In this instalment, I inquire into the the extent to which the sharing of a mythopoeic universe constrains the freedom of the individual author, viz. whether there is a place for genuine innovation between the oversaturation of “canons” and the anarchic multiverse of fanfic.

13.

When Red Dwarf creators Doug Naylor and Rob Grant parted ways circa 1994, they independently sat down to write their own solo spin-off novels—The Last Human and Backwards, respectively. Red Dwarf spin-offs were nothing new: the gestalt entity formerly known as Grant Naylor had already penned two (Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers and Better Than Life), both of which contained a number of ideas that fed back into the popular television show. What is remarkable about The Last Human and Backwards, which were not so much mutually contradictory as they were flat-out obstinate about the narrative non-being of the other, is how they revealed two opposed yet complementary interpretations of what Red Dwarf was all about, and what it very well could have been given the unlimited sort of budget that never visits British sitcoms that die too young.

Unlike the television show in its finest moments, neither book is the paragon of sci-fi comedy: for those risible pleasures, the obvious champion from the British Isles is the one and only tie-in novel to have seized control of its brand identity in the mainstream consciousness, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which one anonymous critic once described as—

Mostly harmless.

Regardless of their quality, the post-mitotic tomes of Grant Naylor provide an ample demonstration of the function that the tie-in novel should ideally serve. The motivation to collect them at all is no different from that which drives us to seek out making-of documentaries and sketches of lost episodes on the DVDs: the insight we get into the competing visions of Grant and Naylor is, by extension, a retroactive insight into the television show itself.

In the case of Red Dwarf, we are dealing with a unique situation in that the authors were the creators of the property and not third-party writers-for-hire, as is the case with most tie-in novels. Nevertheless, what I wanted to draw attention to was the interest that can bloom from the healthy interpretive debate that can exist between derived works, once we have already conceded their status as a subsidiary commercial property.

Ergo, I like much of what Raymond Benson says about James Bond:

Fans have to realize that every author’s oeuvre of Bond novels should be taken as a whole and separate from other authors’—with the exception that Fleming’s original books are the groundwork, the basis for the Universe. That original Universe is free to plunder, and that includes characters Fleming created. A writer of STAR TREK or STAR WARS would do the same thing. I didn’t look at my Bond books as a continuation of Gardner’s series. I started my own series. I was given carte blanche to use or ignore anything in Colonel Sun, the Gardner books, and even the John Pearson fictional biography. Anything I changed from earlier books was certainly not done out of spite! I wanted my Bond to use the old Walther PPK because I felt that was Bond’s gun, just as the Batmobile is Batman’s car!

As I see it, the best environment for the production of tie-in novels is one in which the individual author has ample room for experimentation. In similar environments like comic books and television, where writers work under the ordinance of a committee that guards the brand, the issues and episodes that we remember are the frame-breakers, the ones that turn our expectations upside down and waste no time with the pattern of the merely conventional. They succeed because they surpass the regular limitations of the brand, as “The City on the Edge of Forever” did for Star Trek.

The more individual the vision, the better. It is no coincidence that the most revered title in franchise superhero comics is Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns—not only an impressive accomplishment in formal terms and essential reading for anyone interested in the communicative possibilities of what Will Eisner termed “sequential art”, but also a standalone masterwork of sober meditation on the moral implications of Batman’s Gotham, from the public’s relationship to vigilantism to the consequent anxieties that come from government-sanctioned supermen.

A tie-in series of narrative continuations has a duty to foster a conversation on its own history. That is best achieved when authors have the democratic privilege, the franchise, to advocate their own ideological thesis of what their employer’s brand means and should mean; when they are free to discard the ideas of colleagues with whom they disagree; when they are given sandboxes to themselves, and need not tiptoe around the jealously guarded castles of their predecessors.

14.

I now turn my attention to one particular belief:

“The breadth of a shared, consistent canon makes a world feel immense and real.”

In the preamble to this series, I mentioned Wired Magazine’s article on Leland Chee, the Star Wars Expanded Universe’s continuity man. It is a vivid and entertaining portrait of an occupation that singlehandedly captures the twenty-first century zeitgeist envisioned by the selfsame magazine that canonized Marshall McLuhan as its patron saint.

It is also, at times, a cause for consternation:

Lucasfilm has to plan ahead and think long term. “We don’t reboot. We don’t start from scratch,” Chee says. “When Chewbacca died, he died.” (Poor Chewie yowled his last yowl in 25 ABY, when he was stuck on the planet Sernpidal as it collided with its moon, Dobido, in the novel Vector Prime, the first book in the New Jedi Order series. His death is now canon.)

“The thing about Star Wars is that there’s one universe,” Chee says. “Everyone wants to know stuff, like, where did Mace Windu get that purple lightsaber? We want to establish that there’s one and only one answer.”

This is not strictly true: canonicity is actually quite the tangle. Recalling the meta-genies of Gödel, Escher, Bach, Chee’s official position—corroborated by the historical evidence of change prior to the completion of the films—is that the canon exists in a many-tiered hierarchy (five levels high, at present) in which the core of the franchise is free to conduct its business with abandon, while the books exist in their own contiguous alternate-universe bubble (occasionally inseminating the core with a name, a character, or two), with nondeterministic entities like the video games in an outlying orbit. Whenever the films did something new, the backstory in the tie-in products had to revise itself to fit. It recalls the fanciful parable of the square peg and the round hole.

