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.
Those drawings are adorable. I wish I drew like that when I was little but I wasn’t really artistic- I was a talker.
The beauty of Star Wars is that you made 9 references, literary, psychological and other, of which I only understood 2, but I still got what you are talking about. It is the Rosetta Stone of culture, pop and otherwise.
I always felt quite an affinity for C-3PO as well. It’s probably why I was so disappointed to see Lucas turn him into a bad pun generator in the prequels (Attack of the Clones, especially).
I actually had this theory that R2D2 is the hero and main character of the entire saga. He certainly is the most competent one, IMO.