My Star Wars Story

"A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."

When you begin your film with these words, you're making a statement. You're saying, "This movie is going to be like everything and nothing you've seen before. It's going to be equal parts past and future, fantasy and western, familiar and unknown, and it's going to stay with you for the rest of your life."

There's no tagline quite like it in the history of cinema. It's almost mathematical in its self-contained genius. No word is out of place, and every word is necessary. My cynical side wants to say that this phrase contains the essence of what makes Star Wars so easy to market to the masses, but the kid in me wants to tell you that it captures the essence of what makes Star Wars so personal, precious, and moving for so many. And it's the reason I am about to tell you my Star Wars story...

When something big happens in your life, the details surrounding it tend to get lodged in your memory. I was 7, maybe 8 years old and I was with my parents at Chuck-a-Rama, a local buffet restaurant in Utah Valley. Blockbuster was next door to the restaurant and my parents were trying to decide what movie they should rent for me. At the time I loved old movies, and my parents were vital in introducing me to classic cinema and setting the stage for my lifelong love of film. As they brainstormed, my mom's eyes lit up. "We should rent Star Wars for Andy!" she said with an enthusiasm that immediately caught my attention. "What's that?!" I quickly asked. She then proceeded to sell me the movie, citing everything about it that she thought would appeal to my mini-movie buff sensibilities. "It's in space" I think she said, "and there are these two robots named R2-D2 and C-3PO and they go on an adventure..."

I don't remember what else she told me about it, but I remember how it made me feel. I hadn't even seen the movie yet and I was already dying to see what these two robots looked like, what type of creatures they would encounter, and what kind of universe they would inhabit. I remember seeing the VHS cover for the first time at Blockbuster after dinner. Though they stood off to the side, under a towering Luke Skywalker and buxom Princess Leia, R2-D2 and C-3PO caught my eye first as I recognized them as the robots my mom had described. Then we drove home and I watched Star Wars for the first time. First there was the 20th Century Fox fanfare, which I recognized from countless other old movies I had already seen. Then silence, and those words came across the screen in blue. "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..." then, there it was, STAR WARS, the title taking up the whole screen with that wiz-bang opening note of the John Williams soundtrack. I'm sure I didn't bother to read the title crawl, but it enthralled me nonetheless, like nothing I had ever seen in a movie before.

Then those two robots (actually called droids, as I soon learned) I had been waiting to see showed up in the first interior shot of the movie, and I was hooked. I would watch the other two Star Wars films in the coming months, and throughout the trilogy I saw R2-D2 and C-3PO as the main characters. They were my through-line, my connection with the story. I think they serve this function for most children. I guess for a child, these two little droids are easiest to relate to. On the playground I pretended to be Luke Skywalker or Han Solo, but when I watched the films, the droids were the avatars—the route through which I felt like I was part of the action. This is why I still feel the same way about R2-D2 that I feel about my cat. They're both faithful friends who speak to whatever innocence and child-like wonder I have left.

Like any kid who grew up in the '70's, '80's, or '90's, I interacted with Star Wars largely through the merchandise. I was really into action figures as a kid, and my favorite one was a Han Solo who could fit into a little carbonite-freeze casing. I spent hours playing with that thing, and as a result found myself looking to Han Solo more than R2-D2 and C-3PO as I got a little older. Around the same time I discovered Star Wars, I also discovered Indiana Jones, which would become my absolute favorite thing on the planet for the next 4 or 5 years of my life. With the one-two punch of these two movie trilogies, the combined efforts of George Lucas and Harrison Ford (with a little help from Steven Spielberg) consumed and completely shaped the landscape of my imagination for years to come. From about 4th to 6th grade I wore a leather jacket and fedora to school, for which I was teased mercilessly. My love for Indiana Jones was too visibly different to have it go unscathed by the brutality of boyhood. Luckily, I still had Star Wars, which was always a source of connection with my childhood peers rather than alienation. It may not have been cool in my neck 'o the woods to dress like Indiana Jones every day, but it was cool to engage in lightsaber duels on the playground or talk about which books from the Star Wars Expanded Universe we had read...especially after The Phantom Menace came out. It may be a dud of a film, but Episode 1 was a source of much fun and friendship for me and everyone else my age.

And I'll say this for all three of the prequels: they re-kindled the hell out of my interest in the original trilogy upon their respective releases. I didn't really hate the prequels at the time, but even then I found myself re-watching A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi as a pallet cleanser. Re-visiting these movies again and again as a teenager placed Han Solo alongside Indiana Jones and James Bond as my go-to cinematic heroes, and gave me a chance to delve into the mythology more deeply.

