Goodnight, Neverland!

Let The Wookiee Win Week 7: Just A Flesh Wound April 15, 2010

The following originally appeared in The Peak. It is the final edition of a seven week column. It was a long strange trip, and I thank you for reading.

It’s some strange justice that the current pulse of Star Wars fandom is talk of the series’ complete demise. Strange — but not surprising — as there’s nothing quite as fascinating as spectacular failure. George Lucas knew this, which is why he made sure Empire was as depressing as possible.

Head on over to YouTube and search for “Star Wars” and you’ll be treated to some thoroughly entertaining journalism on the subject of spectacular failure, specifically the Star Wars prequels. This comes courtesy of RedLetterMedia and Mr.Plinkett, the sociopath star of the outfit’s hour-plus long reviews of the films.

In it, his sardonic analysis of the films is cut with a darkly funny portrayal of a man beset by psychosis and obsession, his basement (pointedly) the scene of purported grisly deeds. The realization of this character is incisive service for and against those who would cast anyone with interest in the subject matter as a parent’s basement dwelling, sycophantic dork with mommy issues. It’s done so well, in fact, that you might not even notice that the character is a perfect metaphor for the Trilogy That Couldn’t; a man with no redeeming qualities, no hope, and no future. Star Wars asks the same question with its plot and characters: is redemption available?

The Star Wars universe is set in orbit around Luke Skywalker, a young man from the interstellar Bread Basket (or Water Basket, as the case may be), gone off to the big city to make good and beat up his dad. His personal journey, however, is marked early with the obligation to redeem the Skywalker name, and to fulfill the destiny his father set back a great deal — to bring balance to the light and dark sides of the Force. The weight of this is comparable to Adolf Hitler Jr. job hunting in 1956. Significant is the operative word there.

At the end of Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader has his human cockles tickled by the torture of his son and decides to take a hot electricity injection for him, turning on his master and ending the Sith Empire he helped bring to pass. This is an odd storytelling choice, one that seems so perfect in hindsight but could have very easily been different. If Luke strikes his father down, good triumphs over evil, right?

The fly in the Vaseline is that this is a particularly Sith course of action. Murder is pretty uncool for a Jedi. Trapped between a homicide and a hard place, Lucas needed an asteroid or drunk TIE fighter pilot to crash into the throne room, eliminating the three biggest potential threats to the galaxy. But Star Wars aims higher than that. Han Solo is the test bed for George Lucas’ philosophy of redemption, but Darth Vader is his finished symphony.

Lucas is reaching out a hand to the droves of fans that have flocked to a shared fantasy, telling those who might sit a little too close to the screen that their time spent is not wasted. He is giving retroactive justification to those of us who lean just a little too hard on the lives and experiences of people who will never exist outside celluloid and CG.

Just like Vader turned it around for a quickie deathbed sacrament, just like a hand getting cut off didn’t stop Luke, and just like they all ignored C-3PO’s advice and went up against the Imperial “Wookiee” at the risk at having their arms torn off (see what I did there?), Lucas aims to prove that a third act in life is not only possible, but well within reach.

So for those who are looking for coping tools in the exploits of fake smugglers and warrior monks, for fanboys dealing with exaggerated reports of their failure and a filmmaker tasked with following his own greatness, Star Wars can teach us that redemption is only as remote as the effort we are willing to put in.

Maybe instead of a rise and fall, we should try for a fall and rise.

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Let The Wookiee Win Week 6: Be Like Han March 31, 2010

The following is part six of a seven part column in The Peak. This is the one I wanted to write at the outset, the one that really got me excited about the project. I am as happy with it as I could expect to be. I tried my best to source the inspiration bit, thinking I had seen it on a blog somewhere. But alas. Sounds like a 4chan soundbite anyway, doesn’t it? If the originator is reading this, we should date. And sorry.


HanSolo.jpeg

Surfing around the information superhighway, cyberspace, if you will, I came across perhaps the most important philosophical advance since Plato said some stuff about stuff. It described the scene in Empire Strikes Back where Han Solo is promised a delicious meal and instead is served a platter of “Darth Vader a la Badass”. With no hesitation, no looking around in surprise, no look of disbelief towards Lando, he just takes out his gun and starts blasting away at him, taking pot shots at a man that can castrate him a parsec away. His thought process begins and ends with “Evil. Shoot it.” The parable concludes: Be Like Han.

