IT WAS SOME TIME before I realized the cultural significance of Star Wars.  The cultural phenomena of Star Wars I knew quite well: childhood’s evidence of speeder bikes and life-size lightsabers give me away on that account.  But it wasn’t until the hubbub of Episode One that I started to hear talk of Star Wars in relation to its time period, it’s picture of good-versus-evil after years of 1970s cultural and political grey.  Whatever my thoughts of Episode One ended up being, I tried to look at it through that same lens: how this movie might tell the story needed for our time.  To me it was clear: evil wasn’t as obvious as it used to be.  Evil had become, as it were, a phantom menace, the underhanded use of power and bureaucracy to achieve a bad end. That message, I fear, got swallowed up in a bad movie.  That’s unfortunate.

So I really liked Sunjeev Bery’s recent Huffington Post article, “Saving Star Wars.”  The article is, of course, in response to last week’s news of a Star Wars continuation.  It’s a nice reminder as to why Star Wars was so successful in the first place (and part of why so many fans were so turned off in the second place).  And he gets something about Star Wars and story very right, especially in what he hopes comes next.  In thinking about writing the Star Wars mythology for today he asserts:

Multiple human societies are now in the midst of dramatic and diverse kinds of turmoil. At the risk of being grandiose, we need signs and stories to help us navigate the days ahead. We don’t all necessarily think we do, but we do.

Someone will soon make the movies that help us understand this global moment. As laughable as it now sounds, if those movies have the words “Star Wars” in the title, if they can credibly embed these issues in the Star Wars universe, they will achieve a status that rivals the original franchise.

Bery understands the potential of both story and Star Wars.  And while neither has to preach and beat us over the head, they can nudge us into a better understanding of the world around us.  Maybe that’s what made Lucas’s prequels so bad: maybe they do reflect the worst parts of our cultural story at that period of time.  And while I’m sure I’m not the first fan to say this in the last week, maybe these new movies can give us at least a semblance of a refreshed and new sense of storytelling hope.

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