Sam on Star Wars
My son Sam (5) has now seen Star Wars. (quoth the clerk at my local “collectible toy” boutique: “You’re in trouble now.”)
SAM: You know who my favorite Star Wars guy is?
DAD: Who?
SAM: C-3PO.
DAD: Yeah, I think he was my favorite when I was a kid too.
SAM: You know why?
DAD: Why.
SAM: ‘Cause he’s always, like, saying to R2-D2 “No, I’m not going to follow you, you’re crazy, I’m not going to do that” and then they both end up in the same place anyway.
And it struck me just how thematically dense that first movie is. Somehow it had never occurred to me that, in this series of movies about Destiny and Duty, even the clowns, the Beckettian pseudocouple robots, one the irrepresible id, the other the worrywart superego, play out their little comedy of destiny together. One forges blithely ahead, heedless of danger, the other is very careful to avoid danger altogether, they choose very different paths, and yet they do both end up in the same place. It’s all very Mahabharata or the movie Sandy Bates is making at the beginning of Stardust Memories.
The Empire Strikes Back
A good reminder that movies are, at the end of the day, their plots. You can have as many great ideas in a movie as you want, but if you don’t have a good plot, you’re screwed.
What follows is a screenwriter’s exercise: take a favorite movie and reduce it to its plot. Take away the performances, the production values, the dialogue, the special effects, everything but the plot and see what makes it all work. The plot is the engine that makes the movie go. The result is a kind of retro-fitted treatment.
100% spoilers ahead