The New Age Subversion of Warriorhood

Warriors and warrior-hood go back a long way, crossing huge cultural, geographic, and temporal divides. It's arguably a universal feature of complex civilisation, by which I mean that any large and sophisticated society has, somewhere in its past, some sort of comitatus structure in its DNA.

Whether it's the Romans, the Anglo Saxons, Qin, Han, Zhou, Japanese, or Vikings, each one of these civilisations and cultural complexes has, as a major and arguably essential feature of its structural integrity, a wholly committed warrior elite (comitatus). It's not controversial to say that the comitatus structure and culture, whether it be Samurai or Legionaries, was a key part of the aggressive militarisation which enabled early expansion of all the world's current major civilisations, and which has shaped the world we live in today.

And this is the thing which I think has largely been forgotten. The origin and purpose of warriors exists in the service of the state. This might sound an uncomfortable proposition, but is actually reasonably obvious. The absolute loyalty of the warrior in ancient times is always focussed on a single figure: the thane, daimyo, king, or emperor. And in ancient times these people, whoever they were, weren't actually people, but rather living embodiments of part or all of the state. So while it may feel, when we're looking back through time, that what we're seeing is fierce personal and human bonds of loyalty, this isn't a true or complete picture. Warrior-hood, at its deepest, most functional level, exists as the force necessary to maintain and legitimise power, encoded into living, breathing humans.

Concepts as old as this do not, of course, need to be preserved pristine and in their boxes like some man-child's collection of Marvel figurines, but in order to retain any meaning or significance, what cannot be compromised is their core fundamentals. In the case of the concept of warrior-hood, that core centres around selfless service. Which would be why the man bun wearing single origin crystal healing elephant dung version of the warrior ethic makes me so viscerally angry. To be a warrior is emphatically not about making oneself 'better'. It is not about 'fixing' or 'improving' the self as a goal in and of itself. To be a warrior is to negate the self. To live as one already dead. Vanity, self-improvement for its own sake, and wandering around cocking on about being a warrior are no part of actually being a genuine one.

I know many people who say they're living a warrior lifestyle, and some of them actually are. But the vast majority are not - they're simply co-opting a garbled idea of warrior-hood as an excuse to be selfish, or in an attempt to be interesting, but mostly as a pretext for living a life that fails in any way to be of service to anyone other than themselves. We often speak of 'walking the path'. I would suggest that a great many people who claim to be are not - they're stuck in that zone just within sight of the first important step, rendered static by their insistence on striking a warrior pose.

In Defence of Shakespeare

I'm often confronted with students who have absolutely no idea why the collected works of a seventeenth century showman are inflicted upon them with such relentless regularity. The thing is, I generally meet these kids when they're at the point of having suffered through nearly half a decade of this strange phenomenon and, for some reason, nobody has ever satisfactorily answered their very natural question, "Why the hell are we doing this?" This being the case, I intend to attempt to answer that question here.

If we accept that literature and history are intimately intertwined, which I don't think is controversial, then we can put forward the idea that literature can serve the function of being a history of human thought. Not in any thorough or rigorous way, but in a sort of 'highlights reel' sense. The New Testament marks a high point for the Near East in social and religious thought, Beowulf marks the first signs of Dark Age mythos and soul searching, Chaucer shows us the earthy intellectualism of the upper classes in the Mediaeval, and Joyce neatly bookmarks the point when the Modernists actually disappear up their own jacksies. Okay, so I don't like Joyce, but you catch my drift. What Shakespeare roughly marks for us is the appearance of the modern mind.

Considerations of quality and entertainment aside, Shakespeare just happens to be writing on the cusp of a massive change in the way people see the world – the rejection of determinism and fate in exchange for a burgeoning sense of human agency. In this period, for the European world, at least, we can see the last remnants of Mediaeval Christianity loosening their hold on the human mind. No longer is everything pre-determined and attributable to God – there is a growing body of thought around the idea that fate is not fixed, God is not necessarily agent in the anthropomorphic way previously imagined, and therefore human ethical thought, scientific enquiry, and moral responsibility to ourselves and others become increasingly important. This has huge ripple effects, not just in the high altitudes of philosophy, but right down in the dust where people look at themselves and wonder what to do with their lives.

