Luke Skywalker Can't Read (18 page)

Imagine this instead: the Empire has everybody cornered, Han is out of ideas, Chewie is shitting his non-pants, and C-3PO, for once, is speechless. The Ewoks are obviously no match for the Empire, and as their little furry bodies are burned, Leia kneels down to surrender to the commander of the Imperial troops. But then, as she rises, she also brings her hand up, Vader-style, and Force-chokes the lead bad guy. Then, in a display of godlike power, Leia uses the Force to throw around a few Stormtroopers in midair. Han's blaster
levitates back into his hand and he starts blowing away the bad guys.

“I never knew you had that in you, sweetheart,” Han says.

“You know,” Leia says, panting, exhausted but resolved to win, “neither did I.”

There's never a real on-screen payoff dealing with Leia being Luke's sister and in the slapdash way these movies were obviously written, it seems like a massive oversight. Plus, it would have been so cool to have given
Return of the Jedi
's title added meaning by demonstrating the dominance of Luke, the redemption of Vader, and then, ultimately, the rise of Leia. It was all right there waiting to happen. Instead, the lasting impression of Princess Leia in
Return of the Jedi
was of her in a bikini outfit from the beginning of the movie. Even Barbarella had more agency. And she was naked in her first scene.

Up until the sale of Star Wars to Disney in 2012, I think, in Lucas's mind he was still revising
The Star Wars
, even after everything had been released. Despite everything that I've argued for in this essay, and throughout this book, Star Wars is “just” a movie, meaning we can't get as angry with it as we do with real people. Or, to put it another way, if we do happen to get that angry, we should at the very least
think about why
. If video killed the radio star, then Star Wars fans are what made Star Wars sacred. We took Star Wars away from George Lucas (and from all the actors, too!) and we were 100 percent successful. Saying Star Wars is a victim of its own
success is an understatement on par with “The teachings of Moses are popular,” or “There are decent acoustics in Carnegie Hall.”

In 2004, my friend Brittany had a problem. She was taking a George Lucas/Steven Spielberg film studies course and one of the assignments was to “write a story treatment for either a sequel to
Return of the Jedi
or
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
.” Brittany was (is) a big fan of Indiana Jones, but wasn't as into Star Wars. “Can you help me, Britt?” she asked. And so I said, “Sure, let's write a sequel to
Return of the Jedi
that is
also
a prequel to all the Indiana Jones movies.” What we came up with can only be described as “Raiders of the Lost Dinosaur Planet.”

It went something like this: The opening credit crawl tells us there's been a great famine in the galaxy. Everyone is starving to death and the only solution, it seems, is to actually leave the galaxy where everyone lives and go somewhere else. In a
Battlestar Galactica
–esque move, Luke, Han, Lando, and Leia pack up everybody they like into a giant unused prototype of the Death Star, which they've painted white and renamed the “Life Star.” It's the size of a small planet, and it will take them across the galaxies to their new home.

Meanwhile, living inside of a volcano, a bunch of zombie Sith Lords awaken and decide they want to leave the galaxy, too. They follow the Life Star across space until it rolls up on a lush, beautiful planet in a great solar system. It's Earth! But it's
Earth during dinosaur times. Luke and company head down to the planet to think about settling it
Terra Nova
style when the new Sith attack.
*
Luke has a bunch of other Jedi Knights in training now, so there's a small army of folks with lightsabers. The Sith are similarly prepared. And everyone is ready to ride some dinosaurs. Meanwhile, did I mention Leia is pregnant?

While dinosaurs and lightsabers are gratuitously featured in an awesome battle scene that includes five chase sequences
and
Lando riding a pterodactyl, Leia is fighting a different battle on the Life Star against Sith stowaways. Han is fairly useless, because at this point, Leia's lightsaber skills are totally badass. But suddenly, Leia is about to go into labor. Things are looking pretty bad for the good guys, so Han decides that they'll freeze the baby in carbonite as soon as it's born. That way, no matter what happens, the baby will be safe.