So struck was I by this nugget of science that the years of Catholic schooling just melted away, replaced by a sorbet of Harrison Ford-flavored enlightenment. How many years had I admired the roguish smuggler and not realized that he is the perfect role model for everybody? Let me explain with some key examples.

When there is somebody across the dinner table from you who has more or less decided to kidnap you and either kill you or sell you into the bondage of a giant slug gangster not named James Gandolfini, you should probably take the nessecary steps to prevent this action by shooting first.

Be Like Han.

When you’re trying to pull the wool over someone’s eyes, be polite about it. If you’re fine, ask them how they’re doing. If they’re on to you, put a bullet in the phone.

Be Like Han.

If a friend get’s killed in battle, the time for tears is after you escape the giant space station that can blow up planets with all the nonchalance of shopping for detergent.

Be Like Han.

When everyone has written you off and when you know you have made a mistake, redemption is as easy as admitting you were wrong and doing right. You can always swoop back in at the nick of time, blow that thing and go home.

Be Like Han.

Never leave a man out in the cold or a soldier behind. And if he is out in the cold, get him someplace warm.

Be Like Han.

Find your Kessel Run and be the best at it.

Be Like Han.

Technology is fallible and intelligence beats radar any day. If you find yourself in a place more dangerous than where you came from (say, inside a giant asteroid worm type thing), don’t fret, just calmly push the throttle as far as it will go.

Be Like Han.

If an authority figure tells you to do something heinous to an innocent, say no. The Nuremberg Defence is never moral and saving a life is worth your own.

Be Like Han.

Even if a friend has proven himself to be a touch greasy in the past, just remember that true friends are in short supply and grease is universal, especially on you.

Be Like Han.

Never, even under the pain of torture, talk to the “Empire” without a “Jedi” present. They are not your friends and you will go to jail.

Be Like Han.

If someone you love is watching you get turned into a Han-sicle, and they finally bust out the L-bomb, don’t waste time assuring them you love them too. You always did.

Be Like Han.

If you are going to be frozen solid for awhile, strike a memorable pose.

Be Like Han.

Despite what skills you may have, post-secondary education should be respected. Be nice to people with lightsabers.

Be Like Han.

Allies come in many shapes and sizes. Furry Marxists with spears can help you take down empires.

Be Like Han.

Lend your car to your friends when they need it, especially to fight wars. It will be fine.

Be Like Han.

When your best friend is about to be crushed by a celestial body of some sort, make god damn sure you have an outreached hand to grab them until someone has to drag you off the cargo ramp. If you can’t haul them in, it’s okay to cry.

Be Like Han.

Pride is not a sin. Confidence and willpower are virtues. Keep a blaster on your right hip and a good woman on your left. Punch people that deserve it. Know when you are wrong, and know that you can be sometimes right.

And when someone tells you that being like Han is a bad thing, have the wisdom and balls to do it anyway.

Be Like Han.

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Let The Wookiee Win Week 5: He Ain’t Heavy (He’s My Android) March 16, 2010

I can think of about six films off the top of my head where a robot taught me how to be a better human. My god I’m lonely. Star Wars in particular taught me that there’s nothing quite like having a best friend in in your corner to fight with you, support you, and do a bit of Taun Taun spooning.

Appropriately, I learned this from two robots, one a lovable mute, trundling through the movies like a wheel-bound Huck Finn, and the other ripped from the pages of steampunk homoerotica. There really is nothing quite like the friendship between C-3P0 and R2-D2.

See, it’s the other friendships in Star Wars that push me towards the mechanical Mork and Mindy. They all just fall a little short in the BFF Olympics. Take Han and Chewbacca for example. Their friendship would likely take homeboy gold, but their arrangement is really just a semi-legal situation that blossomed into a lifelong commitment. Han was just a really handsome imperial lieutenant ordered to kill Chewie. He refused, and Chewie ended up owing him a ritual life debt.

That it worked out so well and they became such good friends is nice, but its an affair born out of insubordination and obligation, two things that rarely form the foundation of a healthy friendship (but sometimes work pretty well for marriage, especially of the shotgun variety).

Han and Luke just weaken SoloBacca. I suppose it doesn’t matter where Han gets his appetite if he gets his meals at home, but there is a little bit of bro competition going on in this triangle. Han and Luke are another friendship that grows out of a sub-optimal arrangement and continues through convenience and warfare. Though there’s nothing as reliable as a war to bring on the bromance, it’s not near as organic as the one experienced by our non-organic duo.

