In 1994, when I was 23, I was shopping for graduate schools. I remembered a paper I’d read by U of O archaeologist Madonna Moss, “Shellfish and Gender.” So I applied to the U of O. A year later Dr. Moss was my graduate advisor.

In 1990, I was obsessed with Twin Peaks. It was set (and filmed) in Washington, but that was the first intimation of the coming Pacific Northwest Cultural Wave (Grunge, Starbucks, Microsoft) that kind of wormed its way into my perceptions of the world.

In 1986, when I was 14, my family took a vacation to the Pacific Northwest. On that trip I first saw the ocean, probably at Neskowin. We stayed in Manzanita. I’d had dreams about the ocean my entire life: swimming in heavy waves, being underwater, sailing, standing on beaches. The beach at Neskowin was exactly like I imagined an Oregon beach should be. Even the smell was familiar; the whole experience was familiar. Cold feet, salt air, windburn, gray sky, woodsmoke, rotting seaweed.

In 1985, I saw the movie Goonies. It was a good enough story but I fell in love with that landscape. Trees and cliffs and rocky beaches, set hard against the restless water.

In 1981, I was in fourth grade, the year that Nebraska children first learn state history. We lived in Scottsbluff, within sight of the famous bluff that featured prominently in diaries of the Oregon Trail. Near at hand were actual physical artifacts of the Trail: the Rebecca Winters Grave, Signature Rock, wagon ruts on Windlass Hill. Much of our state’s history was the story of people moving through. To Oregon. These were gruesome stories of hardship: hunger, starvation, dysentery, Indian attack, freezing in passes, drowing in river crossings. It didn’t take a genius to figure: Oregon must be pretty nice. Nice enough to walk for four to six months across a continent.

The year previous, Mt. St. Helens erupted. It struck me as profoundly weird that people would live in a place with volcanoes. And Bigfoot. And flying saucers. All of which were childhood obsessions.

Also around that time I read a book I think no one else has ever read: The Haunted Cove by Elizabeth Hazelton. I think I got it free from Scholastic Book Club for ordering umpteen other books. It’s a Young People’s Mystery (ala Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew) set on the Oregon Coast. Hazelton did a superb job drawing the Oregon land/seascape. Her prose is why my dreams of the ocean looked exactly like the ocean in Oregon. This obscure book is probably singlehandedly responsible for my ultimate move to Oregon.

We’ve a long gray wet spring that just can’t seem to quit. It’s easy to complain but — for me, anyway — easier to remember: this is why I moved here. I came here for the gray and wet and chilly. So mild, so green; so unlike the fierce wilting humid heat of my childhood summers. The coldgraywet makes me grateful for books, for bicycles, for mud and coffee and hiking boots, for empty beaches and quiet forest trails. It makes the beer taste better.

It’s midnight and I just woke up from a dream about a movie that Hollywood™ should totally make. It would win Best Picture, hands down. The elevator pitch:

Modern-day Rashomon with gays in the military, careers on the line, each retelling progressively more unbelievable. Did I mention: Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt make out? Topicality bonus: Abu Ghraib!

This video (thanks, Scott) set me to thinking a little bit about Star Wars:

I first saw Star Wars 31 years ago. A friend of the family named Jim took my family to see Star Wars in the theater ... we were living in rural Nebraska and at that time (1977) even blockbusters like Star Wars took a month or two to hit the theaters out in the sticks. So Jim had seen it like a dozen times already (he was from the Big City, Lincoln) & explained it in great detail to myself and my brother. This was (is?) my first clear memory. From that day until puberty (ca. 1983), pretty much the only games that interested me were either a) Star Wars or b) another outer space–related game.

Based solely on the extreme coolness of the Star Wars movies — Empire in particular — I wanted to be an astronomer until I was about 14. Carl Sagan had an influence here as well. It must say something about me that I thought (OK, still think) Carl Sagan is one of the coolest people with whom I have shared the Earth.

One of the awesome things about Star Wars in the 70s and early 80s was that it didn’t have an “expanded universe” in the same scope as it has today. There was a Holiday Special, novelizations, a few scattered novels like Han Solo and the Lost Legacy, some Sunday comics, and a comic book series. I remember a cartoon about Ewoks, and some Ewoks TV specials too. There was precious little “canon” and most of that was hard to get at. On the other hand, the movies hinted at a lot of stuff happening around the edges. Who was the bounty hunter on Ord Nandell? What cargo did Han Solo drop? Why did Yoda live in the swamp? What’s a Womp Rat? For six- to eleven-year-old boys, richly hinted backstory + poorly developed canon = endless possibility to expand the stories. The only game I ever played was Star Wars and I never once played out a scene from a movie.

