All photos by the author
As I rode in an Uber to Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, where I’d spend the next few hours freezing my ass off at the red carpet ceremony for the Star Wars: The Force Awakens premiere, I felt a sense of creeping dread about having to actually watch the new Star Wars movie. The closer we get to The Force Awakens, the more and more I feel like I want to simply savor the anticipation, rather than actually watch the thing. The closer I am to its release date, the more certain I am that The Force Awakens will let me down.
See, I’m less concerned with The Force Awakens being a good movie than one that means something to me personally. But the more I see the advertisements, and the more I see literally insane Star Wars branding on packaging, the more it feels like “Star Wars Stuff” is becoming a cultural format the same as books or movies or porn. This iteration of Star Wars is meant to be as universal as possible, and will be almost coldly efficient in how incredible it is. But as long as I don’t see it, The Force Awakens is infinite in its possibilities and can actually be the very exact Star Wars movie that would appeal to me as a Star Wars fan and an adult who has been shaped by Star Wars in very tangible ways. Right now, The Force Awakens is both the best possible Star Wars movie and the worst. After I see it, it will land being somewhere in the middle. Call it Schrödinger’s Tauntaun, if you will.
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It was even more overwhelmingly clear to me that The Force Awakens is truly the Star Wars of the masses at its premiere, which took place at three theaters on a multi-block stretch of Hollywood Boulevard and which I got to several hours early because I am an idiot. Despite the fact that it was easily the coldest, windiest day I’ve experienced in my year of living in Los Angeles, there was already a sizable crowd on the street, consisting in about equal numbers of both Star Wars fans, as well as members of the media who were there to interview them about being Star Wars fans. You could tell who was a member of which camp because they were, quite literally, wearing uniforms. The fans were bundled up in Star Wars blankets and Star Wars hats and Star Wars coats, holding Star Wars accoutrements like toys and lightsabers and posters, while the media people were generally armed with cameras and microphones and fleece jackets with the logo of their news outlet sewn on the chest. When one camera crew would find a good interview subject, like a woman covered in Star Wars tattoos, you’d see the rest of them start swarming, like moths to some sort of flame that provided content instead of warmth. It’s moments like this that made The Force Awakens itself feel like an afterthought, simply yet another event that will provide an opportunity for content to be created, money to be made, and then forgotten as we all go on to the next Cultural Event to be consumed.
A woman gets interviewed about her Star Wars tattoos
This is not to say that The Force Awakens will be bad. I expect that it will be at least as good as it needs to be. Which is to say: The Force Awakens will be good enough to restore the feeling that the original Star Wars trilogy gave viewers, while simultaneously washing the taste of the prequel trilogy out of Star Wars fans’ mouths, while also being accessible for someone who has never seen a Star Wars movie. Given that Disney has put probably a billion dollars, if not multiple billions of dollars, into TFA with the intent of accomplishing that exact goal, it’s extremely likely that the film will be much, much better than it needs to be. It’s very possible that it will even be great. Ultimately, it will please as many people as possible, and one of those people will probably, at least on some level, be me.
But still, what I love about Star Wars isn’t that it’s this universal thing that’s meant to be loved by everybody, I love it because of what it means to me. The memories that I’ve got wrapped up in it are mine and mine alone, and they’re important because exist at all. Things like being in the first grade and making my dad tell me the plots of all the Star Wars movies and deciding to watch Return of the Jedi first, because I was afraid of stories not having happy endings and needed to make sure the trilogy worked out OK for the good guys before I could watch the whole thing. Or effectively growing up with The Phantom Menace, The Clone Wars, and Revenge of the Sith, being too young to understand why anyone hated them so much but still feeling distinctly horrified and embarrassed at this one particular Clone Wars trailer on TV that featured the slogan, “Who da man? Yo-da man!” (it helps if you say that one out loud). Or being in college and leaving parties early because I wanted to read Wookiepedia, the Star Wars wiki page, half because I wanted to find more out about Chewbacca’s family tree, but half because I felt awkward around new people and wanted an escape.
These memories aren’t necessarily tied to Star Wars as chunk of the western cinema canon, they’re just tied to Star Wars existing at all. In fact, I almost like how bad the prequels are. They’re like the filmic equivalent to that one uncle you’ve got that you literally have to love because he’s part of your family, even if he’s loud and annoying and shares dumb memes on Facebook that he earnestly captions, “Really makes you think.” Over the years, you grow to love him precisely for his loudness, for his annoyingness, for the dumbness of his memes. That’s how the Star Wars prequels are for me, amazing in their unique terribleness, the watching and picking-apart of them a sport unto itself for my friends and I. Both at its best and worst, Star Wars has played such a huge part in the experiences that have shaped me into the person I am today.
This sensation of feeling shaped by this vast thing that stretches across different mediums and that is so massive and ambiguous that you can draw your own meaning from it, is not unique to me in the least. That’s part of what’s so wonderful about Star Wars, that it’s a big tent and nobody judges you underneath it. Take the above sisters that I met in a Buffalo Wild Wings while hiding from the elements. They had come to watch the red carpet because Star Wars reminded them of their dad, who they explained had gone to see the original trilogy when he was living in Mexico. He’d passed on his love of Star Wars to them, they told me, and they’d grown up with the prequel trilogy just as I had. Now they were adults and had taken off school to watch The Force Awakens‘ stars in person. I asked who they wanted to see the most; the one on the left told me she had a crush on Mark Hamill.
A security checkpoint leading to Hollywood Boulevard
The Wild Wings we were camped out in just so happened to have a deck that allowed you to see The Force Awakens‘ stars exit their escort vehicles just before they took the red carped. It was on this deck that I hung out for most of the afternoon, periodically retreating into the Wild Wings to drink some Diet Coke or order the bare minimum of chicken that would allow me to stay there.
Watching people get out of cars was not particularly exciting, simply because most of the people involved in The Force Awakens are either not famous or not recognizable. As a crowd, we’d often greet the arrival of some high-powered studio executive, or (I assume) some cast member who’d spent the majority of their career hidden inside some suit or several layers of makeup and was therefore all but anonymous in person, with a collective shrug. But then when someone actually famous showed up, like Harrison Ford, or Lupita Nyong’o, we’d go berzerk, greeting them with unified chants as well as individual screams for attention. Perhaps fittingly, it was Star Wars’ new head honcho J.J. Abrams who garnered more cheers than Star Wars creator George Lucas, who at 71 seems content to recede into the background rather than pilot the proverbial X-Wing for this go-round.
From where I was standing, though, nobody got more cheers than Mark Hamill, who leapt from his limo with aplomb, skipping and cheering before he hit the red carpet, waving to fans and approaching the ones closest to him to high-five. Hamill, seemed excited—jubilant even—and more than that, grateful for his reception, and he was determined to make the most of it.
Though he’s consistently found work as an actor and is somewhat known for voicing the Joker across various forms of Batman media, Hamill is tied to Star Wars in a way that his costars Harrison Ford or even Carrie Fisher are not. Fisher is a respected writer and actress, while Ford is (obviously) one of the most prominent actors of the past 30 years. They don’t need Star Wars. Hamill does. In a way, Star Wars fans probably showed so much love to Hamill because he is a part of Star Wars—which has become this thing that is much greater than the die-hard fans who are willing to hang out in some of the worst weather L.A.’s seen in years—that is theirs and theirs alone. And now that Star Wars has taken over the known universe for the time being, that’s a rare thing worth cherishing.
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