Luke Skywalker Can't Read (4 page)

By the time I turned eighteen, that particular corporate bookstore had an incompressible magazine section, a ridiculously mis-shelved philosophy section, and a self-help section that would actually cause people to have new emotional breakdowns. But the science fiction/fantasy section was now
meticulous
. In an era before
Wikipedia
could guide me, I'd created subgenres other branches of our chain bookstore wouldn't have dreamed of, and within a specific author section, the book titles were no longer shelved alphabetically. No, no, no. Now, those titles were shelved in publication order, meaning back then, we
had
The Chronicles of Narnia
in what many today would consider the “right” order.

When it came to the Star Wars books, though, doing it by author or publication order made zero sense, and here, Captain Space Pirate was super-impressed with what I'd come up with. Back then, when the Internet was more like a bad special effect than something pervading our real life, I'd put the Star Wars books in an order I'm fairly confident existed only in a handful of other places at the time. Just as John Cusack's Rob organizes his records “autobiographically” in
High Fidelity
, I put the Star Wars books in a specific reading order; each section told the specific biography of a particular character. There was a small Han Solo section; a section for books that were more Princess Leia–centric; a section for some of the anthologies out at the time that focused on the minor, briefly seen characters; a Chewbacca section; plus larger stretches of shelves for Luke, and his dad, Darth Vader.

Meanwhile, was I right about
The Matrix
? Well, as a real adult, I've come up with a fairly comprehensive Matrix rip-off list, including a good chunk on William Gibson's cyberpunk stuff and the famous 1967 Harlan Ellison story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.” In that particular short story, people are tortured by a gleefully malevolent computer program that hates them. The story ends with a dude literally being turned into a blobby thing that doesn't have a mouth, like Keanu losing his mouth at the start of
The Matrix
.

I've never lost my big mouth, but I did figure out having one wasn't the thing that made science fiction like rock and roll. Instead, you had to really
be cool
to be cool. Like Captain Space
Pirate, I figured out the best way to look at this stuff is to wear your leather jacket over your button-down and tie, and to talk about science fiction like it is the only thing that matters, but know your stuff, too. Even if you loved Star Wars, you probably wouldn't have noticed my bizarrely nuanced shelving system, which evokes that age-old question: if you can speak perfect Ewokese but there's not an Ewok around to hear it, does it still count as perfect? I think Captain Space Pirate knew the answer, and after that summer, so did I.

G
rowing up, I thought I was just like Luke Skywalker. While Luke lived on a desert planet called Tatooine and I lived in a desert suburb called Mesa, Arizona, we were both weirdo loners with outsider interests, and we both longed for adventures that were seemingly prohibited by our sweaty, outdoor, sunburn-causing chores. I bet about a billion little girls and boys felt (and feel) the same way as I did. When Luke Skywalker stares off into the setting suns while the strings of John Williams swell and tell us the desire of his heart, there's nothing that needs to be said here; everyone gets it. It's our society's collective sigh of wonderment, of angst-ridden youth, of the longing for something more. If Luke were a mermaid in a cartoon it would be his moment on the rock, thrusting his chin and chest out to the horizon, daring, wishing he were part of another world.

Maybe I was wrong and I was nothing like Luke Skywalker, and my childhood differed from Luke's in other substantial
ways: he had robot friends, and screwy aliens as neighbors, or an ability to fly spaceships without any formal training. But I had those things, too, because like so many of us, they existed in my brain, in my shows, and in my books. Hey, what's Luke's favorite book anyway?

Sadly, Luke Skywalker doesn't have a favorite book. And even though he's the ultimate dreamer, a craver of adventure, a wide-eyed Joseph Campbell archetype hero, he's initially presented to us as kind of a philistine. This supposed pop descendant of Odysseus and Perseus lives in the zip code of a galaxy far, far away, meaning he's got no Shakespeare, Homer, Robert Louis Stevenson, J. M. Barrie, or even J. K. Rowling to get him excited about packing up and seeking adventure. In Star Wars, romantic notions of adventure don't spring from literature or a received tradition of storytelling. Instead, Luke wants to get out of the house and go to space because he's bored as fuck. And this boredom might not just be because Luke Skywalker doesn't have a favorite book; it's because he actually
can't
read.

