[music]
Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. That theme from concluded John Williams truly needs no introduction. From A New Hope to The Rise of Skywalker to The Mandalorian, Star Wars has been one of our enduring cultural phenomenon. Whether you identify with a droid helping the Republic-
C-3PO: R2-D2, a pleasure to meet you. I am C-3PO, human-cyborg relations.
Melissa Harris-Perry: -or aspire one day to be a Jedi yourself.
Luke Skywalker: The war is just beginning, and I will not be the last Jedi.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Or maybe you're into the dark side.
Darth Vader: I am your father.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Today, we can all bask in these words.
Obi-Wan Kenobi: May the force be with you.
Melissa Harris-Perry: From The Takeaway team, may the Fourth be with you today, on this May 4th. Grab your lightsabers, start the engines of your Millennium Falcon, because we're exploring a galaxy far, far away, right now.
Maya Phillips is a critic at large for The New York Times, and author of the upcoming book, Nerd: Adventures in Fandom from This Universe to the Multiverse. Maya, it's great to have you here.
Maya Phillips: Thanks for having me. May the Fourth be with you.
[laughter]
Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. Take me back to your first Star Wars memory.
Maya Phillips: I was so young, it's kind of blurry, but I do remember, just like a sequence of Saturday's just sitting in my parents bedroom and watching the VHS tapes, because we had the three box set of the original trilogy. I just remember being so engrossed, and it always being an element of my childhood growing up. My dad was a big Star Wars fan, and so we watched all those movies, and I had such a crush on Luke Skywalker, I have to say. [laughs]
Melissa Harris-Perry: Can you remember what you found exciting other than having the big crush on Luke Skywalker? Was it the overall concept? Was it the special effects? What got you going about it?
Maya Phillips: It was my first interaction with a genre world that there was a whole mythology to it, there was a whole universe there, and it felt so complete. Of course, I didn't know what world building was as a child, but it felt like something that I could just step into and engage with. In particular, two part of my crush on Luke Skywalker was that he was like this doofy little farm boy, who just became this incredibly cool Jedi, and he had these powers, and I was like, "Oh, man." You can have these humble beginnings and then just become a total badass. [chuckles]
Melissa Harris-Perry: Given those humble beginnings, are you the target audience for the sequels?
Maya Phillips: Oh, man, I do think so. It's so funny, because Star Wars has been around for so many years that it crosses generations, but yes, I do think I am part of the target audience of that.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Did you like them?
Maya Phillips: [laughs] I like the way you ask that question too. You're like, you're ready for the response. I have to say, I don't really like them. I enjoyed the experience of seeing them, which is my very critic way of going around that, but I could enjoy them as fan experiences, especially Force Awakens.
I feel like it was a lot of structurally had the same format as Episode IV, but I felt like there was a lot of fan pandering. There was a lot of inconsistencies across the three movies. You could see when the directors switched, and they're just going back on each other, changing things that the other director had introduced between Rian Johnson and J.J. Abrams, and I felt that it didn't hold together as well. I'm not engaging as just a fan like I was when I was a kid. Now, I'm engaging as a critic, and it changes my relationship to the fandom.
Melissa Harris-Perry: It's interesting to put that sense of those inconsistencies or that ability to see the directorial stamp, which in some ways seems fine that filmmakers should be able to have their own voice in their films, but I wonder if that also goes back to your interest in the world building, that the world actually does fall apart, it disintegrates if it's not built with certain consistencies.
Maya Phillips: I do think so. It's just the same with the MCU. There's these big franchises and once they branch out in various directions, you lose some of that consistency. Eventually, if you keep adding on, if you keep doing spin offs, and the additional comics, and the additional TV series, then you're stretching the narrative really thin.
Melissa Harris-Perry: That's it. Even in the first three originals, you've got Leah kissing her brother in the first one. We all had to just cope with that when we got to the third one.
Maya Phillips: We did. We did. That movie, with the Ewoks, too, there was a lot of things happen in that movie, but I will say too, yes, we did make some concessions back then, and because George Lucas is not a strong writer. We know that. He's got the imagination, but he can't really piece it together all the time, especially with the dialogue. I do think that, as I said, the imagination of the first trilogy is really something, and I will even say, I really appreciate the imagination of the prequels too. I know it's bad for me to say this, but I think that compared to the sequels, they really tread new territory in a way that I found enjoyable.
Melissa Harris-Perry: I am going to get on a coffee mug or a t-shirt or something. We all know George Lucas is not a strong writer. That just did something to my soul. I want to think a little bit about this world building and the word diversity in a quirky way. On the one hand, I can't think of any film that at least as a child I saw that was more diverse initially than Star Wars. The cantina scene is extremely diverse in the sense of all of these different kinds of alien life beings and forms all hanging out together, and there's a lot of diversity going on, but the humanoids only more recently have we seen a world built with brown and Black folks in mind.
Maya Phillips: Yes. What's really annoying and problematic is throughout the franchise, we've seen examples of aliens who are supposed to be stand ins for diversity very clearly, and then they exhibit racist tropes and racist accents. We had Jar Jar Binks. [chuckles]
That's a problem. Obviously, there should have been more diversity within the human cast, and yes, it's really great that we had more diversity with the cast in the newer movies, but then you see how some fans reacted and how people were coming for these roles especially. It's been horrible, but that's what happens when fandom gets locked in this idea of a canon that is very exclusive in a way that's problematic to fans of different representation.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Star Wars or Star Trek?
Maya Phillips: Oh, come on. You're going to ask me that on a Star Wars show. I've always been Star Wars though. I'm not a huge Trekkie.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Maya Phillips is a critic at large for The New York Times, and an author of the upcoming book, Nerd: Adventures in Fandom from This Universe to the Multiverse. Thank you so much, Maya.
Maya Phillips: Thanks for having me.
[music]
Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.
New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.
