Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Tag: George Lucas (Page 1 of 2)

Under the Influence, Part 2:  The Top Five Formative Cinematic Muses from My ’80s Childhood

October 9, 2024 / / 28 Comments

Let’s play Ten for Ten!  To commemorate the ten-year anniversary of this blog, which launched on June 26, 2014, here’s an appreciation for ten of my formative cinematic influences—an examination of why these movies resonated with me when I first saw them, and how they permanently informed my aesthetic tastes and creative sensibilities.  This post is presented in three installments.

“Under the Influence, Part 1” informally ponders through personal example how an artist develops a singular style and voice all their own, and offers an analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s essay collection Cinema Speculation, the auteur’s critical look at the movies of the ’70s that inspired him.

In “Under the Influence, Part 2,” I spotlight five films from my ’80s childhood that shaped my artistic intuition when at its most malleable.

And in “Under the Influence, Part 3,” I round out the bill with five selections from my ’90s adolescence, the period during which many of the themes that preoccupy me crystalized.

Given that my childhood coincided with what Quentin Tarantino terms “the miserable eighties”—that decade of “middle-of-the-road successful films”1 during which “likeability was everything”2—the following ten cinematic specimens that impressed so notably upon my nascent imagination, accordingly, span the years 1978 through 1993.

Before we dive in, let’s stipulate what this digest isn’t.  These are not what I consider the Best Movies Ever, or even the best movies of their era, neither of which I am particularly qualified to judge.

Furthermore, they are not necessarily even my favorite movies, merely the ones that made a meaningful, lasting, and demonstrable impression on me, and whose DNA has (repeatedly) found their way into my own work.

Nor does this cover my literary or musical influences, because, as Geddy Lee suggests, the project of tracing this stuff ain’t easy; it took a surprising amount of rumination to settle upon the ten selections studied here.  (None of them are particularly obscure; if you haven’t seen all ten, you’ve at least heard of them.)

I have excluded any films that may have once held sway over me, particularly ’80s action movies (from police thrillers to sci-fi dystopias to car-worshipping petro-propaganda), whose hypermasculine spirit and/or trashy cynicism I can no longer in good conscience abide.

It must also be noted I am uncomfortably aware of how, well, white all my chosen case studies are.  The filmmakers and screenwriters are nigh exclusively straight white men, with the known exceptions of Joel Schumacher, Leslie Newman, and Janice Fischer.

What’s more, every protagonist across the board is a straight white male, several of them either explicitly or implicitly Irish American, at that.  Boys like me were very well represented in popular media back then—still are—as there are precious few actors of color to be found in any these productions, and, in those rare instances, always in small or supporting roles.

These cinematic influences are all unambiguously predicated on a heteronormative worldview and a white male perspective.  I acknowledge that.

But… as much as they (mostly) glorify white boys, they all (save one) speak to at least one of two themes that have fascinated me throughout my life, and which are the dominant subjects of my own fiction.

The first is the complicated dynamic between fathers/men and sons/boys.

The second:  the special bond of boyhood friendship, and how boys often look to each other for the emotional support they don’t get from their parents.

Men’s relationships with their fathers and their friends was a central theme of “Ted Lasso”

The stories I respond to and the stories I write are, for the most part, about straight white males.  But I consciously seek to eschew the reductive paradigms favored by Hollywood—notably the solitary antihero and middle-aged manchild—in favor of men who are competent but not superheroic, compassionate but not saintly, flawed but not cruel, and definitely not proudly antisocial, brazenly irresponsible, or comfortably violent.

In stark contrast with Tarantino’s reflexively defensive view that cinematic expressions of violence and hypermasculinity (to say nothing of the institutionalized misogyny that inspirits them) are harmless exercises in wish fulfillment, I believe commercial storytellers—particularly straight white cisgendered men—have a moral obligation to be a productive part of the cultural conversation initiated by the #MeToo movement and the George Floyd protests:

We have spent the past half-decade wrestling with ideas of gender and privilege, attempting to challenge the old stereotypes and power structures.  These conversations should have been an opportunity to throw out the old pressures and norms of manhood, and to help boys and men be more emotionally open and engaged.  But in many ways this environment has apparently had the opposite effect—it has shut them down even further. . . .

Perhaps it’s not surprising that in the grip of the culture wars, caring about boys has become subtly coded as a right-wing cause, a dog whistle for a kind of bad-faith politicking.  Men have had way more than their fair share of our concern already, the reasoning goes, and now it’s time for them to pipe down.  But for boys, privilege and harm intertwine in complex ways—male socialization is a strangely destructive blend of indulgence and neglect.  Under patriarchy, boys and men get everything, except the thing that’s most worth having:  human connection.

