By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire

I secured a second mortgage on our home last weekend so my family could see the latest Star Wars movie. It was cute, the way an Oreo cookie is sweet. It stars a guy in a mask who pals around with a big-eyed puppet and kills people who are bad. It consisted mainly of action sequences that were impossible to follow because they were filmed in the dark by people using computers who like loud music and hate narrative. And before you think that’s me being critical, let me add that it put me in mind of Richard Wagner, the romantic-era genius who reinvented grand opera. Wagner pioneered the concept of total art, melding music and visuals and theme into an overwhelming package. (Whether he succeeded is a different question. “Play faster,” he once exhorted his conductor. “The audience is falling asleep.”) The Mandalorian would love Bayreuth. He’d fit right in, mask and all.  

One scene stuck in my mind because of the unlikely talent involved. Martin Scorcese, who directs serious stuff like Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ, lent his voice to a less big-eyed puppet with four arms and a worried demeanor who makes a living slinging hash at a lunch counter in some rundown space port. I didn’t know Scorcese needed money that badly.

Anyway, the background for Scorcese’s performance evoked Los Angeles as filmed by Ridley Scott in the first version of Blade Runner, all hard rain, bleary neon, and exhausted souls. Harrison Ford played the lead in that movie, taking time off from his more lucrative job as Han Solo in the Star Wars cycle. Blade Runner was adapted from a novel by Philip K. Dick called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. So I finally got something out of this movie: I got reminded of a book.

Entertainment is like that, be it good or bad. There is nothing new under the sun (wrote the author of an even older book) and resonances are all. The very first Star Wars movie quoted so many other movies, it was practically a compendium of them. The robots came from Kurosawa, Tatooine lacked only John Wayne, and when the X-wing fighters are seeking the right groove with which to attack the Death Star, they’re flying a formation from Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, a Van Johnson vehicle from the Second World War. And it made my day when Luke Skywalker discovered his paternity in a later Star Wars story by way of a trope from Rafael Sabatini, a writer of boys’ books from the nineteen-twenties whose predilection for swashbuckling pirates informed the use of light sabers too.

Sabatini’s most famous tale was Captain Blood, from which they made a terrific film starring Errol Flynn and Olivia Dehavilland, the Luke and Leia of the Spanish Main. That production has a great trial scene that takes place in a strange and cavernous interior of fascistic simplicity and airy brutality, reminiscent of nothing so much as the Empire’s digs in every Star Wars sequel and prequel ever made.

I have read a handful of books in my life and seen a few movies, the number I remember of each is vanishingly small compared to the time and effort put into the reading and viewing of them, but I know Sabatini by heart and I’m sad that people don’t read him anymore. His masterpiece Scaramouche begins like this: “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” That’s anapestic meter; nothing so plain as iambic for Scaramouche. Sabatini’s syntax was poetry in motion.

Little about this last Star Wars movie could be called poetic. We went for an escape, and we liked it well enough because to say otherwise is being churlish, but it honestly didn’t even function on that level. The marketing was too obvious, the toy quotient too prevalent, the story too simplistic. I’ve heard they were trying to re-boot their franchise to appeal to a younger demographic, and that’s fine as far as it goes. But perhaps kids would appreciate bona fide artistry instead. Some of our best written literature and much of our culture’s most powerful imagery is devoted to the hearts and minds of children.

Next time I’ll write about how Walt Disney makes the story of Bambi flow like a John Ford movie, how John Ford movies borrow from Shakespeare, how Shakespeare echoes the King James Bible, and how the Old Testament encompasses the vastness of space. But then we’re back to where we started. No puppets, though. Nothing to sell.

Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project,  The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.