Chuck Klosterman On Film And Television (7 page)

I concede that part of my bias toward
Empire
probably comes from the fact that it was the first movie I ever saw in a theater. This is a seminal experience for anyone, and I suppose it unconsciously shapes the way a person looks at cinema (I initially assumed all theatrical releases were prefaced by an expository text block that was virtually incomprehensible). The film was set in three static locations: The ice planet Hoth (which looked like North Dakota), the jungle system Dagobah (which was sort of like the final twenty minutes of
Apocalypse Now
), and the mining community of Cloud City (apparently a cross between Las Vegas and Birmingham, Alabama). It’s often noted by critics that this is the only
Star Wars
film that ends on a stridently depressing note: Han Solo is frozen in carbonite and torn away from Princess Leia, Luke gets his paw hacked off, and Darth Vader has the universe by the jugular.
The Empire Strikes Back
is the only blockbuster of the modern era to celebrate the abysmal failure of its protagonists. This is important; this is why
The Empire Strikes Back
set the philosophical template for all the slackers who would come of age ten years later. George Lucas built the army of clones that would eventually be led by Richard Linklater.

Now, I realize
The Empire Strikes Back
was not the first movie all future Gen Xers saw. I was eight when I saw
Empire,
and I distinctly remember that a lot of my classmates had already seen
Star Wars
(or at least its first theatrical rerelease) and of course they all loved it, mostly because little kids are stupid. But
Empire
was the first movie that people born in the early seventies could understand in a way that went outside of its rudimentary plotline. And that’s why a movie about the good guys losing—both politically and romantically—is so integral to how people my age look at life.

When sociologists and journalists started writing about the sensibilities that drove Gen Xers, they inevitably used words like
angst-ridden
and
disenfranchised
and
lost
. As of late, it’s become popular to suggest that this was a flawed stereotype, perpetuated by an aging media who didn’t understand the emerging underclass.

Actually, everyone was right the first time.

All those original pundits were dead-on; for once, the media managed to define an entire demographic of Americans with absolute accuracy. Everything said about Gen Xers—both positive and negative—was completely true. Twenty-somethings in the nineties rejected the traditional working-class American lifestyle because (a) they were smart enough to realize those values were unsatisfying, and (b) they were totally fucking lazy. Twenty somethings in the nineties embraced a record like Nirvana’s
Nevermind
because (a) it was a sociocultural affront to the vapidity of the Reagan-era paradigm, and (b) it fucking rocked. Twenty-somethings in the nineties were by and large depressed about the future, mostly because (a) they knew there was very little to look forward to, and (b) they were obsessed with staring into the eyes of their own self-absorbed sadness. There are no myths about Generation X. It’s all true.

This being the case, it’s clear that Luke Skywalker was the original Gen Xer. For one thing, he was incessantly whiny. For another, he was exhaustively educated—via Yoda—about things that had little practical value (i.e., how to stand on one’s head while lifting a rock telekinetically). Essentially, Luke went to the University of Dagobah with a major in Buddhist philosophy and a minor in physical education. There’s not a lot of career opportunities for that kind of schooling; that’s probably why he dropped out in the middle of the semester. Meanwhile, Luke’s only romantic aspirations are directed toward a woman who (literally) looks at him like a brother. His dad is on his case to join the family business. Most significantly, all the problems in his life can be directly blamed on the generation that came before him, and specifically on his father’s views about what to believe (i.e., respect authority, dress conservatively, annihilate innocent planets, etc.).

Studied objectively, Luke Skywalker was not very cool. But for kids who saw
Empire,
Luke was The Man. He was the guy we wanted to be. Retrospectively, we’d like to claim Han Solo was the single-most desirable character—and he was, in theory. But Solo’s brand of badass cool is something you can’t understand until you’re old enough to realize that being an arrogant jerk is an attractive male quality. Third-graders didn’t want to be gritty and misunderstood; third-graders wanted to be Mark Hamill. And even though obsessive thirty-year-old fans of the trilogy hate to admit it, these were always kids’ movies. Lucas is not a Coppola or a Scorsese or even a De Palma—he makes movies that a sleepy eight-year-old can appreciate.
²
That’s his gift, and he completely admits it. “I wanted to make a kids’ film that would… introduce a kind of basic morality,” Lucas told author David Sheff. And because the
Star Wars
movies were children’s movies, Hamill had to be the center of the story. Any normal child was going to be drawn to Skywalker more than Solo. That’s the personality we swallowed. So when all the eight-year-olds from 1980 turned twenty-one in 1993, we couldn’t evolve. We were just old enough to be warped by childhood and just young enough not to realize it. Suddenly, we all wanted to be Han Solo. But we were stuck with Skywalker problems.

