Star Wars: Nothing but Star Wars

Over the past ten days, I have rewatched every Star Wars film in anticipation of the release of Episode IX: The Last Star War Until the Next One. I have written one mini-essay per film (which was also one mini-essay per day). They’re going to seem a bit negative at first, but I’m starting with Episode I, so that’s inevitable. Stick with me.

Episode I: The Phantom Menace (32 BBY[1])

A Google Books Ngrams search reveals that usage of the word “problematic” spiked dramatically at the end of the twentieth century. Coincidentally, The Phantom Menace was released in 1999.

The lightsaber fights are still very fun to watch.

Episode II: Attack of the Clones (22 BBY)

Yoda and Yaddle have more sexual chemistry than Hayden Christiansen and Natalie Portman. “I don’t like sand” is, of course, the infamous moment, but two things really jumped out at me in this viewing.

First, there is the scene where Padme talks about a boy she dated way back when she attended the “Legislative Youth Academy.” I’m no science fiction expert, but it seems to me that if you want to engross your audience in a legendary galaxy of heroism and intrigue, you don’t have your romantic leads tell stories about this one time at band camp.

Second, Anakin’s horniness from jump street is really something to behold in this movie. Very early in the film, during an elevator ride where he tells Obi-Wan how excited he is to see Padme for the first time in a decade, Anakin is what my students five years ago would have called “thirsty af.” He knew Padme when he was like eight. That’s way too long to have a crush on your babysitter.

Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (19 BBY)

It’s fun to dunk all over the prequels. Indeed, you might have noticed me doing so for the previous 200 or so words. But one thing that I’ve always genuinely admired is Ewan McGregor’s speech at the end of Obi-Wan’s climactic duel with Anakin/Vader. I find it as moving as anything in Star Wars outside of the original trilogy. That McGregor is the best part of the prequels has frequently been stated, and it’s true. Most of that is just down to the fact that he’s the only actor who seems to be having any fun at all, but he also deserves credit for the work he does when he’s given a scene with more emotional weight. Given how much everyone makes fun of everything from these movies, you would think that lines as self-serious as “You were my brother...I loved you!” or “My allegiance is to the Republic...to democracy!” would catch a lot of hell. But McGregor sells it. God love him, he even does as much as he can with “I have the high ground.”

Solo: A Star Wars Story (10 BBY)

I honestly don’t get the hate for this movie. Yes, some of the jokes are corny, and no, Adrian Ehrenreich is not as charismatic as Harrison Ford. But on the other hand, Donald Glover is  as charismatic as Billy Dee Williams, there’s a bunch of fun spaceship stuff, Lando has a whole room for capes, the droid rebellion takes the idea of sentient willful servant robots to a logical if hyperbolic conclusion, there’s an ass-kicking femme who proves quite fatale, Woody Harrelson plays himself, and Chewbacca fucks up a lot of people. I recall reviews proclaiming variations of, “why do we need a story that just fills in a bunch of background?” Well, by that logic, why did we need Paradise Lost or The Godfather: Part Two? If you claim to like Star Wars  but didn’t have some fun with this silly little low-stakes summer-release ramble through the back alleys and dive bars of the outer rim, consider the possibility that the problem is you.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (0 BBY)

I’ve watched this movie a couple more times since I saw it in the theater, and it’s only strengthened my opinion that this is the third-best Star Wars movie. Felicity Jones is effortless in conveying the “tough but vulnerable” thing that’s been at the heart of a lot of the best performances in these movies, going all the way back to Ford and Carrie Fisher. The story starts a bit slow, but once the big heist starts, the film really cooks all the way through the third act, and the tension is heightened by the fact that, unlike in other Star Wars films, the characters are entirely bereft of plot armor. Indeed, it’s pretty impressive that Rogue One is as tense as it is given that we know the mission to steal the Death Star plans has to be successful.

