The end of a decade. The internet is full of lists. Best films. Best books. Best cussing. I was born in a year ending in zero, so the end of a decade for everyone else always carries a different weight for me. I’m creeping up on forty, and as everyone else wants to discuss entertainment milestones, I find myself thinking of personal ones. It’s not my style to write personal blogs like this anymore. I prefer to let my fiction do the talking. But…there’s something in the air. What are the ten best movies of the decade? What are the ten best albums? What are the ten best versions of myself, right before my own odometer turns over?
It’s made even more pointed in a decade that closes with the ‘final’ Star Wars movie. I tell people that I’m not a Star Wars fan. But for anyone my age that’s a half-truth. Empire Strikes Back came out the year I was born. I’ve grown up in a Star Wars culture, whether I currently engage with it or not. My first toy craze was He-Man, my second was Transformers. Thundercats. The Turtles were my last big toy thing, before I moved into the next stage of my life. But Star Wars was always there. My uncles were only a decade older than me, so the toys I inherited were all still recent. He-Man and Transformers may have been the things I was looking for in toyshops, but Luke, Han, Chewie, and that piano-playing-alien, were what I had in the box at home. (Along with the Six Million Dollar Man, Action Man, a Lone Ranger toy that I was accused of breaking, and a battered metal Batmobile.) It mattered that I was the only kid at school who didn’t have the Millennium Falcon. The films ended before I was attending the cinema, but mine was the generation that had a different kind of Star Wars experience; it came into our homes. The droids and ewoks cartoons. The spin-off movies. The comics. The novels. In the long gap between Return of the Jedi and the special editions, two (close) generations of fans kept the property alive in an analog version of fandom that doesn’t really exist anymore.
And then we also killed it.
But I’ll get there.
I guess my journey with fandom has matched my evolution as a person. At times I’ve loved things deeply and unironically, at others I’ve kept my affection buried in layers of snark and bitterness. These days I’m mostly found searching out honesty, positivity, and heart. And at some stops along the way, I’ve really not been nice.
My big theory on life is that we don’t change into different people as we age, rather, we become better or worse at being who we really are. That’s a pattern that holds true in my writing. All of my characters, if you look at them in the right light, are on journeys of self-realisation. They don’t transform, as bad writing advice tends to insist. They either figure out who they are, and survive, or stay trapped in ignorance, and fail. I see that motif in the work of Elmore Leonard. An easy (read: lazy) criticism of his work is that he didn’t handle plot very well. But the truth, which seems both harder and easier to grasp, is that he was solely focused on character. On people who either figure themselves out, and live in the moment, or miss the signs and die. I’m sure it’s also why, when I finally got round to watching The Last Jedi over a year after its release, I was so moved by the choices made by Luke Skywalker. I’d grown up with his journey. The angry and frustrated young kid, keen to escape, to race, to blast his problems with a gun, who grew to be troubled by his own darker impulses and inner power, before ‘finally’ choosing to let go of his anger and put down the weapon. Thirty years on we met an older version of the character, and he seemed, to me, to be exactly where he should be. He’s made mistakes in the years since we last met. Big mistakes. His inner battle was never won or lost. It never could be. Good days and bad days. Before too many of the latter, and too many hours staring into his own darker impulses, had led him to withdraw from the world. And then, finally, when that world came calling, and when the universe needed some kind of new hope again, he found a way to make the last stand while also honouring all of his personal lessons. He won by being himself. I found that to be a beautiful storytelling choice, and the most honest way to handle the journey. The Last Jedi seems to be a lesson in people not seeing the difference between what a character in a film says, and what the film itself is saying. Yes, the angry young man (who killed his own father in the previous film) insists you need to kill the past. And yes, Luke Skywalker spend a portion of the film sitting on an island refusing to re-join the fight. But the whole point of the journey was to repudiate those positions. Luke turns up, hope is reignited, faith is rewarded, but it’s all done in a way that stays true to character.
On the flip side of that, a lot of people saw their childhood hero die, and they really were not ready for it. We don’t seem to be ready for a lot of things. Emotional honesty. Feelings. Grief. Letting go. Any experience that takes us out of the comfortably numb, detached, ironic existence we’ve carved out for ourselves. Nostalgia seems increasingly to be a storytelling technique employed by writers of my generation. Trading on old emotions, old associations. But my own tastes are for stories that give me emotions in present tense, plugging me into now and tomorrow.
But I’m skipping ahead again.
I saw The Phantom Menace on opening night. I saw Attack of the Clones at a midnight screening. I didn’t see Revenge of the Sith in the theatre, and, if I’m honest, I can’t actually remember if I’ve ever seen it. I know the big moments through cultural osmosis, but did I ever really see the film? And what happened, over the course of that trilogy, that sapped my interest? I’m of the generation that cracked the Jar Jar jokes. The cruel barbs that led an actor to contemplate suicide, simply because he’d played a children’s character in a set of big fun movies. I’m of the generation that turned on George Lucas, while accusing him of betraying us, because wedidn’t think he did a good enough job of telling his own damn story. And in saying I’m of that generation, I’m not trying to pass the buck or distance myself. I was one of them. Star Wars never really did anything to hurt me. George Lucas was guilty of nothing more than continuing to tell his children’s morality tales of space wizards and evil lords. But we had all collectively created something, in that space between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, that was ours. Lucas had handed Star Wars off to us, into our homes, into our toyboxes and our comic books and our dreams, and then he came and demanded it back. How did we handle that? Not well, troops. Not well. Han shot fist, god damn it. He did. I remember it.