This is compounded by the fact that Han and Luke are too absorbed in their own lives to really maintain the friendship. Han is too busy getting frozen in carbonite and trying to use the Force on Leia’s brass undergarments to support Luke through his trials at Uncle Yoda’s Jedi Community College, and Luke is too busy carrying senile old men on his back through swamps (my god, the innuendo) to care about anything Han is doing (other than Leia). Friendships can span distance and time, but the amount of effort needed is just not there between the two.

Leia and Luke are even worse. Harry and Sally knew the sex thing would always get in the way, and I can only imagine accidental incest to be a dealbreaker in that respect.

This is all why R2-D2 and C-3PO have such an exceptional relationship. They met by chance and had chemistry right away, if not affection. Forced apart early by fate, they lived their lives autonomously, their meetings sporadic and unmemorable. When they finally are together, that obvious compatibility starts turning into something deep and defined. They escape crashing ships, wander the desert, get kidnapped, and go on missions to save the universe together.

Their wit and banter is a pillar of the Star Wars experience, this made more incredible by the fact that one of them is incomprehensible to an English-speaking crowd. Like any good friends, the armour comes off when needed, sarcasm falling to emotion when danger and mortality are involved.

C-3PO insists that his injured friend take any of his own parts if needed, and when R2-D2 is going off to fight, C-3PO tells him to make sure and come back alive. Knowing his friend is unable to have his back and feels guilty about it, R2 makes sure to make a good-natured wisecrack to assuage this feeling in his friend despite the looming personal danger. He takes one for the team, a selfless act for their friendship. Thick, thin, and Three Laws Safe.

Rather than just comic relief and foils for the mostly dire attitude of the human leads, George Lucas imbues these characters with an added depth; he gives something created by humans the ability show compassion perhaps (in the given context) even beyond that of their creators. Their dedication to each other is unsettling, and forces you to wonder if you have anyone that would donate their parts to aid in your recovery, someone to follow you through whatever desert you find yourself in.

And let me tell you, if you can say “Yes, by god, I do,” Star Wars is going to put a sizable lump in your throat.

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Let The Wookiee Win Week 4: I Am Your Father…Issues (Or: That’s No Moon) March 2, 2010

The following is the fourth part in a seven part column appearing in The Peak. I talk about Star Wars a bunch in it. This one is all about daddy issues, because George Lucas was pretty blunt about things of that sort. Check it out.


Pour out a bottle of Algarine for the ladies in the audience, because if the startling innocence rate of its fans didn’t tip you off, Star Wars is about as male centred as flicks come. Both trilogies give us dashing young protagonists with some pretty heady paternal issues right when most their age are just, you know, totally getting into Led Zeppelin.

But by representing one of the worst possible such scenarios, fathers in absentia, Star Wars encapsulates a paternal tension as old as time. Show me a man without unresolved issues with his father and I’ll show you a liar, and George Lucas seizes on that. And as I would rather loofah my balls with steel wool, I’m not going to use the word “heteronormative” even once in talking about it.

George Lucas’s evocation of Jesus Christ with Anakin Skywalker is about as subtle as Greedo shooting first. His mother was immaculately impregnated by the Force, and in so doing gave her son some built in neurosis to go with his raw talents. I’m not stating that not having a dad around will screw you up, but having your mom say you were willed into being and then having a shadowy league of battle monks insist you are their messiah might inflate your ego a tad. I can’t help but think the scene at the Mount of Olives might have played out differently with lightsabers.

Anakin cum Vader has a lot in common with notable movie badass Bill from Kill Bill. Both spent their time collecting father figures, and both ended up with a fairly nifty villain resumé. Anakin drifted from his slave master Watto to The Worst Jedi Ever, Qui-Gon Jinn, where Bill went from pimps to samurai sword makers. Anakin was a little more attached, however. The trauma of having his saviour and preferred figure cut down by a bad L.A. Ink experiment stayed with him to the end, whereas Bill just went along shooting people in the face.

Anakin’s revolving door stopped the longest on Obi-Wan Kenobi, but it was a role that was constantly denied by his Jedi master. His constant quest for approval was met with more pedagogy and fraternity than his desired paternity. The Jedi council just served as an institutional body for condemning his adolescence, and the moderating effects of indoctrination from birth was lost on him as he joined the order at such an old age. Anakin wore this failure to find a male role model like a Tauntaun sleeping bag, and damn if it doesn’t smell worse on the inside.

