It’s possible that last week, the more sensitive amongst you may have felt an unsettling psychic tremor—a disturbance in the Force, if you will. But a quick glance about the nerdier corners of the internet quickly revealed an explanation: it was the anguished cry of millions of Star Wars fans who have recently learned that George Lucas isn’t done tinkering with their beloved series.
Their pain came as a result of learning that the forthcoming re-release of the films on Blu-Ray will include changes to the canon, such as replacing the The Phantom Menace’s puppet Yoda with a computer generated one, or—and this one seems to have really set people off—having Darth Vader awkwardly say ‘No’ when he kills the Emperor at the climax of Return of the Jedi.
For most Star Wars fans, these minor, generally insignificant changes seem to register just shy of a tweak that would see Luke and Leia happily engage in an incestuous romance. Outrage has been everywhere, with many calling for a boycott. Even geek cult leader Simon Pegg has weighed in.
But not all of nerd-dom is opposed to the changes. Or at least, this one-person section of the geek universe is not. Here are five reasons I welcome not only these changes, but would want a total remake of the original series too:
1. Allow me to go on record as belonging to the Billy Corgan school of art. The brains behind The Smashing Pumpkins, Corgan was notorious for layering guitar tracks 40 or 50 times over, producing sounds on CD that were impossible to recreate live. His reasoning was that if you’re pressing something to disc, it should be as good as you can possibly make it. Now, if you watched The Phantom Menace and its laughably awful Yoda puppet without cringing, I can only imagine it’s because you were so impossibly excited you viewed the film through tears of joy—or you’re just insane. Let the man fix what was so horribly wrong and create the version of the film he wants to.
2. After the distinctly cheesy Episodes 1-3, there is very little left to protect anyway. People arguing for the sanctity of the original trilogy sound a bit like those arguing for the “sanctity of marriage”: your long sought after purity has already been lost, and even if it wasn’t, it’s not a very good argument anyway.
3. Why? Because adherence to the canon is a profoundly conservative, 19th century view of art. It fixes the work as unchanging, pure and sacrosanct. But beyond nostalgia for your youth, there is no particular reason every piece of art must stay the exactly the same as it once was. In fact, the very idea is an impossibility. Paintings look different each time you see them. Novels produce new relations and ideas on each new go-through, as does film. Moreover, re-presenting a movie in higher resolution and with remastered audio is a profound change anyway. There is no purity to hold on to because it never existed in the first place. This is something to embrace, because it means you can discover something new about art and yourself each time art changes. This is good. Besides, unless it’s a secret unadvertised feature, I’m 98 percent sure these new films won’t make your old copies spontaneously combust.
4. Beyond that though, there’s something else going on here. We know that Hollywood is saturated in remakes. “Dearth of creativity” or “finance over art,” we say. And sure, that’s mostly true. But what if the rash of reconfigured movie franchises (like a Spider-Man reboot a decade after the last Spider-Man reboot) is a way of dealing with the fact that we are constantly inundated with new ideas and narratives? That, instead of giving people yet another new frame for ideas, you present them with one they know to give them a slightly different way of relating to the familiar? Sounds farfetched, but keep in mind that every new phase of technology has an impact on the type and nature of how we tell stories. And what we’re going through now might be a new version of oral storytelling, where the storyteller retells a familiar story but injects their own subtle changes and inflections.
5. You’re getting high-defintion, Blu-Ray versions of a popular sci-fi classic. I leave the rest to comedian Louis C.K.
Navneet Alang is Toronto Standard’s Tech Critic and writes about the impact of technology on contemporary culture for a variety of publications. He is also finishing a PhD on the same topic at York University in Toronto.