I think Empire spoiled my generation. It’s really the only undeniably good movie of the entire six-pack. It was so good that it made the first movie deeper and the third movie palatable. I saw Empire when I was nine years old, old enough to understand a lot of the grownup type themes about love and loss. It was heavy and dark in a way that fascinated me.

I have a theory about Star Wars films:

A Star Wars film can be great cinema, or it can have a scene on Tatooine, but not both.

Until the second (prequel) trilogy, I used to phrase this theory as “The cinematic greatness of a Star Wars film is inversely proportional to the amount of Tatooine it contains.” Actually, that theory might still hold, I dunno.

On my college admissions form (1989), I listed my religious preference as “Jedi.” This was actually not too far off the truth.

In college, I lived in a house near campus with several friends, and if the TV was on, it was probably playing a Star Wars video (or American Gladiators).

In 1996, I went to see a movie with my then-girlfriend at the mall in Eugene. One of the trailers was for the digitally remastered series:

At the moment when the announcer says “Now, for its twentieth anniversary...” my then-girlfriend said, “I think I’m going to cry.” I said, “I already am.” (FWIW I’m a little misty watching it again right now.)

I think I’ve seen the first three Star Wars movies several hundred times each. I’ve seen each of the three prequel films exactly once. Pretty much out of a sense of obligation: “oh, it can’t possibly be as bad as they say...” No, actually it’s worse. About 10 of the last 20 minutes of the last movie, and one scene in each of the first two movies, held a tiny kernel of the old Star Wars magic.¹ So maybe 13 or 14 good minutes out of six excruciating hours.

It’s cliché for people of my generation to say, whenever filmmakers recycle beloved ideas from the 1970s and 1980s, that they’re “raping our childhood,” or “molesting me retroactively.” This is especially true on this topic. But after I saw Phantom Menace, that’s kind of how I felt. I lay awake all night — I was living in a hot, noisy apartment directly above West Burnside, not very conducive to sleep anyway — feeling a little like I’d just learned my father wasn’t really my father. I suppose that must be what it’s like for a devout and rather credulous young Mormon to hear about the Planet Kolob stuff . “Whoa, you mean I grew up thinking that was cool? Ugh, now I feel all dirty.

One of my favorite mental games for bored-times is to imagine plot outlines for better prequels. The Internets are awash with nerds pontificating about how the prequels suck, and I’m sure someone has written some plot outlines or somesuch. I haven’t — and probably won’t ever — go that far. But I think Lucas missed two (and a half) really big opportunities in the prequels. My mental plot outlines concentrate on those missed opportunities. In particular:

• Obi Wan is almost totally lacking in backstory. Lucas could have filled three prequels with his story: his youth, his Jedi training, how he came to work for the Organas, his involvement in the Clone Wars. That’s two good movies right there, and we wouldn’t just be treading water for two interminable hours on Tatooine. Late in the second movie he meets Anakin Skywalker, and the third movie is all about Anakin’s fall, but told from Obi-Wan’s point of view.
• Similarly, Padme/Amidala is a whole lotta nothing. You know what would be awesome? If she were a Jedi. You know what would be even more awesome? If the prequels were all about her in exactly the same way they could have been about Obi Wan Kenobi. You know what would be even more awesomer? If the reason Obi Wan and Anakin fight to the death in a volcano is because they are both in love with her.
• (This is the half idea) Lucas really missed an opportunity by failing to introduce any new plot twists in the prequels. The worst thing about watching the prequels (two and three in particular), was the grim inevitability of it. You knew exactly what would happen, and whaddyaknow it did. Perhaps the most memorable scene of humanity in the entire six-pack is when Darth Vader tells Luke he’s his father. So what if he wasn’t? I’m just saying.

Notes

¹ In the first movie, when Liam Neeson is fighting Darth Maul, there’s some kind of force field or something. It keeps interrupting the fight. Darth Maul and Obi Wan are all twitchy nerves jumping around looking menacing or scared but Liam Neeson sits down to meditate. I thought: “there’s something Yoda would teach.” That’s one. In the second movie, Natalie Portman and Teen Vader jump into a spaceship to go rescue Obi Wan. Portman pulls off that scene in such a way that you think “shit, she’s all psyched to go save her buddy’s ass,” and it feels a little Princess Leia-ish. That’s two. And in the third movie, the sequence where the robots are turning Teen Vader into Darth Vader...that’s three.