Silencing or demonizing boys in the name of progressive ideals is only reinforcing this problem, pushing them further into isolation and defensiveness.  The prescription for creating a generation of healthier, more socially and emotionally competent men is the same in the wider political discourse as it is in our own homes—to approach boys generously rather than punitively.  We need to acknowledge boys’ feelings, to talk with our sons in the same way we do our daughters, to hear them and empathize rather than dismiss or minimize, and engage with them as fully emotional beings.

Ruth Whippman, “Boys Get Everything, Except the Thing That’s Most Worth Having,” Opinion, New York Times, June 5, 2024

The storytellers could contribute to a meaningful shift of the cultural mindset if we summoned the moral imagination to refuse to further represent masculinity as a binary (and compulsory) choice between two equally oppressive and simplistic models of social posturing and self-identity—either he-man or Peter Pan—and dared to instead portray boys and men as human beings of nuanced emotion, as capable of expressing sympathy as they are deserving of receiving it.

Now more than ever, we need thoughtful, responsible fiction by men about men—stories that explore masculinity and manhood without invoking the same tired, narrow, noxious archetypes of tough-guy antiheroes who “play by their own rules” and stunted-adolescent slackers for whom rules, the mere acknowledgment of let alone adherence to, are the stuff of “adulting,” and fuck that shit.  Such prosocial, aspirational fiction might very well be called helpful exercises in wish fulfillment.  That’s what I’ve called for, and what I strive to produce myself.

Now let’s look, in mostly linear order, at the films that shaped my tastes and style, starting with the first five (of ten) selections.  Click on any of the links below to jump directly to that particular subheading and its corresponding treatise:

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“Young Indiana Jones” Turns 30:  Storytelling Lessons from George Lucas’ Other Prequel Series

March 28, 2022 / / 18 Comments

A television series based on an immensely popular action-movie franchise shouldn’t have been a creative or commercial risk—quite the opposite.  But with The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which premiered on March 4, 1992, filmmaker George Lucas had no intention of producing a small-screen version of his big-screen blockbusters.  Here’s how Lucas provided a richly imaginative model for what a prequel can and should be—and why it would never be done that way again.

Though he more or less innovated the contemporary blockbuster, George Lucas had intended—even yearned—to be an avant-garde filmmaker:

Lucas and his contemporaries came of age in the 1960s vowing to explode the complacency of the old Hollywood by abandoning traditional formulas for a new kind of filmmaking based on handheld cinematography and radically expressive use of graphics, animation, and sound.  But Lucas veered into commercial moviemaking, turning himself into the most financially successful director in history by marketing the ultimate popcorn fodder.

Steve Silberman, “Life After Darth,” Wired, May 1, 2005

After dropping the curtain on his two career- and era-defining action trilogies (Star Wars concluded in 1983, then Indiana Jones in ’89), then failing to launch a new franchise with Willow (his 1988 sword-and-sorcery fantasy fizzled at the box office, though even that would-be IP is getting a “legacy” successor later this year courtesy the nostalgia–industrial complex), Lucas did in fact indulge his more experimental creative proclivities—through the unlikeliest of projects:  a pair of prequels to both Indiana Jones and Star Wars.  And while both arguably got made on the strength of the brands alone, the prequels themselves would, for better and worse, defy the sacrosanct conventions of blockbuster cinema—as well the codified narrative patterns of Joseph Campbell’s “heroic journey”—that audiences had come to expect from Lucas.

A perfunctory scene in Return of the Jedi, in which Obi-Wan finally explains Darth Vader’s mysterious backstory to Luke (a piece of business that could’ve been easily handled in the first film, thereby sparing the hero needlessly considerable risk and disillusionment in The Empire Strikes Back, but whatever), served as the narrative foundation for Lucas’ Star Wars prequel trilogy (1999–2005), in which a precocious tike (The Phantom Menace) matures into a sullen teenager (Attack of the Clones) before warping into a murderous tyrant (Revenge of the Sith).  Underpinning Anakin’s emo-fueled transformation to the dark side is a byzantine plotline about Palpatine’s Machiavellian takeover of the Republic.  Meanwhile, references to the original trilogy, from crucial plot points to fleeting sight gags, abound.

You’ve all seen the movies, so I’ll say no more other than to suggest the story arc—which is exactly what Obi-Wan summarized in Return of the Jedi, only (much) longer, appreciably harder to follow, and a tonally incongruous mix of gee-whiz dorkiness and somber political intrigue—is precisely the kind of creative approach to franchise filmmaking that would’ve been summarily nixed in any Hollywood pitch meeting, had Lucas been beholden to the corporate precepts of the studio system from which the colossal success of the original Star Wars afforded him his independence.

