calling it quits with my first love
anakin, you're breaking my heart
I know we can’t stay the same forever. I’ve grown out of favorite clothes, lost touch with dear friends. But if a relationship has to end, you hope it comes to a dignified conclusion, one where you can both walk away without bitterness or anger. And you hope that a once-burning passion might not slowly sputter out, a long, tormented death. Yet this is what happened between myself and Star Wars.
I don’t remember a time before I liked Star Wars. My dad set us up, of course. I had the original trilogy VHS set growing up, a millennium falcon toy and a Luke Skywalker doll. This isn’t a thing where I based my identity around a franchise and now I’m figure out I that shouldn’t do that, but on the other hand, did I write LucasFilm a letter pitching an Adventures Of Teen Princess Leia series, ideally starring myself? I did. Did I throw a little party at school with my friend Neena when Revenge of the Sith came out? I did. Did I tell my rabbi that I chose Leah as my Hebrew name (look it up) in honor of my cousin when, in my heart, it’s Leia as in Organa? I definitely did. Do I know Weird Al’s Phantom Menace version of “American Pie” as well as the original? I do. Was my first romantic1 dream about Attack of the Clones-era Hayden Christensen? I think we both know it was.
The girlish crush became my boyfriend who lived in Canada. You don’t need to meet him, but I promise, what we have is real! Star Wars definitely wasn’t a “cool” thing to be into at my middle school (cool things included The O.C., soccer, Abercrombie & Fitch, Green Day, the ability to do a back handspring, and being good at art), but it wasn’t too too weird; everyone’s heard of it. And my generation, mercifully, has always embraced a certain level of cheesy nostalgia, to the point that I wore a My Little Pony locket and kept Lisa Frank folders in my binder as a teenager, and no one batted an eye.
In a world where everyone had a franchise — be it a sports team or a book series, James Bond or wrestling — I was happy to make Star Wars mine, especially because it was such a low lift. Three movies, then three more. You could knock it out in a weekend, which I often did. Yeah, there were comics and animated shows and novelizations, but George Lucas conceived of Star Wars first and foremost as a film series, so I considered myself a fully-informed fan for having watched them.
I liked that Star Wars was a little older, more mature. I could talk about Star Wars with adults, not just as a story but as Films, starring a girl who went to Harvard.
Sure, we fought. Half the fun of being a Star Wars fan is hating half of Star Wars. Ewoks! Jar Jar! Sand! Debating the merits of various aspects of the universe was good clean fun, like hitting yourself in the shins with a plastic lightsaber.
When Star Wars was bought by the House of Mouse, I genuinely thought, “Disney doesn’t make bad stuff. They’ll take care of my sweetheart.”
I was assumed they’d do to the franchise what they’d done to Pixar: utilize its capabilities while leaving its pillars intact. For both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, that seemed to be the case. The original cast was back, and I felt real, fully-formed lust for Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron.
(TLJ is a franchise highlight BUT I do think Rian Johnson fundamentally dishonored what Lucas set out to do by inserting a shot where what you think is a bad guys ship turns out to be a clothing iron,2 and3 it was annoying to be tangentially connected to racists hell bent on bullying an Asian actress off of social media, but at least there weren’t any sex pests on screen.)
But some twenty years into our relationship, we hit a rough patch. Star Wars became enamored of a brunette who was not kind like Padme or sharp like Leia or brave like Rey. She was just…there…and her name was Jyn Erso.
Rogue One is a movie about sending an email, and I hate it.
The tone isn’t Star Wars-y and I did not like CGI simulacrum Carrie Fisher showing up in the last beat. Worst of all is the scene wherein Darth Vader Force-chokes Director Krennic and tells him not to “choke on his own aspirations.”
Are you kidding me? Vader Force chokes that one guy in A New Hope because he dissed the Force, and to prove that the Force is real, and he did it in front of a bunch of other people to demonstrate his power. I’m supposed to believe that, like, a day before this, he was force-choking a different guy during an epic one-on-one conversation and making a little joke? A little jokey-joke for no one? Vader?
If you’re one of this movie’s weirdly passionate defenders, don’t take my word for it, trust as always in Jenny Nicholson:
Then came Solo.