After my first year of college, I spent two years as a missionary for the LDS church. In Mormon culture, missionary service is a right of passage for young adults, and it's supposed to be a time of great joy. The fact of the matter is, it's a really dark and sometimes nightmarish time for many of us. The separation from home is a lot to deal with and the pressure to generate success in the mission field is a disastrous mental and emotional strain. One of the ways we dealt with all this on my mission was talking about Star Wars. We'd debate everything from which prequel movie was the worst to whether Yoda was more powerful than Darth Vader. There was even a group of us who had come up with our own Star Wars alter egos and made up stories about how our characters interacted with each other and what sorts of adventures they would have. I guess it was the most common denominator, the most shared experience from our combined pre-mission lives, so it was the easiest way to generate conversation. I think it was also a way of remembering who we were as people, keeping one foot in our real lives so we didn't lose ourselves completely to our whitewashed missionary identities. During this strange, dark time in our lives, Star Wars was truly a saving grace.

I returned home from my mission in, 2011. A little over a year later, Star Wars would play a huge role in connecting me with the love of my life. Jenna and I met on a study abroad program in Berlin. We spent our first day together with the rest of our study abroad group at the Brandenburg gate, where a guy in a Darth Vader costume was charging 2 or 3 euro to take pictures with him. As Jenna paid this guy and posed for a picture with him in front of this historical landmark, I silently judged her like the smug idiot that I was. "She probably doesn't even like Star Wars, and she's paying money to take this dumb touristy picture." I soon learned that she was a bigger Star Wars fan than I, but before I learned that I was already developing a huge crush on her anyway. I embarked on that trip all hopped up on Hemingway and Bukowski, planning to avoid any and all romantic entanglements and take a long stroll down the male bleeding-heart-expat-poet road. I hadn't dated anyone seriously since my last break up the year before, and I'd be damned if I wasn't going to keep it that way. Instead I found myself on an adventure with a woman who would shatter all my expectations (sound familiar?). Over the course of the three-month trip we watched all three Star Wars movies. A New Hope we watched early on with some friends over a Saturday breakfast. This was when I realized how big a fan she was, so I spent the whole breakfast talking everyone's ear off about the genre roots of Star Wars, probably in a feeble attempt to impress her. About a month later we were on a weekend excursion to Greece. Our second night there we watched The Empire Strikes Back on somebody's laptop, there were four of us cuddled up on a couch and Jenna fell asleep with her head on my shoulder. I was really falling hard for her at the time and I had no idea how she felt about me, and I sat there with her head on my shoulder watching Han Solo and Princess Leia slowly moving in for their first on-screen kiss, and I realized that I was living out this love story in space that I had seen a million times. Like Han Solo, I had embarked on an adventure, getting more than I bargained for in the form of a strong, beautiful woman who wasn't going to put up with my scruffy-lookin'-nerfherderness, and the more I tried to pretend otherwise, the more obvious it was that I was falling in love with her.

Two years later, Jenna and I were married. Being the James Bond fan that I am, I wore an ivory dinner jacket like the one Sean Connery wears in Goldfinger, but not without a pair of cufflinks Jenna had given me as a wedding gift—one with the words "I Love You" on the face of it, and the other, "I Know". When we graduated college together, we wore matching Star Wars vans to the ceremony. A few months ago, we had neighbors stop by our first apartment. I let them in, and one of them took a quick look around and said, "I guess you guys really like Star Wars, huh." I hadn't realized until that moment that nearly half of our apartment decor was Star Wars-related, and I was even wearing a Star Wars t-shirt at the time. I guess Star Wars is no longer something we enjoy separately. It's now our thing. Like any couple, we've taken a common interest and made it something that's indicative of the life we're building together.

Me and Jenna at Graduation

    

So...here we are, all caught up to the present. Tomorrow at 10:15p.m. I'll be sitting in a theater, dressed as Han Solo, watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens. For the past year I've been thinking a lot about what this new movie will mean for me and countless other lifelong Star Wars fans. Judging from the message of the movie's trailers and other promotional footage, it seems that the new characters interacting with the old ones may act as a metaphor for the way new generations of fans keep discovering and connecting with the original trilogy. For me, The Force Awakens will mark a new chapter in my Star Wars story. I have no idea how I'll feel about any of the new Star Wars films, but I do know that I'll always have the original trilogy. Star Wars became a property that reached far beyond the films very early on, but it's still those first three films that mean the most. George Lucas once called mythology a "form of psychological archaeology". Pop-culture tends to serve this function in the 21st century, and there is no pop-culture phenomenon more universally captivating than the original Star Wars trilogy. This is why we revere these movies as a culture. Sure, they have their flaws, their silly bits of dialogue, bad acting, etc. But whether we like it or not, Star Wars is our shared mythology in the 21st century. At its core, the mythology of Star Wars sends a message of hope to the masses. As someone who has benefited personally from that message since I was kid, I'd say we could do a whole lot worse than a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.