George Lucas on the set of the “Star Wars” prequels

Which is not to say Lucas’ artistic instincts were infallible.  Financially successful though the prequels were, audiences never really embraced his vision of an even longer time ago in a galaxy far, far away:  Gungans and midi-chlorians and trade disputes didn’t exactly inspire the wide-eyed amazement that Wookiees and lightsabers and the Death Star had.

Maybe by that point Star Wars was the wrong franchise with which to experiment creatively?  Perhaps it had become too culturally important, and audience expectations for new entries in the long-dormant saga were just too high?  In the intervening years, Star Wars had ceased to be the proprietary daydreams of its idiosyncratic creator; culturally if not legally, Star Wars kinda belonged to all of us on some level.  By explicitly starting the saga with Episode IV in 1977, he’d invited each of us to fill in the blanks; the backstory was arguably better off imagined than reified.

As an IP, however, Indiana Jones, popular as it was, carried far less expectation, as did the second-class medium of network television, which made Lucas’ intended brand extension more of an ancillary product in the franchise than a must-see cinematic event—more supplemental than it was compulsory, like a tie-in novel, or the Ewok telefilms of the mid-eighties.  The stakes of the project he envisioned were simply much lower, the spotlight on it comfortably dimmer.  In the event of its creative and/or commercial failure, Young Indiana Jones would be a franchise footnote in the inconsequential vein of the Star Wars Holiday Special, not an ill-conceived vanity project responsible for retroactively ruining the childhoods of millions of developmentally arrested Gen Xers.  Here Lucas expounds on the genesis of the series:

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Too Much Perspective: On Writing with Moral Imagination

June 7, 2021 / / 18 Comments

Practicing morally imaginative storytelling means scrutinizing the values and messages encrypted in the fiction we produce—but it does not mean passing a “purity test.”

In Marty Di Bergi’s 1984 rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, the titular British heavy-metal band, faced with ebbing popularity and flagging album sales, embarks on a disaster-prone tour of North America in support of its latest release, the critically savaged Smell the Glove.  During a stopover at Graceland to pay their respects to the King of Rock and Roll at his gravesite, lead vocalist David St. Hubbins comments, “Well, this is thoroughly depressing.”

To which bandmate and childhood best friend Nigel Tufnel responds, “It really puts perspective on things, though, doesn’t it?”

“Too much.  There’s too much fucking perspective now.”

It’s a sentiment to which we can all relate, collectively endowed as we’ve become with a migrainous case of “2020 vision.”  At the start of the pandemic, long before we had any sense of what we were in for let alone any perspective on it, I like many essayists felt the urge or need or even the responsibility to say something about it, despite knowing I had no useful or meaningful insight.  I netted out with an acknowledgment that the months to come would present a rare Digital Age opportunity for quiet introspection and reflection—one in which we might expand our moral imagination of what’s possible, to invoke the exquisite wisdom of my mentor Al Gore, and perhaps envision a world on the other side appreciably more just, equitable, and sustainable than the one we had before the global shutdown.

Did we ever.  Here in the United States, we are now wrestling with issues of economic inequality, structural racism, police brutality, environmental justice, and fair access to affordable housing and healthcare with an awareness and an urgency not seen in generations, and President Joe Biden—responding to the social movements of his times like FDR and LBJ before him—has proposed a host of progressive legislation that matches the visionary, transformative ambition of the New Deal and the Great Society.

Reuters via the New York Times

With heartening moral imagination (certainly more than this democratic eco-socialist expected from him), Biden is attempting to turn the page on the Randian, neoliberal narrative of the past forty years and write a new chapter in the American story—one founded on an ethos of sympathetic coexistence, not extractive exploitation.  With our continued grassroots support and, when necessary, pressure, he might even be the unlikely hero to pull it off, too—our Nixon in China.

As for me?  I spent most of the pandemic thinking about narrativity myself.  Doing nothing, after all, was a privilege of the privileged, with whom I am obliged to be counted.  So, I used the time in self-quarantine to think and to write about the stories we tell, and I arrived at the resolute conclusion that we—the storytellers—need to do a lot better.

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The Road Back: Revisiting “The Writer’s Journey”

September 28, 2020 / / 20 Comments

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Christopher Vogler’s industry-standard screenwriting instructional The Writer’s Journey:  Mythic Structure for Writers, here’s an in-depth look at why the time-honored storytelling principles it propounds are existentially endangered in our postnarrative world… and why they’re needed now more than ever.

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell identified the “monomyth”—the universal narrative patterns and Jungian psychological archetypes that provide the shape, structure, and emotional resonance of virtually every story in the Western literary canon.

