At ten years of age I walked onto a large, grassy field at Colorado State University where the kids in my summer camp were already playing. A few of them recognized me from previous years and ran up to greet me. Strangely, they did not say, “Hello, how are you?” Rather, they opened our summer with a direct inquiry that challenged my coolness: “Have you seen Star Wars yet?!”
It always sucks to be the last one in on something, and I had to confess that I had no idea what they were talking about. My friends began to explain how there were lasers and spaceships and a really bad guy named “Death Invader” or some such. Before long, one of the camp leaders came over and he too began excitedly trying to explain the film to me. It sounded like the strangest, most mysterious, magical thing I could imagine.
I immediately went home and convinced my mother of the dire magnitude of the situation. By the time I actually saw the movie a few days later, I had the key names memorized, and had a working familiarity with the “death star” space station and something about a “life saver” laser sword. I learned this without McDonalds franchising. Now, thirtysomething years later my six-year-old daughter has her own plastic light saber, a Clone Wars lunchbox, and a Lego® Echo Base Station. She can also talk a good Wookie. All this knowledge even though she’s never seen any of the films. We’ve become so much more efficient at acquiring our mythologies in the thirty-five years since the original.
The Auratic Galactic
Star Wars proves that Walter Benjamin might have been wrong when he argued that the aura of art withers when artworks are mass reproduced. Benjamin’s idea was that artworks (particularly those before photography and film) could possess a presence that was seemingly natural despite its socially constructed setting. There’s only one Mona Lisa, only one leaning tower of Pisa, and people travel to bask in the particular space and time of their highly charged presence. For Benjamin, the power of this locatable “authenticity” was not so much intrinsic to a unique artwork, but was created through collective, social feeling. This was often evoked through ritual, pulling viewers toward that feeling from great distances.
Film was supposed to change all that, as feature films would arrive “at a theater near you.” The unique, authentic appearance of the work of art was dispersed across theaters, throughout time and space, and thus an aura could not surround one singular, unique, separate work. The journey was now proximate, and mass distributed. What authenticity was there in that?
Films like Star Wars confirm that some semblance of an aura is alive and well in this dispersed, postmodern, postindustrial world. These films tell us something too about our ongoing desire for the sacred mysteries and ritualistic events that, increasingly, have been fulfilled by mass media for masses of people. Here, even when a film is shown and watched in theaters around the world (i.e., there is no “one” Star Wars) an aura has been established around some seemingly single work of art, at least one that many people can collectively discuss. Each of us hundred million or so who have seen the original or sequel Star Wars films in our own places and times, respond, react, and register our own likes and dislikes across continents and generations.
When new installments of the Star Wars series have been released, thousands of people in all corners of the globe have set up camp for days at a time outside the box office waiting for tickets to go on sale, dressing in appropriate costumes, and speaking in intergalactic lingo to their fellow fans camped out alongside them, and basically having a good time in their neo-rituals. Others plan for Star Wars theme weddings and bar mitzvoth (like Mark Zuckerberg). And when the 2001 Australian national census resulted in 70,000+ people marking “Jedi” as their religion, Chris Brennan, director of the Star Wars Appreciation Society of Australia, responded, “This was a way for people to say, ‘I want to be part of a movie universe I love so much.'” Fans declare their allegiance to an alternate reality, one posited to be in contradistinction to mechanically reproducible office cubicles, mortgage installments, and traffic commutes. The mass distribution of Star Wars does nothing to diminish its aura—if anything, it offers a new terrain to diagnose the sacred and profane of their postindustrial lives.
Mythical Mashup
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