The exciting thing about Shakespeare is that we can see the tension between these two points of view being mapped and explored in his characters. In Macbeth we see a man who is apparently clearly pre-destined by fate (somewhat unoriginally portrayed as three women) to follow a tragic arc of ambition, murder, and madness. But is he? In the very first instance we find that he's not able to make up his mind to murder the king. It's his wife who urges him to act, and if he hadn't told her of the witches' prophecy, could this have actually happened? If he hadn't also decided to murder Banquo, to act generally in a way which made it morally impossible to accept him as the new king, would he have died on that field?

We can see that Shakespeare has grasped the essential dichotomies around fate and free will in the uneasy awareness his protagonists have of both concepts, and their eventual acceptance not just of the things they can't control, but also of their responsibility for that portion which they can. Hamlet's "providence in the fall of a sparrow", Richard's capping of a night of self-doubt with the simple act of putting on armour and heading out into the field, come what may – again and again we see his characters coming to variations on the same conclusion. Fate and God are all very well, but we are possibly more trapped by who we are and what we do, and because it's who we are and what we do, we're also responsible and must accept that. This is a kind of subtlety you simply don't see in earlier Mediaeval authors, and it marks a major shift in human thought. So we study Shakespeare, in part, to get as close as we can to watching that shift play out, live and in colour, in front of us.

Language is another consideration. The official designator is something like 'Early Modern English', and to a lot of students the whole thing just seems like unnecessary gibberish. The thing is, though, that the language of Shakespeare is seminal with regard to the language we speak today. Something like 1000 words and phrases enter standardised modern English through the printed works of Shakespeare, which is a factlet every student eye-rollingly knows. But what they generally don't know is why this is important. Shakespeare's language, apart from just being beautiful, provides us with a kind of 'source code' for understanding why and how we speak and write the way we do today.

I've seen a similar process in marine diesel engineering. The best way to understand modern marine diesels is to take apart an old one. There's no complicated EMS threaded through the whole thing, no assumption that this is a finished product nobody but the manufacturer's certified techs will touch. All the components are simple and raw and, when once the whole assemblage is understood, revealing of the inherent reasoning behind the entire mechanism. Deconstructing Shakespeare's language works a bit like that. We can see from the clunky hand-crafted components, the crazy syntax and rhythms of multiple legacy systems of grammar, just what is possible with language, and understand the path of evolution from multiple distinct dialects of English to the slick, pre-packaged Newspeak of today.

And finally, there's the counter-intuitive fact that Shakespeare's plays are trash. What I mean by this is that they are very certainly not the gold standard of highbrow discernment we see them as today. In his time, he was a popular entertainer. And what's both interesting and important about that is that he's in just the right sweet spot to simultaneously be a participant in and inventor of a totally new way of amusing the masses. What this means for us is that he's a seminal story teller. When we look at The Tempest, we see a plot to marry some people for underhanded purposes, which people inconveniently fall in love for real, thus derailing the original plan and cue hugging and learning. This is exactly how a good proportion of romantic comedies work today. Broken down into their component parts, we can actually see the roots of almost every story and myth we make in films and on television now and ever since. And whether or not Shakespeare invented any of this stuff is completely beside the point – the point is that he's arguably the best and completest example.

So why do we study Shakespeare? For the same reason we study anything from the past: to better understand the present. And with the Immortal Bard, there's also the added advantage of jump scares, rivers of blood, and endless cock jokes.