Depressingly, everything does go downhill, and because I've watched
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
too many times,
*
the superlaser of the Life Star accidentally gets set off and zaps the atmosphere of Earth, killing the dinosaurs and everyone else. Luckily, just before this all goes down, Han and Leia's child is tucked away into a cave, safely encased in carbonite, an immortal infant. Like Captain America, only a baby from space. The coda of the movie would reveal archaeologists, circa the early 1900s, excavating a weird cavern only to discover a
newborn baby. Suddenly, a young Sean Connery would appear (CG, obviously) and hold the baby before softly saying, “Junior.” The movie ends with the baby a little older, a toddler now, playing with a big sheepdog that Sean Connery calls Indiana.

I'm not actually sure if Brittany ever ended up using that story treatment, but I do know she passed the class and is, to this day, a real live working screenwriter. I also, of course, never believed there would be a sequel to
Return of the Jedi
until now, which is why, when asked to create one, I dreamt up a joke. Like all of you, I thought Star Wars belonged to me. Even during the prequel era I was right: everybody loved Boba Fett so much that George Lucas put Boba Fett's dad in
Attack of the Clones
in 2002. See? We've been getting our way with Star Wars more than we care to admit. Now, even though we were told we'd never get to see a sequel to
Return of the Jedi
, we're somehow living in an age where that is happening, too. And these guys, unlike me, are taking it seriously. Star Wars has often been accused of being a new kind of cultural mythology, and like superheroes, I think that's relatively true. But, up until right now, it was never actually passed down to a new generation. What's been “ruining” Star Wars all these years, and what sometimes continues to “ruin” it, is its insistence on looking backward. Collectively, both the fans and George Lucas knew the classic trilogy could never be topped, so instead, we got the special edition and a glorified backstory in the form of the prequels. To actually make a sequel to
Return of the Jedi
, and by extension the “real” Star Wars movies, is much riskier and requires everyone to actually move on and leave the baggage of the old stories behind. The prequels and the special
editions inherited the emotional baggage of our childlike love of the original films, and so, we didn't like them, and in fact, hated them. Hate, we're told by Yoda, leads to the Dark Side, which is probably why Star Wars has been perceived to be in need of this comeback.

Smartly, Obi-Wan Kenobi intentionally lets Luke Skywalker take over the heroic narrative of the story in
A New Hope
. And ever since then, fans around the world have longed to have that lightsaber passed to them, too. With Lucas leaving and letting younger people like J. J. Abrams and Rian Johnson actually make real Star Wars movies, it's sort of like that has happened in real life. I'm closer in age to J. J. Abrams than I am to George Lucas. J. J. Abrams and Rian Johnson are
possibly
bigger fans of Star Wars than George Lucas. This is a good thing. Things are really starting anew. The exciting thing about Star Wars is that it perpetually reminds us that everyone can have new beginnings. Everything can change; everyone can be redeemed. And now that the father of this insanely important pop event has allowed a different generation to take over, maybe the rest of us can do the same.

It's time to get over ourselves. We can stop being haters by letting go of our hate. There's still good in us. I can feel
it.

S
omething like this doesn't happen without tons of friends, colleagues, and robots-in-arms. If you feel like I forgot you, I'm sorry. I'll write your name in when I see you.

Big guns first: thanks to my agent Christopher Hermelin for believing in this book and me on nearly blind faith. To Ryan Harbage and his Fischer-Harbage Agency for making it happen. To Matthew Daddona, a brilliant editor and my favorite Rebel general. And thanks to everyone at Plume and the empire of Penguin at large. It's good to be here.

Thanks to the editors of publications where many of these pieces originally appeared or to any editor who has had the misfortune of dealing with me at all: Will Doig, Pete Smith, Neil Clarke, Cheryl Morgan, Choire Sicha, Matt Buchanan, James Yeh, Lincoln Michel, Josh Perilo, Joel Cunningham, Melissa Albert, Janet Manley, and Claire Evans.