This is as it should be. As I have alluded to before, my hostility to the Expanded Universe during the production of the prequels was motivated by an insistence that the EU did not in any way constrain the imaginations of the film’s production team (true); that the marginal existence of the EU should not curtail free speculation on things it already claimed to “explain”; and that at any rate, anything beyond the most trivial influence from the EU was undesirable anyhow, as the tie-in books fundamentally promoted a specific ideology of what Star Wars was about that diluted a treasured brand of great dignity, and would prove more detrimental to the saga than midichlorians any day of the week.

All the same, what concerns me is what Chee identifies as the secret to the EU’s success—the desire of many fans to know more, and to have hard, cold answers fed to them on a plate. It serves as an unwelcome reminder of the lust for absolute, authoritative truth that drives the herd not only into the clutches of religious dogma, but also to a misapprehension (and consequently, mistrust) of scientific and rational inquiry as being about “facts” and “proofs”—the very same misapprehension that leads so many to dismiss science as just another religion, or just another instrument of Western hegemony. In collaborative mythopoeia, as in science, the ideal course of development occurs as a series of ever-better refinements and paradigm shifts that discards as often as it adds.

15.

It is healthy to want to know more. It is not healthy to expect and accept an absolute answer when it comes to something as transparently imaginary as fiction: to do so is to consent to the dulling of the critical and interpretive faculties.

As a reader, it would be the height of the intentional fallacy to blindly accept any statement of authority, even an agreeable one, as the final determinant of what to include or exclude when it comes to one’s personal scope of diegetic truth.

Nor is it desirable, even from the pragmatic standpoint of what Lucas Licensing should do to optimize the quality of its tie-in books, that the authors hired by Lucas Licensing are bound to each other’s narrative grotesqueries. With very few exceptions, they share the same overcrowded sandbox, the same beat-up, faded colouring book: there is little room for genuine exploration when so much territory has already been colonized by stories that did so much to reduce the majesty of cinema’s first wholly original heroic cycle to an overexploited puddle of apostrophe-riddled cliché.

There ought to be debate. There ought to be some risks. There ought to be authors who are given some degree of license to defy the tie-in continuity from within. The nine-volume story arcs can still exist and appeal to the same individuals they always have, if there is any room left for them to expand; but they should relinquish their monopolies, their exclusive drilling rights in their patch of the timeline. At the risk of chanting the all-too-familiar motto of capitalism, let quality soar on the wings of competition.

16.

But if it is a collapse of monolithic continuity that I want, why not tread in the even slushier marsh of fan fiction? Perhaps there, I’ll find that defiant, triumphant, high-literary Star Wars novel I insist cannot exist—say, a multigenerational family saga of the Russian disposition that crescendoes to a courtroom finale where Luke and Leia are tried for incest? (“Mr Tam, step away from the Nabokov and place your hands on your head.”)

• Whatever we think of tie-in fiction, it is vetted by publishers. The bar is low because demand is high. But as is the case everywhere else, agents and editors read the sloppier manuscripts so I don’t have to.
• Tie-in books are copyedited, i.e. readable in the most rudimentary, technical sense. By printing them, the publishers promise me this much. By stocking them, the retailers promise me this much.
• I may pose as a staunch advocate of fiction that challenges the conventions of the source text; however, I hear that for reasons completely unbeknownst to me (and honestly, I don’t want to know), the 90% bracket of fanfic writers that Sturgeon’s Law predicts has an unusual hankering to see Harry Potter get it on with all the boys. That is not what I had in mind.
• Fanfic overwhelmingly plays ball with tie-ins like the Expanded Universe. That defeats the whole point.

On principle, the frontier anarchy of fanfic should provide the ideal space for innovation that monolithic canons do not; no doubt fanfic writers have already seized on this observation, and made their fair share of attempts at genuine novelty. Unfortunately, like the vast majority of self-publication, fanfic is a country where the filter is set to off. I am a busy reader, and if I can’t even be bothered with tie-ins, I can safely say that I don’t have the patience to mine fanfic for nuggets of gold.

Is tie-in fiction just glorified fanfic? No, by the simple distinction that it’s not self-published. That is not to say that tie-in writers should feel comfortable in their smug sense of superiority over the unpublished (that means you, Lee Goldberg). Any criticism of fanfic on the basis of originality extends to tie-ins as well; that is why it is easy to perceive them as two sides of the same coin, one legal tender, one not. And in the case of a franchise like Star Wars, I speculate that there is a massive chasm of unfulfilled demand for derived fiction that rejects the established excesses of the EU, uses the films as its launching pad, and bears the stamp of a reputable publisher. As long as that market remains unexplored, that territory is fan fiction’s to keep.

To clarify, I think we can also agree that the whole point of licensing tie-ins in the first place is to capitalize on a core-product canon that it treats as inviolable. In the case of Star Wars, that should be the films, though the majority of fanfic voluntarily accedes to the EU for its shared knowledge base.