As depicted in the first “real”
Star Wars
film, in 1977, Luke Skywalker—when you consider a substantial amount of evidence—is a functionally illiterate person, and his fellow citizens might not be much better off. Not once in any of the existing Star Wars movies does a person, droid, or creature pick up a book or newspaper, magazine, literary journal, or chapbook of Wookiee poetry. Instead, if something is briefly read by someone in Star Wars, it's like one sentence, read off a screen—and even then, almost certainly being “translated” by R2-D2. I say Luke and his buddies are
functionally
illiterate because this tiny amount of reading ends up being the
difference between someone being fluent in a foreign language and having learned just enough to ask for directions. And any way you look at it, no one in Star Wars is reading for fun.

To be fair, finding a popular science fiction or fantasy universe richly populated with its own indigenous art—and more specifically, its own literature—is rare. The funnier-than-everyone novelist and book critic Lev Grossman once said to me, “No one reads any books in Narnia.” Then, with the kind of shit-talking zeal that can only happen when one is bashing the things we love, Lev switched from C. S. Lewis to J. K. Rowling and explained to me that he felt like Harry Potter wasn't really his “kind of hero” either because Harry Potter didn't seem to be a reader. And he's right, because when you think about it, Harry's pal Hermione really digs reading, but her bookish tendencies are treated as an aberration in a world of magic and adventure. More frighteningly, Hermione's love of reading and Harry's and Ron's doltishness actually just mirror most high school clichés and accidently reinforce them. The bookworm kid living in our world who really loves and reads the Harry Potter books can probably
only
identify with Hermione. More broadly, Harry's nonreader status is totally par for this particularly illiterate course of fantastic heroes. But maybe it's not his fault. Maybe an overabundance of stimuli might be to blame. I mean, if you lived at Hogwarts or were roommates with Princess Leia or had a house in Narnia, it stands to reason the escapism reading provides might not be in high demand. Instead, in these kinds of narratives, books tend to be plot devices the characters use to solve problems rather than truly wonderful ends in themselves.

Now, like me, you're totally aware there's a reason why long scenes in novels or movies with characters turning pages and sighing haven't ever once been a thing. You can't depict your characters reading books and hope for a lot of excitement, particularly if they're only reading for pleasure. So, I'm not saying we should “see” characters sitting around and reading. But books and reading change us, make us smarter, and so it bugs me how main characters from big sci-fi or fantasy epics don't seem to really dig reading. The existence or even suggestion of these activities in certain made-up worlds is alarmingly low.

In
The
Lord of the Rings
, Gandalf's reading comes in the form of scrolls and prophecies to figure out what the hell is going on. He's blowing a lot of dust off this shit, too, because it always seems like no one has taken up this kind of thing for a long, long time. Even here in Middle-Earth, a world born from the very literate linguist J. R. R. Tolkien, a place where books
do
exist, they're treated like something other people used to handle. And then—either in the novels or the films—Gandalf's reading of old legends and myths is more like a training montage from a Rocky movie than anything else. Reading powers, ON! Plus, the suggestion that
The Hobbit
or
There and Back Again
exists as some sort of real book (Bilbo's life story?) is borderline insulting to a real memoirist. Because no one seems to ever read anyway, Bilbo writing his life story comes across like a delusional hobbyist deciding he can write a memoir, even though he's never read one.

Still, I love the Hobbits, and the Middle-Earth people, because even though they all don't read as much as I'd like them to, it's
clear they do
have
books, which in part is why they get hip to so much cool stuff so fast. Gandalf might be cramming with those old books and scrolls, but at least he knows what he's looking at.

Very popular science fiction does a little bit better here, with characters on both
Star Trek
and
Battlestar Galactica
being totally down with theatre, novels, and poetry. And even though both the 1978–79 and 2003 versions of
Battlestar Galactica
take place in a similar Star Wars–esque galaxy (they're searching for “Earth,” so they've got to be far, far away), people from Caprica and the other colonies read all the time. They've got so many different kinds of literature, in fact, that President Roslin even likes trashy murder-mystery novels, ones Admiral Adama reads to her by her beside. True, a lot of this made-up literature in
Battlestar
comes across as a little forced, but the attempt to at least create it is in staggering contrast to the paperless Star Wars universe.