The loss of his mother and his orphaning is just enough to send him to an exploitable edge that Darth Sidious seizes upon. Sidious as Palpatine gives him everything he wants from a father, and just enough validation and cajoling to convince him that the Jedi council deserves to be rebelled against. Naturally, with a new father promising him the moon, he has to annihilate any other fatherly pretenders. Like any confrontation with one’s father, this ends with him losing three-quarters of his limbs.

Lucas’ allegory is brilliant. The tension between any two fully realized adult males in the same family is palpable. While I don’t envy the mother/daughter dynamic, the father/son dynamic is fraught with testosterone and performative masculine crap, a dangerous cocktail of pride and competition. And blaster rifles, as the case may be.

Lucas describes the two ways the story can end. With Anakin, it ends terribly, through violence and loss. Even as he lays dying, Obi-Wan denies his paternal role, screaming at Vader, his “brother.” His failure to recognize the needs of his Padawan in this way is his greatest failing as a master, something that The Worst Jedi Ever Qui-Gon Jinn saw Anakin needed right away and satisfied as best he could. Rebuilt with a sexy new helmet, the death of Obi-Wan becomes the singular reason for Vader’s existence. The death of his “father” pulls him farther away from his duties as a father to his own child. The cycle begins anew.

Luke’s father figures meet with Vader’s at Obi-Wan, so his “death” is doubly significant. Han Solo and Yoda fill in for Luke’s paternal figures, but the entirety of Luke’s life becomes the defeat and violent death of his father, Vader. So when Vader sacrifices himself for his son and Luke lifts away his father’s armor to be met with a frail, dying old man, it represents the other end of the story: noble death, and the absolving of sin. The story that goes back to cavemen is unchanged by parsecs and protocol droids. Just conflict, love, and family insanity ending in death.

Confused? You should be. It reads like some Freudian psychoanalysis with a heavy dose of Orson Scott card sci-fi and Christian values. Lucas stops short of shaking you by the shoulders and screaming “the nuclear family unit is the salvation of the universe” like some sort of interstellar Tipper Gore, but just short. That the man without a father would go on to become a tyrannical psychopath is just horribly steeped in heteronormativity oh God dammit.

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Let The Wookiee Win Week 3: Full Carbonite Jacket February 1, 2010

The following is the third part of a seven part column I am doing for The Peak at SFU. You can read the other ones by clicking the title tag at the left of this post. It’s about Star Wars and how important it is to the world. Why yes I am in university, thank you for asking. Yes, I have kissed a girl before, too.

I feel a little like Milton, trying to justify the ways of Lucas and instead portraying some sort of bumbling God in denim button-ups. Which is to say in trying to portray sombody I like quite a bit, it comes off like he has wronged me in some way. This is not totally the case. While Lucas may have found himself at odds with the standards of his audience and good filmmaking, his mastery of contradictory human nature is, at it’s worst, better than most. This is excellently illustrated with his attitudes towards war and conflict, and is brilliant in the near omission of it’s significance.

In the history of film and television, the most memorable depictions of war are often the ones that run counter to traditional perceptions of military conflict as a glorious and honorable act. Post-Vietnam, these diminutive portrayals became the norm, with Stanley Kubrick nearly creating a career out of taking the piss out of hawks. Now, in an age of guerilla warfare and military excursions with all the popular support of tuberculosis, war has an all too uncomfortable way of getting put to the back burner, forgotten until it boils over. Star Wars raises stakes by not being contrary at all, and instead slapping us with the wet noodle of reality.

Released just eight months later, The Deer Hunter brought the terror of Vietnam to the home front while Star Wars gave the casualties of war all the gravity of a trip to Wal-Mart in heavy traffic. That is to say distressing, but in no way impossible to ignore. Star Wars is almost prophetic in how it’s characters react to prolonged military struggles with marked indifference, ahead of it’s time in describing the numbing of society to matters of foreign war that would define the rest of the Cold War and beyond.

Luke Skywalker’s Aunt and Uncle get killed? He shrugs it off and gets to work bringing down the Empire. Darth Vader blows Alderaan into a million pieces? Ben Kenobi puts his fingers to his temple and Leia is a little upset. She gets over it. Millions killed when the Death Star is blown up not once but twice? No tears for dead Imperials. The death of serial Force-choker Darth Vader is met with the most emotion (and little at that) in a prosaic relationship climax that evokes one of the most horrifying hypocrisies within human capacity; war becomes statistical and distant one moment, tragic and personal when convenient. We could write this off as bad acting, but the consistency of the chilled reaction to mortality forces us to consider it a directorial mandate.