As it’s more commonly known, this is the “Hero’s Journey,” in which the status quo is disrupted, sending our protagonist on a perilous adventure—physically or emotionally or both—through a funhouse-mirror distortion of their everyday reality (think Marty McFly in 1950s Hill Valley, Dorothy in Oz) in which they encounter Mentors, Shadows, Allies, and Tricksters throughout a series of escalating challenges, culminating in a climactic test from which they finally return to the Ordinary World, ideally a bit wiser for their trouble.  From the Epic of Gilgamesh to a given episode of The Big Bang Theory, the Hero’s Journey is the foundational schema of storytelling.

The Writer's Journey graphic
The stages of the Hero’s Journey

The book’s influence on the visionary young filmmakers who came of age studying it was quantum:  George Lucas consciously applied Campbell’s theory to the development of Star Wars (1977), as did George Miller to Mad Max (1979), arguably transforming a pair of idiosyncratic, relatively low-budget sci-fi projects into global phenomena that are still begetting sequels over forty years later.  After serving Western culture for millennia, in the waning decades of the twentieth century, the Hero’s Journey became the blueprint for the Hollywood blockbuster.

In the 1990s, a story analyst at Disney by the name of Christopher Vogler wrote and circulated a seven-page internal memo titled “A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” a screenwriter-friendly crib sheet that was notably used in the development of The Lion King (a classic Hero’s Journey if ever there was one), evolving a few years later into a full-length book of its own:  The Writer’s Journey:  Mythic Structure for Writers, a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of which was published this past summer.  The nearly 500-page revised volume is partitioned into four sections:

  • MAPPING THE JOURNEY:  Here Mr. Vogler characterizes the mythic archetypes of the Hero, Mentor, Threshold Guardian, Herald, Shapeshifter, Shadow, Ally, and Trickster.
  • STAGES OF THE JOURNEY:  Each monomythic “beat”—The Call to Adventure, Crossing the First Threshold, Approach to the Inmost Cave, etc.—is given thorough explanation and illustration.
  • LOOKING BACK ON THE JOURNEY:  Using the tools he teaches, Mr. Vogler provides comprehensive analyses of Titanic, Pulp Fiction, The Lion King, The Shape of Water, and Lucas’ six-part Star Wars saga.
  • THE REST OF THE STORY:  ADDITIONAL TOOLS FOR MASTERING THE CRAFT:  The appendices are a series of essays on the history, nature, and cultural dynamics of the art and craft of storytelling.  After 350 pages of practical technique, Mr. Vogler earns the privilege of indulging a bit of literary theory here, and his insights are fascinating.  He devotes an entire chapter to the subject of catharsis, “comparing the emotional effect of a drama with the way the body rids itself of toxins and impurities” (Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey:  Mythic Structure for Writers, 4th ed. [Studio City, California:  Michael Wiese Productions, 2020], 420).  Stories, in that sense, are medicinal; their alchemical compounds have healing properties—more on this point later.

Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey codifies mythic structure for contemporary storytellers, demonstrating its form, function, and versatility through more accessible terminology than Campbell’s densely academic nomenclature, and by drawing on examples from cinematic touchstones familiar to all:  The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Titanic, etc.  Like The Hero with a Thousand Faces before it, The Writer’s Journey has become, over the last quarter century, an essential catechism, affecting not merely its own generation of scribes (including yours truly), but the successive storytelling programs that stand on its shoulders, like Save the Cat!

Comparison of Vogler’s Hero’s Journey and Snyder’s “beat sheet”

But why is it essential?  If Campbell and Vogler and Blake Snyder have simply put different labels on narrative principles we all intuitively comprehend from thousands of years of unconscious conditioning, why study them at all?  Why not simply trust those precepts are already instinctive and immediately type FADE IN at the muse’s prompting?

Because just as a doctor requires an expert’s command of gross anatomy even if no two patients are exactly constitutionally alike, and an architect is expected to possess a mastery of structural engineering though every building is different, it behooves the storyteller—be them screenwriter, novelist, playwright, what have you—to consciously understand the fundamentals of the narrative arts:

The stages of the Hero’s Journey can be traced in all kinds of stories, not just those that feature “heroic” physical action and adventure.  The protagonist of every story is the hero of a journey, even if the path leads only into his own mind or into the realm of relationships.

