I am not a geek. I’m also not a nerd. Any evidence you can find against that in my ridiculous number of reviews on RYM was planted there by the Manitowoc County police. I am innocent.
If I’ve seen The Empire Strikes Back 52,000 times, that’s just a fact of growing up in the 80s, when we didn’t have the internet yet, but we did have VCRs. Otherwise, I don’t get into debates about who would win in a fight between Darth Vader and Wolverine. I don’t come up with fan theories. I don’t read fan theories. I don’t know the names of any minor characters in the saga UNLESS I owned an action figure of them in 1984. I don’t come up with high-horse opinions based on trailers and behind-the-scenes photos of the new stuff. I’m not mad at George Lucas for monkeying around with the movie twenty years later (as long as he doesn’t lay a hand on my ancient Reagan-era VHS copies, which is my sentimental favorite format for these flicks, we’re cool). No Star Wars movie (or any other movie) has ever ruined my life. I’m not a virgin. And I’m not 100 lbs. overweight.
Yes, I’ve got a nostalgic streak. I admit it. Sometimes though, I think that my nostalgia is mostly for that kid’s sensibility—or at least MY sensibility, back in ’84, playing with those action figures—where everything is either cool or it sucks. That’s it. We didn’t look to movies for politics and only took them seriously until we grew up, got hurt a little, saw things we never wanted to see and felt things that we never wanted to feel, but still came out alive—and characters in Star Wars movies no longer had anything to say to us. All they were there for anymore was the good time.
I like the old Star Wars movies because they still bring that good time. To 80s-damaged motherfuckers like myself, at least. It’s our pulp fiction. It’s our Shadow, our Doc Savage, our Flash Gordon. Some of the great freaky science fiction writers of the 1960s and 70s, such as Philip Jose Farmer and Harlan Ellison, wrestled with their pulp fiction heroes of old in their new forward-thinking, scandalous fiction. They cut their fictional heroes wide open with a fresh scalpel, but when they got to the heart, they couldn’t pierce it. They couldn’t kill it. Their own love for the characters got in the way. Their final reaction was to celebrate the old icons, add new dimensions, make them weirder (sometimes with the proper legal copyrights in place, sometimes not). They loved. And they betrayed, as lovers sometimes do. Nevertheless, the fire remained lit.
Anyway, a lot of people consider The Empire Strikes Back to be the masterpiece of the old trilogy, I guess, because it’s the darkest. Even its cutest character isn’t so cute (I’m talkin’ about Yoda) and it has the luxury of setting up a cliffhanger without having to follow it up. It hangs in the sweet spot of a saga, which is square in the middle, after the beginning has set you up and before the ending has let you down. Also, who wouldn’t want to witness the awesome spectacle of Imperial AT-AT walkers coming at you on a brutal snow planet, fly out of the mouth of a carnivorous space monster and drink Colt 45s with Billy Dee Williams on a city in the clouds?
Sign me up. Even if we lose in the end, we’re gonna win eventually. In the next chapter.