Monday, October 5, 2020

Five years in the doghouse is long enough

Five Octobers ago I watched The Empire Strikes Back for the first time in eight years, as the fifth in a six-movie preparation prior to the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. That viewing shockingly upended my previous comparative rankings of Star Wars movies. For some unknown number of years, I had claimed that the sequel to the original Star Wars was my favorite Star Wars movie. In one two-hour viewing of an albeit "scruffy looking" copy of the original Empire, I lost all that. (You can read the full post here.)

Not only had it been my favorite of the Star Wars movies, but it had been my fifth favorite movie of all time. Its #5 ranking on Flickchart put it only three spots ahead of Star Wars, so the difference there was negligible. But that also meant it was ahead of some 4,000 and change other movies.

In the time since then, there has been a corrective on Flickchart. It started with Do the Right Thing beating it (as discussed here), and then went on from there. The movie that was once #5 on my Flickchart is now ... #46. Still very high in terms of its overall 99th percentile, but quite a fall from grace for a no-doubt top ten movie up until five years ago. 

Every time a movie would beat The Empire Strikes Back, sending it a notch further downward, or beat a movie that was ahead of Empire, which had the same result, I greeted it with some concern. Too much more of this, and it might threaten to fall below Return of the Jedi, which is at #58. For five years now, I've known that another reckoning with Empire was necessary. I just didn't know when.

It should have come before now. It was Christmastime in 2017 when we watched, as a family, the original Star Wars. That meant me, my wife, a relatively sentient seven-year-old and a likely clueless young boy who was a week away from turning four. The goal was to watch one Star Wars movie each Christmas until, I don't know, we got to the prequels at least. 

But we didn't watch The Empire Strikes Back in 2018, nor in 2019, nor so far in 2020. And that had everything to do with the relatively sentient seven-year-old, who is now ten. 

Although he liked Star Wars fine, he has told me on a number of occasions that he doesn't like "Star Wars," as a concept rather than a single movie. This despite an interest in Star Wars-related paraphernalia, like our Where's the Wookiee? books.

So we didn't push that next viewing. It likely wouldn't have happened Sunday either, except my wife wanted to do a family movie, but we were all Marvel'd out. Since getting Disney+ at the end of August we have watched Captain Marvel, Doctor Strange and Ant-Man -- each of which successively became my ten-year-old's favorite movie he'd ever seen. Ant-Man and the Wasp seemed like a logical next step, and I'm sure the kids would have gone for it, but my wife put on the kibosh -- wanting to save it for later, so it felt fresh again.

We were throwing around other movies -- the merits of Frozen II were half-heartedly considered -- but the time our pizza was arriving was fast approaching, so I just made a command decision. Tonight would be the night that I, that we all, would reckon with The Empire Strikes Back. (It being the 40th anniversary of the movie also appealed to my internal editor's sense of a good news peg.)

After only a few moments of the pristine version of the movie available on Disney+, my "scruffy looking" takeaway from the previous viewing was as thing of the past. I suspected, without outright knowing, that the rest of my complaints would fall by the wayside, too. I immediately felt as though I were back in the company of an old favorite.

One of the things that helped me recognize that was how much investment I felt in whether the kids were enjoying it. If I no longer vouched for Empire, I probably wouldn't care much. But it was clear that I did, and that I do.

They were both incredibly restless, for different reasons. The younger one (now six) was running back and forth on the side of the room, shooting lasers. That's a positive outcome.

The older one was wriggling from one position to another in a beanbag chair, apparently bored.

We used different strategies to quiet them down, with varying success. Though as we have both obviously seen the movie many times, my wife and I didn't try too hard.

Despite all this evidence of my ten-year-old's fitfulness, I was still surprised to hear his assessment when it was all over.

"Did you like it?" I asked.

"No," he responded, definitively. "It was really bad."

I had girded myself for the likely response from a soon-to-be-teenager, which I imagined would be "It was okay." But this really surprised me. I didn't ask any follow-up questions.

