Perhaps you’ve heard about this new film that just opened? It features mostly unknown actors, seriously faraway locations, and obscure historical events – in this case, a struggle between some elderly people with a lot of baggage, and a whippersnapper who wants to boss everyone around. The director of this new film has a timid look about him: messy hair, heavy-rimmed glasses, dirty baseball cap, baggy trousers. He looks more like a computer hacker than a movie director.
I’ve got a good feeling about this film; I think it’s going to force itself into people’s minds and stay there, like it’s been downloaded into our human hard-drive. I’m told the movie returns to old-fashioned storytelling, the kind of story that gives people new hope and offers something to everyone: young and old, men and women, princesses and peasants.
I suppose you might come to this movie thinking it’s not the film you’re looking for, but maybe you’ll go because you’re on a date, and it was your date’s turn to choose the movie. So go ahead, plot your revenge as you sit in the cinema. You will make him go to your favourite cantina afterwards, you decide, even though the last time he was there, he said he hated the band and almost lost his arm in a terrible fight with some old man.
But hey. Don’t act on those revenge plans just yet. Patience, you must have, patience. Wait for the movie to start before you judge. It’s supposed to be a movie that will awaken us to wild desires for funky costumes, daring plane rides, and journeys through the Liwa desert.
Anything could happen, say movie industry insiders, because the movie’s director has built an empire out of striking back against Hollywood convention. Which is to say that he offers just enough “Hollywood” to keep people happy, even as his work attacks the clone-stories that Hollywood churns out: all those superhero prequels and sequels and “reboots”, or the endless iterations of Mission Impossible and Fast and Furious. I know some people expect this new movie to simply recycle old material, but I find their lack of faith disturbing.
It’s entirely possible, I think, that this movie might become one of those flicks that inspire people to dress up like their favourite characters and sit through repeated screenings, lurking in the theatre like phantoms, menacing the other audience members with their sheer enthusiasm.
Let me be clear, however. I will never be one of those costumed phantoms. The closest I’ve come to such excessive fandom happened when I was 13 years old, when a weird little movie called Star Wars came out and I developed a massive crush on the lead character, played by a previously unknown actor named Mark Hamill. I sent him fan mail. Or at least, I wrote him adoring letters and then hid the letters in my desk, too embarrassed to declare my devotion publicly.
I didn’t know that the tousle-haired Hamill was part of a movie that would revolutionise the film industry, and that the age-old struggles of fathers and sons, as played out in some faraway galaxy, would so deeply embed into the public imagination.
Actually, I suppose that embedding happened precisely because it’s an age-old story: archetypes function like tractor beams, pulling us in to something larger than ourselves, like the Millenium Falcon being pulled into the maw of a death star (but without the malevolent intent).
Star Wars has seeped into popular culture like sand into a tent: a relentless trickle. Star Wars saturates this entire column, and I’m not even a fan of the movies. My husband and children, however, cannot believe that we fly to New York for the holidays the same day The Force Awakens opened in the UAE. According to my children, this 24-hour viewing delay means we will be the last four people on Earth to see the movie.
Can JJ Abrams meet the world’s expectations? Will this movie embed in our minds like the earlier tales? Hard to know, but the bar to achievement has been set quite high, by quite a small person: JJ can only do or do not, there is no try.
Deborah Lindsay Williams is programme head of literature and creative writing at NYU Abu Dhabi
