Last week Lucasfilm very casually announced the title of the highly anticipated beginning of the next Star Wars trilogy; Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The film, which just wrapped principle photography and is slated for a December 18th, 2015 release, has apparently dropped the numeration which was made popular by the Special Edition and Prequel trilogies. This hearkens back to the Original Trilogy which has been director JJ Abrams’ main focus in the creation of this next film.
Falling inline with the previous first chapters of each trilogy this title is a bit vague and carries the same kind of mystery of the first two films. Who is the new hope? What is the phantom menace? How does the Force wake up?
I’m feeling the title. Actually, the more I think about it the more I love it. A friend of mine sent me a text the other day. ‘I broke down and read a bunch of the Episode VII leaks’ He said ‘You better hope that stuffs all fake.’ I’ve seen some of the ‘rumors’ going around. One claims that Luke is actually hidden away on a distant planet. Others claim that he is an evil cyborg, while others simply state that he is grappling with his own powers. This all plays on our nostalgia. Decades have passed since Return of the Jedi. Decades where, hypothetically, only one person had a working knowledge of The Force: Luke Skywalker. Still, focusing on the Skywalker name has many saying isn’t the universe bigger than a desert world on the Outer Rim?
Ultimately, nostalgia embraces us and keeps us from taking risks on something new. We’re afraid to see something we could potentially hate out of fear of being taken advantage of or made to feel like fools. The more lost we feel the more we long for what once was. With the fog of years between our first exposure and our current memory, we cannot recall the flaws in our judgement. There is something about taking a theme and re-imagining it in new and honorable way that honors the current zeitgeist, but when fear of losing capital, whether our own money or a producers, we balk and go back to what was a guaranteed feeling of satisfaction. This has far greater implications than just media. It’s an attempt to feel immortal and still feel relevant about current events.
Now, If you haven’t yet…PLEASE watch Midnight in Paris. It explores the notion of nostalgia. In it, a man is transported back to 1920s Paris every evening where he meets several literary and artistic idols: it’s Mecca to this guy, a successful screenwriter who wants something more. While there, he falls in love with Picasso’s girlfriend, and here’s where it gets interesting: she in turn is transported back to 1890s Paris: her Mecca, just as 1920s Paris is the man’s.
What the film ultimately suggests, to me, is that nostalgia is something of a false god: there’s no intrinsic value to the things we idolise in our youth, and more often than not I think the things we held dear to our hearts back then can turn out to be crap or at least overrated. From that perspective, nostalgia feels like something of a cheap trick to employ.
Nostalgia can be a dangerous thing. There are so many instances in which we look at things through those famous rose-colored glasses and see them as we want to remember them, without looking at them in the plain light of day. Not every movie, TV show, comic book or novel we enjoyed as a child or teenager is going to hold up today. That doesn’t mean they’re bad — it’s just that sensibilities, both ours and the culture’s at large — have moved on.
If you’re going to tell new Star Wars stories, tell new Star Wars stories. Give the kids of today their own mythology to fall in love with. And, by all means, make it fun.
-Dagobot
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