The Force rules

Why Star Wars belongs to all of us

by Carly Carioli

Coming home from seeing Star Wars, when I was all of four, in 1977, is my earliest memory -- and the continuing saga of a life begun with a powerful jolt of myth, folklore, and fantasy. Star Wars provided both a context for my first encounters with religion, sex, and commerce (witness the vast collection of AT-ATs, Death Stars, Jawa Sandcrawlers, and the like crowding my parents' basement). It even provided a language for talking about them. Which makes Star Wars sorta like the Force itself -- an intangible that surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together, a generation's secret history.

Growing up in an agnostic household in a working-class, mostly Catholic neighborhood in Philadelphia, I was often called upon (as "that kid who doesn't believe in God") to defend atheism in schoolyard polemics pitting my second-grade Darwinism against my peers' Sunday-school propaganda. These went on for some time, until my best friend betrayed me (y'know, like Obi Wan told Luke about Darth and Anakin in the first one) -- eventually they browbeat me into submission, and in a baptism of tears I admitted, "I believe in the Force!"

The Force was, given a lack of church indoctrination, my first experience with a tangible power greater than observable reality, the first template on which the eternal battle between good and evil was metaphorically played out. An old guy in a beard sitting in the heavens? Nah (that look was already taken by Alec Guinness) -- but this Force thing seemed plausible, or at least preferable: no tyrannical deities, no seven deadly sins or ten commandments, bona fide life after death (as a double exposure, at least), no church on Sunday, available to everyone, inclusive of the shadow side of the soul. Maybe that's why the Eastern religions George Lucas patterned the Force on subsequently became so popular, from the Beastie Boys' Zen kick to Krishna-devoted hardcore kids to the Wu-Tang Clan's Shaolin Monk trip.

By the time Return of the Jedi came out, in 1983, I was all of 10, and bordering on the precarious precipice of puberty. Seeing Princess Leia, the virgin of flowing white robes and razor tongue, become suddenly sexualized -- first in a bounty hunter's rubber suit, then bound and chained in the infamous golden bikini -- corresponded indelibly with my own sexual awakening (maybe even earlier: if I remember correctly, the first time I thought to use my dick for anything other than pissing was in defiling my 12-inch Leia action figure, pre-Empire Strikes Back). Add to Jedi's thinly veiled bondage and domination the brother-sister kiss in the original and you've got a blueprint for an outbreak of talk-show-variety sexual deviance. And since there were thousands of us experiencing our first pangs and twitches in those years, Leia functioned as a sort of shared sexual experience -- as Ross on Friends demonstrated, you could talk openly about her because she wasn't real, as if we'd all made it with the same imaginary girl (which between our sticky Star Wars-print sheets most of us, I think, had).

Indeed, in 1995, four hardcore punks (probably teenagers) from the desertscape American dreamland of Las Vegas got up the nerve to call themselves Boba Fett Youth (probably in defiance of $5 billion worth of copyright infringement) and released a homonymous album on a small independent label (probably their own). On the cover, four stylized renditions of Star Wars characters are having a discussion. A ganja-smoking C-3P0: "Star Wars? Man, I was into that shit way before y'all had a clue . . . I was kickin' it wit the Millennium Falcon while you sorry mugs was still pushin' your Hot Wheels 'round the porch!" An acidic Chewbacca: "And then there these crossover muthafuckas, the one on the G.I. Joe tip until Star Wars got on the one! This posin' ass on my block tryin' to mix his two sets together an' shit!" A death-metal Boba Fett: "Shit, everybody claimin' Star Wars these day . . . "

They are talking about authenticity -- the ground zero of hardcore's ethos, a rather fleeting concept overall -- but they're using a vocabulary that's uniquely unambiguous to anyone who grew up talking about the world as a function of Star Wars (which I suspect is pretty much anyone under 30). And there's more to this than simply a demographic that's been Force-fed action figures and product tie-ins.

Even if George Lucas had in mind a global empire when he set out to make Star Wars, it's a good bet he didn't figure on what I'd do to that Princess Leia doll, or what four Las Vegas teens would do with his characters, which is just part of why I feel Star Wars is more ours than his. And if he's gotten a good bit of cash from me over the years, I have no reservation in concluding that I got my money's worth.

The opposing view.

Star Wars Links.