Remember: what I am advocating is not the radical disassembly of the core product itself, but the mutual competition between one tie-in writer and another, much like what happens with Bond. I’ll take my canons shaken, not stirred.

The rest of the story

• Part the First
• Part the Second
• Part the Third
• Part the Fifth

I’ve noticed a bit of confusion in the air owing to the fact that cinemas are booking something called Star Wars: The Clone Wars this weekend. Lots of cinemas, actually—3,452 at last count, placing it on the order of a big summer release (and take special note of how I’m not going to call it a “film”). Well, the throngs of uninformed consumers out there are the primary audience at the multiplexes anyway, so you might as well cast a wide net.

The fact is, anyone who pays the least amount of attention to Star Wars (and if you aren’t, why would you watch this release?) is, or should be, fully aware that The Clone Wars is nothing more or less than a television pilot for a spin-off series that follows the footsteps of a long line of spin-off series, though the subject matter probably allows for more lightsabre duels and space battles than Droids or Ewoks did back in the ’80s. This might appeal to the individuals who will swallow anything as soon as you stick a Star Wars label on it—refer to your local bookshop’s “Science Fiction & Fantasy Series” shelf for details—but I’m not fooled for a second. I, for one, am quite aware that the seedy underworld of Star Wars spin-offs has historically produced nothing of value whatsoever, with the notable exceptions of Bioware’s Knights of the Old Republic, Genndy Tartakovsky’s 2D Clone Wars vignettes, and a couple of choice LEGO sets.

I’m not even speaking to the quality of The Clone Wars, since I haven’t seen it: word has it that it’s dreadful, for all that other people’s opinions matter around here. The fact remains that there is no new Star Wars movie opening this weekend. The film series ended three years ago. Some would go so far as to argue that it ended twenty-five years ago, though they would be wrong.

When the dust settles and the inevitably anemic box office tally comes in, let it be a warning to anybody who thinks projecting television-quality material on underbooked screens confers some sort of legitimacy on the product. It doesn’t. Even Disney found this out years ago in the dying throes of the Eisner regime, when they tried to sneak the likes of Return to Never Land and The Jungle Book 2 under our noses. It confuses the market and dilutes the brand.

This is especially criminal where the Star Wars brand is concerned, because since the inception of the franchise, there has been an invisible line between the core product—the six Star Wars films—and the spin-off money farms of the comics, books, and video games. The existence of The Clone Wars is not news. What is news is the gumption of the folks at Warner Bros. (yes, Warner Bros., not 20th Century Fox) to fire the first salvo across the ceasefire line. It makes a mockery of the possibilities of cinema to remain above and beyond what television and direct-to-video have to offer. Then again, that’s standard practise now, isn’t it?

The above title is, apropos, a reference to Charlie Brown’s summer camp bunkmate in an amusing Peanuts story arc published in July 1971 – and if you caught it, dear sir or madam, I salute thee.

So here we proceed to the substance of my return, and unlike the disgraced coverboy of Punch-Out for the Nintendo Entertainment System, there’s no Kevin McBride to stop me. The only thing that may stop me, as I have discovered to both my detriment and yours, is a promise.

You’d think I would have picked up on this by now after almost two years of aperiodically pushing mountains of ideas onto the metaphorical stack and never bothering to pop, but I should never, ever again promise a future post – not to myself, for sure, and especially not to you guys up there in the loft who pay a nickel in time every night to see this two-bit digital cabaret.

Vonnegut’s last novel, to which I often refer in spite of not having opened it in eight years, is (to oversimplify) a book about the author’s inability to write the book. At this very moment, I am operating in that spirit. Yes, I know I promised a modem-breaking photo journal of the eleven-and-a-half hours I spent in my Jedi robes lining up for Revenge of the Sith at South Edmonton Common. To my credit (but acknowledging Watto’s reminder that Republic credits are no good out here), I do have those photographs at the ready. I’m reluctant to post them here at the full resolution, but I’m just amateur enough a photographer that the vast majority of the pictures do not show much of discernible value once shrunk to manageable dimensions. Clearly, I need something more efficacious, perhaps along the lines of the sockless house-elves or typewriter monkeys that run the Jones Collection.

I’ll work around the limitations somehow – maybe just post a few choice shots instead of covering the entire day-long chronology as originally projected – but for the time being, take my word for it that the costumes were awesome.

And that’s the kind of thing that has kept me from writing here lately, but it is not alone in that regard. I came across a number of observations as I started planning a framework for a whole series of dissertations on Episode III, which certainly instigates as many potential controversies as it resolves on the surface.

The first obstacle I recognized was that every time the credits roll (and here I should note that I’ve only seen ROTS a couple of times), I feel that I am not yet ready to tackle the subjects I want to tackle until I see it just one more time; not because I don’t know what I want to say, but because I seek reinforcement, and I’d prefer to test my theories vigorously before unleashing them upon the unsuspecting public.

The second was known to me: with little exception, I loathe discussing Star Wars with laypeople. This is part of why the idea was to do a number of standalone posts that responded and answered to nobody, because the overwhelming majority of people who broach the subject don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. In fact, I think this of most cinema in general, which is why I am more hesitant to discuss film in polite company than politics or religion by several orders of magnitude. Most people don’t know how to watch it. However, some folks are swell and receptive enough to pick it up, and that I don’t mind at all, as we all have to start somewhere. But those landlocked in their own binary reduction of “criticism” into either liking something or destroying it, when it is properly the understanding and inference of a hypothetical literary system at work – those I won’t deal with. And that includes, as a proper subset, a lot of otherwise smart people.