There is one particular frame of this film that really sticks with me: the Death Star rising like a moon over the horizon of Scarif. It’s breathtaking, uncanny, and frightening all at once. Hollywood action blockbusters often strive toward and almost always cheapen the Burkean sublime, and the Star Wars franchise in particular has been guilty of this. But this one image is simultaneously beautiful and eerie, and the effect is achieved simply because someone thought to ask, “what would a Death Star-rise look like if you were a lowly little human standing on a planetary surface?” It’s that terrestrial vantage point that lets the image embody what the entire movie is about. Luke Skywalker will soon get to zip triumphantly towards a well-lit Death Star in the cockpit of a souped-up starfighter, but the Rogue One characters are relatively ordinary people who will only ever see this superweapon half-obscured in the sky, awesomely huge and unassailable. Their heroism is inseparable from their insignificance.

Episode IV: A New Hope (0 BBY)

Way back when I was in college and the Special Editions came out, like all the other Star Wars dorks I was horrified that George Lucas altered the Greedo-Han cantina scene. As the decades have passed, though, my tune has changed a bit, and now whenever the old movies come out in a new format I look forward to learning what crazy shit old George has gotten up to this time.

I hope George Lucas lives forever, and that every three or four years, something else gets added to the Han-Greedo showdown, so that future generations can enjoy these alterations as their forebears have. Here is my humble submission for the next edition of A New Hope.

INT. MOS EISLEY CANTINA

Everything happens as usual. Then, once all the usual dialogue is over:

GREEDO

Maclunkey!

Greedo and Han shoot their guns simultaneously. Greedo’s shot goes ten feet wide, but Han shoots and kills the Rodian. Han stands up.

HAN

Maclunkey? More like M’clunk thee.

Han pauses, looks at the Bartender, and flips him a coin. The Bartender takes in the scene, then chuckles. The Bartender’s chuckle slowly evolves into a full-throated laugh. Han looks back, and tries to keep a straight face, but he then too starts to laugh. Both men continue in ever-escalating peels of head-tilted-back laughter, until Han shakes his head and, still laughing, exits the bar, turning to point at the bartender as he leaves. The bartender smiles and points back. A big lizard walks through the door. Wipe to next scene.

Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (3 ABY)

This is one of two Star Wars movies that I think are better than the movie that won the Oscar for Best Picture in the year they came out. Ordinary People is good, but Empire is better (though Raging Bull, which somehow didn’t win that year, is better than both of them). The other Star Wars film that is definitely better than the Best Picture winner from its year is Revenge of the Sith, but that’s only because every movie that came out in 2005 is better than Crash.  

On this viewing of Empire, I was struck by how dependent the film is on reaction shots of Carrie Fisher. Repeatedly, moments of serious emotional weight are punctuated by wordless close-ups of Princess Leia’s reactions: Luke and Han not returning to Echo Base before nightfall; Han going into the carbon freezing chamber; Boba Fett escaping with Han; Luke in danger and communicating with Leia via the force. When you watch Empire after watching A New Hope the previous night, you see how much Fisher had grown as an actor from her “six different accents in twenty minutes” days. In Empire, every single one of those close-ups works, particularly the shot of her watching Boba Fett fly away with Han, where in one second she conveys despair, terror, and pure shock that for once the Rebels didn’t find a way out of a jam. It’s not an accident that the sequel trilogy staged several similar reaction shots for Fisher.

There’s obviously something gendered about Empire’s tendency to focus on a woman’s emotional response to things men are doing. But it’s important to note that Leia is anything but a passive watcher: she also commands armies, flies a spaceship, and shoots stormtroopers. Those reaction close-ups are essential to the arc the film has designed for Leia, wherein we see that she is a badass do-it-all leader who presumably suppresses her emotions because women leaders run the risk of undermining their authority if they are perceived as being emotional, but she has to balance that against the fact that she is a deeply feeling person in an emotionally taxing situation. In this way, Empire is one of the first “working woman/can she have it all” films of the 1980’s (it’s interesting to think of it alongside Broadcast News especially, but also 9 to 5 or Working Girl). To be clear, I’m not claiming that The Empire Strikes Back is some profound feminist statement—the film is far too okay with Han ignoring the word “stop” for that to be the case—but it is at least framing the problem of how complicated it is to be an ambitious woman in a man’s galaxy. I doubt Leia’s arc would have worked if the movie had been directed by someone as unsubtle as Lucas, and I definitely doubt it would have worked if so many of the film’s key emotional moments had not centered on a performer as on-her-game and inherently likable as Fisher.

Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (4 ABY)

These movies were imprinted on my brain at such an early age that now I often want to say the following words in a Darth Vader voice: “power”; “Luke”; “master”; “feelings”; “sister”; “what!?”; “no”; “complete.”

Episode VII: The Force Awakens (34 ABY)

The best thing about The Force Awakens is that the cast is charismatic and seems to be having a good time, so it ends up being a fun, freewheeling confection of a movie. And to be clear, that’s no small thing. The worst thing about The Force Awakens, as millions of voices have cried out, is that it has virtually no new ideas. If you like movies where a ragtag group of misfits blows up a big evil thing—and we know you do—you’ll probably like this.

Nowhere is this combination of fun and dumb more on display than in the scene where the Resistance stands in a big circle and develops their plan to blow up the Starkiller Base. This is an archetypal Star Wars scene—indeed, at least four other movies in the franchise have a version of the planning/pep talk scene positioned early in the third act (ANH, ROTJ, TPM, R1). Some of the more memorable phrases in Star Wars have come from these scenes (“bullseye womp rats;” “many Bothans died;” “rebellions are built on hope”). But the version of this scene from The Force Awakens is mostly memorable for how slapdash it is. Usually in these scenes, it is implied that somewhere off-screen a team of robots and nerds has been crunching the data and cooking up a scheme, and now the military brass are announcing the plan to the cool kids so they can go be heroes. But in The Force Awakens, we get to watch literally the entire planning process, which boils down to, “Han and Chewie will land on the base, and there’s usually something to blow up so they’ll blow it up, and then the spaceships will shoot at this thing that is probably a weak spot that the enemy constructed for some reason, and then we meet back at Leia’s for a kegger. This should work.” The entire planning process takes a minute and 31 seconds. To put that in perspective, the Leeroy Jenkins World of Warcraft group spends a minute and 24 seconds planning their Waterloo. And I realize that Leeroy Jenkins is satire, but in this specific scene, it feels a little like The Force Awakens is too.

Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (34 ABY)

Won’t lie: I’ve been dreading writing about this one. The online discourse around The Last Jedi has been so poisoned by rampaging hordes of Edgelords, Memestains, and Twitquisitors that the movie is honestly not at all fun to talk about anymore. That’s sad for me, since talking about Star Wars movies has been one of my primary forms of recreation since I was in kindergarten.

But here goes. I really love the Rey-Kylo plotline in this film. Their scenes together are strange and riveting, and unlike anything else we’ve seen in a Star Wars film. It’s interesting to see a version of the attempted seduction to the darkside plot involve a hint of actual seduction. The “kill the past” stuff is intriguing (though I think it’s worth keeping in mind that the person who keeps saying it is the villain). Their lightsaber fight with the red dudes in the red room is very cool to watch. And I can’t imagine what is going through the heads people who were angry that Snoke got killed. Snoke sucked. Kill him. I hope they bring him back to life for five seconds in Episode IX so they can kill him again.

But beyond that, the movie is a mess. The casino planet would be ludicrous even if it weren’t for the fact that the entire plan is foiled because Finn is too cheap to park in a garage. The Oscar Isaac-Laura Dern stuff is the most remarkable waste of acting talent achieved in a Star Wars film since Natalie Portman and Samuel Jackson were apparently told “again, but stiffer this time.” Also, I’ve watched nearly five hours of this trilogy at this point, and I still don’t know what the First Order is. Say what you will about the prequels, but I at least have some sense of what the Trade Federation wanted.[2]

In Conclusion

I’ve gone back and forth on whether to throw a ranking out there. Star Wars fans hold their personal rankings as closely as a nun holds her rosary beads, but I guess I’ll put mine out there. Here’s how I’d rank them after my most recent binge. The tiers are used to suggest groupings of similar quality. Hence, I’d consider #4 through #8 to be pretty close to a five-way tie. Here goes:

1. The Empire Strikes Back

2. A New Hope

--tier break

3. Rogue One

--tier break

4. The Force Awakens

5. Revenge of the Sith

6. Return of the Jedi

7. Solo

8. The Last Jedi

--tier break

9. The Phantom Menace

--tier break

10. Attack of the Clones

Thanks for reading. You may fire when ready.

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[1] “Before the Battle of Yavin.” ABY is “After the Battle of Yavin.” Don’t blame me—this is the nomenclature.

