Luke Skywalker Can't Read (17 page)

Wow, don't you wish you'd seen
The Journal of the Whills
—or better yet, George Lucas's
Flash Gordon
—before Lucas went and ruined everything?

Of course you don't.

However, most of us are correctly angry that Lucas screwed with the classic trilogy when he released the “Special Editions” in 1997 and 1998. In the interests of letting the good work countless others have done in enumerating all the changes performed on these films speak for itself, I'll just describe the
special editions of the movies with three words: random laser bolts. I mean this both metaphorically and literally, but more literally.
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Though to Lucas, the random laser bolt fired by Greedo in the special edition of
A New Hope
isn't random at all. Instead, it's an edit. Throughout the history of his Star Wars from
The
Journal of the Whills
to
Revenge of the Sith
, George Lucas has constantly altered the information by making shit up on the fly. If you dig into research on how all three original films were written, directed, and edited in postproduction,
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you'll start to suspect the finality of these stories was a little half-baked throughout the entire process. If you watch just
one
interview with Lucas where he discusses the making of any of the three prequels, you'll be sure of it.

The
Star Wars
prequel trilogy—
The Phantom Menace
,
Attack of the Clones
, and
Revenge of the Sith
—offends purist fans of the original trilogy for the exact same reason the special editions do. And that's because both smack of revisionism after the fact. In the original release of
Star Wars
, we think Han murders Greedo in cold blood, but in the special edition, Greedo “shoots first.” The
meaning
of the scene was changed and so we all got super-pissed. But the prequels are the same. We thought the Force worked a certain way in the old movies, but then Liam Neeson tells us something different about little critters living in our bloodstream who talk to the Force in
The Phantom
Menace
. Leia says she remembers her mother in
Return of the Jedi
, but then, in
Revenge of the Sith
, Natalie Portman dies before she can even coo at the just-born Leia baby. Lucas revised the origin story of Leia, but still left the original scene in the special edition of
Return of the Jedi
.
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If Episodes 1–6 of Star Wars were not a series of films but, instead, a single novel, that one scene with Leia—among many other maddening problems—would be a serious continuity error. Still, in his (kind of) defense, if Lucas had made
Revenge of the Sith
before he'd released the special edition of
Return of the Jedi
you can bet he would have messed with the part where Leia talks to Luke about her mother. Hell, there may have even been a digitally inserted thought bubble above Carrie Fisher's head featuring Natalie Portman crying or, even worse, brushing her hair while talking dirty to Anakin. But there isn't and he didn't because George Lucas's revision process of the entire Star Wars saga is beyond postmodern. If we extend the idea of Episodes 1–6 as composing a single novel, it would be a novel that was constantly being revised by a time-traveling author who hadn't bothered to reread the parts of the manuscript that he was
changing. If we think of Lucas as a time-traveling novelist working on a sentence level, and Episodes 1–6 were each a sentence, then the episodes would be sentences that only sort of go together. In at least one documentary about the prequels, Lucas described aspects of Star Wars as “poetry,” which abstractly might be more accurate, but somehow also insulting to real poets. All of this can make you angry, but it also does prove George Lucas is a mad genius.

Still, if you think this hop-skip-and-a-jump story-revision bullshit began with the special editions and continued through the prequels, you're about as wrong as Luke was when he fantasized about having sex with his sister. We tend to forgive Lucas for revisions that take place after the fact, provided of course that those changes
work
. No one complains about the improved, cool-looking X-Wing dogfights in the special edition of
A New Hope
for the same reason nobody complains about Darth Vader being Luke Skywalker's father or Leia turning out to be Luke's sister. All that stuff works. Which doesn't change the fact that both Darth Vader being Luke's dad and Leia being Luke's sister were elements of the story that were worked out during Lucas's revision process, which, as we now understand, is a revision process that doesn't operate under the normal rules of linear time.

In the late '70s, the screenplay for
The Empire Strikes Back
was initially commissioned as a work-for-hire to be written by the excellent fantasy novelist Leigh Brackett. Though it looks like she and Lucas collaborated a substantial amount on this, there are a lot of elements of Brackett's screenplay that obviously didn't make it into the final movie, most notably a scene
in which the ghost of Luke Skywalker's father is not a bad guy, but just another ghost who talks to Luke. Yoda is called “Minch”; Lando might have been a clone left over from the Clone Wars; a secret crystal hidden in Luke's lightsaber gives him a secret message; and so forth. When Leigh Brackett sadly passed away, George Lucas and his
Raiders of the Lost Ark
screenwriting buddy Lawrence Kasdan took over finishing the script for
Empire
. For those of us who are really serious about this stuff, this is the real moment when George Lucas starts to truly care about Star Wars in a way that actually creates the larger mythology. Here, he invents his wackado revision process: “Sure, Darth Vader is Luke's
father
, always has been.” And what's totally brilliant about this is that, broadly speaking, his retroactive continuity worked so well that it redefined a global phenomenon that was already a global phenomenon!

The Empire Strikes Back
is an aberration in film history that should almost never have happened. No matter what anyone tells you (including me), all movie sequels are just ways of getting more money out of the same thing. Even direct-to-video sequels to
Starship Troopers
weren't made out of a love for the characters or the franchise. So, when sequels are actually
good
it's a total miracle. I say “miracle” specifically, because it almost never happens.

