The Elan of Nostalgia

I’ll be honest, I was intimidated to go ahead and sit down to watch the original Star Wars for the purpose of writing about it. When I started blogging, the chief motive was to give myself an outlet for my impulse to point at great works of art that I loved and gush about them. So I was afraid to touch this movie, both because there’s really nothing left to say on it at this point (not that originality actually matters in art) and because I feared to waste my shot at writing about an all time classic. But I realized that I was unlikely to ever really feel conditions for creative engagement were ideal, so I chose to embrace my mediocrity and neutralize it by making it into the first topic of this blog. After all, that’s always been the redemption of mediocre writers.

Watching this film that I grew up with after years of prequels and sequels, the terrific work of the prop department is elevated into the realm of the otherworldly. I can’t look at R2-D2 as he originally was, after years of derivatives and slightly shinier versions, without a sense of awe at seeing the original as a new product, with all the DNA of its progeny already present. And seeing Darth Vader’s black carapace enter the screen for the first time feels like the film production design equivalent of glimpsing the carpenters and goldsmiths assembling the Ark of the Covenant. To paraphrase another space traveler, this is Star Wars, the definite article, you might say.

There’s definitely a wistfulness of nostalgia about this movie, about how things were in the beginning, and what could have been. Obi-Wan’s description of the Jedi as idealists on a crusade - unlabored with our years of baggage - feels far more appealing than what the Jedi become. And the binary sunset is wistfulness ascended to myth.

Ultimately, I was too engaged by the movie to keep consistently making notes all the way through it.