Black Panther And Insidious Colonialism

At the end of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Allan Quatermain, who has died a heroic great white hunter death, is interred in the good soil of Africa while a voiceover assures us that should Africa ever need him again he will, like some kind of colonialist King Arthur, rise from his grave and save all the black people. Or something along those lines. It would seem that Black Panther has proven this prophecy to be correct. 

That last statement probably requires some explanation, so let me begin by telling you a story. 

There was once a magical land, hidden in a mountain fastness in Africa, to which it was death for any outsider to go. The kings of this land were wise and powerful, and took steps to protect their kingdom from being known to outsiders, for they knew that the treasure which they held would lay them open to the rapine of the white colonisers. There was, however, warfare within this kingdom, and one king raised his hand against his brother, killing him, leaving his brother's son alone and unprotected in the outside world. This is the story of that brother's return to reclaim his rightful place on the throne. This is the story of King Solomon's Mines – the very imagined world from which Allan Quatermain comes. 

Sound familiar? If you've seen Black Panther, it certainly should. 

I went into this film having heard and read quite a lot of discussion about its racial politics, its symbolic loading and meaning, analysis of its major themes, and so on, and my first inclination was to dismiss most of this as both giving Marvel far too much credit while simultaneously placing unreasonably heavy burdens on what was bound to be a childishly simplistic framework. In short, while the opening credits were rolling, I resolved to ignore the deep language of symbols and take Black Panther at face value. This, however, proved impossible, as the film insisted from the very start on speaking to its audience primarily in a language of symbols and tropes and, rather unfortunately, turning this language to a discussion of much weightier matters than it had the capacity to parse. 

But over and above its infantile clumsiness when dealing with the politics and philosophy of race, is the insidious, endemic conceptual whitewashing inherent in so much of US cinema, and of which Disney is especially guilty. Mulan somehow becomes a story about western individualism and girl power, 47 Ronin a masturbatorial European fantasy of Shogunate Japan, and Black Panther, apparently, a resurrection of the tired, parochial tropes of mysterious, magical, dark, 'mumbo jumbo' Africa. Any culture that isn't western must be viewed and ultimately distorted through a western lens such that any core ideas and values inherent within it are modified to suit pre-conceived parochial notions of 'the other'. Rather like the first dinosaur exhibits, where spines were broken and bones left out in order to make them lie flat, as their discoverers had expected them to. And what's probably most disturbing about this is that it's happened in a film predominantly made by black people. 

From interviews with the cast and crew it's obvious that they sincerely believe they've created a shining example of representation and the promotion of African culture and general African-ness. But it surely must take either an entirely colonised, or at the very least somnolent mind to so happily and eagerly do so within a framework of tropes I honestly thought we'd left behind in disgust at the turn of the twentieth century. To be sure, at the heart of this film it's much more about being African American than being African, and it was therefore to be expected that we'd be dealing with a more or less imagined version of Africa, but why this one? And why in a form that seems to be almost deliberately parodying itself?

Where the film is solid is when it explores the anger of African American marginalisation, even if it does use unbelievably stilted didactism in order to do so. Michael B Jordan's abrasive appeal more than anything helped to beam this through the clunky script, posing questions you'd ordinarily expect to hear in the mouths of nine year olds with a sort of intense and furious sincerity. The feeling of the urban reality of Oakland left an enduring sense of truth in my mind. But the African sections, which comprise the bulk of the film, are a crazy and senseless jumble of colonial visions. From the sound stage environments which seem to have been deliberately modelled on the flimsily disguised analogue for Africa made by the appallingly racist Burroughs (read: John Carter), to the insane, mutually incompatible grab bag of cultural elements thrown willy nilly into a poorly meshed reversal of the noble savage trope, the entire mental landscape of the film looked and felt like the patronising products of the white west from which it draws so heavily, and so inexplicably.