The third obstacle is an extension of the second, and not an intuitive one: with little exception, I loathe discussing Star Wars with other self-proclaimed Star Wars fans. A good chunk of them fall into the category of people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, but think they do. Some of them are too blindly polluted by the licensing project’s inflicted travesties; others have yet to move beyond the elementary misconception of critical thinking I mentioned earlier.

There do exist others still with some measure of intelligence who have not retreated behind the curtain out of frustration, and I respect them. Even if they disagree with me on certain key judgments and interpretations about George Lucas’ six-episode cycle (which happens, as I have a higher opinion of Episodes I and II than most), at least they do it in a reasonable fashion where conclusions follow from premises, and the premises aren’t apocryphal junk. Over the years I’ve managed to pick out a few people from the forum scene who are not categorically idiotic, and it turns out the ideal solution was to go off and discuss the films in and out in a private community by invitation only. Ironically, though, analytical prowess under a common umbrella of knowledge and passion breeds a swift compromise of mutual comprehension, and discussions don’t go for very long before most of the bases are covered and everyone who is late on the game (recently, that would be me) is left nodding in agreement with little to add.

I love writing about Star Wars. I hate writing about Star Wars. And that’s why I haven’t been writing about it, though this may just be an elaborate excuse to avoid building a precarious house of cards that begs to collapse under its own weight before it has even come into existence.

There have been other delaying factors shuffling in and out of play, and while I may discuss them in a subsequent post, I make no promises.

I do believe this is all quite unmanageable. There’s so much to say, it’s hard to know where to begin. But the absence of a clear beginning is what the saga has congealed to become – a complete circle, but one akin to a snake eating its own tail. Episode III is a movie that feeds into both the past and the future.

I don’t remember the last time I saw a movie in the two-hour ballpark that was so dense with content. There is no shortage of things to discuss and debate in the context of both the film itself as a self-contained chapter, and its implications for the saga on the whole. I need to go back and see it again before I can produce any genuinely useful commentary beyond gut reactions of ecstacy – and tragedy. There are scarring images that I would not place far behind the climaxes of Empire and Jedi on the heartbreak scale, and a bittersweet impression left by the final shot – one of the best exeunts I’ve seen in any movie, and one that does not operate on its own terms alone. But I need to return to the cinema and let everything sink in, like every nuance of Palpatine’s sinister elucidations, or the way scenes like a certain pivotal one by a shattered panoramic window resonate with the Classic Trilogy in the truest sense of the word as it pertains to plotwise amplification and feedback.

I’ll pause there before this post spirals out of control and spins away from the metaphorical trench to parts unknown like a certain starfighter we know.

There will shortly be a photo journal of sorts on what opening night was like at South Edmonton Common. Those of you on dial-up connections have been warned.

It all started – the descent into a state of non-posting, that is – with an attempt to give the Garth Jennings film The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, based on the absurdist discontinuity of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Phantom treatment – all the while geeking out about the obscure references to the BBC television series like the cameo by the original Marvin and the appearance of the “Journey of the Sorcerer” theme music with the introduction of the Guide, and singing the infectiously catchy “So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish” to the end of the earth (in about twelve minutes). By the way, AMPAS should realize by now that the Oscar for Original Song had better be kept under lock and key, because we have our first surely-should-win of the year, and I don’t imagine anything topping it. As for the rest of the experience, it was hit and miss, and for reasons that only erratically intersect with concerns for how close it was to Adams’ multiplicity of contradictory universes.

Before I was more than a paragraph into my scene-for-scene rant and roar, which I hoped would balloon into a critique as holistic as Dirk Gently’s detective agency, I had already thrust myself into yet another galaxy-spanning epic comedy of infinite philosophical resonance, only this one was twelve minutes long and sketched by Don Hertzfeldt. And that was only one highlight of many of The Animation Show 2005, which I wish I could spare the time to applaud in writing. Then there was Kung Fu Hustle, Stephen Chow’s over-the-top martial arts fantasy – not as outright funny as Shaolin Soccer, but more ambitious, and successfully so. It is likely to remain the best superhero film to see release this year.

Opening last weekend was Kingdom of Heaven, a refreshingly sober gentle brushing of the dead horse that pretend-epics spent all last year beating, and with another keeper of a Harry Gregson-Williams score beneath it. It’s not as fun as Gladiator and does not have the pulpish charm that will preserve it as well, but stakes out its own position as a very different sort of beast – indeed, a tamer one, and a thinking man’s history.

