Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Vengeful

There’s so much to unpack in Revenge of the Sith, I’m going to have to take things out of it and put them into little analytical drawers onethingatatime--bra by bra, if you will--or suffer a full geek-on panic attack.

Star Wars and I are of a natal vergence. In August, in 1977, I was busy about many things, most of them variations on staring at shiny things and struggling to pee without incident. So, we're full cycle, pretty much.

I discovered the galaxy after it had faded from the theatres, in those dark days between Return of the Jedi and the re-release of the original trilogy. These were the days of dusty Ewok catapults (just the catapult itself, mind you; Ewoks sold separately and, by this point, only on the green vinyl tops of card tables in Cheviot yard sales) on barren Toys R Us shelves. I had a plastic Rancor and a dinged-up Palpatine action figure and a great deal of pouting because the other girls wanted to do stupid things like talk to each other and not attempt a full-on space battle using only a tiny yellow bucket balanced on a pile of plastic sticks, a bumpy brown lizard with a highly realistic lever on its back to make its jaw move, and a four-inch figurine of quite possibly the only person who had gotten less sun than I had.

There were aspects I hated about the movie; there were aspects I loved. Sometimes I cried; sometimes I wanted to break the arm rest off the chair to ram through my cerebral cortex so that I wouldn’t have to HEAR NATALIE PORTMAN TALK ANYMORE.

In two and a half hours, the film cocoons twenty-eight years of cinematic history with layer upon layer of new meanings, an array of patinas so intense I may even permit myself to skip next week’s New Kids on the Block Fan Club meeting. It was a thrilling deluge of new details of How Things Work in the Star Wars Matrix. For instance, the dork faithful are introduced to George Lucas’ idea of haute entertainment; having resigned himself to the concept that perhaps not every single non- space battle scene must take place in otherworldly pubs with clinetele of varying degrees of sliminess, George reveals that there is indeed theeeeeatre in Star Wars galaxy…and it is produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber. We get to watch an entire scene in a large theatre in which a massive egg, to equally massive applause, is apparently undergoing fertilization. It was so awesome! I have to buy the soundtrack! I hope my high school does it for the fall musical next semester! It will run forever and ever on Bespin! Even Regis can’t get tickets!

This is why these films work, frankly—they slide aspects of our graspable world into a spacey milieux, and we feel we could step right in and make our own Kessel runs in less than twelve parsecs. And thus, we smile into our bags of Episode III Limited Edition M&Ms: George, you sly old dawg. He understands that bad performance art is an intergalactic constant.

seriously! it's a new email address: MB@blondechampagne.com

1 comment:

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