It was time for them to go to bed, so I didn't want to impede that part of the process. But I remained sitting on the couch during the credits, befuddled.

Before I had a chance to get up, my son returned to the couch and apologized for not liking the movie.

"That's okay," I said. "You don't have to like it. But what do you think it is about it that doesn't connect with you?"

It was here I was reminded of what an essentially weird movie The Empire Strikes Back is. Especially when you only sort of remember the events of the first movie, which you saw three years ago -- which might as well be 20 when you are a kid.

We should have known from the start there were disconnects here. Not four minutes into the movie my son had asked to pause it, to clarify what was going on. He only sort of remembered the characters from the first movie, and says he does not even remember the Death Star blowing up. We had just read the crawl aloud, but it had not helped. And now suddenly they were on this planet covered with snow, which had nothing to do with any of the settings he may have vaguely remembered from the first movie. 

He didn't ask us to pause it any more times during the movie, perhaps because he allowed the momentum of some of the action scenes to propel him along, perhaps just because he sensed we were annoyed by the interruption. But it was clear he had never fully gotten on the wavelength of this movie.

As he tried to explain what was wrong with the movie, he said "A lot of things happened that seemed like they were important, and then they didn't end up seeming as important as they should have."

I think what he's describing here is the lack of resolution at the end of the movie. As a middle movie in a trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back could end without a happy ending. But my son has seen very few movies that have cliffhanger endings. In fact, he might have seen none. (Avengers: Infinity War is still far off in our Marvel future.) 

I think his comment could be describing that Luke Skywalker loses the lightsaber battle to Darth Vader (and his hand), or that Han Solo is taken away frozen in carbonite, his face a kind of horrifying death scream. I wouldn't be surprised if he were also disturbed by Luke's face appearing in Darth Vader's decapitated helmet after their confrontation on Dagobah, which certainly got me, back in the day. I had to explain that it was a vision, and they didn't ask any follow-up questions.

I think they were also confused by characters like Lando Calrissian. They are not accustomed to processing ideas like betrayal, or how a compromised character can redeem himself as the movie goes along. 

But the real mind-fuck the movie put on him was also the most surprising thing, to me, about his whole viewing experience:

"Why was Darth Vader Luke's father?"

"Didn't you know that?" I asked.

"No," he said.

Now it's me that's mind-fucked.

In this post I wrote about my worries of Star Wars being spoiled for my kids through supplemental material, like the storybook Darth Vader and Son, which includes a bunch of cute drawings of Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker engaged in banal father and son activities. I had wanted the reveal in Empire Strikes Back to still have an impact on my kids when they eventually saw it, but assumed that it was not possible.

When I asked what he thought that book was talking about, apparently, my son thought it had been a joke, like if you made a book where Frankenstein's monster was Superman's father. (That's my example, not his.) He didn't think it was like, you know, real.

That's because in a child's world, it's really hard to comprehend that the epitome of evil and the epitome of good could be related to one another. It's a really adult concept to try to grapple with.

In the ten minutes after the movie ended, he had already done some of the grappling. In just talking about it on the couch for a few minutes, he had upgraded his assessment to "pretty good." In the coming days, he will likely continue to process it, and maybe he will unlock more of the experience he had.

As for me, Empire is back in my good graces. I don't think it's going to be back in my top ten on Flickchart anytime soon, but I can easily see it working its way back up to the 20s. I still like Star Wars better, but most of my previous affection for Empire has officially been restored.

The period of reckoning for my son may determine where we go from here. If he can come around on Empire, maybe a viewing of Return of the Jedi will be in the offing, and we'll go from there. Maybe a love will be born. My wife has already suggested something only tangentially related to this storyline, like Rogue One, as a next possible viewing, to see if that helps steer the ship.

Or maybe Star Wars just won't ever be his thing.

As for the younger one ... well, we already know he loves the lasers. 

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