If truth be told, I've never been a Star Wars fan. I've sat through them all, sometimes grudgingly, in order to fulfill the canon, and I've been stirred by it, but mostly out of some sort of cultural obligation. The fact is, as a child in that summer of '77, I was pissed that other kids wouldn't play "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" with me.
"Hey, Sears! Where's my Richard Dreyfuss and Francois Truffaut action figures?" I protested. "You be Terri Garr and I'll try to convince you they're real!" I hoped.
But the pull toward light sabers and robots and empires and rebels was too strong. My first taste of alienation, I suppose. No pun intended.
So now, as my four year old son wears his R2D2/C3PO shirt never having seen a single episode, I must make a choice. Which episode shall he see first?
There are two major variables at play: the medium and the message.
The medium: Should a child see it in a theater with all the available whistles and buzzers of THX and 3D or at home in the comfort of a couch and a decent and loud 2D television?
The message: Where should a child begin in the story? Where I did, with Luke and Leia, or a character generation earlier, with lil' Anakin and Amedala?
The conclusion is inescapable: The kid's gotta see Episode I on the big screen in 3D, first.
Sure, you'd be right to say The Phantom Menace sucks. But then again, you're not 4 ("Four and a half, really"), and you are no tabula rasa, either.
This is not me deciding how I would have wanted to see them if I had the choice; This is me deciding for the kid, acting as he would act if he had a full appraisal of the facts and history of the matter, substituting my forty-something judgment for his.
Nor does this decision mean that he must "witness" all episodes in the same forum. I can surely envision him seeing the deathly freeze of Han from the comfort of a couch.
Rather, my kid is immersed in the technologies of our times, and seems to have a cultural awareness beyond his years. Perhaps I'm projecting, but in one shamefully commercially interrupted partial viewing of Revenge of the Sith a few months ago, as the Jedi council met, my kid noticed that some members were "telepresent" and not actually in the room.
I look forward to sharing Star Wars with my kid, nudging him through it, despite my long held distaste for it. In this regard, it is a metaphor for lots of things in life. And maybe, just maybe, by the time The Hobbit rolls around, he'll have forgotten all about Jar Jar Binks in the embrace of Bilbo.
"Let the pod race begin!"
