Star Wars Isn't Star Wars

I watched an Instagram vid this morning all the way through. That's a rare event as I have only a modicum of patience for vids.

The vid was done by Jason Pargin. I've watched his vids before. He writes about film and culture. This piece was about Hollywood, Star Wars and other franchises, and the subsequent decay that occurs in said franchises.

There were things I agreed with and things I disagreed with. And there were things I thought he overlooked that are worth mentioning, in terms of writing and creativity. Pargin talks about Star Wars, the Simpsons, and Ghostbusters in his post, but I'm going to limit myself to discussing Star Wars. Star Wars is the 800 pound gorilla in world entertainment right now, and all other franchises seem to use it as a model.

I'll list his main points:

• The original manifestation of a franchise, such as Star Wars, is usually a highly imaginative work. As sequels and further derivatives emerge, the quality suffers.
• The derivatives are almost always decided for capitalistic reasons. Money runs studios.
• What results is a series of "copies" of the old idea (see Kendric Tonn Tweet), which result in nothing more than "fan fiction".

I'm going to take this bit by bit for the sake of clarity.

Originality

I think we need to discuss exactly what "original" means. Ever since I was a child I was told that there are no original stories. In college, in the orgiastic era of post-modernism, I was told that there is no original, "no there there". Everything is a simulacrum, an especially unsatisfactory simulation or substitute for something real. Or, as Tonn would put it, "xeroxes-of-xeroxes-of-xeroxes".

When I was further along in college, I learned about adaptations, mythology, and structural theory. I'll get to this in a minute.

Is Star Wars, the original movie, "original"? Pargin gives good evidence in his own work that it actually isn't original. Lucas created a pastiche or a collage of ideas created by others. The biggest piece that Lucas used for Star Wars, which I'm surprised Pargin didn't mention, is Joseph Campbell's "Hero With a Thousand Faces". I remember studying the cave scene in Empire Strikes Back in lit classes in junior college and UCLA. It's straight Campbell.

It is more accurate to say Star Wars is a collage. It would be unfair and harsh to say Lucas stole his ideas. I have a very flexible idea of artistic theft and I wouldn't condemn him his decisions.

Capitalism

The manifestation of "franchises" is quite unique in our cultural history. I want to be very specific here. A franchise is a business. Have another definition:

A franchise is a product of capitalism and it has only one point: make money. I will never argue that capitalism hasn't ruined movies, TV, art, music, artists, musicians, and on and on and on.

There is a distinct difference between "Star Wars the Franchise" and "Star Wars the Art". The franchise will cut corners if necessary in order to make money. Have they? We can only speculate. We love to speculate. We watch The Mandalorian and speculate as to why it was so unsatisfactory, why it seemed uninteresting, boring, trite. It must be because they didn't spend enough money on it. They didn't hire the right people. They didn't have the right writers.

Pargin and Tonn speculate as well, and claim it's because of the franchise: they aren't doing anything original because all they want is a product that is merely rewriting the old ideas because that's what people pay for.

We can look at it another way. Rather than looking at Star Wars the Franchise, and blaming capitalism for its shortcomings, let's look at Star Wars the Art and see what is actually happening.

Star Wars the Art

Looking at Star Wars as a family of works of art is daunting, if not impossible. I'd pull a screenshot of the Wikipedia article about Star Wars, but it's too big. Here's the LINK.

Pargin argues that the franchise machine of Star Wars has resulted in the "Shoe horning in more Star Wars lore to keep it tied to the rest of the franchise". In essence, the more Star Wars art there is, the more movies and TV shows, the more money they make.

I love that he used the word "lore" because it ties directly into my next point, which is this: Star Wars isn't Star Wars. What we think of Star Wars is the Franchise form. Star Wars has transcended the category of "art". It's no longer a collection of individual works. Star Wars is mythology. It's folklore. It has grown into our culture and it works independently of the franchise. Capitalism can't touch it. There's nothing in the world that can kill Star Wars. It will always exist in the imagination of its fans.

How is this manifesting itself? Halloween costumes, paintings, digital art, cosplayers, conventions, an unofficial-official holiday, the following of actors who appeared in the movies, a religion, the Wookieepedia, non-canonical books, fan fiction, intense discussions on social media, and much more.

Star Wars has a canon. I don't think people truly appreciate what this means. The ancient Greeks didn't have a canon. Greek mythology was written about by various writers in various forms, often with inconsistencies that no one cared about. Granted, we have more of an obsession for precise, uniform details, but Greek mythology has been a dominant influence on western culture. It has spawned its own manifestations, such as God of War, Clash of the Titans, and Troy.

With every movie and TV show, the Franchise is perpetuating the mythology. For money? Yes, of course. But we mustn't forget the people involved. Dave Filoni, for one. Filoni dressed as a Jedi Master for the opening of Revenge of the Sith. When George Lucas offered him the job to work on a Star Wars show, he thought he was being pranked. Because he wanted it that badly. Because Filoni is probably a Star Wars nerd across multiple dimensions of reality.

For him, and probably the thousands of people who work on Star Wars, this is a passion project. It's art. Pargin says, "we have people hired to write a franchise and doing nothing more than fan fiction, because it’s not something new and merely rehashing old ideas."

This is the only time I was disappointed in Pargin: his pejorative comment about "fan fiction". Fan fiction is an incredible, mind-boggling manifestation in our culture, and more people, such as Pargin, sneer at it rather than take it seriously. Fan Fiction perpetuates mythology. Does it have the best written stories? We can't answer that question. There's too much, and what is considered "good" fan fiction is probably "bad" to other overly-educated authors.

Fan fiction gives Star Wars, Pokemon, Twilight, and any other series autonomy. They cease to be under the sole control of the original creators and people are able to make something of it for themselves and their readers. They are able to have fulfilling creative experiences and contribute artistically to society, or solely to themselves.

Fan fiction is nothing to laugh at. Fan art for Star Wars has given it a life more akin to a religion. It is not required that we believe in some sort of a "god" in order to worship. Fans, or fanatics, are devoted. Fans of Star Wars worship it.

The Elizabethans wrote what could be considered Fan Fiction. Shakespeare only wrote one original story in The Winter's Tale. Everything else was lifted from history, or cobbled from other writers. This was common at the time. Originality is something we overly-occupy ourselves with today.

Adaptations are legion in our culture. I've written a handful myself. You know, the real joy behind an adaptation is seeing how the story can be told differently.

So this really is all about two things: the Franchise and the art. Should Star Wars do something "new"? Star Wars is a space opera centered on the mythological hero figure. It's always going to be that. That's what people want. People want Star Wars to keep doing what it's doing because this is more than about movies.

Could the quality in Star Wars improve? Sure. Sometimes, though, it's difficult to hit a 6 when you have a sticky pitch. Sometimes Star Wars loses. This is one of the things Star Wars fans (any franchise fans, actually) love to scream about. I scream about it like a fucking banshee. But I need to be more understanding. We all need to be more understanding and stop looking for people to blame. We need to think about what we have, the rich mythology that exists, and critique it for what it is, not what we want it to be.