The way stations of the Hero’s Journey emerge naturally even when the writer in unaware of them, but some knowledge of this most ancient guide to storytelling is useful in identifying problems and telling better stories.  Consider these twelve stages as a map of the Hero’s Journey, one of many ways to get from here to there, but one of the most flexible, durable, and dependable.

ibid., 7

I’ve read and reread previous versions of The Writer’s Journey endlessly, and I take new insight from it each time:  An excellent primer for aspirants, it yields yet richer dividends for experienced writers—those that can readily appreciate it vis-à-vis their own work.  Though this updated edition, which includes two brand-new essays in the appendices (“What’s the Big Deal?” and “It’s All About the Vibes, Man”), was certainly sufficient reason in its own right to revisit The Writer’s Journey, I had a more compelling motivation:  I wanted to see for myself how Mr. Vogler makes a case for the type of conventional story arc he extols in the face of mounting evidence of its cultural irrelevance in our postnarrative era.

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Some Assembly Required: Why Disciplined Creativity Begets Better Fiction

March 19, 2020 / / 24 Comments

Editor’s note:  “Some Assembly Required” was written and scheduled to post prior to COVID-19’s formal classification as a global pandemic and the ensuing social disruption it has caused here in the United States and around the world; in light of that, a thesis about storytelling craft seems to me somewhat inconsequential and irrelevant.

More broadly, however, the essay makes a case for slowing down, something we’re all doing out of admittedly unwelcome necessity at present, and learning to value the intellectual dividends of thoughtful rumination over the emotional gratification of kneejerk reaction; as such, I submit “Some Assembly Required” as planned—along with my best wishes to all for steadfast health and spirits through this crisis.

Castle Grayskull.  The Cobra Terror Drome.  The Batcave.  I didn’t have every 1980s action-figure playset, but, man, how I cherished the ones I got.  In those days of innocence, there was no visceral thrill quite like waking up to an oversized box under the Christmas tree, tearing off the wrapping to find this:

I had one just like it!

Or this:

Optimus Prime was both an action figure AND a playset! Didn’t have him, alas…

Or this:

The seven-foot G.I. Joe aircraft carrier! DEFINITELY didn’t have this one…

Oh, the possibilities!  Getting one of those glorious playsets was like being handed the keys to a magical kingdom of one’s very own.  After having been inspired by the adventures of G.I. Joe and the Transformers and the Ghostbusters at the movies, on their cartoon series, and in comics, now you had your very own “backlot” to stage your personal daydreams.  It was grand.

I am in no way indulging 1980s nostalgia here—surely you know me better than that by now.  Rather, I mean only to elicit the particular thrum of excitement the era’s playsets aroused, the imagination they unleashed.  It’s fair to say I became addicted to that sensation in my youth; even at midlife, I still need my fix.  Nowadays, though, I get it not through curated collections of overpriced memorabilia—retro-reproductions of the action figures of yore—but rather the surcharge-free creation of my own fiction.

CREATIVITY—ONE… TWO… THREE!

Getting a new playset as a kid and a starting a new writing project as an adult share arguably the same three developmental phases.  The first is what I call Think about What You Might like for Christmas.  This is the stage when you experiment noncommittally with ideas, get a sense of what excites you, what takes hold of your imagination—maybe talk it over with friends—and then envision what it will look like.  Selling yourself on a new story idea, deciding it’s worth the intensive time and energy required to bring it to fruition, is much the same as furnishing your parents with a carefully considered wish list:  You’re cashing in your biannual Golden Ticket on this.  It’s a period of escalating anticipation, and of promise.  The “thing” isn’t real yet—it’s still a nebulous notion, not a tangible commodity—but it will be…

Stage two is Some Assembly Required:  This is the recognition that your personal paracosm doesn’t come ready-to-play out of the box.  You’ll need to snap the pieces in place, apply the decals; you need to give the forum structure first.  To use another analogy:  You don’t start decorating a Christmas tree that’s been arranged askance in its stand.  (More on Some Assembly Required in a minute.)

Stage three:  It’s Playtime!  You’ve done the hard, preparatory work of building your imaginary realm, and now you get to experience the pure joy of writing—to have fun, in other words, with your new toys.

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Artistic Originality: Is It Dead—or Was It Merely a Fallacy to Begin With?

February 27, 2018 / / 58 Comments

Over the course of the many insightful conversations generated by the recent post on Star Wars:  The Last Jedi—sincerest thanks to all who shared their time and thoughts—the subject of artistic influence was discussed:  what role it played in the creation of some of Gen X’s most cherished movie franchises of yore, and what part, if any, it has in our now-institutionalized praxis of remaking those films wholesale—of “turning Hollywood into a glorified fan-fiction factory where filmmakers get to make their own versions of their childhood favorites.”

Because where is the line drawn, exactly, between inspiration and imitation?  If the narrative arts are a continuum in which every new entry owes, to a certain extent, a creative debt to a cinematic or literary antecedent, is originality even a thing?

