Month: October 2004

…Loriga adds romantic yearning and original wit to an increasingly ubiquitous figure, the neuronic hero, that blurred-out soul lost in a transnational wonderland of neurochemical engineering and noirish intrigue.

And then there’s Michael Agger’s examination of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, in which Agger poses the following question:

Sergio Leone meets Tolkien in Stephen King’s seven-volume series. Is that a good mix?

The short answer, he would seem to say, is…well, no, not really. I’ve only read the first four of seven books so far, so I can’t really comment on the series as whole, or any excesses which King may have lately brought to it. But I was struck by something else Agger writes in his semi-review:

In 1970, when he was 22, Stephen King wrote a sentence he liked: “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” It’s an innocent sentence — pulpy and suggestive — but it grew to become a monster.

Again, I couldn’t say whether the series has become a monster or not, but I do intend to read the final three books, so I’ve not lost faith in King just yet. Personally, I’ve always really liked that sentence, largely because it is so suggestive. In fact, it’s always been one of my personal favorites, along with “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” and “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” First sentences can be extremely important.

The thing you have to understand — and I’m no expert, but I think the evidence supports me on this — is that George Lucas has absolutely no idea what he’s doing. Or, if he does, it’s more often than not a bad idea. There’s nothing inherently wrong in making things up as you go along, but there is when you pretend you’ve had it mapped out from the beginning, make changes to earlier choices just to match the mistakes you make later, and completely gloss over or erase certain details because they’re inconvenient to the story you’ve somehow managed to botch.

Star Wars was a terrific technical achievement and pretty decent fantasy. But it’s pretty obvious that Lucas initially intended it to be a stand-alone film. It doesn’t exactly set itself up for a sequel. The sequels were more a product of the first film’s success, I think, than of any grand scheme that Lucas had in his head from day one. In order to preserve the illusion that he’s had it all mapped out and knows what he’s doing, Lucas has resorted to altering the earlier films (like Hayden Christensen as Vader or Greedo shooting first) and ignoring inconvenient plot details (like how absolutely nobody in Star Wars remembers that Tatooine is where Annakin Skywalker grew up — not the droids, not the Emperor, not even the man in the black suit himself).

At the very least, I think Lucas was in need of a good fact checker. Of course, while he was at it, he probably should have hired someone else to write and direct the damn things as well, too. His energies these days are much better spent, I think, acting as a producer.