To give Lucas credit, though, much of the innocuousness is actually by design.
I found I had less affection this time for the Mutt-and-Jeff antics of C-3PO and R2-D2 and Mark Hamill, with his gee-whiz ’70s doofiness, is, at first, a shockingly callow hero-we might be watching the intergalactic coming-of-age of Richard Carpenter. In this case, however, the tweaking doesn’t matter much, since the first half of the movie, where most of the changes take place, is meandering and coy to begin with. In general, I can’t say that I’m wild about directors mucking around with our memories by fiddling with their classic films. In the new, remastered Star Wars, the added effects, which range from leathery desert beasts inserted into already existing shots to an awkward new scene in which Han Solo bargains his way out of a jam with a computer-generated Jabba the Hutt, don’t do much besides call attention to themselves. The magic of Star Wars lies in the way that his triumph is mirrored, emotionally, by the audience’s sense of joining something larger than itself. Luke Skywalker defeats the Empire by rising up out of himself to embrace something larger: the Force. Lucas, in his creative innocence (if he had actually intended to do this it wouldn’t have worked), created a zippy techno-dreamscape whose meaning was crystallized by the fact of its unprecedented box office success. You went to become part of the Event - to merge with it. (Thus, a few years later, the feel-good presidency of Ronald Reagan, who came up with a PR coup in naming his cherished missile shield after Lucas’ film.) When you went to see Star Wars, you didn’t just go to a movie, or an Event. With the election of the scoldingly saintly Jimmy Carter, America was like a kid longing for a hot rod. Yet by the time that Star Wars was released, there’d been a further shift in the national mood - a yearning, after years of fragmentation and upheaval, after Vietnam and Watergate, for something bold and official and empowering.
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And just two years before Lucas’ extravaganza, in the summer of 1975, there was Jaws, the original modern blockbuster, a virtuoso exercise in primal terror that generated first-weekend grosses so staggering they effectively turned the movie industry on its head.
Star Wars, of course, was hardly the first movie to become a national event. To see Star Wars in a theater again, amid crowds cheering both the movie and their own propensity to cheer, is to feel an ambiguous surge of nostalgia, a nostalgia for the moment when we agreed to reunite as a culture by going back to the future. Now, as the film is rereleased for its 20th anniversary, we’ll come once more, not just to see the newly enhanced ”Special Edition” but to reexperience the high of mass enthusiasm that George Lucas reintroduced to America.
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The ultimate popcorn movie, memorably dubbed by Pauline Kael ”a box of Cracker Jack that is all prizes,” Star Wars, with its eagerness and flash, its fairy-tale irresistibility, paved the way for a new era of demagogic comic-book moviemaking, one in which speed and action and special effects would take precedence over character, content, soul. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader were like white and black chess kings even their lightsabers were color coded. An ecstatically entertaining retro sci-fi adventure, fusing the clunky ”innocence” of ’50s outer-space serials, the oedipal design of the Arthurian legends, and the eye-zapping technology of a new era, the movie tapped into something at once superficial and deep, our yearning for a world in which good and evil could still stand apart with sublime clarity. George Lucas built Star Wars, and we came.
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