One of the odd sensations of apocalyptic storytelling comes from seeing normal places you have known transfigured by whatever forces have defeated the world. The Statue of Liberty. The White House and Washington Monument. Mount Rushmore. The Eiffel Tower. Big Ben. Any and all of the above will do.
What would it be like, decades of destruction from now, for survivors to come upon our recent obsession with recreating imaginary worlds? Wanderers come across Hobbiton in New Zealand and wonder if little folk with hairy feet really walked the earth. What is this strange place called Diagon Alley? Did Asgard somehow come to planet earth? And is this really a region of space known as Tatooine?
That last one is part of what resonates in a recent Grantland article by Bryan Phillips about the gobbling up of intellectual properties that are becoming a kind of real people and places. The article focuses primarily on the recent announcement concerning the creation of Star Wars Land. He starts out by talking about playing the Star Wars Galaxies video game at a particular place in his adult life. Then, halfway through the article, he gets to this place when thinking about what Star Wars land might really mean:
For a series in which the ultimate act of heroism involves not surrendering to the will of an authoritarian central planner, Star Wars certainly encourages surrender now, or at least patient acquiescence to the corporate expansion-timeline being drawn up in Burbank. You’re going to get what you get. It will probably involve R2-D2. Might as well try to enjoy it.
This has been true of other creative ideas for some time . . . most of them tied to Disney and our very human-in-the-20th-century desire for our entertainment faith become sight. It’s part of the DNA of commercialism, especially if you grew up in the 80s watching cartoons of the toys you wanted more than just about anything else. It’s all over the movie theater these days: so many comic book ideas turned into major theatrical epics that make every few months at the theater feel like a normal Wednesday at the local comic shop..
From near the end of the article:
Maybe Star Wars Land will be great. But it’s hard not to see it as a further imaginative contraction, the literalization of my Galaxies experience. Visit the same five planets, take your picture with the same 12 characters. Keep talking the way you always talk. Only now you get to sit on the flume log next to the mildly depressed twentysomething writer and guy with the heart condition and secret cigarettes — which is fascinating in its own way, more fascinating than Star Wars, even, but again, presumably not what brought you to Hoth in the first place.
We are navigating strange times, indeed. It makes you wonder if they’ll have near-authentic tauntauns that you can slice open with your own personal light saber in an attempt to survive the coming apocalypse. For so many of us, I fear, that would be a trap.
You can read the whole article here. It’s a good read.
Space Enough, and Time 