We dream of Star Wars

Anna and I went on one of our vanishingly rare parent dates to go see The Force Awakens a few days ago. We had a great time. The movie is loaded with gratuitous fan service and doesn’t stand up to even casual scrutiny, but then, that was true of episodes IV and V too. Nothing that happens in the reality of Star Wars makes an ounce of sense. Why try to pick apart the logical inconsistencies in these movies? It’s like picking apart the logical inconsistencies of dreams.

All movies are a kind of waking dream. The good Star Wars movies (in my opinion, IV, V and VII) are as dreamlike as it’s possible for movies to get without becoming impenetrably avant-garde. There is no stranger or more dreamlike special effect than plain old human aging. Seeing the familiar actors playing the familiar characters, but thirty years older, is a kind of strangeness I have never experienced in the movies before.

Spoilers follow! I have had strange experiences with time and aging in my dreams. My dad is a regular presence. Sometimes he’s the age I remember him being, forties to early fifties, getting heavier, greying at the temples. Rarely he’s young, square-jawed and fit. Less often, more disturbingly, he’s the age he would be if he were alive now: early seventies, white-haired. Han, Leia and Luke aren’t as important to me as my dad, but they’ve been part of my psyche for almost as long. So this kind of image is naturally going to grab me hard by the brain stem:

I first encountered the idea of Star Wars as a waking dream in Roger Ebert’s original review of A New Hope back in 1977.

Every once in a while I have what I think of as an out-of-the-body experience at a movie… When I use the phrase, I simply mean that my imagination has forgotten it is actually present in a movie theater and thinks it’s up there on the screen. In a curious sense, the events in the movie seem real, and I seem to be a part of them.

“Star Wars” works like that… The movie’s happening, and it’s happening to me.

“Star Wars” taps the pulp fantasies buried in our memories, and because it’s done so brilliantly, it reactivates old thrills, fears, and exhilarations we thought we’d abandoned when we read our last copy of Amazing Stories.

What are dreams but a journey through a weirdly scrambled version of your memories? Even if you’ve never seen Lucas’ source material for Star Wars, you’ve picked it up indirectly through the culture. The tropes and genre archetypes in Star Wars are so much a part of our collective unconscious that it must feel strangely familiar even on first viewing.

This scene from The Empire Strikes Back is the most psychologically amazing one in the whole saga: a waking dream within a waking dream.

Rey’s vision in The Force Awakens when she touches the lightsaber is almost as intense, though it lacks the whomping Freudianism of Luke’s.

If Star Wars is a dreamlike mashup of nerd culture, then asking it to be coherent or original or psychologically believable is asking the wrong things. The movies were made for a population already living a waking dream most of the time anyway: little kids. Aaron Bady asks us to regard Star Wars as the childlike pretend play that it is. He’s worth quoting at length.

As experience, as ritualistic performance, as society-wide holiday, and as entertainment-industrial-complex, Star Wars is a strange and magnificent and disgusting enterprise.

No one complains that this year’s Christmas only re-packages and recycles the stories of Christmases past, and to pretend to be scandalized by how commercial Christmas is “getting” is, itself, a clichéd-to-death joke. The same is true of Star Wars. You can be cynical or you can enjoy it; you can turn your brain on or leave it off. But you can’t have it both ways. Star Wars is what it is, and you can participate, or not. But there’s nothing else it should be.

For starters, it’s hard to think of a movie franchise that so revels in its own tautological premises. After all, what is “the force” except a means of embedding narrative convenience directly into the story itself? The force of heroic protagonism is strong with this one, declares Obi-Wan; may the camera be with you… The force is strong with Luke because he is a stand-in for Lucas’s own wish-fulfilments, and so, the universe obeys his commands. It’s not subtle, and like Luke for Lucas or Darth Vader for Dark Father, it’s not clever. But it is compelling.

It’s easy and fair to complain that the original trilogy had precisely one woman in it, and that she played sister, love interest, and mother all at once. This is how infantile (male) fantasies work, and Star Wars is nothing if not an infantile fantasy… A movie that can pass the Bechdel test is the last thing you want: if two women have a conversation—and if it’s not about you—it might turn out that your boy-hero character is not at the center of the universe. If you let society into your movie, it might tell you to stop being a child.

The real question, then, is whether you should stop and think about it. Lots of people have done so, laboriously struggling to work out how it all does makes sense, adding stories and details and characters to turn a radically simplistic and mythically shallow set of stories into something that resembles the logic of the real world.