[2] Trade, presumably.

Christian Colón: The EG Revue's Sportsperson of the Decade

The Twentybens: Ben Celebrates the Best of the 2010's

One of the great charms of baseball is that, more than any other sport, it affords the opportunity for unlikely heroism. It’s no great trick to design a basketball offense where LeBron takes the lion’s share of the shots, and Tom Brady throws all the Patriots’ passes (except, hilariously, when he doesn’t). But in baseball, once your best hitter bats, he doesn’t get another shot until everyone else in the lineup takes their turn. And if the game goes longer than expected, and a team runs out of all the pinch hitters they actually want to use, they have no choice but to let the last guy on the bench step up to the plate.

This brings me to Christian Colón, a local hero whose status as folk legend is only made possible by the egalitarianism of baseball. Colón absolutely should not be a mythic figure. He’s never been a regular major league starter. He’s played in parts of five seasons, but in none of those seasons did he ever appear in more than a third of his team’s games. He’s posted no steals and only one extra-base hit since 2017. His career slugging percentage is lower than his on-base percentage, which indicates a commitment to slap-hitting that would be more at home in the 1910’s than the 2010’s. He’s pretty good at defense, but he’s definitely not very good at defense.

Usually, when I am watching the worst professional athletes on their particular teams, the thought crosses my mind that, even in their high-profile failures, they are much better at what they do than I am what I do. But I’m honestly not sure that’s true of Colón. Being a tenured professor at the University of Central Missouri with a short stack of mostly second-tier journal articles to my name is probably the rough academic equivalent of getting 355 career MLB at-bats and hitting .256 with one homer.

Except...and here again is the glory of baseball and the privilege of athletes...on two nights, one in 2014 and one in 2015, Colón had a shot to write himself into baseball history, and he bullseyed immortality both times.

On the evening of September 30, 2014, Colón spent several hours doing exactly what the majority of Kansas Citians were doing: he sat on his butt and watched a baseball game. Indeed, if the Wild Card playoff game against Oakland—KC’s first playoff game since Back to the Future came out—had ended in nine innings, Colón would never have left the bench. But in the bottom of the 10th, he entered the game to pinch-hit for another benchwarmer, short person Terrance Gore, who had come in to pinch run in the 8th, and who is such a terrible hitter that he makes Colón look like Mike Schmidt. Colón looked less Schmidtian when he was immediately asked to sacrifice bunt, but at least he did so successfully.

His bunting complete, Colón went back to the dugout...and then he hung out for a while. Gore had pinch-run for Billy Butler, which meant Colón took Butler’s slot in the lineup, which meant Colón was now quite possibly the least-fearsome Designated Hitter in the history of the American League. But the game kept going and going, and in the 12th, Oakland took the lead, and KC had to score to survive. Eric Hosmer, a large man who hits baseballs very far and who once lived in a fancy apartment above a fancy restaurant that specializes in selling marked-up offal to yuppies,[1] came just a few inches short of hitting a game-tying homer, and he was standing at third when Colón came up with one out. Then this happened:

As I study that replay, I’m pretty sure that after leaving Colón’s bat, the ball makes initial contact with the earth approximately an inch in front of home plate. Fortunately, the ball bounced very high, giving everyone enough time to advance a base, and Christian Colón, a rookie backup infielder with six career RBI’s to that point, was standing on first base with a game-tying RBI in an extra-inning sudden-death playoff game.

With two outs, Colón stole second base, which is also unusual—he still only has five career stolen bases. The steal was vital, since it allowed him to score when Salvador Perez poked the biggest Royals hit in a generation into left field.

Perez and relief pitcher Brandon Finnegan are probably the most-remembered heroes of that game, but nevertheless, Colón had played an essential role in one of the unlikeliest victories in playoff history (per Baseball Reference, the Royals had a 3 percent chance to win at the end of the 7th). Having accomplished this, he did next-to-nothing for the rest of the 2014 postseason, taking the field only to play defense for half an inning in Game 2 of the ALCS (the Orioles didn’t hit the ball his way).

Indeed, during KC’s magical playoff runs of 2014 and 2015, after Colón’s game-tying RBI in the Wild Card game, the Royals played 282 innings of postseason baseball before he had another chance to bat.