This past Saturday, Jenny and I saw Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian at the Kennedy School’s “Family Matinee.”¹ It was a good-enough movie I suppose, although a lack of alternatives (most theaters a) aren’t explicitly appropriate places for toddlers and b) don’t serve beer) may have colored both my expectations and experience. Also, Prince Caspian is probably the weakest of the Narnia books, so getting a decent movie out of it would be a challenge I’m sure.

But this isn’t really about Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. It’s about Epic Fantasy Movies, the Genre. I have a simple request for people who produce movies in this genre (see also: Golden Compass). Not even a request, so much as an observation:

The gigantic set-piece battle at the climax of your movie probably sucks.

It sucks because it’s almost certainly unnecessary. For example, the entire tone of Lewis’ Narnia series is personal, not epic. These are stories about some children and their fantastical relationship with a magic lion (who is coincidentally Jesus). They are not stories about the grand sweep of history in a brilliantly-realized alternate world. When it came to realizing the warp and weave of Narnian culture and history, Lewis was clearly making it up as we went along, because that wasn’t the important part of his books. Sure, most of the Narnia books have a battle, but Lewis frankly couldn’t write a decent battle scene to save his life. That’s why they’re each about two pages long. They didn’t need to be lengthy and detailed because they weren’t the center of his stories — the centers of his stories were the talky bits with the magic Jesus lion. If you’re using a Narnia book for the source of your Epic Fantasy Movie, you better pay more attention to the talky Jesus lion parts than to the gigantic climatic battle. The lion is Jesus: he will make the battle turn out OK, and we all know that.

Yes, we know The Lord of the Rings had one awesome climactic battle after another and they just kept getting giganticker and awesomer and we, the audience, loved it. But, and here’s the really important part, we didn’t love the battle because Legolas surfed down the oliphant’s trunk, we loved it because by the time Legolas was surfing down oliphant trunks, we’d spent six hours getting to know and love Legolas, and we really cared about what would happen when he did that trunk-surfing thing.

Also: Tolkien wrote really awesome battle scenes. They went on for pages and pages. That’s because Tolkien was interested in all the stuff Lewis wasn’t, the warp-and-weave-of-imaginary-history stuff. He made up languages, that’s how much he cared. The battles in Lord of the Rings were not a foregone conclusion, because a) there was no magic Jesus animal who would go and deus ex machina the outcome for us, and b) the battles really really mattered to Tolkien, and to Middle Earth. Peter Jackson could have filmed those battle scenes in claymation and we’d have had the same amount of emotion invested in Legolas, Middle Earth, and the outcome of the battle. That’s why they worked, and yours don’t.

So, to reiterate:

When you’re making an Epic Fantasy Movie based on a book, and the book devotes 1% of its space to a battle, don’t make the battle in your movie twenty minutes long. It will suck and we won’t be impressed. Except with how sucky it is.

Notes

¹ For those of you unfamiliar with McMenamin’s Kennedy School, it features a brew-and-view movie theater, a brilliant concept even without the Family Matinee.

“Brew-and-view” defined: second-run movie theater that serves beer and food (usually pizza). Tickets usually cost $2 or $3, and the beer & food are usual bar prices. We can see a movie, eat a meal, and drink beer at a brew-and-view for less than the admission price (usually $8 or $9 each) at a first-run theater.

McMenamin’s is a Pacific Northwest chain of brewpubs and related venues (such as movie theaters, hotels, and chip-and-putt golf courses — which all serve beer, natch). A favorite Oregon passtime is to bitch about McMenamins’ substandard [beer|food|service|ubiquity], which gives you a sense of how awesome Oregon can be at times. That’s like saying “a favorite Oregon passtime is bitching about the substandard quality of our gumdrop trees and chocolate bonbon bushes.”

The “Family Matinee” or “Mommy Matinee” is a local innovation where families with very young children are encouraged to bring their toddlers to the movie. The theory being, if all the kids are crying, you won’t stress because your kid is crying. It’s a pretty good theory.

• You can only type “LOL” or “ROTFL” if you are actually Laughing Out Loud or Rolling on the Floor Laughing
• Once a year, every American family must move everything they own, by hand, out of the house and into a standard 20-foot shipping container. Anything they cannot carry or fit into the container will be donated to the African nation of their choice.
• Cel phones will cause physical pain while in use.
• Every automaker must offer at least one car with an AM radio, standard transmission, and carburetor; and with no power steering, windows, or brakes.
• Robin Williams may continue to make movies but all human beings must agree that any movie in which he participates is, by definition, bad, and that, moreover, said badness has become so egregious that it has retroactively bad-ified previously non-bad movies like The World According to Garp and The Fisher King.
• Steve Martin will be warned that the Robin Williams Act may be extended to certain other actors.