(no subject)

[calimac]

John 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 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.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

There's a misleading point in the previous, because I misremembered how I phrased myself earlier. (A hazard of the software of LJ posting is that if you come to Reply directly from e-mail you can't read the earlier posts.)

This refers to "correcting for the fact that music is live performances." It's not possible to write a review that way. But it is possible to have a theoretical discussion of the difference between professionals and amateurs and bring in performing as well as non-performing arts to make the comparison.

What actually happens in real life that's different in performing arts is that one makes allowances for mistakes in the performing arts. I made another comment pointing to a post in which I discussed this very fact. But there is nevertheless a huge difference between a professional making a glitch and an amateur who doesn't achieve professional standards in the first place. I could play you some recordings and describe the difference. It's not hard for those who know music to hear, and I know people who can hear it more clearly than I can.