The End of Days: Part Three
Harry Knowles can’t enjoy his nephew’s “glee” because Tatooine is simply no country for old men; he can’t sit with his 8-year old buddy, marveling at two suns, forever. His nephew is already skipping away over the sand dunes and Harry can’t keep up any more. Moriarty (aka Drew McWeeny, although I’m not sure why he has a nom de plume, seeing as his real name sounds like someone - a bountyhunter, say, or a Rankor wrangler - from the film), who became a parent a while back, perhaps sees the matte lines behind the Star Wars construct even more clearly now (he’s a professional screenwriter after all; one would think any sense of wonder had been beaten out of him many moons ago…).
When he takes his son to the theater in future years, settles down with the popcorn, and watches the look of unalloyed joy on his kid’s face as he is rocked by the tenth Clones sequel, is it possible Moriarty might see something else too: the invisible strings that Emperor Lucas is silently attaching to his little tyke in the dark, ready to steer him out the theater once the lights come up, and into the Toys R’Us figurine cavern, the Jedi aisle of Target, the Cloneburger stand? Maybe Moriarty will look at his own shoulders and see his scars from when he cut the hooks out…
Investment can be a fragile thing; especially in a phenomenon that wasn’t planned in the first place. Nobody really knows what the shelf life will actually be of a franchise that began as a self-contained film that even its creator felt might be a fiscal and creative disaster (check out Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls), then blossomed into a full blown contemporary religion (fact: more people saw Star Wars around the world than their were Christians in the times of Jesus. Utter fact.). And once doubt blooms…
To be continued…
The Daily Mona Lisa Monster Truck:
The last video game I played was Batman Returns in approximately 1993. I got to the last level (on the train) but after three hours of failure to smosh the Penguin I gave up; that seemed more than long enough to complete a simply motor task… and so I got on with my real life: learning eight languages, the Heimlich Manoeuvre, curing cancer and marrying five supermodels in a row. Maybe I would have been more tempted to stay the course if I had the opportunity to have an avatar Batman like the one shown on Destructoid.com who wanders around Arkham Asylum with what looks like even his belly button lint delineated...