Cultural Touchstones

During the middle of May, 2005, George Lucas released possibly the last Star Wars film he is likely to make. Even if he hopes life after Star Wars will allow him to make films like life before Star Wars, he may not succeed. In the summer of 1977, Star Wars came out. Although widely seen as the first mega-blockbuster, you can't forget Jaws, Spielberg's big time debut in 1975 (yeah, he did Sugarland Express and the TV film, Duel, but does anyone but Spielberg fans remember them).

Despite wide acclaim for Star Wars and the return to Saturday matinee films of the 40s, not everyone embraced what Star Wars became. There are those who criticize Star Wars for ruining what was considered a great time in American independent filmmaking. During the late 60s and early 70s, films like Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown, The Conversation, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, the first two Godfather movies and Apocalypse Now reflected the uneasy sentiments of an era going through war, and grappling with peace and resistance. This was the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era, the downfall of Nixon. The violence of the civil rights movement. The birth of the gay rights movement.

Star Wars was to the 70s what It's a Wonderful Life was to the 40s, a curiously optimistic fairy-tale that believed in the goodness of people. Star Wars is less science fiction than it is space opera. It doesn't wrestle with the big theological or philosophical issues of man, as did, say, 2001.

The return of the first trilogy of Star Wars meant that kids who grew up in the 70s, who remember the innocent joy they had, as they pretended they were Obi Wan fighting Darth Vader with lightsabers, or piloted X-wings through the trenches of the Death Star, or used the force to fight blindfolded against pesky seekers. In one film, Lucas brought together a memorable bad guy, cool dogfights, a pseudo-religion, and even cooler light saber, and two loveable robots, to boot.

Episode 1, in particular, allowed those kids, now dads of their own, to share their experience with their sons, to have them know what Star Wars was like when they were a kid. That seems like such great fun, no? Yet, when I was growing up in the 70s, I don't know if there was any film like that which my dad could have taken me to, and that's even allowing for the fact that my dad wasn't in this country during the 50s.

Episode 3 just came out, and of course, newsmagazines want to ride the popularity of any Star Wars film, so Darth Vader's famous cowl graced the cover of Time on May 9, 2005. Articles talked about the Star Wars phenomenon, and the new characters showing up in the last installment. However, of all the articles, it's the essay by John Cloud that's most personal.

He returns us to that place a long time ago, in a place, far, far away, which was the summer of 76. As a teen who was on the move, he kept having to make new friends. He also discovered that he liked boys more than he liked girls. One way he learned to survive during this time was to imagine himself not as Luke Skywalker, farm boy turned Jedi knight (OK, that didn't really occur until ROTJ, but indulge me), but as ruffian, Han Solo. His wisecracking ways and general coolness gave him a role model for life. He memorized Han's lines.

This space fantasy got him through a difficult time. When Return of the Jedi concluded, he turned his interest to the Star Trek franchise from the Next Generation to Enterprise. Enterprise was just about to wrap up its last show, and for the first time since STTNG came out, no new Star Trek episodes were going to be on the air. And with Episode 3 also being released, the last of the Star Wars films was also almost concluded.

And while Cloud said he would miss these movies and what they meant to him, he was also at a point in his life, with his sci-fi hating boyfriend, that he no longer needed these films. He could get on with life just fine.

I suspect stories like Cloud were not unusual, and that when we look back on the effect of Star Wars on a generation of kids who grew up in the heyday of disco and the rise and fall of Carter, that many a person can claim an influence as profound to them as it was on John Cloud.