Now that Star Wars is over...

I was content with the finality of the franchise and the magnum opus that Lucas left us in the form of his Complete Six Episode Saga before the Disney takeover. I don't really need any more Star Wars content than that, I see it as one complete story. Any enjoyment I might get from spin-offs like Obi-Wan is just a plus. I enjoyed some of the old EU back before Disney, but I always came back to the six feature films. I can watch those endlessly, they're timeless to me.

What a pleasant surprise. I was in a mood when I posted this. Contemplating mortality, as one does. Let this be a general midlife crisis thread for Lucas heads.

I watched Hook (1991) last night. George is in it, hidden in plain sight. I had forgotten so much of it. But not the music. Hits different when you're older. Thanks to the internet, I see that it is not highly rated and has a bad reputation. Even Spielberg says he's unsatisfied with it, specifically the middle of it. But it doesn't really have a beginning, middle, and end, as far as I can tell. It feels like one continuous dream. Which it is, obviously. It's also plain to me now that Peter and Hook are one and the same. And that Tinker bell's true nature is revealed with her final piece of dialogue. Which, Carrie Fisher was hired on the low to doctor. She's also hidden in the movie, with George, in plain sight.

"You know that place between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming? That's where I'll always love you, Peter Pan. That's where I'll be waiting."

You gotta watch it again.

Darkslayer
Carrie's gone Harrison won't play Han ever again and Mark was disenchanted with how they treated Luke I still say there was no need for a ST ROTJ was a Perfect Ending.

Yep. I think it was the very night before you posted this thread (saw it but didn't add anything for a while) that a guy I work with a fair bit in my current job suddenly asked me, "So where do you see yourself in five years?" I mumbled some half-answer, but it's not a question I've ever liked trying to formulate a response to. Weird timing. 

Star Wars, as you once said, has taken a lot from our lives; and maybe we don't have particularly well-developed lives outside of it. What happens, then, when you see the thing you loved changing. Surely, you must also change or else become a relic, frozen in amber, not really living or achieving anything?

The question most certainly is: "What now?"

Unfortunately, like the five-year question which that guy posed to me, I don't have a good answer at the moment. I mean, in line with the anxiety you articulated, I literally turned 40 a couple of weeks ago, so I'm now that guy (a middle-aged Star Wars neckbeard loser posting crap on the Internet). For my 40th, I went to see an event featuring Priscilla Presley, live in my home city. So I was at least able to tick that off my bucket list -- and what a surreal experience it was. Ironically, Star Wars Celebration was happening in London a few days later. Elvis and Star Wars! Both!! At the same time!!! (I didn't go to Celebration).

I think, now I've caught up with the ex-wife of Elvis, or at least been in the same room as her, my "dynamic" with Elvis has changed; just like my dynamic with Star Wars has probably changed since the Sequel Trilogy was concluded. Neither in necessarily a bad way, but something seems to have shifted with the both of them at very nearly the same time. At the moment, then, I'm trying to put the pieces together. Star Wars and Elvis both lasted, for all intents and purposes, 42 years. Likewise, I went and saw both TROS, the concluding 42-year "piece" of the Saga, and the Priscilla event, with my mother; and at both, we sat in Row K (Karen is also my mom's name). Freaky alignments.

I hope I'll still keep these particular interests alive, while filling up my allotted time by discovering and exploring new ones. I'm sure we've all got other passions, even if not on the same scale, whether it's watching podcasts, photography, nature hiking, a fascination with other countries or time periods, books/reading and/or great literature, delving deep into film, music, etc., learning another language, sociology, psychology, science and technology, religion and philosophy, playing a sport, fashion, interior design, digital currencies and investing, volunteer work, raising kids, cars, travel, working out, self-improvement, or an incel classic: porn/erotica.

To be honest, as lazy as I am, I sometimes feel I don't have anywhere near enough time; even if some of that time is spent unproductively lolling and I don't work all hours God sends or have a family of my own to keep me preoccupied. Ultimately, I'm sort of happy, sort of not. The main issue is that I don't have a clear path in life and have never really known how to find one. One of the enticements of Star Wars is that, as a story, it provides a crude yet attractive template for living honestly and finding one's purpose. Turns out, those aren't easy things to do. No wonder, then, we're very addicted to the message or the abstraction, because it's a heck of a lot easier to see the steps laid out in a fictional "safe space" and to dig that as if it were reality; such that, for priests/addicts like us, it starts to replace reality itself. The problem, of course, is that reality is exceptionally messy, nothing like the comforting structure that movies supply in abundance. While there are many beginnings, middles, and ends in life, there isn't always an obvious reason that something happens, you rarely receive closure, and you can't replay the movie beat-for-beat in glorious Technicolor. No, Star Wars is easy, and life is hard. So, if Star Wars = Life, we've committed an error, of sorts, and we gradually need to come out of our Star Wars shells and discover what the vast and dangerous ocean all around us is really all about (and try not to get eaten or re-eaten along the way).  

Does any of that help? No, it probably doesn't. Oh, well.

We could at least do another three-way chat or something. Unfortunately, Pyro seems to think he's in every movie ever made and that he's "God".

It's slightly funny (I feel you have to see the humour in things). But otherwise, same. 

That's a great question Stampihd. I also share your view a bit that Star Wars feels like its coming to a closure. I mean, ever since the pandemic in the wake of having boycotted TROS and finished The Clone Wars, it did feel strange for me, as if a certain era and part of my life was coming to an end. I haven't seen the six movies since lockdown (been 3 years now) and my moviewatching experience is mostly dominated now by films made before the 60's, pulling back the curtain to the movie period Star Wars has always emulated.

I don't know at this point If I will ever see new Star Wars content again- I don't have Disney plus, and only opened an account to watch the Obi-Wan series, which felt like a scratching itch that needed to be filled ever since the Disney acquisition was announced. A lot hinges on what Mangold does with his Origin of the Jedi film, which I feel has the potential to be a "tabula rasa" when it comes to the franchise, a rare case in which nostalgia and mining content limited by the main story shouldn't be an issue.

If there's a lesson to be learned I guess is that Star Wars should not "take over your life" but help guide you through life as the Notorious GL once said. There's a danger in our increasingly virtual society of letting life become a passive experience in which you aren't an active participant but rather an observer, and I think it needs to be clarified that Star Wars, as fun as it is, shouldn't take over in a religious way, because then we are in the territory of Scientology, something that GL firmly resisted every step of the way. If anything, it seems to me that the problem with fandom is that it never has fully absorbed the wisdom of the maker himself.

As far as what my plans for the future are; well to those who know me it won't come as a surprise, but I've been following one of my other great passions in life, farming and cattle ranching, for a while now, tending to the lands inherited from my mom's and dad's side of the family. Its a game of patience in which life rolls slowly but pleasantly I suppose, and where I get to perhaps live out my fantasy wanting to be a cowboy. So yes, my childhood obsessions simply express themselves in a different way now. I'm pushing 30, so a bit younger than many of you, but without compromise or a family. I hope at some point to get married and start a family. Maybe If I have kids I'll introduce them to Star Wars and that could be the time to fall in love with our beloved series again. Who knows?