A prominent example of what I'm talking about is the much lauded use of 'Amazon' bodyguards for the king. Where historical awareness of this practice originates is primarily from western contact with one King Dahomey, and the wave of feverish Victorian soft porn this generated. Dahomey was really famous for two things, one being his all female elite bodyguard, and the other for being the most prolific seller of African slaves to the English and Portugese on the entire continent. Even making all possible allowances for the general historic amnesia and mindlessness of the Marvel ouevre, is the resurrection of this trope really being presented as an actual advance in representation? And what am I supposed to make of it as a symbol? This representational choice is either deliberately offensive, or just downright silly. 

Equally irritating is the mad insistence on magic, ancestor worship, and ritual. Intentionally or no, what this reinforces – relentlessly hammers home, in fact – is the idea of 'mysterious Africa', a continent apparently exclusively inhabited by witch doctors, shaman, painted warriors, and other variations of 'noble savage'. Can the film makers and, even more surprisingly, the audience, really be unaware of this glaring subtext? That's difficult for me to understand, as it's right on the edge of being so blatant it no longer qualifies as one. Is it really possible that nobody has parsed the underlying Eurocentrism of this imagining? Or that they have, and don't care, because here's a movie full of black people and we'll take it on any terms we can get? Is that really the level to which the discourse has sunk?

And then there's the central thesis of the film, insofar as it has one, that all of the African diaspora can and should be united by a kind of imagined ideal of Africa, and that this can also be extended to all people. The 'all people' bit feels a bit tacked on, but I'm totally at peace with that. What I'm not at peace with is where this imagined Africa originates. Basically, in the fevered, racist imaginations of non-Africans. Marvel, being myth-makers, have obvious limits on how progressive any story they tell can be, myth being by its very nature parochial and conservative. But in the case of Black Panther, I feel this parochialism to be toxic. 

I left the cinema with the nagging sense that the makers had somehow been tricked into conniving at their own stereotyping and marginalisation, and, along with much of the audience, conned into celebrating the act of so doing. 

Orwell And Irony

It is a persistent source of amusement for me that so many of the people, left and right, who revere Orwell today have not only never really read him, but are also the kind of people he held in utter contempt.

Understanding Orwell is not a simple matter of reading 1984 and Animal Farm. This is really only a way of accessing his literary persona. Orwell was a highly intelligent, emotionally conflicted, and politically and philosophically very complex individual. Unlike so many commentators of his and our time, he sought first hand and active experience of the things in which he took an interest. As a journalist he spent months living with tramps and the Parisian demi-monde, as an activist he literally put skin in the game in the trenches of the Aragon Front, and as a political philosopher and commentator he attracted controversy, hatred, and even government oppression by the simple means of deciding to tell, unflinchingly and completely, the truth as he saw and felt it.

This is revealed more in his essays than anywhere else, and it's typical of the way he was treated in life that his final wish that they be burnt was not honoured. Orwell first and foremost believed in The Revolution. He was intelligent enough to understand that this could come in many forms, but one of the many parts of the great man's memory we gloss over today is the fact that he was cheerfully resigned to the possibility that change might in fact involve the murder of the bourgeoisie and blood in the streets of London. His attitudes to homosexuality (possibly formed during a childhood at Eton, where he was miserable), women, the free market, and race would horrify the intelligentsia and insipid latte socialists of our times. And his bitter hatred for the compound word 'onto' would be simply confusing. But what I really want to zero in on is his attitude to Stalin and Soviet communism in general.

It's hard for us to imagine nowadays, but Joseph Stalin was quite a popular figure in the years just after WWII. Hollywood has re-written history in the popular mind to cast the USA as Europe's white knight, but before this process was complete, it was Stalin's Russia who wore that laurel. Popularly referred to as 'Uncle Joe' (Big Brother, anyone?), Stalin was the darling of a surprisingly broad range of British social classes and affiliations. The 'Soviet Miracle' was often gushed over in leftist circles, and what can only be understood as a deliberate blind eye was turned to the rumours and hints of horrific atrocities that were leaking out of the Eastern Bloc in those early days.