I think I do, anyway.
Somewhere in my twenties I not only fell out with Star Wars, but I would happily tell anyone who listened all about the many problems inherent in the franchise. Because that’s just how damn clever I was. What was I hiding from? Why did sincerity bother me so much? I don’t know, really. At some point all of my pop culture was jaded, cynical. And it felt like the world was matching me. Our heroes had to be broken people. Our idealism had to be buried in irony. Even the Doctor, the character who has two hearts and travels through space and time fixing things and saving people, had to become a PTSD-riddled destroyer of worlds, the lone survivor of a pointless war.
Here’s a truth, uncomfortable to some. George Lucas owes us nothing. No artist does. If we’ve drawn as little as one second of escape, or comfort, in the work they’ve produced, they’ve done their job. A favourite musician who changes their style is not betraying you. A treasured football player who moves to a different club isn’t a traitor. A beloved filmmaker who makes new films is not stealing the old ones away from you. Harrison Ford does not need to give you a second more of his time, simply because he once did a thing you liked with a whip or a quip. In fact, in giving you that memory, he’s already done more for you than most other people ever will. Treasure that. Keep it. And move on.
Star Wars came out in 1977, and it was for children of all ages. Star Wars came out in 1999, and it was for children of all ages. Star Wars came out in 2015, and it was for children of all ages. I love Doctor Who. The show started in 1963, and was for children of all ages. It started in 2005, and was for children of all ages. The new season begins next week, for children of…
What changed in me? What changed in my early twenties, that made me turn away from Star Wars? What changed in my thirties, that made me turn back towards a brighter, more hopeful, pop culture? I have no idea. I hope that my big theory on life is right, and this is me getting better at being who I really am. I hope that I’m finding the way to be true to myself while also giving other people what they need of me.
When Star Wars came back again, I wasn’t there waiting for it. I’ve tried to figure out why, a few times. It felt like the same frustrations that ‘drove’ me away in my twenties were keeping me away now, but from the opposite perspective. I was very much part of the problem when I was younger, and I walked all of that baggage off. But the problem was still there, in the fandom, and now it was becoming a barrier to entry. The twenty-something version of me would probably have gone back out of nostalgia, simply to wait for chances to snipe. But the thirty-something version of me just didn’t really need to be involved in any of it.
I can’t escape the feeling that part of what has kept me away from the franchise is, like that fella in the robes, the fear of seeing too much of myself. With the new trilogy has come reminders of the toxicity that plagued the last one. The middle-aged (mostly) men who aren’t very good at sharing. Something that is probably, if I’m honest, a version of me that I remember, and a version of me that I spent a long time killing.
The Force Awakens came and went, and I didn’t go to see it. Rogue One hit the theatres, and I went, because it felt like I might enjoy it, but I came away worried that Star Wars was being made by the wrong people now. It looked and felt like an old Star Wars movie, but also feels (to me) like it misses the heart and soul of Star Wars. It was a cover band. So I decided to give Last Jedi a miss, and sat back, and watched the internet eat itself alive. I watched a woman of colour driven off social media by assholes, simply for being hired to play a character in a movie. And I knew this wasn’t new. If social media had existed twenty years earlier, I would almost certainly have been doing the same thing, without thinking through the implications.
Eventually I caved and watched both of the two new episodes. Seven and Eight. Ultimately, I think my own journey over the past decade was fully in sync with everything The Last Jedi had to say. Stories -like the Force- are not owned by one protective, exclusive, group. Fandom is for everyone. But it doesn’t always need to be for everyone equally. I think big, bold, positive stories need to reach those who most need to see them. I had my Luke Skywalker. I’ve had my doctors. And, god dammit, as a near-middle-aged man, I got to see Steve Rogers pick up Mjolnir and stand alone against Thanos. A moment we’ve been waiting for since we were children, but a moment that we got to share with other generations, with the children here and now who needed that lesson.That simple movie beat in Endgame, Steve, battered, broken, standing back up on his own, showed how some people will always get back up. Even if the lights are out, even if nobody can see the stand being taken. And the beat that followed, on your left…portals…showed that people like that will never need to stand alone. Faith was rewarded. Faith in people. Not things.
I love finding moments like that in stories now. I found a similar beat in Last Jedi where the last remaining fighters against a fascist regime were asking for help, and standing alone, and one of my childhood heroes, Luke Skywalker, turned up to show that they were not alone, and reignited the same hope he’d sparked in 1977. But older, and wiser, and on his own terms.
And half of fandom seemed to hate every single thing about that, and as I stare at the internet, I don’t really understand why.