As far as books go, those into children’s literature should spend these precious remaining pre-Half-Blood Prince days with Eoin Colfer’s fourth Artemis Fowl, The Opal Deception. I’ve always thought the Irish techno-thriller fairytale series was a pleasant diversion, but this one goes well beyond the call of duty and plays off everything that has come before it so thoroughly that should Colfer write a fifth volume, it’s unlikely he could spin a yarn quite as all-encompassing. Deception takes all three of its predecessors and uses every part of the buffalo. I’m still not over what a gut-busting action-packed romp it is, and it makes me wonder why so-called adult sections don’t get escapist spy stories this good. Tom Clancy’s making video games – no, video game sequels, Dan Brown’s off in his own little world publishing prosaic Cliff Notes to Umberto Eco’s obscure waxings on historical secret societies, and here we have a children’s writer from Wexford stomping all over their turf. One can only hope he keeps on stomping.

I do not enjoy capsule-summary judgments that say nothing of value aside from what one recommends seeing or reading and what one decidedly does not. I wish I had time to talk about every last detail of all the blossoms of storytelling springtime I mentioned. But no – there’s just too much.

And beyond that, I haven’t had time to think about them. No, everything is bent towards one upcoming story right now, one chapter in a grander story decades in the making that is finally on the verge of congelation. I think we all know what I’m talking about.

I’ve been going back and seeing all the existing movies over the course of the week, and already I have a laundry list of essays to get through once the last piece of the jigsaw is in place, dissertations I’ve been waiting for the chance to dissert for the better part of the last seven years. I want to talk about modern divergences between philosophical and scientific thinking, particularly with regards to determinism, and discuss them in the context of the collapse of the Jedi Order. I want to return to the age-old question of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s success or failure as a Jedi Knight and infer from it a model of causality that applies to the operation of the Force. I want to whip out my copy of The Hero With A Thousand Faces and see how the Lucasian approximation of Joseph Campbell’s formalization of the monomyth holds up to its specification. I want to evaluate and possibly reinforce my claim that Vader was not in the suit when Luke sets it afire. I want to look away to the future (never my mind on where I am, what I am doing) and close the book on the canonicity debate now that the circle is at last complete. I want to watch the saga I-II-III-IV-V-VI after I complete my current cycle of watching it IV-V-VI-I-II-III (which I will of course repeat for the sake of reliable experimentation) and see how the story unfolds empirically and inductively – then maybe try something unorthodox like IV-I-V-II-III-VI, which would actually make a lot of sense now that I think about it.

There is a very real possibility that for several months, this could undergo a full conversion to being a Star Wars blog. If you can navigate your way through this or this, you should be fine, but otherwise, I make no claims to comprehensibility. You have been warned.

Join me, and together we can rule the cinema as father and son.

But not all is lost. As I did in Calgary at Famous Players Coliseum in 1999 and Cineplex Odeon Sunridge Spectrum in 2002, this year I plan to be at the midnight screening of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith on the night of 18 May at the biggest and best moviehouse within reach. This effectively boils down to two choices, and it is a decision that needs to be made quickly.

SilverCity West Edmonton Mall – The biggest strike against this theatre is that as with all Famous Players screens, tickets do not go on sale until a week before the big show. I watched Episode I under similar conditions at what was then the biggest Famous Players in Calgary, and opening-night tickets drew a three-day line. The risk of not getting tickets is one I am reluctant to take, as that sort of line is just not possible for me this year. However, everything else speaks in its favour – it’s easy to get to (for both the show and the ticket purchase), it’s surrounded by other shops and fast-food establishments to draw your attention while somebody else in your party holds your spot, and if the weather is bad it probably won’t matter, as at least some of the line will trickle indoors. There’s also a certain prestige factor associated with this particular multiplex, one of the biggest box-office leaders on the continent.

South Edmonton Common – As part of the Cineplex Odeon chain, tickets for the opening show here are available right now, so you can see the urgency of this predicament. Given the architecture of the cinema, which is identical to Sunridge Spectrum three hours to the south, the line will almost certainly be outdoors – a good thing, weather permitting, because of the spaciousness in general, the furious lightsabre duels with total strangers and the stunned looks from passersby who just don’t get it. Two problems, though: first, the cinema stands tall in barren pavement in the middle of nowhere, a fair walk from anything to see, do or eat. Second, it’s an incredible pain to get to by public transit from the University area. (Ask me about Sin City sometime.) Now, I’m not so presumptuous as to use my blog to wink at people to offer me rides and stand in line for me at six in the morning so I don’t have to skip a whole day of work, but you get the picture.

Finally, I am aware that both of these theatres will likely offer four or five post-midnight screenings at once, including shows labeled for 12:02am, 12:05am, et cetera. These are unacceptable. Traditionally, We of the First Line have looked upon Those of the Second Line with earned derision, and had the battle scars inflicted from the scramble for midnight-show tickets to justify it. It may not be a very practical distinction, but I value my pride, thank you very much.

So – and here’s where you, my readership, enters the fray – what works for you guys? I’d love to see you at the ritual – er, I mean, movie.

Here’s a predictive reference for those of you who have never done this before. For a city like Edmonton, here’s what I predict: the first party in line for the midnight show will arrive either the night of the 17th or by 6am the next morning – perhaps before that if they were already in line for tickets a week before, but they won’t be significantly joined. You can expect thirty to fifty people by noon, which will balloon threefold as most of them are holding spots for others. Arriving at 6pm will put you at about the hundredth spot, which may double by the time you are let in to grab your seats, typically between 7pm and 8pm. (For a party of greater than two to four, don’t expect decent seats if you don’t have a representative firmly in line hours before then.) Arriving after 10pm, less than two hours in advance, is not recommended – that’s when gaps fill in and the ushers start scrunching people together, and saving seats is damn near impossible.

