snuff with the old, even, if you’re feeling purist. But most narrative can’t touch a sliver of what that film did and still does.

Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress is often cited as a precursor to Star Wars from a stylistic sense, but the one that I think of more is Ikiru, which, if you accept my analogy, is about a broken man who thinks he has toiled inside a Death Star for years and then suddenly realizes he’s in an X-wing and there’s a trench in front of him – and then he makes the trench run.

But Kurosawa doesn’t end the film there. The last third of Ikiru is the man’s funeral, attended by his depressed coworkers, who eventually depart without any confidence they will be able to duplicate his feat in their terminally bureaucratic mindsets. His brief glimpse of the ultimate is thus passing, brief, and lost, save to the viewer, perhaps.

That is cinema. Star Wars is not cinema, not by Scorsese’s standards, certainly. There is no hard look at the inevitable nature of death and the corrupt duality of man; Skywalker is not FMJ’s Joker. But his moment of surrender to the Force that allows the trench run repeats endlessly in an eternal present that is only dated a long, long time ago. He will always be right there, ready to make the trench run again,  forever in my streaming queue.

I watch the first film when it has been too long since I felt the quiet rush that comes with doing something unquestionably good. Empire is better, a classic, surely, far more artfully written and presented. And Return juggles its end-of-the-trilogy job as well as it possibly could have. But they don’t have the moral clarity and epistemic power of a classic myth. The Death Star was destroyed, yes, but it will also be destroyed tomorrow and the day after that, as much as Luke fired the causal torpedo and will do so again.

The story will be retold as it was told before.

I am in the middle of reading The Hobbit to my five-year-old son. We get through a few pages a night.

He does not understand much of it yet, but he does understand there is a journey, and there are heroes and those that help them, and there are bad guys, and there is suspense and danger and more than a little humor. He is often worried about the progress of Bilbo and the dwarves, and why Gandalf is so cantankerous and unreliable.

I reassure him even as Mirkwood closes in, though. I know how the story ends, I tell him. I’ve read it before. It was the same last time, as it will be once more. Bilbo did get to the Lonely Mountain and back again. I’m as certain of that as I know that Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star. The narrative is fiction, but the emotional truth is not.

Humans respond to a call to the good in different ways – indifference, cynicism, opportunism, name your sin. The best reaction that we can build and encourage is a default urge to help despite danger. My son’s admiration for firefighters – it was not long ago he watched some fight a fire a street over from ours – suggests he is on a certain path where he will have some resistance to the default quiet ambivalence I’ve noted in most, where the world is what it is, and he holds no responsibility to improve anything but his own lot.

Perhaps I have overstated my case, though. Perhaps he will grow up and dutifully fire the giant laser that destroys Alderaan. I doubt this, however. He does not respond well to orders. I can’t even reliably get him to go to bed on time, and his sneaky methods of candy acquisition suggest I am raising a Han rather than a Luke.

But his sense of right and wrong is developing on schedule, in fits and starts, much like mine continues to develop. Anything that can keep us going in the right direction helps – even a fictional past.

So I will read to him as Bilbo nears the Lonely Mountain, and we will watch Luke take out the Death Star again and again. The impossible will always be there when we need it to remind ourselves of what is possible.