who's your daddy, luke?

I saw Star Wars a second time the summer of 1977 because I didn't get it the first time. I also wanted to give the movie, which was quickly gaining on full-blown phenomenon status, a fair shake. After all, the first time I'd seen it at a drive-in, and everyone I knew who loved it told me it must be appreciated in a theatre.

I doubted that. The reasons I was underwhelmed had little to do with the venue, which after all had facilitated precisely the kind of pharmaceutical indulgence that one might expect render the movie amazing under just about any circumstances. No, it was the vision of the future -- or past, or whatever it was -- that bugged me. It just seemed, well, dumb.

Let me step back here. I had actually been kind of cranked to see it. Some months previously, Star Wars had been featured in a science fiction/fantasy/horror magazine called Cinefantastique, and the production images and drawing boards included in the story made it look amazing. As technologically ravishing as 2001, it seemed, but with way more violence. How could that go wrong?

But here's what, under a starry sky that summer of '77, I saw: a movie with a Saturday morning cartoon plot, a riot of bad costumes, blow-dryed hair jobs, dorky-looking fuzzball aliens, cardboard-thick performances, Flash Gordon-level dialogue and some of the most asinine character names I'd heard of this side of a Mel Brooks movie. A lone wolf rebel hero named Han Solo? A golden boy space hero named Luke Skywalker? A heavy-breathing black-caped intergalactic death-dealer named -- I kid you not -- Darth Vader? I mean, what the christ was this?

What made the whole thing seem even dumber was the fact that it was, especially for its day, so technically ravishing. It was as though somebody had given Stanley Kubrick's vision-making toolbox to a twelve-year old.

To hopefully bolster my case, we also must consider context. If you were, as I most indisputably was, a movie-fixated nineteen year-old who had just dropped out of journalism school to study film full time -- not all that common an academic pursuit in those days -- you probably would have seen a lot of the movies I had that year. Annie Hall was also released in '77, but so were New York, New York, William Friedkin's Sorcerer, Don Siegel's Telefon, Eraserhead, George Romero's Martin, John Frankenheimer's Black Sunday and Altman's 3 Women. Cassavetes released Opening Night, Alain Resnais made Providence, Satyajit Ray finished The Chess Players and Wim Wenders sprung The American Friend. The Taviani brothers' Padre Padrone arrived, and so did Andrzej Wajda's Man of Iron. And all of these -- I mean every single one of them -- opened and played at commercial theatres. I'm still kind of stunned to think about it.

However snobbish though I may have been, I should stress that I wasn't averse to taking in, nor enjoying, anything simply because it was a success. Far from it. I thought Saturday Night Fever was terrific (and still do), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind was sufficiently mesmerizing to me to qualify as a kind of obsession. (I've probably seen that one about twelve times since.) No, I was perfectly okay with popular provided it was also interesting. And that, when you get right down to it, was what Star Wars wasn't -- at least not at the time. It just wasn't interesting.

But everybody loved it, so I went again.

The result was the same, so I stood by with more than a little amazement in the coming months as George Lucas's movie proceeded to pretty much change the entire game. People were going multiple times, merchandise was selling in stratospheric numbers, anticipation for sequels was surging, and just about every studio was scrambling to produce its own version of a blockbusting space opera. The fuss simply eluded me. For the life of me, I could not understand why people were getting so worked up.

The rest of the story you know, at least the George Lucas vs. Hollywood version of it: Star Wars goes on to break all existing box office records, spawn equally record-breaking sequels (which I dutifully but unenthusiastically went to see). It re-writes the books on merchandizing, rollout strategies and opening-weekend numbers, signals the ultimate last gasp of the studio era (it was, after all, an independent production), and generates the most rabidly keen fan base anyone had seen since Star Trek. Indeed, it was as much the success of Star Wars as the relentless lobbying of the Trekkers that ultimately led to the re-launching of the Enterprise. Most importantly, Star Wars confirms the action-fantasy future of the movies, and thus the end of Hollywood's brief spasm as a producer of author-driven art movies. In a word, it changes everything.

So let's leap ahead a couple of decades, and smack into the future Star Wars makes possible. By then, the first movie has become a kind of generational touchstone, perhaps the movie most often cited by an entire generation of moviegoers (and filmmakers) as the one that first planted the bug. In 1997, the trilogy is being re-released by Lucas with new footage, and my ten-year old daughter, who has already seen the movies on videocassette, is practically panting at the idea of seeing the movies on the big screen.

By this time, I'd already begun to reconsider. In seeing how my kid -- whom absolutely everybody knows is uncommonly brilliant -- had taken to the movies, I realized that, in a very simple and uncomplicated way, I was just too old for Star Wars to appreciate it. I had gone in with expectations of a grownup science fiction movie -- of which there was no shortage in the '70s -- and was predictably unimpressed by a high-tech Saturday afternoon serial for kids.

After seeing the re-released trilogy, my daughter's passion only intensified. She started reading Star Wars  books, playing Star Wars games, collecting Star Wars comics and toys, making her own Star Wars-inspired art. And she did so for years. She was deeply immersed in the entire culture of Star Wars and therefore qualified as something I never was and never fully appreciated: a fan.

Finally, I started to get it. Star Wars wasn't just a movie. It wasn't even three movies. It was, so to speak, an entire universe, and one's full appreciation of it also required a full immersion: in the books, in the games, in the comics. In the life. Eventually, I even came to appreciate that, for fans like my kid, the movies were really only a small part of the whole thing. An element of a much larger enterprise. The real Star Wars experience involved the whole multi-media shebang. It was all in or nothing.

When the franchise was finally revived for the CGI-era, I went with my daughter to see both The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. I found them almost unendurably dull, cold and painful. Funny thing is, my kid's feelings weren't all that different. But her disappointment was diluted by the then almost incidental nature of the movies. The fictional universe of Star Wars, which had well begun to expand into cyberspace, was much, much bigger than these moribund megaplex fillers. So when she didn't like the movies much, it didn't really matter. If anything, they at least introduced a whole cast of new characters and situations that, she knew, would be far more satisfactorily expanded upon and fleshed out in alternate official Star Wars fictional worlds.

So while I still don't really enjoy Star Wars, I've certainly developed a healthy respect and understanding of it. And I've also some to understand something about fandom that's only becoming more pervasive in the age of globally networked, actively engaged, multiply-mediated, web-circuited fandom. Fandom, like the things that ignite it, can take many different forms, and Star Wars fandom tends to take a form that's just different from my own. My enthusiasms tended to toward singular experiences: a particular movie, a particular book, a particular comic or band. Star Wars, like Star Trek or Lord of the Rings or Frank Herbert's Dune books, was about entire worlds. Same for Harry Potter, another fictional experience that otherwise completely eludes me. (It doesn't help, I've come to realize, that I also have absolutely no interest in games, which by now have become an absolutely key component of so many pop culture franchises.) The thrill came from their integration and connection, the incremental expansion of their narratives into every more complex epic dimensions. In this, it was visionary in much more than the industry-transforming sense. It anticipated the fan world of the digital era.

But I still think that movie's pretty dumb. But I thank George Lucas, whom I interviewed once and graciously autographed a Star Wars comic book for my daughter, for helping me understand there are other ways to get obsessed than my own. The Force may not be with me, but I'm just a speck in the universe anyway.