Star Wars Going Commercial? Oh, Right, Normal… (Or, Look, It’s Boba Fett and Han Solo!)
If you haven’t already heard from io9, Entertainment Weekly, and Geeks of Doom, Lucasfilm is considering the possibility of two standalone Star Wars films — one involving an origin story for Han Solo, set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope (III and IV), and the other involving Boba Fett either between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back (IV and V) or Empire and The Return of the Jedi (VI). That is, of course, if you accept the rumors (including this weird one about a Yoda movie). Frankly, we don’t have much reason to believe Disney won’t make as many Star Wars movies as they possible can, especially when you consider just how lucrative the universe has been for Lucas and his various companies. Any new movie would equal a new video game, new books, new merchandise, and on and on and on and on. Basically, unless a Star Wars movie ends up flopping at the box office — unlikely — Disney will probably pump out as many movies as is reasonable. Expect one of these years to become “the year of Star Wars,” with t hree different movies/series releasing all at the same time… (that’s my rumor — you can quote me). What do I think about all this? First, I’m not actually all that bothered by the prospect of a whole bunch of new Star Wars movies. Honestly, I expect Disney to handle the franchise well enough; they might even do a better job of it than Lucas has in the last decade-ish. I’m likely to see most of the movies, regardless of their setting, characters, and so on, if only because I have been a Star Wars nut since I was a kid (my mother gave me the VHS tapes of the Leonard Maltin editions, and I still have them — in fact, I have two sets, because I wanted one that I could play without worrying about damaging the tapes…I was a weird teenager). I see pride! I see power! I see a bad-ass mother who don’t take no crap off of nobody! My concern is that Disney will produce Star Wars films it shouldn’t just because it can. While an origin story for Han Solo or an expansion of Boba Fett’s sparse plot in the originals might be interesting, it does make me wonder whether there aren’t new and more interesting ways to inject freshness into a franchise that has, if we’re being honest, been pretty stale (with some exceptions to a few of the extended universe products — books and games in particular). I love Star Wars and always will, but I’m also a bit bored of seeing the same old characters being trotted out over and over. Now that we’ve followed through the origin of Darth Vader, I’d really like to see more new stuff. New characters. New stories. And not just origins for characters living during the major events of the prequel and original trilogies. I want to see stories set beyond the current film franchises. I’m like a snake. I lure you into a false sense of security, andthen I shot your ass under a table, melting your green skinlike a mutated cake from a galaxy far, far away… Fool… Think about it. For those that follow the extended universe (I have some familiarity), imagine all the ways Disney could reinvigorate the franchise with new and exciting plots. Take, for example, the post-Empire narratives, from the final death knell of the Empire to the various new invasions and terrors that befell the New Republic. Even more fascinating might be to take us all the way outside of the immediate aftermath (an easier feat when you consider that most of the original cast is too damn old to reprise their roles) and film the Young Jedi stuff (the solo kids would make a great new set of heroes for new Star Wars fans) or even the incredible Yuuzhan Vong War, which would allow the original cast to return as secondary characters (or even as primaries, if one wanted to go that route — I’m not sold either way) and allow us to see the New Republican and the New Jedi Order engage in one of the most important, violent conflicts of its new life. The dreams of a Republic scattered like so much biology… Basically, I’m saying that there is too much to show us in this world to let it go to waste re-hashing stuff we’ve already seen. Sure, Han Solo is a great character, but he’s an old character. We more or less know his story; a prequel won’t change that. We even know Boba Fett, to some extent, and so imagining his pre-ROTJ past doesn’t really add anything to the film franchise. The only new material we’re getting is in whatever film J. J. Abrams ends up making, but I’m not sure where he’s going to set that story (or, rather, what Disney will let him and his writer do with the universe). I can dream for a Mara Jade narrative, but I also have this absurd notion that Mark Hamill must reprise his role as Luke Skywalker at some point. He can’t do that in the Mara Jade plot because he’s just too old (sorry, Mark), and I’m not sure I like the idea of casting a young blond guy to play the role… I guess my biggest concern is that Disney will try so hard to keep the money coming in that they’ll piss on the only opportunity I see that could make Star Wars more than just “that series we loved as kids, and which gave us enough merchandise to destroy a planet.” I want to go back into that movie theater and have the experience of a lifetime — my first, actual Star Wars experience (the one older folks talk about all the time when they wax nostalgic about 1977). But I don’t expect that to happen…
Literary Explorations: Jack London’s The Iron Heel and the Political Dystopia