Thanks and apologies to the early adopters who put up with me when I was a fake writer and/or a fake person: Jason
Meyer, Mike Strahan, Pat Trusela, Marsha Morris, Damon Moss, Alissa Cherry, Andy Borowitz, Vicki Lewis Thompson, Dan Kennedy, Alissa Quart, Simon Navarro, Mel Olsen, Suzanne Konig, Daniel Power, Craig Mathis, Dana, Kelly, Britt, everyone at the Gotham Writers' Workshop, Erin Harris, Seth Fishman, Sara Barron, Lyndsay Faye, Vito Grippi, Travis Kurowski, Etgar Keret, Kirsten Sorensen, Andy Christie, Ishtiaque Masud, and Asa Yappa.

Thanks to those colleagues and mentors who pushed me (knowingly or not) to be better than I am: Julia Fierro, Victor LaValle, Dani Shapiro, Michael Maren, Lev AC Rosen, James Hannaham, Jim Shepard, Karen Shepard, Hannah Tinti, John Wray, Penina Roth, Ben Greenman, Paul Park, and Lev Grossman.

A giant thank-you and some hugs and kisses and high fives and rounds of drinks go to my sci-fi family of many years, those who occupy the rocket ship of Tor.com and its related fleet; Irene Gallo, Greg Manchess, Bridget McGovern, Bridget Smith, Emily Asher-Perrin, Kelsey Ann Barrett, Sara Tolf, Patrick Nielsen-Hayden, Ellen Datlow, Carl Engle-Laird, Theresa DeLucci, Pritpaul Bains, Mordicia Knode, Diana Pho, Leah Schnelbach, Natalie Zutter, Patty Garcia, Fritz Foy, Jenny Tavis, and Chris Lough. Obviously this wouldn't exist without any of you.

To my students: So many of you have meant the world to me, but you're too many to list. My favorites know who they are. If you're reading this, you are one of my favorites.

Thanks to my friends who by just existing over the years have kept me either sane or insane depending on what we've both needed: Syreeta McFadden, Brittany Hilgers, Mike Stuto, Tracie Matthews, the Spirit of the Hi-Fi Bar, Shelly Oria,
Michael Irish, Jessica Noven, James Scott Patterson, Rob Ventre, William Irwin IV, Ted Dodson, Melissa Febos, Rebecca Keith, Jenn Abbotts, Mike Baptist, Colleen Kinder, Leslie Jamison, Emily Wunderlich, Andy Reynolds, Gabriela Vainsencher, Hugo Perez, Emily Stowe, Sam Brewer, Julie Messner, Diana Spechler, Karen Thompson Walker, Casey Walker, Leigh Stein, Robert Silva, Nathan Ihara, Hannah Labovitch, Artie Niederhoffer, Hal Hlavinka, Irene Plax, Jenny Blackman, Emily Kate O'Brien, Amanda Hess, Jenn Northington, Amanda Bullock, Justin Taylor, Adam Wilson, Janet Turley, Brett Saxon, Karen Russell, Lena Valencia, Ryan Spencer, Lindsey Skillen, Carter Edwards, Chris Togni, Anne Ray, Nelly Reifler, Teddy Wayne, Ophira Eisenberg, Jonathan Baylis, Cici James and everyone at Singularity & Co., Matt Mercier, Allegra Frazier, Stefan Merrill Block, Liese Mayer, and Justin Lemieux and the Lemieux Brood: Lucy, Caroline, and, of course, Katy.

To Wesley Allsbrook for the wonderful illustrations and limitless talent.

Thanks to Mike Lopercio, Jane M. Trayer, and the extended Trayer/Lopercio vortex, a constellation of family members who have supported me infinitely. And an extra thanks to George Lopercio for being the best and worst best friend I could ever hope for.

To my family: Mom and Kellie. You're all I've got and I don't say that enough. Of course, to the ghost of my dad, Terry Britt, who I'm sure is reading this somewhere.

And to Jillian Sanders—who thought the role of Luke Skywalker was played by Harrison Ford—this wouldn't be possible without
you.