Orwell, being a revolutionary socialist, was surrounded by people eagerly participating in the lionisation of one of history's most appalling mass murderers. As a journalist and veteran of Spain, he knew at first hand what the Soviet regime was actually like, and he frankly and fearlessly spoke out against it. Animal Farm and 1984 were his literary reaction, but it's in his essays and journalism where we see the most direct and unflinching attacks on the Russian state. Of course, the result of this was to alienate him from his natural leftist allies, even while his undiminished enthusiasm for social revolution kept him firmly in the sights of the establishment and the right. One critic describes him as "a permanent political misfit", and this is very apt. But if we think about why that is, I think we get to the core of why Orwell should be the example every one of us tries to follow.

Orwell never made the mistake of conflating political right and left with moral right and wrong. He never once made the mistake of conflating that which was popular with that which was good. Not once in his life did he confuse taking a political position with joining a political tribe. He was guided solely by his conscience, his beliefs, and the gnawing sense that any slavish adherence to any pre-fabricated ideology was simply a louder and more annoying way to reinforce the existing hierarchy - to slot oneself neatly into current power structures and connive at maintaining all their present injustices, immorality, and inequalities. This, more than anything, is what separates him from the obtuse and mindless evils of both his times and ours.

For Absent Friends

I'm writing this for those of our friends who could not attend Kyung's service.

The Macquarie Park Cemetery Complex is large. There's sections for all faiths – a niche wall for Jews, the curious obelisks and broken pillars favoured by Protestants, angels and crosses for the Catholics, and even stelae and burrows for Daoists, Buddhists, and so on. The grounds slope gently down to the discreet main gate, and all around the parklands are dotted with pavilions, fountains, and stately mature gum trees, a ring of which also cuts off the whole complex from the noise and ugliness of the industrial parks and main road. Apart from the formal monuments, there are little personal acts of devotion everywhere. In random trees, on the footings of graves, there are small, handmade tributes – a paticular bouquet, obviously renewed daily, a carved bird, a hand crocheted heart with the single letter 'M'. It is a nice place to sleep for a while.

Kyung was farewelled in the Magnolia Chapel. I'd been there before. It's a nice enough space, with a curtained area at its head for the catafalque, screens all around, and those curiously uncomfortable seats peculiar to funeral homes. When the service started I immediately learned two important things. One was that I have never over the course of our decades of friendship pronounced Kyung's name correctly. And the other was that Kyung's family had no idea just how many friends, or just how well loved by so many, their only son was. I like to imagine Kyung laughing mischievously about both those things.

The service was pretty well entirely in Korean. It was clear that the family really only expected it to be themselves. It was also deeply Christian. All the while when the pastor was asking Jesus to take Kyung into his arms, I thought about how my militantly atheist friend would have reacted to that. Part of me thinks he would have hated it. But then, he loved his father, and I think he would have wanted them to do the thing which gave them most comfort. Either way, I think that once he'd thought it through he would have found it hugely funny – I never met another man capable of enjoying irony quite so much as Kyung was.

The service was open casket, which meant that we were all able to say our last farewells face to face. When the family invited us to do so, it was with real satisfaction that I noted that the queue went down the aisle and practically out the door. A mourning band fitted in size in some small measure to the size of his soul. I think his family were pleased too. I hope they were. They'd laid Kyung out in his finest. They didn't shave him, but just trimmed the Fu Man Chu he loved to sport. I liked that very much – Kyung will go to his long home fitted out as he always wanted to present himself to the world.

I ran into Jezza in the queue afterwards, when a long long stream of people lined up to pay respects to his dad. Jezza talked about Kyung's presence of mind, and his consideration for others. "Only K-Dog," he said, "would have had the kind of presence of mind to pull safely off the road." He was right.

When all was done, we all went our separate ways into that bright Australian sun. Some went to The Ranch, to pour a libation and remember. I suspect many, though, were like me – forced to re-enter the living stream of the day and work. But either way, you all should know that Kyung was sent off in real style, by dozens of people who loved him. I think he would have wanted all his friends to have the satisfaction of knowing that.