There’s a scene late in
The Empire Strikes Back
where Luke and Vader are having their epic light-saber duel, and one particular shot is filmed from behind Mark Hamill. Within the context of this shot, Darth Vader is roughly twice the physical size of Luke; obviously, the filmmakers are trying to illustrate a point about the massive size of the Empire and the relative impotence of the fledgling Jedi. Not surprisingly, they all go a bit overboard: Vader’s head appears larger than Luke’s entire torso, which sort of overextends any suspension of disbelief a rational adult might harbor. But to a wide-eyed youngster, that image looked completely reasonable: If Vader is Luke’s father (as we would learn minutes later), then Vader should seem as big as your dad.

As the scene continues, Luke is driven out onto a catwalk, where he loses his right hand and is informed that he’s the heir to the intergalactic Osama bin Laden. He more or less tries to commit suicide. Now, Luke is saved from this fate (of course), and since this
is
a movie, logic tells us that (of course) Vader will fall in the next installment of the series, even though it will take three years to get there. This is all understood. But that understanding is an adult understanding. As an eight-year-old, the final message of
The Empire Strikes Back
felt remarkably hopeless: Luke’s a good person,
but Luke still lost
. And it wasn’t like the end of
Rocky,
where Apollo Creed wins the split decision but Rocky wins a larger victory for the human spirit; Darth Vader beats Luke the way Ike used to beat Tina. A psychologist once told me that—over the span of her entire career—she had never known a man who didn’t have some kind of creepy, unresolved issue with his father. She told me that’s just an inherent part of being male. And here we have a movie where the hero is fighting every ideology he hates, gets his ass kicked, and is then informed, “Oh, and by the way: I’m your dad. But you knew that all along.”

In this same scene, Darth Vader tells Skywalker he has to make a decision: He can keep fighting a war he will probably lose, or he can compromise his ethics and succeed wildly. Many young adults face a similar decision after college, and those seen as “responsible” inevitably choose the latter path. However, an eight-year-old would never sell out. Little kids will always take the righteous option. And what’s intriguing about Gen Xers is they never really wavered from that decision. Luke’s quandary in
The Empire Strikes Back
is exactly like the situation facing Winona Ryder in 1994’s
Reality Bites
: Should she stick with the nice, sensible guy who treats her well (Ben Stiller), or should she roll the dice with the frustrating boho bozo who treats her like crap (Ethan Hawke)? For a detached adult, that answer seems obvious; for people who were twenty-one when this movie came out, the answer was just as obvious but completely different. As we all know, Winona went with Hawke. She had to. When Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert reviewed
Reality Bites,
I recall them complaining that Ryder picked the wrong guy; as far as I could tell, choosing the wrong guy was the whole point.

