‘I’ve seen the first one over 100 times’: how Star Wars expert who teaches courses on the franchise viewed the movies through a different lens
- On Star Wars Day, the author of ‘Star Wars Multiverse’ Carmelo Esterrich says being gay and Puerto Rican let him see the films differently to some other people
- He thinks the blowback towards the latest trilogy was a generational issue that also had a lot to do with American culture at the time
Doing anything special for Star Wars Day, other than digging out that old, busted lightsaber in your basement for old times’ sake?
Carmelo Esterrich, professor of humanities and cultural studies at Columbia College in Chicago, in the US state of Illinois, knows what he’s doing that day, May 4.
When he’s not teaching or writing, Esterrich is a fitness instructor at a Chicago district park. And on Star Wars Day, “we usually do abdominals to the tune of the John Williams music of ‘The Imperial March’.”
For several years, the 57-year-old has taught courses on the myth, meaning, political implications and fan fiction generated by Star Wars. In his 2021 book Star Wars Multiverse, Esterrich tackles issues of authoritarianism, colonialism, xenophobia, sexuality and gender norms, as well as the politics of language.
We talk to him about his book and the Star Wars franchise today.
Tell us about your first time. With Star Wars, I mean.
I was 12. It started with the trailer, I’m sure. I heard Darth Vader breathing, I saw spaceships and I thought, ‘I gotta see this now.’
I’ve seen the first one over 100 times by now, though I didn’t read any of the Star Wars comics, or the novels, until very recently. I didn’t grow up with all of that. The movies came first; the rest came later.
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Early in the book, you write about viewing Star Wars through different lenses: as a gay man, as a Puerto Rican, and how those perspectives set up your particular viewpoints on the multiverse, as you call it. Can you go into that?
Sure. It’s not that I think I’m special because I’m gay or Puerto Rican. But those facts let me see Star Wars in a slightly different way than some other people do. My seeing the first film where and when I did necessarily informed the way I thought about it.
That’s why there’s a chapter on war, colonialism and slavery themes in Star Wars. Those ideas were present to me from the very beginning.
In Puerto Rico, we talk about the US as “the American Empire”, so every time I heard the word “Empire” in the movies, I thought of the United States! And I wasn’t the only one.
Lucas originally thought of [the Star Wars universe] as a rethinking of the Vietnam war. The bad guys were the US, and the rebels – the little band that could – were the Vietnamese.
Let’s talk about the blowback from some angry, disappointed factions of the Star Wars fan base to The Last Jedi in 2017.
The mere presence there of Kelly Marie Tran and John Boyega, actors of colour, plus a female protagonist (Daisy Ridley’s Rey) guiding the storyline – it was apparently too much to ask of some fan subsets who didn’t want their memories of the original messed with. In any way.
The reaction to the trilogy [that] began with The Force Awakens [2015] and ended with The Rise of Skywalker in 2019 had a lot to do with American culture of the time. It’s important to keep in mind the political moment when these comments and threats, particularly directed at Tran, were made.
It’s also a generational issue. A lot of the younger generation has embraced that sequel trilogy in ways the older generation has not, because they see themselves in it.
With The Last Jedi, when it turns almost feminist, the younger generation goes with it; at the same time, the older generation, some members of it, anyway, are reluctant to have that viewpoint inserted into their memories and fantasies of the original.
This is typical of the US: sometimes there’s a minority opinion that’s so loud, it feels as if the entire base is becoming toxic. But usually you find out it’s not really the majority.
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Let’s talk about Star Wars and how it reshaped modern Hollywood. The first film was made for US$11 million, which is about US$55 million today. It was a medium- to high-budget picture.
The Star Wars films now, like all massive franchise drivers, cost many times that amount, and the movies basically have to work, or else.
There’s this notion that Lucas and [Steven] Spielberg created the modern blockbuster. This was at a time when the movies, made by all these younger [so-called New Hollywood] directors, were everywhere.
But what seemed radically new, or at least different, to audiences of the ’70s and early ’80s is now Hollywood’s modus operandi.
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I’m a huge opera fan, and it’s remarkable to see cinema, the 20th-century art form, turning into the opera of the 21st century.
I think my understanding of opera helps me view the future of cinema not as disappearing, but certainly changing.
