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| At the UUCiA on December 13, 2015 |
I was just a kid when the original Star Wars movie came out. I was 8 ½-years-old, to be precise. It was my oldest sibling – who was a senior in high school at the time – who convinced our mom to take all of us kids to see it. Believe it or not, I was not enthusiastic, at all. First of all, my generation wasn’t as versed at sitting still in front of a screen; the prospect of sitting still for two hours wasn’t that appealing. The other reason I wasn’t too psyched to go was that, frankly, I wasn’t too wild about my sister’s taste in TV and movies. Her idea of good TV was Lost in Space and My Favorite Martian. I couldn’t imagine sitting through two hours of either of those. But I did tag along reluctantly with my mother and siblings to see Star Wars not long after it was released.
I
sat down, daydreaming during the previews about being outside playing baseball.
Then, after the previews were over, these words appeared on the screen: “A long
time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” Then the amazing, majestic music of the Star Wars Main Theme! Then, against a
backdrop of mostly empty space, words started to scroll from the bottom of the
screen to the top, making it look like they were floating off into the great
beyond. And darned if they didn’t pull me right along with them like a tractor
beam. I was hooked – a little kid, hooked! – by orchestral music and written
words. If that isn’t an amazing achievement in cinema, I don’t know what is.
I
have seen the original Star Wars
movie so many times that I lost count back in, oh, 1978. I know that I saw it
in the theaters at least 30 times. My older brother and I would regularly save
up our weekly allowance to see it again and again (movies were cheaper then,
even adjusted for inflation). More often than not we’d walk down and across the
highway to get to the theater – free range kids, and no one called the police!
The
special effects in the original Star Wars
trilogy were astounding. Whereas the Star
Trek Enterprise was so obviously a model that I kind of giggled at it even
as a kid, the Star Wars spacecraft
were pretty spectacularly convincing. But it wasn’t the special effects that
kept me coming back. I kept coming back for what might as well have been, for
an 8 ½-year-old, the Greatest Story Ever Told.
I
was raised as a humanistic Unitarian Universalist kid by atheist parents, and
to be completely honest, I think Star
Wars filled some void I was feeling. Yes, I learned the most famous
biblical stories in my UU “Sunday School” (as we called it then). But they felt
like someone else’s stories to me, at the time. Star Wars felt like my
story… my grand tale of fighting the
good fight not because you necessarily expect to win, but because it is the
right thing to do. And don’t forget magic. I do believe in intellectual
integrity and love that aspect of Unitarian Universalism. But there is
something – dare I say it? – good for the
soul about suspending your disbelief occasionally, even if just for two
hours in the dark theater, and feeling connected to things beyond your
immediate world and understanding. So I do think that was the deeper appeal for
me. The Force. Mystery. Magic. The triumph of good over evil.
In
fact, with apologies to Robert Fulghum, all I really need to know I learned
from Star Wars. Among other things, I
learned:
Do,
or do not, there is no try.
Judge
by one’s size, do not.
Patience
you must have.
Don’t
blast the controls before jumping into a trash compactor.
Beware
the Dark Side.
Let
go of your hate.
Stay
on target.
Let
the Wookie win.
In
the words of Fulghum, “Everything you need to know is in there somewhere.”