In this the canon is not nearly reconciled. The Star Wars universe waxes between having the foot soldiers of the Empire nee Republic and Rebellion act as foreign policy meatsacks just a little more often than it creates fictions around distinguished veterans. The Jedi are exceptional, the ruling class, so we care about them. The average soldier is less than a volunteer, a clone built for the express purpose of being an expendable unit of a shrewd Machiavel who can shoot lightning out of his fingers. Making the average Stormtrooper a clone of Jango Fett and not a draftee of unjust regime was an embarrassingly fit metaphor for our attitudes towards military personnel.

The primary films disregard Stormtroopers, Republic troops and Ewoks as little more than bullet sponges. Genndy Tartakovsky’s outstanding Clone Wars vignettes straddle the line between the extremes, the clones taking on varying degrees of expertise, but ultimately being the silent, soulless vessels the series more than demands. Recently, as the series takes pains to gain the Sesame Street crowd, they’ve softened this stance to include fairly generous concern for the lives of the average trooper from the Jedi leadership, but at this point it seems token.

Star Wars puts a mirror up to our collective unconscious considering matters military, and the reflection is less than favorable. The nameless, faceless Ewoks and Stormtroopers fight battles a long long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, far away enough that to ignore it is a matter of turning off the (space) television. When it does view war through a compassionate lens, the moments are sparse enough to be arresting, and rarely involve central characters.

Consider this: the single most evocative explication of military loss in the entire series is seven seconds long. Through the frenetic cuts of the final battle on Endor, between Han Solo being suave and R2-D2 being mutely hilarious, Lucas cuts to a lone Ewok running to the front. In the grass is the body of a fallen comrade, a motionless ball of fur on the ground. He stops in his tracks and falls to his knees, cradling his head in his hand with grief. The war is screaming in his brain and there isn’t a title actor around to hear it.

Sometimes Star Wars hits a little close to home. Sometimes we need it to.

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Let The Wookiee Win Week 2: Love In The Time of Boba Fett January 19, 2010

The following is the second of a series of columns for The Peak. This week deals with how love is stupid, and how Phantom Menace is stupid, and how when combined they are kind of awesome.

A bunch of years after George Lucas got his rocks off letting the global movie-going populace innocently root for incest, he decided to revisit the franchise that made him grotesquely wealthy. He made a few prequels. You may have heard of them. They were kind of a thing.

The wholesale rape of a series aside, George Lucas did a funny thing: recognizing that love was second only to war (as in, Star Wars) in the landscape of literary devices, he decided to rewrite the entire context of his continuity. I think his goiter told him to do it.

Instead of the epic quest of a band of rebels with the intention of bringing down an empire, Phantom Menace made it the story of a headstrong young Jedi who would enslave a galaxy because he had a dream that his wife might die. Maybe.

This ruffled a few feathers.

And why wouldn’t it? The move made their beloved series of jock sci-fi into the nerd equivalent of The English Patient, with such swagger as to inspire calls for the Lucas himself to be buggered with a Jar-Jar Binks doll. The subsequent, weepy version of the baddest badass to ever rock a cape and emphysema had casual and hardcore fans alike introducing their palms to their faces.

But don’t be deceived; the wooden acting and staid dialogue characterizing the romance between Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala is merely the poor technical execution of the most powerful idea Lucas ever committed to film.

It’s awkward from the word go. Our savant slave boy meets the incognito Queen Amidala through a nearly impossible series of coincidences (blame the Force, not the writing), and, throwing reasonable notions of statutory rape to the wind, proceeds to try and woo the 14-year-old monarch as best as his nine-year-old prowess allows (which is to say he showed her his space Lego). Lacking biceps or a wicked automobile, he resorts to clumsiest attempt at flattery in cinematic history, asking her if she was “an angel.” In the best possible distillation of every romantic encounter I have ever had, she looks at him dead in the face, cocks her head to the side and says “What?”

This is the best part of the film, and possibly the best of all three prequels.