In a recent discussion on The Skiffy and Fanty Show (it’s here), Andrew Liptak, James Decker, Paul Weimer, and I discussed the prevalence of dystopian narratives in science fiction. At one point, Andrew suggested that dystopias are, in large part, responses to the political climate of the author’s present. I agree with this assessment in principle, but I think the idea collapses when applied to works of the popular dystopia tradition — the “dystopia is hip” crowd, if you will. The Iron Heel, however, is the most obvious example of a literary response to a particular political climate — in this case, the U.S. boom-and-bust economy at the turn-of-the-century.* Told through the memoirs of Avis Everhard, The Iron Heel employs a number of literary devices to explore its political climate. First, London frames Avis’ narrative with Anthony Meredith, a historian from a future in which the Revolution (i.e., the Socialist Revolution) has succeeded, resulting in an apparent utopia — though we are never given much information about this future world. Meredith introduces and annotates the “journals” of Avis Everhard, herself attempting to relay her past life with Ernest Everhard and the first revolts — all of which fail. We know from the start that both Avis and Ernest are dead, the latter due to some form of execution, but that their desires to see some form of change will find their realization some 700 years later. The confusing narrative structure is probably best understood in terms of time: Anthony Meredith is writing from 700 years into the future Avis Everhard is writing in the 1930s about events that took place roughly between 1912-1917 Ernest Everhard’s speeches occur in Avis’ recent past What is important about these shifts is how they relate to the political climate of London’s 1908 present, and to the same climate that drove the early Dystopians to begin the literary tradition of critiquing utopian social concepts (more prevalent in Europe and the surrounding territories than in the U.S. in the last 1800s to the early 1900s).** The Iron Heel directs much of its attention on the same issues that were a concern of the Progressives (see these sites on The Progressive Era for historical details): rapid industrialization, commodification (the early stages, that is — not what Fredric Jameson would identify with the cultural commodities of the Postmodern Era), social strife (women’s rights, early African American rights movements, etc.), and so on were all important issues of the time. In particular, London’s “hero,” Ernest Everhard, takes the form of the revolutionary who wants to set right a world of economic inequality/monetary totalitarianism and to prevent or destroy the Oligarchy (The Iron Heel itself), which, by the end of the book, manages to reduce most of society to absolute poverty (in a nutshell).*** The Iron Heel not only addresses many of these economic concerns, but it also does so by making their logical steps “forward” a part of the plot of the narrative itself. Instead of imagining a future world where the Oligarchy has taken over, London shows us how the world came to be under the Oligarchy’s control, springing off of a real-world historical/political/economic context that certainly resonated with contemporary audiences. Maurice Goldbloom, writing in Issue 25 of Commentary (1958), argued that the popularity of London and Lewis Sinclair’s (It Happened to Didymus) work stemmed from the fact that “both write recognizably about their own time, and about those aspects of it which are of most concern to ordinary people wherever they are” (454). He further suggested that because many of the issues that presaged the writing of The Iron Heel remained in 1958, London’s novel couldn’t avoid continue relevance throughout history.**** I don’t want to bore everyone with the socialist teachings of the book, themselves a product of London’s attempts to come to terms with his own beliefs about capitalism and socialism.***** Rather, what I want to point out is the way this novel fits into a larger paradigm of political dystopias — that is, works of dystopian literature which are direct responses to real-world concerns, as opposed to the anti-utopians (i.e., the Dystopians) who simply rejected the supposed utopian impulse in political thought. London (and E. M. Forster in the 1909 short story, “The Machine Stops“), like many writers that followed in the wake of the First World War, was one of the first to do just what I am describing, and his work, whether directly or otherwise, influenced dystopian literature through the pre- and post-Second World War periods, from Sinclair Lewis’ fascist dystopia in It Can’t Happen Here (1935) to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s satire of the Soviet Union in We (1921)(not in chronological order, obviously). The trend continued through George Orwell in his most famous works, 1984 (1949; apparently influenced directly by The Iron Heel and We, if Michael Shelden is to be believed in Orwell: The Authorized Biography (1991)) and Animal Farm (1945) — both works deeply concerned with totalitarian forms of government (a common trend); to Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” (1961) — a dystopian look at radical equality; Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta — totalitarianism again; and P. D. James’ Children of Men — an allegory of reproductive rights. There are plenty of books I’m leaving out, of course, but the idea, I think, is clear. The political format of dystopian literature — the political dystopia — has a long and incredible history in literature, and it is a tradition that continues to this day, such as in Max Barry’s Jennifer Government (2003) or Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale (1999).****** Unlike many works of dystopian literature, the various ones I have mentioned here have directly engaged with real-world issues, often set within the author’s present. They attest to the remarkable ability for dystopia and science fiction to engage with our contemporary world by opening up the dialogue that is so crucial to any political system. Even if we recognize that many of these dystopias are unlikely, the intellectual exercise entailed in reading political dystopias, I believe, fosters the critical faculties we