That next at-bat was on a considerably larger stage: the 12th inning of Game 5 of the World Series, with the Royals only one win away from their first championship since the year Cyndi Lauper released “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough.”[2] The Royals had been in pretty dire straits in this game as well—the Mets had a 95 percent chance to win the game as late as the middle of the 8th inning. But KC fought their way back via the idiot savant baserunning that had become their hallmark. Colón came in to pinch-hit for the pitcher in a tie game with a runner on third and one out, and this time he managed to hit the ball a bit more squarely than he had 13 months earlier in the Wild Card game:

The Mets melted down at this point and the Royals ran out to a 7-2 lead before they were done, but the fact remains that the go-ahead RBI of a decisive World Series game was driven in by the player who was least likely even to get into the game. He came around to score a run of his own when Alcides Escobar drove him in, and then he went back to the bench and was replaced by relief pitcher Wade Davis in the bottom of the inning. As with the Wild Card game, Colón is not really the player lodged in the cultural memory of Game 5—in KC, it’s remembered mostly for “Hosmer’s Mad Dash;” in Flushing, I’m sure it’s the “Lucas F-ing Duda” game. But when called upon, Colón got it done.

Four years later, the Royals’ moment in the sun seems even more bizarre as MLB has returned to being a league dominated by power hitters and big markets. As for Colón, he did not play in the majors at all in 2018, and he appeared in only eight games for the sub-.500 Reds in 2019. But if it turns out that Colón is done, his postseason batting record will be forever pristine: 2 at-bats, 2 hits, 2 RBI’s, 2 runs, 1 steal, 1 sacrifice hit, 2 pennants, 1 World Series ring. Not half-bad for a footnote.

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[1] Fwiw, The Rieger is very good.

[2] I hadn’t realized it before, but 1985 was a heck of a year for Hollywood comedies aimed at ten year-olds. Also, I know the following opinion is indefensible, but “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough” is definitely my favorite Lauper song. Unlike Colón, it’s a banger.

Big Thief's "Shark Smile"

The Twentybens: Ben Celebrates the Best of the 2010's

Big Thief’s “Shark Smile” participates in a specific, venerable tradition of alternative/college/indie/art-rock: the rambling, incongruous, discordant, and even borderline off-putting instrumental intro that precedes a catchy or even “pop” song recorded by artists who otherwise courted an identity as “edgy” or “innovative.” “Sweet Jane”; “100%”; “Star Sign”; “Cannonball”; “Texas Never Whispers”; “Corona”. That’s a killer mixtape right there if you happen to dig the music of well-read white people who dress poorly.

Now, obviously, there are differences of degree and even kind in that list. The “Corona” intro is a quick hit of tension that releases when the song kicks into gear. The intro to “Sweet Jane” is pleasantly boring. The intro to “Star Sign” is unpleasantly boring at great length. And the intro to “Texas Never Whispers” will cause you actual physical pain if you’re wearing headphones. But in all of those cases, if you stick around, you get to hear one of the catchier songs by the artist in question.

Perhaps this maneuver is done to signal seriousness—after all, The Beatles never did rambling intros when they wanted to hold your hand, but once they were serious artistes they couldn’t resist an occasional prelude. Or maybe bands just want to punish the listener for having the audacity to skip right to the catchy song.

The more recent example of Big Thief, though, makes me consider another possibility specific to the streaming age, which is that the discordant intro is a tactic to scare away any listener who would skip the song after hearing the first five seconds on a Spotify playlist.[1] A streaming service is certainly how I discovered this song—it’s really how I discover any interesting music these days, since Brookside is not exactly the epicenter of KC youth culture. Regardless, I’m glad I stuck around, because once “Shark Smile” got past the intro, it sunk its teeth into me as much as anything else I’ve heard this decade.[2]

At its core, it’s a lovers-in-a-car song. Closer inspection of the lyrics reveals it to be a lovers-speeding-toward-death song which also includes a vampire who might or might not be metaphorical. But I don’t know that the lyrics matter much in their specifics beyond their ability to convey in a few deft word-clouds the image of an object of desire flickering in the passing headlights. The object of desire in this case seems to be someone named Evelyn. She and the speaker are flooring it through the upper midwest. They smile; they glance; they kiss; there’s a pile of money on the dashboard; there’s a wreck in the final verse. Things lead, as they do, to a chorus, and that chorus, as in any good song about desire, is baldly straightforward: “She said oh baby take me/ and I said oh baby take me too.” It isn’t Keats, but then again, Keats and Fanny Brawne never drove around in a Nissan hatchback listening to Morrissey.

