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Oct. 12th, 2006 09:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacJohn Scalzi eats Star Wars alive for breakfast.
Upon reading his screed, I realized that I've been waiting nearly thirty years for someone to say this. (I've seen other criticisms. They were not so much to the point.)
The fact is I've never really understood the enthusiasm for Star Wars. I wasn't even planning to see the original film, way back when. The descriptions made it sound like the biggest, flashiest, most elaborate space opera of all time, and my SF tastes had never run towards space opera, so I was intending to ignore it.
Just before the premiere, a feature article in Time, or one of them, gave a different perspective, saying it wasn't a serious film but a fun romp. This turned out to be a bit misleading, but it was enough to convince me to join![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sturgeonslawyer and another college friend who actually had a car, on an expedition down to the big theatre, the one where I'd seen 2001 and would, years later, see Jackson's Lord of the Rings films.
And we went in and we saw it and we came out and someone asked, "What did you think?", and I said "Not bad."
This has remained my settled opinion. In a world ofcalimacs, mentioning Star Wars today would generate a briefly wrinkled brow and the reply, "Star Wars? Oh yeah, I remember that. Wasn't bad."
The sequel wasn't bad either, though I didn't believe the Big Revelation at the end for a minute, and the third film had that villain with the terrible makeup job and those obnoxiously cute critters, and after a long break the fourth one was the most tedious film I'd ever seen, telling of a futile, pointless expedition to the Planet of the Bureaucrats and back again, with a pit stop at the Planet of the Boring Auto Races.
After that I refused to see any more.
But wait. Scalzi says that Lucas's problem lies in his attempt to create a mythology. Didn't Tolkien also create a mythology? Why isn't he just as bad, or is he?
The first answer has to be that there's no idea inherently so bad, or so good, that a sufficiently good or bad author can't make it otherwise. The second answer is that conscientious Tolkien scholars refer to his creation as his legendarium rather than his mythology. His purposes were different. Despite the presence of a creation myth, God, angels, legendarily-mighty heroes, and teleology, Tolkien wasn't creating a watered-down religion. Lucas puts his stories at the service of his thesis; Tolkien's best work keeps the mythological aspect as scenic background, and lets the stories get on with being the stories.
Upon reading his screed, I realized that I've been waiting nearly thirty years for someone to say this. (I've seen other criticisms. They were not so much to the point.)
The fact is I've never really understood the enthusiasm for Star Wars. I wasn't even planning to see the original film, way back when. The descriptions made it sound like the biggest, flashiest, most elaborate space opera of all time, and my SF tastes had never run towards space opera, so I was intending to ignore it.
Just before the premiere, a feature article in Time, or one of them, gave a different perspective, saying it wasn't a serious film but a fun romp. This turned out to be a bit misleading, but it was enough to convince me to join
sturgeonslawyer and another college friend who actually had a car, on an expedition down to the big theatre, the one where I'd seen 2001 and would, years later, see Jackson's Lord of the Rings films.And we went in and we saw it and we came out and someone asked, "What did you think?", and I said "Not bad."
This has remained my settled opinion. In a world of
calimacs, mentioning Star Wars today would generate a briefly wrinkled brow and the reply, "Star Wars? Oh yeah, I remember that. Wasn't bad."The sequel wasn't bad either, though I didn't believe the Big Revelation at the end for a minute, and the third film had that villain with the terrible makeup job and those obnoxiously cute critters, and after a long break the fourth one was the most tedious film I'd ever seen, telling of a futile, pointless expedition to the Planet of the Bureaucrats and back again, with a pit stop at the Planet of the Boring Auto Races.
After that I refused to see any more.
But wait. Scalzi says that Lucas's problem lies in his attempt to create a mythology. Didn't Tolkien also create a mythology? Why isn't he just as bad, or is he?
The first answer has to be that there's no idea inherently so bad, or so good, that a sufficiently good or bad author can't make it otherwise. The second answer is that conscientious Tolkien scholars refer to his creation as his legendarium rather than his mythology. His purposes were different. Despite the presence of a creation myth, God, angels, legendarily-mighty heroes, and teleology, Tolkien wasn't creating a watered-down religion. Lucas puts his stories at the service of his thesis; Tolkien's best work keeps the mythological aspect as scenic background, and lets the stories get on with being the stories.
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Date: 2006-11-28 05:02 am (UTC)Most generally, you misread my self-certainty. I've given some thought to these matters, I think I'm right, I can cite other people who've also given thought to these matters and agree with me. I may be wrong, but until I change my mind or am proved wrong I will continue to have faith in my thought processes, because a person cannot think about anything or reach any conclusions about anything at all if he does not have such faith.
There are many matters about which my conclusions are much more tentative. These are matters about which I've thought less, know less, or simply have reached no conclusion. But you won't read me saying much about these things because, by that very token, I have less to say. If I choose to make an LJ post about such things, it will usually be to ask a question or to present very tentative findings to gather others' ideas. See my recent post on pop music, for instance. It's in a quite different tone from my post about Star Wars. I've been thinking, if not constantly, about Star Wars and what makes mythic fiction and why bad movies are bad for thirty years, and I have definite ideas, and I'm going to present them in definite statements.
I'm not trying to correct for the fact that performances are live. You're right, one can't do that in judging an individual performance. I'm trying to make a general analogy using musical performance as the analogized part. For something on that level of generalization, the comparison is valid.
I can see how erroneous ideas lead to erroneous conclusions. What I don't see is how they compound themselves.
Re Campbell: on the contrary, what I would consider pretty breezy would be to assume that, because he is great on his home ground, that he must continue to be great when he leaves it and says something patently ridiculous.
No. Neither crappy fanfic writers, nor good writers with day jobs or independent incomes, are compelled to turn out anything, not in the sense that professional writers are. Professional writers have to write whether they feel like it or not. Sometimes they don't, or don't feel like writing what they're financially compelled to write (e.g. novels instead of short stories), and sometimes the fiction suffers. Fanfic writers who write endless reams, crappy or otherwise, write it because they want to. Good writers with day jobs etc. also write because they want to. Many of them spend a lot of time on it, but they produce less copy, because they don't have to. They therefore have more time to spend on making it good. Whether they succeed depends on talent, an independent factor apart from the minimum required to become a professionally published author at all.