Lucas can't take all the credit for
The Empire Strikes Back
being as good as (or, probably, better than) the original
Star Wars
. Director Irvin Kershner famously altered a lot of stuff as the cameras were rolling. When Han Solo is getting ready to be frozen in the carbonite chamber, Leia can't take it anymore and says, “I love you!” to which Han Solo jerkishly quips,
“I know.” Instantly more classic than
Gone with the Wind
's “Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn,” this line was originally written by Lucas (or Kasdan or, doubtfully, Brackett) as “I love you, too.” In collaboration with Harrison Ford, Kershner changed the line on set and turned this unimaginative dialogue into a living, breathing explosion of unforgettable romance. Like many hard-core Star Wars fans who are also George Lucas haters, I used to constantly point out that Kershner (and maybe Kasdan and maybe Brackett and
maybe
producer Gary Kurtz) was the true genius of
The Empire Strikes Back
, and George Lucas was just sort of a useless man-behind-the-curtain. A non-wizard of Oz. But I was wrong.

From a certain point of view, Irvin Kershner is actually just an accomplice to George Lucas's make-it-up-as-you-go-along revision process. If anything, the total success of
The Empire Strikes Back
, thanks to Kershner's directorial skill,
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proved to Lucas that he (and his cohorts) could get away with anything. They were just like the Rebels! Don't have a plan for how these movies are going to turn out? Don't worry! We'll just make it up as we go along! This kind of admirable nonsense is why
The
Empire Strikes Back
is a miracle and not a masterpiece. Or to put it another way: it was a miracle the year it came out, but it's a masterpiece
now
. And ultimately, there's something totally rock and roll about George Lucas's borderline dismissal of convention in making the original
Star Wars
trilogy. Here was someone so disinterested in this wonderful thing he'd created that he actually tried to farm out the screenplay to someone else. Like Conan Doyle before him, George Lucas, at least in the early days, clearly felt like he was above the “kids movie” he'd made, and so, he treated the process by which he made the films immaturely. This isn't a dig. This is why he's awesome.

Still, we're dealing with a process that seems like it shouldn't have worked. And when you get to
Return of the Jedi
, the sad truth is, it didn't. As a child my favorite movie (period) was
Return of the Jedi
. There are a lot of dumb little-kid reasons for this (the Ewoks are cute; Admiral Ackbar is a talking fish person), but I think the overwhelming real reason is that Luke Skywalker resolves all of his family's problems and that everyone lives happily ever after. If
A New Hope
was a homage to an old adventure serial like
Flash Gordon
, and
The Empire Strikes Back
was a bizarre, dark hybrid of contemporary filmmaking and Shakespearean tragedy, then
Return of the Jedi
is a good old-fashioned fairy tale. Luke Skywalker rides into town, rescues his best friend, gets his dad to kick his bad habits, and everyone sits around the campfire and tells stories about it. Throw in some speeder-bikes and a ton of awesome monsters and you've got a movie that feels more like a family film than
any of the other Star Wars movies, especially the prequels. When you grow up, though, you begin to detest this movie because it feels like it took one look at all the dark and twisted themes of
The Empire Strikes Back
and said, “Never mind.”

For one thing, Luke Skywalker's character seems to have developed in between
Empire
and
Jedi
. When we leave Luke in the final moments of
Empire
, he's practically just recovered from crying and almost (maybe?) attempting suicide.
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From his first moments in
Jedi
, however, he's a total badass, a man who takes no shit and gives zero fucks as to what anyone thinks of him. How did he become this way? In addition to advice, did Yoda also give Luke some Prozac or lithium or Ritalin? Has all of that stuff just finally kicked in by the time of
Return of the Jedi
? We're meant to think of
Return of the Jedi
as Luke's journey toward becoming a grown-up, but the fact is, he's pretty much this person at the beginning of the movie: calm, confident, and willing to face up to consequences. True, we see Luke being “tempted” by the Dark Side of the Force when the Emperor is making fun of him for fighting with Vader. But as many have argued, the audience never really believes there's much for Luke to gain by turning to the Dark Side, meaning it's a non-choice and doesn't play that well dramatically.
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Perhaps we are
a little worried Luke might die, but his soul has already been saved, so as nice as it is to see him happy, it's a little boring.

Similarly, in
Return of the Jedi
after Han Solo is rescued from the vile clutches of Jabba the Hutt, there's not much tension for that character either. No longer as roguish or as funny,
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Han Solo is given the rank of general and spends most of the movie playing second fiddle to Luke. In
Empire
, Luke, Han, and Leia felt more like an ensemble, as they did in the first film, only more so. But in
Jedi
, Leia and Han are mostly just there to support Luke and the basic “plot.” Harrison Ford has said repeatedly in interviews that he wanted Han to get killed in
Jedi
to bring the character's arc to a more tragic conclusion. There are also indications from Kasdan that it would be a good idea for Lando to get killed by the Sarlacc toward the start of the movie to let people know that particular monster was “for real.” True or not, this seems to all have been shot down by Lucas in an effort to demonstrate that the good guys were all going to win and that, just this once, everybody lives. In a sense, even people who die get to live. At the end of the film, the last thing we see are the ghosts of Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Anakin, meaning that the only people who really died in the
movie were either minor characters (those poor Rebel pilots) or bad guys.

Leia, sadly, has the least amount of character development other than discovering she's Luke's sister, which makes her ability to pick Han as her boyfriend a little easier. If this was truly the end of a three-part story about these three people, you'd think Leia and Han would have been able to do more soul-searching, the way they did in
Empire
. This is doubly strange because even though we learn Leia is Luke's sister (and therefore a member of the Skywalkers) she doesn't use the Force or do anything coolly reminiscent of having Jedi powers. I attempted a full rewrite of
Return of the Jedi
many times when I was in my early twenties, but for me it comes down to one thing that could have easily been changed. When Han, Chewie, and Leia are all on Endor captured by the Empire, they are saved, we discover, because the Ewoks rise up and throw some rocks on the Stormtroopers. Why did the writing go in this direction when the story has Leia sitting right there?