Vale, Kyung Un Kim

I was teaching this morning when I got a message telling me that my old friend Kyung had died. Kyung had been a big presence in my life during what I think were very dark years for both of us. We met in the midst of a mild bender in Manly, introduced by a mutual friend, and hit it off immediately. Back in those days, both Kyung and I were living on the ragged, bleeding edge of excess and self destruction, and one tragedy of his death is that I think the reason we hadn't seen each other in years was because together we tended to enable each other's bad behaviour. We seemed to be both going through a largely unspoken process of getting ourselves right, and I think we both knew we needed to be apart to get that done. It looks as if Kyung had pretty well got there, which makes his passing doubly unfair. And the other tragedy, this one for me alone, is that because of the way we interacted I don't believe anyone who loved him would ever wish to see my face, especially not at his funeral.

So this is my act of remembrance.

When I think of Kyung, what I mostly remember is his anger. He was furious – at his ethnicity, at everyone and everything that snubbed him for it, at all the world's injustice, the greed and mendacity of humanity, and at himself. I guess that's a big key to why we got along so well. I remember when we'd talk, solving the problems of the world, the incandescent rage and hatred which would flame in his eyes as his jaw muscles suddenly jumped out the side of his head, his fists and shoulders balled and rolled like he was preparing to physically rip evil from the world with his bare hands. I remember times when we'd be talking politics over a beer and staff would be shooting us concerned glances, edging towards us as if expecting a fight to erupt between us at any moment. And then suddenly we'd both stop, one of us (usually Kyung) would drop a gag and we'd be laughing like crazy donkeys and agreeing to disagree. I remember that laugh. It was a kind of high powered machine gun cackle, like his laughter was the steel capped emergency relief valve on a nuclear reactor gone critical. And I suppose it was.

Love, hate, fury, and laughter. These were the major components of Kyung as I knew him. He so hated evil and injustice. He was one of those rare – all too rare – people for whom the dichotomy of good and evil was a source of actual, physical distress. And his hatred of the perpetrators of evil and discrimination was an equally physical force. Everything about the way he reacted to the world was writ so large it was impossible not to see the immense love, generosity, and care for humanity which drove and animated him. And this wasn't confined to the abstract, either. He was a loyal, dependable, entertaining, and absolute friend. Kyung practiced total friendship in the way some nations practice total war. He would literally go several extra miles for anyone he counted as a friend. He never once failed me, and it is with bitter regret that I remember the times I failed him – failures I will now never be able to scrub out or repair. Kyung was the sort of friend you could call, tell him you were bored, and half an hour later he'd be at your front door with a case of beer, a cheeky grin, and a furious determination not to accept any money or thanks for either. Such a trivial example to illustrate such an enormous reservoir of generosity, kindness, and concern for the people in his life doesn't seem to do him justice, but it's the thing I remember most vividly.

I remember our long and heated political arguments, our twenty four hour gaming marathons, our weird and hectic night-time missions through empty, darkened streets, our clenched, angry existences seeming to be in tandem as we ate up the miles of road beneath our wheels. But I mostly remember laughing. Kyung loved to laugh, and not least of all at himself. For such a serious, intense soul, he was ever ready to laugh a great fat belly laugh at any or all of his own foibles. Another way in which his largeness of spirit outstripped my own. I remember Kyung as a man on fire, lit with profound, intense, and above all selfless concerns. A being constructed in proportions of greatness. I'll miss him, and I regret bitterly the failure of my half-thought plans to one day, older, wiser, and weirder, reconnect over a beer and laugh again about all the stupid, brilliant, and just plain hilarious stuff we'd done.

Vale, my friend. Sleep now, and be at peace.

