I don’t like Star Wars, and I feel I ought to blame Mel Brooks for it.
It’s hard to appreciate an old-school original after being first seduced by its spoof, and no matter how much I watch or read about George Lucas and his unending galaxy-spanning series of sequels and prequels and spin-offs, nothing is going to come close to the sheer heady joy of watching Spaceballs and laughing my head off. The 1987 Brooks comedy is a mind-bogglingly ambitious, multilayered skewering—like several Mad magazine parodies (drawn by the immortal Mort Drucker) pasted one upon the other, a veritable bebinca of buffoonery—which lampoons not just Star Wars but also other franchises such as Alien, Planet Of The Apes and Star Trek, all, mind you, while sticking to the narrative skeleton of Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, plus coming up with the cleverest time-travel scene in movie history. Spaceballs is bloody genius.
Tragic, the way the Brooks taint sticks to the very soul of the Lucas movies. Darth Vader saying “No, I am your father” to Luke Skywalker doesn’t sound quite as reality-bending if you’ve already heard Dark Helmet reveal to Lone Starr that “I am your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate.” (“What’s that make us?”, wonders Starr. “Absolutely nothing,” confirms Dark Helmet as he prepares to kill him, “which is what you are about to become.” Hee. Infinitely better writing, as you can see.)
Therefore, I’m left without a dog in any Star Wars fight. I might be a card-carrying nerd in many a pop-cultural respect, but I have absolutely no opinions around even the most basic of Star Wars geekery, like whether Return Of The Jedi is better than The Empire Strikes Back and, blasphemy of blasphemies, I even find myself bemused by the rabid hatred directed towards that Jar Jar Binks fellow.
There is, however, one thing about Star Wars that fascinates me to the very core. The bit where Han shot first.
Most of you reading through this Star Wars special issue know exactly what I’m talking about, but for those less intrigued by Wookiees and Siths, here’s a quick recap: Sometime during the original 1977 Star Wars, two characters meet in an intergalactic cantina and one shoots the other in the middle of a conversation. A tense conversation, sure, but a conversation nonetheless. A slimy bounty hunter called Greedo corners the film’s hero, Han Solo, and threatens to kill him when Han—never one for nonsense or foreplay—whips out his trusty whatchamacallit and laser-blasts Greedo to death.
It’s a scene straight out of a Spaghetti Western, complete with shots of Han stroking his blaster under the table with singular malice while the bad guy lays out his threat and then firing first. Clint Eastwood’s scowling Man With No Name would be rightfully proud, as are many a Star Wars fan since they see this as part of Han’s character arc, going from morally challenged protagonist to the eventual shiny valiant hero.
The one person who wasn’t entirely pleased with this quick-on-the-draw shot, it turned out, was Lucas himself. As Star Wars grew into its own gargantuan franchise, Lucas, feeling the need to tell a safer story presumably about more marketably nice folks, decided to go revisionist and tweak what happened. Twenty years after the first Star Wars movie, The Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition was released, in which a digital laser beam is inserted to show Greedo firing first and Han killing him in retaliation.
This is an unforgivably clunky piece of work, a red line flying towards Han who doesn’t even flinch, let alone dodge, implying Greedo was a bounty hunter who forgot his spectacles on his home planet and thus missed at point-blank range. I understand the outrage about such a tacky retcon-job, not in the least because it implies that Han only emerged victorious purely because he was lucky enough to be facing an evidently myopic opponent.
Still, Lucas continues to tweak the scene in every subsequent version, altering the timing of the lasers (while not improving things much) and, for nearly two decades now, all copies of Star Wars have stuck to Lucas’ insistence that Han only shot after he was shot at. It is childish, this assertion, and while Lucas—to this day—goes on about how his character is “not a cold-blooded killer”, it is all too easy to dismiss that as an afterthought. Still, does a creator not have a right to change his creation? Or do the people own something as culturally significant as Star Wars by sheer dint of their undying fandom? Do the ones who perpetuate a myth also have the right to write the said myth?
The people’s perspective is coherent enough. I posit that they desperately want to cling to the good stuff, and the first Star Wars movie, they believe, is the good stuff. I don’t disagree; there is something fundamentally special about that magical movie (and the first ones that followed it) to be able to spawn such a passionate cult. It was a groundbreaking film for its time, but I doubt it has aged as well as true classics. A generation bred on Avatar and blindingly fast PlayStation polygons can still enjoy and buy into Star Wars, sure, but only because they make allowances for the material. It was a groundbreaking game-changer, certainly, but today it’s only great in the nostalgic context of being a 1977 film—unlike, say, the 1975 Jaws, which, bad fake shark and all, can still scare the pants off you without any need for disclaimers.
Digitally scrubbing and cleaning up Star Wars—and actually tinkering with what happens on screen—therefore ruins the “classic” experience folks are buying into. They want Star Wars the way it really was, but Lucas, that tenacious technocrat, continues to gloss it up with coats of CGI paint, regardless of what people ask for. Today, you can’t even see an “original” version of the 1977 film because no high-definition copy exists or has been released by Lucas or Disney; the closest you can get, I discovered, is something called Harmy’s Star Wars: Despecialized Edition, painstakingly assembled by a 25-year-old Star Wars fanatic from the Czech Republic named Harmy who splices together old footage from a variety of sources and leads a community of fans who have spent thousands of hours to recreate something like Lucas’ original vision. A vision Lucas himself seems to care less and less about.
The other reason people want to believe that #HanShotFirst—and the reason there isn’t a #GreedoShotAndMissedFromTwentyInchesAway—is, of course, because pop culture is now all about the anti-hero. Good guys are passé, and the rule-benders—the psychotic vigilante dressed as a bat; the hard-drinking billionaire with an iron suit and a wandering eye—are the superheroes ruling the roost on the big screen. Even Superman, that big blue boy scout, now stands in the shadows and scowls. All the most popular protagonists are flawed in ways either Shakespearean or soap-operatic, crippled by doubts and insecurities, unable to leap tall buildings in a single bound without seeing their shrinks first. Squeaky clean just doesn’t cut it any more, and Han is regarded too much of a maverick buccaneer to colour within the lines.
(For the record, Han did shoot first. It has finally been “proven”; Peter Mayhew, the British actor who played Chewbacca, released his shooting script from the film online a few months ago, where all is made clear. The script says: “Suddenly the slimy alien disappears in a blinding flash of light. Han pulls his smoking gun from beneath the table as the other patrons look on in bemused amazement.” There we go. No mention of any slimy alien discharge.)
It is still amazing that the community of Star Wars lovers—many of whom wear the costumes and queue only up overnight, they claim, in order to hate-watch all the substandard newer films—oppose Lucas so strongly on this, not allowing the creator to have his say. It is as if Director’s Cut privileges have been snatched away, as always, by those who paid for the film—and in the case of a phenomenon as big as Star Wars, it’s the people, not the producers.
The last word fittingly belongs to Han himself—or, the next best thing, Harrison Ford. When asked “who shot first” on an AMA (Ask Me Anything) interview on Reddit, the silver-maned actor curtly replied, “I don’t know and I don’t care.” Classic Han.
Raja Sen is a film critic, columnist and screenwriter.
