what i learned from a class on star wars

Every freshman at Rice is required to take a freshman writing intensive seminar, affectionately referred to as a FWIS. Most colleges have similar requirements designed to equip the incoming class with enough skill in writing and reading to succeed in academia. There's usually a pretty decent course selection to make citations and research papers go down a bit easier, and Rice is no different. I got absolutely blessed with the FWIS I ended up in.

Before I took the course, I was a pretty casual millennial Star Wars fan; I grew up with the prequels, and all I really remembered was a vague sense of contentment with the CGI and cringe-worthy appreciation for Jar Jar Binks. The Force Awakens had piqued my interest last December, but I struggled to bridge the gap between J.J. Abrams and some 1977 space opera made with a lot of puppets. Upon re-watching the series this semester, though, I gained - and lost - a lot (spoiler: support of Jar Jar was one of those things).

The FWIS did its job. I learned so much about my own writing, things that seeped through into essays for other classes and that will stick with me for the rest of my life. And in between the dense academic papers written by people determined to uphold or destroy Star Wars one way or another, I fell in love with it all. I’ve written papers about so many strange topics at this point that I’ve become fearless about paper titles.

Some of my personal favorites include:

“Shakespeare in Star Wars: Hamlet in Space”

“A Bounty Hunter Who Loves You: A Close Reading of the Rescue Mission”

&

“Kylo Ren Attends Rice University”

Featuring some crossovers from my Critical Reading and Writing class:

“The Big Sleazy”

&

“The American Sleep Paralysis”

Yes, I devoted over four pages to a discussion of how Kylo Ren was a 2015 outer space nod to Hamlet, and another few pages to why he’s such a great villain -- teenage angst and indecision that feels like I just walked in on another classmate having an existential crisis. I feel like I can do anything at this point.

Looking back, I think the most important thing I learned during my FWIS and, very possibly, the entire semester, was not how to cite an article or how Carrie Fisher really felt about the metal bikini. It was the value of art.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, George Lucas took the originals and he revamped them. Input CGI over the puppets, cleaned up VFX, pretended that Han didn't shoot first, even went as far as inserting a new and improved rock in one scene. If you compared the theatrical releases against the re-releases that nearly all of us have in our DVD cabinets, you'd be amazed. These are noticeable alterations, not just tweaks here and there to improve the viewing experience. This was George Lucas claiming sole ownership of a trilogy that hundreds of people put hard work and spirit into, and for what? Crappy CGI? The worst is at the end of the sixth episode, when we see Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Anakin looking on proudly in their glowing blue ghost forms. George Lucas edited an actor completely out of the film. His name was Sebastian Shaw, and he played ghost Anakin before Lucas copy and pasted Hayden Christensen’s creepy Anakin smirk right in there. The moment I saw this scene, I realized something that I would never have understood without this real and valid emotional trauma. No matter how instrumental you are in creating something, no matter how powerful and important you feel, once you set your work free, it no longer belongs to you alone. It will never be as pure as it was the first time the public met it and fell in love with it, and it is our duty as artists to let our work go and grow on its own. We have to commit to doing the best that we can with the resources that we have in the time that we work, and let our art stand as something we can be proud of, even when fellow artists start making New and Better Things. Art has worth, even as it ages, and if I’ve learned anything, it's that art mimics life. Go easy on yourself for making mistakes in the past. Learn from them. Use the knowledge to have new and wonderful adventures. Don't go back and take a CGI dump over everything your friends and family know and love.

In case you're interested in understanding what the big deal is, here's an eye-opening series of YouTube videos dedicated to highlighting the alterations Lucas made. Afterwards, you can watch these Robot Chicken Star Wars episodes to cleanse your soul.

And of course, a salute to Carrie Fisher, that wonderful woman who taught all of our inner princesses that we don't need saving, and that feminism, aging, and mental illness are not things we need to be ashamed of. The rebellion lives on in us all. Godspeed, Carrie.

#starwars #carriefisher #rice #college #writing #fwis #courses