A Long Time Ago: Growing Up With And Out Of Star Wars

by Gib van Ert

  As the 1980s came to a close and I approached my high school graduation, I finally came to see the absurdity in the Breakfast Club categorization of teenagers. I began to understand the transitoriness of adolescence—that it was just a phase I had to go through before sloughing off childhood for good and getting on with the rest of my life. I got a job at a used bookshop the owner of which, Bruce, was a film and literature buff—as keen on Kurosawa as Bob was on Captain America. I studied hard, did well and won a place at McGill, one of the best universities in the country. I graduated from Pen Hi in June 1991. Towards the end of the summer I packed up my room in the house my grandparents had helped my mother buy five years earlier and prepared for the move to Montreal. Stored away neatly in the back of my bedroom’s deep closet was my Star Wars collection: the action figures, the playsets, the books, the trading cards, the full-colour prints, the plastic 7-Eleven cups, the Princess Leia bubble bath, and all sorts of other odds and ends. It took seven cardboard boxes to pack them all away. I carefully marked each box in black felt pen: Gib’s Star Wars collection. Not for a second did I consider getting rid of these things. But I certainly was not bringing them with me. They were childhood keepsakes, not things of current importance. Star Wars was a fond memory.

  [PREQUELS] TURMOIL IN THE REPUBLIC

  I look out the window of my small room in R Staircase. The gardens below are still. The sky is bright and clear. I won’t need my coat. I head out, down into the gardens, through the arched passageway into Chapel Court and on to the porters’ lodge where I am meeting Greg. It is March 1997, I have just turned 24, and Greg and I are going to a matinee showing of Star Wars.

  Greg is a doctoral student in German philosophy with particular interest in Friedrich Nietzsche. I read a lot of Nietzsche at McGill and am interested in Greg’s work, but he does not willingly talk about it. In my short time in Britain, I have learned that the British abhor ‘shop talk’. Instead, as we make our way up Sidney Street to the bus stop and onward to a cinema I have never been to, we trade hollow witticisms and jokey allusions, trying to make them seem effortless when, in my case at least, they are quite the opposite. Greg excels at this game. It is nearly his only form of verbal communication. I try to keep up, and sometimes I do, but mostly I feel as though I am hanging on by my fingertips. When, rarely, I manage a decent quip or successful riposte, Greg smirks silently and turns his eyes to the ground. I am immensely gratified by this acknowledgement and will replay the scene in my mind later.

  I am what is known, in the peculiar jargon of Cambridge, as a lawyer. In fact I am no more than a first-year law student, and not an especially promising one at that, but in Cambridge the medical students are medics, the mathematics students are mathmos, the natural science students are natscis and the law students are lawyers. Law is an undergraduate course in Cambridge, but as I already have a BA from McGill my college has accorded me membership in the Middle Combination Room (the organization representing graduate students) and in practice I spend as much or more time with graduate students like Greg as with the 17- and 18-year-olds in my course. Certainly I would only go see Star Wars with a graduate student; the undergrads would not understand the significance of the event. But Greg is my age and his childhood, like mine, was shaped by the films. The fact that he is British and grew up thousands of miles away from me makes no difference.

  The re-appearance of Star Wars in my consciousness in the spring of 1997 broke the longest Star-Wars-free spell my life had ever known, dating from my entrance into university in 1991 if not earlier. During that time I had thrown myself completely into the life of the mind. If I was not attending a lecture in European history or Greek philosophy or English literature I was studying these topics with a monastic devotion in a carrel at the McLennan library. The various dingy apartments I occupied in the McGill student ghetto—a different one every year—were crammed with library books, textbooks and second-hand treasures acquired during my near-daily visits to The Word, a poky bookshop in the heart of the Ghetto which was so well known to students and bibliophiles that it did not even have a sign out front. On my desk, at my bedside or ranged carefully away in IKEA Billy bookcases were Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Weber, Shakespeare, Donne, Gogol, Tolstoy, Twain, Yeats, Pound, Stevens, Walcott and so many others, without even mentioning the profusion of historical works on ancient Greece, Tudor-Stuart England, the Great War, Russian communism, or the history of Christian thought. Whenever I could afford the time—usually not until after final exams—I brought my copy of the Riverside Shakespeare to the audio-visual library, borrowed a BBC Television production of a Shakespeare play on VHS, and spent four hours or so reading along as I took in the magnificent performances of Derek Jacobi, John Gielgud and the rest.

  Comic books, Dungeons and Dragons and Star Wars had no place in this new world I had entered. I found my former interest in them slightly embarrassing. When, in September 1992, my best friend Scott transferred to McGill and became my roommate, he brought a copy of a Star Wars novel by Timothy Zahn called Heir to the Empire. He said it was good. Many people agreed, and the book spawned a new category of Star Wars content now known as the Expanded Universe. I didn’t even pick it up. Why spend my precious time on it when I could be reading The Brothers Karamazov or The Nicomachean Ethics or any of the thousands of great works of literature and philosophy I had not yet discovered? These works loomed over me, a giant checklist of intellectual accomplishment upon which I had hardly made a mark. And what would Emma—the same brilliant, supremely talented girlfriend I had in high school, and who arrived at McGill at the same time as Scott—think to see me wasting my time on Star Wars again? So I did not read Heir to the Empire or its sequels. I did not go along with Scott when he joined the university’s D&D club (whose office was just next door to that of the Debating Union, which I did join). I did not buy any of the new Dark Horse Star Wars comics that began appearing at this time. All this was behind me. I had become a man, and put away childish things.