If so, what is it, then?  How is one to construe it concretely, beyond simply “knowing it when we see it”?  And, as such, is there a way for us as artists to codify, or at very least comprehend, the concept of originality as something more than an ill-defined abstraction to perhaps consciously strive for it in our own work?

 

THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND INFLUENCES

Since it was Star Wars that provoked those questions, let me start with this:  George Lucas is one of my eminent creative influences.  When I was in high school in the early nineties, during that long respite between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, when Star Wars was more or less placed by its creator in carbon-freezing, I became aware that the same mind had conceived two of my favorite franchises, and went to great lengths to study Lucas’ career:  how he learned the art of storytelling, where his ideas came from, how he managed to innovate the way in which blockbusters were created and marketed.

“Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” mastermind George Lucas, my first creative idol

In order to more fully appreciate what Lucas created in 1977 when he made Star Wars—a work of fiction so thrilling and inspired it seemed to emerge fully realized from his singular imagination—it behooves us to consider the varied influences he drew from.  The 1936 Flash Gordon film serial Lucas watched as a child provided the inciting animus—a grand-scale space opera told as a series of high-adventure cliffhangers.  (It also later informed the movie’s visual vocabulary, with its reliance on old-fashioned cinematic techniques like opening crawls and optical wipes.)

In a case of east meets west, Joseph Campbell’s study of comparative mythology The Hero with a Thousand Faces provided a general mythic and archetypal blueprint to endow Lucas’ sprawling alien-world fantasy with psychological familiarity, while Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress served as a direct model for the plot he eventually settled on (after at least three start-from-scratch rewrites).  Lucas ultimately patterned the series’ three-part narrative arc after Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings cycle (which later directly influenced his high-fantasy franchise-nonstarter Willow), because, prior to Star Wars, closed-ended “trilogies” weren’t really a thing in commercial cinema.

In addition to his cinematic and literary interests, Lucas is also a passionate scholar of world history (as evidenced by Indiana Jones, particularly the television series), and a direct line can be drawn from the X-wing assault on the Death Star to the aerial dogfights of World War II, to say nothing of the saga’s allusions to the Roman Republic, Nazi Germany, and the Vietnam War.  As for where the Force and lightsabers and the twin suns of Tatooine came from… who knows?  The sheer number of disparate interests that met, mated, and reproduced within the confines of Lucas’ brain can never be fully accounted for, even by the man himself.

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Won’t Get Fooled Again: “The Last Jedi” Incites a Fan Rebellion against Disney’s “Star Wars” Empire

January 29, 2018 / / 46 Comments

Well ahead of the release of The Last Jedi, I’d made a private resolution to stop being so goddamn grumpy about Star Wars and superheroes moving forward.  That’s not to suggest, mind you, I rescind my cultural criticisms of them, merely an acknowledgment that I’d said my piece, have nothing more to offer on the matter, and have no wish to spend 2018 mired in negativity.  There’s enough of that going around these days.

And yet here I find myself, first post of the New Year, compelled by fate—just like Obi-Wan, I suppose, and, more recently, Luke Skywalker himself—to crawl out of hiding.  Here’s what happened:

The week Last Jedi hit theaters, I was preoccupied with last-minute errands and arrangements for my trip home for the holidays, and Star Wars, frankly, was the last thing on my mind.  I was peripherally aware the movie was “in the air”—reviews were near-universally hailing it as “groundbreaking,” the best of the series since Empire—but altogether oblivious that it had already opened.

Until Saturday, December 16.  That’s when unsolicited text messages start pinging in rapid succession from friends and colleagues, decrying it as “the worst Star Wars ever,” “a betrayal,” “the death of the franchise,” etc.  (One old friend even suggested I stay away from the movie at all costs if I wanted to preserve any fondness I had left for Star Wars.)  I couldn’t quite reconcile any of that with the glowing critical notices, so I went to Rotten Tomatoes, and, sure enough, an overwhelming plurality of the audience was hating this movie.  Not strongly disliking it, mind you—despising it.  Some excerpts:

“I will pass on IX and it won’t make any difference in the grand scheme of things, but there is nowhere the plot can go in the final movie that I particularly would care for.  I have no investment in the characters, plot or universe anymore.”

“Steaming pile of bantha poodoo.”

“Easily the worst in the Saga.  Lifelong Star Wars fan.  It’s now all over.”

“Worst movie EVER.  I can’t begin to find the words that express how bad this was.  Guess it’s hard to say much without spoilers.  Just be warned it’s not the star wars you know.”

“You won’t fool me, nor my money, ever again.”

