The last of the Star Wars sextuplets has arrived on international cinema screens, and those of us who’ve waited most of our lives for this moment are delirious with joy. We want to sing it from the mountain top, we want to write it in the sky. Free at last, we want to cry. Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last!
No longer will our conversations at restaurants be drowned out by gaggles of spotty nebbishes at the next table arguing over which software package will prove the best in rendering Darth Vader’s goitre in the upcoming instalment. Never again will we hunt in vain for real news through column inches swamped by lukewarm sound bytes from Ewan McGregor about how interesting he finds the catering on the set. And wonderful, wonderful, most wonderful: never again will George Lucas and his marsupial roadkill coif pontificate at us.
It’s finally over. No doubt for a year or two there’ll be some hoopla over DVD box sets, but they, and the obsessive-compulsives gulled into collecting them, are easily dismissed. The clouds have parted, the deckchairs are coming out again now that the children’s games are done with, and it’s time to lie back and contemplate the ghastliness of it all.
This week the West’s media assumed the insistent incredulous tone of the teenagers it was emulating, and declared that the Star Wars franchise was integral to “our culture”. Of course, this isn’t strictly true. Star Wars is not part of my culture. What is part of my culture, however, is a burning disdain for cultural relativism, which frees me to call the series what it is — a -turgid, self-important pseudo–spiritual soap opera with the epic scope of an Enid Blyton novella — and to dance on its grave.
Most of the media’s genuflections in Lucas’s direction involved nostalgic babbling, which revealed that by 1977 American film audiences were sick of watching the drivel produced by the likes of Coppola and Scor-sese, and had had enough of two-bit hams like De Niro, Redford, Hoffman, Streep and Brando. No, the lowest common denominator knew what it liked, and what it liked was death rays, heavy breathing, love affairs truncated by the spectre of incest, and sets that crumpled when extras leaned against them.
The first three films were devoured by children marooned by their career-focused baby boomer parents on a beautiful lonely Holly-wood desert island, left to raise themselves as best they could. Happily, this brave new world was founded on cliché and governed by the groovy tides of ageing hippie spirituality. Little boys, watching their fathers surrender their virility to feminism and the imposed sanctity of the nuclear family, gazed in awe at duelling supermen wielding big humming blue penises that could cleave skin and bone. Little girls, much more in touch with reality and their hearts’ desires, wondered what it would be like to saw off their mothers’ heads with a light-sabre.
Of course, today’s audience is a step removed from that kind of emotional neediness. The attention deficit disorder generation loves the films because they never involve more than four characters, and because it’s been told to.
Undiluted love — the kind a space pirate shares with his Wookie in the damp, moist places of the cosmos — must explain how it is that the series has always escaped conventional criticism. Love is, after all, blind. And you’d need to have had your eyed gouged out — perhaps by a desperate columnists trapped in a continuous screening of e pisodes one through five — to miss the horrible acting and dialogue; the laboured metaphors cranked out by Lucas’s Etch-A-Sketch brand of directing; the microwave-friendly moralising.
One could point out the leaden pace of all the films; how they crawl when they should fly. One could accuse the hallucinatory characters — the Ewoks, for example, a race of abusive anthropomorphic -Yorkshire terriers, or Darth Vader, an emphysemic S&M gimp with his head stuck in a carburettor — of being invariably feeble.
But there’s no longer a need. Ding dong, the Empire’s dead! Clap your hands, get out of bed! Ding dong, the bloody thing is dead …