A Mystery

(Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 5:29 PM Eastern on 30 Jan. See below.)

The Star Wars phenomenon, I mean. I freely confess I simply don't get it. I never did. From the first Star Wars movie through the following three installments (or four or five or whatever), which installments were just more of the same, the enthusiastic response, both popularly and in the mainstream critical media (using critical here in the loosest way possible), has been and remains for me a mystery defying solution.

Consider, please, what we have in this series of movies: Dialogue so mindless it makes the networks' Movie Of The Week seem almost literate. Scripts the veritable Saturday 'toons or Cliffs Notes versions of ancient mythology's great hero-cum-dragon-slayer sagas, George Lucas's pretentious and risible pronouncements about what the series is about, and the late — and before he became a New Age icon and pop culture hero — serious-minded Joseph Campbell's largely fulsome praise for the original Star Wars movie notwithstanding. Acting so execrable it makes the acting on the daytime TV soaps seem worthy of mention alongside that of The Royal Shakespeare Company. And special effects so tacky and thoroughly video-game cartoonish they're laughable.

All of which is to say, there's no there there — or rather, nothing there that would not at minimum be an insult to anyone with an IQ larger than his belt size. Yet clearly intelligent people wax eloquent over these works of rank, and at times rankly pretentious, dumbness.

In truth, it would be surprising were these movies otherwise than dumb. George Lucas is, at best, little more than a technically imaginative moviemaker, unlike, for instance, his buddy and sometime-partner-in-crime Steven Spielberg, a Hollywood-style moviemaker of the very first water, and a man who developed and raised the aesthetic and form of the Hollywood narrative movie to its utmost limits, which limits if pushed beyond would produce a different sort of work altogether. If Lucas is to be credited for being gifted, one would have to say that his gift lies in the domain of marketing, not moviemaking, which gift, I hasten to add, is not a gift to be sniffed at, especially given the mind-boggling economics of moviemaking and movie promotion, and the sophistication and hyper-competitiveness in today's marketing arena.

But marketing, no matter how slick and consummately expert, does not a great movie make, although great movie box office it most certainly does. I could understand this whole business if the enormous popularity of the Star Wars series were in the nature of a cult phenomenon à la, say, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or some such. But the numbers involved are far too large to be considered the result of mere cult devotion or great marketing. Accordingly, I would be most grateful to any weblogger reading this who's a fan of the Star Wars series who would provide on his weblog a cogent and non-fan explanation as to why these supremely dumb movies are as widely popular as they are and have been for the better part of the last quarter-century.

Inquiring minds want to know.

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Update (5:29 PM Eastern on 30 Jan): For responses to this post and my request therein, see here.