On Saturday, June 30, 2018, I sat down to watch Solo: A Star Wars Story on its opening weekend in Japan. It was a late-show screening at my local Toho Cinemas. By Monday morning, I would be a married man.
Like other international couples we know, we didn’t have a wedding ceremony. We just went down to city hall. The first part of our honeymoon comes next month.
This is obviously huge personal news, but it’s not often I let my personal life encroach on this blog. So what does me tying the knot have to do with the new Star Wars movie, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you …
Life After Luke - How Solo: A Star Wars Story Helped Me Come to Terms with Growing Up and Letting Go
Solo: A Star Wars Story is the movie equivalent of an amicable breakup. That’s a metaphor my mind keeps returning to as the dust settles from Solo and The Last Jedi and we enter the comparatively long, limbo-like stretch from Solo to Star Wars: Episode IX. Like so many other fans, I’ve had a passionate, on-again, off-again love affair with the Star Wars franchise throughout my life. However, I’m 37 now and in terms of emotion, the return of Star Wars from the ashes of the prequels peaked for me last year with the 40th anniversary and the death of Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi.
During that time, I experienced something of an online contact high from the subculture of Star Wars fandom. Some of that was chronicled in two long /Film articles I wrote:
Unlearn What You Have Learned: Luke Skywalker is the Greatest ‘Star Wars’ Character
Addressing the Four Biggest ‘The Last Jedi’ Fan Complaints
Feelings are subject to change — who knows, maybe the best Star Wars movies are still ahead of us — but the way I feel right now, as both a fan and consumer (let’s face it, the Disney-Star Wars industrial complex targets wallets), is that The Last Jedi was my intense last waltz with the galaxy far, far away. I know we’ll meet again but I don’t know if it will ever be the same between us.
The original Star Wars trilogy was a fairytale and owing to that, perhaps, there’s a whole generation of fans who have had almost a fairytale romance with those movies in their heads. We refer back to that constantly when envisioning what an ideal Star Wars movie should be, but it may well have created an impossible standard for any new able-bodied filmmakers to meet. We’re now four films into the Disney era and personally, I’ve liked or loved every one of the new films to varying degrees. Yet with each of them, I’ve also had my little issues — nitpicks, gripes, grievances — that I have to overlook in order to enjoy the movies.
Now that I’m old enough to see their flaws, that’s not so different from how I feel about A New Hope and Return of the Jedi. But if nothing else, the music and design aspects of those movies still affirm them as unparalleled feats of imagination. If you think about all those old John Williams cues and the vehicles and the armor and the aliens and environments and how they all came together in a highly concentrated dose of world-building, there’s been nothing on quite the same level of uniqueness and originality ever since. It’s led me to realize that maybe nothing’s ever going to be able to fully recapture the same special spark of magic as the original trilogy, simply because it was lightning in a bottle, a natural phenomenon that was briefly contained in the field but is now being replicated in a post-modern lab.
Basically, what I’m getting at here is that Solo represents a conscious uncoupling of me and Star Wars. I say that with tongue firmly planted in cheek, like a writer adopting a stance that isn’t funny enough to be in The Onion or McSweeney’s but is just as absurd. What’s sad is that it’s also half-true?
You can read my review of the film here:
'Solo: A Star Wars Story' - The Gaijin Ghost Review
For a child of the ‘80s who amassed a collection of Kenner Star Wars action figures through clearance shelves at toy stores and neighborhood garage sales, it feels a bit odd but also liberating to finally have the same level of healthy detachment toward Star Wars as “the normals” (the kind of adults who don’t sink money into 6-inch Black Series figures). I’m still invested in mainline characters like Rey and Finn, but my mind is a blank slate now regarding Episode IX and I have no expectations of it like I would if Star Wars and I were still in the middle of the relationship drama that we suffered for years.
