May the Fourth Miscellany

The panelists ranged over the Hero’s Journey (see handout, doubling for fanning myself with) and archetypes, three act structure and ring structure, screenwriting tropes and characterization and rhetoric and deconstruction and design principles and historical context, and several times I got up to visit the snack board and gulp water, for it was the warmest day of the year, and I’d been out in the sun at the farm fair all afternoon besides, putting up a happy front for the kids though I felt like a bit of a hypocrite,--but where it all ended up, between fielding intricately thought-out questions and the nerdy tidbits de rigeur on lightsaber colors and whether Han shot first--this went completely over Steph’s and my head--and with deft facilitation moving through such a madcap congeries of topics while providing for the insecurities of the personalities, who had dedicated such care and thought to these problems and analyses, being laid bare and brushing up against one another now awkwardly, now meanly, so that I lost heart and never asked my own question about the Force and freedom, as the requisite points were made about good and evil portrayed as black and white at first in episodes 4-6, then in the prologues giving us an anti-hero balanced by despicable pandering slapstick, and now with the sequels gritty grayscale, which to me missed the whole point: that this is a mythic story, told in images as Tolkien’s is in words, and that the choices of the heroes do matter more than the banality of evil or innocence of the Empire’s citizens or the Rebels’ complex justifications--where we ended up was that aside from all this stuff, the movies are just so fun--awesome--playable and replayable, not as Catholic-serious as Tolkien’s myth but presumably laughing Buddhist--but so on a note of nostalgia for earliest distinct aesthetic experiences, loving reminiscences of watching at a theater or drive-through or in a basement on a VCR so many times the tape broke, that this is as important as and inseparable from the way the films resonate with myth and cultural desire and wish-fulfillment...So what kind of argument is that? Was the question, why is this good storytelling, or what does this teach us about storytelling, remotely addressed, much less answered, or did I just come away with a summary of some bibliographies for unwritten books? As if I of all people needed such a thing, what! The irony! It left me wishing there had been a true, open seminar or a frank lecture series rather than this mishmash panel discussion, with us little Leia- and Luke-slaves and the mighty totemic Jabbas raised on their stage dais, with that off-putting if interesting drama of their egos, angsts, and over-compensation, particularly that of the rhetorician-philosopher, being played out up before us. Still, edifying all around, to one permitted to listen feeling smug and superior in the front row, to glean psychological insights, unintentional-turned-intentional, over and above the billing, besides the intriguing nuggets that Thom Caraway teaches a Tolkien course at Whitworth; that the prologue and the whole saga might be narrated by R2; and that in the main divergence from formulae--that the ordinary world is the special world, that home is already or soon to be destroyed--however conscious or slavish his writing and work may be in other respects, Lucas has given us something wonderful, original, profoundly true--and so much damn fun.