Sturgeon Wars

Last week some of the staff writers at National Review, of all places, had an amusing exchange of views on the current state of Star Wars. It began when one wrote of being “Star Wars-ed out.” Another seconded that feeling and drew an analogy with the Marvel movies: both are series that have decreased in quality as the suits behind them have produced more and more “content.” Yet another followed up specifically critiquing the trilogy produced by Disney while rightly reserving some small praise for Rogue One.

But the best and most incisive perspective came from Jeffrey Blehar, who with aggressive indifference toward everything since Return of the Jedi forty years ago, mildly suggested that not much of Star Wars is any good. Dissect and fuss over the prequel trilogy, the sequel trilogy, the Disney+ shows, and cartoon shows and novels and comics and video games however you want, none of it is as good as the original trilogy and most of it is terrible. In fact, the best thing to come of Star Wars since 1983 is Mr Plinkett.

I mostly agree (and wholeheartedly agree about Mr Plinkett), and that’s because I’m a big believer in Sturgeon’s Law. In its simplest formulation, Sturgeon’s Law states that:

“90% of everything is crap.”

For several years now I’ve been saying that Sturgeon’s Law applies just as much to Star Wars as to anything else, it’s just that Star Wars got its 10% of quality out of the way first. What they’ve been producing ever since is, well…

I have ideas about why this is, including but by no means limited to Disney’s desperately overvalued purchase of the rights to the series and—probably more importantly—its merchandising, executive mismanagement, ideological capture of the filmmakers, oversaturation (speaking of Marvel), and of course simple artistic failure. But there are three more fundamental problems that I’ve seen with Star Wars over the last couple decades.

One is that everyone forgot that Star Wars was lightning in a bottle. The original film didn’t emerge fully formed from George Lucas’s head like a nerd Athena, it was the product of a difficult production, a demanding shoot, and a host of other limitations. The many points of friction in the production required genuine creativity to solve, not least from a brilliant editor and one or two real creative geniuses like Ben Burtt and John Williams. But the very success of Star Wars meant that the circumstances that shaped the originals have not recurred. Everything since has been greased by money, money, money, and the synthetic smoothness of the prequel and sequel trilogies allowed bad or incomplete or incoherent story ideas to slide straight through into the finished films.

Second and relatedly, with one or two exceptions the fans and producers of Star Wars drifted into a category error regarding what kind of stories these are. Star Wars since Return of the Jedi has been treated like fantasy set in space. Mr Plinkett, among many others, has noted the ridiculous and gratuitous multiplication of planets, species, vehicles, and everything else since The Phantom Menace. But Star Wars wasn’t originally fantasy—it was a Boomer pastiche of westerns, Kurosawa samurai films, World War II movies, Flash Gordon serials, and a film school dweeb’s skimming of Joseph Campbell. As Star Wars quickly became the cultural remit of younger generations and more and more Star Wars “content” was churned out, those referents were lost to all except the buffs and nerds. The galaxy far, far away came to be treated as an infinitely expandable object of “world-building” when it is and always was an assemblage of spare parts.

I don’t mean that dismissively. Being made of spare parts is not necessarily a bad thing. The originals are greater than the sum of their parts, and it’s worth pointing out that the handful of new Star Wars material that tried to tap directly into some of what inspired Lucas—war movies about ill-fated missions in Rogue One, westerns in the first season of “The Mandalorian”—were good. Eventually ruined by committee-think, but good.

The final problem, which brings us back around to Sturgeon’s Law, is that the fans allowed it, even demanded it. Having had that 10%, they gobbled up that 90% we’ve been getting since and kept wanting more. I know plenty of people have complained about the storytelling, the filmmaking, the behind-the-scenes drama, the ideological drift of the Disney films, and everything else, but for every Mr Plinkett or Critical Drinker on YouTube there are a thousand people who are satisfied with anything as long as it has the Star Wars logo on it. From archetypal storytelling to lifestyle brand—that’s the real Skywalker saga.

This is by no means unique to Star Wars fans, as some trends among purported Tolkien fans have made clear in the last couple years. But if people want to enjoy their favorite things again they need to regain their suspicion of corporations as well as remember the difference between quantity and quality.