Star Trek, meanwhile, has people quoting from Shakespeare and Milton practically from its first aired moments. Furthermore, the first “real” (debatable) episode of the original
Star Trek
, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” boasts a scene in which Gary Mitchell quotes from “Nightingale Woman,” a fictional poem written by someone from another planet, featuring this staggering couplet:
My love has wings / slender feathered things.

The fact that this space-poem totally sucks isn't the point; it's simply that even a one-off character like Gary Mitchell in Star Trek is way more of a well-read person than pretty much anyone we ever meet in Star Wars. Sure, in
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
, Spock gives Kirk Charles Dickens's
A Tale of
Two Cities
as a birthday present. It's totally clear from the dialogue that these guys aren't all that familiar with Dickens, and maybe Spock is trying to start a book club in which these guys will get caught up on the classics in between phasering interstellar assholes and saving idiotic planets. It's like this book gift is on the sly, because we all know Kirk and Spock both cut class in college and are undereducated, too. But still, it's cool these guys are trying.

In his 2009 nonfiction book,
The Tyranny of E-mail
, John Freeman talks a little about Star Trek, pointing out that “science fiction may not always predict the future, but it is often a brilliant counter-mythology—a visible cultural symptom—of our prevailing anxieties.” Meaning if the best and brightest people in Star Trek are a little behind on reading, it seems like a pretty realistic possibility. I'm not sure if there are science fiction writers who live in the futuristic world of Star Trek—what could they possibly write about?
*
—but I do know that no one in the future-world of
The Hunger Games
has a desire to read, become a librarian, or write anything other than memoir. You could make an argument that Star Trek is a utopian vision of the future, and
The Hunger Games
is a dystopian one, but when it comes to how books are regarded, these two wildly different science fiction future-worlds are both downers, at least in relationship to the future of literacy. Being a writer is not a serious thing in these futures, and books are regarded as an
old-school curiosity. Science fiction isn't necessarily proud of its dystopian stance on the future of books, but the idea that people stop reading in the future often seems like a foregone conclusion. In fact, the entire plots of both
Zardoz
and
Logan's Run
end up hinging on the staggering amounts of ignorance most people have, with the former depicting a mustachioed Sean Connery going on a murderous rampage because he found a copy of Frank Baum's
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
in an abandoned library. So, the extremely common sci-fi narrative about reading goes something like this: people get lazy, they forget to read, and everything goes to hell. Still, as bad as Katniss's education might be, like Kirk and Spock, and unlike Luke Skywalker, she can actually (probably) read.

Does Star Wars just not have time for all that crap? As epic fantasy, it's therefore not concerned with the specifics of what people are up to outside of the adventure. Here, realism and culture don't matter as much as story. Many people love to point out (often correctly, I might add) that the debate between science fiction and fantasy sort of permanently wages inside of Star Wars, insofar as science fiction often strives to be more realistic while fantasy is more whimsical and thematic. And yet, there are technical rules about the Force in Star Wars, just as magic has rules in Harry Potter,
The Lord of the Rings
, and Narnia. Plus, in science fiction or fantasy, a fictional “world” has to make sense in order for us to buy the plot, no matter how brass-tacks plausible and whimsically thematic it might be.

But this isn't about calling out the culture of Star Wars as unrealistic. Nope. I'm actually saying the opposite. It's totally realistic. In fact, it's the lack of reading and books that helps
explain why this fictional culture is so screwed up and oppressed. Our media says a lot about us, and in the case of the culture of Star Wars, its indigenous media speaks volumes. In the Star Wars films there is utterly no reportage or journalism, which actually starts to make the possibility of widespread illiteracy more and more likely. In the prequel films—where a more democratic government is supposedly intact—there is a black hole of political news. In
The Phantom Menace
we see floating little cameras bobbing around Natalie Portman in the Senate, but these cameras don't seem to be actually feeding this information anywhere. After watching all the Star Wars movies, we'll later figure out these cameras aren't news cameras and they're just for security.
*
This gets weirder when you realize that Natalie Portman is only there to talk to the Senate
in person
to plead her case because, presumably, no reputable news outlet has
written
about the blockade/invasion of her entire planet.