  And yet here I was, now 24 years old, studying law at an ancient university, and instead of spending the morning lounging in the college gardens reading about the British constitution or public international law, I was on a bus to see Star Wars with a British Nietzsche scholar. I had not changed much. I was still a serious, ambitious student. I still read Shakespeare for pleasure. But I was coming to see that my understanding of maturity was itself immature. The British students’ distaste for shop talk, for talking about ideas at all, was exaggerated. At times it bordered on anti-intellectual. I found it silly, even frustrating, that if I wanted to have a serious conversation over lunch in Hall I had to sit with the other foreign students. But this British affectation of indifference towards the things they had come to university to study proved to be a boon to me. I never doubted the intelligence of the British students. They had been admitted into Cambridge, after all, and besides that so many of them sparkled with talent and ability. So when I found myself chatting with them in the college pub, or dining with them at formal dinners, their low-brow enthusiasms—for TV chat shows, Premiership football, the Spice Girls, the Simpsons, and a thousand other interests the characters of Brideshead Revisited never indulged in—elevated these things in my esteem. I began to rediscover a truth I had known as a 13-year-old Dungeons and Dragons nerd: intelligence and frivolous pastimes were not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they frequently went hand-in-hand. I had traded my childhood infatuation with Star Wars for a barely-postpubescent infatuation with scholarly learning. Just as I had allowed my obsession with Star Wars to crowd out other interests as a child, I had, in university, excluded all other facets of life as inconsistent with bookishness and intellectual improvement. There was a middle ground between these positions which I never seemed to occupy.

  It may not have been a coincidence that Emma and I finally broke up around the time I came to this realization. Our devotion to each other had been remarkable. We stayed together during my first year at McG
ill, despite the fact that she was completing high school in Penticton four thousand kilometres away. She then came to McGill and our relationship continued. While it appeared to all the world that she had followed me there, it was more a case of me following her: after touring numerous universities with her parents well before her sixteenth birthday, she had decided on McGill and recommended it to me. I was attracted to McGill in large part because I knew Emma would be there. We continued dating throughout our McGill years and then decided together on law at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. (I was inclined towards Oxford but allowed her to bring me around. She later did a master’s degree there and told me, to my slight annoyance, how much better she liked it.) It was not long after arriving in Cambridge that we began drifting apart. Emma met an Englishman who was even more bookish (and considerably smarter) than me. I met an exchange student from Yale with dual manias for English literature and the Spice Girls. When finally we admitted to ourselves that we were through, the question that had dominated my decision-making for nearly seven years—what would Emma think?—lost some of its potency. Now, if I wanted to see Star Wars at the matinee, I could, in theory, do so without worrying what my girlfriend Emma would make of it. (In fact I did continue to worry about the answer to this question, at least a little, for years after we broke up.)

  So Greg and I went to see Star Wars. But what we saw was not quite the Star Wars we knew. For this “special edition”, George Lucas had added effects and even entirely new scenes. Some of these changes I appreciated, such as the shot of the Millennium Falcon escaping Mos Eisley, or that of Rebel fighters assembling before their assault on the Death Star. These updates enhanced the story without changing it, adding gorgeous effects that did not detract from or impede the existing narrative. But other changes were troubling. The infamous addition of an improbably errant close-range shot by Jabba’s lieutenant, Greedo, prior to Han’s murder of him in the Mos Eisley cantina was surprising and annoying, but did not greatly exercise me at the time. In retrospect, however, I agree with the “Han Shot First” agitators who have made their voices heard through countless movie reviews, t-shirts and web sites over the years. What I really objected to was the addition of Jabba the Hutt, inserted by means of computer-generated imagery and cutting-room-floor material which ought to have stayed there. Not only does Jabba come off as a buffoon instead of a threat as he slithers around Docking Bay 94, but the whole notion of him being ambulatory at all bothered me. Much of what made him sinister and repulsive in Return of the Jedi was that he barely moved; he was the exemplar of sloth and avarice. I preferred Lucas’s treatment of Jabba in the original theatrical releases of Star Wars and Empire: a shadowy, threatening figure from Solo’s past or, to invoke a Lucas phrase, a phantom menace.