So, any recommendations?

Everything of note happened today, when I watched Ray, the first trailer for John Lasseter’s Cars, the Oscar-nominated short Boundin’, and The Incredibles. You’ll notice that the trailer for Revenge of the Sith is missing from the list, despite guarantees that it would show in front of Pixar’s latest. Well, Canada and the Famous Players chain are funny that way, in that these guarantees don’t necessarily apply. But I caught the trailer at one of the links listed here, and I’m stoked.

This is the most I have seen or heard of the final episode of the Star Wars saga, given that I’ve been living in a spoiler-free bubble since Attack of the Clones – minus this trailer, of course. The first thirty seconds or so splice footage from both Star Wars (A New Hope, that is) and Clones in a surprisingly cohesive way, before going into brief and somewhat complete-looking glimpses at the work in Episode III. As for the rest of it…

A space battle over Coruscant (and damn, do the Prequels need one)? Wookiees galore as was originally going to be the case in Return of the Jedi until they were replaced by Ewoks? The Emperor with a lightsabre? The legendary duel over the molten pit on some unknown blood-red planetoid of fire (another concept from an early draft of Jedi)? Throw in the Vader suit, Obi-Wan’s hair and design elements that hearken back to the starship interiors and exteriors in Episode IV, and it looks very much like Revenge will deliver the aesthetic bridge between the two eras.

Of course, it’s up to the script. There’s a whole gaggle of plot threads left to be resolved here and tied into a neat little knot. No sign of Count Dooku in the trailer, you’ll notice, although Christopher Lee is still playing a major enough role in the movie for his name to earn a high placement in the credits. I also remain sceptical about whether it makes all that much sense to give the Emperor a red lightsabre of his own – it always struck me that one of the defining traits of the mastermind character is that his final resort to physical violence in Return of the Jedi is his downfall – but if they could make dueling work with Yoda, they can make it work with him.

I have too much to say about The Incredibles for this post. Rest assured, if they don’t give it the Best Animated Film Oscar this year (specifically, if it goes to the likes of the enjoyable but overrated Shrek 2), it will be the wrong decision – unless The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie or The Polar Express are good, real good, life-changingly good. Please drop what you are doing and see The Incredibles. You won’t regret it.

I only mention Star Wars books because out of the few I own, there exists one that I consider to be an indispensable reference: Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays, edited by leading Star Wars documentarian Laurent Bouzereau. The 336-page 1997 paperback coincided with the release of the Special Editions, and is a transcription of the entire text of the Classic Trilogy. Interspersed throughout are interviews with the likes of George Lucas, Irvin Kershner, Lawrence Kasdan and Ralph McQuarrie on all manners of things concerning how the films came together. It is not a shooting script complete with, nor is it a draft that represents the dialogue at a developmental stage; rather, the volume is the “quick and easy path” to scooping up valuable quotations without having to waltz over the VCR.

The interviews themselves are indispensible, perhaps even moreso because they offer a 1997 perspective; there are references to the story meetings while drafting Return of the Jedi that established Uncle Owen as Ben Kenobi’s brother, something that Attack of the Clones threw out the window. Should a debate ever degenerate into what New Criticism calls the intentional fallacy, this book was a genuinely authoritative resource amidst a cesspool of “authoritative” printed-page backgrounders like cross-sectional schematics of Imperial Star Destroyers born of a licensee’s fancy.

The Annotated Screenplays also features insets providing the alternate scenes written and edited into the Special Editions, some of which are a source of debate themselves. Here I speak not of Greedo shooting first, but a subtlety not on the screen but on the page, at the end of Jedi (Bouzereau, 318):

1983 Edition

“Luke sets a torch to the logs stacked under the funeral pyre where his father’s body lies, again dressed in the black mask and helmet. He stands, watching sadly, as the flames leap higher to consume Darth Vader – Anakin Skywalker.”

Special Edition

“Luke sets a torch to the logs stacked under a funeral pyre where his father’s armor lies; black mask, helmet, and cape. He stands watching sadly as the flames leap higher to consume what’s left of Vader.”

It’s the same scene and the same shot, only the original one cuts to the “Yub-Yub” celebration on Endor, while the Special Edition segues to a grand tour of the Galaxy Far, Far Away. So why the change in wording to emphasize that it is not Vader’s body on the pyre, but an empty suit?

See, one of the mysteries that has pervaded the saga since Obi-Wan Kenobi vanished at the end of the lightsabre duel in A New Hope – and one that remains largely unsolved even as Revenge of the Sith draws ever closer – is why, and under what circumstances, Jedi disappear only to reemerge as glowing spirits. The corollary of that mystery is an inquiry into whether or not the dead and thoroughly pasty Anakin Skywalker was still in the Vader suit as the flames of its combustion lit the Endor night sky.