You don’t often see
Reality Bites
mentioned as an important (or even as a particularly good) film, but it grows more seminal with every passing year. When it was originally released, all its Gap jokes and AIDS fears and Lisa Loeb songs merely seemed like marketing strategies and ephemeral stabs at insight. However, it’s amazing how one film so completely captured every hyper-conventional ideal of such a short-lived era;
Reality Bites
is a period piece in the best sense of the term. And in the same way I have a special place in my heart for the first film I saw inside a movie house, I reserve a special place in my consciousness for the first film so unabashedly directed toward the condition of my own life. I was graduating from college the spring
Reality Bites
was released, and—though it didn’t necessarily seem like a movie
about
me—it was clearly a movie
for
me. Eighteen months earlier, everyone I knew had seen Cameron Crowe’s
Singles,
which we initially viewed as a youth movie. When we went back and rented
Singles
in the summer of 1994, I was suddenly struck by how old its cast seemed. I mean, they had full-time jobs and wanted to get married and have babies.
Singles
was just a normal romantic comedy that happened to have Soundgarden on the soundtrack.
Reality Bites
was an equally mediocre movie, but it validated a lot of mediocre lives, most notably my own. As I stated earlier, all the clichés about Gen Xers were true—but the point everyone failed to make was that our whole demographic was comprised of cynical optimists. Whenever my circa-1993 friends and I would sit around and discuss the future, there was always the omnipresent sentiment that the world was on the decline, but
we
were somehow destined to succeed individually. Everyone felt they would somehow be the exception within an otherwise grim universe. This is why Ryder had to pick Hawke. Winona made the kind of romantic decision most people my age would have made in 1994: She pursued a path that was difficult and depressing, and she did so because it showed the slightest potential for transcendence. Not coincidentally, this is also the Jedi’s path. Adventure? Excitement? The Jedi craves not these things. However, he does crave something greater than the bloodless existence of his father. Quite simply, Winona Ryder
is
Luke Skywalker, only with a better haircut and a killer rack.

Part of the reason so many critics think
The Empire Strikes Back
is the best
Star Wars
movie is just a product of how theater works:
Empire
is the second act of a three-act production, and the second act is usually the best part. The second act contains the conflict. And as someone born in the summer of 1972, I’ve sort of come to realize I’m part of a second-act generation. The most popular three-act play of the twentieth century is obvious: The Depression (Act I), World War II (Act II), and the sock-hop serenity of Richie Cunningham’s 1950s (Act III). The narrative arc is clear. But the play containing my life is a little more amorphous and a little less exciting, and test audiences are mixed: The first act started in 1962 and has a lot of good music and weird costumes, but the second act was poorly choreographed. Half the cast ran in place while the other half just sat around in coffeehouses, and we all tried to figure out what we were supposed to do with a society that had more media than intellect (and more irony than personality). Maybe the curtain on Act II fell with the World Trade Center. And as I look back at the best years of my life, I find myself wondering if maybe I wasn’t unconsciously conditioned to exist somewhere in the middle of two better stories, caught between the invention of the recent past and the valor of the coming future. Personally, I don’t think I truly understand invention or valor; they seem like pursuits that would require a light saber.

Within the circuits of my mind, the moments in
The Empire Strikes Back
I most adore are whenever Yoda gives his little Vince Lombardi speeches, often explaining that—in life—there is no inherent value to effort. “Do, or do not,” says the greenish Muggsy Bogues. “There is no
try
.” And that’s an inspiring sentiment. It’s the kind of logic that drives the world. But in my heart of hearts, the part of the film I can’t shake is when Luke Skywalker and Han Solo are riding around Hoth on tauntans, which are (for all practical purposes) bipedal space horses. When things get rough, Han Solo cuts open the belly of a tauntan and stuffs Luke inside the carcass; he saves him from a raging blizzard by encasing him in a cocoon of guts. I assume we’re supposed to find this clever and disgusting (or maybe even inventive and heroic). But I just know I’d rather be inside the belly of the beast.

1
. I know nobody uses the term
Generation X
anymore, and I know all the people it supposedly describes supposedly hate the supposed designation. But I like it. It’s simply the easiest way to categorize a genre of people who were born between 1965 and 1977 and therefore share a similar cultural experience. It’s not pejorative or complimentary; it’s factual. I’m a “Gen Xer,” okay? And I buy shit marketed to “Gen Xers.” And I use air quotes when I talk, and I sigh a lot, and I own a Human League cassette. Get over it.

2
. Case in point: When
Episode I
—
The Phantom Menace
came out in 1999, all the adults who waited in line for seventy-two hours to buy opening-night tickets were profoundly upset at the inclusion of Jar Jar Binks. “He’s annoying,” they said. Well, how annoying would R2D2 have seemed if you hadn’t been in the third fucking grade? Viewed objectively, R2D2 is like a dwarf holding a Simon.