I wouldn’t overthink it. Take Finn the good Stormtrooper: what a great character! But his psychology makes no sense at all if you think even a little bit about the life he has lived, the world he knows, and the things he has experienced… Finn has never even had a name: he should be damaged and tortured, deeply traumatized and unstable. These are not problems with solutions. These are flaws so fundamental that the only thing you can do is let go your conscious self and act on instinct. As Obi Wan taught Luke, so long ago: Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them. Stretch out with your feelings!

If you stop and think about how actual human beings act and think and behave, however, even a little bit, there’s nothing to be salvaged here. None of these people should be doing any of the things that they do. So don’t stop and think… It’s not a criticism to call Star Wars infantile fantasy; that’s simple description. None of these characters existed before they walked onscreen, and they fall apart if you think too much about their paper-thin backgrounds. But that’s how action figures work: they are meant to be picked up and played with; they are not meant to be ruthlessly interrogated for their psychological coherence.

And if there is one thing sillier than Star Wars, it’s taking Star Wars so seriously that you criticize it for being Star Wars, for not being original, for having failed to be something different than it is. Because here’s the thing: I don’t know if George Lucas’ hair is real, but I love that he’s rocking it like that. And Star Wars works when it is exactly as shameless as that crazy lock of hair that sweeps majestically across George Lucas’ forehead. Who cares if it’s real?

Every beat in The Force Awakens reminds you that you are watching fan service. It recycles the original Star Wars with the same shameless and joyous abandon that the original trilogy “recycled” chanbara samurai movies, WWII movies, pulp sci-fi, and anything else that George Lucas happened to come across and devour. And this point is worth underscoring: Lucas gobbled up and digested so many different pop cultural predecessors, and did it so directly and shamelessly, that to subject any of the resulting crap to standards of originality is to fundamentally misunderstand how it works, or why. The man literally cut together footage from WWII fighter pilot films and then re-shot it as space battles; his first treatment actually plagiarizes Donald Richie’s description of The Hidden Fortress. But to accuse him of “plagiarism” is like accusing him of making a movie. If it felt good, he released it, and that’s Star Wars: sensation and feeling without thought or coherence. Star Wars is the indescribable goodness of the images and sounds, and the way that goodness overwhelms and digests the rest of it. Star Wars misses the target if it aims. Just let go, Luke. Trust yourself.

Dreams are what your brain does when you don’t demand that it make sense. You can subject them to rigorous analysis—and, perhaps, the rigor of that analysis might help you understand something about the conditions that created those night-terrors, or the work that dreams do to provide relief from the pressures of daily life. And you let dreams go, once you’re awake and moving around and doing daily life things. But dreams are also the literal opposite of work, the unspooling of your mind when your body rests, when the filters and safeguards and adult self-surveillance is all turned off for the night. You might need to rest so that you can work again, but this doesn’t mean that rest is work. And neither are dreams, or Star Wars: they are play.

There’s another activity that resembles dreaming, and that shares the word play: music. William Benzon thinks that the whole point of music is to enter a waking dream state. During peak musical experiences, you stop thinking about the past, the future, and your own motivations and intentions. You simply exist in the moment, fully absorbed by your bodily sensations. This is probably the same mental state that most animals inhabit all of the time, and it’s the one you experience in dreams.

As for the sense of floating and flying that music can evoke, Benzon notes that you frequently experience these feelings in dreams, a further hint that dreaming and music are related. It’s possible that the brain activities producing your social self are connected to the ones maintaining your sense of bodily orientation and location. When you suspend one, you suspend the other. It’s no accident that Star Wars is so fixated on floating and flying! I’ve had uncountably many dreams in Star Wars settings: twisty passages, claustrophobic compactors, open skies, bottomless pits, deserts, swamps, forests…

Musically, Star Wars is most closely associated with the nineteenth century German symphonies that John Williams pastiched together into his remarkable score. But Star Wars more closely resembles a different kind of music: sample-based electronica. Lucas dug through the crates of his favorite movies and sampled and remixed them into Star Wars. JJ Abrams has sampled and remixed Star Wars itself to make a tighter and more satisfying groove. Robin James pointed out on Twitter that Abrams’ approach to making The Force Awakens is like a DJ set.

Read the crowd and play what THEY know and love. Mix in familiar reference points so they can lose themselves, awash in the experience.

It’s not about content, but the universe of intertextual references, feeling at home, etc.

Remixes and mashups make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. At its best, that’s what Star Wars does too.

Here’s my remix of one of the dreamier parts of the Star Wars score, the little interlude between the end of the title crawl and the beginning of the action.

https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/after-the-crawl

See my analysis of the main Star Wars theme.