Star Wars – You Are What You Eat

In spite of what the critics have been saying, I enjoyed the new Star Wars. Quite a few commentators panned it for being "meaningless", but without the eye of love and nostalgia, the level of meaning they expected was never an intended or actual part of the original franchise.

This made me think about the reverence in which we hold A New Hope and Empire. I first experienced these films when I was about six, and thought they were the most fantastic, unbelievably earth-shaking things I had ever seen. But then, I was six, and the list of things to which I attached the same value also included a random naked woman in some manga, my neighbour's dog, and the dead lizard behind my cupboard. In later life, I discovered that having seen these films made me a member of some kind of culture club which seemed mainly concerned with casting those who had not into social outer darkness. This was in my teens - that era of insane crushes, obsessions, and psychological cruelty. We would watch these films over and over again, reassuring ourselves and each other that they were the apogee of human creation. This reassurance became shriller and more urgent, of course, as repeated viewings exposed the real, significant, and manifold flaws of both films. They drag. They're heavily derivative. The acting is, in places, ridiculously bad.

A fair bit of my time in particular was spent desperately trying to ignore what thematic messaging there was. The franchise as a whole has a starkly conservative and practically mindless world view. The magical 'Force', a kind of re-chewed and regurgitated compound of poorly understood Zen mysticism and Protestantism is actually kind of toxic. It's deism. Or animism. Or maybe panpsychism, or spiritualism - it's really too vague and changeable to be clear about exactly what it is, but in any event it is clearly the element of the divine. So, this story element panegyrises adherence to ancient religion. We have The Empire, and The Rebel Alliance, with The Empire being evil apparently because it's an empire and for no other discernable reason. And the rebellion is in support of a dying or dead republic. Hmmm... a republic struggling to overthrow an empire - sounds strangely familiar. It's almost as if some Americans were re-imagining their own revolution, interleaving it with the history of Rome and painting it all over with a thin veneer of science fiction. With magic. And god. So the idea is that it's important to be a republic and, if we look at the way the two forces are represented, the more uniform, organised, and well equipped you are, the more evil. And then there's the basically moronic binary imagining of morality represented by the dark side and the force. The dark side is all negative emotions, which must be defeated - repressed, basically - whereas the not dark side is all about floating rocks and pashing your sister. Okay, that was a cheap shot, but the silliness of the binarism is still real.

For me, the message is one of subservience to god and a near libertarian conception of how the world should be run. This is totally unacceptable to me on both counts, and yet I spent quite a lot of mental energy on convincing myself that it wasn't so, and that these two films were the best sci fi films ever made, despite the fact that they're not really sci fi, and nor are they really good enough to justify such an assessment. It's rather like my first girlfriend. She was a nice girl, I assume (I never really knew her that well), but she certainly wasn't the paragon of all girlhood I furiously persuaded myself that she was. If I'm completely honest, she's not the one I wanted, but rather just the one I happened to get. And because she was my first, she blew my head back by relative power alone, and I spent the rest of my time with her trying to convince myself she was the best female ever begotten. Until, that is, I grew up a little and was able to see her clearly.

And it's the same thing with Star Wars. When I look at it clearly, A New Hope is a very good film. It's got so much to like, it's still enjoyable decades later, and it was clearly made with real love and care. But what it's not is a film objectively worthy of the reverence in which it's held. And it's this clear-sightedness which I think is most important. We're not just made up of what we consume, but also of the way in which we consume it. The way we respond to and absorb things like films also ripples out into the way we process the rest of our lives. The way we convince ourselves that Star Wars is the kind of masterpiece it's clearly not is exactly the same way we convince ourselves we like our jobs, can live with our partners, like our foolish and mendacious selves, and have some hope of finding meaning in our lives. We can find jobs we like, partners we love, meaning, and all the rest, but not without shedding the kind of thinking that has us desperately trying to convince ourselves that Star Wars is more than it is. Because it's this exact same thinking which, if we don't consciously attack it, we use to negotiate ourselves into accepting our own mediocrity.