Whether intentionally or by accident, Lucas captured one of the greatest and most realistic love stories in Hollywood history, and what makes it so profound is that it almost wallows in its ridiculousness. It recognizes that love is hardly ever the measured, dramatic perfection like we see with Han and Leia in the later episodes, and throws the stupid things we do to the opposite sex at us like a fistful of sand in the eyes.

When Anakin is a kid, all he sees is a goddess, an object of desire. His romantic schooling only goes as far as his mother telling him he was immaculately conceived, likely winking and nudging him the whole time. As he goes through the dogmatically celibate Jedi training, he swims in an ocean of testosterone and midi-chlorians and dreams about her.

Though he has the ability to detect emotions, Yoda and Co. decide it would be a great idea to send a teenager who can crush steel with his mind to spend some alone time with a girl over whom he has Gacy levels of obsession.

Given this opportunity, he awkwardly and directly confesses total dedication to this woman he has spent virtually no time with, and luckily she’s a sucker for a guy with a big lightsaber. In between strained confessions of affection, (and probable explorations of the coital implications of a robotic arm,) they do things like run through a field of wildflowers without a hint of irony.

She gets knocked up, has some twins (who would later totally make out), and, as in every good love story, Anakin goes on to kill millions and set up a cruel dictatorship. What you are feeling right now is the squirming of a million nerds suddenly silenced by the realization that they relate entirely.

Phantom Menace and the love arc of Padme and Anakin was George Lucas’ attempt to take his stories to an operatic level. While the result is more “kill the wabbit” than Barber of Seville, it shows us exactly what our courtship looks like: obsessive, stupid, humiliating, amazing, and utterly central to the life of every person who has ever lived.

Making that primal need for companionship the core of his narrative is just another way Star Wars shows us how we are all exactly the same.

Which is to say, pretty damn goofy.

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Let The Wookiee Win: Week 1 January 6, 2010

The following originally appeared in The Peak. It is an exploration on why Star Wars to this day makes me squeal with girlish joy. It is part one of a seven part run.


It all begins with a flash.

The way to properly shoot a lightsaber battle is not exactly the most creative aspect of Star Wars. You take two stalwart opponents or, say, sparring partners, and have them fling brightly coloured phalluses at each other in a vaguely acrobatic neo-fencing duel and pocket the billions thrown at you by young male virgins.

Visually, you add a few frames of pure white every time one of those phalluses touch, and you get that brilliant effect that has dazzled audiences for the better part of four decades. Like a photographer’s flash, it fills the room and leaves you feeling physically dazed, which is an important dismissal of defenses when presenting audiences with the supernatural.

George Lucas was using this technique to brain-slap crowds years before Pokemon up and decided to give epileptics the finger.

I know a lot about lightsabers. I know how to make one (both where to get the amplifying crystals and how to build the housing) and I know their most revered users (Yoda, Mace Windu, and Shak Ti, to name a few).

Not only do I know the name of the technique Obi-Wan Kenobi used to make Darth Vader into a multiple amputee (“mou kei”), I know this is a predominantly Sith move, which is why that nerd to your left gasped when it happened while you were watching Revenge of the Sith (even though he knew for years what had occurred).

I also know that it’s unlikely The Holy Trilogy would have had the same global impact it did without them.

This information serves no real purpose. It won’t help me seduce a woman, provide for a family, or find gainful employment. But lightsabers are probably one of the most important parts of my life and of the lives of millions around the planet.

A long, long time ago, Robin Williams grabbed his nuts and said poets were way more important than lawyers and doctors. Though he had a lusty preoccupation with Langston Hughes and likely meant that the works of the Western canon were a touch more steeped in value than the Millennium Falcon, the Dead Poet founder was making an excellent point on the value of (dare I say it: pop) culture in a societal landscape that expects such things to be abandoned when entering adulthood.

Though I doubt he expected his students to jump up on a desk and yell “O Captain my Captain many Bothans died to bring us this information,” the sentiment applies.

It’s a worldwide flash. A single relative frame against the exorbitantly long reel of time that everyone can see, filling the room and dazzling them in a language of light and sound. Star Wars is an international handshake and an embodiment of our collective thoughts about morality, relationships, and war.

It’s as accessible to those who have no idea what a Holocron is, as it is to those who have read their share of sapphic Force erotica. If civilization collapsed tomorrow it would still be relevant: its archetypes and lessons are as universal as any Bible, plus Ewoks.

In fact, everything worth knowing, you can learn from Star Wars. And over the coming semester, I aim to prove it.

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