It’s a truism to say that rock music would never have existed without sex, cars, death, sex in cars, death in cars, or sex and death in cars.[3] But most of the automotive-lust rock canon does a staggeringly poor job at conveying the actual fraught hesitations and discomfiting upwellings of desire that accompany the experience of being strongly attracted to someone who is sitting next to you in the very small space of a vehicle. Meatloaf, Poison, Van Halen, Elastica, R Kelly, Bob Seger—that’s a first pass at a sex-in-car rock canon, and while I like several of those songs (even the Poison one!), and am morally appalled by a couple listed artists (not just R. Kelly!), there is not much effort in those tracks to convey fraught hesitation. Springsteen at his very best can pull it off—and Big Thief singer/songwriter Adrianne Lenker has mentioned Nebraska in particular as an influence on “Shark Smile”—but Springsteen on Nebraska is, in all the best ways, an outlier.

“Shark Smile” conveys lust and hesitation far more with its instrumental tones than with its lyrics. The rhythm section in particular is insistent but gentle all at once. A fairly strummy guitar asserts and then withholds at various points before a more chaotic electric guitar line crescendos to take the end of the song towards a concluding chaos that evokes, like any tilting toward the sublime, lust and death inseparably. Lenker’s vocal performance is by turns alien and caressing, whispery and growling. She has one of those voices that is initially a bit off-putting in its lack of polish, until she sinks her hooks in and suddenly the idea of listening to rock music performed by a merely beautiful voice seems actively obscene. Put all the elements of “Shark Smile” together, and it somehow sounds to this old guy’s memory like being seventeen and driving around town, unsure of yourself and overwhelmed by yourself, with no particular place to go.

The fatal conclusion of the song is a nice bit of fragmentary melodrama. Bonnie and Clyde or Thelma and Louise come to mind, but that doesn’t quite fit inasmuch as all four of those characters die, whereas the narrator of “Shark Smile” seems to be alive to hear Evelyn’s last words (which are, of course, the chorus). In this way, “Shark Smile” riffs on the much more maudlin pop subgenre of songs about teen romance interrupted by vehicular death, headlined by the likes of “Teen Angel” and “Last Kiss.” And say what you will about “Teen Angel,” but it understands that teenage desire is so terrifying, eruptive, overwhelming, and shameful that its enormity can only find an objective correlative in the image of a sixteen-year-old girl getting hit by a mother-fucking train.

I’ve thus far avoided dwelling on the fact that “Shark Smile” is a song in which a woman sings about a woman, largely because I didn’t want to come across as suggesting that the song’s apparent queerness is what makes it interesting.[4] Indeed, its queerness doesn’t make it interesting, or at least it doesn’t make it novel—Tracy Chapman wrote a hit driving song thirty years ago. I also wanted to avoid getting all male-gazey about it. But I will hazard that Lenker’s lyrical stew of same-sex desire, outlaw imagery, and rural setting creates an air of reticence, stealth, and even dread that is echoed in the steady drone of the guitar, and also in the way that the framing dissonance of the song is at war with its catchiness.

At the end of the last sentence I talked myself into liking the intro. What can I say? It’s a very good song. Perhaps the point of close reading is to make ourselves like the things we don’t like about the things we love.

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[1] I should note that Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker, who wrote the song, says that the intro “foreshadow(s) the turmoil that happens in the song.” That’s clever, and the part of me that believes that a rock song can be an urn well-wrought as any Donne sonnet is willing to go there. However, the part of me that commutes to Warrensburg usually wishes they’d just get to the first verse already. https://www.npr.org/2017/11/26/565921721/big-thiefs-shark-smile-is-a-rocking-road-song-ending-in-tragedy

[2] One nice thing about blogging is that I don’t have to listen to the editor who would rightly insist that I remove that pun.

[3] I might be stretching the definition of “truism.”

[4] All of this is assuming that “the speaker” of the song is a woman, which is by no means a definitive reading.