Taking the breakup metaphor and running further with it, I’m content to let my relationship with Star Wars settle into a new platonic status quo. We’ll still remain good friends — I know that — because Star Wars was my first love and I have the kind of deep-seated bond with it that could only grow up out of youth. But from now on, I’ll have to accept that Star Wars is with someone else: namely, a new corporate owner and a new generation of fans. It’s my ex but I’m happy for the times we had together and who knows, maybe we’ll make some nice new memories in the future as we see each other at casual get-togethers in the vein of Solo.
It’s the letting-go aspect of this that I thought might resonate, given the current state of Star Wars fandom. The empire of dreams seems more divided than ever, and in some ways, it feels like making a Star Wars movie has almost gotten to be a thankless task, because there’s always going to be one segment of fans who aren’t happy. There’s a vocal contingent of disaffected haters out there (whether they’re a minority or majority is beyond my powers to judge), and of course, there are many other true believers still carrying a torch for Star Wars all around the world. But I think there’s also a good-sized contingent of people who are sort of on the rebound, in a vulnerable state right now. Those people are in the mode where they’re turning up the song “I Will Survive.” They tell themselves they’re over it, but of course, none of us are ever really over it with Star Wars. It’s the old flame that will always stir up feelings in us.
If whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, then maybe the best way to toughen yourself up sometimes is to repeatedly expose yourself to the thing that hurts you or lets you down. Star Wars belongs to the world now and even before Disney took the reins, the prequels had already started waging a war of attrition on my own personal expectations and desires as a fan. It’s been almost twenty years now since the first trailer for The Phantom Menace debuted in theaters. With Solo: A Star Wars Story, we’ve now come full circle to another prequel. The last two decades’ worth of movies have frustrated me and delighted me in equal measure, rekindling the romance of Star Wars but ultimately wearing me down to the point where I’ve grown numb and am no longer capable of harboring any ill will even toward Jar Jar Binks.
Loving Star Wars means wanting the best for it but also relinquishing ownership of it. That’s what I’m doing with the franchise after Solo: A Star Wars Story. Let’s see what the next forty years of movies bring.
Looking back over this, it seems quite silly, now that I’m legitimately married, to couch my relationship with Star Wars in quasi-romantic terms. Maybe that’s the point. There’s no comparing the love that I feel for my wife with my affinity for this fictional space franchise. Even just typing that — as if somehow it wasn’t a given — makes me feel like I’ve gone too far with this terrible man-boy metaphor when I should be lavishing my new spouse with affection. (In my defense, she’s at work and I’m off right now, home alone and catching up on missed movie blogging.)
In my Solo review, I mentioned Saturday Night Live, and I guess what this all boils down to is that my inner adult is having the Mark Hamill equivalent of a William Shatner moment, wanting to take my inner child aside at the ongoing Star Wars convention and say: “Get a life!” Maybe Simon Pegg — an actor who has appeared in both Star Trek and Star Wars films — was right when he talked about how “we’ve been infantilized” by pop culture.
And with that, my young padawans, comes the announcement that this post will be the last Star Wars-related one that I do for the foreseeable future. With freelancing and other things keeping me busy, I’ve had less and less time to update this website. While I still plan on maintaining the site as a portfolio with links to freelance work I’ve done, and while I still plan on updating it with blog entries and photo galleries as time permits, this post effectively closes the book on the project that I started back in 2016, looking at Star Wars through the lens of Japanese culture.
Writing in that niche is what allowed me to break into the freelance market in the first place. Though it was my second published post, the very first pitch I had accepted for a paid article on /Film was Exploring the Japanese Roots of ‘Star Wars.’
In lieu of an ebook, I’ll be condensing down the blog’s Star Wars in Japan sidebar section to a single Table of Contents post and then probably filing that under Film-Lover’s Guide to Japan. The Last Jedi felt like a definitive end to the first 40-year chapter of Star Wars history, so maybe it’s appropriate to wrap up this whole long project I’ve been working on as the next chapter in the space saga starts.