And then there was this succinct four-word review:

“Fuck you rian Johnson”

How to explain such opprobrium?  (Note:  There are those that suggest a vocal minority of haters has merely created the misleading illusion of substantial backlash—possibly that’s true—but the sampling of direct responses I’ve fielded for the most part range from faint praise at best to seething vitriol.)  I mean, these were the movies that were supposed to “redeem” Star Wars after creator George Lucas’ best malignant efforts to ruin all our childhoods with the prequels, right?

Epic fail—”Episode VIII” turned out to be something other than the glorious return of the Jedi many fans anticipated

So, what’s gone wrong? I wondered.  Were fans simply being oversensitive?  Or did filmmaker Rian Johnson, making his Star Wars debut, indeed deliver a credibly bad movie—a “franchise killer”?  How exactly did things reach such an extreme, fevered pitch a mere two years after Disney’s much-anticipated brand-relaunch of Star Wars?

It’s a complicated answer with more than one determinant, but I can get to the heart of the problem for you.

Hold that thought, though.  We’ll get back to Star Wars shortly.

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This Counts, That Does Not: On Canonicity in Media Franchises

January 20, 2017 / / 34 Comments

It may surprise you to learn this, but the events of Star Wars never actually happened—the majority of them, anyway.  I mean that sincerely—not for a minute should that be interpreted as snide or condescending.  But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself…

In 1983, George Lucas brought his Star Wars trilogy to a close with Return of the Jedi (oh, those bygone days when movie franchises actually reached—wait for it—a conclusive resolution).  Throughout the eighties, the series lived on by way of a pair of made-for-television Ewok movies and the Saturday-morning cartoons Droids and Ewoks, which continued to stoke interest in the franchise—and its lucrative action-figure line… for a while.  But by the end of the decade, with no new big-screen productions to energize the fan base, Star Wars had resigned its position at the top of the pop-cultural hierarchy.

George Lucas looks to the horizon

Lucas, who had always been a forward-thinking businessman as much as he was a visionary filmmaker (he negotiated a reduced fee for writing and directing the original Star Wars in return for ownership of sequel and merchandising rights, which the studio deemed worthless and was only too happy to relinquish), had plans to revisit the Star Wars galaxy in a prequel trilogy that had been part of his grand design when he was developing the earlier films—hence the reason, in case you never thought to ask, they are numbered Episodes IV through VI.  Even though the prequels themselves were some years off—production on The Phantom Menace wouldn’t commence until 1997—he began laying the groundwork to return Star Wars to its lofty place in the cultural consciousness by commissioning science-fiction author Timothy Zahn to write a trio of novels set five years after the events of Return of the Jedi—what later became commonly known as “the Thrawn trilogy” (named for its chief antagonist).

The books were released successively in ’91, ’92, and ’93 (my best friend Chip and I couldn’t get down to the local bookstore fast enough to buy a copy of each upon publication, though being a year older, he got to read them first); they were New York Times bestsellers that not only got their intended job done—reigniting public interest in a dormant media franchise—but also led to an endless, ongoing series of novels that explored every facet of the Star Wars galaxy:  No character or event was too small to be the focus of its own story.  Thus, the Star Wars Expanded Universe (SWEU) was born.  Han and Leia had twins!  Luke got married!  Chewbacca sacrificed himself for the Solos’ son Anakin!  A universe of stories, far beyond the contained narrative arc of the classic trilogy, took on a life of its own and captured the imagination of a generation that invested itself in the ongoing space opera collectively known as Star Wars—a vast, complex continuity that Lucasfilm maintained with curatorial oversight to prevent inconsistencies and contradictions in the expansive mythos, which comprised movies, books, comics, TV shows, RPGs, and video games.

The Force awakens? For many fans, it never went dormant

When Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, however, they had their own ambitious plans to expand the franchise, and didn’t want to be tied down to every addenda in the extensive mythology.  And just like that, everything other than the feature films and then-current Clone Wars animated series was “retconned”—still commercially available, mind you, under the new “Legends” banner, but henceforth declared noncanonical.  This was an outrage to many of the longtime fans who considered these “expanded universe” adventures sacrosanct—who’d invested time, money, and interest in the world-building fictions of the Star Wars continuity that had been undone with the stroke of a hand.  Some of their favorite stories were now apocrypha, whereas the much-derided prequels, on the other hand, were still canonically official.  Where was the justice—the sense—in that?