Bad things in Solo: Alden Ehrenreich (the role almost went to Glen Powell, which would have been good for the movie but bad for Glen Powell) was given the impossible task of matching Harrison Ford’s swagger (just ask Shia LaBeouf playing Indiana Jones’ son; it can’t be done), the story is a mess, he gets the name Solo because he goes somewhere alone (WHAT IS WITH THE WORDPLAY?????), I can’t even get into the implications of making John Williams’ score the in-universe recruitment theme of the Empire, and if Darth Maul was alive all this time, then what the fuck did Qui-Gon die for?
Good things in Solo: Donald Glover as Lando.
“Please!” I screamed in the pouring rain. “I want to love you again but you’re making it hard. No more spin-offs!”
Like a petulant spouse who finally goes grocery shopping and buys all the wrong products just to spite you, Star Wars returned to the Skywalker Saga and delivered some absolute nonsense. Maybe Episode 9 will, someday, be fun nonsense, like the prequels, but right now it hurts too much to look back.
At least, I thought, we could take a little break now. Maybe Disney would scale back the whole operation, and after some time apart, I could return to the Star Wars entries I knew and loved and find them as charming as I always have. But Disney had turned my beloved into something entirely too ambitious, a workaholic that forgot its soul in the race to match Marvel’s output.
I mean, can we finally admit that The Mandalorian was kind of boring? Even the first season was kind of slow, and some people are like “that’s the point, it’s subtle,” but like…it’s Star Wars not The Leftovers. Give me fun NOW.
(No offense to Grogu, Grogu is an absolute blessing to society, I worship Grogu.)
I know, no one was making me watch the shows. But they were live action with actors from the movies, it felt too canon to ignore. If I’m going to call myself a Star Wars fan, and The Book of Boba Fett is what Star Wars is now, I have to watch it, right? And Ahsoka? And Kenobi? And Andor? But that’s too much stuff, and none of it is particularly good or even bad in an interesting way (I will admit I liked baby Leia because I like when little girls are brave). And don’t tell me Andor is actually really deep despite being kind of bleak and unenjoyable. If I’ve said it once I’ll say it a hundred times: Star Wars is not The Leftovers.
Where’s the fun? Where’s the cheese? Where’s the “stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder?” New Star Wars won’t let me in, won’t let me love it. Going down a path I cannot follow.
The Acolyte hits Disney+ today. It’s created by Leslye Headland, whose work I like but not as much as you’d think. I’m not curious or intrigued. Worst case, I’m disappointed; best case…I don’t even know what that looks like anymore! I’m here for space cowboys and odd couple droids, but I suppose I could get invested in…this crime drama? I don’t think I’ll watch.
But then, where does this leave me? Not a Star Wars girlie? A fan who only likes the old stuff? That makes me sound like an old fogy wearing a Make The Death Star Great Again hat. If Star Wars doesn’t care to keep my attention anymore, I could make the breakup official by striking up with, I dunno, Dune, maybe. I could pretend I like Jurassic Park a lot more than I do.
The honest truth is, the fun-seeking, lore-interested, story-loving part of my heart has, for a couple years now, belonged to miss Taylor Allison Swift. It’s not better, it’s just different. And if Taylor has taught me anything, it’s that our great loves shape us, are part of our stories forever.
Maybe Star Wars is my ex-husband, someone I check in on once a year to make sure he’s alive and reminisce about the good times, but even as we keep things cordial, it’s time to move on. We’ll always have Dagobah.
May the Force be with you,
Lizzie
I mean, literally, romantic. We didn’t even kiss. My tween brain couldn’t process that as a possibility.
Star Wars, at its core, does not mislead the audience, does not fool the viewer, does not betray out trust, does not show off the cleverness of its director, does not cue us into one thing with a music sting and then, rolling its eyes, reveal that another, and I thought we already established that the more you try to make the universe “make sense,” the less it makes sense, so why on Earth (or off-Earth, as it is) am I watching a droid do the First Order’s laundry? But I digress.
Just one more thing about The Last Jedi while we’re on the subject, that great scene, the one everyone loves, where Rey and Kylo fight back to back, how much better would that scene be if their main adversary, Snoke, weren’t dead before it started? We never get the sense that the Praetorian Guards pose a real threat to these two, so watching them team up to defeat a bunch of faceless guys in red…I just think it could have been better! Great scene but it could have been better!
I LOVE this writing!!! Nice job as always