The answer, as Schrodinger would no doubt propose, is that we have no way of knowing without removing the mask. But if we were to speak of author’s intent, George Lucas – retroactively or not – seems to have decided on the route that symbolically, makes a whole lot more sense. In burning the Vader suit, Luke destroys the last corporeal remnants of the machinery that consumed, yet sustained the living flesh of Anakin Skywalker, much as the Dark Side of the Force consumed his soul and identity. If Anakin Skywalker vanished upon death, it would mean that he at last found peace through his unity and “oneness” with the Force after a life of slavery. Throughout his life, he was never trapped by his body, but bound by external chains; hence, it is the suit that is destroyed. If we are to think that Luke burns it with his father inside, this closure is lost.

And that’s setting aside how Anakin manages to appear in the form of a ghost with the likeness of Sebastian Shaw – which brings me to the real subject of this post, which is the new 2004 DVD Edition of the Star Wars Trilogy.

As everybody is no doubt aware by now, Sebastian Shaw no longer plays the restored Anakin Skywalker. In his place is Hayden Christensen.

Not everybody is happy about what is, if not the biggest change in the DVD set, firmly in the top two. But when it comes down to it, all value judgments one way or another are best tackled if distilled into three separate questions. These are: a) Does George Lucas, as the artist, have the right to retroactively change his work? b) Do we, as the audience, have the right to commercially access the original editions in digital form? and 3) What impact, for good or ill, do the tweaks in the DVD versions have on the story itself?

Most of the controversy and outrage is squarely directed on the first two axes, and the third is referred to for peripheral justification at best. I am no fan of those fans. With that said, let’s take the entire issue out of the context of creative ownership and look it in the eye for once.

In Return of the Jedi, does the apparition of a young Anakin Skywalker make sense? As someone who actively avoids unsanctioned information on how things blow over in Revenge of the Sith and has yet to sit through the audio commentaries on the Classic Trilogy discs, any answer I could provide here would be on incomplete information. Setting all nostalgia aside, though, we should ask ourselves: did an old Anakin Skywalker ever make very much sense?

The answer depends on what we construe to be the nature of the Force, and the act of achieving spiritual purity with it. An old Anakin Skywalker implies that the ghosts appear to Luke alone, in a form determined by his own interpretation and judgment; that is, Luke sees Sebastian Shaw because having seen that pale face aboard the Death Star, the young Skywalker mentally reconstructs the rest of his father clothed in Jedi robes and with a head full of hair.

Then the question becomes, how do Yoda and Obi-Wan recognize the older Skywalker? Sure, like the audience, they can extrapolate who this guy is despite never having seen him before. Or more sensibly, perhaps the visage of a Jedi apparition is determined by the conscious self-image of that deceased Jedi, and not the eye of the beholder.

If we are to believe the latter, then Anakin appearing in the form of Hayden Christensen makes a whole lot more sense. Remember, his body ages and decays in the Vader suit. Why would Anakin’s perception of his former identity be an extrapolation of what he would look like at that age in a hypothetical progression where he never became Darth Vader? Why would it not be constructed from his memory of himself instead, which is firmly set in the days of his youth?

Let us not forget the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi: “He ceased to be Anakin Skywalker and became Darth Vader. When that happened, the good man who was your father was destroyed.” For all intents and purposes, Anakin dies when he suits up in the armor, helmet and cape. In Return of the Jedi, he is reborn through his redemption. So would it make sense for that rebirth to proceed from the last true preservation of his identity? Preliminary signs indicate yes.

I have been told that Lucas says as much when discussing the change in the commentary track of the Jedi DVD, but like I said earlier, I have yet to check.

Somewhat curiouser and curiouser is the big change in The Empire Strikes Back – the modification of the scene where Vader bows before a hologram transmission of the Emperor. For the sake of continuity, the face and voice of the Emperor have now been replaced by those of Ian McDiarmid, who plays the ruler of the Empire in Return of the Jedi and his younger self in the Prequels. This is not the shocking part. The shocking part is the addition of some new dialogue in the mix.

1980/1997 Editions

EMPEROR: We have a new enemy – Luke Skywalker.

VADER: Yes, my master.

EMPEROR: He could destroy us.

2004 Edition

EMPEROR: We have a new enemy – the young rebel who destroyed the Death Star. I have no doubt this boy is the offspring of Anakin Skywalker.

VADER: How is that possible?

EMPEROR: Search your feelings, Lord Vader. You will know it to be true. He could destroy us.

This poses more questions than it answers, and one must wonder if it is a setup for something that will be revealed in Revenge of the Sith, like the minor change in Return of the Jedi where Sebastian Shaw’s eyebrows have been erased.

Prior to this, the implication has always been that Vader discovers Luke’s identity between Episodes IV and V – hence the line in Empire‘s opening crawl: “The evil lord Darth Vader, obsessed with finding young Skywalker, has dispatched thousands of remote probes into the far reaches of space….” Mind you, this was never conclusive. We know that by the time Empire opens, Vader is aware that the Force is strong with this one kid who is suddenly with the Rebels, and was somehow under the protection of Obi-Wan Kenobi. His imperative for searching for the young Skywalker could conceivably be, at that stage, part of his search for this disturbance in the Force that has turned the tables in the Rebel Alliance’s favour.