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“I Heard You Were Dead”: What the Career of John Carpenter Demonstrates about the Nature of Legacy

July 25, 2016 / / 5 Comments

I write all my fiction to movie soundtracks.  Instrumentals only—lyrics in my ear are too distracting while I’m trying to compose words, and I usually wind up tuning that noise out entirely, in which case:  What’s the point?  At the beginning of a project, I’ll choose a good mix of selections from movies that represent the tone or theme I’m going for, then compile a playlist that cycles in the background—turned up just enough to register but not actively listen to—for as long as it takes to complete the manuscript; that playlist serves as an aural compass, or “temp track,” keeping me in touch with what the world I’m creating should look and sound like at all times.

Just the other week, I finished the first draft of what will be my debut novel, Escape from Rikers Island.  The influences on EFRI are too numerous to quantify, but include novelists Richard Price and Elmore Leonard, as well as filmmaker John Carpenter.  In both title and premise, Escape from Rikers Island owes a great creative debt to Carpenter’s exploitation thrillers Escape from New York and Assault on Precinct 13.  His movies, love ‘em or otherwise, have a look and feel all their own, owed in part to his eerie, synth-driven soundtracks; he is one of very few directors who’s scored most of his own movies, so writing EFRI to his music seemed like a no-brainer.

As fate would have it, right around the time I began the draft, Carpenter released his first album of original material, Lost Themes, so EFRI got a soundtrack of its very own, with music I now almost exclusively associate with my work of fiction rather than any specific film of his.  One of the cuts, “Vortex,” even became, to my mind, the novel’s unofficial theme song:

John Carpenter is touring this summer to promote Lost Themes and its just-released follow-up, Lost Themes II, and I went to see him perform last month at the Orpheum Theatre here in Los Angeles with my friend and fellow horror enthusiast Adam Aresty.  Adam is a burgeoning master of horror himself, having written the literal bee movie Stung (now streaming on Netflix), the chilling short story “Recovery” (which evokes—and I mean this as the highest compliment—Ambrose Bierce’s 1890 literary classic “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”), and the brand-new sci-fi novella The Communication Room.  Don’t take my word for it, though:  Sample for yourself some of the free fiction on his Web site, including one of my favorites, the James M. Cain–style noir tale “Wrought Iron”.  If you like what you read and you live in the Los Angeles area, perhaps consider coming out to Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard on Tuesday, August 2nd at 7:00 p.m. to hear Adam read from The Communication Room.

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The Exodus Is Here: On Saying Goodbye to the Who

May 31, 2016 / / 9 Comments

There was a lot of contentious shouting in our apartment throughout my childhood, so much so that it could be heard the moment I stepped off the elevator—I’m talking thunderous, mean-spirited bickering.  All of it—every word—was filtered through the tinny speaker of the AM/FM radio that sat atop our refrigerator.

My father listened daily to The Bob Grant Show—at top volume.  He didn’t particularly agree with Grant’s conservative politics, but he loved a good argument.  (I wonder if he’d feel the same today, in this era of ‘round-the-clock cable-TV squabbling masquerading as news?)  When he wasn’t listening to Grant in the kitchen, he had it blasting from the radio in our Plymouth Duster.  I didn’t understand much, if any, of what was being debated, but I laughed every time Grant hollered, “Get off my phone, you jerk!”  (He did so often.)

The endless caterwauling from Dad’s favorite station prompted an antithetical reaction in my mother (whether intentional or unconscious I do not know):  When she had control of the radio, we listened almost exclusively to 106.7 Lite FM.  Up till the age of ten or so, “easy listening” was effectively the only genre of music, save classical, I was aware of.  It was probably upon hearing Ambrosia’s “Biggest Part of Me” for the thousandth time (or maybe it was Journey’s “Open Arms”—like it even matters) that I finally asked out of both frustration and genuine curiosity, “Doesn’t anybody sing about anything besides love?”

My mother considered that for a moment.  “Love is what makes the world go ‘round.”

It wasn’t a particularly satisfying answer, and perhaps on some subconscious level she herself recognized that, because the following Christmas—this was in ’86 or ’87, I think—she gave me a cassette copy of the Who’s 1978 album Who Are You (which I recently rediscovered while cleaning out my childhood closet).

I’d had no awareness of the Who before that; Who Are You was my crash course in progressive rock, a style that came to speak to my more philosophical and intellectual proclivities throughout high school, college, and beyond.  I didn’t always understand what the songs meant—many of Pete Townshend’s lyrics, I suspect, are a mystery to all but (perhaps) himself—but that was exactly the point:  The music of the Who is a Rorschach—a receptacle into which you can pour you own feelings and experiences, and from which take your own meaning and catharsis.  The lyrics—and the narratives of the band’s operatic concept albums—are so specific to Townshend’s particular imagination, but the broader themes are universal.  Take any given Who song, and I doubt it means the same thing to any two people.

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