Friday, June 17, 2005
Now there is an interpretation.
The inimitable novelist Neal Stephenson has an op-ed in the New York Times for 17 June 2005 that offers one of the best reasons I’ve yet seen for why Star Wars may survive as a cultural icon. Its Jedi are a metaphor for the Geek class of current society: “Twenty-eight years later, the vast corpus of Star Wars movies, novels, games and merchandise still has much to say about geeks—and also about a society that loves them, hates them and depends upon them.” Also an interesting comment on the march of technology: “In the 16 years that separated it from the initial trilogy, a new universe of ancillary media had come into existence. These had made it possible to take the geek material offline so that the movies could consist of pure, uncut veg-out content, steeped in day-care-center ambience. These newer films don’t even pretend to tell the whole story; they are akin to PowerPoint presentations that summarize the main bullet points from a much more comprehensive body of work developed by and for a geek subculture.”
Gay!