  Despite these complaints, I enjoyed seeing Star Wars again. When the special editions of the two sequels were released in the UK, Greg and I made the same trip to the cinema, in April for Empire and May for Jedi. The changes to Empire were few and unobjectionable. But the addition of a Muppets-inspired miniature music video to the Jabba’s Palace sequence of Jedi was horrifying. It communicated to me that Lucas and I were suddenly in profound disagreement about what kind of story Star Wars was. This scene, more than any other change brought by the special editions, made me despair for the possibility that Lucas could pull off successful precursors (or, as Lucas dubbed them, “prequels”) to the original trilogy. Lucas’s intention of making the first, second and third episodes of his tale was known by 1997. The special editions, though purportedly released to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Star Wars, were surely motivated instead by the desire to build interest in the coming films. As we walked out of the theatre and into the sunlight of an English May day, Greg and I shared our reservations about what we had seen. His criticism of the new Jedi and what it said about Lucas’s vision was even fiercer than mine. Despite the muppetry, I maintained some hope that the coming films would succeed. Lucas was, after all, the creator of Star Wars. How far wrong could he stray?

  *

  The phone rings. I am sitting at an improvised desk in a small suite of offices on the third floor of Centre Block, Parliament Buildings, Ottawa. I am wearing one of two suits I bought before leaving England. They are the only ones I have. I steel myself. It is my job to answer the phone if, as today, no one else is around. I must, of course, answer in French; no one calling the office of a Quebec separatist member of parliament expects to be greeted in English, even by the underpaid intern. The greeting is not the hard part. What can be tricky is understanding what the caller wants. My French is fairly good for someone who grew up in the resolutely Anglophone interior of British Columbia. But understanding what someone is saying to you over a telephone line is, I have learned, rather more difficult than understanding what someone is saying to you when looking you in the eye. Usually I manage well enough, but when things go badly they go very badly. If I hesitate, or misspeak, or misunderstand, the caller’s confusion inflames the situation. I can almost hear him or her thinking, “Why is an Anglo answering the phone at the office of the Bloc Québécois’s foreign affairs critic? Who is this person? Have I dialled the wrong number? C’est quoi cet osti de merde là?”

  The phone rings again. I pick it up and pronounce my boss’s name with exaggerated confidence. The voice on the other end laughs and says, in faultless English, “That cracks me up every time”. It’s Pat, a fellow parliamentary intern.

  I bristle. “We’re not all perfectly bilingual, you know.”

  “It’s just funny that you’re there at all. You’re no Quebec separatist. Anyway, you’re not going to believe what happened. There was a contest on the radio this morning. I won two tickets to The Phantom Menace, opening night—tonight. Do you want to go?”

  Of course I do. I am about to say so. Then I remember the plans I made with Andy, a friend from McGill who, coincidentally, ended up in Cambridge at the same time as me and now lives in Ottawa. Andy, like Scott, Greg, Pat and just about every other man I know between twenty-five and thirty, grew up consumed by Star Wars mania. Andy and I had not even tried to get opening night tickets—we assumed it would be hopeless. Instead we bought tickets for the next night, Thursday, 20 May 1999. We had been talking about seeing the new Star Wars film together for weeks now. I explained my predicament to Pat.

  “Just go with Andy again tomorrow night. Seriously—you can’t say no.” Pat was right. This was too good to pass up. But it somehow felt disloyal to Andy. It briefly occurred to me that I need not tell him—I could just go with him on Thursday as if I had never seen the film before. I immediately thought of the IG-88 rifle I stole from Nathan, and the Making of Star Wars library book I never returned. No—my days of Star-Wars-inspired dishonesty were over. I was twenty-six years old for Christ’s sake. I would just have to explain the situation to Andy. He would understand. And I would still go with him tomorrow night. I would see The Phantom Menace twice.

  I left work as soon as I could, changed clothes, ate a quick dinner and headed to the cinema to meet Pat. Our tickets were for 7 o’clock. There was a crowd of joyous, excited people—mostly men around our age—waiting to be admitted. A few were in amateurish costumes but most wore casual clothes appropriate to a May evening in Ottawa: jeans and a t-shirt, maybe with a light jacket. Waiting in line, Pat and I compared what we had heard about the film from the early reviews, almost all of which had been negative. Strangers within earshot of us in the queue joined our conversation without hesitation—a behaviour I had frequently observed in public places in the US but rarely in Canada. There was something festive in the air that suspended the usual rules of Canadian social conduct. The consensus among our fellow fans was that the original Star Wars got bad reviews, too, but nevertheless went on to be the most successful film of all time. George Lucas would not disappoint us. We were about to be told a grand story—again.

  At long last the doors opened. The patrons filed in, in high spirits but not unruly—this was a Canadian crowd, aft
er all. Pat and I found quite good seats: only slightly to the right of centre and about half-way back. We sat down and waited. The lights stayed up and the screen stayed blank. I was growing impatient. Then I recalled how long I had waited for the sequel to The Empire Strikes Back. Compared to that, this was nothing. Before I had a chance to share this comforting thought with Pat, the lights went down, prompting a roar from the crowd. But it was a false alarm: seemingly every one of the hundreds of fans surrounding us had forgotten about the trailers. I doubt that trailers have ever received a rockier reception from film-goers than those that preceded The Phantom Menace on opening night. Absolutely no one was interested in any other movie. Jokers in the audience heckled the trailers, sometimes with catcalls and Star Wars catchphrases (“These are not the droids we’re looking for!”). The projectionist was unmoved, however; the agonizing succession of trailer after trailer continued for what seemed like half an hour.