But how common is the name Skywalker, anyway? Aside from Brock Skywalker of Alberta’s finest folk-rock band, Captain Tractor, there are only so many out there – and certainly any of them would have raised some suspicions about the boy. One is tempted to remark that perhaps the good side, the remnants of Anakin Skywalker buried deep beneath the armor and behind the mask, were so most sincerely dead by that point that there was no recognition here. But that would be patently false, as Vader clearly has some memory of his former self. Take this iconic line prior to his duel with Obi-Wan, for instance: “The circle is now complete. When I left you, I was but the learner. Now I am the master.”

The best explanation, and one that I can hardly take credit for given how it has been deduced by many in the week since the DVD release, is that Vader most certainly had his own plans for Luke once he was found. We already knew as much from the “I am your father” scene on the Cloud City propeller, when Vader suggests to Luke that together they can overthrow the Emperor and “rule the galaxy as father and son.” After all, one of the tenets of how the symbiotic power struggle works within the order of Sith Lords, as the Prequels continually impress on us, is that “always two there are; no more, no less” – implicitly because both master and apprentice have the motivation to seek out a new recruit in order to pass down the ideals of the Dark Side. In this game-theoretical construct where the apprentice depends on his master, but has a desire to break free of that enslavement and become a master himself, is at the core of how a Dark Lord of the Sith operates and thinks. The “circle is now complete” line mentioned above corroborates this in a perhaps unintended, but entirely consistent fashion.

So here we sit, baffled by this line: “How is that possible?” And the answer may be that Vader is not referring so much to the fact that Luke is the son of Anakin Skywalker, so much as a double entendre playing on how his plans have been threatened by how the Emperor was now on the case. Playing dumb in this matter is a display of complicity that allows his master to continue dwelling in his bubble of arrogance and illusion of complete control. (As Luke points out in Return of the Jedi, the Emperor’s overconfidence is his weakness. Indeed, it turns out to be his undoing, and one that parallels the arrogance that initially blinded the Jedi Order to his nefarious plans in the Prequel era.)

Recall how in the hologram scene, it is Vader who suggests that Luke not be destroyed, but turned. Here we already see that for some reason or another, Vader does not want Luke dead. It would be overly presumptuous to interpret this as a conscious act of charity; rather, the display of that unconscious concern is the first indication that there is a way to get to the Skywalker within, which turns out to be the bond between father and son. As far as we can tell at this point, the additional dialogue reinforces the theory just described.

So in the context of the story, does the change make sense? Possibly. At this stage, it requires one to be a critical observer and not merely a consumer of what is fed by way of bendable concave cutlery. But it should be well known by now that if you are not willing to read deep into Star Wars, this is not the blog for you.

There are few other changes in the DVDs that have a direct impact on the story; most are much-needed cosmetic improvements on the 1997 Special Editions. The new look of the Jabba the Hutt scene in Docking Bay 94 buries its predecessor. The Wilhelm added to Luke’s tumble down the Cloud City ventilation shaft in 1997 has been removed. Greedo still shoots first, but only sort of. Boba Fett’s two lines in The Empire Strikes Back have been dubbed over with the voice of Temeura Morrison, who plays Jango Fett in Attack of the Clones, and deserves some recognition because Maori accents are an objectively good thing.

I was rather surprised to see the Theed Palace in Naboo, down the same street as the celebration at the end of The Phantom Menace, was inserted into the “grand tour of the galaxy” montage at the end of Return of the Jedi. See, its intact appearance debunks a theory I once fancied – that in Episode III, the Empire would pillage it to little bitsies. I guess it survives the Prequels after all.

The best way to sum up the DVD editions of the Star Wars Trilogy is to dub it with the moniker, “the Consistent With the Prequels Edition.” Or the “Sequel Edition,” as the case may be. Naboo, Boba’s voice, Hayden Christensen – a lot of these are geared towards viewers who have the foreknowledge posed by the Prequel Trilogy. Now, due to how The Phantom Menace came together, this does not automatically make the saga watchable for the first time in the I-to-VI order. It does make that order tremendously watchable on a second pass, but that is because the saga has become cyclical. It is in Episode IV, the original Star Wars (or A New Hope) that we have a concise explanation of the story’s internal universe – who are the Jedi, what is the Force. The rest of the Classic Trilogy follows a dramatic thread of unveiling. The narrative drive of the Prequels, on the other hand, lies entirely in dramatic irony, and is predicated on the assumption that the audience knows what is going to happen. But now we have a Classic Trilogy that has retroactively looped itself back into the cosmogonic cycle, like a snake eating its own tail.

It’s a new way of looking at things, isn’t it?

And that brings me back to where this post began: Laurent Bouzereau. Until the release of the Star Wars Trilogy on DVD format, with its PC compatability and chapter selection and all that jazz, the best way to make quick reference to a specific scene was through The Annotated Screenplays. But now, Bouzereau’s book is even more archival than it was before, as it refers to not only the originals, but an intermediary as well.

With the new perspectives offered by the prequels and the release of yet another edit of the Classic Trilogy on DVD, we need a new Bouzereau. With any luck, we will have a whole new set of annotated screenplays in six parts after Episode III has come and gone. The presence of audio commentaries on the DVDs of all five released instalments serve a similar purpose, but I would love to see interviews with the Star Wars team that take the entire saga into account ex post facto.

Until then, may the Force be with us.