Nothing beats the original

I'm told that the new release of the Star Wars trilogy on DVD is going to be a hot item this Kwannakahmas. Hell, Amazon.com is practically giving it away at $42 -- what savings! And as much as I love the Star Wars franchise, and I do love the Star Wars franchise far more than is normal or healthy, George Lucas will be getting none of my money this holiday season. Like Wordsworth aging into insignificance, George Lucas, drunk on the wine of licensing and royalties, has gone back to tinker with the creation that made him great. And I'll have none of it.

The new DVDs will have all the bells and whistles of "re-released" movies (Better sound! Louder sound! Did we mention better, louder sound?). But beyond that, elements of the plot have been changed, the most egregious of which comes in the first (technically, the fourth) movie. Smuggler Han Solo is confronted at gunpoint in a bar by the bounty hunter Greedo, who, presented with a choice between collecting dead or alive, clearly intends to exercise the "dead" option. In the original, Han coolly stalls while slowly unholstering his gun under the table and shooting Greedo dead. Decades later, Lucas decided this was too "cold-blooded" and changed it so the bounty hunter shoots first and misses.

It is hard to explain to someone who doesn't know Mos Eisley from Mos Def why this is such an appalling difference. On one level, it's just stupid -- in movies, no one misses from point blank range, especially someone who we're supposed to take for a hardened bounty hunter. It takes you out of the movie just as fast a seeing a boom mic in the top of the picture.

But there's more to it than that. It is directly antithetical to Han's devil-may-care attitude and cloudy moral background that make him such a hit with the ladies. After all, if he was a golden boy all along, what's the point of him coming through in the clutch at the last second of the movie? Not to, you know, give it away or anything.

This is also why the vast majority of even casual Star Wars fans greeted the character Jar-Jar Binks from the newer movies with such outrage. It wasn't just that he was annoying, not funny (although they tried to make him funny, boy did they try) and an overall obnoxious waste of space. He represented everything that was wrong about the new movies: an appeal to marketing over substance. By directing and (oh boy) writing the new films with visions of licensed Burger King cups dancing in his head, Lucas neglected to include little things like "writing" and "fun" and "logic." While the original movies gave us lines like, "do or do not; there is no try," in the prequels we are treated to, "I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything's soft ... and smooth ..." Gag. Try turning that into a Penn writing class, I dare you.

So what has changed since 1977, the year of the original release? Judging by gas prices and Middle East snafus, not a whole hell of a lot. And I know that, unlike myself, most people do not connect everything they see and read to cultural politics. But I can't help thinking that this fits perfectly into our current rigid, black and white view of the world. In an age when "nuance" is a dirty word, Han can't shoot first. For us, the good guys wear tights (good luck with all that, Andy) and are devoid of any of those troublesome moral question marks. Casting everyone as either "good" or "evil" fails to account for the fact that most people are both. I can love America, a great country, while recognizing that it has done bad things. This doesn't make me unpatriotic. It just means I'm not delusional.

Aging artists going back to the earlier works that made them great and changing them, often softening their original stance, is a sadly common trend. Later in life, the poet W.H. Auden turned on earlier poems, re-writing some and leaving others out of anthologies, including "September 1st, 1939," which Auden probably hated because of its enduring popularity. But in the end, he did not change the title of the poem to "Gee, I'm rather worried about the Nazis, among other things," in order to give it greater appeal with kids whose parents buy them things. One is a question of artistic ego, the other one of subverting artistic integrity for greater economic gain, or, as it is known colloquially, "selling out."

There is a good chance I'm reading too much into this, but I honestly don't care what anyone else thinks. In my reality-based community, nuance lives. Han can shoot first. And screw Jar-Jar Binks.

Eliot Sherman is a senior English major from Philadelphia and editorial page editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. Diary of a Madman normally appears on Thursdays.

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